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News from German Studies--scattered around the globe: Twin Cities: Ellis Dye is finishing a book on the Liebestod (love-death) topos in the writings of Goethe. He interprets novels, poems and plays by Goethe (Faust!) and examines the role in culture and cognition of such commonplaces as the Liebestod and other conceptual conventions. He also displays Goethe's novel and virtuosic use of traditional subjects and genres in a way that both highlights the fact of intertextuality (the idea that every text recycles other texts--that we are all recyclers of culture) and demonstrates the breadth, depth and originality that have made Goethe one of the giants of world literature. Linda Schulte-Sasse is finishing an article on Italian film director Dario Argento, who works almost exclusively in the horror genre. Argento has a cult following, but his work has been almost entirely neglected by film scholars. The slippery intellectuality of Argento's films lays a trap: on the one hand they scream for "interpretation"; on the other, they defy interpretation, resisting narrative unity, totalization or graspable "message." After Argento, she'll continue work on aesthetic resistance in the films of German director Detlef Sierck, who became famous in Hollywood as Douglas Sirk, master of melodrama. During Spring/Summer 1999 she taught film at the University of Bonn and in Spring 2003 directed the Macalester German Study Abroad Program. Rachael Huener is working on a manuscript based on her dissertation entitled "Consuming Fictions: Reklamemarken in Wilhelmine Germany," in which she explored the social and commercial mediations of pre-World War I collectible advertising stamps. Summer 2003 she participated as an instructor in workshops for graduate students on computer technology in foreign language education at the Center for Educational Technology at Middlebury College. Last December she presented a paper at the Modern Language Association on German nationalism and Tourism. Brigetta Abel is on the national Steering Committee for the Women in German organization, and attended the annual WiG conference in Rio Rico, Arizona to facilitate both the Steering Committee meeting and business meeting. She attended the Modern Language Association conference in New Orleans, where she presented a paper entitled, "'Heimat in der Fremde': Adrienne Thomas and Identities in Exile" for a panel on Jewish German Women Writers. Vienna, Austria: Gisela Peters is the Spring Semester 2004 Director of the Macalester German Study Abroad Program in Vienna. The group of students studies in Berlin, Germany at the Goethe Institute during January and February, and then moves to Vienna for the remainder of the program which ends in June.