Ingeborg Glier

Professor of German 

Ingeborg Glier, Ph.D University of Munich 1958, Habilitation 1969, faculty member at Yale since 1973: When you were appointed to Yale in 1973 you were one of only two tenured women members of the faculty. Although a leading medievalist and comparative medievalist since your earliest days as a scholar, your career has been defined by its range. You began as an Anglist, publishing a book on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and theater. You then wrote a book on the art of German versification from the 8th to the 20th century and became an expert on that subject. You later authored a study of medieval manuscripts as cultural objects, co-edited a three-volume anthology of medieval German literature and wrote on such varied subjects as allegory and carnival comedy—among many others. 

As a teacher you have displayed this same extraordinary range. You have taught courses on German literature and culture from 700 to 1600, with strong emphasis on the High Middle Ages. But you also have offered courses on Hoelderlin, Jean Paul, and Kleist, and you are a formidable Thomas Mann scholar. You were famously the first to introduce courses on women writers into Yale German departmental offerings. In 1973, when you were appointed to the Yale faculty after a visiting year, graduate students cheered. Since then the combination of “learnedness, balance and wit” often cited as the source of your scholarly, teaching, and administrative success has been valued by students from Cologne to Colorado—and especially by your lucky students and colleagues at Yale. As you retire to continue your writing and travel, your grateful colleagues thank and salute you.