Deprecated: Return type of CsvImport_RowIterator::seek($index) should either be compatible with SeekableIterator::seek(int $offset): void, or the #[\ReturnTypeWillChange] attribute should be used to temporarily suppress the notice in /home/wigherst/public_html/plugins/CsvImport/models/CsvImport/RowIterator.php on line 123

Deprecated: Return type of CsvImport_RowIterator::current() should either be compatible with Iterator::current(): mixed, or the #[\ReturnTypeWillChange] attribute should be used to temporarily suppress the notice in /home/wigherst/public_html/plugins/CsvImport/models/CsvImport/RowIterator.php on line 82

Deprecated: Return type of CsvImport_RowIterator::next() should either be compatible with Iterator::next(): void, or the #[\ReturnTypeWillChange] attribute should be used to temporarily suppress the notice in /home/wigherst/public_html/plugins/CsvImport/models/CsvImport/RowIterator.php on line 104

Deprecated: Return type of CsvImport_RowIterator::key() should either be compatible with Iterator::key(): mixed, or the #[\ReturnTypeWillChange] attribute should be used to temporarily suppress the notice in /home/wigherst/public_html/plugins/CsvImport/models/CsvImport/RowIterator.php on line 93

Deprecated: Return type of CsvImport_RowIterator::valid() should either be compatible with Iterator::valid(): bool, or the #[\ReturnTypeWillChange] attribute should be used to temporarily suppress the notice in /home/wigherst/public_html/plugins/CsvImport/models/CsvImport/RowIterator.php on line 166

Deprecated: Return type of CsvImport_RowIterator::rewind() should either be compatible with Iterator::rewind(): void, or the #[\ReturnTypeWillChange] attribute should be used to temporarily suppress the notice in /home/wigherst/public_html/plugins/CsvImport/models/CsvImport/RowIterator.php on line 55
1 10 72 https://wig-herstory.com/files/original/4680d5ce0f30fbc06476389e58a62175.jpg 7d5f7b72e107c92c93bf687d3fae4e7a Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data screenshot of website Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource WiG website screenshot Description An account of the resource shot of Statements page Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Beth Muellner Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived jpeg Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024_12_10 Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource jpeg https://wig-herstory.com/files/original/79c24ef22a8681c6ab10d9dc214ed8b7.jpg c54d68a4c63b137b7b0d0875917d9ffc Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource FGS volume 36 Description An account of the resource screenshots of FGS 36 issues 1 and 2 covers Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Beth Muellner Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived screenshot Language A language of the resource eng Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 2024_12_10 https://wig-herstory.com/files/original/943cc1a578854fc9c11d93900930ff75.jpg 8f0cab7d57a91af86a4b667db34cdd21 Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data screenshot Physical Dimensions The actual physical size of the original image 5.51 x 8.11 inches, 72 KB Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Feminist German Studies 2018 cover Description An account of the resource screenshot of cover from website https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/issue/39675 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Beth Muellner Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/issue/39675 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource jpeg Language A language of the resource eng https://wig-herstory.com/files/original/fbef6bd72a51d527afc0011dc48fc96f.pdf 93c282aa7a5919a22c3a8da6e4fa2579 https://wig-herstory.com/files/original/8353c15209f2448b2be40db1fcda9d87.mp3 5bdbed397eb41a1df21f1ca0b2e909eb Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interviews Subject The topic of the resource Feminism; Congresses; Germanists Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Interviews Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Brigetta (Britt) Abel Interview March 24, 2023 Transcribed/Edited by Elizabeth Heatwole- Summer 2023 Gruber: My name is Julia Gruber. I am also a WiG member and an associate professor of German at Tennessee Tech University. And I have invited Britt to do this interview today. So Britt, can you please introduce yourself? Tell us your name, where you work, and what country you’re- Are you in the US, are you, are you abroad? And uh, also from your country of origin. And please also tell us what year you first joined WiG and how you first heard about it. Abel: Yes. Hi everyone. I'm Britt Abel. Brigetta Abel is my full name. I go by Britt. She, her, hers pronouns. I currently work at Macalester College where I am an associate professor, non-tenure track in German Studies, and also the Director of Writing. I'm from Ithaca, New York, so from the U.S., and I first joined WiG in 1992, which, the fall of 1992 was the first conference I attended, which was also my first semester of graduate school at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. And I heard about WiG through my many colleagues at the U of M. There were at that point in time in particular, and, as has continued, but particularly at that time, there were a lot of Wiggies at the U of M, so I was encouraged to attend the conference that year. Gruber: Okay, so that's how WiG began for you and … can you tell us about your career before you joined WiG? Abel: I can't really, because I, like I said, I came to WiG in my very first semester of graduate school in German Studies, so my career was that I was an undergraduate. I did a Fulbright in Hamburg after I graduated, and then I started in graduate school. So really becoming a member of WiG was also my entry into the career. Gruber: Mm-hmm. Okay. That's wonderful. Describe your, the first WiG event you attended. What was that like? Abel: Yeah, so I was a brand-new baby graduate student and I went to WiG with my colleague and roommate, Christina White. We got bumped from our flight, so we were late arriving and caused so much trouble for the poor conference organizers who had to figure out a way to get us there even though we were late and had missed the shuttles. WiG was in Great Barrington, is that right? It was this MA in 1992 WiG was in Massachusetts, and the conference itself was in this big house/inn or retreat center. So, the, the conference itself was there and there were kind of communal rooms there for people to stay in. It's true that most of the grad students stayed there and some of the more senior faculty stayed at the hotel down the way because there weren't too many- there weren't very many bathrooms, and it was definitely a different type of experience than WiG is now when we tend to stay in swankier places, I would say, yeah. I certainly remember some things from that conference. I had lovely colleagues from the University of Minnesota there, and it was great to get to know them a little bit better. I remember not fully understanding everything that was going on, right. Just because I was just starting out, right? Gruber: Mm-hmm. Abel: And still figuring out what, you know, what does it look like to be a professional, a researcher, and to practice in this area. So, in some ways, that was just lovely. It was great for me to be immersed in it that way. It was a little intimidating. People were friendly. I remember seeing Sara Lennox and as an undergrad I had read an article of hers and I was just like starstruck. I think I also remember that that might have been the year when Helga Thorsen was elected to the steering committee, and she was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, and she coordinated the language program at that time. So, there was a personal connection there. And I was in awe of Helga as well. Gruber: I remember being in awe of both of them too when I came to WiG much later in my career, but I was just as starstruck by them as well. What role has WiG played in your career? Abel: Yeah, so let's see. I went to WiG maybe twice in Massachusetts or maybe once, and then I went- when I went in Florida, I think I just decided that what was really cool is if you went to WiG every year, you started to make friends there and it felt more comfortable. Like if you didn't go every year, there was this awkward, like, I don't know people or I don't know what- kind of how to, how to do this WiG thing. Gruber: Right. Abel: And I just decided, you know what, I'm a graduate student who's majoring in German studies and minoring in feminist studies. This is my conference. I just need to go every year and I think I will feel more confident. Gruber: Mm-hmm. Abel: That doesn't mean that I never felt imposter syndrome or things like that while I was at WiG, cuz I, I did all the time. I still do. Um, but that, I, I just felt like if I do this every year, it's gonna feel different. And indeed it did. So I think I attended all three years in Florida, all three years in California at Aptos, and that's when I was first, first elected to the steering committee. I think I'm gonna tell, I'm gonna answer both questions at once, like. Gruber: That's fine. Abel: One about WiG in my career and what roles I've played. So, I co-organized a panel for the first time in Florida. I presented, I think, for the first time in California and that year I was also elected to the steering committee. So that was exciting. I went all three years in Arizona as well, because then I was on the steering committee, and after Arizona. Gruber: Was it in Canada too? Abel: Yeah, but that was later after Arizona. There were kind of two cycles of WiGs that I just, I didn't go to, and basically my career had kind of stalled. I had my first baby. I was still on the job market, but I was working in my very temporary Macalester job. I had my second baby that kind of put me over the, over the edge a little bit and, and my mother got very sick, and I lived far away from my mom. So, there was a period in there where family concerns were kind of taking over. And it's partially because I was still in a temporary position and had just decided to direct attention in other directions for a while. Gruber: Yeah. Abel: And then, I, eventually, things became a bit more permanent at Macalester. Things became more permanent for me at Macalester, and I also started- I returned to WiG. So, in Michigan, when WiG was in Michigan, I returned to WiG. I was reelected to the steering committee, then did WiG in- in Canada for three years, and then in Sewanee and now, Portland. Gruber: Mm-hmm. Abel: I think that those, I think that I'm remembering all those places. I think the two years that I missed were the Utah years, which I'm very, very sad about, and the Kentucky years. In other words, my kind of connection with WiG has ebbed and flowed in the same way that my profession has ebbed and flowed. Flowed, and, and I'm not on a standard academic career. You know, I started this job at Macalester for.. as a one-year half-time replacement, and now I'm, I'm full-time and I'm directing the writing program and I'm involved in strategic planning and I'm doing lots of things in addition to teaching German and in addition to occasionally directing our study away program in Vienna. Yeah, my career has just been different. I need to mention Grenzenlos Deutsch, which is the collaborative open educational resource that I've been working on for the past, I don't know, like seven years now. And that's been a way in which WiG has just been invaluable. So many of my collaborators have come through my connections at WiG. And likewise, my work with Grenzenlos Deutsch has strengthened my connection to, and commitment to, Women in German. So that's been the big thing in my career. Gruber: Mm-hmm. Abel: And it's probably what will carry me through to retirement and death. Gruber: So, without your involvement in WiG, Grenzenlos Deutsch would have maybe not even happened. Abel: It would not have happened because the idea was born from a Facebook rant of a Wiggie online and where a couple of Wiggies responded. And that's really how we started the whole project. It would not have happened without WiG. And then, you know, we advertised pretty broadly for collaborators. The majority of our collaborators came from WiG, although we also had other ones who, who were not as closely WiG affiliated. … First when I, when I returned to WiG, I served, I began serving as the personal news editor, which is a super low key and really wonderful way to be involved in WiG because people are sending you all their good news. Okay, sometimes it's not good news, but in many cases it's good news, and just in the short little email exchanges it, it's wonderful to feel connected to WiG when you're not at a conference, and I'm now serving as the Vice President, president elect of WiG. Gruber: Cool. Can you tell us an anecdote that embodies WiG for you? Abel: Yeah. There are so many anecdotes, but I think I'm gonna share this one. There was one point where I had agreed to write a book review of a book by a very established person in German studies, and I, I really didn't like the book very much and I was struggling with what to do about it. And, and I happened to be sitting at a table with a number of more experienced Wiggies. I think now we would call them Swiggies, senior Wiggies, right. They were significantly senior to me, and I was- kind of shared my struggle about this, and they proceeded to give me the best advice. Here's some things that you can do. Here's some kind of phrases you can use. Here's some ways you can frame it. Here's what you- I mean, they absolutely understood what was going on with me. And just in that one session, uh, you know, it was informal. We were having a meal or a drink or something like that. They told me exactly, kind of, how to move forward. And what that meant is I went home, and in one day I sat down, and I just wrote the whole friggin' thing. And I just- it was this moment of informal mentoring that- that recognized the inherent power structures of our profession and that proposed honest, but realistic and pragmatic solutions for how to deal with the situation, and I am so very grateful. Gruber: Yeah, I agree. That's really what I get out of WiG too. It's just more real and it's like women talking, right? Like that film, like have you seen that film? Abel: I haven't yet, but I really wanna see it. Gruber: Well, this is like, you will think of WiG because they sit there and they just talk it out and you, you become a, a stronger academic, but also kind of a stronger woman. Like you deal with life differently. Abel: Mm-hmm. Gruber: You get so much life advice in there. Abel: Mm-hmm. Gruber: What were some of the hardest discussions or debates that came up at WiG in your memory? Abel: So there are two strands of discussions that come up for me, and the first is that WiG is continually struggling with how to not be a white feminist organization. And conversations about race have been really hard at WiG, and I have seen multiple iterations of that. And it seems like we keep making mistakes and we keep trying to do better. I think even the very first WiG that I attended, there were issues. There was a conversation about race that got heated, and I don't remember the details of that, but I remember the impression that it made, and I've seen that happen again and again. I think of a moment in which I take full responsibility for causing a problem. It was in one of our community discussions about how to make WiG a more welcoming place for scholars of color. And as the steering committee was figuring out how to have this conversation, we had an idea about reading a piece from Claudia Rankin and I read it. I was the person who kind of volunteered to read it and then we were gonna discuss it. And I realized too late the impact of reading that piece out loud, that it had been triggering for some, for at least one of the scholars of color who were there. And so even as we try and have conversations, we're still making mistakes and I personally am still making mistakes. And so those are always hard conversations. Yeah. Gruber: Yeah. They're painful. Abel: Yeah. Gruber: I've- I'm really glad you brought up that you were involved in one of those, right? That you- I see that that still affects you. And so even when you then own it, right? Because it's happened to me too. Abel: Yeah. Gruber: Even when you own it, there's no good way to talk about it because when you express how that made you feel, because it's very uncomfortable and you know it follows you and you never stop thinking about it. And it also comes into your work, and you know, then that is interpreted as you want the attention for yourself. Right? So while you are working through what you caused, and you want to own that, you cannot really own it because when you talk too much about it, then you’re crying these white women tears. Right? And so, I've really struggled with that too. And it's shocking somehow to see that it happens over and over again. It's the same thing that happens, right? Abel: Yeah. Gruber: I'm thinking that we are not really clear on what the lesson should be there, or you know, what should be different. Abel: Yeah. Gruber: I think that's where it stalls. Abel: Yeah. Gruber: Right. It's like we can't jump over that. And it's been the same. I mean, I've seen some of those now too. Abel: Yeah. Gruber: And