Willkommen! The Department of German Studies offers a full 4-year range of courses (in English and German) about German-speaking cultures, histories, language, literature, film, media, and society.
Our majors and minors represent the diverse lives, identities, cultures, and communities that make up the German-speaking world. Join us!
Who are German majors and minors, and what do they do?
- They are emerging multilinguals who actively create new knowledges, cooperate with others, and take new perspectives.
- They enjoy using German to build new connections, unpack old ones, come to better understand themselves.
- They learn how to work with and beyond monolingual and national categories.
- They learn to tell and examine stories, explore information and misinformation.
- They learn to articulate what it means to be human and well in today’s world.
What are German classes like at UArizona?
Our language classes are small and experientially grounded. We bring students right into language practice and build new experiences together (while also revisiting what we know). We encourage our students to delight in using German with all its sounds, shapes, and intricacies.
At the intermediate and advanced levels, students bring increasingly complex German language forms into their repertoire. Students also learn detailed interactional and rhetorical details that make an impact across a diverse range of German-speaking media. We aim to help prepare students to step into these spaces while also connecting this work to today’s most urgent historical, social, and cultural questions.
Classes taught in English explore several themes in context, including historical and contemporary cultural conversations, media and cinema, religion and business, translation and multilingualism, authoritarianism and the Nazi past.
What happens after graduation?
German majors and minors pursue a wide-reaching range of activities and professions that are a direct result of their engagement in our program and German language learning. Some examples of where our recent graduates have landed:
- Fully funded Fulbright research or teaching year abroad post-graduation
- Graduate programs in the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany in a range of fields (German studies, political science, international relations, others!)
- A wide range of areas in education, including:
- K-16 German language instruction
- Instructional design and assessment in higher education
- Study abroad and international education
- Advising in higher education
- Psychology and counseling
- Speech language pathology
How do I get involved?
Students with no knowledge of German start from scratch with German 101. Students with some (or a lot of) German experiences filter in through the UArizona placement process (including AP, CLEP, and IB credit) with additional advising support as needed. Check out the pathway to the major, minor, and with honors!
We aim to support German learners at every stage as you
- Navigate your fears or anxieties about your emerging German language skills and which classes to take;
- Learn how to participate actively and multilingually in German-speaking; communities, via study abroad (with scholarships), our German student club, internships, and other communities;
- Achieve more complex and articulate forms of meaningful self-expression in German;
- Prepare for life-long use of German as an additional language!