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UCI Department of German About Us

History of the Department

The University of California, Irvine, which was founded in 1965, is a relatively young Book Stackinstitution, and as such it offers fresh and innovative academic programming across the campus. In the beginning, UCI had a modern languages department, encompassing several languages and national literatures. German became a separate department in the late sixties under the leadership of Herbert Lehnert, who is still active in the department as Research Professor of German, and William Lillyman, now also Research Professor of German. A Ph.D. program was planned and approved in the early seventies, and the curriculum, then as now, stressed creativity and focused research over coverage. Although we emphasize (and provide through our seminars) competency in literary history, philology, and major genres, the UCI German graduate curriculum has never been structured as a series of recurring period-author-genre courses. Instead, we seek to offer graduate students the opportunity to work creatively with research scholars on the subjects of their current and recent research. Recent courses have centered on topics such as punishment and the death penalty in Classicism, the aesthetics of violence in Modernism, the legal theories of Carl Schmitt, philosophies of religion, German-Jewish culture or post-Wende literature and globalization.

Since the beginning of the doctoral program, the department has also maintained a strong series of Distinguished Guest Professors who add to the variety of the offerings and enrich the intellectual conversation among professors and graduate students. These appointments have ranged from Egon Schwarz, Peter Pütz, Wolfgang Iser, Uwe Ketelsen, Leslie Adelson and Thomas Elsaesser in the early years to Sander Gilman, Stefanie Barbe-Hammer, Irmela von der Lühe, and Richard Gray (among others) in the last decade.


Location

The University of California, Irvine (UCI), is one of the nine campuses of the University of California system, the most highly rated state university system in the country. Since its Laguna Beachfounding in 1965, Irvine has emerged as a leading research center with a total enrollment of approximately 24,000students. The campus is situated on 1489 acres of rolling coastal foothills between the cities of Irvine and Newport Beach, five miles inland from the Pacific Ocean.

Located halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, Southern Orange County gives students easy access to major cultural and artistic centers. The Orange County Performing Arts Center (which offers opera, musicals, ballet, and symphony), the South Coast Repertory Theater, the Irvine Barclay Theater, and the Laguna Beach Playhouse are all nearby. Los Angeles, with its superb museums, art galleries, theaters, restaurants, and entertainment industry, is an hour away by car. The Orange County Airport, which offers direct air travel to many American cities, is located only two miles from the campus. Los Angeles International Airport - which offers direct flights to Europe and Asia - is less than an hour away.

Humanities Instructional BuildingUCI Department of German

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