Deutsches Haus at NYU will proudly award the ninth annual Volkmar and Margret Sander Prize to Dr. Sabine von Mering, the director of the Center for German and European Studies (CGES) and Professor of German and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. Dr. Sultan Doughan will hold the laudatory speech in honor of Sabine von Mering. Remarks will also be provided by the Friends of Volkmar and Margret Sander.
A musical performance by the singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Uta Habbig will conclude the award ceremony.
Attendance:
This event will take place at 42 Washington Mews. This semester, based on NYU's guidelines, in-person events will be open to members of the general public.
Attendance instructions for NYU faculty, students and staff: Please show your NYU Violet Go Pass at the door.
Attendance instructions for members of the general public: According to new university guidelines, all visitors must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 (including a booster, if eligible); however, visitors no longer have to present proof of vaccination at the door. Please be prepared to present proof of compliance with NYU's COVID-19 vaccination requirements if asked to do so. You can read more about this new policy here. Please RSVP for the event using the link above.
About the award recipient:
Sabine von Mering, Ph.D., is director of the Center for German and European Studies (CGES) and Professor of German and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University, where she teaches courses in German Language and Culture, European Perspectives on Climate Change, and Antisemitism on Social Media. She is a member of the core faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, a member of the program faculty in the Environmental Studies Program and an affiliate with the Minor in Creative Arts for Social Transformation (CAST). She is currently working on a Handbook of Global Climate Activism. Her English translation of Luisa Neubauer and Alexander Repenning’s Beginning to End the Climate Crisis. A History of Our Future will be published with Brandeis University Press in 2023. She recently co-edited Antisemitism on Social Media (Routledge, 2022). Her previous co-edited volumes are Right-Wing Radicalism Today: Perspectives from Europe and the U.S. (Routledge, 2013), as well as Russian-Jewish Emigration after the Cold War: Perspectives from Germany, Israel, Canada, and the United States (2006) and International Green Politics (2002). As Director of the Center for German and European Studies she organizes lectures, conferences, and cultural events in the interest of promoting transatlantic dialogue, and hosts the popular CGES Online webinar series. Professor von Mering is a local affiliate with the Minda deGunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and a longtime climate activist with 350Mass.
About the laudator:
Sultan Doughan is the Dr. Thomas Zand Visiting Assistant Professor in Holocaust Pedagogy and Antisemitism Studies at Clark University. She received her M.A. (2009) from Freie Universitat Berlin and her Ph.D. (2018) from the University of California-Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at Clark University in 2021, she held a position as a postdoctoral associate at the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies at Boston University. Prof. Doughan is a political anthropologist with a research focus on contemporary Holocaust education, antisemitism, racism and racialization, Middle Eastern migration and diaspora, gendered religious difference, Muslims and Jews, secularism and nationalism in Western European liberal democracies. Her primary research sites have been civic education projects in immigrant neighborhoods, schools and neighborhood organizations across Berlin, Germany. More broadly, she is interested in how pedagogical practices intervene in state-citizen relations by affectively reshaping a relation to the Holocaust past, the figure of the Jew and forms of comporting, expressing and experiencing oneself consistent with the ideal of citizenship. She offers courses on memorialization, memory, political violence and human rights as well as pedagogical practices in Holocaust, genocide and tolerance education after violent events and ongoing structural violence. She is currently preparing a new course on “Antisemitism in a Global Context” where she examines the historical emergences, social formations and political effects of antisemitism and its combat in Europe, the Middle East, and the US. Her courses are interdisciplinary, but take an anthropological approach by focusing on human interaction, ritualized practice, personhood, political subjectivity and social relations. Her book project, Converting Citizens: German Secularism and the Politics of Holocaust Memory, examines the practice of citizenship in relation to history. As in most Western European countries in the last decades, citizenship is understood through the notion of tolerance organized in opposition to religion, particularly to traditional Islam. As a consequence, EU governments emphasize European values through national history for purposes of social integration. In the context of Germany, this national history centers the Holocaust and antisemitism by exhibiting the fate of European Jewry. The book centers the experience of Middle Eastern civic educators. They are employed for being role-model integrated Muslims and who can carry acceptable notions of citizenship into the public and their own communities in a time of increased securitization of Muslims as a religious and migrant community. The book brings back the minority question in order to conceptualize the various ways in which Muslims have to convert (assimilate, integrate, reform, re-learn) into German secularism. While secularism constitutes the larger backdrop of the book, she specifically discusses how fundamental and human rights to religious freedom and freedom of speech are not simply granted with regards to Middle Eastern communities but given out as tasks to change into a secular-liberal Muslim selfhood: a German Muslim.
About the musical performer:
Praised as “an exquisite vocalist with an extraordinary artistic versatility” (WDR 3) New York-based, German born musician Uta Habbig has intrigued audiences in Europe and the U.S. with her endearing and colorful sound. Centered on captivating vocal presence and authentic expression, the singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist asserts herself most through distinctive combinations of musical styles, intertwining folk, jazz, classical and even R&B. Uta Habbig’s latest album is "Songs From The Lighthouse" (2020).
About the prize:
The Volkmar and Margret Sander Prize was established by Professor Margret Sander in memory of her late husband, Professor Volkmar Sander, former head of the German Department of NYU and founder and first director of Deutsches Haus at NYU, who passed away in 2011. The prize - which was awarded for the first time in 2013 to the late Dr. Fritz Stern and, in the following year, to Dr. Gary Smith, to Dr. Lya Friedrich Pfeifer in 2015; to Dr. Claus Leggewie in 2016; to Karsten Voigt in 2017; to Dr. Henry Jarecki in 2018, to Dr. Susan Nieman in 2019, and to Dr. Heinz Ickstadt in 2021 - is awarded annually in the fall and is endowed with a $5000 grant, kindly donated by Margret Sander, and honors individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the cultural, political, and academic relationship between the German-speaking world and the United States.