FACULTY RESEARCH

Jeroen Dewulf has recently published a postcolonial study on travel literature about Brazil: "Brasilien mit Brüchen" (2007). He is currently working on literature from the Dutch-speaking Caribbean (the work of Albert Helman and Tip Marugg), Dutch clandestine literature related to WWII, postwar identity of the German-speaking community in Belgium and multicultural citizenship in the Netherlands.

Nikolaus Euba's intermediate textbook Stationen: Ein Kursbuch für die Mittelstufe (with Prisca Augustyn, Heinle and Thomson, 2008) and the accompanying Stationen: Arbeitsbuch für die Mittlestufe have been published this July and are already in use at several Colleges and Universities. He will host a panel on Drama Pedagogy and Foreign Language Learning at ACTFL in November 2007 and report on recent developments of the Language Program articulation project at the BLC's lecturers panel in December of 2007.

Karen Feldman’s current research concerns figurality and literariness in the wake of Kant’s aesthetics. In this context she has written about Kantian hypotyposis in „The Fictional and the Figural: On Derrida, Kant and the Textual Event” in Cardozo Law Review (27.2: January 2006) and about Hannah Arendt's understanding of figural philosophical language in Life of the Mind ("On Vitality, Figurality and Orality in Hannah Arendt," in Thinking Allegory Otherwise, ed. Brenda Machosky (Stanford University Press, forthcoming). She has recently presented work on Schiller and Kant at a colloquium on Schiller’s Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen. She is currently planning a one-day colloquium on philosophy and literary theory for Spring 2007.

Deniz Göktürk is currently working on a book tentatively titled Disguise in Diaspora: Transnational Aspects of Comedy and Community. A preliminary article toward this book has been published in a special issue of New German Critique on "Multicultural Germany: Art, Performance, and Media" (92: Spring/Summer 2004) that she co-edited. She has assembled a research group at Berkeley around questions of migration, citizenship, and multiculturalism. Germany in Transit. Nation and Migration, 1955-2005, a co-edited sourcebook (with Anton Kaes and David Gramling) that grew out of this project, is currently in press with UC Press and will be published in December 2006. Papers from an international conference that she co-organized at Berkeley have been published in the inaugural issue of TRANSIT, the new electronic journal launched by the German Department.

Anton Kaes chaired the department 2001-2006. He recently published Shell Shock Cinema; Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton University Press 2009). He co-edited with Deniz Göktürk and David Gramling the sourcebook, "Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955-2005” (University of California Press 2006); he also worked on the new Multicultural Germany Project web site. Book and interactive web site are meant to open up a new subfield in German Studies. His BFI book on Lang's M (2001) is in its 2nd printing. He also co-edited a recent issue of New German Critique about film in exile; his own article analyzes Fritz Lang's first film in Hollywood. His new work is focused on critical theory and cinema with special emphasis on documentary film (with special emphasis on Werner Herzog) and the “ethical turn.” Recent lectures in Amsterdam, Berlin, Seoul, Vienna, Princeton, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv.

Claire Kramsch has recently delivered keynote addresses on language, thought, and culture at the 13th World Congress of Applied Linguistics in Singapore, at the 20th Congress of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Fremdsprachenforschung in Frankfurt and will be giving a plenary talk at the Internationale Deutschlehrertagung in Graz. She received a grant from the France-Berkeley-Fund to engage some Berkeley graduate students in an international research project on multilingualism and multiculturalism in the teaching of foreign languages, based in Paris. A recipient of Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Award, she has just completed a book on The Multilingual Subject, currently under review by Oxford University Press.

Winfried G. Kudszus' new book Terrors of Childhood in Grimms' Fairy Tales has been published in 2005. His most recent publications focus on questions of translation, cultural transfer, and topographical imprint. Recently he delivered his lecture "Freud's Autoanalytic Conceptions between Vienna and Paris" at the University of Budapest and spoke on Freud's Wolf Man case at the University of Graz. He has been invited to the International Semiotic Congress at the University of Lyon in July 2004, where he delivered his lecture "Lost Worlds: Chayan Khoï's Cyberrealism and Sigmund Freud's Paris."

Niklaus Largier is currently chair of the department. He is working on projects involving the multiple intersections of religious practices and the literary imagination, especially in the context of sensation, the emotions, and the rhetoric of love. His book on the history of the stimulation of sense experience, Die Kunst des Begehrens: Dekadenz, Sinnlichkeit, und Askese, has appeared in February 2007 (Munich: Beck Verlag). An American translation of his Lob der Peitsche has been published by ZONE Books (In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal, 2007). In the near future he is planning to explore the poetics of possibility. Recent lectures in Berlin, Chicago, Princeton, Cambridge, Munich, and Seattle addressed topics ranging from the history of sensation and emotion to Musil’s “sense of possibility”, questions of secularism, and concepts of Christian martyrdom.

Irmengard Rauch’s second edition of her 2003 The Gothic Language: Grammar, Genetic Provenance and Typology, Reading will appear in 2011. Her Bay Area German Linguistic Fieldwork Project, in its twenty-seventh year, is revisiting e-mail data (first researched by the BAG Project in the 1999 publication “BAG VI “Toward a Grammar of German e-mail”) in light of the fast-moving new digital technology of the past decade. She is preparing for publication the most recently completed BAG research, co-authored with Germanic Linguistics students, on human : canine communication. Her phonological work on the role of sound in translation, presented at the 2010 Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable, has spawned further research. Two books are currently in progress, one treating diachronic contrastive analysis, the second, an edition of twelve BAG fieldwork projects.  She continues editing of the Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis and of the two book series Berkeley Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics and Berkeley Models of Grammars.

Currently Tom Shannon is researching word order and drift in West Germanic. Having started with German and Dutch, he is now investigating Afrikaans and Yiddish. The findings have been reported at several recent national and international conferences, and in the past year two articles from this project appeared. He plans to publish the complete findings in book form. In addition, two books in the American Association of Netherlandic Studies book series he edits have appeared recently.

Chenxi Tang’s book The Geographic Imagination of Modernity: Geography, Literature, and Philosophy in German Romanticism (Stanford UP, forthcoming) traces the emergence of the geographic paradigm in Western thought around 1800. Recently he has been awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship to work on his current book project entitled Fictions of Humanity: Poetics of World History in European Modernity. This project seeks to illuminate the world-historical imagination in Europe from its beginning in the early-modern period to the early twentieth century from two intertwined perspectives: the conceptual paradigms for imagining humankind as a collective entity, and the specific narrative procedures that configure the multitude of human events and phenomena in the past and present and around the globe into a meaningful whole.

Elaine Tennant is working on Maximilian's elaborately illustrated verse romance, Theuerdank, and its reception as design and material artifact. The project is concerned with notions of intellectual property and cultural transmission, media shifts and hybridity, textual genres and counter-factual history in the first century of German printing. Recent essays of hers deal with design considerations in early printed books and gender dynamics in the Nibelungenlied. She is one of the organizers of the UC Colloquium on Early Modern Central Europe.