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With courses going live on Wednesday, we want to spotlight GNS 270: Foodways of Central Asia! This class is open to all ...
10/12/2026

With courses going live on Wednesday, we want to spotlight GNS 270: Foodways of Central Asia! This class is open to all majors will be run by professor Gulnara Glowacki on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, with a focus on "Dumplings, plov, and politics: how food tells the story of a whole region."

Course description is as follows: What do a dumpling, a loaf of tandyr bread, and a bowl of tea have in common? In Central Asia, almost everything. Each one carries thousands of years of history from nomads moving across the steppe, caravans along the Silk Road, both Soviet Union and post-Soviet nation-building, famine and forced resettlement, migration and memory.

In this course we treat food as evidence, a source as rich as any document or artifact. Why did plov become a symbol of the Uzbek nation, and beshbarmak of the Kazakh? How did plowing up the steppe for wheat permanently change what is served on the table today? Why do countries compete to “own” a dish on UNESCO’s lists? And what lies behind the tired image of the “wild nomad” and stereotypes that this course will teach you to see straight through?

We’ll read anthropologists, historians, and archaeologists, watch films, and in a campus teaching kitchen, cook and taste dishes from the region ourselves, asking what they reveal about culture, hospitality, and identity. No prior knowledge of the region or its languages is required; just bring curiosity and a willingness to think.

Learn more about the course on the GNS+ website or UW Course Search and Enroll this Wednesday!

Join the Nordic Folklife project for a wide-ranging conversation with celebrated fiber artist Lesley Darling, current MA...
10/07/2026

Join the Nordic Folklife project for a wide-ranging conversation with celebrated fiber artist Lesley Darling, current MA candidate in Material Culture and Textile Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Darling will speak about the scope and nature of her work, and answer questions about her perspectives on traditional art, sustainability, folk art pedagogy, place, and more. Event is free and open to the public!

For more information, visit the GNS+ events page.

Declarations on the fate of poetry after mass violence—enshrined most notably in Theodor Adorno’s indictment of “poetry ...
10/02/2026

Declarations on the fate of poetry after mass violence—enshrined most notably in Theodor Adorno’s indictment of “poetry after Auschwitz”—have tended to stress poetry’s impotence in the face of representing past destruction. Arriving too late to catastrophe constitutes the primordial belatedness of any poetics of witness. But what happens when we shift the locus of poetry from representation to resistance? How might understanding the lyric as an insurgent act against present dispossession refigure the burden of “catastrophic belatedness”? Through a tapestry of texts and images—from the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard to the militant theory of Basel Al-Araj, from the Arabic reception of Paul Celan to the painting of Anselm Kiefer—this talk will weave an inquiry into the chronopolitics and -poetics of genocide that have structured discussions of Holocaust and Nakba as discrete, partitioned events. Ultimately, Peter Makhlouf offers a lyricological reflection on how the poem as such possesses a contemporaneity each time we, as readers, engage with it, actualize its demands in the present, and answer its call to refuse the catastrophic nature of temporality: the division of exterminative violence into before/during/after that renders that violence a fait accompli immune from contest.

Lunch will be served at the talk. All are welcome, but if possible, please register in advance if you plan to attend. Register here: https://mideast.wisc.edu/event/a-lecture-by-peter-makhlouf/

For further information, please contact Matt Johnson ([email protected]) or Tsela Barr ([email protected]).
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Photo of Peter Makhlouf.
Peter Makhlouf is the Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of German, Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has published on topics ancient, medieval and modern in a range of scholarly venues, while his public writing has appeared in fora including Jewish Currents, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and boundary2online. He has currently at work on two books: one on culture and imperialism in the poetry of Stefan George, the other on catastrophic poetics between Germany and Palestine.

The flamingoes have started to land! Show your support for GNS+ with Fill the Hill until 5 p.m. today!
10/02/2026

The flamingoes have started to land! Show your support for GNS+ with Fill the Hill until 5 p.m. today!

10/02/2026

Join us this afternoon to listen to and discuss Maxi Obexer's radio play Im Auge des Sturms!

Probably everyone is familiar with the images of the attack on the United States Capitol in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021. But what happened inside the building on that day? In her award-winning documentary radio play Im Auge des Sturms, Maxi Obexer shifts the lens away from the mob outside to focus on the lawmakers inside. The piece centers on the intense verbal battles, panic, and political shifts that occurred among the representatives trapped within the building during and immediately following the siege. Combining real-life documentation with dramatic structure, the play captures politicians scrambling to defend a democratic system they themselves had, in some cases, actively undermined shortly before.

