Penn State German Studies at the German Studies Association Conference 2025
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.
