Calls for Papers: Women in German Conference 2010 & WiG Panels at MLA, AATG/ACTFL, and GSA
October 21-24, 2010
Yarrow Golf and Conference Center, Augusta, Michigan

• Thursday Night Session: Mission, Position, Identity: WiG and Intersectionality
• Poster Session: Open Topic
• Pre-20th-Century Panel: Moods and Gender
• Praxis Panel: The Changing Profession (Workshops)
• Women Writers in German: Rethinking Space and Place
• Marketing German Studies: Visibility, Students, Jobs
• Guest-Related Panel: Cinematic Journeys (to correspond to visit by Ulrike Ottinger)
• MLA 2011
• AATG/ACTFL 2010
• GSA 2010: Outside the Metaphorical Marriage: Gendering the Beitritt
  

Thursday Night Session: Mission, Position, Identity: WiG and Intersectionality

How do we--as scholars, teachers, feminists, and activists--talk about race in a productive fashion? How do we position ourselves and our work at the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation? If WiG is to remain at the forefront of feminist, gender, and German studies, we must continue to engage critically with these and other questions.

This panel grew out of multiple discussions at panels, meals, and speak-outs during previous WiG conferences, and we would like to provide a space for WiGGies to engage with, reflect on, and discuss issues of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, how they intersect with and how they inform our work as scholars and feminists. According to our current mission statement, WiG "seeks to create bridges, cross boundaries, nurture aspiration, and challenge assumptions while exercising critical self-awareness." This session asks whether we are succeeding and, to the extent we might not be, how should we achieve this?

We invite papers from WiG members willing to reflect on these issues on personal, professional, and political levels. Please send a 200-300 word proposal electronically to BOTH of the organizers by March 15, 2010:

Maureen Gallagher, University of Massachusetts (mogallag(AT)german.umass.edu)
Rick McCormick, University of Minnesota (mccor001(AT)umn.edu)

Poster Session: Open Topic
The purpose of the poster session is to allow scholars to employ visual forms to initiate conversations about their research, teaching, or academic life. Examples of visual forms include: posters, 3-D art, interactive exhibits, and multimedia presentations. Proposals will consist of a 300-500 word abstract describing the project’s content and form. This must include a description of the layout, design, material, and technology that will be used. For logistical reasons, presenters must provide their own materials and equipment, including projectors and computers. If sound will be used, presenters must also bring headphones. To insure that your information is available throughout the conference, multi-media presentations must be accompanied by a simple explanatory poster or handout.

Posters from past sessions have addressed such topics as teaching, literature, film, cultural studies, history, and the balancing of career and family. "Posters" have taken the form of PowerPoint presentations, websites, dioramas, sculpture, and of course cardboard (past examples).

Many universities support the production of posters as a way of publicizing research. You may want to find out what your institution offers in terms of audiovisual support and travel funds. Show us all how creative you really are! Get valuable feedback on your newest, brilliant idea!

Submit your proposals electronically to BOTH organizers by March 15, 2010 to Marjanne Goozé, University of Georgia (mgooze(AT)uga.edu), and Astrid Weigert, Georgetown University (weigerta(AT)georgetown.edu).

Pre-20th Century Panel: Moods and Gender

This panel will explore the interrelationships between concepts, representations, and modulations of mood and gender. Moods are generally understood as enduring affects like melancholy and sadness, boredom, happiness or anger that do not appear to have a clearly
identifiable source and that can combine a variety of sensations and feelings, making them often difficult to describe. As recent scholarship demonstrates (cf. Elisabeth Goodstein, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Thomas Pfau, Juliana Schiesari, and Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf), definitions and evaluations of moods have changed radically over time, from the ancient four humors theory, to late 19th century psychology, psychiatry, and early psychoanalysis: Hildegard von Bingen’s descriptions of “sanguine,” “phlegmatic,” “choleric,” and “melancholic” women transgressed and challenged gender boundaries; in the romantic period, melancholy was considered a characteristic of the male genius; as the nineteenth century progressed, the same mood became increasingly associated with femininity as an illness hindering creativity. This panel invites papers that explore the interrelationships between mood and gender in changing historical, cultural, intellectual, and social contexts from the Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century.

Possible areas of investigation include:

• literary and cultural representations and modulations of mood and gender
• mood and gender in medicine, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy
• the moods of genre and gender (i.e. the relationships between
  poetry, melancholy, and the male genius)

Please submit a 300-500-word proposal electronically by March 15, 2010 to both organizers:

Lisabeth Hock, Wayne State University (lhock(AT)wayne.edu) and
May Mergenthaler, Ohio State University (mergenthaler.4(AT)osu.edu)

Selected panelists must become members of Women and German by May 15, 2010.

