Department of German
UW-Madison
College of Letters & Science

Graduate Program Booklet: Introduction

Occupying the 8th floor of Van Hise Hall, , the Department of German is one of the oldest, strongest, and best in the United States. Established in 1890, it awarded its first M.A. in 1893 and its first Ph.D. in 1901. Since then, over 700 M.A.'s and more than 300 Ph.D.'s have been granted by the program. The Department is one of the highest rated in the country. The university-wide system of faculty teaching evaluation by students consistently places the department members in the top quartile, and several faculty have received prestigious teaching awards. The size of the Department allows the program to emphasize both breadth and depth and to offer considerable scope and choice of courses, while the size of the university encourages a wide range of interdisciplinary projects. The fact that our former graduates teach in numerous colleges and universities around the country has firmly established the Department's reputation and significance.

The Department of German provides a rich environment to study all things related to the literatures, cultures, and language of the German-speaking countries. The state's ethnic history has created a serious public interest that supports the excellence of both the undergraduate and graduate programs. In turn, the Department strives to enrich campus and community life with a wide range of activities: lectures, film screenings, drama performances, and publications. Graduate students often work together with faculty in organizing these events or conferences, sometimes presenting papers and introducing sessions themselves. They also form their own discussion and study groups and coordinate the Department's regular Kaffeestunde and Stammtisch.

The Department offers curricula leading to the degree of Master of Arts and the degree of Doctor of Philosophy with specialization in several fields of literature and linguistics. In addition, it offers candidates the opportunity to do specially tailored work with other units on campus, such as the departments of Comparative Literature, History, Art History, Communication Arts, Scandinavian Studies, Linguistics, as well as the programs in Jewish Studies, European Studies, and Women's Studies.

The Department is the home of the quarterly Monatshefte, the oldest journal of German studies in the United States, established in 1899. It publishes articles dealing with all aspects of the literature and culture of German-speaking countries. The Journal of Germanic Linguistics, the journal of the Society for Germanic Linguistics, is also edited and produced in the Department. It is dedicated to scholarship in linguistics and philology in the full range of Germanic languages. Other journals that were founded in Madison include The Brecht Yearbook / Brecht Jahrbuch (1969), Basis - Zeitschrift für Gegenwartsliteratur (1974-1984), and New German Critique (1974, now published at Cornell University). Two book series are also edited in the Department: occasional volumes of Monatshefte and German Life and Civilization.

The Wisconsin Workshop, an annual event held each year since 1968, provides a forum for scholarly discussion concerning literary or cultural topics. Speakers include University faculty and invited scholars from other universities in the U.S. and abroad. The proceedings are published in book form. Recent topics include Writing (in) Images / In Bildern Schreiben (2005), Prejudice and Enlightenment (2004), Music and Philosophy (2003),Fascism and Its Legacy: The Reemergence of the Extreme Right (2001),Aesthetics and Aisthesis: Sensate Cognition, Art and Literature (2000), Heroes and Heroines in German Culture (2000),

Departmental members regularly organize conferences which focus on new developments in their fields of expertise. Through co-sponsorship with other departments and with the financial support of the University and outside organizations such as the Goethe Institute, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and the Dutch Language Union, symposia have enriched German and Netherlandic studies and related areas on the campus. Topics in recent years have included Yiddish Literature and Culture, The German-Jewish Dialogue Reconsidered, Shaping Forces in American Germanics, as well as a conference of the International Herder Society. The German Department has also hosted the Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference and the conference of the American Association for Netherlandic Studies, a multi-disciplinary organization addressing linguistic, literary, and cultural issues pertaining to the Dutch-speaking countries.

The Round Table is a lecture series for the presentation of original research and critical scholarly work by members of the faculty, advanced graduate students, and distinguished visiting scholars and writers. Over the years, the Department has regularly brought distinguished visiting professors and exchange professors to the campus, both from other U.S. institutions and from Europe, thereby maintaining active contact with other programs and new directions in German Studies.

The Memorial Library of the University houses over 5.5 million volumes and contains extensive German collections. The Library of the Wisconsin State Historical Society is especially renowned for its German-American holdings. Further, the Department maintains its own Handbibliothek and a reading room with several thousand volumes of primary and secondary literature for the benefit of its faculty and graduate students. The Foreign Language Learning Resource Center has a wide range of German feature films on video and DVD as well as a satellite connection that provides daily German-language news.

The Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, founded at the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1983, is an international center for the study of German immigration and culture in America. It aims to foster understanding of the role played by German-speaking immigrants in shaping the culture of the United States. The Institute sponsors lectures, organizes conferences, and funds numerous graduate students through its research projects across various disciplines. It also maintains a library of several thousand German-language American imprints, immigrant archives, secondary research materials, and the largest collection of German-American dialect recordings in the world. For current information on the Institute's activities, consult its webpage at http://csumc.wisc.edu/mki/.

The Center for German and European Studies is a consortium of faculty from the UW and the University of Minnesota who share research and teaching interests. Established in 1998 with a grant from the German Marshall fund, it is a unique locus for advanced, interdisciplinary research, teaching, and outreach that organizes conferences and team-taught seminars. The Center also offers graduate fellowships each year for advanced graduate students.

The German and Dutch Graduate Student Association (GDGSA) represents graduate students in the Department. Its committees organize lectures, colloquia, and reading groups; its representatives to faculty committees participate in decisions regarding program changes on the graduate and undergraduate levels, textbooks, new faculty selection, and course offerings. The GDGSA meets every few weeks during the semester to exchange ideas and information about courses, conferences, lectures, fellowships, summer workshops, and other matters of interest to graduate students in the department. In addition to providing an opportunity for the discussion of common concerns, the meetings also facilitate contact between newer and more experienced students in the program. New graduate students are encouraged to attend the first meeting of the semester in order to meet the rest of the graduate students and to begin active participation in the graduate student community.

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