In a post earlier this year, Juliane Schicker commented on the role that professional and scholarly conferences play in our work as faculty members in German, focusing in particular on the 2022 German Studies Association (GSA) conference. Kiley Kost then discussed her work in service to national and international scholarly organizations, focusing on the Climate Emergency and Technology (CLEAT) Committee of the GSA and the Mutual Aid group of the scholarly collective Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum. In this post, I provide further discussion of our work in German Studies beyond Carleton’s borders.
Some of this work involves professional organizations and online resources. One of my current roles is to serve as a coordinator for the GSA’s Environmental Studies Network. While the CLEAT committee, which Kiley described in her post linked above, is focused on advancing sustainability goals such as reducing the GSA’s carbon footprints and using technology effectively for more resilient and accessible events, the Environmental Studies Network is focused on promoting scholarly dialogue for faculty and graduate students conducting research on environmental humanities topics. The goals from both of these groups come together in the GSA seminar “Environment, Activism, and Social Change,” which Kiley and I are co-organizing with two colleagues from other institutions, and which will have the twin goals of developing new scholarly projects and building sustainable and resilient processes for collaboration. Another ongoing working group is focused on content and events around the website Environment and Engagement in German Studies. In conjunction with this website, we have conducted workshops with international audiences ranging from high school teachers to graduate students to college professors. This work takes place at multiple overlapping scales: Kiley and I engage in each of these projects from our offices in LDC; our collaborators range from scholars nearby in Minnesota to professors across the US and German-speaking Europe.
In addition to the work that Juliane, Kiley, and I perform with scholarly and professional networks, each of us also engages in teaching projects that extend beyond campus. This can take place at a local scale: colleagues at Carleton’s Center for Community and Civic Engagement (CCCE) have helped me to implement academic civic engagement components into teaching, starting with an A&I seminar this past fall focused on the idea of “home” that involved numerous connections with visiting educators and organizations that work on environmental issues in Northfield. I partnered with the Greater Northfield Sustainability Collaborative to set up the project, and the students’ work culminated in a resource guide designed to help other newcomers get connected with their new environment in Northfield. In an upcoming project that goes off campus at both a local and global scale, Kiley and I are currently organizing a DAAD-sponsored seminar on environmental humanities that will take place this summer in both Minneapolis and Munich. To prepare for that seminar, we first created a proposal that we sent to the Center for German and European Studies (CGES) at the University of Minnesota; CGES then included our proposal among numerous other projects in their funding application to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Kiley and I continue to work with UMN colleagues on the program’s logistics; meanwhile, on the academic side of the program, we are connecting with environmental historians and literature scholars at the Rachel Carson Center (RCC) in Munich and developing place-based activities in Minneapolis and Munich that will complement the students’ readings and research projects.
Finally, beyond our service and teaching work, Juliane, Kiley, and I all engage in research and publishing projects that draw on networks extending far beyond Carleton, but that also benefit from collaborations here at home. For me this year, these activities have felt particularly demanding, as I have been slogging through the final phases of a book project alongside a few smaller publications. I wrote part of the book during a research fellowship in Munich and have developed some of the chapters at conferences and panels with experts in the relevant subfields, but I have also worked closely with students and colleagues right here on campus to finish the project. Nadia McPherson ‘23 and Esme Krohn ‘24 have served as Student Research Partners over the past two and a half years, and more recently, Jens Bartel ‘25 has provided support through his role as the German program’s research assistant. Moreover, faculty Research Circles sponsored by Carleton’s Humanities Center have provided commentary and peer support through the writing process.
Taken together, all of these examples illustrate one of the aspects I enjoy most about working at Carleton. My projects are developed through close engagement with students and colleagues, and are simultaneously plugged into professional networks that span the country and the globe. As professors teaching the craft of academic writing, we frequently talk about scholarly work as an ongoing discussion. Sometimes it’s difficult to imagine how the arguments we make in Northfield, Minnesota, within the narrowly circumscribed environment of an A&I seminar or a course on contemporary German culture, might be conceived of as part of a scholarly discussion that stretches across the international field of German studies. In other words, when we talk about scholarly work as a conversation, it might feel abstract. But as I engage with students and colleagues within the context of courses, scholarly networks, and research projects, I benefit from interlocutors at Carleton no less than at national and international conferences. Within the small world of German studies, it quickly becomes clear that the “scholarly conversation” is not just a metaphor. It is taking place in real time, with real people, both on campus and off.