Letter from the Department Head

Dear Alumni and Friends, Liebe Freunde, Dorogie druz'ia:

It is hard to believe that another academic year is behind us and State College has already acquired its sleepy summertime appearance. After sending the class of 2004 off into the "real world," the moment has come to give you my annual update on the life of our department.

Given the location of Penn State in the heart of central Pennsylvania and its status as a land-grant university, it has always seemed to me that part of the mission of our German program should be to explore and showcase the local Pennsylvania German culture. To this end, our "Pennsylvania German Day" last October was a rousing success. More than a hundred people attended the two lectures and the performance of a Mennonite and Amish chorus from Big Valley at Eisenhower Chapel. The concert provided a unique opportunity to hear a kind of music that is usually only accessible to members of the Amish community. The next Pennsylvania German Day is planned for Saturday, October 16, 2004, and will focus on architecture. Two illustrated presentations on Pennsylvania German farmhouse architecture will be followed by a banquet and an afternoon excursion. You will receive a detailed program and registration form later in the summer. As always, I hope that you will be able to join us for this day. Now that we have had two Pennsylvania German Days already, it is becoming safe to call it a tradition!

The culture of the Pennsylvania Germans not only appears in our outreach activities, but also in our research and teaching. Our most successful general education course for many years has been "Pennsylvania Germans: The Culture of the Sectarians." Originally developed by Ernst Schürer and Willard Martin, the course is now primarily taught by Richard Page, associate professor of German and linguistics. It is offered every fall with an enrollment of approximately 175 students and it usually "sells out" to the last seat. Richard Page is currently engaged in a long-term research project on language maintenance and shift among Pennsylvania German speakers. Two graduate students will be focusing on Pennsylvania German in their dissertation research. Last fall, Willard Martin, who grew up in Canada as a native speaker of Pennsylvania German before getting a Ph.D. in German from Penn State, taught an additional section of the course as a continuing education class.

The proximity of Pennsylvania German speakers also helps us to enhance our German language teaching. Last semester, the students in fifth-semester German created documentary films on the Amish under the direction of Scott Payne, the assistant director for technology and research in the Center for Language Acquisition. Students researched the historical periods of German immigration to the USA and studied the experiences of actual immigrants by reading historical diaries and other materials on the World Wide Web. Their findings were the focus of class discussion and group presentations as well as a mid-term project writing a story of historical fiction by weaving together historical events with inventive narrative. These content-based learning activities provided the background for four separate documentary film projects highlighting the history, language, and culture of Pennsylvania Germans in the vicinity of the University Park campus.

In looking back over last year's milestones and accomplishments, special mention has to be made of our longest serving faculty member in the department, Vickie Ziegler, professor of German and medieval studies. Her latest book, entitled Trial by Fire and Battle in Medieval German Literature is forthcoming this summer with Camden House. It brings together literary texts that provide some of the most vivid and detailed accounts of the medieval judicial ordeal and places them in the larger legal and cultural context of the society for whom these works were written. In addition, Vickie Ziegler hosted an NEH Institute for high school teachers last summer and just obtained another $157,000 grant from the NEH for a new project entitled "Building Community: Medieval Technology and American History." This grant will develop curricular materials that show the connection between late medieval European technological knowledge and its transfer to colonial America. Highlighting the cultural continuity between the multi-national Middle Ages and the Great American Experiment is particularly timely in our age of increasing globalization.

We should also note some high achievers among our students. Heide Crawford, a spring 2004 Ph.D. graduate in German with a dissertation on the theme of vampires in romantic literature, obtained a tenure-track position at the University of Kansas. Given the current tight job market in the humanities, finding a job at a research university is quite an impressive feat. Three of this year's graduating undergraduate majors received Fulbright grants. One of them is Jennifer Hickey, a double major in Integrative Arts and German. For her honors thesis, she painted a series of still life oil paintings focusing on daily rituals. After completing her teaching assistantship in Germany, she plans to attend graduate school for either studio arts or art criticism and theory. Danielle Copelli, another recipient of a Fulbright grant, has three majors in International Politics, German, and International Studies. She will be teaching English to fifth - thirteen grade German students in the German state of Rheinland-Pfalz as well as study the European Union. Madhury Ray, our third Fulbright recipient, also graduated with a triple major in Mathematics, Russian, and Pre-Med. She will spend next year in Kiev researching the Ukrainian medical emergency system before returning to the U.S. to attend medical school. As her honor's thesis, she translated Ilya Erenburg's novella Julio Jurenito from Russian into English. It is always heartening to see the impressive array of talents and interests among our German and Russian majors!

With the recruitment of a new graduate student from India who will be joining us this fall, our department is becoming ever more diverse. According to my latest count, we will have students from nine different countries (U.S., Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, India, and China) in our graduate program. Our faculty is becoming increasingly international as well. The latest person to join our team is Dr. Ünlü, who began a full-time position as senior lecturer in German and TA coordinator with us this year. She received her B.A. and M.A. in German literature from Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey, and completed her dissertation on the influence of Sufism on nineteenth and twentieth century German poetry at the University of Michigan. In addition to German language and literature, Dr. Ünlü specializes in ghazal poetry, mystical symbolism, minority literature and feminist theory in modern day Germany. Last fall she taught a highly successful senior seminar entitled "Germany's Migrant Literature: The Turkish-German Case" which we are bringing back this fall by popular demand.

A few words about the Slavic Program: in last year's newsletter I mentioned our collaborative efforts with the College of Agricultural Science in fostering exchange programs with Russia and Ukraine. The project has continued this year with the successful implementation of an on-line course in Ukrainian culture and a Ukrainian language course offered via compressed video to various institutions across America. A generous donation from the Woskob family in State College will allow us to start a regular Ukrainian language program this fall. Given the importance of Ukraine as the second largest successor nation of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian studies will be of growing importance to us in the coming years.

Let me conclude with news about two of our alumnae. Emily Grosvenor, a 2001 graduate of our department, is now the editor of the German Information Center newsletter. As she wrote us last September: "I owe much of my success and my interest in German to Penn State and especially to Dr. Hager, Dr. Schürer, and Dr. Browning. Indirectly, you can thank the Penn State German department for the quality of The Week in Germany!" Debby Rooney, a 1970 graduate, was recently featured in the electronic newsletter of the College of the Liberal Arts (you can find the story on our web site). She is the founder of BEADS, a charitable organization in Kenya that aims to enhance the status of women in their communities and to promote environmental awareness. She writes, "My education at Penn State really set me up to do what I am doing. I was a German major, and I took my teacher credits, expecting to work in a school. I didn't realize how important languages would be. I've learned some Swahili, and some bits of other east African languages, but you can get around the world on German."

Do you have stories to tell or news to share? As always, 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