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Nikolaus Euba received his M.A. from the Institut für
Deutsch als Fremdsprache at the University of Munich in 1994 and has taught and
coordinated a broad variety of German courses at Miami University of Ohio and
the University of South Carolina before coming to Berkeley. His teaching and research
interests include issues of foreign language acquisition and teaching, intercultural
communication, and the integration of theatrical productions into foreign language
learning experiences. He coordinates the language program and is responsible for
training the Graduate Student Instructors who teach lower level language courses
in the department.
Karen Feldman
Karen Feldman's areas of specialization include hermeneutics and phenomenology, the Frankfurt School, German Idealism, feminist theory, literary theory and aesthetics. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago (1989) and her Ph.D. from DePaul University (1998). Prof. Feldman was a Fulbright scholar at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel and in Berlin (1998-2000); and a postdoctoral fellow at the Graduiertenkolleg "Repräsentation, Rhetorik, Wissen." She is the author of Binding Words: Conscience and Text in Hobbes, Hegel and Heidegger (Northwestern University Press, forthcoming in 2005) and co-editor of Continental Philosophy: An Anthology (Blackwell, 1998). She has published articles on early modern and Continental thought in Journal of the History of Ideas, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Word and Image, Angelaki, Philosophy Today, and in edited collections. Her current research concerns figurality and literariness in the wake of Kant's aesthetics.
Emerita. Professor Goldstein holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University with a disserta-tion on Franz Kafka. In addition, she has studied at the Universities of Vienna and Munich. Courses taught include: romanticism; philosophy (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) and literature in the early 19th century; Marx, Nietzsche, Freud; turn-of-the-century Vienna; 19th and 20th century Austrian literature; Franz Kafka; expressionism; Brecht and political theater; German fascism; Jewish writers in the German-speaking world. An important interest concerns methodological approaches that mediate social and cultural history on the one hand, and close readings of texts on the other. She has written on Kafka and Brecht, and her book, Reinscribing Moses: Heine, Kafka, Freud, Schoenberg, and the European Wilderness, appeared in fall 1992.
Deniz Göktürk was born in Istanbul, studied in Konstanz, Norwich (UK), and Berlin, where she received her Ph.D. in 1995. She joined the German Department at Berkeley in fall 2001, after having taught at the University of Southampton (UK) for six years. Her publications include a book on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture: Künstler, Cowboys, Ingenieure: Kultur- und mediengeschichtliche Studien zu deutschen Amerika-Texten 1912-1920 (1998) as well as numerous articles on migration, culture and cinema. As a translator from Turkish into German she co-edited an anthology of contemporary Turkish literature, Jedem Wort gehört ein Himmel (1991, with Zafer Senocak), and translated novels by Aras Ören and Bilge Karasu. She is also co-editor of The German Cinema Book (published by the British Film Institute in 2002, co-edited with Tim Bergfelder and Erica Carter). She is currently working on a book tentatively titled "Disguise in Diaspora: Transnational Aspects of Comedy and Community." She is also collaborating with Anton Kaes and a team of students on a an archive and sourcebook project on "Multicultural Germany" and in organizing workshops and conferences on "Rethinking Diversity in Europe and the USA." She teaches courses on: "Transnational Cinemas," "World Cinema/Global Cities," "German Cinema: Spaces, Borders and Travel," "Comedy and Community," "Nation, Migration and Multiculturalism," and "Hybrid Cultures: Jews and Turks in Germany." Recent Publications.
Emeritus. Professor Hillen studied German and English literature in Munich and Hamburg (Staatsexamen, 1960) and taught German at the University of Hong Kong from 1961 until 1963. His publications reflect his interest in the works of Grimmelshausen, Gryphius, and Lohenstein; the form and function of literary allegory; various aspects of the oeuvre of G. E. Lessing; and post-WW II literature, especially the novels of Max Frisch. His most recent research involves a review of interpretations of Lohenstein's African dramas, Grimmelshausen's picaresque novels, and questions regarding the methodology of writing literary history. He is now in the process of completing a series of essays on German cultural history from 1500 to 1750.
