Associate Professor Linda Tyler will be speaking about New Zealand artists living and working in Berlin, including Simon Denny, who will be representing New Zealand at the 2015 Venice Biennale. 

Linda Tyler is Director of the Centre for Art Research at The University of Auckland. She administers the university's Art Collection, runs programmes and exhibitions at the Gus Fisher Gallery, and also manages digital and on-site exhibitions under the auspices of the Window project.  Linda Tyler also teaches at the Elam School of Fine Arts.  In 2011 she was the Robert Lord Fellow at the University of Otago, researching the art and science of nineteenth century botanist and draughtsman to the Colonial Museum and Geological Survey, John Buchanan FLS (1819-1898).  Her MA thesis at the University of Canterbury in Art History was on the New Zealand work of Austrian architect Ernst Plischke (1903-1992). 

Dr Anna Bauer, DAAD lecturer in German at the University of Auckland, will be talking about where the brothers Grimm collected the fairy tales many of us know and love, and how landmarks from the region have left their imprint on the tales.

Anna Bauer was born in Kassel and raised in Rengershausen, the village where one of the Grimm brothers' main fairy tale informants lived: Dorothea Viehmann. Having grown up with lots of fairy tale lore, Anna now teaches language acquisition and linguistics, as well as being the study and scholarship advisor for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

The presentation will be in the Pat Hanan Room (Room 501), Arts 2 Building, University of Auckland City Campus.

James Bade, Goethe Society President from 2000 to 2012, is Professor of German and Director of the Research Centre for Germanic Connections with New Zealand and the Pacific at the University of Auckland.  

He will be speaking on the German presence in the Pacific, one of his main research areas over the last 20 years, with particular reference to Tonga and the eight-year collaborative research project which culminated in the launch of his book Germans in Tonga in Nuku’alofa last June.

The presentation will be in Room 501 (Pat Hannan Room) in the Arts 2 Building, University of Auckland City Campus.

Professor Richard Gray is Professor of Germanics and Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington Seattle. He is a world authority on nineteenth and twentieth century German literature and is an internationally renowned authority on the writings of Franz Kafka. 

Professor Gray's presentation will focus on the Holocaust novels of W. G. Sebald. It will be in Room 501 (Pat Hannan Room) in the Arts 2 Building, University of Auckland City Campus.

Professor Sabine Wilke, Chair of the Department of Germanics at the University of Washington Seattle (one of the leading Departments of German Language and Literature in North America), is an internationally renowned specialist in German colonialism who has published extensively on the German connection with the South Pacific, from Georg Forster’s eighteenth century perspective on the South Pacific gleaned from his role as a naturalist on Captain Cook’s explorations, to the 4,000 enquiries from Germans wanting to emigrate to Tonga after a visit by the King of Tonga in 1979. 

Professor Wilke's presentation to the Goethe Society will focus on the famous Prussian geographer, naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. The presentation will be in Room 501 (Pat Hannan Room) in the Arts 2 Building, University of Auckland City Campus.