We cordially welcome you to our celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Midwest Center for German and European Studies, a coordinated program of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Minnesota-Twin Cities that has been developed at both universities with extensive university support and the generous funding supplied by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). We will be holding events in Madison on October 19-20, 2007 including some seminar-style presentations that are linked by internet to Minnesota, as many of our research collaboratives have been.
Our tenth-anniversary conference is entitled "Cultures of Democracy? Germany and the USA at Home and Abroad" and it both celebrates the contributions of collaborative research “at home and abroad” with partners in the US, Germany and other European countries and reaches out to explore new questions of importance on both sides of the Atlantic. The relationship between our two countries as well as the involvements of each in the wider world are in a process of transformation. Our interdisciplinary, multi-sited seminars have been a spur to researching many different sorts of questions raised by the changes in our physical, social and political worlds. This conference emphasizes thematic questions about the ways in which German or American culture has been democratic, what limitations on democracy have been in evidence in domestic and international affairs today and in the past, and how democracy has been established and expressed in the cultural and social domains of both countries. The conference will combine the scholarship of graduate students whose work has developed within the context of our research collaboratives with presentations and discussions of ongoing issues of research concern that bring our faculty into collaboration with noted scholars from outside our community.
A highlight of the conference is the keynote address provided by Professor Ronald Steel, “The ‘German Problem’ and the Atlantic Future”. As an acute observer of transatlantic politics who is accustomed to making his analyses accessible to those outside of academia, Professor Steel will focus our attention on the contemporary concerns of German-American relations.
To introduce our conference themes, we are showing the film series "Selling Democracy" in the week leading up to the conference, October 13-16. This landmark film series, organized by Sandra Schulberg and curated with Ed Carter of the Academy Film Archive, features 25 short films made in Europe by the Marshall Plan's Motion Picture Section and by the Documentary Film Unit of the U.S. Office of Military Government (OMGUS) after WWII.
Our conference is sponsored by the following University of Wisconsin-Madison entities:
Generous additional support for both the conference and film series is provided by:
Full Conference Program (pdf)
