The (North) American Studies division is the third division to be explicitly extablished. When the Department was founded in 1888, it was a matter of course that the resident professor would read courses on the history of English as well as on English and American literature. Some seventy-five years later, when the university system as a whole went into its growth phase in the 1960s and 1970s, this went hand in hand with founding professorships to attend to specialized parts of the teaching and research programmes. Thus, the English Department was able to call professors for Medieval Literature and Linguistics, but also for American Literature. Since then, however, both the methodology of teaching and the degree content has changed considerably. Prof. Dr. Babette B. Tischleder and Prof. Dr. Andrew Gross, our current two professors in the North American Studies division, look back over the developments of the past 35 years.
