Department Events: Fall 2025
The German Department had a strong presence at this year’s German Studies Association (GSA) convention, which was held on September 25-28 at the Marriott Crystal Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. Georgetown German faculty and graduate students presented their research on a variety of literary and cultural topics from the 18th century to the present. Students and faculty were also active as panel moderators and commentators and took part in three-day workshops and seminars. On Saturday, September 27, members of the German Department celebrated a successful conference with other Georgetown colleagues and alums at a reception hosted by the BMW Center for European Studies. A partial list of participants and presenters is available on our website.
L to R: Dr. Dupree, Khuê Pham, Katie Miller-Purrenhage, Sally Simpson, Dingning Chen, and Kristina Schauhoff. Front row: Katie Lightfoot and Katharina Vogel.
On October 27, the German Department welcomed the award-winning Vietnamese-German author and journalist Khuê Phạm for an exciting German-language reading and conversation. Pham met with students from the Intensive Advanced and Advanced I courses taught by Professor Astrid Weigert and graduate student Sally Simpson. Pham read excerpts in German from her novel Wo immer ihr auch seid, which has recently been translated into English as Brothers and Ghosts; she also discussed her inspiration for the novel as well as the experiences of the Vietnamese migrant community in Germany and her impressions of visiting Washington, DC. The class visit was followed by an informal conversation with faculty and graduate students in Konrad’s Korner.
On October 30-31, 2025, the German Department co-sponsored the international symposium “What’s Work? Humanistic Approaches to Understanding Work” with the Georgetown Humanities Initiative, the Fritz-Hüser-Institut in Dortmund (Germany), and the English Department at Georgetown. Five featured speakers and 21 additional scholars from Hungary, Italy, the United States, and Germany explored facets of the theme from the 19th to the 21st centuries in literature, graphic design, photography, and cinema. Topics included documentary photography, the relationship of labor strikes and cinema, the role of labor in oppositional literature in socialist systems, close readings of work as a theme in Victorian and in contemporary German literature, as well as depictions of work in television programs like Mister Rogers, among others.
Dr. Steffen Siegel during the What’s Work? symposium on October 31, 2025
The symposium provided a forum for exchanging ideas, engaging discussions, and a space to articulate the way that the Humanities contribute to our understanding of supposedly utilitarian notions of work. Publication of an edited volume of some of the contributions is planned.
The symposium was co-organized by Iuditha Balint (Fritz-Hüser-Institut), Emilia Endler (GU German), Sherry Linkon (GU English), and Peter C. Pfeiffer (GU German). Funding support came from the Georgetown Humanities Initiative, the George M. Roth German Endowment, the English Department, and the Weise Family Fund of the German Department.
The German Department was pleased to present a lecture by Visiting Researcher Patrick Graur on Friday, November 14. He spoke about his dissertation research on the Aktionsgruppe Banat and the German-language literature in Romania since 1945. Patrick comes to the German Department as a doctoral candidate from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg.
L to R: Dr. Mary Helen Dupree, Patrick Graur, Dr. Friederike Eigler