Association for German Studies annual conference
Vice-Chancellor Prof Colin Riordan
14/04/2013
Event report
Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland
From the 3rd – 5th April 2013 Cardiff University hosted the 76th conference of the Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland, whose president is Professor Pól Ó Dochartaigh (University of Ulster). The Glamorgan Building was the main venue where 80 delegates listened to and discussed papers on different disciplines in German Studies, ranging from Linguistics, Translation and Gender Studies, History and Remembrance, Medieval Studies, 18th, 19th and 20th/early 21st century. There were also two additional special panels on German Philosophy and Art Theories (convened by scholars from Stuttgart and Vienna), and a further session convened by Swansea Centre for Contemporary German Culture on 20th Century Studies. The Lead Panel on German poetry in relation to the UK and Ireland was convened by Professor Gerrit-Jan Berendse. The Lead Panel consisted of nine papers on, for example, G.W. Sebald’s lyrical representation of England in the 1990s, new translations of Brecht poems, and the dialogue between poetry and science in the context of C.P. Snow’s essay The Two Cultures.
The conference was officially opened by President and Vice-Chancellor of Cardiff University, Professor Colin Riordan who underlined that the last time Cardiff hosted this annual event of the AGS was 1966. Prof. Riordan welcomed delegates from as far as Cape Town, Stockholm, Ghent, Malta, the universities of Delaware and Connecticut. Special guest of this year’s AGS conference was the German writer Ulrike Draesner who was introduced by Professor Karen Leeder (New College Oxford). Recently Draesner translated 17 of William Shakespeare's Sonnets, published in the volume Thymine together with Dr Tom Cheesman (Swansea University) in his edition Hafan Books.
In Cardiff, the AGS arrived in the 21st century for the first time by introducing itself on Facebook and Twitter. The conference would not have become a great success without the assistance of Jenny Hulin, and EUROP students Emily Jay and Susanne Roberts
