German

University of California, Berkeley

This is an archived copy of the 2019-20 guide. To access the most recent version of the guide, please visit http://guide.berkeley.edu.

Spring 2020 COVID-19 Measures

Overview

The Department of German offers language and literature classes in German, Dutch, and Yiddish, as well as breadth requirement courses (taught in English) on German philosophy, linguistics, political culture, and cinema. The department's degree options include an undergraduate major, a minor, and a PhD. Our renowned doctoral program is affiliated with the departments of Comparative Literature and Film and Media, the Program in Medieval Studies, and the Graduate Group in Critical Theory.

Both the size and diversity of our program allow us to balance thorough coverage of the basics with innovative thinking aimed at crossing borders. We have the critical mass to let our students explore interests outside the department and study with established experts. In these courses, our graduate students interact with students from across campus by all accounts a most beneficial experience. For the last half century, the Berkeley German department has consistently been recognized as one of the premier programs in the United States. In 1995 the National Research Council’s most recent survey of graduate programs ranked our department number one among German departments in the country.

Other Department Resources

TRANSIT journal is published by the department and affiliated with the Multicultural Germany Project. With a focus on the German-speaking world, our journal invites critical work on a wide range of topics, from translations to travelogues and other forms of cultural transfer.

Undergraduate Programs

Dutch Studies: BA, Minor
German: BA, Minor

Graduate Program

Dutch Studies: Designated Emphasis (DE) offered through the Graduate Group in Dutch Studies
German: PhD

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Courses

Select a subject to view courses

Dutch

German

Yiddish

Faculty and Instructors

+ Indicates this faculty member is the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award.

Faculty

Lilla Balint, Assistant Professor. Contemporary German literature and media, theories of the Contemporary, aesthetics and politics, transnationalism and translation, digital writing, European Jewish literatures, literary and cultural theory, theories of the novel.

Jeroen Dewulf, Professor. Dutch studies, transatlantic slavery, German literature, European Studies, post-colonial studies, hybridity.
Research Profile

Karen Feldman, Associate Professor. Critical theory, aesthetics, literary theory, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Arendt, Benjamin, 18th-20th century German thought, Hegel, Adorno.
Research Profile

Deniz Gokturk, Associate Professor. German literature, German cinema, transnational cinemas, German-Turkish-European-American intersections in cinema, performance and spectatorship and reception, intertextuality and intermediality and translation, the politics and poetics of migration and globalization, urban imaginaries and mediations of place, theories of diversity and nationalism, comedy and community, modern rituals of regulating identity and authority and mobility.
Research Profile

Anton Kaes, Professor. Film studies, modern literature, literary and cultural theory, cinema, interdisciplinary and comparative aspects of Weimar culture, contemporary literature and film, literary theory, theory of cultural studies, film history, film theory, history of cinema.
Research Profile

Winfried Kudszus, Professor. Psychoanalysis, semiotics, culture, literature, philosophy, psychology.
Research Profile

Niklaus Largier, Professor. Religion, literature, German, history of medieval and early modern German literature, theology, mysticism, secularism, senses, sensuality, history of emotions, passions, asceticism, flagellation, sexuality.
Research Profile

Irmengard Rauch, Professor. Semiotics, Germanic linguistics, linguistic archeology, paralanguage, Old Saxon, Old Frisian, linguistic fieldwork, socio-cultural and cognitive approaches to language variation and language change, contrastive analysis and linguistic methodology, Gothic, Modern High German and its dialects, Old/Middle High/Early New High German.
Research Profile

Isabel Richter, Assistant Adjunct Professor. Modern German history (18th – 20th centuries), yransnational youth cultures in the 20th century, history of death in modern Europe, cultural anthropology, material and visual history in the 19th and 20th centuries, national socialism, gender history and interdisciplinary gender studies.
Research Profile

