Summer Recap: North American German Archival Work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

This past summer, Dr. Joshua Bousquette visited the North American German Dialect Archive (NAGDA) at the Max Kade Institute, located on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. 

Dr. Bousquette sought to consult the handwritten (and not digitized) field notes of Professor Lester W.J. ‘Smoky’ Seifert, who conducted fieldwork with German speakers in Wisconsin in the 1940s. These are primarily sociolinguistic biographies of speakers, which will inform Bousquette’s ongoing work with the Seifert audio corpus. Bousquette has been engaged with the Seifert audio corpus since 2009, beginning as a graduate student at UW-Madison. In 2019, he notably collaborated with the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures at UW-Madison as an external partner. He continues this important work today as a faculty member at UGA. 

Moving forward, Dr. Bousquette is working to make Professor Seifert’s unpublished manuscripts available to the public, including both academic articles and also speeches delivered on the topic of German in Wisconsin.

Pictured below: Seifert’s field notes, unpublished manuscripts, dialect maps (many of which were hand-drawn), and pedagogical materials (for teaching German on public TV).