Calendar

Fall - Spring 2008-09

"German Language Broadsides in North America, 1700-1830."

This project ithat is now in the final stages of completion s the result of a multi-year collaboration between the MKI, the Penn State University Libraries and the Penn State Press with a team of colleagues at the Georg-August-University in Gottingen, Germany. Some 1,800 records that document all known instances of the German Language Broadside in North America were identified over a number of years by Hermann Wellenreuther, Reimer Eck, Anne von Kamp and the late Carola Wessell. Initial funding for the project came from the German Research Council (DFG) and has more recently received support from the Max Kade Institute at Penn State, and the University Libraries.  The project is based on a pioneering transfer of the broadsides in digital form from Germany to Penn State where they will be available on line in the form of an extendable and searchable database. The Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing at Penn State under the sponsorship of the Press and the University Libraries will make this resource accessible worldwide. Simultaneously, the Max Kade Institute will publish in its  Book Series the GLB as a reference work that will show the bibliographic entries with details such as the printing location, name of printer, date, and size, meter (if in verse) and typeface. Wherever possible, the resource will include the facsimile images of the printed copy that was consulted to prepare the bibliography.

This project builds upon the earlier work, The First Century of German-Language Printing in the United States of America, edited by Eck and Karl Jon Richard Arndt (1989). Alongside the new GLB these volumes now provide the primary reference tool for anyone interesting in the study of German-language printed materials in early North America. In May, 2008 a three-day workshop on the project brought the German team to Penn State where they were joined by Jeff Bach, the Director of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietism Studies and Lisa Minardi, Assistant Curator of Furniture, The Winterthur Museum, along with the Penn State participants in the project. During the 2008-09 academic year, the final preparations are in motion to produce both the print and the on line search interface through a single master database. If all goes as planned, a functional prototype of the on line database should be available in time for a second workshop planned for late May, 2009. The partners in the project are also now involved in the preliminary phases of planning and organizing a major international conference on the nature of broadsides in the early modern trans-Atlantic context. The conference will be held at Penn State in the Fall of 2010 and include participants from both Europe and North America."


Fall - Spring 2007-08


During 2007-08, the Institute is completing several projects and laying the groundwork for the next Visiting Max Kade Professor who will hopefully join us during the 2009-10 academic year. Our visiting MKI Professor Hermann Wellenreuther will return to Penn State in May, 2008 accompanied by his colleagues, Prof. Dr. Reimer Eck, and Dr. Anne von Kamp. They will participate in the MKI-sponsored workshop on "German Broadsides" that is being hosted by the Penn State Libraries and PSU Press from May 21-23. This German team will be joined by American scholars Lisa Minardi, from the Winterthur Museum, and Professor Jeff Bach, the Director of the Young Center for Pietism and Anabaptist Studies in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. The workshop will address both the theoretical and the practical dimensions of the MKI's project to transfer the digitized collection of images of all known North-American German broadsides to the Penn State Libraries from the work done in Germany by Professors Wellenreuther, Eck, and the late Dr. Carola Wessel.

In addition to the workshop, the Institute is undertaking to publish in our MKI Series the printed concordance that will accompany the on-line images. We expect the publication of this volume to coincide with the on-line project's accessibility, hopefully within the next few months. The initial workshop will address questions of the central European origins of the broadside, the North American production and distribution of this medium, and the practical questions of how the collection will be accessible and at the same time protected from possible abuse by on-line users. The workshop participants will also be discussing the possibility and potential for a major, international conference on the topic of broadsides in a European and non-European context that we tentatively plan on hosting at the Institute during the 2011 academic year.

As Spring approaches, we are also happy to announce that Penn State Press has informed us that the volume of essays produced by our international conference in Fall, 2004 will be ready for distribution in May. Ethnographies and Exchanges: Native Americans, Moravians, and Catholics in Early North America joins our growing Series list that will soon include not only the German Broadsides volume, but monographs on Caspar Wistar, the transformation of Lancaster County, and we hope very soon, a new and important revisionist study of Aaron Levy, the German-Jewish entrepreneur and early republic founder of Aaronsburg.

We are also happy to announce that a Penn State graduate student in History, Jason Strandquist, will be pursuing archival work in the Federal Republic this coming summer with the support of the Institute. We are also presently considering application from undergraduates seeking support for travel to Berlin this spring to participate in a study tour. We continue to encourage both undergraduate and graduate students who have research and study objectives in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland to approach the Institute for support. Although our resources are limited, we continue, with the encouragement of the Foundation in New York, to do what we can to support student research initiatives.