I know people who are not coming to WiG anymore because of those- how it's handled. But there is no good way of handling it. Abel: Right. Well, and it helps me to think about that language of impact and intent. I mean, this was in a discussion in which the intent was to talk about some problematic things, and clearly the impact was not what we intended it to be. So that, I don't know, just thinking about that helps. But then of course I'm not gonna try and follow up and say, oh, but that's not what I intended. No, I think what we need to do is listen and do better next time. But I also think we come from many different places when we come to WiG and we are at different places in this journey of kind of unlearning white supremacy and thinking about all the ways in which both we as individuals and we as WiG are implicit in it. Gruber: Mm-hmm. Abel: And that is also challenging because what do we have? We have like an hour of community discussion, right? Like, yeah, that is hard. Gruber: I agree. Abel: That's so, I just think it's gonna continue to be hard and I hope we, and I know we will continue, and we will continue and we will make more mistakes and we will keep doing it and we will keep trying to get better because that is what we need to do. Gruber: Right. I agree. Abel: Yeah. Can I say- Gruber: Well, thank you for sharing that. Abel: Yeah, yeah, of course. I was gonna say, there's this kind of much less significant, but I think also very interesting, right, in this time, right now in 2023 to be thinking about. Gruber: Mm-hmm. Abel: The other big hard discussions at WiG have been around how we, as an organization, navigate the current political climate. Gruber: Mm-hmm. Abel: So, there was a huge argument when we were in Florida, way back when in the nineties, about going to California as the next conference site because there had been some- I can't even remember what the history was. There was some ballot initiative in California that was problematic. Some proposition, you know, the way California does with those propositions. And there was a question of whether we should boycott the state, and it was a very hard thing. I think this is very much coming into play again now. We've seen this on the WiG list for instance, like do we go to places where abortion is outlawed? And what does it mean to ask a feminist organization or and or people who are pregnant to go to states where their health could be in danger? And there are many people fighting the good fight in those places and could use the support and then there's, you know, institutions getting into the fray with like, “we're not gonna give you funding if you go to certain states.” I mean, it's very complicated and it's very hard to negotiate and it's very hard to negotiate what we as an institution should do. And so, I think there have been many, many hard conversations about that. I think about, Sewanee, right, the University of the South, and the problematic history of that location and how wonderful it was that the conference organizers wove that into the fabric of our conference by having us meet with the reconciliation team working there. These..this, these are just hard conversations that we need to continue having and those tend to be heated. Gruber: Mm-hmm. I remember that Sewanee conference, there was, I think at the second one there was, uh, an indigenous scholar who was talking about her ancestors coming through Sewanee on the Trail of Tears. Do you remember that? On the Trail of Tears? Abel: Mm-hmm. Gruber: And she had, I don't think if she had been exactly aware of where she, where the conference was going to be, but then in preparing, she understood that that's what was going to be. And so, I invited her then to come to our university, which is not very far from Sewanee, and she was supposed to come and do a bead workshop, you know, with her beading, and that then didn't happen. But I think that's what comes out of WiG too, that you become aware of things you didn't know before and so then you can make connections and- and continue the difficult conversations. I think that's where we often shy away from picking up where it went wrong, and I think WiG does a pretty good job at picking up, you know, where we failed. Right? I don't, I don't think that a lot of things get resolved, but at least people keep coming to, or some people keep coming together and … Abel: Mm-hmm. Gruber: Trying to propel it forward somehow. Abel: Yeah. Gruber: But that's- I don't see that happening as much at, in other institutions, in other organizations. Mm-hmm. All right. Thank you. That was a hard question, uh, and you answered it beautifully. It was very, I thought it was very courageous to mention that, but it's necessary. Those are the hardest things to talk about. What was your favorite cabaret moment? Abel: That is a way too hard a question. Um, okay. I'm gonna mention two again. I'm gonna cheat by saying two things, right. Related to the last question. There was a moment at a cabaret in Michigan, where there had been microaggressions going on. Gruber: Mm-hmm. Abel: And it became part of the cabaret. And it was done really well, I thought, like I felt super uncomfortable, and it was about, I can't remember exactly how it was done in the cabaret, but the issue was that we had several scholars of color at the conference and people were misidentifying them, confusing them, and that is just such a harmful and awful, sad thing that happened. And the cabaret team took it up and made it part of the cabaret where black women were being misidentified in the cabaret. It made me super uncomfortable, as it should have. I had been unaware of this issue. It made everyone aware of the issue and we had a really good conversation about it at the Speak Out. Not enough of a conversation, but it was an example of the cabaret roasting the conference in a way that was critical and necessary. As far as I know, I mean, that's the only one. That's the only time I remember the cabaret functioning quite like that, and that's why it stands out to me, because I love the way that the format of the cabaret was used, not just to make us laugh and to kind of poke fun at all the things we had talked about, but also to hold up a mirror to us and to make us think critically about us as individuals and us as an organization. So, that is a really important moment for me. I'm gonna take just a minute because now I'm gonna go on to something totally different from the really important to the ridiculous. Um, one of my, one of the early ca-, one of the early cabarets, I mean, there are a couple things I'll always remember, but one thing is that, at a cabaret in Florida, watching a professor of mine use a beer bottle to simulate orgasm. When I was still a grad student. Kinda was like, oh my God, I can't believe I'm seeing this. Should I be seeing this? Should I be here? Is this ok? And it was so funny. Gruber: Unbelievable. Abel: And it was the, it was, uh, an imitation of a film we had seen as part of the conference. I mean, there was, there was a, a reason for it and, but yes, I, I think I have never laughed so much in my life. Gruber: Yeah. Good. Yeah, that's a lovely, lovely memory. Abel: Talk about like kind of a space in which some hierarchies kind of are, are, I mean, there's no space in which hierarchies or it's a powered space, but, right. There was this moment, I guess I should say, this moment in which it felt like, power structures were in a very different place. Gruber: Right. A solution. Abel: Right. I think that's what the cabaret allows, I mean, I, I think we like to think that the whole conference is like that, but we know it, it's not right. No, but I mean, I think the cabaret does create moments like that. Gruber: Yeah. Abel: I think it's, it's very, like I came to the, my first WiG and did not know anything about WiG. Gruber: I mean, I had heard. I don't know why I didn't come earlier, but I didn't, and I knew about it and some people had continued to invite me, but I just, so I came as a complete virgin. I completely, I did not understand the wigs at all. So, I on, you know, during that, on that night. And so, I drove home. And I told my husband, I have no- it was really fun, but I have no idea why they were wearing wigs. I just, I don't get it. And then it dawned on me while I'm driving, I'm going, oh, okay. I felt like such an idiot. I just didn't get it. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's really good that that is not something WiG advertises because it's good to come and, and be completely surprised by it. Gruber: Mm-hmm. And the last question is, what are the three words that come to mind when you think of WiG? Abel: Well, community comes to mind right away. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Maybe support. Yeah. I think I just wanna say something else that I didn't say in the cluster of early questions about WiG, the role WiG has played in my career and the, the role I've played in WiG. You know, I mentioned that there was a time when I- when my career stalled and I wasn't going to WiG, and I, and also things were just weird for me personally and professionally. And when I first came to WiG, it was hard because my career had stalled and people are asking like, so what are you working on? And I'm like, I'm working on mourning and I'm working on- what am I doing in this shitty non-tenure track job and what am I-? Yeah, it, it was hard, but I still kept coming and, and I just honestly think that, you know, we talked about how Grenzenlos Deutsch wouldn't have been possible without WiG. I just think that I probably wouldn't still be in the profession if it weren't for WiG because I think at that moment in time when things were not going so well, I'm not sure I would've felt the desire to kind of push through to figure out how to make my status here at Macalester what I wanted it to be, or what it could be, I guess. And so, I think it's important for me to say somewhere I just don't think that I would still be in the profession if it weren't for WiG. Gruber: Mm-hmm. Abel: There's just no way for me to separate my career from WiG because they are just so closely connected. Gruber: Mm-hmm. I think that is an important addition. Abel: Yeah. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Britt Abel Subject The topic of the resource Congresses; Germanists; Feminism Description An account of the resource Interview between Britt Abel and Julia Gruber Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Teams digital recording Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Beth A. Muellner Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource March 24, 2023 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Abel; Gruber Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Release form signed Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Mp3 Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Oral history of experience of Women in German https://wig-herstory.com/files/original/406b10844145f2be3366543ea46c270b.mp3 51a8a14628891f69065afbaf363c0519 https://wig-herstory.com/files/original/533bbe0df852c3661f5224603494fcfe.pdf 86605c844ea65183d4f08ee1bca1d3e6 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interviews Subject The topic of the resource Feminism; Congresses; Germanists Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Interviews Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Angelika Bammer Interview June 8, 2022 Transcribed/edited by Elizabeth Heatwole, 2023 Muellner: Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself? Name, affiliation, country of residence and origin. Bammer: Okay. Alright, that's a good place to start. So, my name is Angelika Bammer. My affiliation is Emory University. I'm in the comparative literature department there. My country of residence, that part is easy, I live in the United States. My country of origin is Germany. Muellner: Okay. Thank you. So, the next question, really, is just when did you first join WiG and how did you first hear about it? Bammer: Well, so this is funny because I don't remember when I first joined WiG, and I've often thought that, in light of the fact that what I wrote is being read as a memoir, people think, oh I have this amazing memory. I don't at all, so I was racking my brain trying to remember, and there is no way I can recall when I joined WiG, but I absolutely know how I heard about it and why I joined it. So, this actually- I mean, it kind of bleeds into the second question. When and how did WiG begin for you? But I was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. I was not in German. My PhD is in comparative literature. I did not ever study German officially at the university because I thought, stupidly, I mean, what did I know at the time? I thought, well, I'm German, I don't need to study it. I was clearly not yet a formed academic in my mind because I realized that a lot of times, we study the things we are. Nevertheless, I was in comparative literature, but in the University of Wisconsin, Madison, comparative literature was, if I remember right, on the 9th floor. German was on the 8th floor, so we were constantly back and forth. And of course, because for comparative literature, German, and French and English, the absolutely most conventional at the time configuration of languages. Those are my languages. So, of course, I interacted a lot with the people in the German department, and all the more so because Evelyn Torton Beck or as she was to me then, Professor Beck, was my advisor and had been assigned to me as an advisor, and she had a joint appointment with German and comparative literature. So that's how I heard about WiG, and that's how, kind of, WiG began for me when I was a graduate student. So that I can remember, it was 1975 that I started graduate school, as I said, in comparative literature with Evie Beck. David Bathrick was one of the people. He was only in Germany. He did not have a comp. lit. appointment. So, because I had these two people I was working with pretty much early on, whatever was happening in the wider kind of field of German anything, especially progressive, especially leftist, especially radical, German stuff. Initially, I, as well as other kind of similarly-minded people, got involved. This was before WiG existed. We got involved with New German Critique. So, David Bathrick was one of the editors, along with Anton Rabinbach and Jack Zipes. They were the three editors of New German Critique. And in Madison there was a so-called Student Collective that worked with new German Critique and I had kind of thought of myself ever since my initial student days at the University of Heidelberg. You know, we read Marx. We thought of ourselves as Marxist. I certainly did. So, this was the obvious kind of collective to gravitate toward. And I loved that. I loved working in a collective I loved…the part about academic life that always kind of, not bothered me, but made me feel sad, made me feel like something was missing, was just this idea that you worked on your own, thinking great thoughts and doing brilliant scholarship. I'm not that kind of person. I do my best thinking, I'm also my happiest, when there are other people to do it with, you know, to talk with, to have fun with, to share ideas with, to work out ideas with. So New German Critique was initially that place. And somehow within that framework, all of a sudden, there was this other thing that people started talking about, and this event, an annual- I don't even think it was- it was certainly not called a conference yet, a gathering a get-together that they would drive to because it didn't take place in Madison. It took place, if I remember right, in Ohio. So, all of a sudden, my buddies, my women buddies, would for a while disappear, and then they would come back, and they would tell these stories. They were having so much fun. So, the first word that comes to mind for me for WiG, you know, when you asked about three words? And I thought this is so dorky and so unprofessional, but it's “fun.” They came back and they had lots of fun, but there were also serious discussions, and it was about the elements that we were- we who were involved with New German Critique and we who were students together missed in the kind of associations and communities that we had established, which was a kind of feminist way of being together. What does that even mean? I mean, initially, at least the way it sounded when they would come back all excited from their trip, initially, it just sounded like ohh it- now it's a bunch of women. And, we know of course, and even at the time we knew, that just being women together doesn't necessarily mean feminist, but that was what was initially something that both attracted me, drew me, intrigued me. So, what does it mean when and- and what changes when we get together as women and consciously as women and intentionally as women. How do we do things differently? Do we do things differently, and what does that mean in terms of the kind of political and social theories we were beginning to explore? Around the time, I don't remember the exact dates, but it was either in 1974 or 1975, around there, women’s studies was officially started at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In fact, as far as I know, and I- I think I'm pretty right about this. The women's studies program in Madison, was the first officially instituted women's studies program, and I was right there. I mean, I was right