Photo copyright: Anna Breit
The Faculty is delighted to announce that the Undergraduate Conference in German Studies will take place this Friday and Saturday, March 1st and 2nd, with German Studies undergraduates and sixth form students of German due to attend.
Every year, the German Section at the University of Cambridge hosts a conference for undergraduate and school students in German from the UK, Ireland and beyond. The Conference foregrounds a theme that is particularly relevant at the time, both in the political and literary scenes, and invites speakers to present their current research projects from this angle. In 2024, the topic is “Fact and Fiction”, which remains central for those working with language and literature, but is perhaps even more topical today, as artificial intelligence reorganises our epistemic practices and fake news easily sweeps the globe and political sphere.
The programme invites attendees to think about and experience these issues from a variety of perspectives and in different forms. From mediaeval history to projections of the future, our perception of places, people and world events exists within a complex network of facts and fictions. The binary opposition of fact and fiction is often blurred in instances of expectation vs. reality, accounts and reports or technological interpretation of human experiences. Interrogating such instances and what causes them can help us understand more about the world we perceive.
The paper and poster presentations from our undergraduate delegates will be accompanied by a varied and rich programme of workshops and other sessions focusing on Fact and Fiction from medieval to the present and beyond. We are thrilled to be welcoming Tonio Schachinger, the winner of the German Book Prize for his novel 'Echtzeitalter', to give a keynote address. There will be interactive workshops with the Deutsche Welle Fact-Checking Team, as well as a CPD session for teachers on using AI in MFL teaching. The Conference will also offer opportunities to discover more of Cambridge and the University with tours of Queen’s College, Gonville and Caius College or Emmanuel College.
The Committee is delighted to welcome so many German enthusiasts from all over the country for what promises to be a memorable weekend. We hope you will find the Conference an engaging environment of intellectual exchange as well as an opportunity to meet others with shared interests learning German. Viel Spaß!
