Teaching
Courses Taught at Bates College
Teaching Philosophy
In my teaching, my primary objective has always been to create an environment in which my students can think critically about themselves as learners and readers, or consumers of culture, and to recognize recurring patterns in the overwhelming mass of information they take in every day. I want my students to acknowledge the past and the literary heritage not as a repository of relic facts and outdated themes, but as a source of universal models of social behavior and accounts of individual struggles that are common to us all, no matter from which historical period they originate. Therefore, my primary goal while teaching is to facilitate intellectual and personal development in my students. I want students to experience the feeling of a universal human connection, the discovery that we all try to express our experiences in different languages in a similar way, and the realization that people living in different cultures and at different times can help us understand the complexity of the world in which we live. As a teacher, I aim to challenge the concept of “foreign,” so it loses the notion of strangeness and inaccessibility and becomes a part of my students’ everyday life and thinking.
My work at Bates has concentrated on teaching German language, culture, and literature courses both in German and in English. I have also focused on contributing new courses to the curriculum in German and the program in European Studies, as well as on working toward offering students various opportunities to immerse themselves in German culture through off-campus classes.
In my literature and culture courses – whether on German autobiographical literature, the memory of the First World War, or on national identities in West and East German cinema after WW2 – I want to help my students make connections with their own experiences. I strive to select material that I think best expresses the hopes and fears of people at the time but is accessible to a reader today. I choose topics for discussion that provoke students to verbalize the patterns and recurring themes they see between the literary and artistic works and their contemporary cultural and political environment, and I reiterate the importance of such connections in the selection of topics for written assignments and group presentations. Even if the relationships are not visible to my students at first sight, the discovery of such links leads to the pleasure of the text. It is essential and ultimately very rewarding for both the students and me. The selection of materials for each course has also been an opportunity for me to challenge my understanding of what I deem relevant to the students’ experience at the time of creating the syllabus for a course. Interactions in the classroom with diverse groups of students are often an exercise in humility and a lesson in intercultural exchange. They drive me to revisit my concepts of “foreign” and my own experiences as a migrant; they also compel me to continually revise and evaluate my teaching practices, materials, and their sequencing, as well as my self-awareness as an educator. I consider routine one of the principal obstacles to developing as a teacher, and trying new approaches—at the risk of stress about an uncertain result—helps me feel that I evolve as a teacher.
When students make connections with their own experience, it creates a fundament on which I can build an understanding of the work’s idiosyncrasies in the context of a given historical context. When I succeed in creating that fundament, I can then better develop the students’ awareness of the language: when students understand what the ideas are, they show a keen interest in how these ideas are expressed. In my opinion, the students’ interest in a foreign language should not be treated as a given and constant factor, just because they register for a particular class. It needs to be tended to and developed gradually. For this reason, teaching German and European literature and culture in English is for me a vital step in challenging the conventional concept of “foreign” and an invitation to study the language further.
Teaching both language and language-related content courses is, in my experience, a challenging but also very satisfying task. I believe that a good rapport with the students is key to being a successful teacher, and the teacher’s enthusiasm for the foreign language and culture is a crucial element in convincing students to pursue their language interests.
(The syllabi are available to Bates College users only)
Winter 2024
GER 102, Introduction to German Language and Culture II
This course, part of a yearlong sequence (GER 101 and GER 102), introduces students to the German language and its cultural contexts. Students will learn to speak, build vocabulary, and develop listening comprehension, reading, and writing skills by focusing on communicative skills.
EUS 220 / GER 220, Remembering War: The Great War, Memory and Remembrance in Europe
The course focuses on ways in which the experience of the First World War changed established narratives of violence and armed conflict in Central Europe. It investigates how the new narratives became sites of memory, mourning, and remembrance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, drawing on examples from different European countries.
Fall 2023
GER 201, Intermediate German Language and Culture I
The course is the third part in the sequence of four German language courses at Bates (following GER 101 and GER 102) that use the Impuls Deutsch textbook series. It is designed to expand students' German skills through sustained interactive practice in reading, writing, listening, and speaking and your cultural knowledge about German-speaking countries through wide-ranging, authentic material.
