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The Max Kade Foundation has awarded a $65,000 grant that will fund renovations to provide a technologically advanced headquarters for the study of German at Lafayette.
Improvements will be made this summer to transform Pardee Hall room 429 into the Max Kade Center for German Studies. Enhancements for the “SMART classroom” will include new computer equipment, projection capabilities, moveable walls, “smart” lighting, wooden paneling, high-end window treatments, and other upgrades.
“We’ll be installing the latest in projection and control system technology,” says John O’Keefe, instructional technologist.
Controlled by an advanced touch screen feature, the projection system will present media such as DVD, videocassette, computer presentations designed with software such as PowerPoint, and the Internet. It includes a camera that projects anything ranging from documents to three-dimensional objects. The camera technology is used by the geology department, for example, to show a rock sample to an entire class, and by the math department to display notes and graphs.
The removable walls will allow for space within the Max Kade Center to be manipulated for different uses, including classes, small seminars, and evening presentations.
Hans Hachmann, director of the Max Kade Foundation, which is providing the grant, visited Lafayette in the spring to discuss specifics and meet with faculty and students. Hachmann spoke favorably about providing another grant that would bring a German-speaking writer, artist or scholar to campus each year, notes Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, assistant head and associate professor of foreign languages and literatures.
In another significant step forward for German studies at Lafayette, the department of foreign languages and literatures and the University for Applied Sciences in Zittau/Görlitz have established a paid summer internship program in Germany for Lafayette students.
The first participants are Peter Totev ’04, a civil engineering major from Oberursel, Germany, who is working for Bombadier Transport, a company that builds locomotives and trains, and Gretel Raibeck ’03, a chemical engineering major from Albrightsville, Pa., who is working for FIT, a soap and detergent manufacturer.
Both students are minoring in German. Totev recently was inducted into Delta Pi Alpha, the German honor society.
Totev has worked as an EXCEL Scholar with Ed Saliklis, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, on a study of the Pennsylvania Skating Club Arena near Ardmore, Pa., which was designed by Antod Tedesko using his revolutionary, and yet no longer popular, thin-shell concrete method. In EXCEL, students work closely with faculty on research while earning a stipend. A program director at campus radio station WJRH, Totev is a member of the International Affairs Club and the Lafayette team that came within one point of winning a regional championship in the 2002 National Concrete Canoe Competition this spring.
During the January interim session and spring semester, Raibeck worked on two computer-simulation projects as an EXCEL Scholar with Kenneth Haug, assistant professor of chemistry. The work could help scientists understand the biology that keeps human hearts beating regularly and have applications in the manufacture of semiconductor and magnetic devices. She also participated in Lafayette’s alumni externship program in January, shadowing Richard Coleman ’71, an environmental chemist at Hawk Mountain Labs, West Hazleton, Pa., an independent laboratory specializing in a variety of environmental testing and related services. Raibeck worked two summers ago on an environmental management system for Blue Ridge Pressure Castings, Lehighton, Pa.. She is a WJRH program director, a sister in Alpha Gamma Delta sorority, and a member of the student chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. She plays trumpet in the Pep Band as well.
Jutta Blin, vice president of the University for Applied Sciences, has expressed interest in enhancing the Lafayette internship program next year with a study component at the university. Lamb-Faffelberger made contact with the institution through Lafayette’s three-week interdisciplinary course, “Green Europe,” held last year during the May interim session. She and Javad Tavakoli, professor and head of chemical engineering, traveled to the region and also south to the Austrian Alps and to Vienna with nine Lafayette students.
Der Standard, an Austrian national daily newspaper, reported on the course, which covers the recent environmental movement in Europe and initiatives that the European Union has taken toward the goal of a sustainable Europe in the third millennium. The focus is on renewable energy sources and how European countries are incorporating them into their energy grids. Technical, social, and environmental benefits and drawbacks of renewable alternatives are examined.
“For the nine students, the extremes of Austria’s landscapes – from the rocky 10,000 ft. peaks of the Alps with their glaciers and pristine mountain lakes to the Puszta of the Hungarian flatlands and Lake Neusiedler — left powerful impressions,” the newspaper reported. “In Vienna, representatives of the Vienna Woods forest service guided them through the 250-year-old Lainzer Park to the Jubiläumswarte from where they could overlook the entire city and see Hungary and Slovakia at the horizon to the east and the Czech Republic to the north
“The students had the opportunity to engage in discussions and conversations with many experts who are not available to the everyday tourist. The success of the course is attributed to the two professors who created this course, namely Javad Tavakoli, a chemical engineering professor, and Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, a German professor. Both used their many professional and personal connections to provide their students with access to Austrian and German environmental experts.
“‘This course is only a drop in the big ocean,’ asserts Adienne Needham ’02 enthusiastically, ‘but even a drop can create ripples.'”
Lamb-Faffelberger also has attracted the attention of Austria’s government and media through her work. The professor accepted an invitation by Austria Secretary of Education Elisabeth Gehrer to join a “think tank” focusing on sweeping reforms of the country’s university system.
“The secretary and her ministry are particularly interested in the Lafayette faculty’s strong relationship with students, our advising and mentoring programs, and our EXCEL Scholars program, as well as our special relationship with alumni and our success in raising funds for the institution,” says Lamb-Faffelberger.
