2024-2025 Transatlantic Research Exchanges
CGES is focused transatlantic research exchanges such as:
1. Benefits of Diversity: Results of Cultures in Motion
Key UW-Madison Faculty:
Sonja E. Klocke, Professor, Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic + & Director, Center for German and European Studies
B. Venkat Mani, Professor, Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ & Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities
Zach R. Fitzpatrick, Assistant Professor, Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic +
Nâlân Erbil, Teaching Faculty II, Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic +
Research theme one brings together scholars, artists, activists, and archivists to engage in cross disciplinary, transatlantic, interinstitutional conversations about the intersections of migration, cultural diversity, and society in Germany’s past and present. This theme will continue to directly engage artists and writers whose work is read, circulated in original and translation, and located in the context of (post)migration and diversity, and foster exchanges across subfields, institutional settings, and minoritized communities. It essential to also overcome the enduring East/West divide when thinking about diversity and (im)migration, and therefore this theme will take both West and East German (hi)stories of migration into consideration to discuss developments since unification. In addition, with the growing field of World Literary Studies researchers in this theme seek to investigate modes through which translation becomes central to the experience of migration, both as the migration of human beings, and through Bibliomigrancy (Mani), the material and figurative, physical and virtual migration of books (Mani 2017). DAAD funding will enable us to bring several scholars – from a variety of disciplines – and artists to UW-Madison. It will further facilitate travel for the UW faculty affiliates and their graduate students to conduct research and collaborate with co-authors based in Europe.
2. Diverse Musical Networks: Berlin and Madison in the 1960s
Key UW-Madison Faculty:
Pamela Potter, Professor, Department of German, Nordic and Slavic+
Parry Karp, Artist-in Residence, & Robert and Linda Graebner Professor of Chamber Music and Cello, Mead Witter School of Music
Jonathan Pollack, Honorary Fellow, Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, Department of History
Research theme two will focus on those musicians who came to Madison, Wisconsin, the most prominent of which were the members of the Pro Arte Quartet, who were stranded here at the outbreak of the war and stayed on to become the first resident string quartet at any American university. Prof. Schmidt has uncovered the correspondence of Michael Kopfermann, a Berlin musicologist and performer who came to Madison to study with the Pro Arte’s violinist Rudolf Kolisch. In Kopfermann’s letters to his mother, he offers a rare and detailed account of the intellectual life in Madison in the 1960s and the vibrancy of the community arising from the presence of so many German emigrés who landed there. The letters, all of which are housed in Berlin, would need to be supplemented by materials in the university archive at UW-Madison, such as the rich collection left by history professor George Mosse, the exiled heir to the Mosse publishing dynasty; along with other testimonies and documentation from various members of the German expatriate community, including Professor Jost Hermand. In Madison, collaborations with colleagues in the Mead Witter School of Music (specifically, the current members of the Pro Arte Quartet), Mills Music Library, the University of Wisconsin Archives, the Max Kade Institute, and the newly established Rebecca Blank Center for Campus History, add historical depth to the question of German emigré musicians coming to Wisconsin against the backdrop of German migration and the history of Jews and other minorities at the University of Wisconsin.
3. Economic and Political Shocks in Europe Since 2008
Key UW-Madison Faculty:
Mark Copelovitch, Professor, Department of Political Science & La Follette School of Public Affairs, Director, European Studies, and Jean Monnet Chair, European Union and the Global Economy
Mariel Barnes, Assistant Professor, La Follette School of Public Affairs
Adeline Lo, Assistant Professor, La Follette School of Public Affairs
Nils Ringe, Robert F. and Sylvia T. Wagner Chair, Comparative Politics, & Professor, Department of Political Science
CGES Theme three will study and illuminate the causes and consequences of the serious economic and political shocks that have hit Europe in the 21st century, including global and Eurozone financial crises, the refugee crisis, the pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the rise of populist and far right authoritarian parties in many EU member-states. Building upon an extensive knowledge base on global populism with Professor Nils Ringe, the team will further interdisciplinary expertise in the political, economic, and social aspects of European crises—in migration, populism, and the global economy. The four theme faculty are professors specializing in international political economy, migration, public policy, social policy, gender and politics, applied statistical methodology, populism, European party politics, European internationalist movements, democracy, and public opinion. Three basic work teams will be on these core fields of inquiry, including: 1) The Eurozone and the global economy (Copelovitch); 2) Crises, shocks, and European politics (Barnes, Lo); and 3) Populism and party system change in Europe (Ringe).
4. Migration and Memory in Postwar and Contemporary Europe
Key UW-Madison Faculty:
Brandon Bloch, Assistant Professor, Department of History
Liina-Ly Roos, Assistant Professor, Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic +
Leonie Schulte, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology and the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+
This research group aims to move beyond the polemics that have surrounded Europe’s most recent wave of memory wars, asking more basic questions about why debates about migration policy are frequently carried out as contests over historical memory. How have competing historical narratives (of World War II-era genocide and expulsion, postwar labor migrations, Communism, decolonization, and/or EU expansion) shaped elite and popular attitudes toward migration policy in Europe? How do current anxieties surrounding migration to Europe mirror or depart from cycles of anti-immigrant and anti-refugee backlash since 1945? How do recent immigrants to Europe engage with, adapt, and resist dominant historical narratives in their countries of residence? Scholarship that links migration controversies in Europe with colonial legacies and with the study of race, gender, and sexuality will be featured from an interdisciplinary focus. Core faculty organizers are working on research projects related to European migration from the perspectives of history, anthropology, and literary and media studies. Brandon Bloch is launching a new project on the international human rights activism of German-speaking refugee and expellee organizations in West Germany and Austria, from 1945 through the post-Cold War era. His research will examine how German and Austrian activists internationalized the memory of ethnic cleansing in Central Europe and thereby shaped key categories of modern international law, including the “right to the homeland,” “right against expulsion,” and “right of return.” Leonie Schulte’s current project explores the ways in which Germany’s language and integration policies impact newcomers’ access to the labor market, showing that language-based requirements for employment significantly slowed down rather than accelerate access to work (as was initially intended). Leonie Schulte’s work thus explores the lingua-temporal dimensions of migration, displacement, and policy-in-practice, exploring themes of temporal disruption, uncertainty, waiting, stuckness, and boredom. Liina-Ly Roos continues work on her project that explores how Baltic cultural texts deal with questions of whiteness, white privilege, and migration in a region that has defined itself primarily as a victim of Communism, but in the twenty-first century has realigned itself with Western Europe.