GER 233, Advanced German Language and Introduction to German Studies
The course is the third part in the sequence of German language courses at Bates (after students complete GER 101-102 and GER 201-202). It is designed to further expand students' German skills through sustained interactive practice in reading, writing, listening, and speaking. The course focuses on contemporary discourses in German-language media.
Fall 2022 - Winter 2023
On leave.
Winter 2022
GER 102, Introduction to German Language and Culture II
This course, part of a yearlong sequence (GER 101 and GER 102), introduces students to the German language and its cultural contexts. By focusing on communicative skills, students will learn to speak, build vocabulary, and develop listening comprehension, reading, and writing skills.
GER 253, Contemporary German Cultures
This project-based course engages students in current issues in German-speaking countries. The issues may include difficult debates surrounding pluriculturalism, racism, and the legacies of imperialism and authoritarianism, as well as popular culture, such as music, film, or children’s books. Students work individually and in groups to define current trends and place them in a historical context. This is a project-based course engaging with cultural issues contemporary to the semester in which the course is offered. Students will explore a selection of print, online, and news media, such as newspapers, news magazines, and newscasts, in order to familiarize themselves with both current topics and the discourses surrounding them. They will then break into groups to work on an issue of their choice, researching and analyzing both the current reports and the historical context.
GER 262, The Split Screen: Reconstructing National Identities in West and East German Cinema
This course investigates selected works of West and East German cinematic production after 1945. Students will engage in a broad range of topics and issues that define the popular view of Germany and its culture today. Students will discuss Germany's Nazi past, the postwar division of the country and its reunification in 1990, the legacies of the 1968 generation, the role of minorities in contemporary Germany, and the role Germany plays in the processes of European integration. The course also will provide students with basic tools of film analysis, which are used in the discussion of cinematic art and in the analysis of the specific aesthetic qualities of a film.
Fall 2021
GER 201, Intermediate German Language and Culture I
The course is the third part in the sequence of German language courses at Bates. It is designed to further expand your German skills through sustained interactive practice in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, as well as your cultural knowledge about German-speaking countries through wide-ranging, authentic material.
GER 341, Landscapes and Cityscapes in German Media
This course examines the construction of space in various historical and contemporary German media, answering questions such as: What landscapes and cityscapes contribute to German identity and how? How do geographical location, cultural particularity, and historical context contribute to (sometimes contested) discourses on these spaces? How is the construction of these spaces impacted by the historical diversity of cultures in Central Europe and modern migration to the area? And how have German speakers conceptualized and colonized “other” spaces in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas? A central concern of the course will be to familiarize students with the construction of space and place in different writing genres (such as poetry, short stories, novels, plays, memoirs, travel writing, journalism, etc.) and media (such as maps, film, photography, visual art, etc.). The course will also introduce students to applicable theoretical concepts and help expand their skills in contextualized and theoretically-grounded close reading of texts.
Winter 2020
GER 202, Intermediate German Language and Culture II
The course is designed to further expand students' German skills through sustained interactive practice in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, as well as their cultural knowledge about German-speaking countries through wide-ranging, authentic material. The course is divided into three thematic modules: 1) JUNGE DEUTSCHE: ERWACHSENWERDEN IN DEUTSCHLAND; 2) GESCHMACK UND GENUSS: ESSEN UND TRINKEN; 3) KUNST UND KONTROVERSE: DER KUNSTBEGRIFF IM 20. JAHRHUNDERT. In each module, students explore a different area of cultural, historical, and social experience and focus on its discourses and products in a variety of German-language media.
Fall 2020
FYS 423, Humor and Laughter in Literature and Visual Media
No attempt to provide a comprehensive theory of humor—that would account for every occurrence of and condition for a humorous situation—has been able to satisfy all scholars involved in humor research. Existing theories of humor are limited to particular disciplines: for instance, their authors aspire to define humor within the areas of medicine, psychology, literature, visual arts, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. The scholars’ problems with analyzing humor emerge already with the attempt to create a definition of humor that would encompass the complexity of the phenomenon, explain the enormously broad spectrum of humor appearances, and satisfy all investigators of humor who try to capture the multiple conditions under which humor can be observed. The theorists are therefore divided over the causes, mechanisms, and functions of humor and often offer explanations that are very effective in accounting for certain aspects of humor while completely disregarding others.