there. So was Evie Beck, and so were the close graduate student women friends I was involved with. So, the combination of the politics of New German Critique, the kind of intellectual life of graduate education and professional scholarship that I loved [?], and the kind of beginnings of thinking about feminist structures with women's studies. All of that came together. So, somehow that's what WiG signified. And then at some point, I couldn't stand it anymore. Ohh, I remember. Also, it was the first time I actually went to a meeting was when it no longer meant a drive to Ohio. Muellner: Yeah, that was- I think as far as I have learned, those early meetings like ‘74 was the first one I think in Miami University in Oxford, OH. Gisela Bahr was apparently one of the kind of organizers of that. Yeah. So. So then do you remember, where was the first conference and? Bammer: No, no, this is what's so weird. No, I was trying to rememberthat. Muellner: You said it was in Wisconsin too, wasn’t it? Bammer: To me, I want to say Milwaukee. It was not in Madison. I do know that. I want to say Milwaukee, but I can't quite picture it. But you know, honestly, I can't kind of create a timeline of, oh, then we met there. Some people are really good at that, I know Sarah Lennox is really super good at that. I always have to do extensive research because it's not in my- in my memory, so I just do remember that it was not in Ohio anymore. Muellner: Okay, okay. Yeah. So, I just wanted to kind of back up. When you mentioned that Madison was like sort of the first women's studies department, you're talking about. First, Women Studies department at a major research university in the United States. Bammer: Yes. Muellner: Yeah, wow, that's pretty amazing this sort of trifecta of power. Bammer: That was crucial. In fact, that's part of why since I knew this was beginning to happen when I went to graduate school, I had started graduate school earlier and I was going to get a degree in comparative literature. That's always what drew me and, you know, life is weird. It takes you all kinds of places. I ended up in Dallas. I was teaching at SMU. They had discontinued comparative literature. I was getting a PhD in French, and I remember standing in the classroom teaching French and thinking what the- what am I doing? You know, I don't want to be teaching French. I- this is not what I want to do. What does this have to do with anything in the world? And so, I quit. I just got a Master’s. I kind of exited with the Master’s and then for a bunch of years, I did other stuff. Muellner: Okay. Bammer: Not academic stuff, and it was partly on some level, it's not just that I love the kind of space that universities provide for intellectual life, and I know absolutely that it's not the only place where intellectual life can flourish. I know that. And my critique of the university structure looms large whenever I say that. But, for those of us who have the luxury of a job in this environment, it provides an open space for that. I mean, I've always loved that. That always has drawn me. And the other thing was that, when the years when I was not in a university setting, when I was doing community organizing, community work, I realized that it takes a lot of skills and a lot of courage to do community work, to do community activism. A lot of that work is scary. At least it was to me. When you're talking about violence in the community, when you're talking about police and we're talking about intervention, it sounds cool when we read about it, but I found it really scary, and I kind of started wondering whether as someone raised in a kind of bourgeois, somewhat intellectual household, whether I was cut out for that kind of work and whether maybe my best contribution to making the world a better place, you know, I don't know how else to put it, for kind of progressive change, could be within this kind of setting. You know, learning and teaching and working with students and so that's why I went back to graduate school, and Madison, the University of Wisconsin, was a place I picked very purposely for that. For one, because of what was going on in the German department at the time with New German Critique and, really kind of nationally known, kind of leftist orientation, and feminism, the fact that women studies was starting there, which I had learned about. I thought, that's where I want to go, where these things come together. Muellner: Right. Bammer: And women's studies in Madison was an absolutely exhilarating, exhilarating process. It was like a little utopian place. We had our own building if you can imagine that. And it wasn't a university building, you know. It was a little house. Muellner: It seems like a really nice gesture to have your own building, but was it maybe also that you were marginalized as, like, not as important to occupy a bigger space? Or is that sort of like symbolic of how- how women’s studies started? Bammer: Well, that's- that's a hindsight question, because at the time, being marginalized was not yet a factor. We were just beginning. Muellner: Yeah. Bammer: Being marginalized, that came later. No, we I think we loved it. We had our own space. So, the way we thought about it was more in terms of Virginia Wolfe's A Room of One's Own. We not only had a room of our own, we had a whole house of our own. Muellner: Yeah, that’s brilliant. I like that interpretation of it. So, when you first kind of started going to WiG conferences, what role did WiG then play in your career? I mean, you know, also vis-à-vis what was going on as a graduate student with this burgeoning women studies program? How did those two things kind of intersect for you? Women in German and your own professional development? Bammer: Not in an immediately intelligible or articulable way. And not in an in a- for me, I think differently than for others, because I think most of the others that I encountered in WiG when I started going seemed to be in German departments. Muellner: Okay Bammer: I was not. So, for me it felt much less instrumental if I want to put it that way. It really was completely optional. It had nothing directly to do with the kind of institutional spaces I was inhabiting and working in. So, for me, the way it- WiG played a role in my career was, I think, related to that fact – that it was not something I had to do. It didn’t- if I didn't do it, it made no difference whatsoever to my career or professional development, and it was completely freely chosen. All the networking I did, I didn't even think of as networking. These were just women I like to spend time with, and what I think looking back on it, this was not something I was conscious of at the time, what WiG did is provide a space to think differently, to do all the stuff that I was ordinarily doing anyway: thinking about language, working with language. I don't mean teaching language, but just how we talk about things, how we talk to each other. These were things that were deeply, deeply important to me, and in fact, I remember once giving a talk at WiG, and then writing an article that had more or less this title: “How do we talk to each other?” Something like that. These were all issues that didn't really fit within the framework of the other kind of theoretical constructs I was working with. They didn't fit into a Marxist framework. They didn't fit into a deconstructive framework, at least not in the way I was working with it at the time. But they felt so urgent, and so in WiG we were practicing all this stuff. How do we relate to each other? How do we relate to each other differently? How do hierarchies that institutions impress on us constantly? Who's the professor? Who's the senior professor? Who's the TA, who's all of that, that is so ingrained in the institutions. In WiG, and this was crucial for my I- I don't know if career, Beth, I don't know if that's the right word. It certainly became an element of my career. But it was crucial for my development as a thinker, as a writer, as a scholar, and as a teacher, because we kind of proceeded with the sense that there's a lot of stuff that doesn't feel right. And we want to do it differently and then we would just, in a kind of messy, messy process, see what happened if we did it differently. Muellner: Right. Bammer: And I was part of that. And so it felt like a giant experiment. Muellner: That's that's really cool, yeah. So, it's all kind of really just experimental in many ways, like testing the boundaries of how to change academic discourse and academic behavior in a way. I mean thinking about how we relate to each other. Bammer: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, things that that then later became scholarly projects like the book that I ended up doing with Ruth-Ellen Boetcher-Joeres, the Future of Scholarly Writing, that started at, and because of, WiG. I mean, I remember distinctly that was the meeting- I think 2007, if I remember right- Ruth Ellen and I gave- We had been talking. And I met her through WiG. I met her at WiG at a WiG meeting and through WiG, and we had both kind of noticed each other and we had noticed, I guess, the same thing, which is that we were both really concerned about and kind of drawn to thinking about language and scholarly writing, and you know, this whole big question of not just how we talk to each other, but how so how we write. So, we had started just talking privately about that and then we thought, well, let's do something at WiG, because that's a place where you can do something like this. The MLA was much too established. German Studies Association, which I actually, at the time, didn't even go to because I didn't have to. That was not my professional organization. So, while everyone else went to WiG and GSA, I didn't because I wasn't in German studies. I was in comp. lit. So, we thought, well, WiG is the perfect place to try this out, and we started just talking and emailing back and forth between ourselves and then, we thought, well, let's do a kind of test run at WiG because you can take risks at WiG. And we did, and it was transformative. I will never forget that, you know, like, you can do things that are kind of kooky, kind of a little bit crazy. And it's okay if it fails. I don't think we would have had the chutzpah to do it anywhere else. And so, we thought instead of reading our script, which we had already- and this was already a huge leap into- into the unconventional we'd already written it in two voices, rather than the monologue. Ours was a dia-logue from the very beginning in two voices: Ruth Ellen and me. And so, I remember when we were talking about, so how do we present this? How are we going to do this? We had this crazy idea that we would both speak our role like we were actors, and then I remember we were thinking, oh, but then, we need two microphones. So, we have two microphones, because you know our conference settings are kind of primitive or they were at the time. And I actually don't remember now if we had two microphones or if we passed it back and forth. But anyway, what I do remember is there was a table where the presenters usually sit, so we stood up and we looked out at our friends, at these women and some men that we knew and trusted. That was the big thing. We trusted each other and we thought, this is going to be really scary and risky. And I remember, still now, I was so nervous. And Ruth Ellen was nervous too. And we looked at each other and we smiled. And I remember at that moment, thinking we really love each other, nothing can go wrong. If this turns out to be a big goofball thing, who cares? And we then looked at each other as we spoke and, periodically, we remembered to look out at the- the audience, but we were really speaking to each other, and it was so intense and so intimate and felt so true to what we were doing. When it was over, everybody jumped up, and it was like this chaos of enthusiasm, and it was absolutely fantastic. I mean, I think Beth, that that's when we realized, you know, we're going to do something with this. And we decided, yep, we're. And we didn't at that point yet think, oh, we'll do a volume, but that's where it started. So, in that sense, WiG as a place of possibility, as a place for thinking otherwise. Attempting to do things differently was absolutely generative and critical. Muellner: Yeah. I want to say that I was at that conference but. I'm thinking of it as earlier, like wasn’t … Bammer: It was early, maybe it was because, yeah, I was thinking it was in. Muellner: I think it was in 2002. I see on your CV here the “The Measure of our Words” or- yeah. Bammer: If you're Rio Rico, yeah. Muellner: That yeah, that was really a beautiful moment, for sure. And it's- it's interesting to hear from your perspective because, you know, I was a very young- well, I was still a graduate student at that point, and so I didn't really think about this dual, you know, dialogue as you presented it as so unusual because you were all our mentors and the people we were looking to setting the examples when I was thinking well, this is- this is a possibility, you know. So, to think about from your perspective how it was so experimental and so risky for you or just like outside of the box of what academic … Bammer: Oh yeah. Absolutely. Because– I had had an earlier experience, a different experience that I've sometimes talked about. It was, it didn't involve Ruth Ellen, but it involved Evelyn Beck, Evie Beck. We had both been invited to a conference in Germany, in Hamburg. It was organized by the Frauen in der Literaturwissenschaft and, at that conference, I and Evie in two very different ways, we had our own independent presentations. We were just there as well. She was still my mentor and I was still a graduate student at the time, actually, but we'd both been invited to they had different kind of keynote things- they didn't have one keynote they had, like keynote things scattered in between, and we both had been invited to give one, which is a big deal, certainly for me, was a huge deal at the time. And I spoke about language and theory, and Evie spoke about language as a Jewish woman speaking German in Germany. Muellner: Okay. Bammer: So, both of us spoke about language and its import to how it affects how we relate to each other and who we are four and to one another in different ways and we were both very aware of the fact that we were both taking huge risks, that this these were uncomfortable things to talk about and the reception was ice cold. Muellner: wow Bammer: Ice cold. So much so that Evie and I were both- I would say in a state of kind of shock, and I remember afterwards saying, let's go for a walk, and we walked through the streets of Hamburg, kind of deprogramming what just happened. It was horrible. It was absolutely horrible. So, it was not so- what we did at WiG, partly because I had had this other experience, and because we kind of knew what's considered valid in the institution it was not just something to do, it was indeed a- a step into a new way of doing things, and in that sense it was risky. Muellner: Yeah, I mean, that's interesting that you talk about the differences between academic risk-taking in the United States, you know, coming from Wisconsin, versus what was going on in Germany. This was like in the 90s or late 80s in Germany? Bammer: Yeah, it was. It was a little earlier. Muellner: Yeah, because I think when Sara Lennox was interviewed, she talked a lot about also being in Wisconsin and experiences with the origins of women's studies in the US and then what it meant for her to go to Germany. And they were just very different worlds like going on in the US versus what was going on in Germany. And so, in some ways it seems like there's parallel conversations happening around identity, you know, really the personal in the professional, like this merging that you seem to really focus on a lot in your work, too. And so very different places. So, I guess maybe just to jump in, okay, so you've talked a lot about the role that WiG played in your career, really in your scholarship. What role did you play in WiG? Bammer: I don't know exactly. I mean, I was on the steering committee for three years. I almost forgot that. And I was looking through my CV. I thought, oh, yeah, of course I remember that. Between 1987 and 1990, I was on the National Steering Committee. I kind of was on the graduate student essay prize for a while, so I did play some institutional roles or some structural roles in WiG. Muellner: You were involved in proposing sessions. Bammer: Yeah, yeah, it- it all felt so organic, you know. So actually, when I was looking through the questions that you were asking, that was the one that kind of stumped me because I thought, well, I don't know what role did- what role did I play? I think a role I played, I'm just thinking about this now, is also connecting structures like WiG to structures like the GSA or the MLA. I was very involved in the MLA, actually much more. I- I was not that much involved in GSA for reasons that I explained earlier. I was very involved in the MLA, and for a while I was on the steering committee. I can't remember if they called it steering committee, but I was kind of representing within the framework of the MLA, the German- the division of German Studies, something like that. I can't remember. Muellner: Yeah, I’m looking at your extensive CV over here trying to find it. Bammer: Within the framework of one big professional organization