Chancellor Professor of German and Film Studies, Professor Kaes teaches courses in modern literature, literary and cultural theory, and cinema. After his 1973 Ph.D. from Stanford University, Professor Kaes taught Comparative Literature and Film at the University of California at Irvine, serving as Director of Comparative Literature from 1978 to 1981. In Berkeley since 1981, he was Director of the Film Studies Program from 1991-98. His research concentrates on interdisciplinary and comparative aspects of Weimar culture and contemporary literature and film; literary theory and theory of cultural studies; film history and film theory. His publications include Expressionismus in Amerika: Rezeption und Innovation (Niemeyer 1975) Kino-Debatte: Literatur und Film, ed. (dtv 1978); From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Harvard University Press 1989); The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, co-edited with Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg, (University of California Press 1994). In 2000, his book on Fritz Lang's M appeared in the British Film Institute Classics series. He is also co-editor of the first history of German film, Geschichte des deutschen Films (Metzler, 1993). He has published numerous articles in journals and anthologies, including "Mass Culture and Modernity," "New Historicism and the Study of German Literature," "Holocaust and the End of History," "Literatur und nationale Identität: Kontroversen um Goethe 1945-49," "Metropolis: City, Cinema, Modernity." He contributed the article on New German Cinema to the Oxford History of World Cinema. Major awards: Fellowships of the Rockefeller Foundation (1978) and the Humboldt Foundation (1984/85; 1986/87); Guggenheim Fellowship (1990), President's Research Fellowship (1995). He was also a Scholar in Residence at the Getty Center for Art History and the Humanities in 1989/90 and at Bellagio in 1998. Visiting Professor at the Australian National University in Canberra (1995) and Harvard University (1999). Professor Kaes is currently working on a cultural history of cinema in the Weimar Republic, entitled: Shell Shock: Trauma and Film in Weimar Germany, forthcoming with Princeton University Press. Recent Publications.
After studying at the Ecole Normale and completing the Agrégation in Germanic Studies at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, Professor Kramsch emigrated to the United States, where she taught German language and literature at M.I.T. and Applied Linguistics at Cornell University. At Berkeley since 1990, she holds an appointment as Professor of German and Foreign Language Acquisition in the German Department and in the School of Education. She is, in addition, Director of the Berkeley Language Center, a research and development unit for all foreign language teachers on campus. She teaches courses in foreign language pedagogy, discourse analysis, second language acquisition and foreign language literacy. Her area of research is applied linguistics, with emphasis on pragmatic, aesthetic and hermeneutic approaches to language study. She directs Ph.D. dissertations in these areas both in the School of Education and in the German Department. Her major publications include: Discourse Analysis and Second Language Teaching; Interaction et discours dans la classe de langue; Reden, Mitreden, Dazwischenreden: Managing Conversations in German; Foreign Language Research in Cross-Cultural Perspective; Text and Context: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Language Study; Context and Culture in Language Teaching; Language and Culture; Language acquisition and language socialization - Ecological perspectives. Her many articles have appeared in Studies in Second Language Acquisition, The Modern Language Journal, Die Unterrichtspraxis, The Canadian Modern Language Review, Profession, The ADFL Bulletin, PMLA, The Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language Culture and Curriculum. Majors awards: 1988 ACTFL Nelson Brooks Award for the teaching of culture; 1994 MLA Kenneth Mildenberger Prize for Outstanding Research in the teaching of foreign languages and literatures; 1998 Goethe Medal. MLA Distinguished Service Award 2000; UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award 2000. She holds honorary doctorates from the Middlebury School of Languages 1998 and St. Michael's College 2001. She was also the 1994/95 President of the American Association of Applied Linguistics and was co-editor of the journal Applied Linguistics from 1998-2003. Professor Kramsch is currently working on a book on Subjectivity in Language Learning. Recent Publications.
Professor Kudszus studied literature, philosophy, and psychology at the Universities of Zurich, Freiburg, and Munich. Ph.D. Berkeley, 1968. Following an appointment as Assistant Professor at Stanford, Kudszus joined the Berkeley faculty in 1968. He has been a visiting and a research professor at universities both in the U.S. and in Germany, and in a number of disciplines and interdisciplinary programs: Cornell (Society for the Humanities); Tübingen (German); Mainz (Research Professor at the Institute of Psychiatry); Frankfurt/Main (Sociology/Psychoanalysis). Guggenheim Fellow in 1984. His publications explore questions and interrelationships of literature, psychology, philosophy, semiotics, culture, and psychoanalysis, e.g., Sprachverlust und Sinnwandel: Zur späten und spätesten Lyrik Hölderlins, Stuttgart 1969; Austriaca (Politzer-Festschrift), co-ed., Tübingen 1975; Literatur und Schizophrenie: Theorie und Interpretation eines Grenzgebiets, ed., München/Tübingen 1977; Psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Literaturinterpretation, co-ed., Darmstadt 1981; Contemporary Germany: Politics and Culture, co-ed., Boulder 1984; Poetic Process, Lincoln/London 1995. Articles in collections, including "Literatur und Musik", 1984; "Anschlüsse: Versuche nach Michel Foucault", 1985; "Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance", 1987; "The Semiotic Bridge", 1989; "Disease and Medicine in Modern German Cultures", 1990; "L'homme et ses signes", 1993; "Poetry, Poetics, Translation", 1994; "Körper/Kultur", 1994; "Interdigitations" (Rauch-Festschrift), 1999; articles in journals including Sub-Stance; Confinia Psychiatrica; Mosaic; Journal of the Kafka Society of America; Euphorion; Konkursbuch; Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik; Anstösse; DVjs.; Qui Parle; Wirkendes Wort; SUD: Revue literaire; Modern Austrian Literature.
