North Kingstown High School comes to campus!

What a day! Last Friday (November 15, 2024), 23 students and their German teacher, Herr Zahren, from North Kingstown High School visited the German Section of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures for Kafka on Campus, part of our German Embassy-funded Kafka Weeks program. After a campus tour and an information session about the groundbreaking International Engineering Program (IEP) here at URI (a double undergraduate degree in both Engineering (BSc) and a language (BA)!), and the range of languages one can choose from here, students visited the Language Center in Swan Hall for the German segment of the morning.

Working together in small groups at various stations, students participated in a variety of thematic games and creative tasks through which they learned about German-language writer Franz Kafka, his works, and the period in which he lived. Faculty, intern Marie Huebler, undergraduates of German, and students from Germany alike led the different stations and guided the High School students through the various tasks which were specially designed for the day by Marie and Professor Claire Ross. Sometimes they drew, sometimes they rolled the dice, but they always laughed heartily.

The station in the foyer of Swan Hall, where students got to visit an exhibition of multilingual Kafka-inspired comics and pose for photos as Kafka’s fictional character, Gregor Samsa - the man who wakes up as a giant bug - was particularly impressive! The Kafka Comics exhibition will remain open to URI students until November 22 (and you can even be entered into a prize draw by voting for the most Kafkaesque comic here!).

Kafkaesque may have been the theme of the day, but the mood of all those present was cheerful throughout - especially after the students received the awesome goody bags designed by our Max Kade Visiting Professor, Evi Petropoulou. In addition to a few snacks, the goody bags contained Kafka stickers, the book Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) by Kafka, and many more prizes generously donated by the German Embassy in Washington DC and the German Consulate General in Boston.

The students had a lot of fun and gave us positive feedback throughout the morning. They even said they will consider applying for the IEP program at URI, reading more works by Franz Kafka, and immersing themselves deeper in the “Kafkaesque world.”

It was a very exciting first week and we are already looking forward to next week! At 4pm on Wednesday November 20, Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor Evi Petropoulou will deliver a public lecture entitled “‘Out of Joint’: Poetics of Uncertainty - Exploring the Kafkaesque”, followed by a reception, at the Hardge Forum, Multicultural Center. Register here! Kafka Weeks will conclude with a faculty-led undergraduate trip to NYC to visit the Kafka exhibition at the Morgan Library.

- written by Marie Huebler (German Section intern)