which will keep on doing what it does, until an impulse from elsewhere comes in and says hey, have you considered doing this differently, or let's do this. I think one of the roles that I ended up playing is being that person who can bring impulses and ideas from one structural context to another. Muellner: Mm-hmm. Bammer: So, a lot of what we did at WiG, and ways in which we thought that WiG, including not wanting to have a precedent, including wanting very consciously to have a different organizational structure, that was formulated for me at WiG. Muellner: Mm-hmm. Bammer: And I brought that to the Women's Caucus of the Modern Language Association. I remember talking there about the organizational structure, the hierarchies, that we were just, you know, hadn't even thought about. It was just the way things are done. And I remember talking about WiG and how it's done differently there, and we could try learning from each other. So, when I think about the role I played in WiG, it's as much between WiG and other organizations, especially the MLA where I was very involved in the Women's caucus and this was on a kind of national level. And then I eventually served for a term on the National Steering Committee, and I obviously wasn't there representing WiG, but the ways we had done things in WiG were radical structural changes and interaction changes that I then would carry to other places, as well. Muellner: Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I can see that. I mean, I am certainly not an expert when it comes to especially, MLA. I stopped really going to MLA after I got my job because it's such a huge, you know, a huge kind of madhouse. But like GSA, I kind of feel like there- there are some overlaps between the way that GSA has changed over the years and WiG, you know, and I kind of feel like WiG has a huge impact, you know, like this trickle down, like of this experimental space like you're describing, it's really, it's really kind of coming clear to me how it functions in that way to impact other organizations, like GSA, that was so rigid. When I first started as a graduate student, I remember being terrified. Bammer: Yeah. Muellner: Historian-run, sort of. Bammer: Right. Right. Muellner: But- so, you have kind of talked about this wonderful moment at WiG when you and Ruth Ellen gave your joint talk. I'm wondering if there's another anecdote that embodies WiG for you? I mean, maybe that's it, but is there another moment that you might want to talk about, that kind of was a real WiG moment? Bammer: Yeah, yeah, that- Well, there are two. And, actually, in the questions that you gave me, they're kind of connected to number eight and number nine. So, I- maybe I can connect them there. So, as I was thinking about this, two things came to mind right away. One is kind of connected to number eight: “what were some of the hardest discussions or debates that came up at WiG in your memory?” So why don't I start with that one? Muellner: Okay. Bammer: Because, and again, you know my awful- my awful historical memory, that is anything but linear makes it kind of challenging for me to identify exactly when and where this was. I'm thinking Minnesota. In fact, I'm almost positive that it was Minnesota, and therefore I'm thinking cold. So, I'm thinking Minnesota, and I don't have the list of when WiG, you know, what were the years that we met in Minnesota, but that's kind of what I'm thinking, it was in Minnesota. I'm remembering forested area, I'm remembering a stream, and this is how my- my memory works. And somehow, something triggered uneasiness, nervousness, resentments, distress that had clearly been kind of simmering under the surface. Not just there, not just then, but for a while. Muellner: Mm-hmm. Bammer: And they had to do- they had to do with language. Language seems to be the through line for so much of what I have struggled with and thought about and then kind of worked with and worked through, and so this, again, had to do with language, but this was not in the way that I talked earlier about language. This would come up periodically. I remember at the time, at WiG, when someone would say- she would raise her hand or just kind of blurt out, “warum sprechen wir nicht Deutsch? Warum sprechen wir dauernd Englisch miteinander? Wir sind doch Women in German. Deutsch! Warum sprechen wir alle Englisch?” And then there'd be this discussion, well, what should we speak? Should we speak German? Should we speak English? And indeed, why are we speaking English? Why aren't we “sprechen Deutsch mit einander?” And the and then it initially took the form of, well, let's just vote, so established structures would resolve the issue. A vote, a majority, whatever. But the underlying emotional, historical, political, social resonances that language carries, and in this case, not theory language, which is what I had talked about in other contexts, but a national language, what did that carry with it? And especially in a German context that we never- we didn't go there. Partly, I think because we didn't know that that was the place we should go. We didn't even know that that was being triggered by this seemingly simple question, “Warum sprechen wir nicht Deutsch?” Well, something triggered it. All this stuff at that conference. And you know what, Beth? Even now, as I'm remembering it, I can feel the unspeakable grief and rage and tension that just exploded. And I mean literally, I'm shocked. I can literally feel it now as- as I'm going back to that memory and it was as if history, German history that none of us – no, that’s not true – that only very few of us lived through, Evie Beck being one of them, as a Jewish German who, in 1938, if I remember the date right, as a little Jewish girl in Vienna, had been witness to her father being arrested, and who was then, along with her family, forced to leave Germany and came to America. German has a different role, has a different feeling for her and for all of us, for me. German was the language I could leave when I left Germany, again, when I was 20 years old, without thinking about what does this mean as a 20-year-old to leave my country, leave my family and just kind of reinvent myself as an English-speaking person? I never dealt with that. I never dealt with those feelings. So that came up at that meeting. So, I remember standing in the hallway of whatever dorm or building we were in, our backs pressed against the wall because we didn't even know where to go. We didn't even know how to be with each other. We didn't even know- could we sit? Could we look at each other? That's the image. We're standing in the hallway, our backs pressed against the wall, sobbing. Muellner: Wow. Bammer: No other professional organization would create a space, A) where that happened and B) where we then lived through it together and worked with it. I think that's probably, I mean that was without any question the hardest thing. The discussion or debate is not even the right term. It was literally a kind of psychoanalytic working through that we then embarked on, and it was profound. It was absolutely for those of us who went through that it was absolutely profound and- and incredibly meaningful. So that’s certainly one. Muellner: Yeah, that is pretty amazing. I mean, again, it's so fascinating to hear about this from your perspective. Now knowing what I know about you, having read your memoir and also, you know, hearing stories of other women who were present. As a graduate student, hearing those kinds of conversations, I kind of remember that, but super superficial, you know, the- the ways in which German or English took sort of, you know, Vorrang for what happens but you know. Bammer: Yeah, what should I? Should I maybe end with my favorite cabaret moment? Muellner: Yes, that would be lovely. Okay. Bammer: Because that will get out of the darkness into the light. My favorite cabaret moment again, blah, blah blah. I don't remember the exact year, but it was- I actually have two, but I'll just pick one. I remember it was in Florida, it was in Saint Augustine, and that was super fun because we had the beach and one of our members, Martha Wallach, had cancer and she was going through chemotherapy. And she had lost her hair, and she was wearing a wig. Well, cabaret time came. I mean, we were absolutely intrepid. So, the theme of that year's cabaret was wigs –and wigs proliferated. Everyone on stage had a wig on and Martha had her wig on. And it was the most beautiful celebration of what it means to be together. Kind of, not as academics, not as scholars, as women who cared about each other, who loved each other, and who grieved together and thought, you know what? Fuck it. We're just gonna have a really, really wild time. And I will never forget that there was Martha Wallach with her black wig and all these wigs, and I don't remember exactly whether there was a point when everyone took their wig off and threw it in the air, but yeah. Like it was, it was taking what we do and who we are and transforming it into something that responds immediately in the moment to something in the most zany, crazy, wonderful, creative way. Muellner: Wow, that is amazing. That gives a little context to why everyone wears wigs now, so much. I didn't know that. Interesting. Yeah, that's a whole different ball game. So, three words that come to mind when you think of WiG, you already gave one, which is fun. Bammer: Yeah.. You know, I had the hardest time, too, coming up with words. I don't really know because right next to fun is serious and right next to that is transformative. Muellner: Great. Wonderful. Well, this was a really amazing interview. I've so enjoyed talking with you and learning so much about your perspective and you're just really filling a lot of gaps for me. So, thank you so much. I really- Yeah, this was wonderful. Bammer: Thank you, Beth. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Angelika Bammer Subject The topic of the resource Congresses; Germanists; Feminism Description An account of the resource Interview between Angelika Bammer and Beth Muellner Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Teams digital recording Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Beth A. Muellner Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource June 8, 2022 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Muellner; Angelika Bammer Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Release form signed Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Mp3 Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Oral history of experience in Women in German https://wig-herstory.com/files/original/7f7b71958c40d9890588fe2c48addbe3.mp3 042262f524818a045a598fc80f0d58f0 https://wig-herstory.com/files/original/debdac4a7356502f5cc1bf535df9a71c.pdf a2b892f360719f6de9ba86fb1247115e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interviews Subject The topic of the resource Feminism; Congresses; Germanists Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Interviews Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Helga Kraft Interview Final - Edited by Morgan Hunter - 2022 Kosta: Okay, so here we go. Here we are in Berlin and we are participating in the WiG Herstory project, and as part of the project, I'm going to interview you and ask you questions about your involvement in WiG. You know, what WIG meant for you, and go through the prepared questions. Kraft: Very good, let's do this. Kosta: Ok, so first of all, if you could please introduce yourself with your name, your affiliation, country of residence and origin, what year you joined WiG, and how you first heard about it. Kraft: Yes. I'm Helga Kraft, I was born in Germany in Berlin, I emigrated to the United States in 1958, and studied in Berkeley… Kosta: And your affiliation? University of…? Kraft: My last affiliation? At the present is University of Illinois at Chicago Kosta: And then your country of residence? Kraft: My country of residence is now Berlin, Germany. Kosta: And then maybe you could say what, what year you joined WiG. Kraft: I joined WiG—I believe it was 1980 at the, well, at the beginning. Kosta: And you know how you first heard about WiG? Kraft: I heard about WiG, I would say, by visiting some of the associations. It might have been GSA and I met there, for instance Ruth [Ingress?] whom I knew from Berkeley, where I studied. Kosta: Okay, so Helga, I mean, we can do this interview in German, or we can do it in English, whichever you prefer, but I'm going to ask you some questions in English. Kraft: Okay. Ich wollte eigentlich auf Deutsch sprechen. Ist das in Ordnung? Kosta: Sehr schön. Das ist perfekt. Okay. When and how did WiG begin for you? Kraft: Ich würde sagen, auch 1978. Da hörte ich davon von Studenten auch, sehr interessant. Und ich bin dann auch nach Racine, zu dem Treffen in dem Jahr gefahren und zwar bei meiner graduate Studentin Barbara Kosta, die ja bekannt ist, wir sind da zusammen hingefahren und dann später mit auch weiteren anderen Studenten oder alleine. Kosta: Und so it began in Racine for you. Tell—tell us about your career before WiG? Kraft: Ja, gut. Also ich war, wie gesagt, ausgewandert, und habe dann in Berkeley studiert und mein PhD gemacht 1970; dann bin ich verzogen nach Florida und bekam meine erste Stelle erst 1973 - ich musste meine Familie verlassen um diesen Job zu kriegen, das war in Pennsylvania, Westminster College, und dort war ich ein Jahr, hatte schon eine Tenure-Stelle, ich war sehr stolz; und dann wurde ich nach Kansas gerufen, auch als tenure-track Assistant Professor und lebte da auch ein Jahr, ich machte auch zugleich ein Studentenaustausch nach Deutschland, und ein Jahr darauf konnte ich wieder in der Nähe meiner Familie in Florida [sein], ich bekam eine Stelle in Gainesville, und es war deswegen interessant, denn ich bekam die Stelle deshalb, weil eine frühere Frau, die dort unterrichtete, Gisela Brinker-Gabler war, und sie hatte damals schon 1976 einen Kurs eingereicht über Frauen in der deutschen Literatur und man fragte mich am Telefon, kann ich so einen Kurs unterrichten und ich sagte “selbstverständlich” – ich habe ja in Berkeley deutsche Frauen gelernt, und zwar ein Gedicht von Ingeborg Bachmann und Die Judenbuche von Droste-Hülshoff - also ich war bereit und bekam die Stelle. Kosta: Ich muss—was interessant ist, dass ich diesen Kurs in Gainesville mit Gisela Brinker-Gabler belegt hatte – Kraft: Ehrlich?! Kost: Ja! Kraft: Das wusste ich nicht. Und dann später mit mir noch mal! Kosta: Und dann mit dir noch mal! Genau! Kraft: Ich weiss noch, wir haben Sachen auswendig gelernt noch, weißt du? Kosta: Yeah. Okay. Describe the first WiG event you attended. Kraft: Ja, das war, wie gesagt, in Racine, und ich war sofort unglaublich angetan. Nummer eins, es waren alles Frauen da und war, glaube ich, einen sehr netten Mann dabei, zu der Zeit. Und wir trafen uns alle - es waren fast 100 oder zu der Zeit gleich am Anfang so 78 oder so, und alles in einem Raum, es gab keine Sections, wir waren alle zusammen, alle hörten alle Vorträge - und zum ersten Mal hörte ich Vorträge über Mittelalterliteratur und nicht nur meine Sektion, es war einfach wunderbar - und auch irgendwie fühlte ich mich eigentlich sehr wohl da und wollte dabei bleiben - Und habe das gemacht. Kosta: Toll. Ja, Ich kann mir auch vorstellen, dass es sehr außergewöhnlich war, irgendwie eine Tagung mit nur Frauen zu erfahren. Kraft: Genau. Und da waren nur Frauen. Und irgendwie waren wir dann irgendwie aus der Isolierung heraus, die ich bei mir zu Hause bei meiner Universität hatte. Die Abteilung hatte 10 Männer und ich war die einzige Frau, und immer so ein bisschen belächelt, ich wurde vorgestellt, hier ist unsere Feministin, ha, ha, ha, und war das irgendwie, wurde ich ernst aufgenommen und hatte Vertrauen, dass meine Arbeit auch ernst war. Und es waren dort auch Frauen mit denen ich dann Kontakt hatte, die waren schon erfahrener waren und länger im Beruf, sie haben uns Ratschläge gegeben und das hat mir sehr geholfen, um Selbstvertrauen zu stärken und irgendwie, an meine eigene Arbeit zu glauben, mein eigenes Schreiben und Veröffentlichungen. Kosta: Toll. So that—that describes your role that you played from WiG, now tell us an anecdote that embodies WiG for you. Kraft: Yes, well, I organized, three years, the conference, the WiG conference, and on one of the conference, I believe it was ‘96, it happened to be on Halloween. And so a lot of us dressed up as witches! Kosta: How appropriate! Kraft: Yeah, and my name is of course Kraft, and instead of having my tag saying “Kraft,” it says “Witchkraft.” And we had a lot of fun and had a marvelous conference. Future Nobel Prize winner was there. Kosta: Herta Müller. Kraft: It's a very memorable conference at that time. Also, Monika {?