After studying German, Russian, and Philosophy in Zurich and Paris, Professor Largier, currently the chair of the German department, received his Ph.D. from the University of Zurich in 1989. His research deals with the history of medieval and early modern German literature, especially questions of the relations among literature, philosophy, theology, and other fields of knowledge. He recently finished a project that explores the relation between bodily ascetic practices (in particular self-flagellation), eroticism, and literary imagination in the Middle Ages and in early modernity. (Lob der Peitsche: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Erregung. C. H. Beck, Munich, 2001; American translation to be published by ZONE books in 2004). Current projects: the history of fantasy and the emotions from the Middle Ages to the Baroque era; the history of the senses, of sense experience, and of the stimulation of the senses-especially taste and touch-in medieval, early modern, and modern cultures. Niklaus Largier is an internationally recognized expert on mystical traditions in German literature and thought, in particular Meister Eckhart and his influence from the Middle Ages to postmodern discourses. His books include a study on time and temporality in late medieval philosophy and literature (1989), a bibliography of literature on Meister Eckhart (1989), a translation and commentary of a medieval treatise on spiritual poverty (1989), a two-volume edition of Meister Eckhart's works with extensive commentaries in the Deutscher Klassiker Verlag (1993), and a study of the significance of exemplum and exemplarity in medieval literature, philosophy, and historiography (1997). Largier has published essays on Eckhart, Tauler, Seuse, Mechthild of Magdburg, Hadewijch, Rudolf of Biberach, Czepko, and others. More recently, a series of articles deals with the interaction of images and texts in medieval manuscripts, questions of visual culture, and the significance of exemplarity in various discursive contexts. He has coedited two collections of essays on spirituality and literature (1995 and 1999), and an important medieval collection of vernacular sermons (1998). Largier is a member of the editorial board of Representations and of the book series New Trends in Medieval Philology (DeGruyter, Berlin) and Deutsche Literatur von den Anfängen bis 1700 (Lang, Bern et al.). Recent Publications.
Joseph Mileck
Emeritus. Ph.D. Harvard, 1950. 20th century German prose (emphasis on Thomas Mann, Hesse, Kafka) and drama (emphasis on G. Hauptmann, Toller, Brecht, Zuckmayer, Borchert, Dürrenmatt, Frisch, Weiss, Hildesheimer, Hochhuth, Handke, Kroetz).
Klaus A. Mueller
Emeritus. M.A. Columbia, 1949. Teaching methodology.
Ph.D., Michigan. Germanic linguistics, historical (Gothic, Old Saxon, Old /Middle/Early New High German) and contemporary (New High German, modern German dialects); linguistic fieldwork; socio-cultural and cognitive approaches to language variation and language change, contrastive analysis and linguistic methodology; linguistic archeology; paralanguage and semiotics (how verbal and non-verbal language signify). Since 1982 at Berkeley (previously at Wisconsin, Pittsburgh, Illinois). Author: The Gothic Language. Grammar, Genetic Provenance and Typology, Readings. (2003); The Old High German Diphthongization: A Description of a Phonemic Change (1967); The Old Saxon Language: Grammar, Epic Narrative, Linguistic Interference (1992); Semiotic Insights: The Data Do the Talking (1999). Editor: Berkeley Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics; Berkeley Models of Grammars. Co-editor: Approaches in Linguistic Methodology (1967); Der Heliand (1973); Linguistic Method: Essays in Honor of Herbert Penzl (1979); The Signifying Animal: The Grammar of Language and Experience (1980); Language Change (1983); The Semiotic Bridge: Trends from California (1989); On Germanic Linguistics: Issues and Methods (1992); Insights in Germanic Linguistics I (1995), II (1997); Across the Oceans (1995); Semiotics Around the World: Synthesis in Diversity (1997); New Insights in Germanic Linguistics I (1999), II (2001), III (2002); Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis. Articles in numerous scholarly journals. NEH/NSF grants; Outstanding Woman on Campus; Guggenheim Fellow; President, Semiotic Society of America; Distinguished Alumnus; President, Fifth Congress, International Association for Semiotic Studies; Who's Who in America; Founder/Director: Semiotic Circle of California, Bay Area German Project, Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable. Festschrift: Interdigitations (1999). Recent Publications.
