Undergraduate Conference in German Studies. Experiences of an Institutional Collaboration
by Heikki Lempa, Moravian College
In March 2011, Moravian College and Lafayette College, two small liberal arts colleges from Eastern Pennsylvania, organized an undergraduate conference in German Studies. The second conference took place on March 24, 2012 and the third on April 6, 2013. For the most recent conferences we accepted 24 papers out of 30 applications from 11 institutions mainly from Pennsylvania but also institutions from Texas, Michigan, Ohio, and Virginia. The organizers were Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger from Lafayette College, Axel Hildebrandt from Moravian College and I, also from Moravian College.
The conferences have challenged us to move beyond the customary boundaries of teaching German language, culture, politics, philosophy, music, and arts. In this first blog I will point out how we have started to understand undergraduate research and become aware of the many ways these conferences impact the lives of individual students, faculty members, and institutions. In the second blog I will discuss how these conferences can have a sustained impact on regional resources for the study of German language and culture by enhancing networking and how they can even help keeping German Studies alive nationwide.
The idea of an undergraduate conference in German Studies was not to foster a narrowly defined concept of undergraduate research. As Todd Heidt has pointed out, we in the humanities have to be somewhat creative and broad in our understanding of the concept. We therefore opened the field to proposals for all students from freshmen to seniors who had written an essay or a research paper related to German literature, culture or politics. At our first conference most of the papers were in German literature but some were delivered by history and political science students. To my surprise a fairly large number of papers were given in German. Since the students were struggling with the language the papers were often descriptive and topically confined to an author and were only seldom driven by a thesis. As a result we changed the proposal requirements for the second conference. There had to be an abstract including a thesis and a bibliography. Now most papers were thesis driven and an increasing number had a good discussion of scholarship. I would still like to see more papers that understand their topics as contested fields of scholarly interpretations.
For me the most important lesson of these three first conferences has been the new working definition of undergraduate research. At its most elementary level, starting from a freshman seminar, research is a thesis-driven activity that explores a topic as a contested field of scholarly interpretations. I think that the fundamental meaning of a simple thesis has come to us as a surprise — after all these years — and perhaps not least because of disciplinary differences in understanding it. This, once again, has started to change the ways we teach our introductory courses —and not only in German literature but in other disciplines as well. Undergraduate research, once it becomes more widely practiced, might have its most profound impact at the introductory level and not at senior seminars or honors thesis.
Undergraduate Research in German & European Studies 