Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies (MKI)

The Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies is an interdisciplinary unit in the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. 

The Institute is dedicated to

• researching the story of German-speaking immigrants and their descendants in a global, multicultural, and interdisciplinary context;
• preserving American print culture and personal documents in the German language and making them part of America’s story and historiography;
• sharing the Institute’s resources through publications, community outreach, and educational programming.

The Library and Archives of the Max Kade Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are a resource for those seeking a better understanding of the experiences of German-speaking immigrants to North America and their descendants.

The MKI Library and Archives include rare German-language items written or published in America, ranging from cookbooks and religious works to family records, historical texts, and literature, as well as magazines, pamphlets, photos, and other materials. The Max Kade Institute is dedicated to preserving these documents and serving as a repository for them to ensure that they remain available to scholars and the general public for generations to come. A virtual exhibit of some of our books can be viewed online.

Included in the Max Kade Institute's holdings are:

• More than 3200 books, pamphlets, and periodicals in the German language published in America, and/or by German-American authors;

• More than 5300 books, articles, and pamphlets dealing with the emigration experiences and the political, cultural, and religious aspects of German, Swiss, and Austrian settlement in North America;

• A collection of more than 400 family histories, diaries, and manuscripts of German-speaking immigrants and descendants;

• More than thirty current journals or newsletters on the subject of German-American studies or genealogy.
• The North American German Dialect Archive (NAGDA), which contains several thousand hours of recordings of immigrant dialects from the mid-1940s to the present.