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A prominent German scholar is coming to the University to further his work in the area of Aboriginal literature. Dr. Hartmut Lutz, professor of English and American Studies at the University of Greifswald in Germany, has been awarded this year’s prestigious Killam Visiting Scholarship. He will be housed in our department and work with colleagues in English on Aboriginal Literature and with colleagues in German on the German fascination with aboriginal culture in North America. In 2003 Professor Lutz was the recipient of the John F. Diefenbaker award by the Canada Council of the Arts.

The Killam Visiting Scholar award is made possible through special Endowment funds provided by the Killam Trust. Our university only hosts one Killam Visiting Research Scholar per academic year.

GSEA is happy to announce that Dr. Wei Cai was promoted to associate professor on 1 April 2011, Dr. Sandra Hoenle received tenure on 1 July 2011, Dr. Shu-ning Sciban and Dr. Florentine Strzelczyk are full professors as of 1 April 2012. Congratulations to all of them!

Current projects

Dr. Wei Cai's recent research focuses on the contributions of phonological awareness, morphological awareness and metacognition to second language listening comprehension, as well as the relationships among different dimensions of lexical knowledge and skills engaged in second listening comprehension.

Dr. Sandra Hoenle is investigating the potential benefits and drawbacks of using the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages in university curriculum and course planning.

Dr. Shu-ning Sciban is working on Wang Wenxing's rhetoric of Chinese characters. Her project analyzes the characters that Wang “misuses” and creates in his first novel entitled Family Catastrophe.

Dr. Florentine Strzelczyk's project Colonial Cravings: German Popular Imagination and the Fictional Charting of Canada, 1918 to 1945 is about the discursive formation of Canada in German texts – a set of powerful and tantalizing cultural representations of “cravings” for colonial influence that German reality denied. Emerging in the early 20^th century, German colonial fantasies and fears were played out in literary, cultural imaginings that suggested Canada as a place that, unlike “Amerika,” could still be “had”– if only in fiction. The elements of these colonial cravings are still potent in German culture today and have also reverberated in Canadian popular and artistic accounts.