Executive Committee

Executive Committee of the Max Kade Institute

The executive committee of the Max Kade Institute is comprised of the following members:

Kevin Kurdylo is the Librarian for the Max Kade Institute in addition to serving as Archivist at the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures (CSUMC). He holds a B.A. in German from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and an M.A. from the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His tasks include developing online digital databases that will bring folklore materials to a wider audience as well as maintaining the Web sites for CSUMC and the Max Kade Institute.

Edward G. Langer serves as President of the Board of Directors of the Friends of the Max Kade Institute. He has worked as a tax lawyer/CPA for over twenty-five years and is currently employed in the tax department of KPMG in Milwaukee. He is an amateur historian who specializes in German and Czech emigration from Northeast Bohemia. He served as the President of the German American Heritage Society of Wisconsin, Inc., which designed and financed an exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum dealing with three German-American educators, and is is also Music Chair of the Milwaukee Liederkranz, a German male chorus, founded in 1878.

Mark Louden is Professor of German at UW-Madison. Most of his research has been focused on questions of syntactic structure, from both synchronic (including developmental) and diachronic perspectives. Special areas of theoretical interest include X-bar theory, dialect syntax, and the role of psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic factors in language contact and syntactic change. Pennsylvania German and Yiddish are among the languages he has worked most closely on. He is the Chair of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Germanic Linguistics, a member of the editorial advisory board for General Linguistics, a former Director of the Max Kade Institute, and former Editor of the MKI Monograph Series.

Cora Lee Kluge, Professor of German and Director of the Max Kade Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a central figure in German-American Studies in the United States. Among her editions are Christian Essellen's Babylon (1996), Wisconsin German Land and Life (with Heike Bungert and Robert C. Ostergren, 2006), and Other Witnesses: An Anthology of Literature of the German Americans 1850–1914 (2007). Her research interests extend to German literature of the classical period and the nineteenth century, as well as the history of German studies in the United States. She teaches a wide range of classes, including a new course entitled “The German Immigration Experience.”

Ruth Olson is the Associate Director at the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures and holds a Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. She has extensive fieldwork experience in the Upper Midwest, and has worked as a presenter at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the Wisconsin Folklife Festival and other Midwestern folklife events. In addition to teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she has taught at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. Recent publications include articles in The Journal of Museum Education (1999), Wisconsin Folk Art: A Sesquicentennial Celebration (1998), Wisconsin Folklife: A Celebration of Wisconsin Traditions (1998), and the 1998 Smithsonian Folklife Festival Program Book.

Robert C. Ostergren is Professor of Geography at UW-Madison. His research interests include historical geography, North American immigration and ethnicity, and Conservation. He has written extensively on Swedish immigration to the U.S. Upper Middle West and recently completed two works, The Cultural Map of Wisconsin (1996) and Wisconsin Land and Life (1997), and is co-editor of Wisconsin German Land and Life (2006).

Antje Petty is the Assistant Director and Educational Outreach Specialist at the Max Kade Instittue for German-American Studies. She holds a B.A. in International Studies (Russian and Eastern European Studies) and an M.A. in Germanics from the University of Washington in Seattle. Before joining the Max Kade Institute, she taught German for many years at the college and K-12 levels.

Joseph C. Salmons is Professor of German at UW-Madison and serves as Director of the Center for the Studies of Upper Midwestern Cultures. In addition to work on phonology and historical linguistics, he has written on German dialects spoken in Texas, Indiana, and now Wisconsin. He edited The German Language in America, 1868-1991 (1993) for the MKI and has begun work on a volume analyzing the shift to the use of the English language in Wisconsin's German-speaking communities.