Zilla Goodman

The Hebrew program has shown tremendous growth this past year. Enrollments are at an all-time high. This fall saw the introduction of a third year Hebrew course that focuses more on literary texts. A continuation of this course will be taught in spring 2009. Student demand for the Introduction to Jewish Culture course continues to be high. This course typically fills up very early, and the number of students requesting it always exceeds availability. In fall it was taught by Dr. Naomi Gale, an anthropologist and CU’s visiting Schusterman Scholar from Israel. Next semester Dr. Caryn Aviv, a sociologist from the University of Denver, will be the instructor.

Patrick Greaney

In 2008, Patrick Greaney published the book Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin (University of Minnesota Press), for which he was awarded a CU Provost’s Faculty Achievement Award. He is currently writing a book about quotation and appropriation in post-war literature.

Vicki Grove

The past academic year was a busy and memorable one. The greatest highlight was undoubtedly the honor of receiving, with my friend and colleague Helga Luthers, the GSLL Teaching Award for 2007. In the spring was Russian Culture Week, and all the bustle and activity which always accompanies that event. Off campus I volunteered as a parent helper in a second-grade classroom at Leawood Elementary in Littleton every week, helping the students in their studies of a variety of subjects, from homonyms to minting coins to dinosaurs. (I learned a lot!) It provided an interesting contrast to the typical campus classroom experience, and made for a full and well-rounded year.

Saskia Hintz

Saskia Hintz organized and conducted, together with with Patty Schindler, this year’s Goethe Institute “Zertifikat Deutsch” exams in April. All 11 participants passed with high grades. In February she was certified by Goethe Institute Chicago to be an internationally recognized tester/supervisor of the Business German exam “Zertifikat Deutsch für den Beruf,” and she was certified in November for the new Goethe Institute exams “Goethe-Zertifikat B2” and “Goethe-Zertifikat C1” (formely known as ZMP) in San Francisco. The first two volumes of her English support material (“XXL Glossary”), co-authored with Miranda Schmetzer and Courtney Glore, came out in 2008 and she is currently working on the last volume. The XXL Glossaries provide extensive vocabulary and grammar explanations, pronunciation hints and cultural notes in English for the new German textbook "Lagune" by the Max Hueber publishing house in Germany. She also submitted four teaching ideas (“Steckbrief Porträt,” “Wohin geht’s?,” “Es gibt so Tage,” “Kennenlern-Aktivität für Fortgeschrittene”) to the newest volume of the AATG’s “Best Teaching Ideas” collection, which will be published this fall. In May she participated in the FTEP 2008 Summer Institute for Understanding and Using Social Networking and Interaction Tools Associated with Web 2.0 in Support of Student Learning.

Thomas Hollweck

In spring 2008 Professor Hollweck published "Hermann Broch, Eric Voegelin. Briefwechsel 1939-1949," in Sinn und Form, 60, 2 (2008), 149-174; "Im Schatten der Apokalypse. Zum Briefwechsel zwischen Hermann Broch und Eric Voegelin," in Sinn und Form, 60, 2 (2008), 175-189. "Keine Zeit für Krisen. Zu Voegelins und Blumenbergs Verständnis der Moderne," in Zur geistigen Krise der Westlichen Welt: Eric Voegelins Kritk an der Moderne, Voegeliniana 64, Munich, March 2008, 29-49.

During his sabbatical in fall 2008 Professor Hollweck received a grant from the Hoover Archives at Stanford University for research toward a monograph on history, consciousness and representation.

Elena Kostoglodova

Elena Kostoglodova attended the RMMLA conference in Reno, Nevada, in early October 2008, presenting her paper on "i-Clickers in a Small Language Classroom: Successful Strategies" on the Russian Language and Literature panel. During the past year, Elena was also involved in the Russian Club and Russian Tea. See the program news for more details on these functions.

Mark Leiderman

Mark Lipovetsky Leiderman published his new book on Russian postmodernism – Paralogies: Transformations of the (Post)Modernist Discourse in Russian Culture of the 1920s-2000s (Moscow, NLO Press, 840 pages), in which he summarizes his long-standing research of this phenomenon.

Merete Leonhardt-Lupa

I joined the Nordic Program in GSLL in the fall of 2008 to teach Swedish language and culture while Dr. Ursula Lindqvist is on leave. I am currently teaching Beginning Swedish and Second Year Swedish. It is a pleasure and a privilege to work with the friendly and interesting students in my classes and the faculty and staff in GSLL. My teaching philosophy is, in Swedish, "Det måste vara roligt att lära sig språk för att det ska vara mödan värd,” which means that it must be fun to learn a new language for it to be worth all the work you must put into learning it. I try to provide a learning environment where my students can use their curiosity and creativity to learn the Swedish language and culture. In SWED 1010, we now know how to spend a good day in Sweden making small talk, shopping, and eating Swedish food. Currently, we are working on a tourist brochure with articles on what to see and do when visiting Sweden. In SWED 2110, we have studied some well-known Swedish historical characters, real and fictional, created Facebook pages, and played a game of kubb, an old Viking game.