In January, the German newspaper Sachsiche Zeitung featured Lamb-Faffelberger in an article on her study of socio-cultural development and the search for identity in the Euroregion Neisse, a region that stretches across parts of Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic. A third of the area is within the European Union (the German side along the west bank of the river Neisse) and the rest (Poland in the east and the Czech Republic in the south) lies on the other side of the Schengener outer border between the European Union and the Eastern European countries – members of NATO but not of the EU.
“Having grown up in the border region of Austria’s Waldviertel along the Czech Republic – a region that once was at the center of the Habsburg Empire but was divided by the Iron Curtain after WWII – Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger brings a particular sensitivity toward the need for enhanced crossborder relations to her project,” stated Sachsiche Zeitung. “She studies the written word as it was and still is used for fostering identity formation, namely literary texts and the media.”
In October, the professor’s commentary, “Für die Würde des menschlichen Lebens” (“For the Dignity and Sanctity of Humanity”), was featered in the tri-lingual journal SODA, a cultural magazine for readers in the Neisse region.
In other work, Lamb-Faffelberger used an Integrating Computing into the Curriculum grant from Lafayette to create materials for the course Contemporary Society in German-Speaking Countries as Reflected in the Media. The project involved four separate software applications for a computer-based enrichment program that students use to improve listening comprehension, assist in vocabulary building, review grammar and spelling, and refine their writing skills.
In October, Lamb-Faffelberger hosted 35 scholars from 11 countries at Lafayette for the sixth Annual Conference of Austrian Literature and Culture, “Visions and Visionaries in Literature and Film of Modern Austria.” She served as one of two co-organizers of the conference.
The professor also was part of a three-person group that in the last academic year formed an international organization exclusively dedicated to the research and teaching of Austrian literature and culture studies. The trio established the constitution and by-laws for the Modern Austrian Literature and Culture Association, which elected its first board members this spring.
Lamb-Faffelberger has actively involved students in her research. Marc Ampaw ’02 of Accra, Ghana, who graduated summa cum laude in May as a double major in International Affairs and economics and business, improved his language skills by helping her translate scholarly articles from German to English. Ampaw translated articles about Austrian theater and culture submitted for two recently published volumes, Post-War Austrian Theater: Text and Performance and Literature, Film and the Culture Industry in Modern Austria.
Lamb-Faffelberger also serves as mentor for students such as Robert Georg Murray ’02 of San Paulo, Brazil, who graduated in May with honors in International Affairs and German. Murray completed a senior thesis on Stefan Zweig and Paul Frischauer, Jewish writers who fled the Nazis during World War II. According to Murray, Lamb-Faffelberger suggested that he examine the life and work of Frischauer, a journalist who gathered information about Nazi influence in southern Brazil for the British Joint Broadcasting Committee (later the BBC) and wrote a biography of Brazil’s then-leader, Presidente Getulio Vargas.
“She helped me incorporate the two worlds that I knew,” says Murray, who speaks both Portuguese and German, and has studied in Vienna, Austria. “She is very experienced with the Austrian writers and literature.”
Lamb-Faffelberger joined the Lafayette faculty in 1992. She holds a Ph.D. from Rice University and master’s from the University of Illinois. Her research interests include 19th and 20th century German literature and culture; modern Austrian literature and film; Austrian theater; feminist and minority discourse; and multi-media for foreign-language teaching.
Lamb-Faffelberger co-edited and wrote an introduction for Modern Austrian Theater: Text and Performance, scheduled for publication by Ariadne Press this year, as well as Out from the Shadows. A Collection of Articles on Austrian Literature and Film by Women since 1945, published by Ariadne in 1997. She also edited Literature, Film, and the Culture Industry in Modern Austria, set for publication this year by Peter Lang.
Lamb-Faffelberger authored the book Valie Export und Elfriede Jelinek im Spiegel der Presse. Zur Rezeption der feministischen Avantgarde Österreichs in the Austrian Culture Series, published by Peter Lang in 1992.
She also has written numerous articles in scholarly journals and other publications, including “Christoph Ransmayr’s The Terrors of Ice and Darkness: Interweaving Fact and Fiction into a Postmodern Narrative,” in Modern Austrian Literature: Interpretations and Insights, published last year by Ariadne Press, and “Aus eigener Sicht: Überlegungen zur Zukunft von Austrian Studies in der amerikanischen Germanistik,” published in German Quarterly last year.
Last year, Lamb-Faffelberger was named general editor of the Austria Culture Series produced by Peter Lang Publishing, N.Y. She was keynote speaker at the “Cultural Identities” lecture series at the University of New Brunswick in March 2001 and at the annual Conference of the Association for German Studies in Southern Africa at the University of Witwatersrand in April 2001. She also spoke on “Issues of Cultural and National Identity: Case Study – Modern Austria” at Syracuse University in February that year.
Lamb-Faffelberger is a past winner of the Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Faculty Lecture Award, established at Lafayette in 1966 to recognize superior teaching and scholarship.
The study of German has a rich tradition at Lafayette. On Christmas Eve in 1824, a advertisement appeared in the Easton Centinel, calling on the citizens of Easton to attend a meeting to initiate establishment of a college “in which, besides military science and tactics, the various branches of education, including the German language, shall be taught” Neither military science nor German was taught at any colleges at that time.
Lafayette’s German instructors – Lamb-Faffelberger, Ed McDonald, professor of foreign languages and literatures, and Rado Pribic, Oliver Edwin Williams Professor of Languages and chair of the International Affairs and Russian and Eastern European Studies programs – teach an average of 50 students each semester. Fifteen to 20 percent of Lafayette students enrolled in German also major in it, and many more declare German as their minor.