Graduate students in the Department of German and Scandinavian have the opportunity to pursue a sub-concentration in German Shakespeare Studies, i.e., to avail themselves of local resources that make the University of Oregon an especially conducive setting for considering the legacies of the German encounter with Shakespeare.

These resources include the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Established in Ashland in 1935, the OSF features eleven plays annually over an eight-and-a-half-month season. Ashland 's relative proximity (three hours south of Eugene) offers students and faculty a regular opportunity to attend world-class productions of plays by Shakespeare and other playwrights.

Additionally, the University of Oregon boasts a strong cadre of faculty whose research and teaching focus on Shakespeare and his contemporaries:

Lisa Freinkel associate professor of English; director, Program in Comparative Literature; author, Reading Shakespeare’s Will.

George Rowe professor of English; editor, Comparative Literature; author Thomas Middleton and the New Comedy Tradition and Distinguishing Jonson: Imitation, Rivalry, and the Direction of a Dramatic Career.

Ben Saunders associate professor of English; author, Desiring Donne.

At regular intervals, the Department of German and Scandinavian will offer seminars that deal (narrowly or generally) with Shakespeare and his importance for the German literary and critical tradition. In winter of 2009 Prof. Kenneth Calhoon will teach “Theories of Tragedy” (GER 625). This seminar will attempt a thorough consideration of some of the canonical theories of tragedy, from Aristotle’s Poetics to Hegel’s Aesthetics and Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama. In addition to reading certain representative primary sources (Euripides, Shakespeare, Gryphius, Lessing and Kleist), we will discuss a number of key critical writings (Auerbach, Girard, Agamben, Moretti, Segal and Burkert).