Ursula Lindqvist

In 2007-08, Ursula Lindqvist had an article on IKEA accepted by Space and Culture: International Journal of Social Spaces, forthcoming in early 2009. She also published an article on the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 in the new definitive Encyclopedia of World Fairs and Exhibitions, published by McFarland. Dr. Lindqvist organized the first Roundtable on Nordic Colonialism and Postcolonial Studies at the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study (SASS) annual meeting in Fairbanks, Alaska, in March 2008 and received two internal research grants in association with that project. She also presented a scholarly paper on a separate panel at the conference. In April, she chaired a panel on Comparative Diasporas at the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) annual meeting in Long Beach, California, and also presented a scholarly paper on the poetry of the U.S. Virgin Islands (former Danish West Indies). Dr. Lindqvist received a postdoctoral research grant in summer 2008 from the American Scandinavian Foundation to complete archival work for her book-in-progress in Denmark and Sweden, where she was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Copenhagen and Stockholm University. During the academic year, she taught courses on women in Nordic society, Nordic colonialism, modern Nordic literatures and cultures, Swedish language, and a very popular Maymester course on Scandinavian drama, which included attending a local production of Henrik Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman and bringing the cast into the classroom to talk with students. She also coordinated FIKA, an informal weekly coffee hour for speakers and learners of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, served as a faculty co-advisor of the student-run Nordic Club, and led Swedish song rehearsals with students in preparation for the annual Yulefest in December 2007. Dr. Lindqvist is on leave in 2008-09.

Helga Hlaðgerður Lúthers

In the past year I gave a paper on the Nordic monster in popular culture at the Conference of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, in Fairbanks, Alaska, presented on my new research project on the construct of the popular North at the GSLL Colloquium, and presented on neo-paganism and the problems associated with un-popularizing and re-spiritualizing Norse mythology at the Media, Spiritualities and Social Change Conference here at CU in Boulder this summer. In addition to teaching my regular courses, I redesigned the Viking course to include a blog-based project called “My Virtual Viking,” and designed a new course, “Contemporary Nordic Society and Culture,” which I successfully taught as a study abroad program in Iceland last summer. While in Iceland, the Icelandic National Radio invited me for an interview to discuss the Nordic Studies Program and our students’ interest in the field. As always, I am enjoying my responsibilities as coordinator for the Nordic Film series and faculty advisor for the Nordic Club.

Tatiana Mikhailova

As usual, I am teaching various language courses. The course "Russian Women: From Folklore to the Nineteenth Century" has been taught three times. I enjoy teaching this course and I hope my students like it too. I recently finished an article about the glamorous Russian writer Oksana Robski, the short version which will be published in the magazine Neprikosnovennyj zapas in Moscow.

Laura Olson Osterman

Laura Olson Osterman and David Osterman are parents to twin babies Mira and Daniel Osterman, born Feb. 6, 2008, keeping her pretty busy!

Laura will be teaching a new course in spring 2009, entitled “Slavic Folk Culture: Ideals and Values in the Contemporary World.” The course, which is approved for the Ideals and Values core category, investigates contemporary Slavic folk practices such as calendar holidays, music-making, healing, weddings and funerals, and texts such as internet folklore, personal narratives, and urban legends. The course uses the Slavic countries as a point of focus, but asks students to compare what they learn about tradition and change with their experience of their own cultures.

Henry Pickford

During the 2007-2008 academic year, Henry Pickford taught three self-designed courses: upper division seminars on Marx and Wittgenstein, and a lower-level lecture course on ethics in philosophy and literature. He gave a public lecture on Wittgenstein in Denver and completed an article on Heimrad Bäcker and the philosophy of quotation for a special issue of Modern Austrian Literature edited by Patrick Greaney. Dr. Pickford is currently on research leave writing a book on Tolstoy and Wittgenstein.

Artemi Romanov

Artemi Romanov completed his monograph on Intergenerational Communication (Межпоколенческая коммуникация), Moscow: Editorial URSS, 2008 (under contract, 257 pp.), which will appear in November-December 2008 if the world economic crisis doesn’t affect the publishing house in Moscow.

His article on “Usage and Perception of Religious Words in Contemporary Russian” (Использование церковной лексики и отношение к ней среди носителей современного русского языка) was accepted for publication by the Russian Language Journal, 2008 (32 pp).

In fall 2008 Artemi taught a new course, RUSS 4060: Advanced Russian for Heritage Speakers. The importance of this course lies in the fact that the Russian studies program has experienced a growth in the number of heritage students registering for our language courses. However, Russian heritage students come to CU with a different proficiency profile than non-heritage students. Foreign language instructors are aware of significant difficulties as a result of having heritage and non-heritage students in the same class as these two groups of students have different learning needs. Heritage students usually have well-developed speaking and listening skills but lack proficiency in reading, writing and translation skills. Advanced Russian for Heritage Speakers allows us to fill this gap. The course takes into consideration heritage students’ linguistic needs, their cultural background and their knowledge of (and lacunae in) grammar, spelling rules and vocabulary. The course also serves the needs of Russian Studies majors who sign up for the Russian Studies for Heritage Students – track C.

