Dear GSLL Friends, Colleagues, and Alumni,

Greetings from the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures (GSLL)! GSLL has had a vibrant and productive year, as you’ll see in this newsletter. Our faculty numbers continue to expand, and our course offerings, study abroad opportunities, and student enrollments have grown as well. We’ve also had a busy year full of lively cultural and student club activities, well-attended film series and language tables, and engaging visiting scholar lectures and GSLL colloquia. Here are some of the highlights as we look back on 2007 and ahead to 2008:

In August 2007 we welcomed two new faculty members to GSLL. Assistant Professor Beverly Weber received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. In her research and teaching, Professor Weber explores the intersections of race, gender, and migration in Germany and Europe, including Turkish-German culture, immigrant culture, and Islam in Europe. Senior Instructor Saskia Hintz holds a teaching certificate in German, Danish, and Education from the Pädagogische Hochschule in Flensburg, Germany, and a Ph.D. in German from New York University. Her teaching experience includes language classes on all levels of instruction as well as culture and literature classes. At CU, she teaches our third and fourth-year language courses, including Business German, and also coordinates our Goethe-Institut language certificate examinations.

Instructor Ingrid Sixberry retired in May after fifteen years of teaching language and Business German courses in GSLL’s German Program. As colleagues emphasized in the speeches they gave at her retirement party, Ingrid is a master teacher whose dedication to the profession will have a lasting impact on her students and our German Program.

Helga Luthers became a full-time instructor in our Nordic Program this year. In addition to teaching large courses on topics such as Old Norse Mythology, Nordic Film, and Tolkien’s Nordic Sources, she has developed a new three-week summer study abroad program in Iceland, to be held for the first time in summer 2008.

The German Program, too, is in the process of enhancing its study abroad offerings to include a summer program in Berlin, and expects to have the program running for summer 2008. We continue to offer the CU-University of Regensburg academic year exchange, and Sylvie Burnet-Jones (Study Abroad Office) and I traveled to Regensburg in October to conduct a very successful on-site evaluation of this program, now in its thirty-eighth year.

Other GSLL curriculum development includes Ursula Lindqvist’s core course on Women in Nordic Society, Henry Pickford’s course on Marxism, Davide Stimilli’s core course on Kafka and the Kafkaesque, and Tatiana Mikhailova’s course on Women in Russia. The German Program has also revised its major and minor, and the Russian Program now offers a new major track for heritage speakers. The Nordic Program has a record number of minors (28), and enrollments in Hebrew language are also growing rapidly.

Our faculty members continue to maintain an active research profile, with numerous conference papers presented and peer-reviewed books and articles published in 2007. We congratulate Davide Stimilli in particular this year for his selection as a Lilly Library Fellow; 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. French and Spanish translations of his edition of Aby Warburg’s clinical history were published in 2007, as well as an expanded German edition. We also congratulate Patrick Greaney on the publication of his book Untimely Beggar: Impoverished Writing From Baudelaire to Benjamin by University of Minnesota Press.

We continue to benefit from the dedication and hard work of both our program assistant, Karen Hawley, and administrative assistant, Jan Kaufman, who was promoted to the Administrative Assistant III level this fall.

Coming up in the next few months are cultural events such as Yulefest, organized by the Nordic Club; German Language Immersion Day, coordinated by Senior Instructor Patricia Schindler; and Russian Culture Week. An international scholarly symposium sponsored by GSLL is in the works for 2009, and plans to renovate our current conference room and expand our graduate curriculum are also underway.

As always, we are grateful for your support in 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, the Cliff Hall Memorial Scholarship and the Elizabeth Shevchenko Wittenberg Scholarship; moreover, our graduate students are enriched by the generous donor support we receive for the Grace van Sweringen Baur Graduate Scholarship and the George Scherer Travel Scholarship. 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