Doctoral students select a minimum of 36 credits of graduate course work (including the two-semester introductory sequence in German Studies) during their first three years in the program, including eight credit hours of German 990 during the sixth term in preparation for their preliminary examinations. Students can receive 18 credit hours towards this total if they hold a relevant MA.

In order to maximize possibilities for an individually tailored curriculum, we have decided to limit the number of required courses to the following:

1) German 540: Introduction to German Studies, which must be taken in the Fall term of the first year, and

2) The German Studies Colloquium, which students must take in the Winter of the first year, and are strongly encouraged to continue attending throughout their graduate careers.

German 540 introduces students to central theoretical and methodological debates in the discipline of German Studies. The German Studies Colloquium serves multiple functions: 1) a site of interdisciplinary practice and debate; 2) an opportunity for students to revise a seminar paper in the context of the first-year review; 3) a forum in which more advanced students can present conference papers and dissertation chapters; and 4) a framework within which students can explore and prepare presentations on specific topics directly related to conferences and workshops sponsored by the German Studies program.

Please note that all GSIs who have not taken an equivalent course elsewhere are required to take our course in language pedagogy, German 531: Teaching Methods. Given the great flexibility of our program and the wide array of topics available in regular seminars, we strongly discourage students from taking independent studies, and allow no more than one to count towards the PhD.

All students are strongly encouraged to take two courses covering periods prior to 1900.

Of the many graduate certificates available at the University of Michigan, the following are especially relevant:

Screen Arts and Cultures (all link to Rackham)
Museum Studies
Women's Studies

Joint Ph.D.s in German and another field are possible in principle at the University of Michigan. Such degrees can be negotiated ad hoc at any time after the end of the first semester, if the other discipline agrees to admit the candidate. Several students originally admitted to the Ph.D. in German Studies have succeeded in negotiating such programs over the years, but this possibility cannot be guaranteed in advance.

Students earn M.A. degrees as they progress towards the Ph.D., but the Department usually does not admit students who wish to earn only an M.A. The Rackham School of Graduate Studies stipulates that six of the 24 credit hours required for the M.A. be taken in "cognate fields;" this requirement obviously fits well with the interdisciplinary tenor of our own graduate programs.

Here we seek to come to terms with crucial aspects of power, politics, and identities in Central European history and theory. Michigan’s curriculum offers a wide range of opportunities to study the great theoretical traditions of German-language social and political thought. The Department also offers courses on related topics such as German, Austrian, and Swiss nationalism, the emergence and development of Central European states, the place of language in discussions of Central European nationalism, and relations between German and immigrant identities in Central European history.

The faculty's research and teaching in this area focuses on the origins and history of literary and aesthetic theory, medieval and early modern forms of representation, the materiality of the text, the aesthetics of German Classicism, Idealism and Romanticism, decadent aesthetics, Nietzsche, psychoanalysis, twentieth-century cultural and critical theory, and theories of ideology.

Several members of our faculty are actively engaged in research on both German and Central European social theory and a wide range of historical and contemporary social phenomena in Central Europe. The traditions of social theory covered in departmental teaching and research range chronologically from Kant through Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Simmel, Lukacs, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno, Horkheimer, Norbert Elias, Arendt, and contemporary theorists writing in German such as Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, and Ulrich Beck. Foci of current teaching and research include left- and right-wing social movements, sports, the state, urbanism and cultural geography, spatial cultural studies, the sociolinguistics of German-speaking Europe, and globalization.

A substantial group of faculty and graduate students specializes in the areas of film, visual culture, and architecture. This focus includes coverage of the whole of German film history and theory, with an emphasis on the relationship between film form and the socio-cultural role of the medium in twentieth-century German, Austrian, and Swiss history. Particular research strengths include early German film, the Weimar period, Nazi Cinema, the New German Cinema, and films representing the Holocaust. In addition to survey courses on the history of film theory, faculty interests in this area revolve around questions of film historiography, genre, cultural studies, neoformalism, and psychoanalysis. Students with an interest in film studies can also apply for admission to the Certificate in Film Studies offered by the Program in Film and Video Studies. The history and theory of art and architecture are also strongly represented in our program: graduate offerings have included seminars on Frankfurt School aesthetic theory, Weimar culture, and Viennese modernism. Michigan hosts the biannual German Film Institute. This event brings together eminent scholars in the field of German Film Studies for a week-long seminar of screenings and intensive discussions. The Department has a standing exchange with Germany's best film school, the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen Konrad Wolf, in Potsdam near Berlin. Students with a strong interest in visual culture can apply for admission to U of M's program leading to a Certificate in Museum Studies. German Film Institute site.

The study of psychoanalytic theories is another focus of our department. The faculty's research and teaching interests represent an unusually wide array of approaches ranging from the intellectual history of the psychoanalytic movement (Freud Studies) to Lacanian and post-Lacanian readings of Freud. Key areas of research include 1) the connection between psychoanalysis and ideology, or the issue of subjectivity and power; and 2) the question of psychoanalysis and gender (for instance, studies in masculinity, or the relation between psychoanalysis and feminist theory). Faculty working in this area bring psychoanalytic theory to bear on issues of fin-de-siècle culture (discourses on paternity/masculinity), or postwar culture (trauma, remembrance, and post-holocaust authorship). Many of our seminars in cultural and political history and theory involve the teaching of psychoanalysis, e.g. "Introduction to Ideology," "Introduction to German Studies," "Colonialism and Post-Colonialism," "Trauma, Memory, and Cultural Analysis."

The study of genders, bodies, and sexualities has generated a rich scholarly debate that has been marked by attention to historical specifics as well as by an interest in advancing our theoretical understanding of what it means to inhabit a gendered body in various texts and contexts. In their teaching and research, our faculty is revisiting German culture and literature through the lens of gender, body, and sexuality as categories of analysis. These interests cover a wide array of historical perspectives and include focal points such as the formation of a society invested in sexual discipline, gender and genre, gender and modernities, psychoanalytic approaches to the body, representations of sexual violence, the gender of space, the fin de siècle sexual system, re-imaginings of corporeality during the Weimar Republic, and post-World War II reconfiguration of gender. Students with strong interest in gender studies can apply to the program leading to a Certificate in Women's Studies, and they can take advantage of Michigan's extraordinary Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Since 1998, the important journal Gender and History has been co-edited by our colleagues Kathleen Canning and, more recently, Helmut Puff.

Reconceptualizing Germany as a multi-ethnic nation raises questions about colonialism, migration, and minority culture. Departmental research and teaching thus focuses on the history, language, and cultural production of contemporary minority communities such as Turkish-Germans, Jews, Roma and Sinti, African Germans, Asian Germans, and refugees. Associated with these groups are issues of asylum and immigration policy, grassroots organizing, identity and gender politics, bilingualism and language contact. Teaching and research also focuses on the contribution of Orientalism, music, travel writing, and cross-cultural encounters to the construction of racial and national ideologies, with a specific focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Operating within anthropological, historical, sociological, sociolinguistic, and postcolonial critical frameworks, we ask questions about Germany's colonial past and its legacies. With multiple specialists in a variety of different units, U of M is exceptionally strong in Turkish-German Studies.

Graduate students in German Studies can earn certificates in Screen Arts and Cultures, Women's Studies, and Museum Studies. The Department is also working with Michigan's prestigious Business School to develop a graduate certificate in International Business. German and Linguistics offer a standing joint Ph.D. program in Germanic Linguistics; it is also possible in principle to negotiate joint Ph.D.s with other fields on an ad hoc basis