Germany

This pre-semester course prepares foreign students for academic study at a German university. The focus is on the improvement of oral and written expression as well as grammar and lexical proficiency. The course covers selected topics on German politics and society within a historical context. In addition, excursions are planned to introduce students to German culture. Students work with cultural topics in everyday situations and broaden their intercultural knowledge. They are introduced to independent learning methods and familiarize themselves with typical learning situations at German universities. In this class at the B1 level according to CEFR, students consolidate and systematically build further basic grammar points and vocabulary. They expand their proficiency in all four skills.

The course covers the topic of renewable resources, including wind, sun, tides, and biomass as well as their significance for energy supply. At the beginning, the focus lies on the control of a photovoltaic plant. The modeling comprises irradiation and maximum-power-point-tracking. Furthermore, the modeling of wind energy conversion systems is considered. Other topics include battery application, fuel cells, and tidal energy. 

The new twenties of today bear more than a passing resemblance to the Jazz Age that F. Scott Fitzgerald so memorably chronicled. The role of literature itself, on the other hand, has in the meantime changed dramatically. At the centennial of the full arrival of Anglo-American literary Modernism (The WASTELAND and ULYSSES headline the literary milestones published in 1922) this seminar revisits Fitzgerald's oeuvre, guided by the central question: In what way does Fitzgerald, an author tied to a particular era like few others, speak to our own time and predicaments today? The course explores Fitzgerald's life and works in his own context first—against the social and cultural history of the interwar period—and then engage his novels and short fiction through a number of critical lenses and close readings, including Marxist and intersectional approaches (focused on class, race, and gender), ecocriticism, and affect theory, along themes ranging from addiction and celebrity, to masculinity and fascism.

This course considers travelling artists and artworks in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and the way in which people and objects interacted, thus shaping different local cultural contexts and places around Europe. Through the study of iconic travels such as those by Albrecht Durer, Raphael, Lorenzo Lotto, Martin van Heemskerk, El Greco, Sofonisba Anguissola, Federico Zuccari, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Pieter Paul Rubens, as well as the travel of major artworks within Europe, the course addresses the dynamics and forms of cultural encounters, their narratives, and meaning for today’s art history and its methodologies. Visits to the collections of Berlin museums (depending upon pandemic restrictions) allow students to study in depth specific artifacts and to learn how to look closely at works of art.