Gordon Birrell, associate professor of German, joined the SMU faculty in 1974. He received B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. He also received a Stanford fellowship for study at the Freie Universität Berlin. In addition to language instruction, Professor Birrell has taught advanced courses in German literature from Romanticism to the present and methods of literary analysis. He served as head of two team-taught courses on art, music and literature from the Renaissance to the present as part of the Core general education curriculum in the 1980s and 1990s. He served two terms as chair of the Department of World Languages and Literature and has served for a total of over 20 years as the area chair for German. He is the author of The Boundless Present: Space and Time in the Literary Fairy Tales of Novalis and Tieck (1979) and numerous scholarly articles, book chapters and reviews. From SMU, Professor Birrell received the HOPE Award three times. Prior to SMU he was an assistant professor at Princeton University and also taught at Stanford University. He retires as Professor Emeritus of German.
Gordon Birrell, associate professor of German, joined the SMU faculty in 1974. He received B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. He also received a Stanford fellowship for study at the Freie Universität Berlin. In addition to language instruction, Professor Birrell has taught advanced courses in German literature from Romanticism to the present and methods of literary analysis. He served as head of two team-taught courses on art, music and literature from the Renaissance to the present as part of the Core general education curriculum in the 1980s and 1990s. He served two terms as chair of the Department of World Languages and Literature and has served for a total of over 20 years as the area chair for German. He is the author of The Boundless Present: Space and Time in the Literary Fairy Tales of Novalis and Tieck (1979) and numerous scholarly articles, book chapters and reviews. From SMU, Professor Birrell received the HOPE Award three times. Prior to SMU he was an assistant professor at Princeton University and also taught at Stanford University. He retires as Professor Emeritus of German.