Over the last year, we have continued to build the story of our department in the wake of the legacy we celebrated, in spite of the dark clouds of the current situation with an unsupportive upper university administration casting their shadows on our work: 

Our esteemed colleague Michel Chaouli has been elected as member for life to the German Academy for Language and Literature. The academy plays a central role in Germany and in the world. Alongside Jonathan Franzen and David David Wellbery, he is the third of only three members from the Unites States in what is arguably the most prestigious academy devoted to literature and language in German-speaking Europe. I am proud that one of our colleagues has joined the illustrious ranks of Elias Canetti, Jean Cocteau, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Benedetto Groce, Jürgen Habermas, Nobel-prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, W.G. Sebald and Christa Wolf among others.  The academy also awards several of the major prizes for authors in German language, among them The Georg-Büchner Prize for literature written in German.

Over the last year, our faculty has continued to lead nationally and internationally and be highly productive. Single-authored books remain the indisputable benchmark accomplishment in our field. In 2024 and 2025, the department has published 5 monographs with the highest ranked presses. Most recently Fritz Breithaupt’s The Narrative Brain was published with Yale University Press 2025 (reviewed in The Wall Street Journal), and Teresa Kovacs, Theater of The Void with Cornell University Press 2025. Faculty members also published two co-edited volumes, Jikeli co-edited Antisemitismus in Deutschland nach dem 7. Oktober with Olms in 2024, and Teresa Kovacs co-edited the Schlingensief Handbuch with Metzler 2025.

We are also a leading department in innovation in the humanities: Fritz Breithaupt has pioneered one of the first humanities labs which was featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere. In addition, our faculty have received prestigious grants from Institutions ranging from the NSF (Chris Sapp for a research project on the evolution of the German Language started in 2024) to the NEH (Irit Dekel 2024). Breithaupt was Fellow at the New Institute in Hamburg in spring 2025. We have also secured grants annually from the Max Kade Foundation for our graduate and outreach programs. Our faculty is leading on campus by directing a large number of institutions with national and international impact: Michel Chaouli directs the Center for Theoretical Inquiry in the Humanities, Irit Dekel the Olamot Center, Günther Jikeli is assistant director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, and Teresa Kovacs directs the Institute of German Studies.

We were fortunate to be able to hire a wonderful visiting lecturer, Frane Burazer, who will continue the Dutch program this year. We have also been joined by our Distinguished Max Kade Visiting Professor Ulrike Haß, whose thoughtful presence enriched our intellectual life. Günther Jikeli has been tenured – congratulations! And we note with great sadness the departure of our longest-serving faculty member and friend Fritz Breithaupt, who has been an indispensable cornerstone of our department and an internationally celebrated scholar at Indiana University since 1998. I wish him all my best for the next step in his career at The University of Pennsylvania!

We are proud of the intellectual strength of our majors and minors.  Of their curiosity and their commitment. Our year-end reception was also an occasion to honor their achievements. The quality of our program is confirmed by awards our students have won. Keegan Nichols was inducted to the prestigious national honor society Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest national honor society in the United States, founded in 1776, that counts luminaries such as Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson among its members. Many undergraduate students have won departmental prizes: On the basis of their exceptional merit as students of Germanic Studies, Keegan Nichols, Hannah Myers, and Caden Gasway were awarded the Urfer Award for Germanic Studies. The E.O. Wooley Scholarship went to Raymond Wolf, who has also served as president of our German Club. We are also proud to celebrate achievements in the study of Norwegian, Ives Huddleston and Luke Jackson Curtis N. Knudsen Memorial Scholarship.

The Twelfth Annual IU German Theater Project for High Schools, directed by Lane Sorensen, concluded with over 70 students and teachers on campus. Lane was assisted by a dedicated team including Masha, Lanre, Anna, Luke. Our gratitude goes to them and also to the teachers of German in Indiana for opening these students to the language and culture we love.

Our graduate students are continuing the legacy of our graduate program, which is still among the largest and high-ranking programs in the nation. They have won an unusual amount of funding for their research: Lanre Okuseinde was awarded a Primary Partner Grant to spend the summer of 2025 in Berlin. Bradley Weiss and Claire Richters each won a FLAS fellowship, which subsequently was not paid out due to the current funding cuts. And Cynthia Shin has been successful in winning a COAS dissertation completion fellowship for her dissertation on science fiction. Mary Gilbert has won a Seidlin dissertation writing fellowship, Brian Hensley a Seidlin teaching fellowship. This year’s summer research fellowships went to Louisa de Oliveira for a project on Herder, and to David Gould for his work on the role of the atmosphere in literature.

A new cohort of graduate students has joined our department and we are excited to welcome promising scholars with broad interests as members of our academic community: Schopi Corona, whose interests are in linguistics and philosophy, obtained a BA in French and Philosophy from Southern Utah University before joining us.  Olivia Latimer received a BS in chemistry and German from Hillsdale College, her areas if interest are in twentieth century literature and second language acquisition. And Keegan Nichols is pursuing a PhD in Germanic Studies and in Religious Studies after having completed a BA at Lehigh University, an MA in philosophy at Georgia State and a second BA in Germanic Studies at Indiana University. He is interested in intellectual history and political theory. These students are a testament to how alive intellectual interest are. The College has limited the number of students we can admit to three, so our program is constrained to shrink over the next years.

Several of our students have accepted positions after the completion of their PhD: Sofiya Bodnar has accepted a position as lecturer at MIT, where she will open the door to German culture to some of the brightest young students in the Unites States. After a year as Assistant professor at Denison University, Ohio, David Bolter has entered a position at Humboldt University Berlin as wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter in a project in linguistics change. Katharina Schmid-Schmidsfelden has been offered a visiting assistant professorship at Centre College in Kentucky, which she eventually declined.  After the successful defense of his PhD thesis, Taylor Kniess can now fully devote his energy to his work as human team lead at X.ai. And Brian Donarski has been hired by their alma mater to serve as advisor to students.

I am grateful for everything that each of my colleagues does and look forward to the next chapter in the department’s history. In a situation in which our BA and PhD degree programs have been forced to merge into larger umbrella degrees and our curricular autonomy and our governance is impeded, we lean into our strengths and our resilience. Join us in our efforts—we need your support more than ever!

— Johannes Türk