STEP - Science and Technology in the European Periphery

Representations of German Identity in Visual Culture
Deadline for Proposals: 15 January 2011

CALL FOR PAPERS: VISUAL CULTURE NETWORK
35th Annual Conference of the German Studies Association (GSA)
September 22-25, 2011, Louisville, Kentucky

Questions about identity have confounded and continue to challenge Germans, German-language speakers, and foreign observers. “Who is German?” and “What qualities define Germanness?” These questions have been at the heart of the Gross Deutschland/Klein Deutschland debates of the 18th and 19th centuries, Weimar-era and Nazi-era attempts to define the German state, Cold War struggles on both sides of the Wall, and are still present in post-Wende disputes over the constitution of contemporary German identity. Yet questions about German identity not only play out in political discussions but in visual cultural forms as well.

The German Studies Association’s Visual Culture Network (VCN) welcomes individual paper proposal, group submissions, as well as interest from moderators and commentators on the theme of “Representations of German Identity in Visual Culture” for the GSA’s 2011 conference in Louisville, Kentucky. The VCN envisions a series of panels devoted to visual cultural forms engaging the issue of German identity:

• How has German identity been represented in particular examples from the broad spectrum of visual culture from painting to sculpture, advertising to architecture, television to film to installation art?
• What role have museums played in constituting, questioning, performing, subverting German identity, either historically and in the present?
• In what ways have identity claims made through visual cultural forms by Germans and non-Germans, those residing inside the national borders and those observing from abroad, conflicted, contested, and constituted an authentic German identity?
• To what ends do select visual cultural forms—either as specific case studies or as more general interventions—confront German identity positively, negatively, sarcastically, ironically, subversively, comically?

Please email a 250-word proposal along with name and institutional affiliation by 15 January 2011 to both Dr. Deborah Ascher Barnstone () and Dr. Thomas O. Haakenson ().

Panelists will be notified by 1 February 2011 and will be required to register as a member and submit materials through the GSA website at www.thegsa.org by 15 February 2011.
Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Phd
Associate Professor
School of Architecture
WSU
Pullman, WA 99164-2220

Thomas O. Haakenson, PhD
Chair and Associate Professor

Liberal Arts Department
Minneapolis College of Art and Design
2501 Stevens Avenue
Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. 55404
Email: dascher@acm.wsu.edu
Visit the website at http://www.thegsa.org