About GRLL

GRLL is the largest department in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, offering over three hundred courses a year, from introductory language classes to advanced graduate seminars in literature and theory.  We have around one hundred undergraduate majors and over sixty graduate students working toward the PhD.

The Department - the birthplace of the Modern Language Association and home to Modern Language Notes, one of the leading academic journals in literary studies - continues a long and illustrious tradition at Hopkins of scholarship on the languages, literatures, and cultures of the French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Yiddish speaking worlds.  Our world-renowned faculty publishes important research on an extraordinary range of questions:  from new interpretations of medieval French poetry to the interplay of literature and science in the age of Enlightenment; from the history of lost books to the problem of incivility in contemporary social life; from gender dynamics in the colonial Americas to the influence of new media on present-day body images...the list goes on and on.

Our graduate students come from around the United States and the world to earn their doctorates with this faculty, and go on to teach at some of the finest institutions in the US and abroad.  During their time here they take advanced seminars while developing their own research program, and are supported by a combination of fellowships and graduate teaching assistantships that provide them with excellent pedagogical training for their first years after completing the degree.

The undergraduates who choose to major or minor in one of the Department's languages emerge with a profound understanding not only of the language, culture, and literature they have studied, but of the importance of cultural difference for how one sees the world.  While the major prepares them to go on to graduate study should they choose to, our graduates in fact go on to an exciting variety of careers, all of which benefit from their immersion in the language and literature of another culture.  Finally, our emphasis throughout the major on literary analysis in the original language provides students with powerful cognitive tools of immeasurable value in any walk of life.

If you would like any further information about the Department or how to apply for admission, please feel free to get in touch with the Department Chair or the Department's excellent administrative staff.


History of the Department

At the time of its founding in 1876, the Johns Hopkins University had no formal departments.  German was grouped together with all other languages (English included), and the original intent was for Romance Languages to supplement classical studies.  There was only one faculty member in German, Hermann Brandt, a graduate of Hamilton College, who held the rank of associate.  There were no graduate fellows studying German, but Brandt offered undergraduate courses in German elements, the works of Goethe, scientific German, and readings in High German literature.  While Brandt taught all courses himself, examinations were given by A. Marshall Elliott.

Aaron Marshall Elliott was named an Associate in 1876 to teach Romance Languages and was promoted to full professor in 1892.  He received the Ph.D. from Harvard in 1867 and studied in Europe for eight years before returning to assume his position at Hopkins.  Since he was the only faculty member at Hopkins in his field, Elliott taught a wide variety of languages, not only Romance (Italian, Spanish and French), but also Persian, as well as medieval languages. By 1884 Elliott had established a doctoral program, which would train many prominent romance scholars for American universities.  At this time, he also founded the Modern Language Association of America and its review, the Publication of the Modern Language Association (PMLA), which still plays an important part in literary studies.

By 1880, German had been separated from Romance Languages and grouped with Teutonic Languages, which included Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, and Shakespearean English as well as Old Norse and Icelandic.  In 1882, Brandt resigned his post at Hopkins and was replaced by Henry Wood, a graduate of the University of Leipzig and originally an associate professor of English.  One of Wood's goals (as stated in the President's Report of 1886) was to shift emphasis away from philological evaluation of texts to teaching students to read German at an acceptable level of comprehension.  The separation of English and German in 1888 enabled Wood to concentrate exclusively on developing an improved German language instruction program.

In 1889, the Teutonic Seminary was founded.  Wood headed the group, composed of junior instructors and graduate students.  The Seminary, later called the Germanic Society, met four to five times a semester to hear papers on all aspects of German literature, from technical philological discussions to historical narratives of the lives of great German writers.  In 1890, "area" courses were first offered that dealt with German history and geography and that were designed specifically for non-German majors.  In 1893, the first course in Gothic was offered.

In 1897, Edward Cooke Armstrong, a Hopkins Ph.D. (French), succeeded Elliott as Chair of Romance Languages.  Armstrong taught at Hopkins from 1897 to 1917, chairing it from 1910 until 1917, when he became professor of Romance Languages at Princeton.  Under Armstrong's direction the Romance Journal Club was founded, composed of a group of faculty and students who met weekly and reviewed foreign scientific literature.  In 1919, Henry Carrington Lancaster, who received his Ph.D. from Hopkins in French in 1907, was named Professor and Chair.  He rebuilt the department while also reinforcing the traditional seminar style of education.  Although courses were offered in Italian and Spanish, French remained the primary emphasis of the department.

