Main Research Areas

The Basis of Theoretical and Applied Research Work at the Department, Profile Projects, International Collaboration.

The Department of Germanic Studies concerns itself with all the germanic languages and literatures except English: German (German section), Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and the basics of Icelandic (Nordic section) and Dutch, plus the basics of Afrikaans (Dutch section). The Insititute is divided into the tree aforementioned, relatively independent sections, the German section is further split into the linguistic and literary subsections.

German Linguistics Subsection

We participated in the project Languages ​​and European Network of Excellence (LINEE) - a project co-funded by the European Commission, 2006-2010, in cooperation e.g. with universities in Bolzano, Southampton, Bern, Vienna. The theme of the Prague group was Language and Economy. Since 2000, the lexicographical section of the department runs the project of Great German-Czech Academic Dictionary (Velký německo-český akademický slovník) in cooperation with the Department of Corpus Linguistics at the Institute for German Language in Mannheim.

German Literary Subsection

Regarding the research of German-language literature in Czech Lands – an integral part of the cultural history of our country - we propose to establish an extensive research project History of German literature written in Bohemia. The department staff also participates in further projects, such as the European project Literary Atlas of Europe (Ein literarischer Atlas Europas), Czech-German subproject German Literature in Bohemia in the 19th and 20 Century or the project of Czech Dictionary of German Writers (Slovník německy píšících autorů), which involves Germanists from universities in the whole country.

The literary section develops in cooperation with scholars from home (Universities in Brno and Olomouc, Academy of Sciences) and international institutions (University of Konstanz, Cologne, Berlin, Leipzig, Regensburg, Vienna, Salzburg, Zurich, Strasbourg, London, New York and Tokyo) the project Prague as Intersection of European Modernisms (Prag als Knotenpunkt der europäischen Modernen) and with the University of Tübingen we take part in the project Literature Network. European Minor Languages (Netzwerk Literature. Kleine Sprachen in Europa).

Dutch section

The members of the Dutch section have parcticipated on several research projects: Business Dutch, further Oude drukken in de bibliotheken van Polen en Tsjechië (an international project in cooperation with the universities of Wroclaw, Olomouc and Leiden) and the Studia imagologica project of the Amsterdam university. Currently the section cooperates on the ongoing corpus projects of the Czech National Corpus – Dutch-Czech Parallel Corpus and the international Oude drukken project (the universities of Wroclaw, Olomouc, Prague).