Past Events
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Apr 23Script Talk: Scripts and Social Meaning in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia
Biljana Konatar Weber, University of Kansas
Biljana Konatar Weber, Multi-Term Lecturer in Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian at the University of Kansas, will be presenting her research on South Slavic script usage in the Balkans.
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Apr 20Stadt, Land, Zukunft – 34th German Day
Union South
This annual outreach event invites Wisconsin middle school and high school German language students to campus to participate in competitions in German, including spelling, Pictionary, charades, poetry, music performance, and skits. The motto this year is “Stadt, Land, Zukunft” which translates as city, country, future.
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Apr 11Virtual Workshop: “Learn to Read the Old German Script: Letters and Personal Documents”
Mark L. Louden, Antje Petty
This workshop is designed for scholars, family historians, students, and anyone curious about Kurrent. You will learn how to decipher individual characters, words, and simple texts, even if you do not speak German. We will also discuss common structures and phrases found in personal documents that can help you better understand their content.
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Apr 10GNS+ Lecture: Tomasz Grusiecki (Queen’s University, Canada), “The Last Aurochs: Zoopolitics, Memorialization, and Early Modern Extinction”
Tomasz Grusiecki (Queen’s University, Canada)
Pyle Center Room 332
From the 16th century onward, Jaktorów Forest in Mazovia, Poland, became the last refuge of the aurochs, a now-extinct species of long-horned wild cattle. Despite the Polish kings’ best efforts at conservation, the species perished in 1627 under the watchful eye of King Sigismund III. This lecture will examine objects made from aurochs horn, which …
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Mar 21Rosemaling at the Chazen: An Afternoon with Painter Tara Austin and the Nordic Lights Dance Band
Mead Witter Lobby of the Chazen Museum of Art
Join Tara Austin (MFA 2017), UW–Madison’s Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Culture’s 2026 Folk-Artist-in-Residence and for a live rosemaling demonstration accompanied by Nordic American old-time music from the Nordic Lights Dance Band. Please RSVP ahead of time: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rosemaling-at-the-chazen-tickets-1982713339973?aff=WEev03212026
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Mar 10Virtual Lecture: An Unusual Moravian Diary
Paul Peucker
Join us and Dr. Peucker as he explores the history of the Moravians and examines the diary itself—who these men were, the topics they discussed in London, and why this source remains relevant today.
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Mar 9“Fugitive Logistics: Unsettling the German Archive”
Van Hise 1418
Nathan Taylor's talk, "Fugitive Logistics: Unsettling the German Archive,” is drawn from his forthcoming book of the same name with Cornell University Press. It shifts from discourses of value to global value chains and draws on an emerging field of ‘infrastructural’ and critical logistics studies to rethink paradigms of exile and Atlantic migration in German Studies.
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Feb 25Virtual Lecture: “German and American Protestant Pastors in Occupied Germany”
Brandon Bloch
This presentation examines the fraught interactions between German Lutheran pastors and their American Protestant counterparts, as well as U.S.-based faith organizations.
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Feb 17Reading to Live: From Symbolic Act to the Activity of Form
Dr. Jensen Suther
Elevhjem Building L166
Drawing on the account of a “bio-aesthetics,” I develop in my recent book, True Materialism, I will show that Jameson's provocative idea of the symbolic act fails to live up to its own promise: instead of grasping artistic and literary works as coded representations of class struggle, Marxist criticism must understand narrative not primarily as representation but as an essential dimension of the self-reproduction of animals like us.
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Feb 16Virtual Lecture: Yugoslav & Post-Yugoslav Jewish Identity in the Balkans
Zoom
This talk will aim to better understand Jewish identity in Yugoslavia, and its implication on the wars that saw its dissolution and afterward.