By Elizabeth Covington
May 2025
As part of an international celebration of its one-hundredth anniversary, the German Academic Exchange Service or DAAD (head office Bonn, Germany) invited members of its nineteen-funded centers around the world to Porto Alegre, Brazil for a week-long conference. The DAAD is a publically-funded independent organization sponsored by the German government, which has funded 1.9 million scholars since its creation in 1925.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has hosted a DAAD Center of Excellence, the Center for German & European Studies, since 1998. For this Tenth Interdisciplinary Conference of the DAAD-funded Centers, Professor and CGES Director Sonja Klocke and her graduate student Cassandra Winkelmann presented panels. Dr. Elizabeth Covington participated in the closing ceremony for “Belonging in a Globalised World,” held at the only Brazilian DAAD-funded Center known colloquially as PUC (the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul). Students competed for poster awards, and then joined more senior academics to present papers on Germany’s responses to global disequilibrium, to the end of German post-war exceptionalism, to the cultural responses of German heritage groups to living in Brazil, etc.
The range of paper topics displayed the remarkable global nature of German linguistic influence, scholarship, diplomacy and literary production. Thanks must be given to the DAAD’s Tabea Kaiser among others, and our local hosts Professors Claudia Lima Marques and Draiton Gonzaga de Souza, all of whom made this an important and memorable event for global linkages.