In October, the Center for German and European Studies (CGES) celebrated its 10th Anniversary with an international two-day conference entitled “Cultures of Democracy? Germany and the USA at Home and Abroad”. This landmark event brought together CGES faculty from its partner sites at UW-Madison and University of Minnesota-Twin Cities with notable scholars from across the USA, Germany, and Europe.
Thirty conference participants presented two-day’s worth of paper and panel discussions which highlighted the breadth and depth of recent and current CGES scholarship and research, and looked ahead to the successful development of new research collaboratives. The interdisciplinary breadth of the Center’s research was well demonstrated with panels addressing a wide range of themes including democracy in the EU, issues of national identity and gender, language and immigration, social transformation, the welfare state, media, human rights, and war and peace.
The core of the conference came in ten panels, which showed remarkable diversity in both content and format, and displayed the range of interdisciplinary work that CGES has always fostered and promoted. All of the projects presented were ongoing research efforts that sprang from the collaboratives supported by CGES, and that have drawn new faculty and students into German and European studies. Several panels were linked with their partner universities in Berlin, North Carolina and Minnesota via internet video, as their research seminars had been. Other panels brought in partners from Europe and around the US with whom new collaborations are developing. Both older and newer collaboratives addressed such timely and important topics as immigration, welfare restructuring, and urban development. Recently hired faculty in German and European studies at UW-Madison, Markus Gangl (Sociology) and Nils Ringe (Political Science), suggested interesting new directions for future collaborations.
Two of the panels particularly highlighted the work that graduate students were doing based on their participation in the collaborative seminars. These student panels drew praise from the visiting scholars who attended, as well as from local faculty in the audience. German Consul General, Wolfgang Drautz, who came up from Chicago for the conference, said he was “tremendously impressed with the sophistication” of the student projects that came from the recent collaborative on war and peace in Europe run by Professor Klaus Berghahn at UW-Madison with Professor Eric Weitz at UM-TC.
The student panel on gender politics and family transformation in Europe, which brought together projects from several different collaboratives, drew appreciative comments from German scholars who attended. Professor Ute Gerhard, the former director of the Cornelia Goethe Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Frankfurt, praised the panelists for “offering insights into citizenship politics that we overlook in our own country.” This panel will be available as a podcast at the gender research (Gender Studies Global Network?) website of the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) as well as on the CGES website.
The keynote address was given by Professor Ronald Steel, a prize-winning author of books on presidential power and transatlantic affairs, and professor of international relations and journalism at the University of Southern California. He provocatively argued that the idea of a “transatlantic community” was historically constructed for strategic reasons around the time of World War I, rather than a natural outgrowth of common culture or interests, and asked what strategic interests today would lead to maintaining or dismantling this notion. Spirited discussion followed, particularly focusing on the extent to which the EU was creating a distinctive European identity that was not defined by a “transatlantic” focus. The conference concluded on a high note with a roundtable discussion that suggested new collaborations and future directions for CGES research. The conference was a fitting celebration to mark a decade of high profile research collaboratives, while also giving a clear vision of the new and innovative directions in which University of Wisconsin-Madiosn scholars intend to take their research and scholarship on Germany and Europe in the years ahead.
Our conference was sponsored by the following University of Wisconsin-Madison entities:
Generous additional support for both the conference and film series was provided by:
Film Series
Full Conference Program (pdf)
Full Conference Program (html)
Videos of Select Panels (requires Internet Explorer)
WUN Podcasted Panels (requires Internet Explorer)
