On leave for 2022-23 academic year

Expertise

Contemporary European studies; Holocaust studies; German Jewish studies; Germany and the European Union; contemporary German literature and film

At the Keough School

William Donahue is professor of European studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He is a faculty fellow of the Keough School’s Nanovic Institute for European Studies. Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and Pulte Institute for Global Development.

Courses

• Europe & the Migration Crisis: The Case of Germany (elective for undergraduate and master of global affairs)
• Transnational European Studies Seminar in Washington DC (undergraduate seminar in European studies)

Biography

Donahue is professor of European studies; the Rev. John J. Cavanaugh, C.S.C., Professor of the Humanities; and professor of German at the University of Notre Dame. A scholar of contemporary German literature and film, Donahue is a concurrent professor of  Film, Television, and Theatre. He is the author of Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s  “Nazi” Novels and Their Films and The End of Modernism: Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé. He has served as chair of Notre Dame’s Department of German and Russian Languages and Literatures.

Donahue is co-director of the Notre Dame Berlin Seminar, which brings American scholars of German literary and cultural studies together with experts and leading figures of Germany’s literary scene. He holds a PhD in German Literature from Harvard.

In the Media

• Whose War Is It?: Letter from Germany (Commonweal)