Taking Stock Of German Studies In The United States

Examines the challenges facing German-language study in the new millennium and highlights how creative, innovative, inspired approaches have allowed it to weather many of them.

Today German studies finds itself at a crossroads. It is thus appropriate to examine past achievements and to evaluate the strategies Germanists are now using to develop their field.

Outreach Strategies and Innovative Teaching Approaches for German Programs explores recruitment, curricular design and student retention in modern language instruction by sharing best practices and a wide variety of pragmatic initiatives from teacher-scholars who have been involved in the successful building of German programs. With German programs facing dwindling grant monies as students across the country shift from the liberal arts into career-oriented fields, it is paramount to promote German programs vigorously, to offer courses that reflect and compel students’ interest, to keep students engaged in extracurricular activities and to establish a community of like-minded language learners. The combination of curriculum-based strategies coupled with innovative projects, and extracurricular and outreach activities is intended to serve as a guideline for teachers and scholars alike who are in need of best practices they can use to boost enrollment and attract and retain more students.

The prominent scholar-contributors to this volume share their experiences developing the field of US German Studies and their thoughts on literature and interdisciplinarity, pluralism and diversity, and transatlantic dialogue.

This book presents an in-depth look at the state of transnational education and comparative perspectives on education systems between Germany and other nation states. It explores how a transnational education identity in secondary and tertiary institutions has developed in the German and other national contexts and which lessons can be learned from current challenges and successes of education systems. It uses detailed case studies to promote critical rethinking of current educational practices in high schools and universities, specifically of race, gender, religion and learner ability in educational settings. It understands learning and teaching as an arena to discuss transnational education opportunities in the 21st century as an emerging or evolving discourse on contemporary forms of transnationalism.

German studies scholars from various disciplines often use and reference ethnography, yet do not often present ethnography as a core methodology and research approach. Former Neighbors, Future Allies? emphasizes how German studies engages in methods and theories of ethnography. Through a variety of topics and from multiple perspectives including literature, folklore, history, sociology, and anthropology, this volume draws attention to how ethnography bridges transdisciplinary and international research in German studies.

This book presents an approach to transform German Studies by augmenting its core values with a social justice mission rooted in Cultural Studies. ​German Studies is approaching a pivotal moment. On the one hand, the discipline is shrinking as programs face budget cuts. This enrollment decline is immediately tied to the effects following a debilitating scrutiny the discipline has received as a result of its perceived worth in light of local, regional, and national pressures to articulate the value of the humanities in the language of student professionalization. On the other hand, German Studies struggles to articulate how the study of cultural, social, and political developments in the German-speaking world can serve increasingly heterogeneous student learners. This book addresses this tension through questions of access to German Studies as they relate to student outreach and program advocacy alongside pedagogical models.

Weighs the value of Germanophone culture, and its study, in an age of globalization, transnationalism, and academic change.

For at least a decade, university foreign language programs have been in decline throughout the English-speaking world. As programs close or are merged into large multi-language departments, disciplines such as German studies find themselves struggling to survive. Transverse Disciplines offers an overview of the current research on the humanities and the academy at large and proposes creative and courageous ideas for the university of the future. Using German studies as a case study, the book examines localized academic work in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States in order to model new ideas for invigorated thinking beyond disciplinary specificity, university communities, and entrenched academic practices. In essays that are theoretical, speculative, experimental, and deeply personal, contributors suggest that German studies might do better to stop trying to protect existing national and disciplinary arrangements. Instead, the discipline should embrace feminist, queer, anti-racist, and decolonial academic practices and commitments, including community-based work, research-creation, and scholar activism. Interrogating the position of researchers, teachers, and administrators inside and outside academia, Transverse Disciplines takes stock of the increasingly tenuous position of the humanities and stakes a claim for the importance of imagining new disciplinary futures within the often restrictive and harmful structures of the academy.

Drawing upon the most current methodologies, the essays in this book pursue the multifarious functions of end-times in medieval German texts.