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.

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.   Read the full issue here.

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.

January 25, 2021

Professor Deniz Göktürk published a new article, “Intermedial Solidarity: Drawing Inspiration from the 1970s”, in Monatshefte. Her essay reframes the epic poems of Aras Ören in the context of a multimedia aesthetic project combining poetry, dramatic acting, and documentary to conceive the city as a dynamic site of migration, contact, and change. 

November 25, 2020

Professor Lilla Balint published a new article, "Rhythm, Form, Critique: Kathrin Röggla's wir schlafen nicht (2004)" in The German Quarterly. The article explores narrative motion in Röggla's experimental documentary novel and the (im)possibility of narrative action under conditions of stasis.