By focusing on these and other issues related to humor and laughter, this course provides students with a broad introduction to humor research. Students start from the position that humor, as an important element of human life, is worth studying and understanding. In class discussions, students try to determine what, if anything, creates or designates something as humorous (and is it universal?). They explore the differences between being laughed at, laughing at someone or a group, and laughing with an individual or group. In addition, students focus on the instances when something is funny and offensive at the same time, and they discuss what creates such a dichotomy (and how thin the line between funny and offensive can be). Students analyze examples of literary and visual media works (with a strong emphasis on the culture of the German-speaking countries) and examine specific manifestations of humor in the narratives and their aesthetic and social functions.
GER 101, Introduction to German Language and Culture I
This course, part of a yearlong sequence (GER 101 and GER 102), introduces students to the German language and its cultural contexts. By focusing on communicative skills, they will learn to speak, build vocabulary, and develop their listening comprehension, reading, and writing skills.
GER 350, Margins and Migrations
In the course, students focus on Migrantenliteratur in the last three decades, the period of rapid social and political changes in Germany and Eastern Europe. They discuss selected literary texts of German-Polish authors who currently live in a German-speaking country and write in German, but they also explore examples of work of German authors who moved to Poland and decided to live between the cultures. In addition, students analyze a few examples of cinematic interpretations of the German-Polish borderlands (Germany’s margins in the east) in the last 25-30 years, reaching from the negative view of the area to its distinctly positive readings. The guiding concept behind the selection of the works in the course is the perceived “Eastern turn” (Haines 2008) in the literature and film production of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland: the increased institutional and popular attention to the authors of non-German origins and writing from a position of a subaltern that questions the idea of homogeneous national literature and film.
Teaching “Margins and Migrations” on the Historic Quad on November 6, 2020. (Photo: Phyllis Graber Jensen / Bates College)
Winter 2020
GER 202, Intermediate German Language and Culture II
The course is designed to further expand your German skills through sustained interactive practice in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, as well as your cultural knowledge about German-speaking countries through wide-ranging, authentic material.
GER 234, Advanced German Language and Culture II
GER 234 is a topical course designed to develop students' linguistic and cultural competency. The topic of GER 234 in Winter 2020 is the Weimar Republic and Berlin in the Roaring Twenties. Students read and discuss a number of texts from the years 1918-1933 and work with a variety of other media, they also learn about the social and historical background of the narratives. Through the discussions in class and written assignments at home, students attain greater oral and written proficiency in German while deepening their understanding of the culture of German-speaking countries.
Fall 2019
GER 101, Introduction to German Language and Culture I
This course, part of a yearlong sequence (GER 101 and GER 102), introduces students to the German language and its cultural contexts. By focusing on communicative skills, students will learn to speak, build vocabulary, and develop their listening comprehension, reading, and writing skills.
GER 251, Age of Revolution, 1950-1830
This course is a study of selected German literary works written during the Enlightenment, the period of Weimar Classicism, and early Romanticism. Between 1700 and 1815, in the period of rapid and far-reaching political and social changes, German literature attained a European reputation with the writings of Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, and the Romantic poets that greatly influenced the literary production in the following decades and are still referenced in the German cultures today. Students discuss the last decades of the ‘long eighteenth century’ in Europe as a time of social transformation and redefinition of both public and private life. Through an examination and contextualization of major literary texts and other documents from the period, students discuss the relationship between cultural norms and individual experience in the eighteenth century and beyond, we will address questions of social history, in particular the Bürgertum’s response to the enlightened absolutism, the German reaction to the French Revolution, and the impact of Napoleon's victories on Germany. Other topics discussed in class include questions of gender identity, education, individual and structural violence, religious crisis and coexistence of different religious beliefs, growing urbanization and the changing attitude towards nature, and the emerging foundations of modern German nationalism.
