Mark W. Roche

Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C. Professor of German Language and Literature

Concurrent Professor of Philosophy

University of Notre Dame

Teaching

Current and Recent Teaching

In Fall 2025 Roche taught the first semester of the year-long Glynn Honors Humanities Seminar and a 400-level course, taught in German, on "Challenges to Self, Society, and the Sacred: German Prose Masterpieces." He did not teach in Spring 2026 but will return to the classroom in the Fall of 2026, with a course on philosophy and film and the honors humanities seminar.

In 2024-25 Roche taught the year-long Glynn Honors Humanities Seminar, which in the fall takes students from Homer to Dante and in the spring from Machiavelli to Trethewey. In addition, he taught a 400-level course in German on "Tragedy, Comedy, Inverted World," and a 200-level course in German that helps students advance their language skills while also introducing them to fascinating aspects of Germany as well as Austria, Switzerland, and the German diaspora.

In Fall 2023 Roche was on leave and writing his book Theories of Ugliness: An Unseemly Aesthetic History. In Spring 2024 he taught a College Seminar on "Faith, Doubt, Reason" and a seminar entitled "The Cinematic World of Alfred Hitchcock."

Other courses in recent years have included Philosophy and Film, which satisfied Notre Dame's requirement for a second philosophy course, German seminars on Comedy, Satire, and Humor and Tragedy, Comedy, Identity, and a 300-level course, taught in German, on Contemporary Germany.

Undergraduate Courses

Roche has taught undergraduate courses in German language, literature, and culture, as well as broader courses. Sample courses:

• Comedy, Jokes, and Satire in the German-Speaking World
• Great Questions and the Liberal Arts
• Faith, Doubt, and Reason
• Religious Themes in Modern German Literature and Thought
• Austrian Literature from Grillparzer to Handke
• Weimar and the Third Reich in German Literature and Film
• Modern German Literature in Cultural Context
• Introduction to German Drama

Graduate Courses

Roche’s graduate courses have focused on German literature and intellectual history. Sample courses:

• The Idea of God’s Dependence on Humanity in German Literature and Culture
• Objective Idealism and the Study of Literature
• German Intellectual History from Kant to the Present
• Literature in the Age of Technology
• Tragedy and the Philosophy of Tragedy from Lessing to Hochhuth
• German Comedy from Lessing to Brecht
• Narrative Theory and the Interpretation of Fictional Narratives
• Aspects of Poetics, Rhetoric, and Stylistics: An Introduction to the Formal Study of Literature

Additional Syllabi

• Evil, Power, and Art from Plato to Hitchcock (Spring 2014)
• Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland  (Fall 2014)
• German Narratives (Spring 2014)
• Literature and Contradiction (Fall 2013)
• Comedy, Jokes, and Satire in the German-speaking World (Spring 2011)
• Masterpieces of German Cinema (Fall 2010)
• Great Questions and the Liberal Arts (Spring 2008)

• Teaching
• Scholarship
• Digital Offprints
• Service
• Curriculum Vitae
• Contact

Selected Publications and Addresses on Teaching

• Sheedy Award Address on Teaching 2025
• Why Choose the Liberal Arts? Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010.
• “Should Faculty Members Teach Virtues and Values? That is the Wrong Question.” Liberal Education: 95.3 (Summer 2009): 22-27.
• Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004.
• The Intellectual Appeal of Catholicism and the Idea of a Catholic University. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003.
• “The Doctoral Colloquium as a Community of Learning and a Forum for Professional Development.” ADFL Bulletin30 (Fall 1998): 38-43.
• “Areas of Expertise, Proleptic Interpretation, Penultimate Drafts: Three Ideas for the Graduate Seminar in Literature.” Die Unterrichtspraxis 20 (1987): 261-68.