Latest News

Click here to view our Fall 2025 undergraduate courses. To view our graduate course offerings for Fall 2025, please click here.

We welcome you to attend the undergraduate conference on dis/appearance on Saturday, March 29, 2025 in Seminar Room 4052 on the fourth floor of Rutgers Academic Building West. This in-person event is organized by Rutgers German majors Charlie Scott and Emily Trujillo, advised by Prof. Nicholas Rennie, with a keynote address by Prof. Dominik Zechner. Click here for more information!

Eva Erber has successfully defended her dissertation, "This Woman’s Work: Arbeitswelten in der ‘Frauenliteratur’ der Zwischenzeit von 1930 bis 1940" under the guidance of Prof. Nicola Behrmann. The dissertation committee was composed of Professors Michael Levine, Martha Helfer, and Heide Volkening (Universität Greifswald). Congratulations, Dr. Erber!

Thomas Wallerberger has successfully defended his dissertation, "Auf der Suche nach dem Wunder: Die österreichische Literatur der ‚Zwischenzeit‘ von 1930 bis 1940" under the co-advisorship of Professors Nicola Behrmann and Nicholas Rennie. The dissertation committee consisted of Professors Martha Helfer, Regina Karl, and Fatima Naqvi (Yale University). Congratulations, Dr. Wallerberger!

Congratulations to German major Nathaniel Eck, who has won an award from Fulbright Austria’s US Teaching-Assistant Program to go to Vienna for the 2024-2025 school year.

Congratulations to Prof. Galasso on the publication of Genre, Race, and the Production of Subjectivity in German Romanticism! Prof. Stephanie Galasso’s monograph is out now with Northwestern University Press. In it, she argues that modern genre theory takes for granted a racially coded universality dating back to late Enlightenment and Romantic aesthetics. Copies of Prof. Galasso's book can be ordered through the link here.

The Rutgers German Department's Bob and Charlotte Craig Visiting Professor for Fall 2024 will be Dr. Philipp Felsch. Philipp Felsch is Professor for Cultural History at the Humboldt University Berlin. As an intellectual historian he is interested in the social life of the ideas that have shaped the postwar period up to our present age. His latest books in English are The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960-1990 (2021 – for a current review see...

Dr. Stefanie Populorum has successfully defended her dissertation, "Ökonomien des Untergangs. Krisennarrative bei Franz Kafka, Fritz Lang und Joseph Roth" under the guidance of Prof. Nicola Behrmann. The dissertation committee consisted of Professors Nicola Behrmann, Michael Levine, Fatima Naqvi, and Henry Sussman. Congratulations, Stefanie!

Dr. Christiane Fischer has successfully defended her dissertation, "Seeing Nothing: Violence and Representation in Harun Farocki, Yoko Tawada, Hito Steyerl, and Christian Petzold" under the guidance of Prof. Michael Levine. The dissertation committee was comprised of Professor Michael Levine, Nicola Behrmann, Regina Karl, and Randall Halle. Congratulations, Dr. Fischer!

The Red 1 Mark NovelsJanuary 24th, 2024 - April 24th, 2024Finissage: April 24th, 2024 at 12pmOpen hours: Monday- Friday, 9am - 4:30pm Location: open area in the German Department, Academic Building West Wing, 4th floor

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.