Short Term 2019
GER s26, The Split Screen: Reconstructing National Identities in West and East German Cinema
This course investigates selected works of West and East German cinematic production after 1945. Students engage in a broad range of topics and issues that define the popular view of Germany and its culture today. Students discuss Germany's Nazi past, the postwar division of the country and its reunification in 1990, the legacies of the 1968 generation, the role of minorities in contemporary Germany, and the role Germany plays in the processes of European integration. The course also provides students with basic tools of film analysis, which are used in the discussion of cinematic art and in the analysis of the specific aesthetic qualities of a film.
Winter 2019
GER 202, Intermediate German Language and Culture II
The course is the fourth part in the sequence of German language courses: it is designed to further expand students' German skills through sustained interactive practice in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, as well as their cultural knowledge about the German-speaking countries through wide-ranging, authentic material. The course is divided into three thematic modules: in each module, students explore a different area of cultural, historical, and social experience and focus on its discourses and products in a variety of German-language media. In the classroom, students conduct a series of interactive online exercises, and the discussions in class rely on the readings and materials prepared at home.
GER 234, Advanced German Language and Culture II
This topical course is designed to develop students' linguistic and cultural competency. Students read and discuss the novel Der Vorleser by Bernhard Schlink and work with a variety of other texts and media related to the novel and the social and historical background of the narrative (including the 2008 film adaptation of the novel, The Reader, directed by Stephen Daldry). Through the discussions in class and written assignments at home, students attain greater oral and written proficiency in German while deepening their understanding of the culture of German-speaking countries.
Fall 2018
GER 101, Introduction to German Language and Culture I
This course, part of a yearlong sequence (GER 101 and GER 102), introduces students to the German language and its cultural contexts. By focusing on communicative skills, students learn to speak, build vocabulary, and develop their listening comprehension, reading, and writing skills. The textbook for this course is Schritte international neu 1+2.
GER 202, Intermediate German Language and Culture II
The course is a continuation of German 201. It is designed to further expand students' German skills through sustained interactive practice in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, as well as their cultural knowledge about German-speaking countries through wide-ranging, authentic material.
EU/GR 254. Berlin and Vienna, 1900–1914
From the beginning of the twentieth century to the outbreak of World War I, the capital cities of Berlin and Vienna were home to major political and cultural developments, including diverse modernist movements in art, architecture, literature, and music. The ascending German Empire and the multiethnic Habsburg Empire teetering on the verge of collapse provide the context within which this course examines important texts of the time, as well as narratives created during and after WW1 that take a look back at the last decades of both empires.
GER 252: Tracing the Autobiographical: Personal Narratives in the 20th-Century German Literature (co-taught with Prof. Raluca Cernahoschi)
Why are memoirs and autobiographies so popular? Is it because we seek in them truthfulness and honesty, the “real” experiences of their authors and authentic circumstances, as opposed to creations in literary fiction? But, what do we really read when we read memoirs, autobiographies, or published diaries? Can we always see through the conventions of narrative and the rhetorical elements in the texts to establish what is real and what is creation? The course focuses on the autobiographical writings in the 20th-century German literature and asks questions about the self-presentation of the authors as narrators of their own stories, the relationship between disclosure and literary invention, and the area between truth and fiction in autobiographical forms. Students investigate how “life-writing” and “self-writing” can be a literary genre that presents issues such as identity, belonging and Otherness, memory, and trauma. Here, one of the main goals of the course will be an exploration of autobiographical writing (for example, in a form of a diary) as a way of creating and shaping memories, finding meaning in the overwhelming wave of impressions, a method of self-therapy, or recovery from trauma. This therapeutic aspect of writing is particularly visible in the area of the 20th-century German literature that will be used as the case study: the autobiographical works about the First World War published during and after the conflict. By reading autobiographical narrative texts about the First World War and investigating their social, political/historical, and private contexts, students explore how the war events were experienced and evaluated by the authors.
