Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen

Once home to Hölderlin and Hegel, Bloch and Schelling, Hesse and Tugendhat…

Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen is the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s closest and most important partner in Germany. Close ties between the two universities have developed in recent years at every level between staff, faculty, and administrators. One of the cornerstones in this emerging strategic partnership is the collaboration between GSLL and the Deutsches Seminar at Uni Tübingen. These ventures are extensive and impact every level of teaching and research.

Undergraduate Exchanges

Founded in 1477, the Universität Tübingen is the fourteenth oldest university in German-speaking Europe located in one of Germany’s classic university towns with a population roughly the size of Asheville, North Carolina’s (ca. 85,000 inhabitants; comparatively, Chapel Hill has only 57,000 inhabitants.) Carolina undergraduates will find in Tübingen a familiar counterpart to Chapel Hill, a stellar university nestled in an idyllic corner of southwest Germany.

Carolina undergraduates wanting to study in German have three different study abroad options in Tübingen. The first two are for more advanced undergraduates who have completed at least four semesters of German language instruction under their belt. The third is ideal for students wishing to learning beginning or intermediate German while also taking English-language courses that can be used toward general education or major requirements. These options include:

• Full enrollment for a year (mid-October to late-July)
• Full enrollment for a spring semester (mid-April to late-July)
• Enrollment in an English-language “International And European Studies” program during the summer and fall semester (includes German-language instruction) (mid-July to late-November)

To learn more about the individual programs and actual student experiences in Tübingen, see the catalogue of Tübingen programs on the Study Abroad website.

Students at the Universität Tübingen seeking a bachelor’s degree also have the option of studying at UNC-Chapel Hill through the UNC-Exchange Program. For more information about the application process, international students should see both UNC-EP’s portal for international students and speak with their home campus coordinator.

Bilateral Graduate Exchanges / UNC-Chapel Hill’s Teaching Assistant Program

Advanced graduate students enrolled in the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies have succeeded annually in securing year-long stipends from the Baden-Württemberg Foundation in order to support their research and writing in Tübingen. Graduate students interested in studying in Tübingen should contact Dr. Richard Langston no later than the end of the fall semester. Carolina-Duke graduate students who have studied in Tübingen have cultivated significant relationships with Tübingen faculty who can later serve on dissertation committees.

Advanced students studying German literature at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen can apply to spend an entire academic year (mid-August to early May) in Chapel Hill taking courses both inside and outside the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies while teaching German as a second language at UNC-Chapel Hill. Tübingen students of German literature interested in studying in Chapel Hill should contact the Dezernat Internationale Angelegenheiten. For detailed insight into the Chapel Hill experience, check out these detailed accounts of student life at UNC written by recent Tübingen exchange students.

Faculty Exchanges / Research Collaborations

In conjunction with Universität Tübingen’s Teach@Tübingen program, GSLL faculty have taught literature seminars during the summer semester. In 2014, Dr. Gabriel Trop, offered the seminar “Subjects of Attraction” in 2014 (more about Dr. Trop’s seminar can be found in the Uni Tübingen Newsletter.) In the summer of 2015, Professor Priscilla Layne will offer a seminar on gender and ethnicity. In the summer of 2016, Professor Pollmann is offering a seminar on

Prof. Dr. Klaus Sachs-Hombach of the Department of Media Studies was in residence in Carolina’s Department of Communication Studies in the spring of 2015. In April 2016, the first weekly long “Summer School” workshop on the topic of “Risky Understanding” took place UNC-Chapel Hill.

In addition to faculty exchanges, inter-institutional collaboration among faculty also transpires in the form of workshops and seminars involving not only scholars of German literature but also related fields in the humanities. Future workshops will continue to focus on the intersections of narration and media.

Transatlantic Network for German Studies

Beyond the inter-institutional collaboration between Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, faculty seek to forge a broader network of transatlantic scholars.