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In March, 13 Penn State students participated in an embedded program that allowed them to immerse themselves in German culture.

The Liberal Arts embedded program, GER 199: Experiencing German Language and Culture in Munich, took place over spring break and allowed students like Adam Eglinger to practice their German language skills and explore cultural sites in the Bavarian capital of Munich and surrounding areas.

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This national award is presented annually by the major professional organization for Russian teaching in the United States. This award recognizes Dr. Mikaelian’s many years of service and dedication to our Russian program and all of our students learning and majoring in Russian here at Penn State. As the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Russian, Dr. Mikaelian is responsible not only for advising all students in our Russian program, but also planning countless extracurricular activities, including the weekly Russian Tea Hour, the annual poetry reading event, exciting speakers, excursions to New York and elsewhere to visit Russian-related arts and culture events, and embedded spring break trips to many different locations including Armenia and the Republic of Georgia. For more information, see the following website: https://www.actr.org/Teaching-Excellence-Award-PS

Please check out this recent Penn State News Q&A with Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures faculty members Bettina Brandt and Daniel L. Purdy on their co-edited book, Colonialism and Enlightenment: The Legacy of German Race Theories (Oxford University Press).

On January 1, 2026, Mike Putnam became the 11th (co-)editor in the 102-year history of the journal, Language: A Journal of the Linguistics Society of America. Language is the flagship journal of the Linguistics Society of America and is widely held as a premier venue for high-quality and groundbreaking research in linguistics and related fields and stands as one of the foundational and influential journals in linguistics. Putnam has served as an associate editor for Language from 2023-2025 and was nominated and elected to the position of editor by the members of the Society. He serves as co-editor with Prof. Shelome Gooden until 2028 and will transition to senior editor of Language from 2029-2031.

Featuring a story about our visiting Ukrainian Fulbright Scholars: https://www.psu.edu/news/liberal-arts/story/ukrainian-fulbright-scholars-spending-year-college-liberal-arts

Four senior Russian majors — Aidan Dlugacz, Gabe Daubert, Veronika Miskowiec, and Logan Romanowski — and three Penn State faculty members — Yuliya Ladygina, Irina Mikaelian, and Catherine Wanner — attended the international conference and school Crisis of Democracy: Mutual Symmetrical Recognition Between States and Equal Distribution of Power, held September 13–20 at Shota Meskhia Zugdidi State University in Georgia. The event was co-sponsored by Tbilisi State University and the University of Warsaw, Poland.

The four-day conference was followed by a two-day school for graduate and senior undergraduate students from the University of Warsaw and Penn State. The school was led by Professor Agnieszka Nogal (University of Warsaw) and the Penn State professors, resulting in two joint student presentations.

Our students and faculty were generously hosted by Zugdidi State University. Irina Mikaelian and Catherine Wanner received titles of Doctor Honoris Causa from this university in recognition of their contributions to collaboration between our universities.

Zugdidi is the capital of the Georgian province of Mingrelia, a strategic region located on the border with Abkhazia, a former autonomous republic of Georgia currently occupied by Russia. Our students had the opportunity to explore the city of Zugdidi, the Black Sea coast, and the adjacent mountainous region of Svaneti, as well as to engage extensively with local faculty and residents, many of whom still speak Russian.

We are grateful to Shota Meskhia Zugdidi State University and its Rector, Teona Khupenia for their hospitality, as well as to the Penn State Liberal Arts Career Enrichment Office, which sponsored our students’ airfare.

Penn State’s German Studies program made a dynamic and wide-ranging contribution to this year’s German Studies Association conference, held in late September in Arlington, Virginia. Four faculty, seven current graduate students, and five alumni presented their research on various topics. From close readings of Adalbert Stifter, Peter Weiss, and contemporary graphic novels to corpus-assisted analyses of German press coverage, the work showcased the department’s interdisciplinary strengths and commitment to ethical inquiry.

Mike Mclaughlin presented on Sacha Hommer’s comic, Insekt, in order to interrogate the boundaries of being human through the hybrid use of textual language, visual form, and insect-based reimaginings of historical events.

