Max Kade Professor Dr. Steffen Siegel’s Semester at Georgetown
The German Department was honored to host Dr. Steffen Siegel as the Visiting Max Kade Professor during the fall 2024 semester. Dr. Siegel came to us from Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany, where he is a professor for the theory and history of photography. We will miss him very much, and he was so kind as to provide the following text about his time with the Department:
It is textbook knowledge that photography’s history started in France and Great Britain, with 1839 as the year that first saw public interest in this novel way of imagery. Yet, by the end of May 2024, the history of photography made it to the “Tagesschau” with some remarkable news: Curators at Munich‘s Deutsches Museum had discovered that the oldest German photographs, still preserved in the museum’s collections, must have been taken by two Bavarian scientists as early as in 1837. Such reports may have been a surprising confusion of the medium’s traditional historiographies, and most certainly, they were an ideal point of departure for my seminar “What Does Germany Look Like? Photographic Imagi/Nations in the long 19th Century.” With graduate students from Georgetown University’s Department of German, I tried to rethink Germany’s long trajectory of becoming a united nation through the lens of a photographic camera.
Throughout the semester, we touched a wide variety of photographic materials—in a literal sense of touching: daguerreotypes and ambrotypes drawn from Georgetown’s special collections, early paper-based processes at the Library of Congress, survey photographs at Smithsonian’s American Art Museum, and also original copies of the “Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung” printed during the period of World War I. Georgetown is a perfect place for embarking on such an endeavor because of the richness of its collections and the proximity to major institutions. Most important, however, is the students’ curiosity and openness to explore unfamiliar paths to narrate the German past. I am looking forward to reading the seminar’s final papers for a promising reason: They aim at closing gaps left in my syllabus and also by research accomplished so far.
Before I started my dissertation project more than two decades ago, I had to decide: Would I further pursue my German literature studies or turn my interest to something new, at least by then new to me: visual studies? I opted for the latter and finally found myself working on the theory and history of photography. As an academic field, it represents an interdisciplinary intersection of many interests. I am very grateful to Georgetown’s Department of German colleagues and students for inviting and welcoming, as Roland Barthes once aptly put it, such an “uncertain subject.” I take with me home that thinking about the history of photography is an essential part of German Studies and that the decision I felt I had to make some twenty years ago was just a preliminary choice of direction.