Germany

This course introduces the basic structures of the German language. The student develops communicative competences in the areas of reading, listening, speaking, and writing. The course enables the participant to engage in simple conversations in settings such as shopping or restaurants and to speak in simple past tense. The student becomes familiar with listening comprehension strategies and develops the ability to extract socio-cultural information from simple texts, accompanied by exercises concerning phonetic particularities in communicative contexts. This course is at the A1.1/A1.2 level according to CFER.

Since the mid twentieth century the German welfare state has seen public health outcomes improve with sustained economic growth. But when the pandemic forced governments round the world to consider imposing lockdowns, journalists portrayed the choice in stark terms: either protect the population or the “health” of the economy. Lock­downs were feasible, however, only where governments increased welfare spending substantially, and as the pandemic unfolded other significant links between health and the economy—in Germany, the importance of the biomedical industry, for instance—became patent. Each week, the course focuses on an aspect of the complex interplay between health and “economy” in the history of the German welfare state, arguably the oldest in the world. Topics include the establishment of social insurance; the German coal and chemical industries; the therapeutic revolution during the so-called golden age of the welfare state; population politics, including abortion law, in East and West Germany; surprising trends in public health outcomes in east and west Germany since reunification; and the challenges posed by population ageing and immigration. Along the way, the class discusses questions which the study of the welfare state raises and to which the pandemic has given renewed significance: How should governments act to improve public health outcomes? To what extent should they intervene in people's lives in pursuing such objectives?

This is an introductory course to studying screen cultures in their medium specificity by looking at adaptations that make narrative borrowings explicit. Students learn how to diagnostically write about and think with films, which rework popular and literary tales.

This course explores European art from the fifteenth to the twentieth century with a particular focus on the travels of artists between urban centers like Florence, Rome, Venice, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Paris, London, and Berlin. The aim is to analyze how mobility contributed through the centuries to shape local identities as well as European cultural traditions common to different countries. The course presents iconic moments of the history of the arts in Europe by drawing a special attention to episodes of cultural exchanges and hybridization that arose from travelling artworks as well as from artists' travels. From the impact of Flemish art in fifteenth century Italy, to the stays of artists like Raphael and Michelangelo in early sixteenth-century papal Rome; from the rise of genre painting in the Flanders and the Dutch Republic of the Age of Explorations, to the “painters of modern life” in nineteenth-century Paris, and the European network of the Avant-gardes of the 1910s-1920s, students analyze the artworks and their authors in relation to the different historical contexts and the places of their creation. Recurrent is the focus on the complex interplay between artists and patrons, between local traditions, individual creativity and the broader social, political, and cultural contexts in which artworks were produced. Students gain understanding of the main art movements and relevant artists from the Renaissance to the postwar period and the special role played by travels in giving shape to a European cultural space. For the onsite program only: Visits to the outstanding collections of Berlin museums allow the participants to study original artifacts and to learn how to look closely at works of art.