About the project

EGS seeks to make a contribution towards a more equitable curriculum in the field of German Studies by offering starting points for developing or adapting reading lists on German culture and providing a forum for sharing suggestions and experience. The resource is collaborative, and we invite colleagues and students to contribute and engage in whatever way you can. We also urge colleagues to give ongoing consideration to the impact of their own positionality, pedagogy and assessment approach – as well as disciplinary history and institutional structures – on social inequality. What assumptions underpin our teaching and how do we allow for different experiences, perspectives and expertise? For a more in-depth discussion of what this means and why it is needed, we invite you to read the Guiding Principles which underpin the work of the US-based organisation, Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum (DDGC).

The website offers two main resources: a collaborative bibliography and a blog featuring reflections by colleagues in German Studies. We are grateful to the Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland for funding the EGS website. The bibliography is collectively organised and collaborative. It is the product of the combined, voluntary labour of a number of scholars in German Studies: those who manage the bibliography, those who submit ideas, but also (most importantly) those whose scholarship makes the bibliography possible.

The EGS collective currently comprises a group of able-bodied white¹ Early-Career scholars, both straight and queer. We are mostly based in the UK and benefit in multiple ways from university affiliations, including those of us who are precariously employed. Each of us has different privileges and limitations, and we endeavour to act (as individuals and as a collective) with an awareness of those positionalities, to address them, and to learn from perspectives other than our own. In the bibliography and in our own teaching and learning, we seek to foreground voices that have been – and too often remain – unheard within German Studies. We see this as a small, but important, first step towards opening up a dialogue on the German Studies curriculum in the UK which acknowledges the impact of racialisation, oppression and marginalisation on our curricula and across the history of the discipline.

We welcome new members of the organising collective! Please get in touch with any member of the current collective via email to express an interest in joining the group. There is no application process or minimum time commitment, and we especially welcome the involvement of colleagues of colour, undergraduate and postgraduate students, colleagues with disabilities, precariously employed colleagues and those who are otherwise marginalised within UK German Studies.

We also want to acknowledge the limitations of the system of categorisation and periodisation which we have introduced to make the bibliography easier to navigate. In this version of the site, we have primarily grouped items chronologically to achieve greater nuance within and between time periods. These periods and categories are necessarily imperfect and ever-evolving; there are as many connections between them as there are incoherences within them. If you have ideas about how we can improve them, please get in touch with us.

We invite suggestions of texts to be added via this page. If you would like to systematically overhaul a particular section of the bibliography, please email us.

In solidarity,

Anja Rekeszus (KCL)
Claire Ross (Reading)
Jenny Watson (Edinburgh)
Joanna Raisbeck (Oxford)
Josh Armstrong (Stanford)
Matthew Hines (Birmingham)
Nicola Thomas (Lancaster)
Richard McClelland (Bristol)
Stephanie Galasso (Cambridge)
Tom Smith (St Andrews)

@ExpandingGerman

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