} was there who died a year later and I still have a beautiful picture where some doves fly up from her, and I've never forget that conference. It was wonderful. Kosta: That was also the conference that you organized. Kraft: I organized. Yeah. Kosta: So I mean, that leads to the question, what role did you play in WiG? Kraft: So, for instance, that was one. I—I organized the conference, typically for three years, and for the first time in Florida, beautiful and by the beach, on St. Augustine, Florida, you know, we've rented gorgeous places. And for the first time anyone in WiG got some money from the universities, because I had stepped on their toes and said, “This is a very important association, you have to give us money for it.” And we got some money for it. And it was—it was beautiful. And everybody loved it, and everybody was very wonderful. Writers came to all the conferences from Germany, and that is also a great extra. And not just MLA, GSA at that time, you didn't see women invited, or one in 10 years or so. Kosta : You know, I think if I may interject, I think that's the first that was—you launched our WiG conferences into more luxurious settings. Kraft: That's true. Bad hotel rooms! Kosta: After that, I think there was no return after that. Especially, being able to walk on the beach, right. And that was also when we started, we'd have to look back at the conference agendas, but I think that was also the time where we decided that we have to have an afternoon free in order to explore the area because, you know, everybody just wanted to go to the beach at that conference. Kraft: And I remember we always had this problem at other conferences. We had no time, but just sit in rooms. And I've been in many places United States where I just know the hotel by the airport. Kosta: Yeah, yeah. No, I think that we got very spoiled at that conference. And that—and that changed the whole, you know, expectation of accommodations. Kraft: But this was just one aspect with Women in German. It was not just the intellectual part; it was the whole body that was part of it. The combination of both and the combination of both I also learned and through the feminism that came to me through WiG that body and mind belong together and I started teaching it in German beginning classes we taught differently then from what I learned in feminism and through the WiG people. Kosta: Yeah, so yeah, we took—we took the lessons from WiG and we brought them back to our institutions. Kraft: Right, and to other, not only feminist and women’s literature, but other curriculum too. Language studies… Kosta: Right, exactly, yeah. Yeah. No, I very, I remember that conference very well. Kraft: And Barabara and I wrote this book auf Deutsch, which is still the best one! And that came without WiG, we couldn't have written this. Kosta: I mean, we collaborated very early on in our career, right? Yeah. I mean, we wrote and article together… Kraft: Very few people collaborate. We use graduate students and give them credit while the men usually took the credit, right? When I was—I was leading Women's Studies in Gainesville for a long time, because of the inspiration, I, you know, should mention that too. I remember, oftentimes, women from other departments and other disciplines came to me and said, “I, as a graduate student did this research and my professor took credit for it.” And, you know, I started protesting around. Kosta: Actually, so probably, you know, kind of your career and your experiences with WiG also lead you into women's studies. Kraft: Only. Only because of WiG. Kosta: And you chaired Women’s Studies, right? Kraft: Yeah, for many years, and changed it from a small place. I think we had $3,800, in after three years, we had $100,000. And the BA on—in women's studies, without connection with others. So, it would have not happened. Because of that, right. Kosta: Yeah. So WIG becomes like the fertile ground for all these other career moves. Kraft: All these ideas, just popped to my mind. Kosta: Incredible. Yeah, then. So like, I guess, you know, what role did WiG play for you is very clear. And—but maybe we can go back to what role? You know, what did you also say? You said that you organized the conference, but you did more for WiG. Kraft: I did more. I was—when I started doing the conference. I was part of the steering committee. And then later again, of the editorial committee, I think it was ‘94, 5, and 6, three years. I was editor, of course, co-editor, but I think it was all done at my office. I even got a secretary, whether it helper or assistant from paid by my university for it. So we both did those three yearbooks at that time, and I love doing this yearbooks, and getting those—those articles and we sent them out for review. And I still wonder how we did all that; lots of work, and it was fun. Yeah, yeah. Kosta: Yeah, actually very fulfilling too. Kraft: Absolutely. I think—I think I was mistaken. What have I had not mentioned? And it was it was 2003, 2004, and 2005. Kosta: That you were yearbook co-editor, yeah. Right. Yeah, let's talk about an anecdote that embodies WiG for you. Kraft: Well, yes, I—there's, of course, several, but one that just pops to my mind without thinking it was at this conference in ‘95… ‘96. And we, of course, did every year, the cabaret. And we love the Caberet. Again, it showed the human element of the intellectual that it has to be part of it. And we had a colleague who was just hilarious! It was Martha Wallach.. Dear good friend, who we loved dearly, she would roll on the floor. They will always make fun of the present politics and play those stuffy politicians. And she came with a Schnurrbart [mustache] it was just wonderful. This is the one funny anecdote that comes to mind right now. Kosta: Yeah, yeah. So there had to do a lot with the cabaret. It's a cabaret moment. Kraft: My Cabaret moment. Yeah, we will not miss that. Kosta: Do you have any other anecdotes that you can think of in terms of WiG? I think it's the only conference where everybody hugs each other at the beginning, right? Kraft: Right! Right. For instance. Yes, yes. Kosta: How wonderful that is! Kraft: Yes. Right. And I still like—I also like that sometimes some members brought their children and I remember one woman from, I think she from the New York area. She brought her little child and she was sitting in front of us just quiet, listening. You know, that's unusual that children were—then we had babysitting. Where did you have that? I don't know if that's an anecdote, but it's a good memory. Kosta: A good memory, yeah. Kraft: Yeah. I like that. It was just enjoyable. Kosta: Do you remember any of the hardest discussions or debates that came up at WiG in your memory? Kraft: Nobody's perfect. Some like it hot. Remember the final words? And of course, I'm not perfect. Of course you are. But WiG had a few things that made it hard for me. And that was, it was not from the beginning, but soon thereafter, there started to be some factions. And somehow, it seemed the factions hardened. And they didn't get into the free conversation to say, what is it? They're—like me understand or I think this way and—and are you sure? And that then was very hard and I kind of stopped then participating. I kind of was afraid to say something wrong. No? Kosta: You had to self-censor yourself. Kraft: I had to self-censor myself, of course, we don't want what I was always afraid of was political correctness, you know, and I was this whole thing disturbed everything. It still does, of course, you know, we're still not over this. And it's very difficult and the world is difficult. And I've been living in Berlin now for quite some time in my retirement, now for almost 10 years. And I'm not sure where you are in WiG right now. I have unfortunately not been able to come especially with Corona now. I don't know if this kind of thing has—was in WiG dissolved. No, now Barbara, you were last time? Kosta: I think we're still having some very hard discussions. But I have a feeling that they're more open. I think the time—I mean, if I may interpret this—I think the time that you're talking about - it was part of the women's movement and people were really trying to define themselves in WiG and creating their own camps. Kraft: And I didn't know enough about this fact to even argue; I had to learn first. Yeah. And obviously, this is life, you know, and if we were all only friedevolle Eierkuchen - That would be wrong too. Kosta: There has to be some debate. Kraft: Right, there has to be some way to be some debate, but it must not stop. It shouldn't stop. People should invite people to stay in conversation and I'm glad that you're trying this. Kosta: And not intimidated at all. Kraft: I hope I can come next year. Kosta: That would be fabulous, because it's Portland! Kraft: Because I'm still so young. Kosta: Exactly! Kraft: See, how old would I be next year? Kosta: I don't think you have to reveal that here. I'm gonna take the Marlene Dietrich plea! Kraft: I do this, by the way, in Wikipedia. No age is mentioned of mine. Kosta: So tell us, as you talked about your cabaret moment, now, if you—thinking about WiG. What are the three words that come to mind when you think about WiG? Kraft: Three words… That is hard! Let's see. One, I can only think of English and that—that would be empowerment. The other ones… Let's see. The next one is the… Yeah, Zugehörigkeit And the last one? Definitely. Freude. Joy. So these are my three words. Kosta: Very nice. Kraft: Okay. So this is my—my WiG experience. Kosta: The WiG experience. Kraft: It was very nice to think back, bring it back. Thank you for asking. Kosta: Yeah, these—through these questions, I mean, so many images started coming back, you know in terms of what we’ve experienced over the years in WiG and what an important organization it’s been and it continues to be right. I mean, that's what the cutting-edge literature seems to be. Kraft: So I really hope to, you know, I always wanted to come over the last years, and COVID brought us so back down and I hope next year is better. Much wonderful future for WiG - continue! Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Helga Kraft Subject The topic of the resource Congresses; Germanists; Feminism Description An account of the resource Interview between Barbara Kosta and Helga Kraft Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Teams digital recording Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Barbara Kosta Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource June 6, 2022 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kosta; Kraft Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Release sign formed summer 2024 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Mp3 Language A language of the resource English; German Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Oral history of experience in Women in German https://wig-herstory.com/files/original/290c710f8b34ec375d7ce4649fa6145e.mp3 0a07de9d2923f4bac48a23243e0eba8b https://wig-herstory.com/files/original/e2ee84299b3b368e3c7b47447fdae793.pdf 4177465668bff2bfd5b55e3d9ae8fbab Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interviews Subject The topic of the resource Feminism; Congresses; Germanists Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Interviews Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Jeannine Blackwell Interview June 9, 2022 Transcribed/Edited by Elizabeth Heatwole, summer 2023 Muellner: Please introduce yourself. Name, affiliation, country of residence and origin. We'll start with that. Blackwell: OK. I'm Jeannine Blackwell. And I'm professor emerita at the University of Kentucky and I still live in Lexington, Kentucky. I’m a U.S. citizen and live in America in Lexington, Kentucky. Muellner: Okay. So now, what year did you first join WiG and how did you first hear about it? Blackwell: Well, I can't even remember, but I think it was either in the fall of 1976 or in the spring of ‘77. And I heard about WiG from the other graduate students who were leftists at Indiana University, where I was starting the PhD program. And among the people, there was my co-student at the time was Biddy Martin, and Marc Silberman was one of the older grad students and he was the one who was the leftist with all these connections to Madison. And in the spring term- yeah, I started there in ’75, ’76, I heard about WiG, and then in the spring of 1977, I took a semester as a traveling scholar and went to Madison for the semester. And that was definitely when I started getting involved with both Women in German and New German Critique, which sort of went together in those days. I mean you were in one, you were in both at the same time. And so that was when I started. Yeah, it didn't take much to join WiG, you just signed up for the newsletter. That was it. Muellner: And there was no fee, as of yet. Right. Blackwell: No fee, and newsletter was mimeographed. Muellner: Ah, the good old days, yeah. So, it's interesting that a lot of this revolves around Madison. Blackwell: Yeah, yeah. Muellner: So why was it that you did this scholar in residence in Madison? What was special about that? Blackwell: Well, when I started to graduate school at Indiana University, I was not yet doing research focus on women or on feminist issues. I was a feminist, and I was involved, deeply involved, in a whole lot of extracurricular activities, but I made that turn in that year, working with Biddy at- partially, it was just Biddy and me, and there were no courses, of course, in women's studies in the German department. There was one woman faculty member who was not a feminist, or she was not teaching feminist issues. Indiana had, in the English department, Gilbert and Gubar [ed: Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar] were there, and so there was already a lot of foment going on, and I wanted to focus on German women's literature, and they didn't have any, and I petitioned to have a semester in Madison so that I could have courses in German about feminist and women's issues. And that's what I did, and I went up there and had a course with Evelyn Torton Beck. And mostly, I just hung out with all those graduate students who have always been the source of my knowledge and support and- and, you know, generating ideas and stuff like that. So that semester really helped me establish that I really was going to work in feminist German studies from then on. Muellner: Wow, okay. So, the feminist German studies kind of was already established, then, at the German department at Madison. Blackwell: Well, I wouldn't say it was established. But Evelyn was there, and the graduate students were there, and so that was the base. And a lot of those graduate students, then of course, graduated, moved on into other positions, like Karen Achberger and people like that. So, they were there as graduate students. Nancy Vetter Schultz. And so, they were sort of the core of WiG, Although Pat Herminghouse, who already had a faculty position, was an assistant professor at Washington University, was also deeply involved, and I got to know her. I can't remember exactly how, but she's always been very supportive of me, so. Muellner: That’s great, yeah. Those names all resonate with WiG. You know, so I guess you kind of came to WiG during your graduate student years. So, was there really a career before WiG or what? Blackwell: It was an adventurous life and there and there was a little bit of a German career there. I went and taught in a gymnasium for a year. I went to Spain and taught English as a second language for a year. I went back to the United States and then decided to go to graduate school in German at Duke, which was my undergraduate institution. And there I had always been active in the anti-war movement, civil rights stuff. Just a lot of those same kinds of issues and equity issues, and so I was already primed in my personal life for this. But the research that I was doing on my master's thesis was on [ed: Rainer Maria] Rilke and I started turning, edging, a little bit that way when I decided that I was interested in expressionist women poets, who are not exactly a hotbed of feminism. But that's where I started, and I did a lot of research on them. But that was all that I had done up until I started the PhD program, and of course, women's studies didn't actually exist yet in those years as a formalized discipline at universities. Even at Indiana University, where the English department and history department had a sizable number of people involved in women's studies, they didn't start teaching women's studies until, I'm going to say, that it was 1977 or ‘78, and I was a TA in that first intro to women's studies course at Indiana. Muellner: Wow. That is very cool. Blackwell: So, I was like in it from the get-go. Muellner: Yeah, yeah. That was one thing I was talking with Angelika Bammer about, because she was … Blackwell: Oh yes, she was at Madison. She was one of the Madison people. Muellner: Exactly. And I think Sara Lennox was there for a time, too. So, there's a lot of convergence on Madison. So, I'm hearing a lot of similar, kind of, origin stories, and Madison is really sort of a central location for that. And I think that she was mentioning that she thought that University of Wisconsin, Madison was one of the first women’s studies departments in the country. Blackwell: Yeah. Muellner: Yeah. So, I have to kind of look that up to confirm. Blackwell: You know, a lot of these things were beginning to spring up and there might not have been a formalized department, but there were certainly a program. We got one at University of Kentucky pretty early, as well, but not as early as the big Midwestern leftist schools did. Muellner: Right. Okay. So, you did a lot, and then now can you describe the first WiG event you attended? Blackwell: Yes. And I had to really try hard to remember this. And it was at that convent that was north of Milwaukee; Racine, Wisconsin. And, I didn't know very many people, and I think it was 1980. I'm not sure, but I think it was 1980. It was one of the years at the Racine conference and the first thing was – you're going to a convent. And it was