About the Program

The DE in European Studies provides curricular and research resources for students who want to concentrate on European 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 is administered by the Graduate Group in European Studies and provides a unique context for rigorous cross-disciplinary research. Sponsoring departments include History, Law, Agricultural and Resource Economics, Sociology, Economics, Scandinavian, Anthropology, History of Art, German and Dutch, Political Science, Italian, Architecture, Comparative Literature, Rhetoric, Spanish and Portuguese, Interdisciplinary Studies, Slavic, and French. However, the DE is open to interested students regardless of whether their home department is officially affiliated with the DE. The program helps advance Berkeley’s position as one of the nation’s leading European Studies programs and facilitates research in and cooperation with other European universities. Students applying to the DE must be prepared to integrate high-level research in European Studies into their coursework, qualifying exam and dissertation.

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Designated Emphasis Requirements

Students are required to fill out a form requesting admission, listing their prior preparation in the field, and explaining their projected pathway through the program. In addition, students must submit a brief essay stating their 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. Proficiency in one European language (equivalent to level C1 in the Common European Framework) other than English is a requirement for admission. Students will be required to provide evidence confirming their foreign language proficiency. Students who are unable to provide the necessary evidence regarding their foreign language proficiency will be asked to have their foreign language proficiency examined and officially acknowledged in a letter written by a UCB lecturer or faculty member.

Students must be admitted to the DE prior to taking their qualifying exams. Admission will be determined by the members of the executive committee 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, the quality of the student’s written work, and her/his foreign language proficiencies. The Executive Committee will strive to build a diverse student group, comprising students from a wide range of departments and with a variety of language skills.

The number of students to be accepted in the program is limited to eight per year in order to ensure that each student receives strong individual support.

Coursework/Curriculum

Students admitted to the Designated Emphasis Program must complete the following requirements:

1. Students will be required to complete two required core courses offered by the DE (these courses do  not need to be taken sequentially):

• European Studies (EUST) 200: Ideas of Europe and European Identities. This course engages with a critical reflection on the notion of Europe and European identities, either from a historical and/or a contemporary perspective. It will provide critical explanatory analysis of issues relating to European history, European borders, integration and disintegration, migration, transnational Europe, postcolonial Europe, and/or the position of Europe in a globalized world. Subject to approval by the Advising Committee, European Studies 200 can be cross-listed/room-shared with an existing course taught by any faculty member of the Graduate Group at one of the departments that have officially committed to sponsor the new DE.
• European Studies (EUST) 201: European Institutions and Social Conflicts. This course engages with a reflection on European institutions and social conflicts, either from a historical and/or contemporary perspective. It will provide a critical explanatory analysis of issues relating to European institutions such as the EU Commission, Council, Parliament and Court of Justice, the European Central Bank, the European Investment Bank, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, as well as general issues relating to the European economy and/or social and political conflicts within Europe. Subject to approval by the Advising Committee, European Studies 201 can be cross-listed/room-shared with an existing course taught by any faculty member of the Graduate Group at one of the departments that have officially committed to sponsor the new DE. 

EUST 200 and EUST 201 European Institutions and Social Conflicts serve as the integrative courses for the program. Every semester, either EUST 200 and/or EUST 201 will be offered.

2. Besides the two required core courses, students will be required to complete two approved electives.

The two electives will be chosen in consultation with the head graduate adviser. These courses will support the interdisciplinary nature of the program with attention to the individual students’ research interests. At least one of these electives must be taken outside the student’s home department.

List of potential electives offered by the different departments sponsoring the DE and approved by the Advising Committee:

Students may petition for a course not on this list if approved by the head graduate adviser.

Examination

A member of the Graduate Group in European Studies must be a formal member of the PhD qualifying examination committee. Under most circumstances, the graduate group member in the student’s home department will serve in this function. A member of the graduate group who is not a faculty member in the student’s major department may also serve as the outside member of the qualifying exam committee. A European 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 European Studies must be a formal member of the dissertation committee. The dissertation must relate to European Studies (such as European culture, history, politics, art, literature, linguistics, sociology, or law).

Degree Conferral

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

For questions, please contact the graduate student coordinator, Noga Wizansky (nwizansk@berkeley.edu), 204 Moses Hall.

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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.