Steve Dowden is a Professor of German language and literature, and he chairs the Department of German, Russian and Asian Languages and Literatures. He graduated from the University of California with a Ph.d in German in 1984. After a decade teaching at Yale he joined the Brandeis faculty in 1994. Dowden has published on German literature, art, and intellectual history from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. His teaching spans the literature of the Goethezeit to twentieth-century modernism and the late twentieth-century (especially Austrian) literature. In addition, he coordinates the unique Brandeis undergraduate major in European Cultural Studies.