Latest News

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.

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

Congratulations to Rutgers graduate Nadia Schuman, who will be starting as Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder's Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures in Fall 2021. Nadia graduated from Rutgers in 2014 with a BA in Psychology German Language and Literature. She went on to Binghamton University, initially in the Behavioral Neuroscience PhD program, but she transferred to the Comparative Literature program in her second semester. Her PhD...

Congratulations to Rutgers graduate Veronika (Jeltsch) Burney, who has just started a position as Director of Programs for the AATG (American Association of Teachers of German). Veronika received her Ph.D. in German Studies from the Rutgers German Program in 2015, where she also gained valuable experience as a Summer Study Abroad Program Assistant. She has taught German at colleges across the US for over a decade, most recently at William & Mary in Williamsburg, VA. As a language educator,...

The Department is happy to announce that Professor Alexander Pichugin has been selected as a recipient of the 2019-2020 School of Arts and Sciences Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education at the Assistant Teaching Professor rank. Our colleague in the Russian Program, Professor Chloë Kitzinger, was also selected as a winner in the Assistant Professor category.

German Major Serena Lückhoff presented her paper "Disembodied Cognition: Constructing a Barrier Between Language and Emotion" at the 2021 Virtual Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA). Serena, who is double-majoring in German and Cognitive Science, brought both disciplines together to look at how multilinguals' relationships with their native and non-native languages differ as a function of how they are acquired and represented. She looked at how emotion interacts...