About the Program

The Designated Emphasis (DE) in Dutch Studies provides curricular and research resources for students who want to concentrate on Dutch Studies within their respective disciplines and have their work formally recognized in their degree designation. Designed to bring together faculty and students from different departments, the DE will be administered by the Graduate Group in Dutch Studies and will provide a unique context for rigorous cross-disciplinary research. Sponsoring departments include German, History, History of Art, Southeast Asian Studies, African-American Studies, Comparative Literature, French, and Sociology. However, the DE is open to interested students regardless of whether their home department is officially affiliated with the DE. The program will help advance Berkeley’s position as America’s leading Dutch studies program and facilitate research in and cooperation with other universities in the Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa, Indonesia, and the Caribbean, for example, who also have strong Dutch studies programs. Students applying to the DE must be prepared to integrate high-level research in Dutch studies into their coursework, qualifying exam and dissertation.

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Admissions

To be admitted to the Designated Emphasis in Development Engineering, an applicant must already be accepted into a PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley. For further information regarding admission to graduate programs at UC Berkeley, please see the Graduate Division's Admissions website.

Students are required to fill out a form requesting admission, listing their prior preparation in the field, and their projected pathway through the program. In addition, they have to submit a brief essay stating interests and reasons for applying, a CV, a writing sample, and a letter of recommendation from a faculty member in the student’s home department indicating why and how the student would benefit from the DE.

Students must be admitted to the DE prior to taking their qualifying exams. Admission will be determined on the basis of how coherently and logically the student can articulate the value of the DE for her/his larger course of study and career goals, as well as on the quality of the written work.

Designated Emphasis Requirements

Curriculum/Coursework

Students admitted to the designated emphasis program must complete the following requirements before applying for their qualifying examination:

Qualifying Examination

A member of the Graduate Group in Dutch Studies must be a formal member of the PhD qualifying examination committee of the DE student. Under most circumstances, the Graduate Group member in the student’s home department will serve in this function. A member of the graduate group may also serve as the outside member of the qualifying exam committee if not a faculty member of the student’s major. At least one Dutch Studies topic must be included as a subject on the qualifying examination. Satisfactory performance on the qualifying examination for the PhD will be judged according to the established rules in the student’s major program.

Dissertation

A member of the Graduate Group in Dutch Studies must be a formal member of the dissertation committee of the DE student. The dissertation must (partially) relate to Dutch studies (such as Dutch culture, history, politics, art, literature, linguistics, or sociology).

Degree conferral

Upon completion of all requirements of the student’s major program and the DE in Dutch Studies, students will receive a designation on their transcript and diploma stating that they have completed a “PhD in ( . . . ) with a Designated Emphasis in Dutch Studies.”

Courses

Dutch Studies

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.
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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.
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Winfried Kudszus, Professor. Psychoanalysis, semiotics, culture, literature, philosophy, psychology.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Hans Sluga, Professor. Political philosophy, recent European philosophy, history of analytic philosophy, Frege, Wittgenstein, Foucault.
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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.
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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.