Overview

The Department of German Studies offers a full range of undergraduate courses in German, beginning with elementary German for those with no prior background and progressing to advanced courses on cultural, literary, and historical topics relevant to the German-speaking world.

In addition, the department offers courses in Yiddish and on Yiddish culture as well as courses in English on German film, literature, and culture. In addition to its course offerings at Emory, the department has affiliations with semester- and year-long study abroad programs at the universities of Freiburg, Berlin and Vienna, as well as its own eight-week-long summer program in Vienna. Read more about the German department's vision.

The department offers both a major and minor in German Studies, and many students combine their study of German with another discipline. Students then used that combination to go on to pursue careers in medicine, education, law, business, and non-profit work. For instance, in the past few years German majors and minors have also majored or minored in:

It is a particularly exciting time to study German at Emory because of the collaborative effort underway within the department to revise its undergraduate curriculum. Central to the curricular reform is the abolition of the division between so-called "language" courses at the lower level of instruction and so-called "content" courses at the upper level. This curricular reform has resulted in a four-year curriculum that integrates the study of language and content at all levels of instruction and articulates how one curricular level builds on the previous level.

Moreover, with a much stronger content orientation in the lower levels, students can already begin examining themes, texts, and discourses that (re)signify German-speaking cultures in first-year German, a level of inquiry that typically does not commence until the third year of instruction in a divided curriculum.