Dear GSLL Friends, Colleagues, and Alumni,

Greetings from the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures (GSLL)! GSLL has enjoyed another vibrant and productive year, as you’ll see in this newsletter. Perhaps our biggest news of the year is our receipt of a $140,000 grant from the Max Kade Foundation of New York for the establishment of the Max Kade German Room in McKenna Languages Building room 112. This generous grant will enable us to create a state-of-the art classroom, cultural facility, and meeting space for the CU German Program. Named after the pharmaceutical researcher and philanthropist Max Kade, the finished room will be actively used by students, faculty, visiting scholars, alumni, and donors. As such, it will fulfill a critical need in our growing program. Construction on the room will begin in spring 2009, and will be completed in time for fall 2009 classes.

We are currently conducting faculty searches for a tenured advanced associate or full professor of German and for an assistant professor of Jewish European literature. The position in Jewish European literature is a new line, and as such is evidence of the significant growth of CU’s new Jewish Studies Program (directed by Professor David Shneer) and of GSLL’s Hebrew language courses and cultural offerings (coordinated by Senior Instructor Zilla Goodman in GSLL).

Our Russian Program has a record enrollment in beginning Russian language courses and has also begun offering courses for its new major track for heritage speakers of Russian. The Nordic Studies Program currently has a record number of minors (40), and over the summer Instructor Helga Luthers inaugurated a new three-week summer study abroad program in Iceland. The German Program, too, has enhanced its study abroad offerings. Our new summer study abroad program in Berlin was offered for the first time in June and July 2008, and we are currently working on a proposal for a year-long academic exchange program with the Freie Universität Berlin. We are also in the final stages of proposing a new PhD in German Studies. Other German Program news includes the inauguration of two new donor-supported essay prizes. The Lucile Berkeley Buchanan Undergraduate Essay Prize is named after a German major who in 1918 became the first female black student to graduate from CU. The Mary Rippon Graduate Essay Prize is named after one of CU’s first faculty members and the first woman to be a professor at a public university in the US. See our Student News page for more information on these and other awards and honors.

Our faculty members continue to maintain an active research profile, with numerous conference papers presented and peer-reviewed books and articles published in 2008. We especially congratulate Patrick Greaney, whose book Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin (Minnesota) has been nominated for the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize in Comparative Literary Studies. In October, Professor Greaney was also awarded a CU Provost’s Faculty Achievement Award for Untimely Beggar. Congratulations, too, to Davide Stimilli, who served in 2008 as a Senior Saxl Fellow at the Warburg Institute in London; a fellow at the Liguria Study Center in Bogliasco, Italy; and a research fellow at the Zentrum für Literaturforschung in Berlin. Professor Stimilli’s edition of unpublished writings by Aby Warburg was also reviewed in February by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s most prominent newspaper. We also congratulate Mark Leiderman on the publication of his book Paralogies: Transformations of the (Post)Modernist Discourse in Russian Culture of the 1920s-2000s (Moscow: NLO Press).

Coming up in the next few months are cultural events such as Russian Culture Week, April 2009, and an international scholarly symposium we are sponsoring on the topic “Constructing Nation: From Modernity to the New Millennium,” to be held on March 13 and 14, 2009.

As always, we are grateful for your support of these and other endeavors. Many of our students would not be able to participate in our study abroad programs without the donor support we receive for scholarships such as the Gunnél Thorsin-Hamm Memorial Scholarship and the Cliff Hall Memorial Scholarship; moreover, our students are enriched by the generous donor support we receive for the Grace van Sweringen Baur Graduate Scholarship, the Lucile Berkeley Buchanan Undergraduate Essay Prize, the Max Kade fellowship, the Mary Rippon Graduate Essay Prize, and the Elizabeth Schevchenko Wittenberg Prize. To donate to these or other GSLL initiatives, please click here.

To all of our alumni, we always enjoy hearing from you. Please e-mail us at gsll@colorado.edu with your news.

With best wishes for the year ahead,

Ann Schmiesing
Chair