Top journals in the entire field of German Studies are edited right here at the University of Illinois, by faculty and graduate research assistants in our Germanic Department.
Carl Niekerk recently concluded a six-year term as editor in chief of The German Quarterly. Graduate students in our program served as assistants. See most recent issue information here. The German Quarterly is a leading forum in North America for scholarly debates of all kinds - topical, ideological, methodological, theoretical, established and the experimental, as well as debates on recent developments in the profession of German Studies.
The Lessing Yearbook, editor in chief: Carl Niekerk. See most recent issue information here. The Lessing Yearbook, the official publication of the Lessing Society, is a valuable source of information on German culture, literature, and thought of the eighteenth century. Articles are in German or English. Essays explore a wide variety of subjects pertaining to class and gender, identity formation, and art in the eighteenth century and in Lessing's work.
Emblematica: Essays in Word and Image, editor in chief: Mara Wade. Emblematica publishes essays and specialized bibliographies in all areas of emblem studies. In addition, it regularly contains review articles, reviews, research reports (including work in progress, theses, conference reports, and completed theses), notes and queries, and notices of forthcoming conferences and publications.
Illinois also is a hub for Emblematica Online, an internationally known web resource that draws from the most important collections of emblematica worldwide. Emblems are concise yet potent combinations of texts and images that invite, and require, decoding. In a concise format, they reveal the mentalities and attitudes of the period from c. 1500-1800 in an assemblage of texts and images. Typically an emblem consists of a motto, an often puzzling image called the pictura, and a subtext called a subscriptione or epigram.