My literature and culture courses have several goals: I want to acquaint students with as broad a view of a given issue as possible in the time we have; I want students to think seriously about a problem under discussion; I want students to form and present informed, well-founded, defensible views and opinions on texts and issues; and, for my courses taught in German, I want students to work on their language as well as on content issues and thus improve their language skills. A lot of the materials in all the upper-ddivision courses in the program that are taught in English is generally available in German and can, in fact, should be read in German by students who are capable of doing so.
My presentations often have a comparative-cultural take: how do Germans deal with issues compared with Americans, for instance. I am inclined to bring in more material and viewpoints than we can fully digest. I do this because at the intermediate to advanced levels students are a) perfectly able to work through a fair amount of information; b) as student's familiarity with most issues in a foreign culture tends to be limited, I feel I want to present breadth as well as (maybe even more than) depth; and c) that way every student will find a topic s/he can then concentrate on in more detail and depth for his/her class presentation and essays. I will meet with each student individually to discuss presentations and papers and advise them on useful materials.

Besides first- and second-year language courses, I regularly teach in our GAC program, and offer the following list of upper-level German Studies courses:
 

German 124 : The German Twentieth Century Through Film

German 151 : Modern German Poetry.

German 154 : Great German Fiction.

German 161 : Building the Natioon - And Then Again: The Case of Germany.

German 170 : The Culture of Nature: From Romanticism to the Greens.

German 171 : The Poetics of Work: Work, Money, and Aesthetics.

Occasionally, I co-teach with a colleague from the Russian section a course that brings together both the German and Russian sections of the department:

German & Russian 176 : Berlin - Moscow // Moscow - Berlin: Europe in Transformation.

When I am teaching in Pomona College's Freshman interdisciplinary seminar series, it is usually a course titled:

ID-1 : Fragrant Ecstasies: A Cultural History of Olfactory Perception.