German Studies Association of Australia

Image Credit: Fridolin freudenfett, Monument by Manaf Halbouni in Berlin, CC BY-SA 4.0

Welcome to the GSAA website / Herzlich willkommen auf der GSAA-Webseite!

Statement in Support of the GSA

Statement of Support

The German Studies Association of Australia (GSAA) hereby extends its solidarity to its fellow organisation in the United States, the German Studies Association (GSA), as well as other learned societies in the field.

In light of the present global political landscape and widespread academic budget constraints, we wish to emphasise the critical nature of:

- cross-border intellectual discourse,

- engagement with colleagues around the globe and within diverse academic cultures,

- collaboration with international learned societies.

We recognise the current challenges facing academic exchange, including

- reduced funding for international conferences and research visits,

- reduced support and membership of international learned societies,

- increasing visa restrictions, in particular for foreign nationals and trans and gender-diverse subjects.

We affirm that such exchanges manifest through

- the dissemination of ideas via written mediums, both in traditional and digital formats,

- online meetings and platforms,

- most crucially, the liberty to travel and participate in face-to-face scholarly dialogues.

We aim to explore innovative ways to foster international academic exchange in our field of German Studies as well as strengthen our partnership with the GSA and other international organisations through joint initiatives, actively maintaining this and other relationships to learned societies.

-- as affirmed at the Annual General Meeting, 21 November 2025.

Conference

Biennial Conference 2027

We are delighted to announce that the 2027 conference will be hosted by UWA organized by Assoc/Prof Kati Tonkin and Dr Dale Adams. Further details will follow closer to the date.

Kind regards/ Herzliche Grüße,

Yixu Lü

President

German Research Seminar

2025

Seminars take place at 3.30pm on Fridays, unless otherwise noted. Contact Prof Birgit Lang or Dr Brangwen Stone for the Zoom link.

Semester 2

29 August: Isabelle Hesse (Sydney), "Thinking Israel and Palestine Together: Critical Pedagogy and the Possibility of Rewriting History in Germany" (Sydney/Zoom)
10 October: Achim Küpper (FU Berlin): "Im Arboreal der Fiktionen. Globale Mobilitäten zwischen Kolonialismus, Ökologie und Hortikulturgeschichte. Medienkomparatistisches Pflanzenlesen in Literatur und Film" (Zoom only)
17 October: Kylie Giblett (Sydney), "Multidirectional Memory and the Implicated Subject in Eva Menasse's Dunkelblum" (Sydney/Zoom)
24 October: Brangwen Stone (Sydney) & Katie Sutton (ANU), "Gendered Violence and Non-Binary Dissociative Poetics in Strubel’s Blaue Frau and Salzmann’s Außer sich" (Sydney/Zoom)
10 December, 3pm (nb Wednesday): Klaus Vieweg (Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena), „Hegel in Jena - The Capital City of Philosophy around 1800“ (Sydney/Zoom)

Semester 1

7 April: Wesley Lim (ANU), ”Figure Skating Television Programming in the GDR from the 1960-1980s" (Sydney/Zoom)
4 April: Valeria Morelli (UoM), "Literary Memory of Nazism and the Second World War in Uwe Timm’s Post-Reunification Narratives" (Melbourne/Zoom)
11 April: Bodi Ashton (ZFF, Potsdam), "'Between Ridicule and Hatred': Trans Issues between Press and Public in West Germany in the 1970s" (Melbourne Zoom)
16 May: Emma Thomas (UNSW), "Gendering German Colonialism in Melanesia" (Sydney/Zoom)
23 May: Marvin Martin (Monash), "German-Aboriginal encounters at the Hermannsburg Mission in Central Australia, 1926–1952" (Melbourne Zoom)

2023

Contact Prof Birgit Lang or Dr Brangwen Stone for the Zoom link.

20 March (3.30pm): Annie Ring (University College, London) „Give Up Your Data, and Enjoy! Internet Codes of Conduct in Brenda Lien’s Call of … Short Film Trilogy.“

24 March (3.30pm): Gabriele Dürbeck (Uni Vechta): “Narrating Anthropocenic Futures - Utopia as 'a Necessary Survival Strategy.’”

21 April (3.30pm): Deborah Holmes (Paris-Lodron-Universität Salzburg): “Disquiet on all fronts: Reception and adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues” (Melbourne/Zoom)
28 April (3.30pm): Angus Nicholls (Queen Mary UL): “Hermann Klaatsch in Australia: theories, objects, legacies” (Melbourne/Zoom)
2 June (3.30pm): Anna Axtner-Borsutzky (LMU): “Goethes Gärten und andere. Raumsemantik in ausgewählten Dramen um 1800” (Sydney/Zoom)
9 June (3.30pm): Martin Luginbühl (Basel): „Wie Kinder mündlich argumentieren (lernen) - Zur Verbindung von qualitativen und quantitativen Analysen in der Gesprächsanalyse“ (Sydney/Zoom)

2022

Semester 2, 2022

Hosted by The University of Melbourne. Contact Dr Andreas Dorrer for more information.

Semester 1, 2022

Friday 11th March (3pm): Claudia Sandberg (Melbourne), "The Story of a Tiger in the Bathroom: German-Jewish filmmaker Peter Lilienthal in West German Television of the 1960s."
Thursday 7th April, (5pm)*: Franz-Josef Deiters (Sydney) , "Neues Welttheater? Bühne und Politik im Theater der Neo-Avantgarden."
Friday 29th April (2pm)*: Andrew Hurley (UTS), "Keeping secrets badly? On German revelations of the Aboriginal secret-sacred in the 1970s and 1980s."
Friday 13th May (3pm): Donna Brett (Sydney), "The Surveillance Legacy of East Germany."