Germany

Students explore the relationships of architecture and city planning to ideology, society and politics. Specifically, the course entails the development of these relationships in the context of Berlin across a number of different political eras, including the Empire, the Weimar Republic, National Socialism, the Cold War and the subsequent time which has elapsed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Course contents range from shorter texts and lectures to long, involved city explorations and possibly exhibition visits.

In this class on the A2 level according to CEFR, students learn to understand sentences and frequently used expressions related to areas of most immediate relevance (e.g. basic personal and family information, shopping, local geography, employment). They study to communicate in simple and routine tasks requiring a simple and direct exchange of information on familiar and routine matters. Students work to describe in simple terms aspects of their background, immediate environment, and matters in areas of immediate need. Topics are taken from Berlin and German history and culture and also include politics as well as intercultural topics and current events.

This seminar first develops a brief overview of the form and theory of the essay as a literary genre. Primarily, however, the course reads and analyzes essays North American women writers who, in particular from the 1960s onwards, appropriated and henceforth shaped the form and tradition of the essay. To understand the profound aesthetic and social influence and the cultural work of women authors after World War II, the course devotes some time to canonical authors such as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion. Not least because of the very cultural authority of these writers and their early and pivotal periods of production in the era of counterculture and the women's movement in the United States, the Cold War and accelerating globalization, the course explores how these - and other - women essayists wrote about the Other, about the world. Frequently, in the essay itself and in research on it, the "I," the introspection of the writer, takes center stage. While this is highly relevant to an understanding of the genre, the course wants to venture a shift of perspective and ask: What forms of observation and description, what ethics of regarding the Other (or lack thereof) can be found in these texts? What imagery, cultural valences, and political implications can be distilled from the essays? In addition, the course pays special attention to works by African American women writers such as Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and June Jordan. African American writers in particular used the essay as a medium of political self-authorization, social critique, and literary renegotiation of cultural knowledge and female and minority subjectivity. Which distinct aesthetics of factual writing did they develop, how did they inscribe themselves in canonical essay traditions, yet how did they also perform productive fractures and critiques of these and develop alternative forms of essayistic thinking and writing?

This course examines a variety of aspects concerning international politics in Europe, with particular focus on the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. The course surveys the postwar history of international politics in Europe; European integration in general and the European Union in particular; the role played by security organizations (especially NATO and OSCE); US and Soviet/Russian policy towards Europe; the eruption of ethno-political conflict (in particular, the Balkans); the international impact of Germany's recent reunification; and the quest for order, stability, and security in a region that is no longer divided by the Iron Curtain but in which international politics continue to be shaped and affected by East-West as well as North-South contrasts. The course mixes an examination of contemporary aspects with historical contextualization, in presentations, readings, and video material.

This course examines the possibility and sources of our knowledge of other people’s and our own mental lives. The course begins with the classic mid-20th century debate on the "problem of other minds," and its development in more recent debates in cognitive science over mindreading. The course then turns to look at self-knowledge. The course considers introspection models, transparency approaches, and inferentialism. Finally the course discusses the phenomena of sexual objectification, hermeneutical injustice, and the social construction and regulation of emotion, and consider their relation to the themes of the course.