What’s Work? Humanistic Approaches to Understanding Work
You might have seen the posters around New North announcing a symposium on humanities approaches to work, coming up October 30 and 31st. The Fritz-Hüser-Institut für Literatur und Kultur der Arbeitswelt (Dortmund, Germany) and the German and English Departments of Georgetown University, D.C., in cooperation with the Georgetown Humanities Initiative, have organized a symposium that will explore the specific knowledge that the humanities provide for an understanding of work. Featured speakers include Sonali Perera, author of No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization ; Sarah Ann Wells, author of
Media Laboratories: Late Modernist Authorship in South America ; and Jasper Bernes, author of The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization .
While social sciences are primarily concerned with structural aspects of work, they rarely focus on its human dimensions. Apart from studies that work with oral history or storytelling methods and narrative interviews in sociology, the social sciences do not take into account subjective narratives of work. The approach of the humanities, and in particular of literary and cultural studies, differs significantly from this approach. While studying structural patterns as well, the humanities deeply engage with the meanings and consequences of work through interpretation of varied artifacts like narratives, novels, poems, films, sculpture and painting, photography, performance, and other artistic expressions. In addition, the humanities can approach narratives of work at the intersection of social, political, medical, psychological and economic perspectives as well as a linguistic and discursive phenomenon.
Additional support for this symposium comes from the Weise Family Fund.
Registration
Please register through this Google form by October 23, 2025. Registrations after this date can be sent directly to german@georgetown.edu.
Location
This event will be held in the Georgetown Humanities Initiative conference room, located on the second floor of the Old North building on the campus of Georgetown University. Directions and accommodation recommendations can be found here.
Symposium Schedule
Thursday, October 30, 2025
9:30 am – 6:00 pm
9:30-10:00 am
Light Breakfast Available
10:00-10:10 am
Welcome by Nicoletta Pireddu, Founding Director, Georgetown Humanities Initiative
10:10-10:30 am
Opening conversation between Iuditha Balint, Sherry Linkon, and Peter C. Pfeiffer on the aims of this conference
10:30-11:15 am
Iuditha Balint introducing Sandor Hites (Research Center for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest), “Toilers of the Nation. Intellectual Labor as Patriotic Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Hungary”
11:15-11:30 am
Coffee Break
11:30 am – 12:45 pm
Panel: 19th Century Discourses chaired by Emilia Endler (Georgetown University)
- Kyra Braham (Lycoming College), “The Promethean Ethic: Work as Worldbuilding in Victorian Literature”
- Isabell A. Meske (Leibniz University Hannover), “’Descending into Dirt’: Smell, Social Order, and the Double Perspective of Class in German Workers Literature”
- Bernhard Stricker (Technische Universität Dresden), “‘Working Time’: Revisioning Protestant Work Ethics in J.P. Hebel’s Almanac“
12:45-1:45 pm
Lunch
1:45-2:30 pm
Kathy M. Newman introducing Sarah Ann Wells (University of Wisconsin, Madison), “Cinema and the Strike: Film-Acts and Screen Encounters”
2:30-2:45 pm
Coffee Break
2:45-4:15 pm
Panel: Representations and Structure chaired by Verena Kick (Georgetown University)
- Hunter Bivens (University of California, Santa Cruz), “Belaboring the ‘50s Construction Novel”
- Joseph Entin (Brooklyn College/CUNY), “Visual Cultures of Living Labor”
- Kathy M. Newman (Carnegie Mellon University), “Defining the Labor Theory of Culture”
- Steffen Siegel (Folkwang University of the Arts Essen), “Having the Shoes Shined: The Work of Photography”
4:15-4:30 pm
Break
4:30-5:15 pm
Steffen Siegel introducing Jasper Bernes (University of California, Berkeley), “Gerd Arntz and the Aesthetics of the Workers’ Council”
Immediately Following:
Light Reception
6:30 pm, Bioethics Research Library
Conference Dinner (invited guests only)
Friday, October 31, 2025
8:30 am – 5:00 pm
8:30-9:00 am
Light Breakfast Available
9:00-9:45 am
Peter C. Pfeiffer introducing Maximilian Bergengrün (Julius–Maximilians–Universität Würzburg), “‘Arbeitslust’: Concepts of Productivity in the Late 19th Century and in Theodor Fontane’s novel Irrungen, Wirrungen“
9:45-10:00 am
Break
10:00-11:15 am
Panel: Not Working, Working Differently chaired by Iuditha Balint (Fritz-Hüser-Institut für Literatur und Kultur der Arbeitswelt, Dortmund)
- Angelica Belloli (G. d’Annunzio University), “Mourning Labour: Late Victorian Culture and the Aesthetic Memory of Work”
- Emira Donlagic (Technische Universität Berlin), “’Lessness’ and the Phantom of Work: Thomas Brasch’s Mercedes as the Endgame of Usefulness”
- Patrick Graur (Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg), “The Notions of Work in German-language Literature of Socialist Romania”
11:15-11:30 am
Coffee Break
11:30 am – 12:45 pm
Panel: The Meanings of Work chaired by Sherry Linkon (Georgetown University)
- Irene Husser (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen), “Busy Doing Nothing: Bullshit Jobs in the Works of Franz Kafka”
- Tim Libretti (Northeastern Illinois University), “The Way We Work: Understanding Work as Mutual Aid and Collective Interdependence from Mister Rogers to Mad Men“
- Marietta Schmutz (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg), “Literary Positions on the Tension Between ‘Rationalisation’ and ‘Humanisation’ of the Working World”
12:45-1:45 pm
Lunch
1:45-2:30 pm
Sherry Linkon introducing Sonali Perera (Hunter College/CUNY), “Languages of Class and States of Indebtedness”
2:30-2:45 pm
Coffee Break
2:45-4:15 pm
Panel: Domestic/Gendered Work chaired by Lori Merish (Georgetown University)
- Erika Capivolla (University of Udine), “Cooking, Working, Performing: Teresa Präauer’s Kochen im falschen Jahrhundert“
- Tonya Krouse (Northern Kentucky University), “Women’s Work: Killing the Angel in the House from Virginia Woolf to Taylor Swift”
- Simon Schoch (New York University), “A Propos of Nothing: The Poetics of Housework Between First- And Second-Wave Feminism”
- Franziska Schweiger (Hamilton College), “Text*ile Subjectivity: Craft, Text, and Critique in Elfriede Jelinek’s Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte oder Stützen der Gesellschaften”