GNS+ Digest

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 50^th 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)