Winter 2018
GER 202, Intermediate German Language and Culture II
The course is a continuation of German 201. It is designed to further expand students' German skills through sustained interactive practice in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, as well as their cultural knowledge about the German-speaking countries through wide-ranging, authentic material. The course is divided into three thematic modules: in each module, students explore a different area of cultural, historical, and social experience and focus on its discourses and products in a variety of German-language media.
GER 234, Advanced German Language and Culture II
GER 234 is a topical course offered in the winter semester and designed to develop students' linguistic and cultural competency. The topic of GER 234 in Winter 2018 is the Weimar Republic and Berlin in the Roaring Twenties. Students read and discuss several texts from the years 1918-1933 and work with a variety of other media to learn about the social and historical background of the narratives. Through the discussions in class and written assignments at home, students attain greater oral and written proficiency in German while deepening their understanding of the culture of German-speaking countries.
GER 264, World War One in German Culture
This course explores how the memory of World War I influenced German culture from 1918 to the present, with an emphasis on the literature and film of the Weimar Republic. Topics include the literary representation of the experience of the war, the impact of the war on Weimar cinema, the instrumentalization of the Great War in Nazi ideology, and artistic production, as well as strategies of commemoration of World War I in post-1945 German culture. The course, offered for the first time almost exactly on the centennial of the end of World War One, introduces students to the rich artistic resonance of the war in German culture and demonstrates how the memory of the war was transferred, transformed, and instrumentalized over the course of the last 100 years. Especially significant in the context of the processing of the war memory in Germany is the early reception of the war works in the Weimar Republic and their instrumentalization in contemporaneous power struggles (that, in return, influenced the works’ positioning within the literary discourse). Students discuss selected autobiographical texts, novels, and short stories written by German authors during the Great War and in the Weimar era (1919-1933) that thematize this generational experience. The texts include, among others, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, but also works less known in the English-speaking world but prominently present in the German reception, such as Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, or Transfiguration by Ernst Toller. Students consider the connection between World War One and World War Two, highlighted by some historians in terms of the “long war” (Philip Bobbitt) or the “second Thirty Years War” (Sigmund Neumann). The continuing impact of the Great War on present-day Germany is also discussed: here, attention is given to the strategies of commemoration of the war after 1945. Students learn about the shift in the collective memory of the war related to generational changes, the appearance of critical re-editions of war works in the 1990s and 2000s, and new museum exhibitions devoted to World War One (Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, but also museums in Ypern, Peronne, and Verdun). The impact of the war on popular culture is explored, especially in the context of new film adaptations of All Quiet on the Western Front, increased access to archival materials in new media (i.e. through the Internet databases), and the new wave of German films about World War One (e.g. The Red Baron).
GER 102, Introduction to German Language and Culture II (co-taught with Katrin Laschober)
This course, a continuation of GER 101, introduces students to the German language and its cultural contests. By emphasizing communicative skills, students will further develop their speaking, listening comprehension, reading, and writing skills. The textbook for this course is Kontakte: A Communicative Approach (Tschirner et al., 7th edition).
Fall 2017
GER 101, Introduction to German Language and Culture I
This course, part of a yearlong sequence (GER 101 and GER 102), introduces students to the German language and its cultural contexts. By emphasizing communicative skills, students learn to speak, build vocabulary, and develop their listening comprehension, reading, and writing skills. The textbook for this course is Kontakte: A Communicative Approach (Tschirner et al., 7th edition).
GER 233, Advanced German Language and Culture I
This topical course is designed to develop your linguistic and cultural competency. Students read and discuss the novel Der Vorleser by Bernhard Schlink and work with a variety of other texts and media related to the novel and the social and historical background of the narrative (including the 2008 film adaptation of the novel, The Reader, directed by Stephen Daldry). Through the discussions in class and written assignments at home, students attain greater oral and written proficiency in German while deepening their understanding of the culture of German-speaking countries.
Winter 2017
GER 202, Intermediate German Language and Culture II
The course is a continuation of German 201. It is designed to further expand the German skills of students through sustained interactive practice in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, as well as your cultural knowledge about German-speaking countries through wide-ranging, authentic material. The course is divided into three thematic modules: in each module, students will explore a different area of cultural, historical, and social experience and focus on its discourses and products in a variety of German-language media.