Thomas F. Shannon, Professor. Linguistics, control, German, Dutch, syntax, phonology, naturalness, syllable structure, complementation, ergative phenomena, passivization, perfect auxiliary selection, word order, processing factors syntactic phenomena, cognitive, functional grammar, corpus.
Research Profile

Chenxi Tang, Associate Professor. European intellectual history, German literature from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, political and legal thought, cultural theory, early modern European literature, Europe and China.
Research Profile

Elaine C. Tennant, Professor. German, Habsburg court society in the early modern period, the development of the German language at the end of the middle ages, the Middle High German narrative tradition, literary and cultural traditions of the holy roman empire, European reactions.
Research Profile

Affiliated Faculty

Judith Butler, Professor. Critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, comparative literature, 19th and 20th century continental philosophy, social and political thought, philosophy and literature.
Research Profile

Pheng Cheah, Professor. Nationalism, rhetoric, legal philosophy, feminism, 18th-20th century continental philosophy and contemporary critical theory, postcolonial theory and anglophone postcolonial literatures, cosmopolitanism and globalization, social and political thought.
Research Profile

John Connelly, Professor.

John M. Efron, Professor. Cultural and social history of German Jewry.
Research Profile

Beate Fricke, Associate Professor. Medieval art and architecture, idolatry, iconoclasm, history of allegory, formation of communities, incest, anthropophagy, animation, emergence of life and procreation, theories and practices in use of images and relics, visual and material culture, Carolingian Art, Gothic Art, Ottonian Art.
Research Profile

Hannah Ginsborg, Professor. Philosophy, Kant and on Kantian themes in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of mind.
Research Profile

Mel Gordon, Professor.

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Associate Professor. Modern German and European History, Conceptual History, Transnational History, urban studies.
Research Profile

John Lindow, Professor Emeritus. Old Norse-Icelandic literature, Scandinavian folklore, Finno-Ugric folklore, Pre-Christian religion of the North, Scandinavian mythology.
Research Profile

Linda H. Rugg, Professor. Scandinavian, Swedish literature and culture 1870 to the present, August Strindberg, Ingmar Bergman, visual autobiography, literature and the visual arts, ecology and culture, film, whiteness studies.
Research Profile

Hans Sluga, Professor. Political philosophy, recent European philosophy, history of analytic philosophy, Frege, Wittgenstein, Foucault.
Research Profile

Lecturers

Yael Chaver, Lecturer.

Nikolaus Euba, Lecturer.

Esmee Van Der Hoeven, Lecturer.

Emeritus Faculty

Bluma Goldstein, Professor Emeritus.

Gerd Hillen, Professor Emeritus.

Gary B. Holland, Professor Emeritus. Historical linguistics, Indo-European linguistics, poetics, early Indo-European languages, linguistic typology, historical syntax, history of linguistics.
Research Profile

+ Claire Kramsch, Professor Emeritus. Language, culture, pragmatics, society, education, applied linguistics, aesthetics, literacy, second language acquisition, language pedagogy, language in discourse, hermeneutic approaches to language learning.
Research Profile

Joseph Mileck, Professor Emeritus.

Klaus Mueller, Professor Emeritus.

Hinrich C. Seeba, Professor Emeritus. 18th 20th century German literature and culture, intellectual and institutional, enlightenment, Napoleonic era, vormarz, concepts and images history, role language nationalism, contemporary trends German literature, representations urban space.
Research Profile

Johan P. Snapper, Professor Emeritus. Dutch studies.
Research Profile

Frederic C. Tubach, Professor Emeritus.

Contact Information

Department of German

5319 Dwinelle Hall

Fax: 510-642-3243

Visit Department Website

Department Chair

Karen Feldman

5325 Dwinelle Hall

kfeldman@berkeley.edu

Undergraduate Adviser

Nadia Samadi

5311 Dwinelle Hall

Phone: 510-642-7445

germanic@berkeley.edu

Graduate Adviser

Andrea Rapport

5307 Dwinelle Hall

Phone: 510-642-3786

germanga@berkeley.edu

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