Courses

Source: https://german.princeton.edu/whats-on/courses/current?t=graduate Parent: https://german.princeton.edu/

Spring 2026

Undergraduate

GER 101

Beginner’s German I

Ekaterina Soloveva Woodyard

MTWThF

9:35a - 10:25a

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1264&courseid=003137

The course lays a foundation for functional acquisition of German. Class time is devoted to language\ \ tasks that foster communicative and cultural competence by emphasizing listening and reading strategies,\ \ vocabulary acquisition, authentic input, and oral production. Conducted in German.

GER 102

Beginner’s German II

MTWThF

8:30a - 9:20a & 12:15p - 1:05p

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1264&courseid=003138

Continues the goals of GER 101, focusing on increased communicative proficiency (oral and written), effective reading strategies, and listening skills. Emphasis on vocabulary acquisition and functional language tasks: learning to request, persuade, ask for help, express opinions, agree and disagree, negotiate conversations, and gain perspective on German culture through readings, discussion, and film production. Conducted in German. Taught by Staff.

GER 1025

Intensive Intermediate German

MTWThF

9:00a - 10:20a & 1:20p - 2:40p

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1264&courseid=003139

Intensive training in German, building on GER 101 and covering the acquisitional goals of two subsequent semesters: communicative proficiency in a wide range of syntax, mastery of discourse skills, and reading strategies sufficient to interpret and discuss contemporary German short stories, drama, and film. Intensive classroom participation required. Successful completion provides eligibility for GER 107. Taught by Staff.

GER 105

Intermediate German

MTWTh

9:35 am – 10:25 am

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1264&courseid=003142

Develops deeper proficiency in all areas (cultural understanding, production skills, and receptive skills), using a combination of language-oriented work and cultural/historical content, including film and texts. Taught by Staff.

GER 107

Advanced German

Ekaterina Soloveva Woodyard

MWF

10:40a - 11:30a & 1:20p - 2:10p

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1264&courseid=003143

Continues improvement of proficiency in speaking, listening, reading, and writing using texts, online media, and other sources as a basis for class discussion. Grammar review is included. Conducted in German.

GER 208

Studies in German Language and Style: Contemporary Society, Politics, and Culture

(HA)

2:55p - 4:15p

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1264&courseid=003151

This course traces German cultural and political history since 1945, examining key developments and debates, including the aftermath of Nazi rule; violent clashes between students and government; the ideological rivalry between two German states up to reunification; migration and transnational cultures; Black German activism; Germany’s role in Europe. The course facilitates advanced competence in written and oral German, but also develops analytical competencies in historical and critical argumentation across a range of primary and secondary sources, including poetry, prose, essays, films, artworks, and performances.

GER 211

Introduction to Media Theory

(EC)

2:25p - 3:15p

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1264&courseid=010270

Through careful readings of a wide range of media theoretical texts from the late 19th to early 21st-century, this class will trace the development of critical reflection on technologies and media such as orality, writing and the printed page, pre-cinematic optical devices, photography, film and television, gramophones, telephony and radio, as well as drones, surveillance and social media. Topics include the relationship between representation and technology, the historicity of perception, the interplay of aesthetics, technology and politics, and the transformation of imagination, literacy, communication, privacy, reality and truth. Taught in English.

GER 214

Writing Migration: Introduction to the Worlds of Multilingualism

(LA)

10:40a - 11:30a

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1264&courseid=018115

This introductory class will explore the work of writers, artists and filmmakers emerging from the global experience of migration in the 21st century and the new forms of hybridized expression they have invented to deal with their uprooting. How do migrant authors challenge and reshape their languages? What is the relationship between the polyphonic character of such writing and the struggle for identity or what one might call “migrantity”? Marcel Proust says “beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language”: shouldn’t literature created in multiple foreign languages be thus at least twice as lovely as that written in just one idiom? Taught in English.

GER 223

Fairy Tales: The Brothers Grimm and Beyond

(LA)

TTh

1:20p - 2:40p

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1264&courseid=008948

What do fairy tales do? More than children’s entertainment, they instruct, amuse, warn, initiate, and enlighten. Throughout history, they have functioned to humanize and conquer the bestial and barbaric forces that terrorize us. They have also disguised social anxieties about gender and sex. The history and social function of fairy tales will be explored in the context of Germany in the 18th-20th centuries. Texts include selections from the Grimms’ Marchen, as well as from the literature of the Romantic, Weimar, and postwar periods. Taught in English.

GER 306

ART306, VIS306

Theories of Contemporary Art

(LA)

1:20p - 4:10p

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1264&courseid=003158

What is contemporary art? What defines its contemporaneity? And in which sense can it be called art when it defies categories of modernist art theory? How to define the plural of art when the old art genres have dissolved into countless hybrid forms? And what follows from the artistic destabilization of the border between art and non-art? What are the aesthetic and political implications of an art that addresses its audience and its institutional frameworks as well as questions of globalization, digitalization, historiography, and ecology? The seminar will discuss these problems by looking at philosophy, art criticism, and artist writings. Taught in English.

GER 307

Unruly Bodies

(LA)

TTh

2:55p - 4:15p

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1264&courseid=003159

Bodies are subjected to countless rules, norms, laws, and expectations on a daily basis. What happens when they don’t measure up or when they don’t comply? This course considers a selection of unruly bodies in Germanophone literature and time-based media - from bodies that elude stable identities and categories to bodies that are othered, pathologized, criminalized, disciplined, corrected, punished, or excluded. We will encounter monsters, animals, fiancés, salesmen, dancers, businessmen, lawyers, schoolchildren, refugees, and aging or delinquent women. Taught in German.