Awarded among other prices with Germany’s prestigious “Radio Play of the Year” award in 2024, Obexer’s work serves as a chilling exploration of political polarization, fragility, and institutional self-preservation. It questions whether laws and facts can withstand mob rule and conspiracy theories when a seemingly secure democracy suddenly begins to fracture from within. In this event, we will listen to the radio play (approx. 50 minutes) and then engage in an in-person discussion with the author Maxi Obexer. Radio Play in German, discussion in English and German.
Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ UW-Madison Department of History

Join us for a presentation that tracks modern discourses of human selection as they converged in discussions of film act...
10/01/2026

Join us for a presentation that tracks modern discourses of human selection as they converged in discussions of film acting in Weimar Germany! In the early years of narrative cinema and beyond, the question of how to select actors for films—the question of casting, in other words—preoccupied filmmakers, actors, critics, and audiences. Paul Dobryden traces this question to features of capitalist modernity that made selection a persistent and widespread concern during the Weimar period, and examine how film casting intersected with scientific management and eugenics, emerging disciplines that purported to provide rational criteria for sorting people in employment and marriage. He then turns to texts by Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, who offer critical purchase on discourses of selection by foregrounding the category of surplus population and the politics of stardom.

Paul Dobryden is an Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia, and the author of The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder (Northwestern University Press, 2022).

Sponsored by German (GNS+) and CGES.

Mark your calendars for another great performance and dance featuring Foot-Notes of Decorah, Iowa, and the ScandiAm Jam ...
09/24/2026

Mark your calendars for another great performance and dance featuring Foot-Notes of Decorah, Iowa, and the ScandiAm Jam of Madison, Wisconsin! The event will take place on Friday, October 16 from 6:30-8:30 pm at The Old Barn in Middleton.

Dance to the tunes of the Scandinavian-Americans who settled in the Driftless Area. Expect a slightly rustic setting, with portable toilets, some original (and uneven) floorboards, and a cheerful, casual atmosphere. Dress for fall temperatures. You are welcome to bring a lawn chair for sitting on the lawn outside the barn (you might want a blanket to cover up with as well!).

The event is FREE and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided, and feel free to bring your reusable water bottles. Carpooling is encouraged.

We hope to see you there!
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Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, the Folklore Program, the Nordic Folklife project, and the Go Big Read program.

Just one week away until “Flocktober” on October 1st and 2nd! Starting at 5 p.m. on October 1, every gift the UW receive...
09/24/2026

Just one week away until “Flocktober” on October 1st and 2nd! Starting at 5 p.m. on October 1, every gift the UW receives will add to our “fla-mazing” pink flamingo flock on Bascom Hill. Mark your calendar now for this fabulous, feathery tradition.

The Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ offers undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to learn about the cultures of speakers of more than a dozen modern languages, large and small. The diversity of our department is complemented by the interdisciplinary interests of our faculty and students, which connect us to a variety of other humanities and social sciences departments and research centers.

As a relatively young department that combined three well-established departments in 2016, we would benefit from funds that support activities across the entire department. Donations would specifically support the teaching of Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Icelandic, Kazakh, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Sámi, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Yiddish. Gifts would additionally support the department’s undergraduate major programs (German, Polish, Russian, Scandinavian Studies) as well as its certificate programs (Folklore, German, Languages and Cultures of Northern Europe, Slavic Studies).

Want to bring the flamingo flamboyance home? When you give $350 or more, you’ll qualify to receive your own full-sized lawn flamingo and mini flamingo. You can also give $100 or more to qualify for just the mini.

Want to learn about options for studying German language abroad? Don't know German but interested in studying in Germany...
09/23/2026

Want to learn about options for studying German language abroad? Don't know German but interested in studying in Germany or Austria? Join us to learn about study abroad programs and international internships in Germany and Austria and get advice from returned students and advisors - including available scholarships, important deadlines, and more!

The International Majors and Opportunities Fair will be held on Wednesday, September 23rd (TOMORROW!) in the Gordon Dini...
09/22/2026

The International Majors and Opportunities Fair will be held on Wednesday, September 23rd (TOMORROW!) in the Gordon Dining and Event Center from 3:00-5:00pm.

You can learn about the many majors, certificates, funding and scholarship opportunities, student organizations, events, and post-graduate support and programming on campus that has an international component. Use the QR code in the flyers to see a list of which units will be attending. Questions? Contact the International Studies Major Advisor, Molly Donnellan, at [email protected].

We hope to see you there!

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818 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Drive
Madison, WI
53706

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