For those unfamiliar with current research projects underway in the German Department, the German Studies Association Conference in Kansas City, MO might have made for an excellent crash course: Seven representatives of the the department--three faculty members and four graduate students--were in attendance to showcase current scholarly work, convene seminars and serve as panel commentators.
Following up on her 2009 monograph, Willing Seduction: The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich and Mass Culture, Prof. Barbara Kosta's paper turned to the screenplay's post-war afterlife in the 1959 Hollywood remake of Josef von Sternberg's 1930 classic. In addition to delivering the paper, entitled "When Texts Travel: Hollywood's Remaking of The Blue Angel," she also served as commentator for the panel Women Writing the First World War. Prof. Steven D. Martinson delivered a paper on Friedrich Schiller, "Physiology and Schiller's Aesthetics of Perception," pointing out that Schiller's work constitutes a "Wahrnehmungsästhetik" in contradistinction to the "Wahrnehmungsästhetik" developed by Lessing and other eighteenth-century dramatists. Martinson also organized a session on Transcultural German Studies. Prof. David Gramling served as a convener for the seminar "Turkish-German Studies: Past, Present and Future," which brought together over fifteen experts in the field from both sides of the Atlantic. The purpose of the seminar was twofold: to take stock of the present state of Turkish-German Studies, including its inroads into the multitude of overarching discourses in which the field is implicated--migration, nation, citizenship, race, ethnicity, to name a few. This approach already alludes to the seminar's second purpose, namely to identify areas overlooked by the field and propose new directions for future research agendas.
Among the graduate students, James F. Howell delivered his paper "The Hagioraphy of a Secular Saint: Alexander von Humboldt and the Scientism of the German Democratic Republic," which traced the younger Humboldt's East German reception. Agnes Cser's paper, "Musik als geistige Haltung in Gottfrieds von Straßburg Tristan," synthesized the significance of the titular character's musical prowess with Boethius' conceptualizations of music and morality. The Japanese Light Novel Boogiepop, Nietzischean concepts and Wagnerian musical drama were brought into dialogue in Lee Gagum's paper, "A Discourse among Kouhei Kadono Boogiepop, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra and Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" Antonella Cassia also presented her paper "The Road to Mecca," based upon her dissertation project.
