Smiling students in a classroom talking
Yu Feng teaching

Professor Yu Feng

Students seated in a classroom listen to a lecture
Professor Aida Wong meeting with two students in her office

Professor Aida Wong

Group photo of most GRALL faculty

Back: Xiwen Lu, Irina Dubinina, Valeriya Kozlovskaya, Steve Dowden, David Powelstock, Yu Feng, Pu Wang, Howie Tam Front: Robin Feuer Miller, Sabine von Mering, Yukimi Nakano, Eun-Jo Lee, Jennifer He, Jian Wei, Hisae Fujiwara

The Department of German, Russian and Asian Languages and Literature (GRALL) includes the German Studies Program, the Russian Studies Program, the Chinese Language Program, and the Japanese Language Program, as well as language courses in Korean.

Undergraduate Majors

German Studies Program

The German Studies program is inherently interdisciplinary. We encourage students to explore German language and culture through a variety of lenses, including history, political science, Jewish studies, linguistics, philosophy and cinema. Because our faculty and classes are small, you’ll be sure to develop close relationships and receive the mentoring Brandeis is known for.

Russian Studies Program

The Russian Studies program enables students to explore a wide variety of cultural, literary, social and political aspects of Russia and other post-Soviet states. Scholars in our program study the Russian language in its cultural context. Our graduates develop a deep understanding of the diversity and complexity of human thought and world views, and learn to apply Russian perspectives to texts and ideas beyond the study of language and literature.

Language Programs

 

 

Spotlight on Research

Russian texts on a shelf
Brandeis BiRCh Project Receives NSF Grant

The Department of German, Russian and Asian Languages and Literature is excited to announce that the National Science Foundation has awarded a grant to Brandeis University in support of the project Parsed and Audio-Aligned Corpus of Bilingual Russian Child Speech (BiRCh). The project is under the direction of faculty members Sophia Malamud (Linguistics/Computer Science), Irina Dubinina (Russian/GRALL), and Nianwen Xue (Linguistics/Computer Science). You can learn more about the project on the BiRCh website.

A Lexicon of Chinese Correspondence of Literary Style with English Translation and Notes

After 5 years painstaking efforts of over 70 contributors, we are glad to announce the issuing of a unique free access electronic reference book: A Lexicon of Chinese Correspondence of Literary Style with English Translation and Notes.

As we know, this is the first of the kind reference book to help scholars decode the late Imperial and early Republic letters which are a significant part of documents for studying Chinese history, society, and culture. We wish the users of the reference book would give us feedbacks and we will go on improving and updating it.