Praxis Panel: The Changing Profession (Workshops)

This session will be a series of concurrent workshops that address the changing job market in academe. Academic institutions are increasingly moving towards employing faculty on a part-time or full-time non-tenure-track basis. Each year sees the creation of more dual- and multi-language positions. And tenure-track jobs become harder and harder to find (let alone secure). It is time for everyone from graduate students to department chairs, from senior professors toadjuncts to be aware of these trends and respond accordingly. This workshopsession at the Women in German 2010 Conference is designed to create a spacein which to discuss and take action on a variety of related issues.

Possible workshop session topics include:

• how to prepare graduate students for the job search (or help them find non-academic jobs)
• what to know if you're considering an adjunct or full-time non-tenure-track position
  
• how to advocate for German in times of institutional budget cuts
  
• how to transition to non-academic jobs (including: how to adapt your c.v.)
  
• what you can do as a department chair during a time of economic insecurity
  
• how to find outside funding to support your research
  
• how to combine motherhood with job insecurity
  
• how to enter retirement and stay active in the field

The panel organizers will assemble a number of workshops (ideally approx. 5) that appeal to Wiggies at various points in their careers. Each workshop should be a "how-to" session and is expected to provide its participants with concrete information and/or strategies for coping with this new job market. Workshop organizers should plan an interactive session, provide plenty of time for questions and answers, and consider helping participants create something concrete (e.g., a resume reworked for a non-academic position).

Please submit proposals of approx. 300-500 words that makes the case for the workshop, outlines what you intend to do during the session, and what the participants will gain from it. Send your proposals to BOTH organizers, Allie Merley Hill (hilla[AT]up.edu) and Ulrike Brisson (ubrisson[AT]wpi.edu) by March 15, 2010.

Guest-Related Panel: Cinematic Journeys (to correspond with visit by Ulrike Ottinger)

We welcome proposals that explore cinematic border crossings, travel and the transformation of geographical and cultural spaces into cinematic experiences. Travel in this context suggests transcultural and transnational encounters and movement both thematically and aesthetically. These encounters may be in the form of documentary or fiction films.

Based on the notion that the filmmaker journeys into diverse cultural spaces and visually explores them, we are particularly interested in Ottinger’s later films that feature what may be called an ethnographic gaze.

While Cinematic Journeys is a session that is organized in conjunction with the guest speaker, Ulrike Ottinger, we welcome contributions on other filmmakers to the extend that they are relevant to the topic of this session.

Please submit proposals approximately 250 words in length electronically by March 15, 2010 to both:

Sonja Klocke, Knox College
sklocke(AT)knox.edu

Barbara Kosta, University of Arizona
bkosta(AT)u.arizona.edu

Women Writers in German: Rethinking Space and Place

This panel is broadly conceived and invites interdisciplinary explorations of women’s writing in German that combine ideas from cultural geography and texts that use the language and metaphors of space and place. Feminist geographer Patricia Price-Chalita has pointed out that concerns of empowerment and disempowerment in feminist writings often use spatial metaphors. Displacement, denial, or lack of space stands in contrast to the positive experience of appropriating and creating new spaces, or in reclaiming previously coded negative spaces.
Native and non-native German women writers have oftentimes positioned their protagonists on the margins or in a space in-between. Both captured within and desiring to move away from a western European patriarchal and colonialist mindset, women writers thematize borders,
belonging, and place, but also traveling and mobility. Papers might include these concerns, or look to such issues as environmentalism, globalization, migration and immigration, concerns of belonging, points of encounter, spaces and places of im/mobility, topographies of departure and arrival, movement, motion, or shifting identities.

Please send a 300-500 word proposal to BOTH organizers Carola Daffner (cdaffner(AT)siu.edu) and Beth Muellner (bmuellner(AT)wooster.edu) by March 15, 2010.

Marketing German Studies: Visibility, Students, Jobs

In the face of the current crisis in German Studies (closed German programs, lost jobs, and decreasing enrollments), we invite proposals for brief, practical presentations on strategies for survival. How can we make our field more visible across campus and in our local communities? How do we spark interest in our students and attract them into our programs? Can the right "marketing" solve our enrollment problems? Should we: cross-list courses, team-teach, work across disciplines, revisit the language requirement, tweak websites, embed German in other curricula and programs?

