Scholarship

Faculty members in the German Department are engaged in a range of sustained individual projects of research and scholarship. Most often these address cross-disciplinary issues, such as notions of belonging and Heimat, gender and performance, religion and literature, cultural negotiations of economic concepts, decolonizing the museum, and multiple literacies. A special feature of that work is not only its high level of internal collaboration among faculty members, but also the ways in which it includes undergraduate and graduate students.

At the same time, numerous projects involve national and international collaborations. Themes include the modern meanings of work (see Pfeiffer), auditory knowledge histories in the arts (see Dupree), changing notions of belonging (see Eigler), and the development of advanced forms of second language literacy through telecollaborative partnerships (see Cunningham, Pankova).

Together, these activities give the department particular scholarly strength in performance (see Dupree, Sieg), gender issues (see Dupree, Eigler, Sieg, Weigert, Pfeiffer), second language acquisition and literacy (see Cunningham, Pankova), curriculum and assessment (see Banchoff, Cunningham, Pankova, Pfeiffer, Weigert), and social change and literary form (see Eigler, Pfeiffer). Faculty members have also received prestigious research awards for their outstanding contributions to the field.