Graduate Courses
GERST 5070: TEACHING GERMAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE: PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES
3 credits. Student option grading. Intended primarily for: graduate students preparing to teach German and undergraduate students interested in deeper understanding of language study and teaching. Taught in German. Readings are in English and German.
TBA, G. Lischke
Designed to familiarize students with current thought and approaches in the field of applied linguistics and language pedagogy. Introduces different models of foreign language approaches and discusses various practices for the foreign language classroom. Special consideration is given to topics such as language acquisition progression, planning syllabi, creating tasks and projects, designing classroom tests, and evaluating students’ performance. Participants conduct an action research project.
GERST 6224: WRITING FOR THE PUBLIC: ADAPTING ACADEMIC WORK FOR A GENERAL AUDIENCE (Combined with COML 6224, ROMS 6324, COML 4224, GERST 4224, ROMS 4324)
3 credits.
T 2:00-4:30, S. Pinkham
This workshop-style course will address the question of how to draw on academic research and expertise to write for a non-specialist audience. We will discuss the benefits of public-facing writing; how to select a publication to pitch; how to pitch an article; and how to draft and revise an article once a pitch has been accepted. These skills will be developed through practice. Students will develop real pitch ideas to use as a basis for articles that will be drafted and revised over the course of the semester. We will discuss questions such as selecting appropriate venues, adapting to a new writing style, sourcing, citation practices, and communicating with editors.
GERST 6310: READING ACADEMIC GERMAN I
3 credits. Student option grading. Intended for graduate students with no prior experience in German.
MWF 9:05-9:55, W. Groundwater-Schuldt
This course emphasizes the acquisition of reading skills in German, using a variety of prepared and authentic texts. The follow-up course, GERST 6320 Reading Academic German II, is offered in the spring.
GERST 6365: MARXISM, ANARCHISM, FEMINISM (Combined with COML 6364, FGSS 6365, GOVT 6465)
3 credits. Student option grading. Taught in English.
T 2:00-4:30, M. Jarris
In this seminar, we will draw connections between radical theories and movements from the nineteenth century to the present. Rather than identifying isolated trajectories of “Marxism” “anarchism” and “feminism,” or distinct national traditions, we will focus on key concepts within internationalist thought: from the commune, the state, and the family to empire, colonization, revolution, and the strike. Focusing on the period before and after the 1917 Russian Revolution, we will witness Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin debate the role of the state, Emma Goldman and Rosa Luxemburg consider the benefits and limitations of reform, Vladimir Lenin and W.E.B. Du Bois address the function of the strike, and Silvia Federici, Cedric Robinson, and Andreas Malm interrogate the racialized, gendered, and extractive foundations of capital.
GERST 6600: VISUAL IDEOLOGY (Combined with ARTH 6060, COML 6600)
3 credits. Student option grading. Taught in English.
W 2:00-4:30, G. Waite
Some of the most powerful approaches to visual practices have come from outside or from the peripheries of the institution of art history and criticism. This seminar will analyze the interactions between academically sanctioned disciplines (such as iconography and connoisseurship) and innovations coming from philosophy, psychoanalysis, historiography, sociology, literary theory, mass media criticism, feminism, and Marxism. We will try especially to develop: (1) a general theory of "visual ideology" (the gender, social, racial, and class determinations on the production, consumption, and appropriation of visual artifacts under modern and postmodern conditions); and (2) contemporary theoretical practices that articulate these determinations. Examples will be drawn from the history of oil painting, architecture, city planning, photography, film, and other mass media.
GERST 6655: MEDIA PHILOSOPHY (Combined with PMA 6655)
3 credits. Student option grading. Taught in English.
M 2:00-4:30, E. Born
What is (not) a medium? How have various cultural techniques and media technologies historically informed philosophers and philosophical traditions? To what extent might the very existence of media in the world shape our possibilities of thinking? This seminar introduces the key concepts and scholarly debates around the emergent field of “media philosophy.” We will read and discuss continental philosophers whose thinking about media presents new insights into their work, while also doing rigorous conceptual work on the meanings of “media,” “aesthetics,” “messages,” “intelligence,” “nature,” “technology,” “environments,” “surroundings,” “epistemology,” “ontology,” and “philosophy.”
GERST 6920: HEGEL’S AESTHETICS: ON THE IDEAL, HISTORY, AND SYSTEM OF THE ARTS (Combined with ARTH 6920, COML 6922)
3 credits. Student option grading. Taught in English.
R 2:00-4:30, P. Gilgen
This course offers a systematic in-depth study of Hegel’s Aesthetics, one of the towering monuments in the development of the discipline. In addition to Hegel’s voluminous lectures, we will also consider more recent reactions to and critiques of it.
GERST 7530: INDEPENDENT STUDY
1-4 credits each term. Student option grading. Permission of instructor required. Enrollment limited to graduate students.
Hours to be arranged. Staff.
Graduate student and faculty advisor to determine course of study and credit hours.
GERST 7531: COLLOQUIUM
2 credits. Student option grading.
F 2:30-4:25, P. Gilgen
The course consists of a bi-weekly workshop series focusing on a range of interdisciplinary topics and sponsored by the Institute for German Cultural Studies (IGCS). Speakers include prominent scholars in the field of German Studies (understood in a wide, interdisciplinary sense) and advanced graduate students, who discuss their work-in-progress based on pre-circulated papers. Besides attending the workshops, course participants meet with the instructor for two additional sessions devoted to pursuing the ties between the topics and disciplinary fields showcased by the speakers and the students’ own work. The course is thus intended both as a survey of disciplinary approaches in German and Humanities Studies and as a framework that allows graduate students to hone professional skills (presenter and panel respondent, newsletter contributor, etc).