Conference Sessions and Calls for Papers
Upcoming Conference Sessions and Calls for Paper
CfP: GSA 2025 Arlington, VA: Current Refractions of Heine
(sponsored by the North American Heine Society)
Heine’s style and voice had formative impact on many of his contemporaries, but the exemplary impulse of his writing continues to inspire. How does Heine figure in today’s current literature, cultural and political discourse in Germany and elsewhere? How do these citations, references, and appropriation work and how are we to understand them? What has been the role of Heine invocations or his occasionally glaring absence since WW2, in the Cold War and after the Wende? How is he read, taught, and interpreted in the 21st century?
Please send 250-word abstracts by March 12 to Tracie Matysik (matysik@austin.utexas.edu) and Willi Goetschel (w.goetschel@utoronto.ca).
CfP: MLA 2026 Toronto, Canada: Heine and His Contemporaries’ Bestiaries of Family Resemblances
(sponsored by the North American Heine Society)
Heine’s prose and poetry presents the reader with a rich and colorful bestiary of family resemblances. They operate as critical foil to highlight contrast as often as they expose hidden similarities: Characters, ideas, cultures, and historical memories hurl through his writings’ pages only to show how certain differences bring out unexpected but deep resemblances. Irreverently attending to such unexpected family resemblances, Heine’s writing creates a humanizing effect recasting sharp forms of differences over seemingly irreducible social, political, ideological, and material divisions as oppressive and repulsive. At the same time, such family resemblances bring home the contingent, insubstantial, and unsustainable character of perceived differences as forms of naturalized social and political arrangements to which we might be subjected but from which the recognition of family resemblances offers the chance to emancipation.
Papers discussing any aspect of family resemblance in Heine and/or his contemporaries (the Young Hegelians, Marx, Engels, Moses Hess etc.) are welcome.
Please send 250-word abstracts by March 15 to Willi Goetschel w.goetschel@utoronto.ca
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).
MLA 2025 New Orleans: Heinrich Heine and Literary Identity
(sponsored by the North American Heine Society)
Heinrich Heine’s body of work has a persistent if eccentric relationship to literary history and literary identity that is most markedly revealed in his late writings. Religion, history, and philosophy emphasize the literary nature of poems like “Vitzliputzli” and “Jehuda Ben Halevy” such that stories, anecdotes, myths, legends, and songs rise to the level of a critical poetics. This panel will explore Heine’s oeuvre as a way to engage with him as a philological writer. Papers that offer examples where Heine writes poetry and prose steeped in literary historical reflection and reimagining are welcome.
Past Conferences
GSA Conference, October 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, January 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)
MLA Convention, January 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, January 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, January 2021: World Literature Otherwise: Heine's Opening Gambits
Presider
Willi Goetschel, University of Toronto
Presentations
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).