Forum: Feminism in German Studies

From Professor Wallach\u27s contribution entitled Jews and Gender : To consider Jews and gender within German Studies is to explore the evolution of German‐Jewish Studies with respect to feminist and gender studies. At times this involves looking beyond German Studies to other scholarship in Jewish gender studies, an interdisciplinary subfield in its own right. Over the past few decades, the focus on gender within German‐Jewish Studies has experienced several shifts in line with broader trends: an initial focus on the history of Jewish women and feminist movements gradually expanded to encompass the study of gender identity, masculinity, and sexuality. Historical and literary scholarly approaches now operate alongside and in dialogue with interdisciplinary scholarship in cultural studies, film and visual studies, performance studies, and other fields. [excerpt

Does German Cultural Studies Need the Nation-State Model?

The nation‐state model has long been the basis for the institutional structure in place to teach languages, literatures, and culture at American universities and elsewhere. Nationalism was in fact formative for the establishment of the discipline of German literary and cultural studies itself—and not something brought into its disciplinary history from the outside, as Jakob Norberg, building on earlier research (see for instance Costabile‐Heming/Halverson; Hohendahl, German Studies; Denham/Kacandes/Petropoulos, and McCarthy/Schneider), in a recent issue of the German Quarterly has shown (“German Literary Studies and the Nation.” GQ 91.1, 2018, pp. 1–17). Over the past few decades, this history linking our profession to the nation‐state model has often been questioned by those teaching German literature and culture, while the status of German in general was institutionally quite secure and there was little reason to think about structural changes. This, however, has changed. Not only do fewer students in the United States and across the globe opt to major in German; administrators at many institutions increasingly prefer language, literature, and culture departments to be part of larger structures, thus (implicitly or explicitly) also questioning the value of the nation‐state model that so long has been part of our disciplinary history. In addition, scholars themselves in their teaching and research increasingly choose to emphasize the many global contexts of German literature and culture as meaningful for the study of German itself