The course lays a foundation for functional acquisition of German. Class time is devoted to language tasks that will foster communicative and cultural competence and will emphasize listening and reading strategies, vocabulary acquisition, authentic input, and oral production. Conducted in German.

Continues the goals of GER 101, focusing on increased communicative proficiency (oral and written), effective reading strategies, and listening skills. Emphasis on vocabulary acquisition and functional language tasks: learning to request, persuade, ask for help, express opinions, agree and disagree, negotiate conversations, and gain perspective on German culture through readings, discussion, and film.

Develops deeper proficiency in all areas (cultural understanding, production skills, and receptive skills), using a combination of language-oriented work and cultural/historical content, including film and texts.

Continues improvement of proficiency in speaking, listening, reading, and writing using texts, online media, and other sources as a basis for class discussion. Grammar review is included. Taught in German.

This course will tackle exemplary works of modern German society and culture, including literature, art, film, essays, speeches, and autobiographies. It offers an introduction to the most important events and issues from the first half of the century: the foundation of the German state, the German Colonial Empire, Berlin as a modern metropolis, World War I, the rise of National Socialism. Intensive practice in spoken and written German with an emphasis on vocabulary acquisition and complex syntactical forms.

This course has four goals: 1) to introduce students to key authors, genres, and movements in German literary history between 1770 and the present; 2) to provide an opportunity to deepen interpretive skills through reading and discussion of representative texts; 3) to encourage students to explore theoretical approaches to cultural material; and 4) to provide intensive practice in spoken and written German.

Through careful readings of a wide range of media theoretical texts from the late 19th to early 21st-century, this class will trace the development of critical reflection on technologies and media such as orality, writing and the printed page, pre-cinematic optical devices, photography, film and television, gramophones, telephony and radio, as well as drones, surveillance and social media. Topics include the relationship between representation and technology, the historicity of perception, the interplay of aesthetics, technology and politics, and the transformation of imagination, literacy, communication, privacy, reality and truth.

An introduction to foundations of critical thought in the German philosophical tradition, focusing on major figures such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, and Arendt. The course offers a survey of German intellectual history based on direct engagement with original texts. Topics include problems in the theory of knowledge and being, moral and political philosophy, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history. Classical sources will be read alongside modern thinkers like Michel Foucault, Angela Davis, or Rahel Jaeggi. Our goal is to introduce key concepts of critical thought and probe their relevance today.

This introduction to methods for the study of German literature, media, and culture will hone the research skills necessary to develop a substantial piece of independent scholarship. Combining methodological reflection with practical training and experimentation, we will probe such questions as: What is at stake in "reading" texts and other media closely or at a distance, historically or with an eye to form? How does one find, organize, distill, and respond to extant scholarship? What distinguishes a strong research question or hypothesis? And which intermediate steps lead from the cursor blinking on a blank page to a polished research paper?

The beginning of a story or a novel marks a delicate threshold. It signifies both the entrance into a fictitious world and the advent of a new order. Narrative openings not only determine a story's further course and continuation, they also offer fundamental insights into the logic of narration as such. In order to address all of these questions properly, a selection of canonical works of German and European literature will be the basis of discussion.

The senior thesis (498-499) is a year-long project in which students conduct a substantial piece of research and scholarship under the supervision of a faculty member in the German Department. While the completed thesis is due in the student's final semester of study, senior independent work requires sustained investment and attention throughout the academic year. Details regarding required submissions of work in progress, due dates, and grading criteria are outlined below.

Readings and discussion of current theoretical and practical issues in Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA), with a goal of understanding how theory should inform classroom praxis. Primary audience is the current teaching staff of GER 101. In English.

This seminar offers a critical survey of recent trends in media theory with an eye to questions of aesthetic form and to systems of cultural production generally. Topics include cultural techniques, disability, media archaeology, elemental media, infrastructuralism and network theory, assemblage theory, biomedia, affect, and digital embodiment.

While it is a truism that literature speaks of society, calling the social sciences literary seems unsound. How did this asymmetry evolve and what are its poetic, epistemic, and theoretical effects? This seminar traces the literature-sociology-nexus from its 1800 origins to today. We read sociological case-studies by novelists and experimental fictions by sociologists, study analyses by Simmel, Lukács, Lenk, Barthes, Bourdieu, Lepenies, and Sapiro and investigate key crossovers such as the Collège de Sociologie, the Frankfurt School, ethnographic surrealism, sociology of literature, affect studies, critical fabulation, and autofiction.

An intensive introduction to a diverse range of methods in the study of literature and film. Featuring seminar presentations by faculty members from the Department of German, topics include rhetoric, theory of the lyric, narratology, history and theory of literary form, filmic techniques. Seminar discussions, focused on seminal works of scholarship, aim to equip students with a critical vocabulary and to cultivate interpretative skills.