• Apr 5
    Virtual Lecture: “‘Wo man singt:’ German-American Singing Festivals, 1849–1914” with Heike Bungert

    Virtual Event

    VIRTUAL LECTURE Wednesday, April 5, 2023, 12:00 pm Central Time PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED Email Antje Petty (apetty@wisc.edu) to receive a Zoom link. (Links will be emailed the day before the event) Between 1849 and 1914, German-American singing festivals with thousands of participants and visitors were a constant yet changing element in the cultural landscape of the …

  • Feb 9
    Virtual Lecture: “Comanches, Captives, Germans: Transactions on the Texas Frontier, 1847”

    Virtual Event

    VIRTUAL LECTURE February 9, 2023, 6:00 pm Central Time PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED Email Antje Petty (apetty@wisc.edu) to receive a Zoom link. (Links will be emailed the day before the event) In 2021, three finely worked sketches dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century were brought to the attention of scholars studying the relationship between …

  • Nov 10
    Hybrid Lecture: “African Voices in German-Language Publications: Slave Ship Survivors in the Atlantic World, 1739-1932” with Aaron Fogleman

    UW-Madison Memorial Library, Rm 126

    HYBRID LECTURE Attend in person: UW– Madison Memorial Library, room 126 Receive a Zoom link: email apetty@wisc.edu (links will be emailed the day before the event) Millions of Africans were victims of the transatlantic slave trade, and scholars generally believe only a handful of publications exist that include the Africans’ own accounts of life in …

  • Oct 13
    Virtual Lecture: “New York’s German-Language Press in Times of Peace and War (late 19th Century to 1918)” with Peter Conolly-Smith

    Virtual Event

    VIRTUAL LECTURE PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED Email Antje Petty (apetty@wisc.edu) to receive a Zoom link. (Links will be emailed the day before the event) This presentation examines New York City’s thriving German-language press on the eve of World War I by looking at three representative newspapers: the bourgeois New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, the socialist New Yorker Volkszeitung, and the William …

  • Mar 8
    Virtual Lecture: “Making English Canada: German and French Bilingual Schools in Ontario, 1880-1912”

    Virtual Event

    This virtual lecture is free and open to the public! To receive a link, contact Antje Petty: apetty@wisc.edu When Anglophones and Francophones debated bilingual education in Ontario from the 1880s to the eve of the First World, they often spoke of German schools. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, German stood alongside French and English as …

  • Feb 17
    Virtual Lecture: “The German-American Feminist and the Rape Trial of a Yankee Abolitionist: Insights from the Letters of Mathilde Franziska Anneke”

    Virtual Event

    This virtual lecture is free and open to the public! To receive a link, contact Antje Petty: apetty@wisc.edu Alison Clark Efford explores how German-American feminist Mathilda Franziska Anneke responded to the 1859 “seduction” trial of Wisconsin’s leading abolitionist, Sherman Booth. Anneke, a Forty-Eighter and woman suffragist, was a friend and comrade of Sherman Booth, whose …

  • Dec 9
    Virtual Lecture: “How Swiss German is Amish Shwitzer?”

    Virtual Event

    This virtual lecture is free and open to the public! To receive a link, contact Antje Petty: apetty@wisc.edu Adams County, Indiana, is home to  the Swiss Amish, a population that does do not speak Pennsylvania Dutch, but Shwitzer.  The language sounds surprisingly familiar to speakers of modern Swiss-German dialects – and very different at the …

  • Nov 18
    Virtual Lecture: “Healing Traditions of the Pennsylvania Dutch”

    Virtual Event

    This virtual lecture is free and open to the public! To receive a link, contact Antje Petty: apetty@wisc.edu Exploring the cultural and historical roots of Pennsylvania Dutch healing traditions, Patrick Donmoyer will introduce the customs, folkways, and rituals widely used for treating illness among humans and domesticated animals. Drawing upon the speaker’s family experiences with …

  • Oct 19
    Live Virtual Lecture: “The German-Jewish Diaspora — From China to the US” with Weijia Li

    This virtual lecture is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Email Antje Petty (apetty@wisc.edu) to receive a link. ​Links will be sent on October 18, 2021 From 1938 to 1941, more than 17,000 German and Austrian Jewish refugees fled from the Nazi terror to Shanghai, China. The refugees’ hope to use …

  • May 2
    Virtual Presentation: “The Yiddish Sentence: Social Meaning Reflected in Grammatical Variation,” with Isaac Bleaman

    Virtual Event

    This event will be held virtually, via Zoom. (no registration required)  To join the meeting, click HERE Isaac L. Bleaman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics. His research interests include sociolinguistic variation, language contact and multilingualism, language maintenance, and language change. He addresses these broad areas by analyzing how individuals and communities speak …