Übersicht
Swiss Association of University Teachers of English

History of SAUTE

On the occasion of SAUTE’s 75th anniversary, Prof. em. Dr. Andreas Fischer (University of Zurich) has written a history of SAUTE, which can be read here.

A brief summary of the history of SAUTE is also provided in the following excerpt from Prof. Balz Engler's article "English Studies in Switzerland", published in European English Studies: Contributions towards the History of a Discipline, II (2008), edited by Renate Haas and by Balz Engler himself:

"In 1947 SAUTE, the Swiss Association of University Teachers of English, was founded. It was among the founding members of the Swiss Academy of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and joined ESSE in 1991. SAUTE has consistently promoted closer collaboration between Swiss departments of English. In the 1980s it decided that the introductory courses at the various universities, which pursued the same aims but were often different in structure, should be recognised at all Swiss institutions, a decision that made student mobility considerably easier. However, the introduction of the Bologna system, with its formal assignment of credit points, has now made things more difficult again. Since 1981 SAUTE has organised biennial conferences, which take place, according to a strictly kept order, at the various universities. Their topics try to accommodate the interests of scholars in literature, linguistics, and, more recently, in cultural studies, which has proved to be an increasingly difficult task. Selected papers from these international conferences become part of the association’s annual publication SPELL (Swiss Publications in English Language and Literature). Its website is the one most frequently consulted among those of scholarly Swiss associations in the humanities (http://www.saute.ch/), for reasons which probably have more to do with cuisine than with scholarly interest." (Engler, 2008: 64-65)