Leslie Morris, Ph.D., associate professor of German and director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Minnesota, will speak on “How Jewish Is It? Translations of Jewish Memory in Contemporary German Culture” at 4 p.m. Feb. 16 in Anheuser-Busch Hall, Room 305.
Morris is the first of six speakers appearing this spring as part of The Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences’ 2006 Faculty Fellows’ Lecture and Workshop Series.
Her talk will address the relationship between Jewish text and text as ruin that has emerged as a dominant trope of contemporary German Jewish culture.
In addition, Morris will lead a workshop at 10 a.m. Feb. 17 in the Arts & Sciences Laboratory Sciences Building, Room 201. The discussion will focus on recent critical work in the fields of Jewish history, anthropology and Diaspora studies— work that suggests new approaches to the influence of “place” of Germany in the emergence of Jewish culture in modernity.
She is the author of Reading History in the Poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann (2001) and co-editor of Contemporary Jewish Writing in Germany (with Karen Remmler, 2002) and Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis (with Jack Zipes, 2002).
She is completing a book titled Mourning Place: Translating Jewish Memory in Germany Today.
Morris earned a doctorate in Germanic languages and literatures from the University of Massachusetts in 1992.
Subsequent speakers in the Faculty Fellows series will be:
• March 2: Harriet Stone, Ph.D., professor of Romance languages & literatures in Arts & Sciences at WUSTL.
• March 9: Peter Kastor, Ph.D., assistant professor of history in Arts & Sciences at WUSTL.
• March 23 & 24: Martha Sandweiss, Ph.D., professor of American studies and history at Amherst College.
• April 17: Erin McGlothlin, Ph.D., assistant professor of Germanic language & literatures in Arts & Sciences at WUSTL.
• April 24 & 25: Mariët Westermann, Ph.D., director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
The Feb. 16-17 events are free and open to the public. For seat reservations or more information, call 935-5576.