Born and raised in Hannover, Germany, Professor Seeba studied German, Greek and Philosophy at the universities of Göttingen, Zürich and Tübingen; he passed his Staatsexamen in 1966 and received his Dr. phil, in 1967, both from the University of Tübingen. He started teaching at Berkeley in 1967 and served twice as departmental chair, from 1977-81 and again from 1989-91. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1970/71 and visiting professor at the Free University Berlin in 1992, at Stanford University in 1994, and at the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, in 1999. He was chair of the Society & Culture group in the Center of German and European Studies from 1991-95. His teaching and research areas include 18th to 20th century German literature with emphasis on the enlightenment, the Napoleonic era, the Vormärz, contemporary trends in German literature, intellectual and institutional history, national and cultural identity formation, the theory of literature and interpretation (hermeneutics), cultural criticism, and problems of historiography. His publications include books on Hofmannsthal (1970), Lessing (1974) and two volumes of Kleist's dramas in the Deutscher Klassiker Verlag (1987 and 1991, with extensive commentary). He is co-editor of Festschriften for Heinz Politzer (1975) and Richard Brinkmann (1981) and the author of articles on Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Schiller, F. Schlegel, Kleist, Grillparzer, Heine, Nestroy, reception theory, the Vormärz, historiography, cultural nationalism, the history of Germanistik, Jewish exiles, New Subjectivity, and German Studies in the United States. His current projects include studies in the literary images of historical discourse, the German concept of "Kulturnation," the role of lamguage in identity formation, academic emigration and paradigms of intercultural history, cultural topography of the city (Berlin). Recent Publications.
Thomas F. Shannon, Professor of Germanic Linguistics, member of the Dutch Studies Program faculty, and former director of the UC exchange program in Germany, has been in our department since 1980. He holds Master's degrees in German (SUNY Albany) and Theoretical Linguistics (Indiana) and a Ph.D. in Germanic Linguistics (Indiana). His areas of specialization are modern German and Dutch, particularly syntax and phonology, and he has published widely on a variety of topics, including naturalness, syllable structure, complementation and control, ergative phenomena, passivization, perfect auxiliary selection, and word order. He is particularly interested in functional and cognitive approaches, e.g. the affects of various semantic, pragmatic, and processing factors on syntactic phenomena. Working from actual texts, he is presently studying several word order phenomena in Dutch and German, especially the ordering of elements in the middle field as well as historical change in West Germanic, including Afrikaans, Low German, and Yiddish. Shannon has taught and conducted research in the Netherlands at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen on a Fulbright grant and researched at the Institut für deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. Active professionally, he serves on MLA Executive Committees, the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Germanic Linguistics, and the Executive Committee of the American Association of Netherlandic Studies (AANS), and was formerly Vice President of the Society for Germanic Philology. He is also editor of the AANS Publications series, and co-editor with Johan Snapper of the Berkeley Conference on Dutch Literature and Linguistics series.
Emeritus. Professor Snapper, Queen Beatrix Professor of Dutch Language, Literature and Culture, did his Graduate work in Germanic languages and literatures at the University of Chicago (M.A.) and the University of California at Los Angeles (Ph.D.). He specializes in eighteenth-century German literature and modern Netherlandic literature. In addition to his doctoral dissertation (on Friedrich Maximilian Klinger) his publications include six books and more than fifty scholarly articles. One of his monographs deals with the work of the controversial Dutch writer Gerard Reve, while his most recent study (The Ways of Marga Minco) is a book on the Dutch writer Marga Minco, best known for her novels and short stories on the Jewish persecution in the Netherlands. Professor Snapper is on the Editorial Board of a number of publications, including the Publications of the American Association for Netherlandic Studies (PAANS), the Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies (CJNS) and De Nederlandse Taal. Among national and international offices he has held are the presidency of the American Association for Netherlandic Studies, membership on the executive board of the International Association for Netherlandics (IVN), and the chair of the Netherlands International Commission on Higher Education for Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Rumania. He is also the organizer of eight international conferences on Dutch linguistics and literature and the founder of the Netherlands-America University League. For his scholarly and community service, Professor Snapper received a Congressional Citation of Merit (USA), and he has been knighted as Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau (the Netherlands) and Officer in the Order of the Crown (Belgium). He also serves as the honorary consul of the Netherlands for northern California. Professor Snapper was recently presented with a Festschrift, Vantage Points, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Queen Beatrix Chair.
