The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will sponsor an NEH-funded summer seminar for college and university teachers at US institutions that is codirected by Siegfried Mews (UNC at Chapel Hill) and Keith Bullivant (Univ. of Florida). Colleagues primarily engaged in undergraduate instruction of all levels and in various fields who have an interest in Berlin as well as in postwar German developments in general, are invited to apply. The six-week seminar will take place in Berlin from
5 June to 14 July 2000.
The fifteen participants will receive the standard NEH stipend of $3,700 that is intended to cover travel, accommodations, and living expenses.
Variously known as "Athens on the Spree," the German equivalent of rough-and-tumble Chicago, or a Faustian city inclined to sell its soul to the devil, the metropolis of Berlin has attracted a fair share of attention. Increasingly identified with representing Germany as a whole during the turbulent history of the last 150 years or so, Berlin has been in the center of renewed interest as a consequence of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, an event that has been widely interpreted as signifying the end of the postwar period. The establishment of the so-called "Berlin Republic" in the postwall era provides not only an opportunity to discuss the present and future challenges the new capital faces; above all, it offers a chance to review and assess from different disciplinary perspectives more than fifty years of Berlin's literary, cultural, and political history via studying literary and other texts that both mirror and refract it.
Holding a seminar in Berlin in the year 2000 will offer participants a unique opportunity to read closely a variety of texts, to gain access to numerous research facilities, to familiarize themselves with the sociocultural context and literary traditions of Berlin, to take part in the capital's rich cultural life, and to discuss ways in which Berlin texts may be productively used in the undergraduate classroom. Generally, the seminar will be conducted in German. At the minimum, participants are expected to possess an adequate reading knowledge of German; they should also be able to follow lectures in German. Application packets with detailed information will be available at the beginning of November; requests may be sent to Valerie Bernhardt (valerieB@email.unc.edu). The application deadline is 1 March 2000.
Siegfried Mews, Professor
Dept. of Germanic Languages
UNC at Chapel Hill
Email: Mews@email.unc.edu
Phone: 919/966-1641; 919/843-8863
Fax: 919/962-3708
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