By Rory Hanna, University of Sheffield 2021 saw the release of an English translation of Ijoma Mangold’s 2017 autobiography, Das deutsche Krokodil. Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp's rendering introduces to new audiences one of the most well-known mixed-race intellectuals in the German literary sphere.[1] Mangold is a cultural correspondent for the newspaper Die Zeit and features on the book review TV show, Lesenswert … Continue reading ‘Ijoma Mangold’s The German Crocodile: Teaching a New Black German Memoir’
Welcome to the new EGS website!
By the EGS team We’ve made a lot of changes, and we hope you enjoy looking through the newly designed pages. This summer has been a time of thoughtful reflection and exchange within the EGS collective, as we sought to overhaul the website and build a new version that is broader, more inclusive and more accessible. Since the beginning, our goal … Continue reading Welcome to the new EGS website!
“Why not?” Exploring sex & gender history through N.O. Body’s memoirs”
Dr Ina Linge is Lecturer in German at the University of Exeter, where she is also Co-director of the interdisciplinary Sexual Knowledge Unit. I started out as a new Lecturer in German in June 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. It has certainly been a challenging and exhausting time to develop new modules and … Continue reading “Why not?” Exploring sex & gender history through N.O. Body’s memoirs”
Teaching Pop Music
Tom Smith is a Lecturer in German Studies at the University of St Andrews. Here, he reflects on his experiences teaching popular music in the undergraduate German classroom. Be sure to listen along to his course playlist (just below) as you read! https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5AJtW7OyJNRtUyC9J7VJm3?si=52jA3M-iTdGSMHezj-oZIg As I look back on 2020, one of its highlights was the … Continue reading Teaching Pop Music
Remaking the German Studies Curriculum: A Diversifying Approach
We are excited to publish a post from Domenic DeSocio, who is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. He is currently completing a dissertation on the intersection of temporality and queer and female sexualities in German-language modernist literature. He has recently received funding to set up … Continue reading Remaking the German Studies Curriculum: A Diversifying Approach
Is this the first poem written by a Black German writer?
Dr Nicola Thomas is Lecturer in German at the University of Bristol. Here, she talks about stumbling across a lesser-known landmark in Black German history. I’ve just started a new job at the University of Bristol, and I was asked to update the first-year poetry reader over the summer. Over the years, colleagues at Bristol (past … Continue reading Is this the first poem written by a Black German writer?
Race and Revolution in German Literature around 1800
Joanna Raisbeck is a Stipendiary Lecturer in German at Wadham College and The Queen's College, University of Oxford, with research interests in German Romanticism and the so-called 'Sattelzeit'. The question of race in German literature before the late twentieth century is in general overlooked on undergraduate syllabuses. There are excellent resources that help readers explore … Continue reading Race and Revolution in German Literature around 1800
Modern Theories, Medieval Worlds: Teaching Gender and Identity in Medieval Literary Studies
In this month’s blogpost, Aysha Strachan, a PhD candidate at KCL/HU Berlin, suggests that teaching modern theory alongside medieval literature gives us better access to the challenges that these texts issue to modern norms and assumptions. As a new Graduate Teaching Assistant teaching second-year seminars on Gender and Identity in German Arthurian literature, I was … Continue reading Modern Theories, Medieval Worlds: Teaching Gender and Identity in Medieval Literary Studies
Germany and Eastern Europe
In our first blog post of 2020, Karolina Wątroba discusses the "spectral presence" of Poland in German literature and suggests that attention to this presence, central to much of our undergraduate teaching yet often unremarked, can help us consider intercultural entanglements more generally. Studying and then teaching German at Oxford as a Polish immigrant, I … Continue reading Germany and Eastern Europe
Should we teach Handke? Canon, curriculum and the Nobel Prize.
The awarding of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature to Austrian Peter Handke has been highly controversial. Here, Helen Finch (University of Leeds) considers the implications this has for Germanists and our responsibility to respond. ‘Should I read Handke, then?’ a student of German at Leeds asked me yesterday. I stuttered, stopped, hedged. Normally, I … Continue reading Should we teach Handke? Canon, curriculum and the Nobel Prize.
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