German Graduate Seminar travels to Berlin

In connection with the CGES collaborative and graduate seminar Leslie Morris and Rick McCormick have organized and are teaching in Fall 2014, "Place & Displacement: Transnational German-Jewish Culture" (GER 8300), Leslie, Rick, and 6 of the 8 graduate students enrolled in the seminar are off to Berlin this week.

In Berlin, they will be joined by their partner seminar group that is also part of the CGES collaborative, taught by co-organizer Ofer Ashkenazi, History and the School of Arts at the Hebrew University. Ofer's seminar and the seminar at Minnesota have been meeting together via interactive video during the semester, but now they will meet without the media interface in Berlin. Ofer is bringing all 10 of his graduate students to Berlin.

Besides attending the opening of the international DAAD conference, "Wendepunkte," attending a session of a conference at the Jewish Museum, "Contemporary Jewish Life in a Global Modernity," and visiting such sites of German-Jewish life in Berlin as das Bayrische Viertel, the group will gather together at the Rosa-Luxemburg Stiftung on Sunday for a colloquium at which the students from both universities will make presentations on the research topics they have each chosen for their seminar papers.

Leslie, Ofer, and Rick want to thank the following organizations for their support of this collaborative:

The Center for German & European Studies, the Center for Jewish Studies, and the Department of German, Scandinavian & Dutch at the University of Minnesota; Daat-Hamakom: Center for the Study of Modern Jewish Cultures of Place--supported by the I-CORE Program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee and The Israel Science Foundation; the Richard Koebner-Minerva Center for German History and the DAAD Center for German Studies at the Hebrew University.

Dan Karvonen's translation of Finnish crime novel published

Among the Saints, Dan Karvonen's English translation of Finnish author Jari Tervo's crime novel "Pyhiesi yhteyteen" has been published by Ice Cold Crime. Although Jari Tervo's novels have been translated into many languages, this is his first book to appear in English. Each chapter is told in the first person by 35 different people affected by a murder that occurs in the woods of Finnish Lapland.

Angelica Fenner (Ph.D., 1999) edits essay collection

The Autobiographical Turn in Germanophone Documentary and Experimental Film, a collection of essays edited by Angelica Fenner (Ph.D., 1999), has been published by Camden House.

Jenneke Oosterhoff publishes new book on Dutch grammar

Jenneke Oosterhoff's book Modern Dutch Grammar: A Practical Guide has been published by Routledge.