Groos

A conference in honor of Arthur Groos, “Mapping the medieval in German culture and beyond,” will be held Oct. 23-24 in Room 401, Physical Sciences Building. 401. Groos is the Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities in the German studies department in the College of Arts and Sciences.

“The Department of German Studies is organizing this event to celebrate the wonderful contributions of Art Groos’ research and teaching to the worlds of medieval studies and opera,” says Anette Schwarz, associate professor and acting chair of German studies. “Art is a world-renowned scholar who has had an enormous impact on how we read medieval literature and how we interpret opera. He is one of the greatest and most generous interlocutors I know.”

Cornell speakers at the conference include faculty from the Departments of English, History of Art, Classics and Music, as well as alumni Michael Twomey, Ph.D. ’79, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Humanities and Arts at Ithaca College; Charles Darwin Wright, M.A. ’82, Ph.D. ’84, professor of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Alex Sager, M.A. ’98, Ph.D. ’00, associate professor of German at the University of Georgia. The keynote address will be delivered by Volker Mertens of the Free University of Berlin.

Sager had Groos as his doctoral adviser and says he “singlehandedly introduced me to, and saw to my grounding in, virtually every aspect of the field. It has proven to be a very solid foundation. He has also given me a lot of practical guidance and advice along the way that has made a huge difference in my career.”

As a medievalist, Groos is best known as a scholar of narrative literature; his interests include Arthurian romance, the courtly love lyric, medieval science, early modern city culture, and the age of Goethe. In the field of musicology, Groos’ research includes issues of music and culture, text-music relations and opera, especially Wagner, Puccini and modern opera.

Groos’ book “Romancing the Grail” combined pioneering work in the history of medieval science with sophisticated narratological theory. Says Sager, “Groos’ book has played a major role in shifting the scholarly discussion away from trying to identify something like the grand unified theological message or worldview toward a focus on the text as, first and foremost, a literary project, one with a certain prescient modernity in its ability to represent the complexity and pluralism an emerging secular society.”

Linda B. Glaser is a staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.