The Department of German Studies at the University of Arizona has been designated a German Center of Excellence by the American Association of Teachers of German. Two national recipients are awarded this prestigious distinction yearly, with one award for German programs in the K-12 level and the second for German programs at the college and university level. The German Studies program was recognized as excellent in every category: as valuing its students, having an exemplary faculty, offering a wide range of extracurricular activities and cultivating interdisciplinary connections. The jury was particularly impressed with the German program’s curriculum and that it continues to branch out into new areas of student and academic engagement while already well-established in many others.
Within the curriculum, the Department offers multiple possibilities for students pursuing the BA, MA and PhD degrees. At the BA level, students may choose to pursue a major in German Studies or one of the two German minors, which emphasize either language or culture. Even students not directly pursuing a degree in German Studies are open to apply for one of the Department’s three summer study abroad programs: the Arizona in Leipzig Program, the Medieval Travel Course, or research in Munich at UniBW. For those pursuing the MA degree, a variety of tracks are offered, including emphases on literature and culture, second language acquisition and teaching, Business Administration, Marketing, Management Information Systems, Journalism, Translation, and Collaborative Governance. As part of the Department’s innovative PhD program in Transcultural German Studies, students partake in studying and teaching abroad at the University of Leipzig during their second year of study and are competitively poised to earn the PhD/Dr. phil. dual degree.
This broad range of curricular possibilities is enabled by the diverse research and teaching areas of the Department’s faculty, which includes specialists striding the intellectual landscapes of Weimar Germany, Film Studies, the Middle Ages, Enlightenment and Romanticism in modern thought, Austrian Fin-de Siècle, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, German Verse form, literary and political cabaret, foreign language acquisition and attrition, foreign language literacy development, stylistics, study abroad development, theoretical approaches to multi- and monolingualism, Turkish-German Studies, and translation studies, to name a few. Beyond the curriculum, this expansive breadth of faculty interests provides graduate students with a well-rounded academic environment in which to develop and conduct their own research interests.
The value placed by the German Studies Department upon its students doesn’t end at the classroom door, but extends beyond into a multitude of extracurricular activities involving undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty. Some of these include sponsorship of the Deutscher Studenten Club, which holds weekly Stammtisch gatherings at Café Passé every Thursday at 7:00 P.M. and which organizes the yearly DSC Soccer Tournament to raise funds for study-abroad scholarships. Additionally, the Department is sponsoring two reading groups this Fall for students desiring further critical engagement outside the classroom: the Nibelungenlied group and the Speaking of Gender group, hosted respectively by Profs. Classen and Gramling. For students interested in visual culture the Department offers a semesterly German-language film series, while the Department’s Colloquium series familiarizes students with campus-wide, German-related research. Those not easily unsettled by public speaking can participate in the monthly Fisch Out of Water reading, during which students read short works in their nonnative tongues to celebrate the voice of accented language. Students less bold are free to listen while partaking in desserts and refreshments. With the exception of the Soccer Tournament, all of these events are of no cost to students.
We are proud that these various facets of our individual and collective efforts have come together to create a unified program worthy of such a recognition. Congratulations to everyone who contributed to making our department a German Center of Excellence and we look forward to continuing our dedication to our students’ needs and to the academic endeavor.