GER 234, Advanced German Language and Culture II
This topical course is designed to develop the linguistic and cultural competency of advanced students. Students will read and discuss the novel Der Vorleser by Bernhard Schlink and work with a variety of other texts and media related to the novel and the social and historical background of the narrative (including the 2008 film adaptation of the novel, The Reader, directed by Stephen Daldry). Through the discussions in class and written assignments at home, students will attain greater oral and written proficiency in German while deepening their understanding of the culture of German-speaking countries.
Fall 2016
GER 252: Tracing the Autobiographical: Personal Narratives in the 20th-Century German Literature
The course focuses on the autobiographical writings in the 20th-century German literature and asks questions about the self-presentation of the authors as narrators of their own stories, the relationship between disclosure and literary invention, and the area between truth and fiction in autobiographical forms. Students investigate how “life-writing” and “self-writing” can be a literary genre that presents issues such as identity, “belonging” and Otherness, memory, and trauma. meaning in the overwhelming wave of impressions, a method of self-therapy, or recovery from trauma. This therapeutic aspect of writing is particularly visible in the area of the 20th-century German literature that will be used as the case study: the autobiographical works about the First World War published during and after the conflict. By reading autobiographical narrative texts about the First World War and investigating their social, political/historical, and private contexts, students explore how the war events were experienced and evaluated by the authors.
Fall 2015
BSAG 009, Mapping the City: The Urban Landscape as Text (2015 Fall Semester Abroad in Berlin Program, co-taught with Prof. Raluca Cernahoschi)
The course engages with contemporary Berlin as a multilayered area in which people experience and interact with the past through language, architecture, literature, and the visual arts. By exploring literary, visual, historical, and film narratives about Berlin in Berlin, students construct their own topographies of the city, create mental maps of existing or vanished buildings, stores, squares, and parks, and confront them with the present urban landscape. Students interpret poetry and prose texts, as well as feature and documentary films, and place them in the contexts of urbanization, industrialization, immigration, multilingualism, and multiculturalism in Germany from the 18th to the 21st centuries. At the same time, students identify the topography of the city as described in the works and compare it with the contemporary geographical and architectural features of Berlin. Students explore the concept of the city as a palimpsest, a multilayered area in which people experience and interact with the past through language, architecture, literature, and visual arts. Students follow the traces of the Berlin Wall in the streets, place destroyed buildings back on the skyline of the German capital, discover its empty spaces, hear the voices of its missing inhabitants, and see bridges between its cultures and languages. The main focus of the course is on cultural products created in the last 150 years: in the Kaiserreich, in the Weimar Republic (the Berlin “Golden Years”), in the aftermath of WW2, during the Cold War, and after the reunification of Germany in 1990. The course includes works of authors and filmmakers who represent today’s “hyphenated” identities, for example, German-Turkish, German-Russian, German-Polish, or German-Romanian artists working and living in Berlin and depicting their experiences either from the position of a migrant or second-generation resident. The course encourages students to explore underrepresented discourses and depart from the notion of German culture as monolingual and homogeneous, especially in the context of the social and economic changes in Germany in the last 25 years.
Read more about the 2015 Fall Semester Abroad in Berlin.
Short Term 2015
GER s26, The Split Screen: Reconstructing National Identities in West and East German Cinema
The objective of the course is to introduce students to the turbulent history of Germany and its people in the 20th and 21st centuries through the medium of film. The goal of this course is to make German culture accessible to those who are not studying the language but want to gain insights into German history and into the structures of contemporary German society, as well as into the aesthetics and cultural meaning of film. The course develops a thematic and chronologic trajectory of film narratives from the first post1945 works. The selection of films focuses on the Nazi past and the consequences of the lost war, stories of a divided Germany created on both sides of the border, and films that portray the reunification of Germany in the 1990s and the processes of European integration in the 2000s.
