This course explores issues of cultural diversity through the recent history of migration to Germany. Students analyze literary, dramatic, and filmic narratives of migration that engage the consequences of migrations since the 1950’s. Special attention is paid to the portrayal of dominant and marginalized cultures, the active rhetorical othering of foreigners, religious minorities, and other “non-Germans” as well as the rise of right-wing cultural protectionism. Students question literature, theater, and film’s roles in addressing, critiquing, and shaping the current discourse and its interaction with other forces that frame migration including immigration law, news media, and politics.

This graduate seminar reassesses the thematic role of reading in German-language literature and its practical role in the literary sciences more generally. In light of increased digital reading practices, students investigate media-technological changes from the Middle Ages to the 21st century and their effect on reading as a cultural, social, and professional practice. We analyze literature’s effect on historical reading cultures and practices through reading protagonists and scenes of reading, and we explore critiques of critical and suspicious reading practices and alternative approaches including distant, surface, reparative, and hyper reading.

This graduate seminar introduces students to a range of premodern German-language textual genres through seemingly anachronistic research topics. By exploring the applicability of decidedly modern topics – like fiction, race, the future, and history – for premodern textual archives, we identify distinguishing characteristics of premodern textual cultures and engage issues faced by modern researchers when working with premodern texts and cultures. The course includes textual examples from poetry, epics, romances, drama, mære, and religious writings to the proto-nov

This first-year seminar introduces students to the wide-ranging implications and consequences of human language. We discuss the origins and historical evolution of languages, commonly held linguistic attitudes and language ideologies, and language’s effects on personal and communal identities. We also engage critically the field of linguistics and its history to see how it has not only been used to expand our understanding of language’s place in human cultures but also to promulgate nationalistic, colonialist, and racialized ideologies. Throughout the semester, students learn about the myriad ways of studying language and culture in various departments and programs at UC.

In this undergraduate introduction to German literature, we address questions fundamental to critical literary studies as we explore the history of German-language literature. Our exploration is divided into four thematic issues critical to literary studies: Representation and Reality asks how texts reflect on and construct what we call reality. Media and Form explores what media literature operates with and what it does with them. Nation, State, Community focuses on the political communities that texts construct and propose. And Self-representation and Identity Construction questions how the modern self is invented by and constructed in literary texts. To explore these questions and themes, we read an eclectic selection of texts from the Middle Ages to today.

Medieval German literature offers fantastic narratives of dragons and knights, moving tales of lovers and saints, and indescribable encounters with the divine and the foreign; however, the manuscript culture that preserved these stories also make them difficult for modern scholars, let alone casual modern readers, to access. In this course, we read a variety of medieval texts, including epic, romance, poetry, religious devotion, and drama to confront the linguistic, intellectual, and material challenges they pose to a modern audience. We explore modern digital tools for accessing, reading, interpreting, and disseminating medieval stories, while trying to preserve and highlight the unique elements of premodern literature.