Latest News

Congratulations to German Minor Will Hoover, who has been awarded an English Teaching Assistantship in the US Teaching Assistantship Program, run by the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF) and administered by Fulbright Austria. He will be serving as an English Teaching Assistant at two secondary schools in Vienna, Austria, for the 2023-2024 school year.

Dr. Steven Weinberg has successfully defended his dissertation, "An Ersatz Kabbalah: The Dialogue between Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin on Hope and Failure in Kafka's Literature" under the guidance of Prof. Michael Levine. The dissertation committee with Professors Martha Helfer, Michael Levine, Dominik Zechner and Erica Weitzman was imrpessed by his outstanding research. Congratulations, Steve!

Congratulations to PhD student and Teaching Assistant Alexandra Friedrich, who has been awarded the 2022-2023 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education at the TA rank! This is an amazing and well-deserved recognition of an excellent instructor.

We congratulate our German Major Emily Trujillo for winning the Max Kade Prize for Best Presentation with her paper "Unchrist: Religion & Inversion in Kafka's Die Verwandlung," presented at the 12th Undergraduate Research Conference in German Studies, organized by Moravian University and Lafayette College. Emily's close reading of Kafka's novella understands Gregor Samsa the Ungeziefer as an inverted Christ figure, suggesting that the flattened, forgotten, trash-like status of his dying is a...

Click here to view our Fall 2023 undergraduate courses. To view our graduate course offerings for Fall 2023, please click here.

We are proud to announce that recent Rutgers graduate, former German Major, and Henry Rutgers Scholar Serena Lückhoff accepted a Ph.D. Fellowship in German Studies from Brown University. We wish her all the best for her future academic endeavors!

We are pleased to welcome two esteemed visitors to our department for the Spring 2023 semester!  Professor Jan Mieszkowski will join the department from Reed College for the semester as our Spring 2023 Charlotte M. Craig Distinguished Visiting Professor. He will be teaching an undergraduate course on Plants and Politics (470:304:01) and a graduate seminar titled The Sentence (16:470:672:01). Professor Mieszkowski's research focuses on modern European literature and philosophy, and he is...

Click here to learn more about study abroad opportunities in Germany - and find out how and when you can meet with staff and faculty to learn more about your options.

We proudly announce the publication of Prof. Michael Levine’s new book “Interventionen” (Klostermann, 2022), which contains the German translations of his various essays on the poetry of Paul Celan. Congratulations! 

We are celebrating the publication of “Forces of Education: Walter Benjamin and the Politics of Pedagogy” (Bloomsbury), co-edited by Prof. Dominik Zechner and Prof. Dennis Johannßen. “Forces of Education” brings together a polyphony of critical voices assessing the early work of German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin and the way in which it defined the concept of education as one of the core themes of his entire oeuvre. 

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Congratulations to PhD Student Thomas Wallerberger, who has been awarded a "Förderungspreis der Stadt Wien in der Sparte Geistes-, Sozial-, Kultur- und Rechtswissenschaften" from the City of Vienna!

Dr. Anna Mayer has successfully defended her dissertation, "Vom Raster zum Netzwerk: Der westdeutsche Überwachungsapparat der 1970er Jahre in den Werken von Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, Friedrich Christian Delius und Rainald Goetz" under the guidance of Prof. Fatima Naqvi. The dissertation committee with Professors Nicola Behrmann, Nicholas Rennie, and Rupert Gaderer was impressed by her outstanding research. Congratulations, Anna!

Congratulations to PhD Candidate Anna Mayer on her new position as Visiting Assistant Professor at Vassar College this upcoming academic year! Anna is currently in the process of finishing her dissertation thesis. Congratulations, Anna!

Graduating German Major and Honors Student Neha Aluwalia has been chosen to participate in the Congress-Bundestag Exchange Program for Young Professionals (CBYX-YP) for 2022-2023. The CBYX-YP is an exchange program and public diplomacy initiative for developing young professionals in the United States and Germany. Participants from the United States will spend 11 months in Germany studying the German language, taking courses at German universities, and interning in their desired career fields...

PhD student Arielle Friend has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for the 2022-2023 academic year. This will allow her to conduct research at the Freud Museum in Vienna, where she will be working on the development of post-1945 psychoanalytic theories driven by the analysis of infants and children. Graduating German Major and Honors Student Serena Lückhoff has been awarded a Fulbright research grant in Austria for 2022-2023. She will be conducting research on the very ambitious topic of...

Click here to view our Fall 2022 undergraduate courses. To view our graduate course offerings for Fall 2022, please click here.

The Department of German, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures condemns the Russian Federation’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign nation that has been independent for thirty years. We stand with all those who oppose this war, and we grieve the death and suffering that it is causing daily. We are dismayed by reports of racism and discrimination in the treatment of refugees, and hope that all those who flee from Ukraine will be welcomed by other countries, regardless...

Congratulations to PhD student Steven Weinberg, who has received a graduate research award from Brandeis' Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry. This award will allow him to do archival research for his dissertation at the Gershom Scholem Archive at Hebrew University, Jerusalem.