Germany

Survivors of trauma often only have fragmented memories of the overwhelming event. With its discontinuous form, its division into individual panels, some critics argue, graphic narrative may be particularly suited for representing the experiences and perspectives of traumatized people. In the course, we will investigate this connection, focusing on texts such as Fun Home, One! Hundred! Demons!, Maus, and others.

The students learn the implementation and practical application of new (under development) web technologies, particularly in the areas of online media (e.g. web TV, streaming, content protection, social media), telecommunications (e.g. web RTC) , as well as Internet of Things.

This course takes its title from a series of letters and papers that Dietrich Bonhoeffer composed while imprisoned in Berlin from 1943-1945. The theological questions posed by Bonhoeffer in these personal letters will set the tone for this course, as well as its overall aims. Specifically, those aims are to identify and to critically assess a variety of challenges that have been posed against religious thought and belief by the rapid development of secular culture and its rising influence in the modern, Western world. In doing so, this course will explore a wide range of political, social, and personal/existential ideas and provocations that theologians, philosophers, and religious thinkers have been made to confront in this “world come of age”.

In the course, students practice descriptive evaluations as well as inferential statistical analyses with R: In addition to the most common univariate methods, non-parametric and selected multivariate methods are also taken into account. Further focuses are on the diverse options for creating diagrams and data management. After completing the course, participants can carry out standard exploratory and inferential statistical procedures with R, create flexible diagrams and have gained an overview of the diverse possible uses of the additional packages for special problems.

Moral Psychology is a field of study between philosophy and psychology that studies human functioning in Moral contexts and the way this has an impact in ethical theory. This course is an Introduction to some of the main topics and methods in the field of Moral Psychology, including moral judgment, moral reasoning, moral responsibility and moral emotions.

This course covers the following topics: sets and mappings, complete induction; number representations, real numbers, complex numbers; number sequences, convergence, infinite series, power series, limits and continuity of functions; elementary rational and transcendental functions; differentiation, extreme values, mean value theorem and consequences; higher derivatives, Taylor polynomial and series; applications of differentiation; definite and indefinite integral, integration of rational and complex functions, improper integrals, Fourier series; matrices, linear systems of equations, Gauss algorithm; vectors and vector spaces; linear mappings; dimension and linear independence; matrix algebra; vector geometry; determinants, eigenvalues; linear differential equations.
 

For this advanced research seminar, students choose the topic of their research paper from the range of processes, legal innovations and socio-legal practices that took place within Germany in any period of choice from 1933 to today. The seminar will be held as a block when students will present the elaborated papers with a seminar presentation. The prerequisite for participation is the prior attendance of a lecture on “State Crime Criminology, Transitional Justice, and the Nazi Regime.” Students will write a 20-page seminar paper, give a seminar lecture, and participate in the discussion of the other students’ presentations.

Philosophers, and non-philosophers alike, have fought over the meanings, values and consequences of love and sexual desire from philosophy’s very beginning. The seminar addresses some of these controversial issues, their aporias and paradoxes, and encourages students to find their own interpretations and answers. We will discuss questions such as: Are there different forms of love? What are the differences, if any, between e.g. love and friendship? Is sex or sexual desire essential for love? Do we lose or find ourselves in love relationships? How do we change when we fall in love? Are we free or unfree when we are in a love relationship? How do power and love relate? How much aggressivity, hate and mastery are entailed in love bonds? The seminar will address these (and further) questions by concentrating on four models of love: (1) Love as union or fusion; (2) Love as knowledge; (3) Love as work on oneself; (4) Love as struggle. As conceptual basis for these models, two texts in particular will be read, analysed and discussed, an ancient one, Plato’s Symposium, and a modern one, which however draws upon ancient myths, Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea. The two texts will be studied in light of modern and contemporary insights and issues, as for example those raised by Hegel (and especially his master/slave figure), psychoanalysis, feminism, polyamory theory, and others. There will be space for students to (partially) participate in the articulation of the programme, and for practicing philosophy in some more ‘creative’ ways than usual (by for example staging philosophical theatrical scenes).

The focus of the seminar is the concept of reconstruction in the field of architecture and urban development, an essential term when dealing with loss and destruction in historical urban structures. In addition to the decision or debate between monument preservation and new planning, the course also discusses the crucial role of political, social and identity authorities in these design processes. By reading theoretical and official texts, analyzing international case studies and visiting Berlin case studies, students gain insights into the diversity of theories and methodological approaches to reconstruction in modern and contemporary architectural practice and monument preservation.

The mythologically masculine figure of the creative genius has often been employed to minimize and excuse violence against marginalized people. In exchange for great art, audiences might be more than willing to look the other way when women, people of color, queer people and children get hurt. With the arrival of social media, the violent price of art by monstrous men has become harder to ignore. Their crimes are all over the internet. When knowledge of the wrongdoings by artists spread, it becomes challenging for fans to ignore the reprehensible behavior of people like Michael Jackson, Roman Polanski, Louis CK, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Kevin Spacey and R. Kelly. In this course, we reflect on the dilemma this leaves for audiences: How do we deal with great art made by horrible people? Students will learn how to make use of an intersectional feminist toolbox to engage with questions like: -- Does art have to be moral? -- Can we separate art from artist? Is this dependent on the medium? -- Is the audience complicit or culpable if they continue consuming the work created by monstrous men? -- How does the art by monstrous men play into discussions around individual taste and political identity as shaped by cultural consumption? -- What do strategies of ethical cultural consumption look like? -- Can we have harmless, morally sound cultural products in patriarchal, white supremacist capitalism? -- What is “woke capitalism” and does canceling culture ever work? -- What do accountability and consequences look like? -- Can monstrous men redeem themselves through confessions, apologies and contrition?