Past Events

"Far-reaching Similarities: Freud, Jensen, Gradiva" with Sina Dell'Anno

December 4, 2025

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4:00PM - 6:00PM EST

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Plimpton Room, Barker Center room 133

The German Studies: New Perspectives seminar presents Sina Dell'Anno, University of Basel/Visiting Professor, Yale University A reconsideration of Freud's Delusion and Dreams in W. Jensen’s “Gradiva” with particular attention to the role of paraphrase in...

"Unexpected Alliances Behind the Iron Curtain: Black History and International Solidarity in East Germany,” with Katharina Warda

November 12, 2025

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5:15PM - 6:30PM EST

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Nebel Room (Barker 359)

Katharina Warda, sociologist and literary scholar, will speak on "Unexpected Alliances Behind the Iron Curtain: Black History and International Solidarity in East Germany,” co-sponsored between the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the...

"Wickerwork: On Poetic Translation"

October 30, 2025

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4:00PM - 6:00PM EDT

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Plimpton Room, Barker Center room 133

SPEAKERS: Richard Sieburth (New York University), Christian Lehnert (University of Leipzig) Richard Sieburth will present his translations and engage in discussion with Christian Lehnert. About the Speakers Richard Sieburth is Professor Emeritus of...

"Unlearning the Self: Nietzsche, Emerson, and the Transatlantic Future of the Humanities"

October 22, 2025

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5:00PM - 6:30PM EDT

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Boylston Hall 237

Guest speaker Ulrike Wagner, of Bard College Berlin, explores the question "What if the vocation of the humanities were not to affirm identity but to unlearn it?" For further information contact annedymek@fas.harvard.edu.

Peter J. Burgard: "Zur Wunde Christi: Caravaggios doppelsinniger Naturalismus"

October 9, 2025

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5:00PM - 7:00PM EDT

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Plimpton Room, Barker Center room 133

Part of the Mahindra Humanities Center's German Studies: New Perspectives series. Lecture is in German; Q&A in English or German. In the context of the German Studies Seminar, the purpose of this lecture is to show how the practice of close reading...

"The Use and Value of Language Skills in the Workplace"

October 2, 2025

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4:00PM - 6:00PM EDT

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Plimpton Room, Barker Center room 133

The Language Center and the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures present Dr. Tobias Schroedler, Junior Professor of Multilingualism and Social Inclusion at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Dr. Schroedler holds an M.Phil. (2011) and...

Vance Byrd: “Food Delivery and Delivering Literature in Teresa Präauer’s Der Lieferdienst Wien”

April 24, 2025

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4:00PM - 5:30PM EDT

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Nebel Room (Barker 359)

Vance Byrd is Presidential Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania. His teaching and research focus on literature in German, visual culture, and print culture since the nineteenth century. His first...

Gregory Williams: "Practice Situations: Franz Erhard Walther and the Werkkunstschule"

April 10, 2025

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4:00PM - 5:30PM EDT

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Plimpton Room, Barker 133

Gregory Williams is Associate Professor of Contemporary and Modern Art History at Boston University. In this lecture he will explore how modes of practical training had a visible impact on the work of German artists whose careers began in the late 1950s...

Eric Santner: "Ecstatic Intimacies, Intimate Ecstasies: Some Reflections on the Topologies of Modernity"

April 3, 2025

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4:00PM - 5:30PM EDT

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Thompson Room, Barker Center

The Department presents the Ninth Annual Blume Lecture, given by Eric Santner, the Philip and Ida Romberg Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. How is it that, as a recent author put it...

Jessica Ruffin: "'What can I hope?': Race, Abyssal Aesthetics, and the Failure of Beauty"

February 20, 2025

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5:00PM - 6:30PM EST

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Plimpton Room, Barker 133

Jessica Ruffin is Assistant Professor of Film and Media in the Literature Section at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her talk will address the function of the beautiful in accounts of aesthetic and ethical intersubjectivity. Immanuel Kant’s...

Roberto Simanowski: "On the Future of Communication: Looking at AI through the Eyes of German Classics"

Nov 14, 2024

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4:00PM EST

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Plimpton Room, Barker 133

If language is the "house of our being," as Martin Heidegger once asserted, then artificial intelligence has undoubtedly broken into that house. Who, then, is the speaker in AI-generated texts? According to whose principles and values are these texts...

Sharon Dodua Otoo:   "Ada’s Room": A Conversation about Women’s Agency in History and Literature

Nov 7, 2024

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4:00PM EST

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Barker 133 (Plimpton Room)

Moderators: Cynthia Porter (Ohio State University) and Nicole Sütterlin (Harvard) Organizer: Nicole Sütterlin Sharon Dodua Otoo is a novelist and political activist. Otoo won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2016 with the text "Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin"...