Winter 2015
GER 202, Intermediate German Language and Culture II
The course is a continuation of German 201. It is designed to further expand the German skills of students through sustained interactive practice in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, as well as their cultural knowledge about German-speaking countries through wide-ranging, authentic material. At the end of the course, students should be able to: 1) understand the main points of clear standard speech on a range of familiar subjects related to work, home, and leisure activities (self and family, some daily activities, and personal preferences, such as taste in art, and some immediate needs, such as ordering and making food); 2) produce simple and cohesive texts on familiar subjects or subjects of personal interest (personal opinions, reports, summaries, and descriptions); 3) narrate an event, an experience or a dream; express a personal opinion and support it with arguments, describe a desire or goal, and outline reasons or explanations behind a project or idea; 4) recognize formal differences between non-fictional texts, such as newspaper article, report, review, etc., and start to use language appropriate for the specific genre; 5) better understand cultural differences related to written and spoken communication in German; 6) identify selected key moments in the 20th and 21st -century history of Germany;
GER 234, Advanced German Language and Culture II
This topical course is designed to develop the linguistic and cultural competency of students. Students read and discuss the novel Der Vorleser by Bernhard Schlink and work with a variety of other texts and media related to the novel and the social and historical background of the narrative (including the 2008 film adaptation of the novel, The Reader, directed by Stephen Daldry). Through the discussions in class and written assignments at home, students attain greater oral and written proficiency in German while deepening their understanding of the culture of German-speaking countries.
Fall 2014
EU/GR 220, Remembering War: The Great War, Memory and Remembrance in Europe
The British historian Jay Winter, in the introduction to his study Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century, observes that “the images, languages and practices which appeared during and in the aftermath of the Great War shaped the ways in which future conflicts were imagined and remembered.” Starting from Winter’s observation, the course focuses on how the experience of the First World War changed established narratives of violence and armed conflict and how these narratives became sites of memory, mourning, and remembrance in the 20th and 21st centuries. The scope of the course is designed to offer a comparative perspective on narratives that reflect political, social, and demographic changes in Central Europe following the First World War. The region of Central Europe was the area where Imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated as a consequence of the lost war, and where several new independent states emerged, among them Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Austria. The years 1914-1918 were for all of them, both in official remembrance acts and in individual memory, a symbol of fundamental changes that influenced the course of the next century. Selected literary works, films, and commemoration practices from German, Polish, Hungarian, and Czech language-speaking areas are discussed in more detail in order to capture the processes of memory and remembrance.
GER 101, Introduction to German Language and Culture I
This course, part of a yearlong sequence (GER 101 and GER 102), introduces students to the German language and its cultural contexts. By emphasizing communicative skills, students learn to speak, build vocabulary, and develop their listening comprehension, reading, and writing skills. The textbook for this course is Kontakte: A Communicative Approach (Tschirner et al., 7th edition).
Short Term 2014
GR/EU s21, Weimar and Berlin: German Culture in European Context (off-campus study course, co-taught with Prof. Raluca Cernahoschi)
The course traces the socio-political transformations that inform Germany’s current role in the European Union through the example of two very different capitals: Weimar, the sleepy hamlet turned Germany’s premier intellectual center, and Berlin, the once-divided city reinvented as an intercultural meeting place. Using selected sites in the two cities, students focus on key moments in German history, which absorbed international trends and, in turn, reverberated across Europe. Students learn about important intellectual developments from the Reformation to today, cultural personalities and artifacts, and the crises and co-operations that produced them.
Winter 2014
GER 102, Introduction to German Language and Culture II
This course, a continuation of GER 101, introduces students to the German language and its cultural contests. By emphasizing communicative skills, students further develop their speaking, listening comprehension, reading, and writing skills. The textbook for this course is Kontakte: A Communicative Approach (Tschirner et al., 7th edition).
GER 202, Intermediate German II
The course is a continuation of German 201. It is designed to further expand the German skills of students through sustained interactive practice in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, as well as their cultural knowledge about German-speaking countries through wide-ranging, authentic material. The course is divided into three parts (Essen und Kultur, Recht und Gerechtigkeit, Sport und Nation): in each part, students explore a different area of cultural and social experience and focus on its discourses and products in a variety of German-language media.
