Thank you for your interest in graduate studies in the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I am very pleased that you have contacted us, and as a first step in helping you get to know us better I am enclosing a brochure that should answer many of your questions about our program. You will probably also want to consult the departmental Guide to Graduate Studies.

Before you get to that, however, here’s a brief overview of the items that probably matter most to you.

The Department offers MA and PhD degrees in German literature and culture. In general at any one time approximately one-third are working toward the MA and two-thirds toward the Ph.D. Roughly 25% of our students are native speakers of German. Currently we have nine faculty members. As you would expect, there is a great deal of personal contact between students and professors, facilitated by the fact that we are all grouped together on one floor of the language building.

Our faculty members are leaders in the field and have published dozens of books and hundreds of scholarly articles. In literature, our particular strengths lie in German literature from the medieval period to the present, cultural and intellectual history, and literary and cultural theory. Our curriculum is designed in such a way as to give students a comprehensive grounding in German literary history while exposing them to a large variety of specialized “topics” courses that reflect faculty research interests and engage the most recent issues in the field. The research interests of our faculty tend to be largely interdisciplinary, with colleagues pursuing projects in fields from East German literary politics, post-wall German literature, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cultural studies to gender studies, relations between literature and medical history, and German-Jewish studies. Faculty have also worked widely in aesthetic theory, theory of reading, and psychoanalytic and feminist theory.

In terms of courses, this has translated into a rich offering of “topics” courses that complement the standard courses in literary history. In the last several years, more specifically, we have offered topics courses on “The Mega-Hits of the 1920’s,” Günter Grass, “Visual Cultures and the Written Word” in Medieval Literature, “Nostalgia and Its Discontents: History and Memory in 19th-Century Literature and Culture,” “Literary Pathologies: 18th-Century Psychology and the Novel, “German Aesthetics from Hamann to Nietzsche,” “Germans, Jews and the Discourse of Enlightenment”, “Kant and Schiller,” “Theories of Reading,” “The Undead,” “Hannah Arendt,” “From Stunde Null to the Wende,” “Exile Literature,” “Women in German Cinema,” “Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film: From Freud to Lacan,” “Handke, Wenders, and Postmodern Aesthetics,” “The Berlin Novel,” “Fiction of the 1980s” and “The Quest for the Gemman-Jewish Novel.” Students working in literature also regularly take courses in other departments, such as English/Comparative Literature and the University Program in Cultural Studies. We have a very close relationship with the German department at nearby Duke University. We run a joint faculty-graduate student works in progress colloquium with our Duke colleagues on a monthly basis throughout the year, and our students often work closely with Duke Faculty—as do Duke students with Carolina faculty.

Most of our graduate students enter with financial support, either in the form of university or departmental fellowships, departmental teaching assistantships, or merit assistantships. For 2006-2007, the basic departmental assistantship pays $14,000 for the year and generally includes student health insurance and tuition remission. Depending on legislative provision of funding, it is hoped that this stipend will be increased within the next couple of years. Most of our students teach first and second-year language courses (and occasionally more advanced classes) while conducting their studies. All first-year teaching assistants participate in the excellent teaching training that has been a crucial component of our department since the 1960s. UNC has been a major innovator in contemporary methods of language teaching, and all of our students receive thorough, practical training during their first year of teaching. Our graduate students regularly are nominated for and/or win university teaching awards, and our language program has been recognized as a model nation-wide. I believe that the outstanding skills of our graduate teaching assistants have played a decisive role in maintaining our very vibrant undergraduate program.

UNC has many partnerships with German universities, including exchanges with Göttingen, Tübingen, and the state of Baden-Württemberg. Our department has a TA-exchange with the University of Mannheim, which allows us every year to send one of our students to Mannheim to teach English and pursue further graduate studies. UNC students have also been very successful in obtaining DAAD and Fulbright grants to study abroad.

If you have further questions, the website as well as the enclosed information should answer most of them, but please phone, write, or email if you want to know more. You may submit your Graduate School application online at:

http://gradschool.unc.edu/students_prospective.html

On the back of the enclosed brochure you will find a list of additional requirements that must be sent to the Graduate School (along with a $70 application fee), and a separate list of documents that should be sent directly to the German Department.

You may access the most recent version of the Graduate School Bulletin on the Internet at:

http://www.unc.edu/gradrecord/

There is extensive additional information about study at UNC, and resources for both incoming and continuing students, at:

http://gradschool.unc.edu/guide/index.html

In order to be fully considered for university financial support, including university-wide competitive fellowships, you must get your materials to the Graduate School and to the German Department by January 1 at the latest. If you wish to be considered only for departmental support (usually in the form of a Teaching Assistantship), the deadline for submission of materials is January 31. The earlier deadline is to be preferred, since it affords the greatest chance for some form of support.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions--or if you wish to arrange a visit to the department.

Thanks once again for your interest!

Sincerely,

Clayton Koelb
Chair