Please send proposals by March 15, 2010 to both:
Karen Achberger (krach(AT)stolaf.edu) and Britt Abel (abel(AT)macalester.edu)

MLA 2011 (Jan. 6-9, 2011, Los Angeles, CA)
Imagining Herself into His/story (Coalition of Women in German panel)

Scholarly attention to women’s memoirs and personal narratives has increased our understanding of women’s relationship to, and their role within, gendered historical discourses and the ways they have framed their contributions within and against these discourses. We are proposing an interdisciplinary panel that will analyze the roles of women within, and at the intersections of, various scholarly fields including gender studies, historiography, literature, film, and performance. Individual papers should focus upon strategies that women employ to present and construct counter-narratives, and/or discuss the different possibilities for the elaboration of these stories through fiction and non-fiction across time, genre, and various media of representation.

Please submit a 250-word abstract by March 5, 2010 to Imke Brust and Beate Brunow (wigatmla[AT]gmail.com). The abstract should include your name, institutional affiliation and email address as well as audio-visual requirements for the presentation.

AATG/ACTFL 2010 (Nov. 19-21 2010, Boston, MA)
“Gender, Class and Power: Teaching the GDR to Today’s Students” (Coalition of Women in German panel)

This panel is based upon the assumption that teaching the GDR is a critical aspect of education offered by German programs in the US. In this context, we invite reflective submissions on how a focus on intersections of power, gender and class in our teaching practices on the GDR can help make the “foreignness” of the GDR less daunting. Especially for a younger generation of students who not only grew up in a post-Cold War environment, but also for many who were born after the fall of the Wall, the enduring legacies of Cold War history and the Wall, and Germany as its geographic center, require a reevaluation of our pedagogical approaches to teaching the GDR to our undergraduates.

How do pedagogues approach cultural products as products of the GDR, and how especially do we situate these that we take as critical objects into classroom discussions today? How do we critically engage with new materials on the GDR and/or the Wende?
Possible areas of investigation include:

• “Ossis” and “Wessis”: The East and the “Other”
  
• New Divisions and New Developments after Unification: Questions of Multiculturalism or Interculturalism, Class, and the rise of Neo-Nazism
  
• Multiculturalism in the GDR
  
• The Classroom as Audience: Engaging with Contemporary Productions on the GDR
  
• Memory and Memoire of citizens of the GDR, Oral Histories, Cultural Histories
  
• An Evaluation of Pedagogical Approaches and Materials Used in the Classroom
  
• Placing the GDR in German and European History, and Making Connections to American History, Society, and Culture
  
• The Idea of Building and Tearing Down Walls
  
• Finding Historical Rupture, East and West
  
• Women and Social Transformation in the GDR
  
• Women and the Rupture of 1989
  
• Women Artists, Bürgerrechtlerinnen, Arbeiterinnen, Mütter, usw. in the GDR
  
• Constructions of Gender, Family, and Power Relations in fictional and non-fictional texts
  

Please submit a 300-400 word abstract to BOTH organizers, Astrid Weigert (weigerta[AT]georgetown.edu) and Victoria Lenshyn (vlenshyn[AT]german.umass.edu) by January 5, 2010.

GSA 2009 (Oct. 7-10, 2010, Oakland, CA)
Outside the Metaphorical Marriage: Gendering the Beitritt (WiG-Sponsored Panel)

This panel takes stock of the larger FRG, now, twenty years after what Article 23 of the Basic Law terms the Beitritt of the GDR into the Federal Republic.

Since 1990, multiple, often competing gendered discourses and practices have been shaping understandings of this event and of the New Republic. Conceptions include: failed, impotent state; colonizer/colonized; "normalized" pillar of Fortress Europe; potent economic engine; virgin market; dowried bride.

Our aim is to account for dominant narratives without reinscribing them; we welcome contributions that offer alternatives to established frameworks and lived experiences of the (post) Beitritt.

Please send abstracts of approximately 350 words by January 15, 2010 to both:

Jennifer Ruth Hosek, Queen's University, Ontario
jhosek(AT)queensu.ca

David James Prickett, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (ZtG)
djprickett(AT)gmail.com

Please include academic position and affiliation.

You will be notified of selection results by January 22, 2010. If selected, plan to submit written confirmation, CV, short narrative biography, full contact information, and technology needs by January 29, 2010. All presenters must be current GSA members.