Rimgaila Salys

Rima Salys has published an article on Marina Razbezhkina's award-winning film Vremia zhatvy, "Gleaning Meaning: Harvest Time," The Russian Review 67 (July 2008): 484-97. She also published "Russia is a Pagan Country," a review of Razbezhkina's most recent film "Iar" (The Hollow) in Kino-kultura, 19 (January 2008).

Dr. Salys gave an invited lecture April 1, 2008 at the University of Kansas, Center for Russian and East European Studies on cinematic revisionings of the Stalin era.

Patricia Schindler

Patty Schindler was awarded a CU Boulder Outreach Council Award for German Language Immersion Day, held on Wednesday, January 23, 2008. This is the sixth Immersion Day Patty has hosted and as promised, it was another fun-filled day. Over 300 students, teachers and parents attended this event designed for middle and high school German students in Boulder Valley Schools. The students engage in creative projects using German folk crafts such as the art of paper cutting, carving blocks of wood with German motifs, painting medieval shields, writing in old German script and painting Fasching masks. German food and a film in German also make this such a successful and rewarding event...not to mention the dedication of the high school German teachers, the University of Colorado German faculty, TA's and the German Club.

Ann Schmiesing

Ann Schmiesing published two articles in 2008: “Lessing and Chodowiecki” (Lessing Yearbook 37 [2006/2007]:151-166) and “Daniel Chodowiecki’s Illustrations for Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel’s Über die Ehe” (British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Journal 31:3 [2008]:491-511). She also presented a paper on “Narcissistic Investments and Transformations in Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel’s Lebensläufe nach aufsteigender Linie and Über die Ehe” at the German Studies Association conference in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her receipt of a CU LEAP Professional Growth Grant enabled her to travel to Berlin and Kassel in the summer to research a new book project on the Brothers Grimm.

Davide Stimilli

Davide Stimilli was on teaching leave in the spring semester 2008 thanks to the award of three fellowships from European institutions: he spent the month of January in Berlin as a Research Fellow at the Zentrum für Literatur-und Kulturforschung, where he delivered a lecture titled "Vita Contemplativa" at a conference on the German-Jewish art historian Aby Warburg; he was a Fellow at the Liguria Study Center in Bogliasco, Italy (see the attached photo) from mid-February to mid-March, working on a book project on Franz Kafka and Orson Welles; finally, he spent the month of May in London, UK, as the Senior Saxl Fellow at the Warburg Institute, where he conducted research for his contribution to the volume Radical Philology, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2009. For this last travel he also received a Kayden Award and grants from the Center for Humanities and the Arts Graduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities, and the College of Arts & Sciences Dean's Fund for Excellence at CU Boulder. On February 1, 2008, he delivered the lecture “Aby Warburg's Impresa” at the Institute for German Cultural Studies at Cornell University. His edition of unpublished writings by Aby Warburg, Per Monstra ad Sphaeram: Sternglaube und Bilddeutung. Vortrag in Gedenken an Franz Boll und andere Schriften 1923 bis 1925 (Hamburg: Doelling und Galitz 2008) was released in February and reviewed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on August 6, 2008. An Italian version of this book is forthcoming in 2009. His translation (from Czech to Italian) of a book by the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka: Saggi eretici (Torino: Einaudi 2008; original ed.: Kacirske eseje [Prague: Academia 1990]), was published in March. His essay "Dream Bodies" is forthcoming in the volume “Sleeping, I am More Awake: The Art of Dreams,” edited by Barbara Hahn and Meike Werner (Rodopi: Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2009), and an essay he has written with a colleague from Indiana University, Massimo Scalabrini: "Pastoral Postures: Some Renaissance Versions of Pastoral" has been accepted for publication by the journal Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance.

Beverly Weber

I received a Kayden Grant for summer research in Berlin for a chapter of my book on gender, violence, and notions of modernity in contemporary discussions of Islam in Germany. In October I presented on that research at the German Studies Association and Women in German conferences. I also finished drafts of articles on representations of 9/11 in contemporary German literature and on representations of Islam in bestselling autobiographies in Germany. In the spring I will be chairing and presenting at an American Comparative Literature Association seminar on representations of Muslim women in film and literature.

I continue to develop new interdisciplinary cultural studies courses; in the spring I will be teaching cultural studies courses on gender, race, and immigration in Europe as well as a course on Germany in an integrating EU. It was a pleasure to organize a visit by the German author Angela Krauß together with Gaby Kathoefer of DU. This visit was part of several new activities happening in German Club, including a Wednesday evening discussion group focused on current events.

I also continue my work as web editor and technology consultant to the steering committee for Women in German. At the 2007 Colorado Learning, Teaching and Technology conference I presented on Zotero, a portable research management, collection and citation software.