Chenxi Tang
Chenxi Tang studied philosophy, comparative literature, and German literature at Peking University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (MA 1993), and Columba University (PhD 2000). He had taught at the University of Chicago before joining the German Department at Berkeley in 2007. His research and teaching interests include German literature from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, social and political theory, and modern European intellectual history. His book The Geographic Imagination of Modernity: Geography, Literature, and Philosophy in German Romanticism traces the emergence of the geographic paradigm in Western thought around 1800. Recently he has been awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship to work on a book project entitled Fictions of Humanity: Poetics of World History in European Modernity. This project seeks to illuminate the world-historical imagination in Europe from its beginning in the early-modern period to the early twentieth century from two intertwined perspectives: the conceptual paradigms for imagining humankind as a collective entity, and the specific narrative procedures that configure the multitude of human events and phenomena in the past and present and around the globe into a meaningful whole. Prof. Tang is one of the translators of Kierkegaard’s works from Danish into Chinese.
Professor Tennant did her graduate work at Harvard and at the University of Vienna. Her main areas of research are the Habsburg court society in the early modern period, the development of the German language at the end of the Middle Ages and the Middle High German narrative tradition. Her teaching at Berkeley has been concerned primarily with the literary and cultural traditions of the Holy Roman Empire in the medieval and early modern periods, although she occasionally teaches courses on modern subjects as well. Recently she has offered seminars on women in courtly literature and society, the German experience of the Crusades, a Townsend Center interdisciplinary seminar with Professor Thomas Brady (History) on genres of social discourse in early modern Germany, and a Center for German and European Studies Seminar with Professors Thomas Brady and Horst Wenzel (Germanistik, Humboldt Universität, Berlin) on modes of pre-modern German historiography. She has performed a variety of administrative tasks on campus, including the chairmanship of the Scandinavian Department 1989-92, 1995, and 2001-2002. Professor Tennant's publications include a monograph on the emergence of the German common language (1985), a study of vocalism in sixteenth-century German primers (1981), and essays on Gottfried's Tristan, gender interactions in the Nibelungenlied, the relationship between verbal and visual culture in early modern Germany, New Historicism, intellectual property etc. Her current projects include research on the reception of the Theuerdank, notions of intellectual property in early modern Germany, and earliest European reactions to the discovery of Mexico.
Frederic C. Tubach
Emeritus. Ph.D. Berkeley, 1957. Medieval German literature, folklore, contemporary German culture. Index Exemplorum: A Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales (Folklore Fellows Communications, vol. 204), Struktur im Widerspruch: Studien zum Minnesang; Michael Mann: Fragmente eines Lebens (co-author with Sally P. Tubach); Germany: 2000 Years, vol. 3: From the Nazi Era to the Present (co-author with G. Hoffmeister); An Uncommon Friendship: From Opposite Sides of the Holocaust (co-author with Bernat Rosner; UC Press, 2001); author of Hörspiele (radio plays) and translator of contemporary American plays for WDR (West German Radio, Cologne). Current research interest in European regionalism within the context of cultural theory.
Emeritus professor of English at San Francisco State University, Professor Wolf received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Leiden in 1977. He has taught at the University of Helsinki and the University of California, Berkeley, where he will be Visiting Professor of Dutch again in Fall, 2003. He is the author of Albert Verwey and English Romanticism and five volumes of translated poetry. Most recently he edited Amsterdam: A Traveler's Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press, 2001), a collection of stories with an Amsterdam setting. Professor Wolf's articles, essays and autobiographical pieces have appeared in magazines and journals in the U.S. and Europe, including The American Scholar, World Literature Today, The Psychiatric Quarterly Supplement, Comparative Literature, Nieuw Wereldtijdschrift, Maatstaf, Ons Erfdeel, Midstream, The Literary Review, Beacon Best of 1999, and many others. His scholarly writing is in three general areas: English, Dutch and Caribbean Literature. Columns of his on everyday subjects have been published in the Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, Helsingin Sanomat, NRC/Handelsblad, and many other newspapers.