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Distinguishing Features of our Graduate Program
- A recognized faculty of senior professors that boasts no fewer than six recipients of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship; other awards and honors include Alexander von Humboldt Fellowships, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and Getty Fellowships, a Humboldt Research Prize, a Goethe Medal, a Fulbright Professor Exchange Fellowship, and honorary doctorates.
- Engaged fellow students, many of whom are already fully active in the profession, presenting papers at conferences, writing reviews and articles, and organizing symposia, workshops, and reading groups. Each year graduate students run an international graduate student conference.
- Interdisciplinary openness and strong interest in theory and media. Students are free to work with affiliated and other faculty in philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, rhetoric, comparative literature, film studies, etc. In the past students have taken seminars from Judith Butler, Gary Holland, Martin Jay, George Lakoff, John Searle, and many others across the disciplines. Graduate degrees in German can be combined with Designated Emphases (D.E.) in Film Studies or Women, Gender and Sexuality, among others.
- A strong network of international collaboration. Students are encouraged to work with faculty at other institutions and to build their own network of research contacts in Germany. In order to facilitate this the Department of German entertains networks of research collaboration with several universities abroad. See: International Networks.
- A sound balance of coverage and focus. We offer a full range of courses from the Middle Ages to postmodernism, as well as literary theory and film. At the same time, the department offers advanced research seminars in literature, cultural studies, and theory. Courses and seminars in Germanic linguistics include historical and contemporary German and its dialects, linguistic methodology, comparative Germanic, among others.
- A Ph.D. Specialization in German Literature and Culture and a Ph.D. Specialization in Germanic Linguistics. Shared courses required by both specializations are German 207 (Reading the German Literary Text) and German 270 (History of the German Language). Additional course requirements germane to each specialization allow ample room for the development of individual crossover interests between the two specializations.
- Annual graduate student conference at Berkeley, conceived, organized, and carried out by our graduate students (regularly resulting in a book edited by the main conference organizers).
- Extensive tutoring on outside grant writing by departmental faculty experts on these grants (especially for Fulbright & DAAD, the two most important grant possibilities in our field).
- strong belief in teachers' training and research in second language acquisition. Fellowships at the Berkeley Language Center give students the opportunity to do research on theory and methods of language teaching. Advanced students have the opportunity to develop and teach their own literature and culture courses.
- A critical mass of faculty and students combined with a department-wide collegial atmosphere that allows for a rich and varied program of seminars, research groups, and extracurricular activities. Collaborative projects involving students and faculty (conferences, colloquia, and working groups, for example) are common. Students are involved on all levels of the department.
- Many departmental innovations initiated by students. One such project is our new web-based journal, TRANSIT, the first Internet journal devoted to travel, migration, and multiculturalism in the German-speaking world.
- A stimulating intellectual life that consists of a constant stream of lectures, workshops, and conferences in the department and outside. Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Zizek were among the recent speakers in the German department as were contemporary authors such as Thomas Hettche, Esther Dischereit, Hugo Loetscher, and Zafer Senocak. The Bonwit Heine lecture series, the Semiotic Circle of California, the Berkeley Germanic Lingiustics Roundtable, and the Berkeley Conference on Dutch Literature and Linguistics attract national and international speakers.
- Outstanding research facilities. With over 11 million volumes, including over half a million titles in German, the Berkeley Library is among the nation's largest. Full inter-library loan privileges across the UC system and Stanford add over 20 million additional volumes.
- A sizable departmental library with over 5000 volumes, a video collection, and a viewing station that offers an around-the-clock resource for grads and faculty alike. It also provides an after-hours meeting place for various reading and research groups.
- Additional funding for research assistantships, summer teaching, summer school, and conference travel, as well as for teaching excellence. The Dean's Office grants a fully-paid year for dissertation research after the qualifying exam. Most of our students also successfully apply to DAAD, Social Science Research Council, and Fulbright for study in a German-speaking country.
- An outstanding placement record. In recent years our doctoral students have accepted positions at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Washington University, Harvard University, Brigham Young University, the University of Washington, and numerous other tenure-granting institutions. Non-academic employers, most especially those in the high-tech industry, seek out our Ph.D. students as well.
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