Svetlana Myagkova took part in the annual Emerging Scholars Workshop on Migration in/and German Studies. Each day was dedicated to one of the key components of an academic career: research, teaching, and professional service.

Suchitra Harnahalli presented her paper, Rehearsals of Disruptions: Staging Störungen in Marat/Sade (Peter Weiss) on a panel about disruptions as both subject matter and narrative strategy. By reading Marat/Sade, through the lens of Plato’s allegory of the cave, she explored the play as a medium of a unsettling, “maddening,” and politically generative revolution.

Jack DiMidio took part in a panel on serial criminality in German literature and culture. He read Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas alongside Hegel’s ethics to show how terrible crimes can sometimes positively affect ethical relations.

Gideon Kiptoo’s lecture deployed a discourse analytical approach to uncover the macro-strategies employed by the German regional and national press when reporting about the contentious topic of homosexuality in Kenya.

Wilson Xu’s presentation focused on the role of forgiveness and contemplation in Adalbert Stifter’s Granit as a part of the “Austrian Bodies and Families” panel.

Jenny Wilson joined the “Leben & Lebensphilosophie: A New Look” seminar which workshopped papers on the topic relating to Leben/Life as a distinct question that emerged with Naturphilosophie around 1800 and crescendoed around 1900. Like so many of the Penn Staters, Jenny enjoyed meeting and learning from the members in this workshop as well as supporting her fellow Penn State colleagues by sitting in on their wonderful and thought-provoking panels.

Samuel Frederick offered his new research on the Expressionist poems of the German-Jewish philosopher Hedwig Caspari.

Bettina Brandt took part in the GSA seminar “Wandering Artefacts: Dispersion, Digitization, and Multilingualism of German-Jewish Archives”, where scholars and archivists from Germany and the USA shared new archival findings, discussed research methods and debated how to further access to archives today.

Daniel Purdy continued his research into Asian-German relations by presenting a paper on Enlightenment race theory and the military incursion of Mongolian nomads into East Prussia. He was also met with enthusiastic applause from a dozen Penn State colleagues as he was awarded the Goethe Society’s Essay Prize.

This moment captured the spirit of the department’s presence at GSA: rigorous, supportive, and deeply engaged. Whether presenting revised seminar papers or attending one another’s panels, together, these experiences embody the ethos of the department: supportive and innovative scholarship.

For the last 30 years, scholars have treated Enlightenment race theory and nineteenth-century German colonialism as two distinct events. In Colonialism and Enlightenment, editors Bettina Brandt and Daniel L. Purdy present perspectives from scholars across the fields of philosophy, postcolonialism, literature, and German and African American studies, who challenge this view, providing a critical examination of the historical connection between “scientific” racial theory in late-Enlightenment Germany and the forces of colonialism and Nazism over a hundred years later.

From its first formulations in the eighteenth century and well into the twentieth century, German race theory was implicated in colonialism. Philosophers and biologists drew their arguments about race from information that was generated by the slave trade and plantation economies in the Americas. Their reliance on colonial data was applied to so-called “internal colonization” within Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as to seaborn European competition in South Asia. Most strikingly, some of the sites of German race theorization, such as East Prussia and the Baltic states, were themselves long-established colonies with ethnic separations between ruling and laboring populations. Race theory depended not only on the exploration of distant islands in the Pacific, but on the long-term exploitation and breeding of forcefully transported populations across the Atlantic. Without the involuntary migration of Africans, nineteenth century racial scientists would not have been able to engage in arguments about crossbreeding, skull size, and skin color.

The chapters in this volume explore how eighteenth-century German theories about race reinforced discourses on colonial settlements, both within and outside Europe. Given the multiple, often contradictory positions developed in the Enlightenment, Brandt and Purdy explore how later race thinkers responded to earlier concepts. How did Enlightenment-era debates figure into later forms of racism? How did nationalist and Nazi racisms view Enlightenment anthropology? What Enlightenment concepts and configurations persisted into the twentieth century? Taking a broad view, the scholars in this volume offer a variety of positions on these and other questions as they take stock of the debates about race and the Enlightenment held over the last 20 years.