Ann Schmiesing
Ann Schmiesing's book Norway's Christiania Theatre, 1827-1867: From Danish Showhouse to National Stage was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Schmiesing also attended an international humanities conference in Tunisia in July and was an invited panelist at a symposium on Jacob Burckhardt in Rhode Island in October.
Adrian DelCaro
Adrian Del Caro has published his translation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, over the summer. Co-edited with Robert Pippin of the University of Chicago, who contributed the critical introduction, the new edition appears in the Cambridge University Press series Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, which features nine volumes of Nietzsche titles. Meanwhile, Adrian is working on another translation for CUP, namely Arthur Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena II, under the editorship of Chris Janaway, for a new edition and translation of Schopenhauer’s complete works.
Adrian Del Caro proposed a new undergraduate course for the core curriculum (Ideals and Values), which he is now teaching for the first time: GRMN/HUMN 1701: Nature and Environment in German Literature and Thought. The students get to read canonical works by Goethe, Tieck, Büchner, Droste-Hülshoff, Keller, Nietzsche, Hesse, Wolf, and Petra Kelly, while examining conceptions of nature and environment from the period of Sturm und Drang to the founding of the Green party in Germany. Adrian has also double-listed the Faust course, GRMN/HUMN 4504, so that its graduate course equivalent is GRMN/COML 5504.
Patrick Hege’s master’s thesis, “Digesting Nietzsche” (spring 2006, advisor Adrian Del Caro) has been nominated by CU-Boulder for the Western Association of Graduate Schools (WAGS) and University Microfilms International (UMI) Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award competition. Each member institution may submit one nomination for the award.
Adrian Del Caro served on two honors committees in spring 2006. Christine Clawley, “Toward the Ethics of the Mundane: Nietzsche’s Post-Morality of the Earth” (Philosophy, summa cum laude), and Amanda Wade, “The Need for Balance: An Examination of Rational Thought in Modern Western Society” (General honors, magna cum laude, advisor Adrian Del Caro).
Davide Stimilli
Last year I published in Italian, for the first time in any language, an edition of the German-Jewish art historian Aby Warburg’s clinical history, along with an interpretation of this critical time in Warburg’s life, under the title "La guarigione infinita. Storia clinica di Aby Warburg" (Vicenza: Neri Pozza 2005). Warburg was a patient of the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger from 1921 to 1924. Now a French (Paris: Rivages) and a Spanish translation (Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo) are forthcoming, as well as the German edition of the original materials (Berlin: Diaphanes), all scheduled for 2007. I have also edited a selection of Warburg’s unpublished writings for the Warburg Institute in London, which is forthcoming in one of the series the Institute publishes in conjunction with the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg. The volume, under the title "'Per Monstra ad Sphaeram': Der Vortrag zum Gedächtnis Franz Bolls und andere Schriften 1923-1925" (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz), further documents a crucial and hitherto relatively unknown period of Warburg's life. An Italian version is also being prepared.
Elena Kostoglodova
Conferences
In October 2006 I traveled to the annual RMMLA conference in Tucson, Arizona, to present a workshop entitled "Verbal Supplements: How to Motivate Students to Spell Well in a Foreign Language if They Can't Even Do It In Their Own".
Russian newspaper and Tutoring Lab
I'm continuing to publish Rodnaya Koloradschina for second-year students. Students whose entries are the best (the most creative while being virtually mistake-free) for a given week win a pocket Russian calendar or Russian magazines to read. We have recently published a 111th anniversary issue! I'm also running a tutoring lab for students of Russian of all levels, where they can get free tutoring from upperclassmen or help the beginners to advance in their study of Russian. The lab now counts as many as 32 members tutoring and being tutored!
Russian Club and Tea
Russian Tea has been attracting a steady flow of students this semester. We chat about topics of interest in Russian, help each other with grammar and other questions and enjoy deliciously unhealthy cookies and freshly brewed tea!
The Russian club has resumed its activities this semester with a popular mushroom hike in the mountains, during which we have collected an unprecedented amount of mushrooms (bags and bags of them!) in just a few hours. We have also seen three Russian-themed films at the International Film Series and attended a Russian classical music concert in which our student, Carter Smith, played bass. We will be going to see the outstanding Moscow Ballet's Nutcracker at the Paramount Theater in Denver in December and are planning a few more exciting events in November and December!
Laura Olson Osterman
Prof. Laura Olson married in June 2006 and changed her name to Laura Olson Osterman.
Scholarship
Last November (2005) Prof. Osterman received a grant from the CU Graduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities to host a Russian folklore scholar, Svetlana Adonyeva of St. Petersburg State University. Prof. Adonyeva gave a public lecture on “Cursing, Competing, and Lamenting: Ritual Speaking Conventions, Gender and the Social Order in the Post-Soviet Russian North.” Currently, Prof. Osterman and Prof. Adonyeva are working on a co-authored book on contemporary Russian folklore and gender.