like, oh, shit, what have I gotten myself into here? Because I had been to the conference and, you know, I knew all these people and hung out with them at other conferences, but this was the first WiG that I went to, and it was an incredible experience, because, who did I meet there? Susan Cocalis. And Susan Cocalis had read all the same 18th century German women novels that I had. I had never met anybody who had ever read any of this stuff. Muellner: Wow. Blackwell: Most of the people who were working in feminist German studies were doing 20th century, contemporary stuff, knowing authors, doing GDR stuff. There weren't that many people that were working on the historical side of things. And Susan and I stayed up all night just talking about Julchen Grunthal and Sophie von Sternheim and all of these very obscure 18th century writers. But it was so much fun. And that's what I recall from that first conference that I went to. It was incredibly energizing. Muellner: Wow, that's awesome. I can imagine that would be something, yeah, you don't just find anywhere. Blackwell: Right. Muellner: So, very cool. At the convent. So, what role then did WiG really play in your career? Blackwell: Well, it was the keystone for everything that I did for all of my projects. I would sound them out at WiG meetings, at WiG conferences. I would talk to people about ideas that I had. And so, it was a real sounding board for me, but it was also this incredible sense of support and generosity of people sharing research and not hoarding research, and that proved to be so incredibly important and formative for me. I tended to be that kind of a person anyway. Like, here, here's what I'm working on. Would you like to have some of it? And that's sort of the way that I've operated in my research since then. I'm a highly collaborative person and WiG incorporated that kind of collaboration. It was approved of, and you really need that in competitive academic atmospheres. You’ve got to be able to find people to work with, and so the people that gave me that kind of incredible support- I cannot praise Jeanette Clausen enough. Jeanette Clausen was ahead of me, just barely ahead of me, at Indiana University. She had already gone to her first position as an assistant professor, but I got to know her through WiG. She was not only a support and a friend, she served on my dissertation committee. Muellner: Wow. Blackwell: And I had to petition the IU German faculty to get her onto my committee. Although she was in the IU system, they didn't think a whole lot about having her be on the doctoral committee, and I had to petition to get her to be on my committee. It was one of the best things I ever did, because she gave me such good feedback and support while I was working on this dissertation- my dissertation was the feminist Bildungsroman. They did not want me to say there was a such a thing as a female Bildungsroman. They did not. And so, I needed Jeanette there, giving me all this support in the background and whispering arguments to me. So, she was an important friend. Sandy Frieden, who was then from University of Houston- we didn't have that much in common because she worked on film and 20th century stuff, but she became a longtime friend. And, of course, Susan Cocalis. And then other people that I met, not exactly at WiG, but via WiG. Or because I was running WiG panels at other places, people like Barbara Becker Cantarino and others. Helga, whose name I'm not going to remember, from Cincinnati. Muellner: Gerstenburger? Blackwell: No. Muellner: Or Kraft? Blackwell: No. You're not going to remember her. But beyond that, I met because of WiG, not through WiG, my two major life collaborators: Susanne Zantop and Shawn Jarvis. And now I'm going to try not to get choked up here. I organized a WiG session at the Midwestern MLA, and Suzanne Zantop did a paper at that conference, and that's when we met, and she was freaking out because she had been tapped the way that many of us got tapped: “Oh, you're a woman. Why don't you teach our women's course?” And she felt like she didn't know anything about it. And it was supposed to be 18th- 19th century. She was a nagelneue assistant professor. And she said, what should I teach, Jeannine? And so, I said, okay, here's what you should do. And I went down this list and, she says, “is any of this stuff in English translation?” I said no, it's not in English translation, and she says, let's do an anthology. And that was the beginning of Bitter Healing. Muellner: Wow. Blackwell: And at that conference, we stayed up all night. This is a recurring motif, me staying up all night yapping with people. And that was, of course, the beginning of the long collaboration with Susanne, and of course, she had many, many other interests besides women's studies. But women's studies was clearly a part of her oeuvre, and so that was a really rich and ongoing friendship until her death, her untimely death. And Shawn Jarvis, I got to know through Ruth Ellen Boetcher Joeres, who was also very much of a Wiggy, you know. She was there a lot of the time Sean was not there. She was Ruth Ellen's graduate student at Minnesota. But I got to know her because of our combined interest in fairy tales. And so that was the beginning of this anthology that we did called The Queen's Mirror. So, all of these connections have always fed into how successful I was in my career and all of the people that I hope that I was providing reading material to that they were going to love. And as my husband always likes to laugh about it, you read all of this stuff and wrote the article on it so they wouldn't have to. Like, all those women Robinson Crusoe stories that were in high- in low German you know and- and really, really bad Fraktur print, you know? Yeah, I read it all. I explained it to you, and you didn't have to read it. Muellner: Yes, thank you for your service. I have read a lot of your scholarship on some of those early writers. For sure. I mean, those were really important foundations for the rest of us. And frankly, students nowadays, they don't even want to read Fraktur or anything. You know, it's like a whole another generation. Blackwell: Okay. Muellner: But yeah, laid a lot of foundation there. That’s great. But one of the things that you mentioned early on about WiG panels or like WiG at other conferences- so, I wondered, could you talk a little bit about when that started? Blackwell: That started very, very soon and because I was still a graduate student, I wasn't actively involved in organizing this stuff until after prelims, and then I was organizing stuff, and that was an incredible way to publicize WiG for Wiggies to get together in other corners of the universe, and also to find new collaborators and new people that were maybe not interested in going to the conference every year, but were interested in the topic and in the research, and so I loved organizing panels like that. And I did it- of course, at the University of Kentucky, we have the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference every year. And because Linda Worley were colleagues at UK, we had lots of feminists and lots of feminist panels. And it was our own conference, and we could do whatever the hell we pleased and have whatever kind of panel. And somebody would call and say, “can we have a panel on this,” and we’d say “sure,” you know. And it was in April every year, so the MLA season was over. It was a fun conference, and so there was always at least one, and usually two or three, feminist panels at the KFLC and at the MLA. And then WiG started trying to get serious about every year we're going to have a panel at the MLA and the GSA. And one of the big issues with the GSA was they did not want to have graduate students presenting. Muellner: Okay. Blackwell: And we thought this was utterly idiotic, of course. Muellner: Right. Blackwell: And so, it wasn't exactly a plan to infiltrate the GSA, but that's sort of what happened. And so, a lot of us got onto the board, and people like Pat Herminghouse were- and and Lynn Tatlock were very much at the forefront of changing the attitude of the MLA and the GSA toward how graduate students could collaborate and participate in collaborative work should be presented, not single presenters only. Muellner: Yeah, okay. Blackwell: It was tremendously important, particularly for the people that didn't go to the annual conference, who felt uncomfortable with the kind of loosey-goosey stuff that went on at the cabaret, and … Muellner: Right. Blackwell: …it was just a little bit too much for some people who were shy or who were from an older generation, or their research didn't quite jibe right, but they were still interested. Muellner: Okay. I think that would be the interesting comparison: the early years of WiG conferences, you know, with how it's evolved over the years. You know, this next question, what role did you play in WiG? Maybe you can talk a little bit more about like how those WiG conferences were at the beginning, and then like, you know, this clear moment of crisis when you were elected as the president. Blackwell: Yeah, well, an almost endemic problem with the way that the WiG conferences are organized was that everybody wanted to have an artist, a filmmaker, a poet there at the conference. This was extremely energizing to a large section of the people who were there. The problem with that is, then the whole conference skewed toward contemporary literature. And so people like me that didn't have a bone to pick in that, the conference didn't have that much intellectual input. Now, that shift began probably four or five years in when people started specializing. Before that you read anything and everything you could get your hands on because there wasn't that much that was available at the time. And so, you just read everything. Everybody read Christa Wolf. But as the specialization began to happen and a lot of that was people choosing dissertation topics, then there was just this sort of tension. Those of us who did early literature. There wasn't that much there for us. And so, what was there for you at the conference was the camaraderie, the fun, the other connections where you would go out walking and talking. Like, I don't know how many hours I have booked talking to Carolyn Hodges from the University of Tennessee, and ironically enough, she also became Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Tennessee. And so, we continued our walks at graduate school dean conferences – and just talking about anything and everything. And I think that that was sort of an ongoing tension with WiG, and the other part that was, I think, an underlying tension that's probably still there, and that is that there are a lot of people who had been harmed in Germanistik, in academe, and felt undervalued. And the WiG conference was a place to get renourished and to have a more psychological approach to some of the town-gown, public, private political issues. You know, that this notion that there needed, there had to be a sort of personalized session at every single WiG, usually the first night of WiG- some people found that very off-putting and some people thought that that absolutely had to positively be a part of WiG going forward–that this kind of emotional nurturing just had to be part of it. And so, there are these tensions that were just always there, and people always tried to overcome them, always have a personalized session, try to have something about medieval or 18th century or something like that. And usually, the only way you could do it is like, “Oh, well, we'll do witches,” you know, “everybody can relate to that.” But those were some of the things that were seeds of issues and sometimes people wandered away from WiG because they were too much on one side or the other of those issues, or the conference was so far away and expensive to get to that people just couldn't do it anymore. Muellner: Yeah, that- that makes a lot of sense. I mean, sort of just the way things morphed into the format that we find ourselves in now, which I think works for the most part. A lot of people get their areas covered. We have the teaching, we have all the, sort of, workshoppy, you know, professionalization. And that personal wellness moment at the very beginning that everyone checks in. So, can you talk a little bit about it when you became president? Blackwell: Right. Well, I was on the Steering Committee first, and then there was a contingent of people who said, look, we've got to get more institutionalized in order to have one person who's sort of speaking for the organization, because it was always, “well, huh? I don't know. I'm not in charge. I'll have to ask the Steering Committee,” and getting the Steering Committee to agree on anything was just mind boggling. And I didn't really care one way or the other. You know, I’d keep going with WiG with a steering committee, but I did understand the need as the organization became more prominent and had a larger membership, and was actually- people were moving into positions of authority who were WiG people, and they were department chairs, and they didn't have time for, “oh, we'll touchy feely this in a year,” you know. It was like, “chop chop, we need a decision” and I let myself be talked into running for President, partially because sort of, you know, everybody knew me and they knew that I wasn't, you know, bloodthirsty for power or anything like that. And I thought, okay, I can do this sort of transitional year without scaring the horses. And little did I know that we were going to need a president because of Susanne's murder, and I was President when Susanne was murdered. And all of a sudden, newspapers were calling up and wanting statements and stuff like that, and they were calling up people who were just like “oh no, not me. I'm not- talk to Jeannine,” and it was particularly poignant- I hope I'm not talking out of school here- in the early days after the murder, the entire German department was under suspicion. And they weren't allowed to make statements. Muellner: Wow. Blackwell: And they asked WiG to make statements in German for them, because, of course, the Dartmouth PR people couldn't do it in German. And so, we helped with that, we helped the department over that short time period while they were still suspects. Or, not suspects, but you know, under questioning, incommunicado in a variety of ways. And Bruce Duncan was the chair then, and he was a contributor to Bitter Healing, so we knew him very, very well. And so, that was sort of a very tragic need at a time when we hadn't planned that anything like that would be necessary. I never really had that much to do as President. And of course, you were probably not around yet as a grad student, I don't know. It would have been in Florida. And this was when I became president, and they made this into a Miss America pageant thing. Muellner: I missed that, unfortunately. I was in Florida, but I didn't. You know, either that, or I just wasn't paying attention. Blackwell: So anyway, true to WiG, it's like you've got something that you think is controversial and people are going to be upset about, let's put it in the cabaret. So, I played the Statue of Liberty Miss America with a sash. Muellner: That’s awesome. So that would be leading into the next question about an anecdote that embodies WiG for you. Maybe it was at that moment when you were standing there as the Statue of Liberty/new president, but do you have another story of … Blackwell: Oh, there are so many stories. My favorite WiG was one- and I'm going to try to remember where it was, I think it was in Saint Augustine in 1996. Muellner: Okay. Blackwell: I think that's when it was, and it was about the presidential election. You know, how many times the cabaret is about recent political events. I don't know how they're doing it in the age of Trump, but it was the year that Clinton was going up for reelection. And everybody was in this. Everybody got roped into it. Even Sara Lennox, who never was in the cabaret, was made to play Jennifer Flowers, the floozy. And Dennis Sweet [ed./JB: formerly of Bates College] played Bob Dole. Ruth Ellen, who also absolutely refused to be in the cabaret, was hornswaggled into being Barbara Bush. And Stephanie Ohnesorg, who you probably know, was Al Gore. And- and oh gosh, I can't remember who was Tipper. Oh, I can't remember her name. I've got her face [ed/JB: Edith Waldstein]. Anyway, everybody was in it, and it was when I was H. Ross Perot. And I wore a bathing cap and overdid the Southern accent and had my charts with the pointers and everything. And my favorite chart that I did was, “hear that giant sucking sound? That's jobs in critical theory going to Mexico.” And I had so many charts and so much to say as H. Ross Perot, that they finally had to drag me off the stage. Muellner: That’s great. Blackwell: That was one moment. But the anecdotes, there are two things that I wanted to tell you that aren't that funny, but I think are really indicative about how we've changed over time as their research matured and it was appearing in more and more venues. I remember being at one WiG and you know, we just all know each other and we're- “well, Ruth Ellen,” and so new graduate students who would turn up at this- one of them said to me, “it was like walking through an anthology” being at a WiG conference, and I thought, I've never thought of it like that, but for the next generations it must seem that way. And