Research profiles in the Department of German Studies

Germanistik

Professor Jan-Oliver Decker

Professorship for Modern German Literature and Media Semiotics

Research focuses in recent years have been:

Transmedial storytelling
Star images and fan cultures
Children's and youth literature, young adult, all ages
Analysis of digital formats in media networks
Concepts of the person, eroticism and gender roles in the media
Information and media literacy

Professor Hans Krah

Chair of Modern German Literature and Media Semiotics

Research focuses in recent years have been:

Literature of realism, early modernism, synthetic modernism
Narratology
Privacy
Multimodality
Constructions of space and reality
Popular knowledge transfer
Textual anthropology
Gender discourses

Professor Markus Pissarek

Chair of Didactics of German Language and Literature

Research focus:

Subject-specific professionalism research
Evidence-based reading literacy research (support, diagnostics)
Literary and media literacy

In addition, German didactics plays a key role in the third-party funded SKILL project as part of the Quality Offensive for Teacher Training.

Professor Julia Ricart Brede

Chair of German as a Second Language/German as a Foreign Language

Our research focuses on the areas of language in the subject, multilingualism and multilingualism didactics, writing and literacy, and the professionalisation of (prospective) teachers.
We use qualitative and quantitative methods for data collection and analysis to implement empirical projects.

Professor Andrea Sieber

Professorship of Medieval German Literature

Research focuses include:

Literature from the Middle Ages to the early modern period
Cultural studies approaches (reception of antiquity, gender studies, historical emotionality research, concepts of knowledge and non-knowledge)
Media history and media theory
Reception of the Middle Ages (film, Nibelungen myth)
Medieval texts in German language teaching

Professor Alexander Werth

Chair of German Linguistics

The research conducted by Prof. Alexander Werth's chair focuses on historical and contemporary varieties of German. All levels of the language system are examined, from phonetics and morphology to syntax. A particular focus is placed on German dialects. The empirical approach is strictly data-based and involves corpus analyses and experimental methods such as reaction time measurements and electroencephalography. In terms of linguistic theory, the research is primarily rooted in structuralism, grammaticalisation and construction grammar. The research conducted at the chair is also embedded in the Passau Language and Cognition Laboratory (SKoLa).