Fall - Spring 2007

The 2006-07 academic year has witnessed the revival of the program that brings Visiting Max Kade professors to Penn State. The Co-directors were very pleased to receive a positive response from the Kade Foundation in New York City that enabled us to invite Professor Dr. Hermann Wellenreuther to Penn State to teach an undergraduate course in the German-speaking settlers in North America and their relationship to North American political institutions for the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures. Professor Wellenreuther has also offered a graduate seminar for the Department of History on the Atlantic World in the early modern era besides giving lectures on campus to audiences on his various research projects, including an interpretation of a vast collection of German-language broadsides. He will also be joining Professor Timothy Breen of Northwestern University and Professor Claudia Schnurmann of Hamburg University in late April in a roundtable discussion intended for early modern faculty and graduate students to assess the impact and possible deficiencies of "Atlantic History" as an interpretive framework for doing early modern studies.

This year also saw the final completion of the revised essays (including a newly-commissioned addition) to the volume that emerged from the Fall, 2005 conference on the Moravian Mission Diaries of David Zeisberger. That collection, Ethnographies and Exchanges: Native Americans, Moravians, and Catholics in Early North America, edited by A. G. Roeber, one of the Institute's co-directors, is being copyedited at Penn State University Press and is scheduled for appearance in the MKI Book Series for late 2007 or early 2008. In addition, we are very pleased that we now have an additional two manuscripts that have been revised according to outside readers' requests and they also will be making their way through the editorial and production process during the coming year. We were pleased this year to see the publication of Souls for Sale:  Two German Redemptioners Come to Revolutionary America, edited with introductions and notes by Susan E. Klepp and Farley Grubb and Anne Pfaelzer de Ortiz.

In April, the Institute is helping to sponsor the Early Modern Studies conference "Imaginary Cities: Fictions of Space in the Early Modern World," April 13-14.

As the academic year comes to a close, the Co-directors are planning another meeting with the Foundation in New York to discuss the next guest professorship we hope to be bringing to Penn State in the near future.

 

Fall-Spring, 2004 Events

MKI Conference Agenda
 

Fall-Spring, 2003 Events

MKI Conference Tentative Schedule


Fall-Spring, 2002 Events

This year will be a somewhat quieter one for the Institute as we lay plans for a major international conference to be held on the Penn State campus in September, 2004. During October, Professors Gentry and Roeber and Professor Dan Purdy who is scheduled to succeed Professor Gentry as the co-director of the Institute in 2003-04 attended the invitational conference hosted by the Max Kade Foundation in New York City. Most of the discussions centered  on strategies to help further the study of the German language among high school and college students, and to increase the exchanges of faculty and  students between American and German-speaking universities and institutes in Europe.

We are conserving resources this year by not hosting a Lynen Fellow from Germany via the Lynen Program of the Alexander von Humboldt Program. Normally, we have tried to have a young guest professor from a variety of  disciplines on campus and hope to resume this initiative again in a year or so. For now, however, we want to alert all our friends and donors to a very significant event that has been in the planning stages for about two years.

In 1995, Professor Hermann Wellenreuther of the University of Goettingen, and his student, Dr. Carola Wessel published the first critical edition of David Zeisberger's Diary. Zeisberger, a Moravian missionary, labored among the Delaware in what is today Pennsylvania and Ohio during the mid- to late eighteenth century. Although his pioneering linguistic work is known to specialists for having been the first systematic approach to indigenous languages in the Middle Atlantic region, his diary has remained translated only in parts, and those translations have long been out of date. The co-directors of the Institute at Penn State believe Zeisberger's diaries to be of critical importance for an understanding of Native American-European exchanges and difficulties in early modern North America. Accordingly, we agreed to subvent part of the translation costs in order for Penn State University Press to issue an English-language version of the Wellenreuther-Wessel edition.