it's like all of these women whose work that you've fed off of for these years are here, acting out like absolute idiots in this cabaret. It must have been so strange. One thing that I remember is at Rio Rico in Arizona- and this would have been probably 2002, 2001. Yeah, it was the first time that we met since Susanne’s murder, and we had a small ceremony, anybody who wanted to, that was just an appreciation of Susanne, that was outside in this beautiful desert setting in Arizona. And then at the end we were just going to have three minutes of silence, and this hawk started circling over it and soaring overhead for that whole three minutes, and then landed. And it was just like, “oh my God.” So those are my two moments from WiG conferences that I remember, but the cabaret, of course, has always just been a hoot. Just a hoot. And Susan Cocalis, she used to write it up every year and write-ups were as funny the cabaret was. Muellner: So, when did those cabarets really start? I mean, was that like from the very beginning or like as long as you can remember? Blackwell: As long as I can remember, I mean, you know, when I went to my first conference, I guess 1980, they were already started improvising. It was improvised. And there were some years where it just didn't quite come together, and people would just throw stuff together and drag people up from the audience and stuff. But yeah, I think it was pretty much instituted by then. And the Germans that would come- and, you know, a bunch of Germans have always come whenever they were in the country or something, they were always so shocked at this cabaret because it was so unacademic and like, unprofessional. And when Frauen in der Literaturwissenschaft got started in Hamburg–and they invited a bunch of us up for– Susan Cocalis and me and Jeanette Clausen and I can't remember who else was there. And we went to their first conference, and I think that was in 1985, and they wanted to do something, but they just didn't have the moxie to do it. They just didn’t have that the va-voom that WiG people had, and so instead they said, “we'll have a talent contest.” Or a talent show. And what it was, was people reading very sad poetry. Most graduate students. And it was like, no, this is not a cabaret, kids. Muellner: That is kind of funny thinking of, you know, that cabaret kind of comes out of Germany. Blackwell: I know, I know, but not out of the academe side. Muellner: That's for sure. That's it. Blackwell: Yeah, you asked about other times of sort of dissent or discussion within WiG. And one of those was starting a journal. Muellner: Okay. Blackwell: You- have you heard about this from anybody else yet? Muellner: No. No one's talked about the journal yet. Blackwell: Okay. Well, we had the newsletter. And the newsletter kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And people had book reviews, lots of book reviews, you know, all the books would come in and everybody would review them, and they would have long reviews. The newsletter, 40 pages long … Muellner: Wow. Blackwell: …it was like, okay, what should we do? Should we have just a separate book reviews section over here? And what about our research? And of course, people have been trying to get into Monatshefte, German Quarterly. PLMA, AATG, GSA, so that they had the right credibility. But then there comes a point where you say, okay, why don't we showcase our own stuff? And the other thing was interviews with all these authors and filmmakers that came to WiG. These are important documents for people's research, and they needed to be in a more permanent home, that was accessible through libraries, than just a newsletter. When you've got these folks there and you're interviewing them, that's a real document that needs to be showcased. And so, there were those, there were the reviews, and then there was the actual scholarship. So that, too, was one of those moments of institutionalization that people found worrisome, or troublesome, that undercut that whole notion of WiG as this cozy, supportive family kind of a thing. Because if you have a journal, the articles have to be vetted and they have to be ranked and some people are going to get rejected and you have to have editors, you have to have an editorial board. And so, when that got started, and it was the Women in German Yearbook, there was, of course, a huge controversy about what to call it. A lot of people said, “Women in German Yearbook is idiotic, don't call it that.” But that's what it was. Even though we had articles by men and some people didn't want to call it feminist Germanist because that was it, had its own history. Rick McCormick as “Herr Stuhlmann,” the chair of the German department. Yeah, to the German department. He was always in the cabarets as Herr Stuhlmann. So anyways, starting the journal was one of those things where people worried about whether or not this is going to be yet another layer of hierarchy for WiG. And of course, it was, and I don't know anybody, personally, that's had an article rejected by WiG, because it's a blind submission process. But I was on the board, and I vetted a lot of articles while I was on the board and then afterward as well. So that was 1/3 of a problem when the journal came in, but it was also a real boon for young feminists to have another venue where they could get really important and good feedback that was going to be positive and feminist, and they knew that from the get-go. It wasn't going to be some grumpy old man telling them that they needed to do Goethe, you know, and and so that was- and also as a first step. Of course, we published a lot of other stuff that was much more important and by major scholars and stuff, but also the stuff by first timers. And so, it was an easier first step for some people to get into the publication side of things. Muellner: Yeah, that was an important development for sure. And now you've heard, obviously are you still getting the Feminist German Studies journal? Blackwell: No, because I stopped paying dues. Muellner: Well, it's understandable. Life goes on and you have other things. But yeah, the name has changed. And it's, of course, a very professional venue and it always has been, really. But they wanted to change the name to kind of get away from The Yearbook because they didn't really think that title specifically defined what it was, and so- And I think they're publishing now two times a year. Blackwell: Oh, cool, that is cool. Well, I got out of going to WiG after the three years that we ran the conference in Kentucky, and I was- it was us, it was a very small German department and basically Linda Worley and me. And then I was dean, and it was just so overwhelming to try to run that conference and be dean at the same time that I just had to get out of it. And I thought, okay, I'm not going to go to the conference now, I'm just going to sit out and rest for a bit, but then I was real dean, and then I was associate provost, and I was all of this other stuff piled on, and so, it just never happened again. And I wasn't doing research anymore. And I thought that I was going to. I thought I was going to retire, and I was going to get back to working on these projects. And I just, you know, when you retire, it's over and it's not as important as you thought it was. Muellner: Right. Blackwell: And then I had a big research giveaway on that e-mail listserv, and I said, “who wants this, who wants that?” I gave away all of my research. I gave away huge chunks of it, and the only thing that people did not want is all the research that I've done on German women pietists movement because that's still something that nobody's really all that interested in. Muellner: Okay. But that's really an interesting WiG gesture at the end of your career to give away all this material on areas of research that you had done, laying the groundwork. That's really an interesting gesture, I feel. Blackwell: And I thought we were going to have a bidding war over all of those Robinson Crusoes. “Can you send me the Robinson Crusoe stuff?” And now I bet they regret it now. See ya. But that brings up some of the other people that have been so important to me. Annegrete Pelz, who is from Hamburg, and she was a close friend and she got interested in travel literature. And so, the Robinson Crusoe stuff and her interest in 19th century German women's travel literature crossed paths many times, and she and I got to be good friends. And other people whose names I wanted to mention who’ve been extremely supportive of me. I mentioned Pat Herminghouse, but Valerie Greenberg, who you may not have ever heard of. I don't think she was ever in WiG, but she was my mentor when I was a master’s graduate student and she was a PhD student at UNC. She has always been so supportive of me. Natalie Zemon Davis, who was at Princeton in history, who from afar just mentored me and put me in contact with all these people that worked on women's travel literature in the 17th and 18th century in Holland [ed./JB: Rudolf Dekker of University of Rotterdam, an expert on ego documents, adventure travel, and cross dressing in the early modern era] and Jack Zipes, of course, has been a lifelong friend and supporter of Shawn's and my work in fairy tales, Wolfgang Mieter the same way- he was another guy, just generosity. He had a huge archive of fairy tale jokes, like from The New Yorker and everything. He gave the whole thing to me to use for a fairy tale course, and Siegrid Weigel, who was not that close of a friend but was always a colleague, and particularly when I was a Fulbright professor in Hamburg there. So that was somebody else who was really supportive. So, WiG gave me a research agenda, freed my creativity, provided me with networks, and honed my leadership skills. I was already a leader, been a leader all my life, but it gave me the confidence to be a leader in academia. And I think that's probably the same kind of confidence that WiG has provided for a lot of people to help them understand that they can be bosses, they can run, like, you know who. Uh, that you have that skill set and you can use it, and don't feel bad about using it. Muellner: Right, yeah. That is very true. I mean, a lot of the things that you said really resonate with just that space to grow. They provided that for a lot of us and so, are those, kind of, the three summative words that you would use to kind of summarize when you think of WiG? Blackwell: Yes, and so here's what I put as my three words: generosity, community, and creativity. Muellner: Great. Blackwell: And the other thing is, it helps you raise a feminist child. My daughter, Bettina, is now project director at the Appalachian Regional Commission, and she's involved in solar energy projects and electrical energy projects and small business administration and nonprofit groups. She's really turned into a wonderful woman and I'm so proud of her. And she was, of course, named after Bettina von Arnim. As people at WiG said- I think it was Sandy Frieden who said this, “Fine Jeannine, name your daughter Bettina after your author. Then she'll have something to talk about in therapy twenty years from now.” Muellner: Ah, yes. Well, Bettina von Arnim was not a bad person. Blackwell: No, she wasn't. She was a great person, and she did a lot of wonderful things. So, we we were really glad. And Bettina’s last name is Jones. And so, we wanted to have something that was a little bit different. Muellner: Yeah, yeah. No, that's a great name. Well, that's such a wonderful story. What amazing stories of WiG. Really, you have covered so much. Any, like, final words? Final wisdom? Blackwell: I'm sure that there's going to be some internal contradictions here and people say no, no, no, that's not when that happened. That's not how that happened. And yes, you're going to be stuck with it because you're going to find all of this stuff where people's memories haven't quite worked right, but it still is a wonderful project. I think it really is definitely important, because a bunch of the founding mothers are getting on up there, and I hope that you can get to them while their memory is still good and their minds are sharp, and just recording their voices is going to bring back such memories for a lot of people, too. Muellner: Absolutely. Blackwell: Who have you interviewed so far? Muellner: Well, so we've interviewed Pat Herminghouse. We interviewed Sara Lennox. We've interviewed Ruth Ellen. We interviewed Jeanette Clausen. Blackwell: Okay. Muellner: We’ve interviewed Angelika Bammer. And now we have interviewed you. So, who else would you recommend that- I mean, I would love- we've been trying to get in touch with Susan Cocalis, but she is, like, on another planet. Blackwell: She would be good, and I understand that Ruth Ellen is not in great health now, so that might not work either. And some of the other folks are probably too old. I'm thinking Ursula Mahlendorf, who was around, but she was mature when I was a graduate student. So, there are some folks that I imagine you aren't going to be able to swoop in and get. Sandy Frieden stopped coming to WiG when she got into administration stuff, you know, but she was very operative when we first started doing film and bringing in filmmakers. She was very, very important in that phase of WiG, and so that might be something- somebody you want to talk to and Marjanne. And Marjanne Gooze has been around. Muellner: I have contacted her. We're going to set up an interview later in the summer, I think. Blackwell: Yeah, great, great. And I'm sure I'm forgetting about a whole lot of other people. Unfortunately, Sarah Friedrichsmeyer has died in the meantime, Helga Slessarev, I knew this name would come to me. She was at the University of Cincinnati. But I'm sure she's well into her years. Muellner: Okay. Blackwell: And she was very supportive woman German professor at the University of Cincinnati and important for a lot of people. And was a mentor for Sarah Friedrichsmeyer, as well. Muellner: Okay. I mean, it's good to know these names because some of the names you mentioned are not familiar to me. A lot of them are, but it is good to- I think with these interviews too, we'll be able to fill a lot of gaps in … Blackwell: Right. Muellner: …institutional memory and history. And as I'm doing these interviews, I'm really learning that, in many ways, WiG is like part and parcel to the history of women's studies in the US. So interconnected to, sort of, more progressive leftist academic history. And so, it's an important part of it. Blackwell: Right, right. And first, the- the people that ran New German Critique were the sort of mirror image of all of this stuff that was going on. You know they were doing something similar, but in a much more aggressive traditional but leftist style, still competitive, not having their own conferences, not goofing around. Muellner: Yeah, that name of the organization has come up many times, so we're going to have to dig into that a little bit, and I would love to talk to you about like favorite visitors and guests and all those kinds of things, but if something comes up and you remember and you want to share, just let me know. Blackwell: Okay. Muellner: You know, we can talk about that too, but for the time being, this has been really wonderful. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Jeannine Blackwell Subject The topic of the resource Congresses; Germanists; Feminism Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Beth A. Muellner Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource June 9, 2022 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Muellner; Jeannine Blackwell Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Release Form signed Description An account of the resource Interview between Jeannine Blackwell and Beth Muellner Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Teams digital recording Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Mp3 Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Oral history of experience in Women in German https://wig-herstory.com/files/original/127ef056efacda01a8e52d1127e8bdae.jpg b1a6aef4de8e559a2b73cc490f82ab3e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource In Memory of Sara Friedrichsmeyer Subject The topic of the resource Obituaries; College teachers; Women--Societies and clubs Description An account of the resource Sara Friedrichsmeyer (1943-2021, in memoriam) Wiggies were saddened to hear of the passing of Dr. Sara Friedrichsmeyer at the end of August 2021. Sara was a committed and dynamic member of Women in German who contributed greatly to the field of feminist German studies and to our profession as a whole. She was also an inspiring and kind professor who made a great impact on the many individuals who studied and worked with her. Sara received her A.B. in German from the University of North Dakota and her M.A. in German literature from the University of Cincinnati in 1972. She earned her Ph.D. with the title “The Androgynous Ideal and Its Resurgence in the Works of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel” from the University of Cincinnati in 1979. Sara served as Assistant Professor of German at Raymond Walters College of the University of Cincinnati before joining the faculty at the University of Cincinnati main campus as a tenured professor. From 1996-2006, she served as Chair of the German Department at the University of Cincinnati and supervised dozens of Master and Ph.D. students during her time in the department. In addition, she successfully helped establish close relations with the Max Kade Foundation that supported the founding of the Max Kade Center at UC in 1998, including a Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor and a Max Kade Fellowship. Sara was one of the first women in the German Department at the University of Cincinnati who taught feminist theory and feminist German literature and thus helped numerous students with their dissertations and future publications. She also helped pave the way for gender and transgender studies as well as post-colonial approaches in German Studies. Sara’s research examined the concept of the androgynous in “Romanticism and the Dream of the Androgynous Perfection” in Deutsche Romantik and English Romanticism (ed. Theodore Gish and Sandra Frieden, 1984) as well as “The Subversive Androgyne” in the Women in German Yearbook in 1986. She published on 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century German authors and analyzed contemporary authors’ views on the Enlightenment legacy, such as “On Multiple Selves and Dialogics: Christa Wolf’s Challenge to the ‘Enlightened’ Faust” in Impure Reason: Dialectic of Enlightenment in Germany (ed. Dan Wilson and Rob Holub, 1993). Sara also worked on several Romantic authors and published “Romantic Nationalism: Achim von Arnim’s Gypsy Princess Isabella” in the path-breaking collection Gender and Germanness: Cultural Production of Nation (ed. Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller, 1997). In a trailblazing manner, she co-wrote essays with colleagues, a feminist practice that has become more and more common in German Studies scholarship. Moreover, she influenced today’s approaches to teaching feminist theory within German Studies departments with articles such as “Toward an American Germanics: Feminism as a Force for Change” (with Patricia Herminghouse) that was published in Teaching German in Twentieth-Century America (ed. David Benseler, Craig Nickisch, and Cora Lee Nollendorfs, 2001). In addition, her writing, research, and teaching expertise garnered interest outside of German Studies and she published “Cultural Studies and the Future of Doctoral Education” in the PMLA in 2000. From 1990-1998, Sara served as co-editor of the Women in German Yearbook and served on the journal’s editorial board. She is, after Maggie McCarthy, the longest serving editor of the Yearbook and has had an important impact on developments in gender and German studies in the 1990s. She co-edited multiple volumes, among them The Enlightenment and Its Legacy: Studies in German Literature in Honor of Helga Slessarev (with Barbara Becker-Cantarino, 1991). She co-edited the now classic volume The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy (with Sara Lennox and Suzanne Zantop, 1998). The historian Lora Wildenthal writes in her review of the volume, “This book is the first to bring together scholars in various disciplines who work on German colonialism and postcolonial racial issues, and it is a vital contribution to German studies.” Her exemplary contribution to the field is also evident in her presence at many scholarly meetings, frequently as a speaker, as well as in the time and energy she offered to numerous administrative and research projects. She received the UC Dolly Cohen Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Distinguished Faculty Award from UC’s Association of Women Faculty, and the Ohio Foreign Language Association’s Publications Award. She served on a number of national committees for the GSA, the AATG, and WIG. After membership on the MLA’s Division of 19th- and Early 20th- Century German Literature and the MLA’s Delegate Assembly, she was a member of the MLA Publication Committee. Sara was a person of great generosity and intellectual curiosity and served as a mentor to many students and colleagues. In the outpouring of sentiments after learning of her passing, several Wiggies commented on her impact in their lives. Heike Henderson, Professor of German at Boise State University, told us, “She introduced me to WiG and brought me to my very first Women in German conference, back in 1990.” Sara Lennox, Professor Emerita of German at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, recalled fondly their joint October birthdays celebrated with a cake at the 2003 WiG conference with "The Saras turn 60" written on it. She also shared the joy of how wonderful it was to work with Sara and Suzanne on The Imperialist Imagination, as well as the sad recognition that both of them are now gone. Kamakshi Murti, Professor Emerita of German at Middlebury College shared, “She was so very supportive of my own research on German orientalism. We’ve lost a pioneer in her!” She will be greatly missed by her family, friends, and former students and colleagues. She is survived by her two daughters, Sara and Jennifer, as well as four grandchildren. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Beth Muellner Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Univ of Cincinnati website; Katharina Gerstenberger; David Coury Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available unpublished Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Britta Kallin Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource jpeg Type The nature or genre of the resource Still image Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource February 10, 2022 https://wig-herstory.com/files/original/c52d202395aed438966e1e773f159e0e.jpg 4e3019e0ff264a889d897e148ae67e05 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Wiggies in Memoriam Subject The topic of the resource Obituaries Description An account of the resource Members of Women in German who've passed away, but in their big and small ways have helped to make our organization what it is today. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource In Memory of Dinah Dodds Subject The topic of the resource Obituaries; College teachers; Women--Societies and clubs Description An account of the resource Dr. Dinah Jane Dodds May 29, 1943-Sept. 12, 2019 Professor Emerita of German Studies Dinah Dodds, a pinnacle of the Lewis & Clark community, passed away after a three-year battle with cancer at the age of 76. Dodds was beloved by generations of students and faculty alike. Beginning her career at LC in 1972, Dodds taught German language and literature for three and a half decades. She also acted as world languages department chair and as divisional dean of arts and humanities. Professor of Hispanic Studies and Spanish Section Head Juan Carlos Toledano Redondo spoke on Dodds transforming the role of the world languages department on campus. “She pushed for us to be better represented at the campus level,” Toledano Redondo said. “She stressed language as key to a liberal arts education, not just a graduation requirement.” Associate Professor of German Language and Literature Katharina Altpeter-Jones fondly remembered the compassion of her mentor. “When I came for my on-campus interview, I got a real sense of Dinah’s kindness, and her warmth and her joyful nature,” Altpeter-Jones said. “She was a wonderful mentor with a great deal of optimism.” Altpeter-Jones stressed that Dodds’ compassion was felt by students just as much as faculty. “She was a firm believer in every single individual student,” Altpeter-Jones said. “She was so dedicated to her students. Her door was always open.” The Dinah Dodds Endowment for International Education was established by Missy Vaux Hall in honor of Dodds to provide funding for LC students of any discipline to expand on research they start while studying abroad. Alum Marissa Burke ’15 received the Dinah Dodds endowment. She reflected on how the endowment impacted her overseas experience in Strasbourg. “The Dinah Dodds scholarship allowed me to research my favorite poet, and I am very grateful to have learned about him and his history,” Burke said via email. “Without the scholarship, my research wouldn’t have been possible, and I wouldn’t have been able to follow that curiosity while I was surrounded by all the resources to explore it.” Annika Clunk ’20 shared similar sentiments about how receiving the endowment greatly influenced her abroad experience after a year in Munich. “(With the scholarship) I was allowed to go to an EU Commission conference,” Clunk said. The conference, held in Brussels, served as inspiration for her thesis. Dodds’ impact on the community reached far beyond the department in which she taught. She had a love for music and sang in the Oregon Repertory Singers for over 40 years. In 2011, she returned to campus to chair the music department for two years. Associate Professor of Music and Director of Choral Activities Katherine FitzGibbon spoke fondly of Dodds as her long-time mentor. “I’d ask her questions and advice, much as I would have had she been on campus,” FitzGibbon said. “She was always incredibly supportive and incredibly wise, and would give the best advice.” On the Resonance Ensemble website, FitzGibbon wrote, “There are few words to express the enormity of this loss. Dinah was simply a remarkable human being — a vibrant and passionate leader who devoted her life to the pursuit of knowledge and public service to the arts.” During her retirement, Dodds continued to be an active singer, a board member for the Resonance Ensemble and Portland Experimental Ensemble Theater, and a promoter of the international research endowment and continued to have an active presence on campus. In honor of her investment in the LC community, Dodds was the recipient of the first David Savage award in 2007 for her service and commitment to the college. “I can’t imagine a human who better epitomizes generous service to others,” FitzGibbon said. “It’s pretty remarkable to think (of) the thousands of us that are carrying a little piece of Dinah forward forever, and that her legacy is going to be never-ending.” Dinah’s memorial service will be held on Nov. 3 in the Agnes Flanagan Chapel. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pioneer Log Newsletter Lewis and Clark College; Katja Altpeter Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource October 4, 2019 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Beth Ann Muellner Relation A related resource https://piolog.com/2019/10/04/dinah-dodds-a-pillar-of-the-lc-community-dies-at-76/ Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource jpeg Type The nature or genre of the resource Still Image Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dinah Jane Dodd's obituary; Pioneer Log Newsletter Lewis and Clark College https://wig-herstory.com/files/original/f1d7a3fd2055375b2ccac9c7ab9a43aa.jpg f6791bd47bf60995ba3df0e1c5eba351 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource In Memory of Linda Kraus Worley Subject The topic of the resource Obituaries; College teachers; Women--Societies and clubs Description An account of the resource Dr. Linda Kraus Worley Sept. 5, 1950 – Aug. 15, 2021 Dr. Linda Kraus Worley, professor of German Studies and Folklore/Myth in the University of Kentucky’s College of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Modern & Classical Languages, Literatures and Classics, died after 13-month-long battle with a rare leukemia on Aug. 15, 2021. She died under UK hospice care and with loving friends at her bedside. Linda was born in Cleveland to German immigrants Hans and Elizabeth Kraus, who modeled the importance of hard work and dedication to family and friends. Hans was employed at a heating and air conditioning company for nearly 50 years, and Betty worked in the Borromeo College library and as a homemaker. Linda's parents encouraged her to read at an early age and she easily came to love words and stories. She graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in English literature at Miami University in Ohio. Her interest shifted to German literature at the University of Cincinnati, where she earned a master's degree in 1975. In part because she wanted to support and spend time with her German grandmother, who lived in Hassfurt, West Germany, Linda took a job with the University of Maryland's European Division, where she taught German classes to members of the U.S. military. In 1977, teaching German 101 at an education center in Nuremberg, she met Jeff Worley, who was teaching a University of Maryland poetry class in the adjoining room. After their classes, they began to meet at a local pizzeria and began a relationship that spanned 44 years. They got married a few years later in Jeff's parents' home in Sierra Vista, Arizona. Linda was eager to finish her Ph.D. work with the University of Cincinnati, so they moved back to the United States in 1983, encouraged by Linda's mentor and favorite German professor Jerry Glenn. She earned a Ph.D. in German literature in 1985. Linda was hired the following year by the University of Kentucky German Department, where for 34 years she taught German literature and a popular course in European fairy tales and folklore. Linda was a star attraction for undergraduate and graduate students, who loved her energetic and innovative teaching style. She won The Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence in 1991. Of her many accomplishments and awards and stellar teaching evaluations, one colleague said that Linda seemed to be everywhere at once. She took a genuine interest in her students and after two class sessions knew the name of every student. Even in her larger classes such as European Fairy Tales, she made it a point to learn the names of every student. The UK class rosters provided students' names and their pictures, so Linda was able to personally interact with students even in a class of 200. "Linda's office door was always open for students, faculty and staff who needed her advice or simply a shoulder to lean on," said her German department colleague and lifelong friend Jeannine Blackwell. Her students regarded her as a great teacher and role model. "Her students over the years regarded Linda as a transformative teacher and mentor who filled the room with intellectual verve and witty humor," said Vanessa Plumly, a former student who is now an assistant professor of German at Lawrence University. "She always radiated kindness and compassion and treated students as family." In addition to teaching, she wrote and published articles on German and Austrian writers. One of the privileges of her life, she stated, was to be part of a group of feminist scholars researching the work of such disregarded women writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, as Louise von Francois and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach. Linda became director of Graduate Studies in the department, presented professional papers at conferences in the United States and in Germany, led close to 100 workshops and gave talks to various organizations about teaching and learning styles. She was proudest of her work with Professor Lou Swift, co-founding and developing the UK Teaching and Learning Center. As its first director, she and her staff helped dozens of faculty and graduate students hone their teaching and leadership skills. Linda also loved traveling to other countries and experiencing new people and cultures. In their eight years together living in Nuremberg and teaching with Maryland's European Division, Jeff and Linda visited many European countries. The Greek island of Samos was a favorite vacation spot; she and Jeff enjoyed spending time with friends Chuck and Ruth Vergara and Craig and Monika Anderson in the village of Kokkari. Linda also loved swimming, snorkeling and hiking in the woods. In 2004 she bought a cabin near Cave Run Lake, where they enjoyed making a new set of friends and spending time with Jack and Nancy Furlong, another Lexington couple, whose cabin was downhill from the Worleys'. Nearing retirement, Linda got word that Lexington was now home to a group of Rwandan women refugees who were eager to learn English. Although she didn't know one word of their native language (Kinyarwanda), she managed to teach them some basic English by using pictures and by "acting out," as she called it. After eight months with this group, she took them on a field trip to Lexington's Farmer's Market, where the women were able to buy fruits and vegetable s— in English. One consistency in Linda's life was taking a genuine interest in everyone she met, from famous scholars to workers at local businesses to neighbors in the Mentelle area of Lexington, where she and Jeff lived. Linda is survived by her husband, Jeff, of Lexington; her brother, John, of Atlanta; two brothers-in-law — Michael Worley of Lexington and Steve Worley of Wichita; a sister-in-law, Joyce Rogers of Tampa; and her beloved and spoiled cats, Annie and Worley. A celebration of Linda's life will take place this fall at Lexington's Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. In lieu of flowers, people may consider donating to the International Book Project, The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning or a local pet shelter. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Obituary, Kentucky University Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available https://www.as.uky.edu/memoriam-dr-linda-kraus-worley Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Viktorija Bilic Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource jpeg Type The nature or genre of the resource Still Image