Letter from the Department Head

Dear Alumni and Friends,

I am pleased to provide you with another issue of my annual "state of the department" update. One of the most important strategic decisions that any department faces is the hiring of new faculty. I am happy to report that, after an extensive national and international search, we have recruited David Pan as a new Associate Professor of German. He will replace Ernst Schürer, who is retiring after a distinguished tenure of twenty-five years at Penn State. Professor Pan has had a rather unusual career. After teaching for eight years at Washington University and Stanford, he became a management consultant at McKinsey and Company in Los Angeles. Luckily for us, the intellectual stimulation of academia proved to be a stronger incentive than the material rewards of a corporate career. David Pan's business experience will certainly be a plus for our program in professional German. His main interest, however, lies in German literature, culture, and intellectual history of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. A prolific researcher, he has published numerous articles as well as two books a monograph on German Expressionism and an edited volume on Heinrich von Kleist. Another book on the Anti-Enlightenment is forthcoming. David Pan will spend the academic year 2003/04 as a Humboldt Fellow in Berlin before joining us in the fall of 2004. He will be working on his latest book, Aesthetics and the Sacred: Redeeming the Traditionalist Critique of Modernity. I am convinced that he will further enhance the national reputation of our program and help us to move forward in our pursuit of excellence.

David Pan won't be the only Humboldt Fellow in our department. Daniel Purdy, Associate Professor of German literature and our director of graduate studies, will move to Berlin in 2004/05 to work on his book project, The Poetry of Building: Classical Architecture in German Aesthetics. A Humboldt Fellowship is the most prestigious honor in the field of German studies. It reflects well on the intellectual caliber of our faculty that we received two such awards in one year.

The "return of the prodigal son" from the corporate world to academia could be an overarching motto this year. The story of a former German major Scott Shay provides another example. Scott graduated in 1989 with a 4.00 in German (Business Option). He continued with a master's degree in MIS and has been a successful systems consultant in the Washington, D.C., area ever since. However, Scott realized that his greatest passion has always been Germanic linguistics. He applied to several graduate programs and was awarded a University Fellowship at Berkeley, his first choice, where he will begin his Ph.D. studies in the fall. We want to congratulate Scott on this spectacular success and wish him all the best in his new career. While we are on this topic, we should mention that our own Associate Professor of Germanic linguistics, Dr. Richard Page, is a former attorney at law!

Our department continues to thrive. The number of applications to the German graduate program has more than doubled since last year. Our incoming class includes a Russian with a degree in German from St. Petersburg State University. This will be our second Russian graduate student in the German program. I hope that this Slavo-Teutonic synergy will contribute to the intellectual dialogue between the Germanic and Slavic halves of our department. In the Slavic program, we have benefited from an institutional grant from NSEP to develop new courses and instructional technologies. Last summer, we taught a Web-based version of our Russian culture course to a nation-wide audience, and in the fall we offered an introductory language course via an Internet-2 video hook-up to a consortium of students participating in an exchange program with Moscow State Agroengineering University. This year, we are adding Ukrainian language and culture to the mix. Olesia Shchur, a graduate student from Lviv, Ukraine, will be the instructor for the online Ukrainian culture course in the summer and the language course in the fall.

Our new departmental outreach event, Pennsylvania German Day, had its successful debut last October. Roger Cohen, the former Berlin correspondent and current foreign editor of the New York Times, served as the keynote speaker. His topic, the status of German-American relations, could not have been more timely in light of recent events and the current chill in transatlantic relations. Roger Cohen's lively and insightful talk also included personal reminiscences and anecdotes from his time as the Berlin bureau chief.

This year's Pennsylvania German Day is planned for Saturday, October 18, at Eisenhower Chapel in the beautiful new Spiritual Center on the Penn State campus. One of the featured speakers will be Julia Kasdorf, an Associate Professor of English at Penn State, whose prize-winning volume of poetry, Sleeping Preacher, looks at her Amish and Mennonite roots in Big Valley. The event will focus on the musician and writer Joseph Yoder. Kasdorf, the author of Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American, will be joined by Dr. Hedwig Durnbaugh, an expert on Amish music from Juniata College. The Big Valley Singers led by Percy Yoder, one of Joseph Yoder's music students, will be performing Yoder's music. We will also offer a Pennsylvania German luncheon and an excursion to a quilting workshop in Penn's Valley. I hope that you will note October 18, 2003, in your agenda as the date of your next "homecoming trip" to Penn State. You will receive an invitation in the fall.

If you have any comments or questions, I would love to hear from you. My personal e-mail address is ajw3@psu.edu.

With best regards,

Adrian Wanner
Department Head and Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature