German, Nordic, and Slavic+

GNS+ Digest

Welcome to the GNS+ Digest page! Here, we compile our upcoming events, affiliated department events, recognitions, news from L&S and campus, and essential links.

Featured Spring 2026 Events

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Reading to Live: From Symbolic Act to the Activity of Form - Tuesday, February 17 at 5:30 pm

at 5:30 pm CST in Elevhjem Building L166

Who: Dr. Jensen Suther

What: In Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, he develops an “allegorical” approach to Marxist criticism, according to which literary works are “coded” representations of class struggle. Jameson understands literary works as “symbolic acts” that respond to social antagonisms by resolving them in an idealized narrative form. The task of the critic, on this account, is to deconstruct the work’s aesthetic façade, to disclose its hidden class standpoint, and to “renarrate” the text in terms of the suppressed historical conflict. This paper will deal with Jameson’s work to construct a theory about art more generally. The paper contends that Jameson’s allegorical approach presupposes a fundamentally representational conception of narrative—despite its powerful suggestion that artistic and literary works are symbolic acts. 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. On this account, literature, and art more generally, is not just a symbolic act but the activity of form through which social life reproduces itself under capitalist conditions.

 

GNS+ Pedagogy Workshop (Skam/Druck/wtFOCK/Sram) - Friday, February 27 at 12pm

Friday February 27 from 12pm to 1pm in VH 1418.

Please join Liina-Ly Roos and Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick for a pedagogy workshop about the internationally popular Norwegian web series Skam and its adaptations in German (Druck), Dutch (Skam NL), Flemish (wtFOCK), and Croatian (Sram).

It’s a rare franchise that covers languages throughout GNS+ and, based on feedback, undergrad students really enjoy it! Because there is a bit of learning curve in watching, Liina-Ly and Zach will share tips for how to navigate these web series. Additionally, they’ll highlight potential topics you could teach, from more general depictions of Gen-Z youth in Europe and questions of fandom/social media, to specific representations of queerness, race/ethnicity, gender, mental health, and more covered in various seasons.

This workshop is open to anyone in GNS+ (faculty, academic staff, graduate students) interested in learning more about these series!

The Last Aurochs: Zoopolitics, Memorialization, and Early Modern Extinction - Friday, April 10 at 4:00 pm

Who: Tomasz Grusiecki, Associate Professor, Bader Chair in Northern Baroque Art, Department of Art History & Art Conservation, Queen’s University, Canada.

When: Friday, April 10 at 4:00 pm, Pyle Center.

Title and description: “The Last Aurochs: Zoopolitics, Memorialization, and Early Modern Extinction.” This paper will examine the idea of extinction avant la lettre — that is, before the term entered nineteenth-century scientific discourse — through objects fashioned from aurochs horns and visual representations of the species in 16th and 17th c. Poland. The topic bridges Slavic and Germanic worlds, as the aurochs was an emblematic animal in both Poland and Germany.

All Upcoming Events

GNS+ Events

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Scandinavian Studies 150th Anniversary Events

There are no upcoming events.

CREECA Events

The following events link to creeca.wisc.edu

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CGES Events

The following events link to europe.wisc.edu

  • Feb
    12

    Film Screening: Mr. Nobody Against Putin (2025) @ 6:30 pm CST - 8:00 pm CST Marquee Cinema in Union South

    Co-sponsored by European Studies, CREECA, and the Havens Wright Center. The Havens Wright Center organizes a documentary film series every spring through a collaboration with undergraduate students with the Wisconsin Union Directorate. Mr. Nobody Against …

  • Feb
    25

    Brandon Bloch, “German American Protestant Pastors in Occupied Germany” @ 6:00 pm CST

    This lecture is cosponsored by  The Friends of the Max Kade Institute. Free and open to the public, but registration is required.  Click here to register for the Zoom Webinar Following Germany’s defeat in 1945 and …

  • Mar
    23

    Chad Gibbs, “Survival At Treblinka” @ 11:30 am CDT Online Event

    Co-Sponsored by the Center for European Studies, the Center for Jewish Studies, and the College of Charleston Center for Holocaust Studies. This is an online event. Register here. On August 2, 1943, prisoners at the …

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Max Kade Institute Events

The following events link to mki.wisc.edu

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Mosse/Weinstein CJS Events

The following events link to cjs.wisc.edu

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Recognitions

Congratulations to Anna Tumarkin for winning the campus-wide Mary Lucy Clark Distinguished Teaching Award! Much thanks also to Karen Evans-Romaine for coordinating the nomination packet.

Congratulations to Claus Andersen and Sonja Klocke who were each awarded a Vilas Associate to support specific research projects!

