Upcoming Conference Sessions and Calls for Paper

CfP: GSA Conference 2026, Phoenix, AZ (Sept. 24–27, 2026):
Heine’s Afterlives: Appropriations, Misreadings, and Cultural Memory
(sponsored by the North American Heine Society)

Heinrich Heine is not only a major nineteenth-century poet, but he is also a recurring event in German cultural memory. Quoted, edited, musicalized, monumentalized, taught, and sometimes suppressed, Heine has been continuously remade to serve competing narratives about German history, modernity, and belonging. This panel invites papers that track Heine’s “afterlives”: the appropriations, strategic misreadings, and institutional framings through which Heine has been remembered (or made forgettable) across changing political regimes, media forms, and publics.

Rather than treating reception as secondary to the texts themselves, the panel foregrounds reception as a site of cultural production: how Heine’s tone, Jewishness, cosmopolitanism, erotic lyricism, and political satire are selectively amplified or neutralized. We are especially interested in how Heine becomes a lyric usable object as he circulates through the machinery of canon and commemoration (anthologies and school curricula, monuments and naming practices, translation traditions, performance histories, and quotation culture), where the border between admiration and domestication is rarely stable. What versions of Heine become legible at different historical moments, and what gets cut, softened, or rewritten in the process? How do media formats (the Lied, the edition, the commemorative plaque, the classroom excerpt, quotation culture including digital circulation) reshape his politics and his voice?

We welcome contributions from literary studies, memory studies, intellectual history, Jewish studies, media history, translation studies, music/performance studies, and reception history. Reception is where politics happens, especially when Heine is made teachable, singable, and quotable. Taken together, the panel aims to show that Heine’s legacy is not a settled inheritance, but an ongoing struggle over what counts as “German” cultural memory, and who is allowed to inhabit it.

Please send 150-200-word abstracts by February 28, 2026 to Alicia Ellis (aeellis@colby.edu) and Tracie Matysik (matysik@austin.utexas.edu).

Collected Volume on Heinrich Heine and Translation

Heinrich Heine’s oeuvre and reception raise important questions about the poetics and ethics of translation. Notable US poets, for example, have translated his well-known early poetry with very different motivations, including situating it in his biography as a German Jew (Emma Lazarus), reflecting his lyrical refinement (Ezra Pound), and radically communicating the ambiguities of his poems through homophonic translation (Charles Bernstein). Additionally, modern Hebrew poets (Nathan Alterman) and Jewish translators balanced their love of Heine with his apostasy and Germanness after the Shoah. Heine’s sprawling oeuvre, comprising poetry, essays, journalism, and voluminous correspondence, also begs the question of how much of a writer’s work must be translated, a question Charles Godfrey Leland repeatedly raises in his twenty-volume nineteenth-century translation of Heine’s works, which remains the most complete English translation to date. Moreover, Heine’s regular use of untranslated words and sentences from other languages (including French, English, Latin, and Hebrew) suggests he imagined his German as polyphonous and energized by the tension of translatability and untranslatability.

We are soliciting chapter proposals in a collected volume addressing these and other issues related to Heine and translation.   

Chapter abstracts may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Heine’s reflections on translation and his reception of specific translations (Shakespeare, Cervantes, etc.)
• Heine’s practices of translation in a broad sense including his literary, philosophical, and political mediation between Germany and France
• Multilingualism in Heine’s writing
• Important moments in Heine’s international reception
• Poet-translators and Heine (Emma Lazarus, Mark Twain, Gérard de Nerval, Mikhail Lermontov, etc.)
• Case studies of translations of Heine’s best-known writings and comparative readings of translations of a single Heine text
• Interpretations of Heine in other media (music, illustration)
• Lives of Heine’s translators

Abigail Gillman (agillman@bu.edu) and Michael Swellander (mswellander@skidmore.edu).

 

Past Conferences

MLA Convention 2026: Heine and His Contemporaries’ Bestiaries of Family Resemblances

Presider

Jonathan Skolnik (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

Presentations

Willi Goetschel (University of Toronto): Heine’s Bestiary of Family Resemblances
Andrew Warren (Toronto): Unwanted Relations: Heine’s Influence on Wagner’s Die Meistersinger

 

GSA Conference 2025: Current Refractions of Heine

Moderator

Agnes Mueller (University of South Carolina)

Presentations

Azade Seyhan (Bryn Mawr College): Negotiating Oratory and Poetry in Heine’s Aesthetic
Sebastian Wogenstein (University of Connecticut): Back to the Future: Heine in the Twenty-First Century
Tracie Matysik (University of Texas at Austin): Yoko Tawada and Heinrich Heine on Nonhuman Animals, Rights, and Translation

Commentator

Jonathan Skolnik (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

 

MLA Convention 2025: Heinrich Heine and Literary Identity

Presider

Willi Goetschel (University of Toronto)

Presentations

Willi Goetschel (University of Toronto): Heine's Literary Identity
Mark H. Gelber (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev): Jewish Lexical Items in Heine’s Late Poems and Writings and His Place in Jewish Literary History
Adi Nester (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill): Poetry and Deintegration: The Temporality of Jewish Difference in Heinrich Heine and Max Czollek