We're very pleased to be able to report that the translation is now nearly complete, and that the Press anticipates publication in early 2004. In order to give maximum visibility to this event, we are now planning an international symposium that will bring together some 25 scholars from Europe and the U.S. to the Penn State campus. We're especially pleased to be able to report as well that a special session will be devoted to graduate student work in Native American-European exchange, the session to be co-sponsored by the Newberry Library's D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History, and the Center's graduate seminar supported by the CIC institutions (colloquially, "the Big Ten") among whom Penn State is a member. We anticipate publishing a volume of the most promising essays both from the internationally known leaders in Native American studies as well as the best of the graduate student work. The event will begin with a public lecture, and we hope to feature both Moravian eighteenth-century music performance as well as a visit to one of the abandoned Moravian-Delaware town sites.

Fall 2001 Guests

   The Max Kade Institute welcomes as its visiting Feodor Lynen Fellow for the 2001-02 academic year Dr. Sabine Gieske from the University of Marburg, Germany. A native of Bersenbruck, Germany, Dr. Gieske will be pursuing her post-doctoral work for her Habilitation under the sponsorship of Professor Londa Schiebinger, Sparks Professor of the History of Science in Penn State's Department of History. Dr. Gieske studied in both Muenster and Marburg and has worked as an assistant in the Institute for European Ethnology and Cultural Study in Marburg after a brief assignment in museum and cultural management in Osnabrueck. She comes to Penn State from her position in Bonn where she works at the German Center for Air and Space Travel (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt) in close connection to the state department for science and research (Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft und Forschung) in the research area for gender and research support. During her stay at Penn State, she will co-teach a graduate seminar with Professor Schiebinger in the Spring semester entitled "Self Fashioning: Dressing for Science and Medicine" while working on her own research project.
 


Fall 2001 Events
Alumni Education Tours
Classic Rhine and Mosel: Explore German-American Heritage
September 9-19, 2001

Rhine and Mosel Tour Report

Rhine and Mosel Photo Gallery

   The program was guided by the co-directors of the Max Kade Institute, Dr. A. Gregg Roeber, head of the history department, and Dr. Francis G. Gentry, Germanic & Slavic languages and literatures.
 

 

Fall 2000 Guests and Events

Lynen Fellow Dr. Dirk Wentzel from Marburg, Germany, is in residence at Penn State for the Fall and Spring semesters. He is conducting research on Institutions of self-regulation: A media economics perspective. In Spring 2001 he will offer a graduate course on Media economics and the comparison of broadcasting systems at the College of Communications.
 

 

Spring 2000 Guests and Events

Resident scholar Dr. Mark Haeberlein is a Lynen Fellow from Freiburg Germany. He is in residence at Penn State for the Fall and Spring semesters to direct the final translation and transcription of the Papers of Jacob Leisler.

Leisler Papers Workshop, Thursday, January 20, 2000

Guest Speaker Dr. Mark Haeberlein: Religion and Society in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1730-1820, Thursday, April 6, 2000

AnnualFriends of the Max Kade Institute Meeting: Visit to Ephrata Cloister, April 29, 2000
 

 

Fall 1999

Resident scholar Dr. Mark Haeberlein is a Lynen Fellow from Freiburg Germany. He is in residence at Penn State for the Fall and Spring semesters to direct the final translation and transcription of the Papers of Jacob Leisler.

Fall Conference Jews and Pietists in Dialogue in Enlightenment America, September 30 to October 2, 1999

ExhibitGrassroots of America: the Pietists from Halle, August 30 to October 20, 1999

Guest speaker Thomas Müller-Bahlke: The Francke Foundations at Halle: Their history, their current work, and their rich source collections, September 13, 1999

Visiting writer Renate Welsh: Das Lufthaus, September 30, 1999, 7:00 p.m., Nittany Lion Inn, Penn State Room
 

 

Spring 1999 Guest Speakers

Hermann Wellenreuther, Max Planck Institut Göttingen: The Delaware and the American Revolution: Vision of an Indian State

Philip V. Bohlman, University of Chicago: Diaspora, Utopia, Resistance: Music in the Imagined Community of German Modernity

Anthonya Visser, Philipps-Universität Marburg: Body Talk: Intertextuality and the representation of women in recent German literature
 
 

Spring 1999 Annual Friends Meeting

From Aaronsburg to Philipsburg: German Settlement and Influence in Centre County
Co-sponsored by the Max Kade Institute and the Centre County Historical Society

Bruce Teeple, Aaronsburg Historical Museum: German immigration into Penns and Brush Valleys
        Susan Hughes, Pennsylvania State University: The Simler Tavern, Philipsburg