Graduate Program in German Studies

Program Overview

Duke University's interdisciplinary doctoral program in German Studies responds to the fundamental reorganization of the humanities that has been unfolding for the past two decades. It does so with a graduate program that integrates the best of scholarly traditions past and present. The Duke German Studies program attends both to the study of literature as a preeminent resource for understanding Germany's historical and present communities, and to a model of cultural studies that fosters the exploration of other forms of cultural production and social expression. Under the guidance of faculty whose teaching and research cover the full range of German cultural texts, graduate students study the various intellectual and historical genealogies that connect their chosen fields of study, such as literary history, political science, social history, religious studies, medieval and early modern studies, musicology, aesthetics, philosophy, or art history.

The program's structure encourages students to develop an individual program of study with competence in a literary period and a topic of advanced research developed in accordance with their interests. Students study with core faculty in the German department and with affiliated German Studies faculty drawn from a wide variety of departments and programs. Interdisciplinary work is supported and encouraged . Recent dissertation topics have included the following:

• Jewishness, Blackness and Gender in German Colonial Discourse
• Corporeality in the Work of Theodor Adorno
• The Development of Middlebrow Publishing in Wilhelmine Germany
• Violence and Modernism in Musil, Kafka, and Canetti
• The Rhetoric of Space in the Arthurian Romance and the Minnerede
• Poiesis/Autopoiesis: A Systems Theoretical Approach to Rolf Dieter Brinkmann's Literary Technique
• Breaking with Tradition: Europe as a Political Project in Germany's Christian Democratic Union
• Love, Language and the Economics of Exchange in Konrad Fleck's "Flore und Blanscheflur"

German Studies graduates are employed primarily in German departments; therefore, German literature remains central to the course structure. So powerful, however, is the movement toward interdisciplinary thinking, particularly in contemporary Germanic studies, that graduates from our program are well positioned for placement in the new disciplinary configurations found today in many universities and colleges. Graduates from this program may also consider careers in other professions, such as publishing, journalism, foreign service, international business and cultural relations, where advanced competence in German language, culture, and literature is valued.