GER 316

LIN316

Learning (and Teaching) New Languages

(EC)

TTh

10:40a - 12:00p

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1264&courseid=011574

How do adults learn new languages? Why do some people learn new languages easily, while others struggle? What can language teachers do to make the learning experience as successful as possible? The course addresses these and related questions by providing a critical introduction to recent theories of instructed second language acquisition (ISLA). We will reflect on these issues through readings and discussion, and we will engage them on a practical level through one-on-one ESL tutorials with participants from the greater Princeton community, in collaboration with ProCES. Taught in English.

GER 324

German Childhood – Perspective, Poetics, Perversion

(LA)

TTh

10:40a - 12:00p

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1264&courseid=003169

Although ‘childhood’ is a rather new concept, from the outset artists have been eager to exhaust its representational potential, theorists tried to define children’s perspective, temporality, sexuality, ways of knowing, and institutions regulated but also protected children. With a timeframe from 1800 to the present, special emphasis will lie on NS, the anti-authoritarian movement of the 1960s as well as on Germany’s aspiration today to foster children’s autonomy. We will take up literary and aesthetic objects alongside material culture (children’s books, playgrounds) and pedagogical discourses (science, institutions, educational textbooks). Taught in German.

Graduate

GER 509

MED509, COM518

Middle High German Literature II: From Fables to Fairy Tales: The Medieval Short Form in Context

1:30p - 4:20p

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1264&courseid=003196

Seminar explores the bawdy adventures of animals, students, priests, and adulterous wives in the wide world of medieval short tales, both in verse and prose. Participants will examine select German Mären from the new and comprehensive edition of German Verse-Couplet Tales published in 2020. These will be read alongside analogues in medieval French, Italian, and English and their varying historical and manuscript contexts. Attention also given to Latin (fables) and Arabic influences. Concluding with Grimms’ fairy tales, seminar provides preparation for students who may teach fairy tale courses in future. Readings and seminar discussion in English.

GER 520

ART588, MOD521

Topics in Literary and Cultural Theory : ‘Psychoanalytic Turns’

1:20p - 4:10p

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1264&courseid=003207

Seminar explores turns to psychoanalysis in the history, theory, and criticism of art and literature. Reading psychoanalytic writings by Freud, Ferenczi, Lacan, Klein, Laplanche, and others, paths and detours lead to problems of terminology, translation, mediation. Addressing works of art and literature, questions arise about how those works might be understood as instances of psychoanalytic criticism and/or critiques of psychoanalysis. A need for critical reflection on the meaningfulness of psychoanalytic theories for current scholarship in the humanities is a guiding concern of this seminar. Seminar guests include practicing psychoanalysts. Taught in English. Reading knowledge of German and/or French desirable but not required.

GER 521

COM520, MOD521

Topics in German Intellectual History: Action, Activity, Agency

9:30a - 12:20p

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1264&courseid=003208

The concepts of action, activity, and agency are key targets of research paradigms from Actor-Network Theory to New Materialism, Affordance theory, and praxeological approaches to literary and media studies. This seminar examines excerpts from the intellectual history of those concepts, asking how they are elaborated and problematized in various contexts and what exactly their critics reject or take for granted (e.g. anthropocentric, patriarchal, white supremacist, or other assumptions). Readings draw on the histories of philosophy, drama, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, design, sociology, gender studies, performance studies, and science studies. Readings and discussion in English.

GER 526

Topics in German Literature: Radical Trans-: Drifts, Rifts and Shifts in Literature and the Arts

1:30p - 4:20p

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1264&courseid=003213

What does it mean to think trans- not as a marker of identity or political stance, but as an impulse toward crossing and altering form(s)? This course is an introduction to a generative principle of literature and art, expressed metaphorically by the prefix trans- (“across, beyond”). How does trans- operate in poetic language and other forms of art resisting stability to bring about “the new“? Trans- points to processes and mutations, as suggested by its iterations. While “transgression” peaked in theory around 2000, “translingualism” is still flourishing. We will engage with the potential of trans- from “translation“ to “corecore“. Seminar discussions in English.

GER 530

COM517

Topics in Aesthetics and Poetics: Hauntologies

1:20p - 4:10p

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1264&courseid=016787

According to Mark Fisher, a ghost is characterized by the fact that it “cannot be fully present: it has no being in itself but rather marks the relationship to a no longer or not yet.” It is what insistently makes itself felt in the present, even though it no longer exists or does not yet exist. Indeed, the present is haunted by the past as much as it is by unrealized visions of the future. At a time when a culture of amnesia threatens to enclose the horizon of the future, critical ghost studies become even more relevant. This seminar explores contemporary “hauntologies” (Derrida), probing their aesthetic and political implications. Since all readings and class discussion will be in English, proficience in German is, while desirable, not required.

GER 532

COM538, ENG589

Topics in Literary Theory and History: Theory and Practice of Leaderlessness

1:20p - 4:10p

https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?term=1264&courseid=016788

This seminar reflects on the collapse of leadership (Benjamin, Jelinek, Labatut) and on the question of what political action might look like that does not take the classic, centralized form of leadership. We find inspiration in German moments of counter-history (the Peasant Wars, Council Republics, environmental movement), in anarchist writing (Landauer, Graeber, Robinson), in the pedagogical and psychoanalytical setting (Rancière, Walser, Bion), in small organizations approaches to worker’s rights, housework and childcare, queer rights (Sander, Federici, Rackete), and finally in the arts of leaderlessness. (Romanticism, Dickinson, Melville). Seminar discussions in English.