"Conversation Pieces" is a series that invites UChicago scholars and their surprise guests to enter into dialogue with artworks in Expanding the 50th: Shared Stories. Join us in the Smart galleries on Friday, April 11, 2026, for a micro-talk with Dr. Alice Goff, Assistant Professor of German History and the College.

Presented by the Feitler Center Faculty Advisory Committee. Free, drop-in program.

About the speakers:

Alice Goff is Assistant Professor of History and the College at the University of Chicago. Her work focuses on the history of art, museums, and material culture in modern Germany. Her first book The God Behind the Marble: The Fate of Art in the German Aesthetic State appeared from the University of Chicago Press in 2024. She is currently working on a new project on church bells. 

Madeline Adams is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago studying queer German history. Her dissertation, “Materiality and Memory in East German LGBT Communities, 1982 to 2003,” explores queer media, everyday life, and archival projects in and after the German Democratic Republic. From 2023 to 2025 she was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam. She has also worked in public history through the University of Chicago’s Special Collections Research Center and Public History Practicum as well as at the Wende Museum in Los Angeles. 

IMAGE: Marianne Brandt, manufactured by Bauhaus Metal Workshop, Tea Service: Tea Infuser (Pot), Creamer, Sugar Bowl, and Tray, 1924, Hand-wrought sterling silver (tea infuser and creamer also with ebony). Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Anonymous Gift in memory of Liesl Landau, 2006.19.1-4. Copyright managed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.