A model teacher

Wolfgang Müller believes in “teaching by model.” Instead of lecturing his students, he approaches life as “a questioning person,” never taking the world at face value.

Müller has always been a keen observer and questioner of assumptions. Even as a young man growing up in East Germany, he eagerly examined large cultural questions through literature.

Fascinated with the Far East, he earned his undergraduate degree in Japanese studies. That he’s now a professor of German doesn’t strike him as incongruous—those large cultural questions stay with you whether you study Japanese cinema or contemporary German poetry.

Wolfgang Müller works with students outside the Stern Center for Global Education.

“Human problems don’t change over time; our vocabulary for them changes,” he says.

As a scholar, it's Müller’s job to build as diverse a vocabulary for his students as possible. Beginning with introductory classes, he stresses the intersections among language, culture and history.

This interdisciplinary approach works, he says, because it encourages curiosity. One of his favorite courses, German Cultural History, breaks with tradition by combining high and low culture.

“It’s good to give a comprehensive perspective on culture,” he says. “The American culture or the German culture doesn’t exist in the sense we think. It’s not any one thing. It’s different for different classes of people, so we need to look at its diversity.”

That’s why his students embrace what he calls the “Hip Factor.” Since he grew up in Germany and returns often, Müller knows its pop culture firsthand. He’s as happy discussing Berlin’s punk-music scene as he is the legacy of Mozart, Beethoven, Goethe or Brecht.

So go ahead, ask him about various aspects of German culture. His answer is sure to challenge your assumptions.

Bio note:
Dr. Wolfgang Müller has published three books, numerous articles and book reviews. He is one of the founding directors of Dickinson’s study-abroad center at the University of Bremen, Germany; initiated the Kade Writer-in-Residence Program; and has been both president and secretary of the Northeastern Modern Language Association's German literature section. For the last several years he has organized the Carlisle Symposium on Modern German Literature, a gathering of international writers and scholars. Along with maintaining the German department’s Web page, he produces glossen, an online scholarly journal about recent literature, film and art in German-speaking countries.

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