What Research Areas Do Faculty in the Georgetown Department of German Focus On?

Faculty in Georgetown University's Department of German work across a deliberately interdisciplinary range of topics rather than clustering around a single period or method. According to the department's own description, their research addresses cross-disciplinary issues including gender and performance, notions of belonging and Heimat, visual culture and digital humanities, cultural negotiations of economic concepts, globalization, and the role of multiple literacies in Second Language Acquisition. If you are evaluating the department as a prospective student, collaborator, or reader of its scholarship, the list below is the most concrete starting point the department publishes.

The research areas the department names

The department frames its faculty research as spanning several overlapping fields:

• Gender and performance — how gender is constructed, enacted, and represented in German-language contexts.
• Belonging and Heimat — the contested idea of home, homeland, and who counts as belonging, a concept with a specific and loaded history in German culture.
• Visual culture and digital humanities — the study of images and media alongside computational and digital approaches to humanities research.
• Cultural negotiations of economic concepts — how economic ideas are translated, contested, and given meaning in cultural texts and contexts.
• Globalization — the transnational and global dimensions of German-language literature, culture, and thought.
• Multiple literacies in Second Language Acquisition — how learners develop and combine different kinds of literacy in acquiring a second language.

These are the areas the department itself highlights, not a ranking or an exhaustive inventory of every individual project.

Why this list matters for choosing the department

The grouping is a useful signal about the kind of program Georgetown runs. Rather than treating German studies as a self-contained literary canon, the department positions its research at the intersection of cultural studies, media, economics, and language pedagogy. That has practical implications:

If your interests sit inside one of these areas, the department's stated profile suggests a plausible fit. If your interests lie in a more traditional single-author or single-period philology, you would want to check individual faculty pages to see whether anyone works in that space, since the department describes its strengths in cross-disciplinary terms.

How to go further

The department points readers to its faculty pages and to faculty research for detail beyond this summary. It also notes that it hosts an annual Max Kade professor from a German-speaking country, alternating between a scholar and a writer-in-residence, and invites outside speakers — both of which extend the research life of the department beyond its permanent faculty. For prospective graduate students, the department offers an M.A. and Ph.D. in German and, with the BMW Center for German and European Studies, a joint MAGES/Ph.D. degree; for undergraduates, a major or minor.

To confirm whether a specific topic is actively supervised or supported, the reliable step is to review the individual faculty listings and research pages the department publishes, since the summary above describes the department's overall profile rather than any one person's current work.