WCAS Department of German: Program

Our department comprises a community of scholars with strong research interests across a variety of disciplinary areas, as well as a community of instructors who share a strong commitment to teaching. We have excellent graduate students who successfully continue their careers in exciting positions all over the country. We have some of the best undergraduate majors and minors in the country as evidenced by the fact that we are the leading German department with DAAD and Fulbright winners.

Our Department offers courses in German, Yiddish, and in English in an effort to serve not only potential majors or minors but also a variety of students from different fields within the college and from other schools across campus, such as engineering, communication, and music.

It is our goal to expose students to a variety of learning approaches, content areas, and a broad range of texts so that they may gain a thorough understanding of the language, the history and the culture of the German-speaking world. We believe it is difficult for our students to understand contemporary literature or theater without Brecht, science without Einstein, education and the liberal arts without von Humboldt, the human mind without Freud, and diversity and multiculturalism without German philosophers, such as Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. German is also essential for being able to comprehend the artistic productions of great composers, architects, and artists like Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Händel, Mozart, Schönberg, and Wagner; Gropius, Van der Rohe, Dürer, Klee, Kandinsky and Kollwitz. The German Bauhaus school has revolutionized modern design. The skyline of Chicago is emblematic for the city's direct connection to the German Bauhaus school.

Our graduate program focuses on the theoretical and cultural foundations of the development of German literature, critical thought, and media from 1750 onward. It combines a challenging curriculum in critical thought with an innovative approach to the mediality of meaning. Just as critical thought draws on works in philosophy, aesthetics, literary and political theory, the field of media studies examines scholarship on the theater, on the history of science, as well as on radio, film, and digital media. Students have the opportunity to study in small groups with experts from this and other departments and acquire an expertise in cutting edge fields of research, while working at the same time on gaining a strong basis in the canonical works of the literary and audio-visual tradition. Our core faculty includes specialists in 18th-century literature, Kant and the Enlightenment, Classicism and Romanticism, Science Studies, 19th-century narrative, Nietzsche, fin-de-siècle literature, Freud and psychoanalysis, German Expressionism and the Avant-Garde, Benjamin, Heidegger, post-war and contemporary literature, and German film.

Please contact any of us with questions you may have. Use this website to keep abreast of our departmental activities: visiting guests, keynote lectures, literary readings, German film screenings and plays. We look forward to meeting you. We always welcome inquiries from prospective undergraduate and graduate students and hope they will choose to join our vibrant German Department.

Franziska Lys
Department Chair