Outreach
In August 2006 Prof. Osterman conducted classes in Russian folk games, singing and dancing for elementary school children at the Russian Heritage Camp in Snow Mountain Ranch. The camp serves U.S. families with children adopted from the former Soviet Union.
Mark Leiderman
Dear friends and colleagues,
Greetings from Bristol! My semester-off moves on well although I miss Boulder and your company, and our weather, without a doubt the most pleasant in the world. The weather here is, well, English – which means that it rains every day. However, on a bad day it happens only once and lasts from dawn to dusk. On a good day, though, rain happens on multiple occasions but does not last longer than half an hour.
I am in Bristol thanks to the British Leverhulme Fellowship – perhaps, the most prestigious academic grant in the UK. I was invited to the University of Bristol as a Leverhulme fellow by Professor Birgit Beumers (she was visiting our department with a lecture on Russian cinema two years ago). Together with her, we are writing a book on New Russian Drama – a very prolific movement that has affected both Russian theatre and literature alike. In our project, however, the main emphasis is given to the representation of violence as a main social language in post-soviet Russia. In connection with the topic of my research, I spent three weeks in September in Moscow at the annual festival of New Drama, watching no less than three productions per day and surprisingly enjoying some of them. Also, when in Moscow, I turned in a manuscript of a book on Russian postmodernism on which I was working for the last five years, to a much respected and internationally renowned press. (Photo: Mark Leiderman in front of the London School of Slavonic and East European Studies.)
Since the last week of September, I settled down in Bristol, which is a very charming old city with some buildings constructed in the 14th century, with hilly streets (surprisingly they remind me of Boulder), stone stairs, ancient walls, and almost medieval aura. Although my main task is to write for our book every day (which I am doing, honest to god), the Leverhulme obliges its fellows to make their presence in England useful for as British many universities as possible. So, in addition to a seminar presentation at the Department of Russian Studies in my host institution, I am delivering lectures at the similar departments in the University College of London (School of Slavonic and East European Languages), Oxford, Cambridge, universities of Sheffield, Manchester, Nottingham, Leeds, and Exeter. In short, there will be no week until mid-December when I will not have to lecture somewhere. I cannot say that I do not enjoy this schedule. It gives me a chance to meet colleagues and to check if my ideas make sense when presented to them and their grad students, and of course, to travel and to see the places.
But I feel that soon enough I will be saturated by the sightseeing and the sight of McKenna building will be the one I would like to see the most.
With my best wishes to all of you,
Mark
Tatiana Mikhailova
For the third academic year I have used a weblog (blog) in my advanced Russian language classes (mainly Russian 3010 and Russian 3020). The time has come to share my experience with this rather unorthodox and challenging way to teach a foreign language.
When I first started integrating the site www.livejournal.com with my Russian 3010 class in Fall of 2004, I felt like I was one of very few users. Today there is a very diverse Internet community of professional teachers who use blogs in their classes. For example, the University of British Columbia is very attentive to blogs, and even maintains a site, called Weblogs@UBC. It is an e-learning initiative being spearheaded by the University’s office of technology and this initiative has already brought about substantial results—blogs are being used to teach a wide range of subjects, from English literature to Geology.
But back to the past, I didn’t have firm ground under my feet; all I felt was that I wanted to see some modernization in Russian language education. All of the forms we use today: reading aloud, reciting, writing dictations, work in groups and pairs, acting out dialogs, etc, etc, are effective tools and they served us well before. Why to change anything, then? The thing was, at that very moment I discovered livejournal.com, which fascinated me with the opening possibilities of communicating through the Internet with someone very far away and actually forming meaningful communities, based on common interests (language learning included). It was a coincidence—later on I learned about the existence of myspace.com and some other sites too. But livejournal.com was exactly the challenge I was looking for in language education and I decided to open my Russian Class blog.
These three years that I have used livejournal in my class were certainly the busiest ones time wise. On the one hand I didn’t spend any time in class explaining the homework and writing endless letters to students explaining what the homework was since everything was posted on the Internet and everyone in class could access the homework from anywhere on campus and beyond. On the other hand the amount of my commitment increased sharply because I not only had to grade papers, but Internet postings as well. I didn’t mind, though, since it was fun to play with the new form. It seemed as if anything I wanted was possible. Searching the web for a grammar explanation? Here is a nice link for you to explore, guys! Audio file or even video file? Here you go! Enjoy your show! What was the most exciting thing, though, is that everything I shared could be purely in Russian. My homework was too. Without much thinking my students were involved in some very intense language and they seemed oblivious to the hardships I dreaded: no fear of typing in Russian, no fear of communicating with strangers—not a thing! Instead the students were excited to translate the poems from Russian to English and publish them in their journals as literary translations, they updated their individual journals according to their tastes and started to post in Russian everything they wanted to share with me and with the world.
In this short info it is not possible to talk in depth and in length of all my experiences with teaching and blogging. In brevi, I’d like to say, that the blog is a great tool for advancing the students’ communicative skills when teaching a foreign language. Students interact in a “real life” target language environment, exchange postings on various topics with each other, me and the rest of the world, share ideas and interesting links and build the sense of a strong language community. Blogs allow the feeling of an immediate return to students' investment in a language; they are able to:
I feel that there will be an inevitable change in the structure of a language class and I am sure that all of us, who teach foreign languages, should think about moving from a traditional teacher and textbook centered class to a student-centered, textbook-less and open-walls class.
Tatiana Mikhailova
www.livejournal.com/users/colorussian
http://colorussian.livejournal.com/profile
Helga Hlaðgerður Lúthers
Helga Hlaðgerður Lúthers is enjoying her first year as an Instructor in the Nordic Studies Program. Her new course on Tolkien's Nordic Sources is already becoming quite popular, and Helga hopes to be able to increase enrollments even further the next academic year. In connection with the course, Helga is screening the extended versions of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Two Towers is scheduled to for screening Sunday, November 4 at 1:00 in Atlas 100, and The Return of the King will be screened on Saturday, December 2 at 1:00 in Atlas 100. Everyone is welcome.
Helga continues serving as a liaison for the Nordic Film Series and is happy to announce increased popularity. Upcoming screenings this semester include Babette’s Feast (Gabrielle Axel, 1988) on November 13; Uno (Aksel Hennie, 2004) on November 2; and Producing Adults (Aleksi Salmenpera, 2004) on December 11. All screenings are at 7:00 PM in MCOL W100, free and open to the public.
On September 25th, Helga participated in panel discussion on the topic of teaching and career development. The panel was held at the invitation of the CU Undergraduate Academy, and Helga was asked to represent the perspective of the many instructors at CU who make teaching their career, as well as serving as a voice of humanist on the panel.
Thomas Hollweck
Thomas Hollweck participated in a conference “Religion and Violence” sponsored by the University of Trieste, Italy, February 14 - 15, 2006. He gave an invited paper entitled: “Monotheism, Tolerance, and Metastatic Faith in the “Post-Secular Age.” At the 22nd Annual International Meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society that took place in Philadelphia in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Professor Hollweck gave a paper “Thomas Mann’s Work on Myth: The Uses of the Past.” A review of Freundschaft im Exil.Thomas Mann und Hermann Broch, Paul Michael Lützeler ed. (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2004) appeared in German Studies Review, XXIX, 3 (October 2006), 628-649. On September 10, 2006 Thomas Hollweck was invited to introduce and discuss the 2005 German film Sophie Scholl – Die Letzten Tage by the Boulder Jewish Community Center.
Ursula Lindqvist
Dr. Ursula Lindqvist, Instructor of Nordic Studies, has continued to develop a relatively new and interdisciplinary course, SCAN 3206 Nordic Colonialism, and also proposed a new course to be cross-listed with Women's & Gender Studies: SCAN 3208/WMST 3208 Women in Nordic Society: Modern States of Welfare. Pending approval by the CAS curriculum committee, this course will be offered for the first time in Spring 2007. Dr. Lindqvist is teaching two levels of Swedish in 2006-07: first and second year. Dr. Lindqvist also published an article on Edith Södergran's paradoxical poetics in the January issue of Modernism/Modernity and presented papers at the Denmark and the Black Atlantic international conference in Copenhagen in May 2006 and at the Fundamentalism and the Media international conference in Boulder in October 2006. She is scheduled to present a paper, "Double-speak and youth culture in racialized Sweden," on the Muslim Europes panel at the MLA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia in December. Dr. Lindqvist joined the BFA Libraries Committee in 2006 as a CAS Arts & Humanities representative. In addition, Dr. Lindqvist has become a Faculty Affiliate in both the Women's & Gender Studies Program and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race in the Americas (CSERA). She continues to serve as a co-advisor of the student-run Scandinavian Club, and she continues to coordinate a weekly FIKA (Swedish coffee hour) in which native Swedish speakers get together for coffee with students who are learning the language (and speakers of Danish and Norwegian also are welcome). She can be reached at ursula.lind@colorado.edu.
Patrick Greaney
Patrick Greaney published an article on Brecht, Fassbinder, and montage in the volume Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany, and he completed his first book, Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin, which will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in fall 2007. In Maymester, he taught a new course, “German Women Writers,” and in September 2006, he became an affiliate faculty member in Women and Gender Studies.