Tom DuBois has published a(nother) outreach piece on The Conversation: “An Epic Border: Finland’s Poetic Masterpiece, the Kalevala, Has Roots in 2 Cultures and 2 Countries”.

The A&H Divisional Committee has voted unanimously in favor of promoting Liina-Ly Roos to Associate Professor with tenure—congratulations! Much thanks go out to Tom DuBois and the other members of Liina-Ly’s tenure committee as well as to GNS+ admin staff for their considerable work in preparing the tenure dossier.

Liina-Ly Roos has been awarded the 2026 First Book Prize by the Center for German and European Studies at theUniversity of Minnesota. In April, she’ll be doing a book talk at UM as well as other events related to the award. Congratulations!

On January 5, Liina-Ly Roos was interviewed by the Baltic Ways Podcast about her book.

Check out Claus’ interview about hygge on PBS Newshour!

Mary Hennessy has been award a one-semester open-topic fellowship at the IRH during the 2026-27 academic year.

Brian Kilgour (recent PhD in Slavic) has accepted an appointment as Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian at Notre Dame University, which starts in January 2026.

Three recently retired GNS+ faculty—Susan Brantly, Ewa Miernowska, and Pam Potter—have been granted status as faculty emeriti by the Chancellor. Congratulations to all three!

Lowell Brower and Tom DuBois were featured in this L&S story about Krampus.

Łukasz Wodzyński has received the Chancellor’s Teaching Innovation Award as part of this year’s Distinguished Teaching Award Competition. Congratulations, Łukasz, and many thanks to everyone who helped compile the nomination packet!

Claus Andersen was interviewed by PBS Newshour for a segment on hygge that will air in the next few weeks. 

Brian Kilgour (Slavic)  defended his dissertation “History’s Chosen Genre”: Tragedy after the Russian Revolution

Richelle Wilson  (Scandinavian Studies) defended her dissertation IKEA Fictions

Elliott Brandsma (Scandinavian Studies) defended his dissertation Parables for Modernity: The Secularization of Biblical Myth in Modernist Swedish Literature and Film

Fatima Sartbay (Folklore & Comparative Literature) defended her dissertation Ethnonationalism, the Manas Epic, and Performance in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan

Gavrielle Lent (Slavic) passed her PhD preliminary examination, and the working title of her dissertation is Parody, Pastiche, and the Undeath of the Author

Maksim and his wife welcomed their second child, Michael (Misha), on Wednesday, November 12. He arrived weighing 3.52 kg and measuring 53 cm, and has so far shown admirable restraint by not playing with his older brother’s toys.

Julia Goetze will begin serving a two-year term as Co-Editor-in-Chief at the Journal for Psychology in Language Learning (JPLL) in May 2026.

Julia Goetze has been elected to the MLA Delegate Assembly. She will be starting her term as delegate representing the Second Language Teaching and Learning Forum in January 2026 for a term of 3 years.

Claus Andersen, Marcus Cederström, and Scott Mellor have been nominated as  Fall 2025 Honored Instructors.

Claus Andersen was interviewed by L&S Magazine about his work on Hans Christian Andersen’s (no relation!) fairytales. You can find the interview here.

Claus Andersen was interviewed about Danish hygge for On Wisconsin, the alumni magazine. You can find the interview here.

Professor Emerita Halina Filipowicz’s co-edited volume titled Pole/Jew: History, Literature, Identity, Future was recently published by Ohio University Press.

Mary Hennessy and Matt Johnson have received a Hessen Incentive Grant from the UW International Division for a project titled “New Approaches to Literary and Film Archives: Labor and Value.” As part of the grant, they are planning to bring Nathan Taylor (Goethe University, Frankfurt) to campus for a research workshop and a grad-student-oriented professionalization talk this spring.

In summer 2026 and for the third year running, Scott Mellor will lead the program UW Summer Launch in Sweden: Vikings to Empires. The program is open to incoming first-year students and will take place in Sweden.

Melissa Sheedy presented a paper titled “The Little Meer jungsfrau: Challenging the Heteropatriarchal Norm in Kerstin Hensel’s Children’s Book Rusalko” at the 50th Women in German Conference, which was held in early November at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Melissa Sheedy was elected to serve as interim Vice President for the Coalition for Feminist German Studies (FiGS), formerly known as Women in German.

Memorial resolution for Richard “Dick” Ringler, a noted scholar of Old English, Old Norse, and modern Icelandic as well as three-time chair of Scandinavian Studies (1968-1971, 1980-1983, 1999-2000). View the resolution here.

Nâlân Erbil has been elected to the Board of the American Association of Teachers of Turkic Languages. Congratulations!

Books by three current Slavic faculty, one PhD alum, and one professor emeritus have been short-listed for the annual book awards of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL, which is Slavic’s national professional organization). Maksim Hanukai’s Tragic Encounters: Pushkin and European Romanticism (UW Press, 2023) is short-listed in the category of Best Book in Literary Studies; Irina Shevelenko’s Russian Archaism: Nationalism and the Quest for a Modernist Aesthetic (Cornell UP, 2024) is in the category of the Svetlana Boym Best Book in Cultural Studies; Anna Tumarkin’s and Shannon Donnally Quinn’s Diverse Russian: A Multicultural Exploration (Creative Commons, 2024) is in the Best Book in Linguistics and Language Pedagogy category along with David Bethea’s The Pushkin Project: Russia’s Favorite Writer, Modern Evolutionary Thought, and Teaching Inner-City Youth (Academic Studies Press, 2023). Congratulations and much luck to all as the final decisions are made!

Mark Louden participated in the Pennsylvania German Futures conference, an event sponsored by the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University. The conference brought together scholars and community members with a shared interest in Pennsylvania Dutch language and culture for short presentations that fostered dialogue. The idea was to explore ways that the field of Pennsylvania German studies can be advanced among scholars and the public. Mark participated on two panels, on language and identities. One of the suggestions he made was for people working in Pennsylvania German studies to consider the successful projects and outlets for scholarship and public-facing work in Yiddish. He created a new page on his website with several links for people to access.

Emerson McManus, Lowell Ruck, Berit Skogen, and Clara Vigener presented in a session titled “Past, Present, Future: Learning Language and Culture through Authentic Materials” at the Wisconsin Association of Language Teachers (WAFLT) annual conference held at UW-Oshkosh in early November.

Jeanne Schueller led a three-hour workshop for German teachers titled “Fostering Empathy through German Graphic-language Novels” at this year’s Wisconsin Association of Language Teachers (WAFLT) conference in November.

Zach Fitzpatrick co-authored an open-access article “From Society to the Screen: Navigating Non-Binary Inclusion in the German-Language Classroom” that has been included in a special issue of Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German titled “Between and Beyond Er|Sie: Trans and Non-Binary Identities in the L2 German Classroom.”

Isabella Palange delivered a paper titled “‘How Would We know What They Did in the Olden Days’: Pantaleimon Kulish’s Zapiski o Iuzhnoi Rusi and the Politics of Folklore Collection” at the October 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society in Atlanta.

Claus Andersen gave a talk on “Hygge, Health and Happiness” at the College Endowment Association in Milwaukee on 29 October

Claus Andersen will be interviewed about his new book on Hans Christian Andersen (no relation!) on stage at the Copenhagen Book Fair by the Danish author Carsten Jensen on 7 November

“2025 Our Shared Waters” (a write-up about a high-impact practice), Marcus Cederström and Thomas DuBois

Brian Kilgour, dissertation defense, “History’s Chosen Genre”: Tragedy after the Russian Revolution (Advisor: Irina Shevelenko, October 2025)

Nicole Fischer, dissertation deposit, Early Romantic Wor(l)ding: Re-Reading Novalis from an Ecocritical and New Materialist Perspective (Advisor: Sabine Mödersheim, October 2025)

David S. Danaher gave a keynote talk titled “The Václav Havel Keyword Project” at the Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Conference (University of Kansas, 10-12 October 2025)

Kirsten Wolf and Emily Beyer published the article “Pulmonic Ingressive Speech in Icelandic” in Scandinavian-Canadian Studies 32 (2025):1-28.

Kirsten Wolf’s review of Úlfar Bragason, ed., Ykkar einlæg: Bréf frá berklahælum appeared in Scandinavian Studies 97 (2025): 109-112.

Kirsten Wolf’s review of Sian Grønlie, The Old Testament in Medieval Icelandic Texts: Translation, Exegesis and Storytelling appeared in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology 124 (2025): 504-507.

Kirsten Wolf’s review of Sian Grønlie and Carl Phelpstead, ed., The Medieval North and Its Afterlife: Essays in Honour of Heather O’Donoghue appeared in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology 124 (2025): 496-495.

“More Than Words:  Language, Identity, and the Classroom”: a profile of Julia Goetze

GNS+ achievements and plans (compiled Fall 2025)

Congratulations to Krzysztof Borowski and Nâlân Erbil on reappointment to Teaching Assistant Professor!

Alexandra Portice, dissertation defense, Early Russian and Soviet Alternate Histories, 1917-1927 (Advisor: David S. Danaher, August 2025)

“Scandinavia Has Its Own Dark History of Assimilating Indigenous People, and Churches Played a Role—But Are Apologizing,” The Conversation, 27 June 2025 (Tom DuBois)

News from L&S and campus

Essential Links