 

GSA Conference 2024: New Work on Heinrich Heine

Moderator

Jeffrey Grossman (University of Virginia)

Presentations

Madeline Zimring (University of California, Berkeley): The Stakes of the Razor: Irony and Mimesis in the Political Writings of Heinrich Heine
Raymond Blankenhorn (New York University): The Jewish Aristophanes: Comedy in Heinrich Heine’s Der Rabbi von
Bacherach

Commentator

Michael Swellander (Skidmore College)

 

MLA Convention 2024: Heine between Hegel and Marx 

Presider

Tracie Matysik (University of Texas, Austin)

Presentations

Colby Chubbs (University of Toronto): Heine as the First Left Hegelian
Jörg Kreienbrock, (Northwestern University): A Right against Rights: Hegel and Heine on the Human Right to Life

Respondent

Tracie Matysik (University of Texas, Austin)

 

GSA Conference 2023: Heine and Translation

Moderator

Na'ama Rokem (University of Chicago)

Presentations

Jocelyn Aksin (University of North Carolina Greensboro): “Es treibt dich fort von Ort zu Ort”: Tracing the Footsteps of Heine in Turkish
Abigail Gillman (Boston University): Heine’s Fichtenbaum in a Grove of Oranim: Towards a History of Heine’s Poems in Hebrew
Michael Swellander (Skidmore College): Logopoeia: Reading Heine with Ezra Pound
Paul Peters (McGill University): Heine In and Beyond Translation

Commentator

Jeffrey Grossman (University of Virginia)

 

MLA Convention 2023: Heine and the Diasporic Experience

Presider

Alicia Ellis, Colby College

Presentations

Linda Maeding (University of Bremen): 1492; or, The Emergence of a Diasporic Utopian Thinking in Heine
Willi Goetschel (University of Toronto): Heine’s Diasporic Modernity
Alicia E. Ellis (Colby College): Slavery, History, and Seascapes: Heine’s ‘Das Sklavenschiff’ and Walcott’s ‘The Sea Is History’
Arianna Amatruda (University of Florence): Diasporic Bodies in Heine’s Oeuvre: The Case of Pomare

 

Heinrich Heine und die Menschenrechte. Internationale wissenschaftliche Konferenz zum 225. Geburtstag Heinrich Heines

Heinrich-Heine-Institut, Heinrich-Heine-Gesellschaft e.V. und North American Heine Society, Düsseldorf, 18. und 19. November 2022

Sabine Brenner-Wilczek (Heinrich-Heine-Institut Düsseldorf), Willi Goetschel (University of Toronto): Begrüßung
Christoph auf der Horst (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf): Heinrich Heines Kampf für die Menschenrechte. Konstruktivität und Solidarität
Arnd Pollmann (Alice Salomon Hochschule Berlin): "Der Gedanke geht der Tat voraus". Inwiefern gab es zu Heines Zeit Menschenrechte?
Tracie Matysik (University of Texas at Austin): Ursus sacer: Sovereignty and Bear Life in "Atta Troll"
Christine Ivanovic (Universität Wien / Freie Universität Berlin): Zur Aktualität von Heinrich Heines "Atta Troll"
Helge Dedek (McGill University): "Eine Bibel des Egoismus" - Heine, Recht und Rechte
Christian Liedtke (Heinrich-Heine-Institut Düsseldorf): "...und es war ein Mensch." Menschenrechtsverletzungen in Heines Werk
Sebastian Wogenstein (University of Connecticut): Vom Recht auf Brot. Sozioökonomische Rechte als Menschenrechte bei Heine
Willi Goetschel (University of Toronto): Heine und die Menschenrechte: Eine verborgene Tradition

 

MLA Convention 2022: Heinrich Heine and Human Rights

Presider

Alicia Ellis (Colby College)

Presentations

Claudia Nitschke (Durham University, UK): Embodying Human Rights: Heine’s Atta Troll
Christoph auf der Horst (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf): Heine’s Struggle for Human Rights: Writing in the Spirit of Solidarity
Willi Goetschel (University of Toronto): Poetic Justice: Heine’s Critique of the Limitations of Human Rights
Helge Dedek (McGill University): ‘A Bible of Egoism’: Heine, ‘Human Rights’, and Law
Sebastian Wogenstein (University of Connecticut): Lege artis: Heine and Human Rights

 

MLA Convention 2021: World Literature Otherwise: Heine's Opening Gambits

Presider

Willi Goetschel (University of Toronto)

Presentations

Azade Seyhan (Bryn Mawr College): Searching for Heinrich Heine in the World Literary Domain 
Chloe Vaughn (Columbia University): Invented Worlds: Heine and Herder between National and World Literature
Barbara Di Noi (University of Florence): Heine's Subversive Notion of Weltliteratur (World Literature)
Michael Swellander (University of Iowa): ‘Yes, He Was a Mighty Poet’: Heine’s ‘Jehuda Ben Halevy’ and World Literature
Christoph auf der Horst (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf): Heinrich Heine and the Persistence of His Concept of World Literature

Contact

If you would like to notify the membership of a Heine-related call for papers and would like it posted on this website, please email  Sebastian Wogenstein (wogenstein@uconn.edu).