German Department at the 2025 GSA Conference
As always, current members and alumni of the German Department will be present and presenting at this year’s German Studies Association Annual Conference held in Arlington, VA, from September 25-28, 2025.
A partial list of this year’s presenters and participants includes:
Friday, September 26, 10:10 am: “Photobooks, Photo Essays, and the Body (1): The Hands and Eyes of the Viewer”
Sally Simpson, Moderator
Verena Kick, “Body Politics: Miniature and Stereoscopic Propaganda Photobooks in Nazi Germany”
Friday, September 26, 1:45 pm: “Austrian Bodies and Austrian Families in Literature”
Peter C. Pfeiffer, “Veza Canetti’s Die Gelbe Straße and the Embodiment of Knowledge”
Friday, September 26, 1:45 pm: “Black German Pop Culture: Identity, Media, and Creative Expression (sponsored by the Black Diaspora Studies Network)”
Katie Miller-Purrenhage, “Identity as Blockage: An Argument for the Intersection of Racialized, Feminized Space in Otoo’s Adas Raum”
Friday, September 26, 3:55 pm: “Border Crossing Narratives”
Dingning Chen, “Border Crossings of German-Jewish Refugees in Shanghai: Gender and Intercultural Understanding in Vicki Baum’s Hotel Shanghai and Susanne Hornfeck’s Torte mit Stäbchen”
Friday, September 26, 3:55 pm: “Narrative Aesthetics and Social Critique”
Emilia Endler, “Auch dankbar empfangen können ist ein Glück.” Geben und Nehmen in Theodor Fontanes Die Poggenpuhls
Friday, September 26, 3:55 pm: “Photobooks, Photo Essays, and the Body (2): Character and Corporeality”
Verena Kick, Moderator
Saturday, September 27, 1:45 pm: “Enlightened Humor? Comic Relief in the Long Eighteenth Century (1): Humor, Community, and the Public Sphere (sponsored by the Lessing Society)”
Mary Helen Dupree, Moderator
Saturday, September 27, 3:55 pm: “Black (Im)Mobility: Media, Mobility, and the Politics of Intersectional Belonging (co-sponsored by the Coalition of Women in German and the Black Diaspora Studies Network)”
Katie Miller-Purrenhage, Moderator
Saturday, September 27, 3:55 pm: “Film and Fiction in the GDR”
Peter C. Pfeiffer, Commentator
Sunday, September 28, 10:10 am: “Soviet Receptions of German History and Literature”
Emilia Endler, Moderator
Sunday, September 28, 10:10 am: “Migration and Identity in Contemporary German Literature”
Katherine Lightfoot, “At the Intersection of Precarity and Heimat in Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum and Fatma Aydemir’s Dschinns”
Emma Eisenbeis will participate in the Emerging Scholars Workshop on “Migration in/and German Studies.” Mary Helen Dupree will participate in the seminar “Building a Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts for Goethe and Beyond (sponsored by the Goethe Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts).”
More information about the 2025 conference and the full German Studies Association conference program can be found on the GSA’s website.