The First World War and its concomitant anti-German feeling did not affect the actual working of the German department, although the number of students in departmental programs dropped as more and more young men were called to military service.  The only change in the department was the disbanding of the Germanic Society in March of 1917, although, papers were still presented in the departmental seminar.  The seminar of 1920 deal with German war poetry, and in the President's Report of the same year, Wood states that the poetry was "found to represent constructive ethics of world peace on a background of conflict, instead of a partisan spirit of strife."

In 1927, William Kurrelmeyer, a 1899 Hopkins Ph.D., became chair.  The most conspicuous event of Kurrelmeyer's term was the Second World War, during which all ties with German universities were cut.  The wartime demand for manpower drained the University, and in 1943 the department offered only one graduate course.  One part the department did play in the war effort was its participation in the Army Specialized Training Program, a government program in which students prepared for military jobs by taking courses specified by the government instead of university degree requirements.

Kurrelmeyer resigned his post as chair in 1944 and was succeeded by Ernst Feise.  Feise's area of expertise was the metrical structure of both poetry and prose, and he claimed to be able to identify the author of a piece of German writing simply by scannings its metrical structure.  During the Second World War, he was an outspoken critic of Hitler and, as early as 1937, wrote letters in which he warned of the menace the Nazi regime posed to European stability.  Ironically, one of Feise's earliest criticisms of Hitler was that, as an Austrian, Hitler spoke German so poorly that he would never be accepted as a true German citizen.

In the 1950s, Romance Languages benefited from the presence of émigré European scholars, such as Leo Spitzer, Georges Poulet (who succeeded Lancaster as chair in 1952) , Jean Starobinski. When Poulet returned to Europe, Nathan Edelman became chair.  In 1957 Charles Singleton returned to the department after spending ten years at Harvard.  Singleton's presence was to dominate the Romance Languages Department for almost three decades, despite the fact that his primary appointment was in the Humanities Center, which he had founded.  Singleton was known as one of the foremost scholars on Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and his scholarship received numerous awards, including the Order of Commendation, the highest honor the Italian government can bestow on a non-Italian.

Singleton was also instrumental in developing the Villa Spellman, in Florence, Italy, as a study facility for Hopkins faculty and graduate students. The building is used as a retreat for Hopkins scholars doing research in Italy, and was also the site of a foreign study program for undergraduates. Singleton remained involved in the affairs of the Romance Languages Department until his death in 1985.  Today the Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe as well as the Singleton Fellowship for graduate students in Italian remain as a testament to his lasting influence.

In 1980, Lieselotte Kurth, now Professor Emerita, became chair of German.  Kurth received her Ph.D. from Hopkins in 1963, and her special field of interest in eighteenth-century literature.  The arrival of Rainer Nägele, Werner Hamacher, and David Wellbery in the 1980s signified a major shift in the German department, which henceforth would emphasize aesthetics and the philosophical tradition in its analysis of German literature and culture.  In the years since then the department has hosted many noted scholars as visitors, including Hans-Jost Frey, Hans-Joerg Rheinberger, Wolfram Groddeck, and Christoph Menke.

In 1984 the Department of Romance Languages was divided into two separate departments, the Department of French (chaired by Gérard Defaux), and the Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies, under the direction of Harry Sieber. This arrangement lasted until 1999, when the two departments were once more reconstituted as the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures with Stephen G. Nichols as Chair. 

In 2006 the Department of German and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures merged under the leadership of Professor Nichols to create its current configuration as the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures.  Today, the Department, chaired by William Egginton, continues the tradition of close ties with scholars and universities from other countries in Europe and Latin America. Graduate students and undergraduates regularly study in major universities and institutes abroad.  Every year, students and faculty from partner universities from abroad teach and study in the department creating a dynamic and stimulating intellectual scene.

(Excerpted and compiled from the Ferdinand Hamburger Archives of the Johns Hopkins University.)

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