September 29, 2021

Watch Professor Lilla Balint's interview on CBSN about election results in Germany.

August 25, 2021

German Department alumni Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon published Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age. The humanities, considered by many as irrelevant for modern careers and hopelessly devoid of funding, seem to be in a perpetual state of crisis, at the mercy of modernizing and technological forces that are driving universities towards academic pursuits that pull in grant money and direct students to lucrative careers. But as Reitter and Wellmon show, this crisis isn’t new—in fact, it’s as old as the humanities themselves.

August 19, 2021

In spring 2021, the department started a series of Zoom conversations with contemporary writers titled “Archives of Migration: The Power of Fiction in Times of Fake News.” Organized jointly by Professors Deniz Göktürk and Elisabeth Krimmer (University of California, Davis, German Program), this series engages with writers who bring diverse perspectives to questions of societal polarization and the power of poetic imagination, and presents opportunities to experience contemporary literature in action and think about questions of truth in fiction.

July 25, 2021

In July, Professor Niklaus Largier hosted and co-taught the fifth Berkeley-Yale-Cologne Summer School, a weeklong program in Cologne on the topic “Negation, Refusal, Delay.” The summer school is a part of an ongoing cooperation with Universität zu Köln where the event is held in alternating years.

May 30, 2021

TRANSIT A Journal of Travel, Migration, and Multiculturalism in the German-speaking World published the first issue of its the thirteenth volume, titled "Traveling Forms." The articles in this issue aim to illuminate the ways in which media, aesthetic, and cultural forms are received, transformed, and exported and grapple with questions of form and circulation that challenge the field of German Studies to expand its investigations beyond national, linguistic, or geographic frameworks.  

April 28, 2021

Graduating Ph.D. student Jonas Teupert has accepted a tenure-track position at National Taiwan University. Congratulations Jonas!

April 25, 2021

Professor Karen Feldman has received UC Berkeley's Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of GSIs. The award is presented annually to faculty members who have provided outstanding pedagogical mentorship to GSIs. Congratulations Professor Feldman!

April 15, 2021

Graduate students Caroline Durlacher and Molly Krueger have received the 2021 Outstanding GSI Award. Each year the Graduate Division honors GSIs for their work in teaching that shows dedication, skill and creativity. Congratulations!

March 25, 2021

Professor Tony Kaes released a new foreword to the second edition of his book, M (2000), for the Film Classics Series of the British Film Institute (BFI). The new foreword addresses how the past two decades have revealed the film's shocking prescience and prophetic insights into today’s crises of democracy.

March 2, 2021

Organized by graduate students Andrew Blough and Jonas Teupert, the 29th annual interdisciplinary German Studies conference took place February 19-20. Held online, the conference brought together scholars from Germany, the US, and beyond, to consider the circulation of cultural and medial forms on a global scale.