The department’s goal is to provide students with the linguistic and analytic facility to explore the significance of the cultural traditions and political histories of the German-speaking countries of Central Europe. At the same time, the interdisciplinary study of German culture, which can include art, history, literature, media theory, philosophy, and political science, encourages students to evaluate broader and contradictory legacies of modernity, such as how the literary, artistic, and cultural responses to the belated and rapid modernization of Germany allow for reflection on the modern condition in general.Similarly, the German experience of national identity and political unification sheds light on wider issues of cultural cohesion and difference, as well as on the causes and meaning of phenomena such as racial prejudice, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust.

In general, an education in German Studies not only encourages the student to consider the effects of German-speaking thinkers and artists on the modern world, but also provides a lens through which the contours of the present and past can be evaluated. The department offers students the opportunity to pursue course work at all levels in the languages, cultures, literatures, and intellectual histories of the German-language traditions.

Whether interested in German literature, or the influence of German thought on other fields in the humanities, students find a broad range of courses covering language acquisition and refinement, literary history and criticism, cultural history and theory, history of thought, continental philosophy, and linguistics.