Fall 2013
FYS 423, Humor and Laughter in Literature and Visual Media
What is humor? How do we define what is funny? Can humor be a universal phenomenon that works across cultures and different generations of readers and film viewers? This seminar discusses various manifestations, strategies, and functions of humor in selected literature and visual media narratives, at the same time examining existing theories of humor and laughter. Open to students with a sense of humor.
GER 264, World War One in German Culture
The course, offered for the first time almost exactly on the centennial of the outbreak of World War One, introduces students to the rich artistic resonance of the war in German culture and demonstrates how the memory of the war was transferred, transformed, and instrumentalized over the course of the last 100 years. Especially significant in the context of the processing of the war memory in Germany is the early reception of the war works in the Weimar Republic and their instrumentalization in contemporaneous power struggles (that, in return, influenced the works’ positioning within the literary discourse). The experience of the lost war and the massive killing on the battlefields, unprecedented in European history, shaped the worldview of an entire generation of young Germans, born in the last decade of the 19th century. Students will discuss selected diaries, novels, and short stories based on autobiographical experiences written by German authors during the Great War and in the Weimar era (1919-1933) that thematize this generational experience. The texts include, among others, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, but also works less known in the English-speaking world but prominently present in the German reception, such as Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger and The Case of Sergeant Grischa by Arnold Zweig. Students consider the connection between World War One and World War Two, highlighted by some historians in terms of the “long war” (Philip Bobbitt) or the “second Thirty Years War” (Sigmund Neumann). The continuing impact of World War on present-day Germany is also discussed: here, attention is given to the strategies of commemoration of the war after 1945. Students learn about the shift in the collective memory of the war related to generational changes, the appearance of critical re-editions of war works in the 1990s and 2000s, and new museum exhibitions devoted to World War One (Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, but also museums in Ypern, Peronne, and Verdun). The impact of the war on popular culture is discussed, especially in the context of new film adaptations of All Quiet on the Western Front, increased access to archival materials in new media (i.e. through the Internet databases), and the new wave of German films about World War One which – following the ideological project of the European Union – emphasize the creation of European identity in the war (e.g. The Red Baron, Joyeux Noël).
Winter 2013
GER 202, Intermediate German II
The course is a continuation of German 201. It is designed to further expand the German skills of students through sustained interactive practice in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, as well as your cultural knowledge about German-speaking countries through wide-ranging, authentic material. The course is divided into three parts: in each part, we will explore a different area of cultural and social experience and focus on its discourses and products in a variety of German-language media.
GER 234, German Composition and Conversation II
The course accompanies German 262 (The Split Screen: Reconstructing National Identities in West and East German Cinema) and includes topics for advanced German students. Students are expected to attend German 262 and participate in all class discussions, prepare for the class (except for hand-in assignments and the final project). For our meetings (and meetings with the TA), students are expected to prepare additional materials in German, assigned independently from assignments in German 262.
GER 262, The Split Screen: Reconstructing National Identities in West and East German Cinema
The objective of the course is to introduce students to the turbulent history of Germany and its people in the 20th and 21st centuries through the medium of film. The goal of this course is to make German culture accessible to those who are not studying the language but want to gain insights into German history and into the structures of contemporary German society, as well as into the aesthetics and cultural meaning of film. The course develops a thematic and chronologic trajectory of film narratives from the first post-1945 works that focus on the Nazi past and the consequences of the lost war, to stories of divided Germany created on both sides of the border, to films that portray the reunification of Germany in the 1990s and the processes of European integration in the 2000s.
Fall 2012
GER 201, Intermediate German I
The course is designed to further expand the German skills of students through sustained interactive practice in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, as well as their cultural knowledge about German-speaking countries through wide-ranging, authentic material. The course is divided into four parts: Personen beschreiben, Briefe schreiben, Autobiografisches Schreiben, Berichte schreiben. In each part, we will explore a different area of cultural and social experience and focus on its discourses and products in a variety of German-language media.