Free University of Berlin

This course introduces students to the core themes and debates in the history of science and technology in modern America, examining how both shaped and were shaped by broader U.S. political, social, and economic developments and interests. Questions posed include what role did science and technology play in shaping twentieth-century U.S. history, and which major STEM figures and institutions drove this transformation? Topics covered include the rise of Big Science; research in wartime and during the Cold War; the relationship between scientific expertise and the state; science and public health policy; the development of technological hubs such as Silicon Valley; and the rise of environmentalism. Readings include contributions by figures such as Rachel Carson, Richard Feynman, Mae Jemison, Katherine Johnson, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Chien-Shiung Wu, alongside relevant historical scholarship. No prior STEM background is required. The course includes at least one science-focused field trip.

This course regards the researcher’s self as a critical resource for ethnographic inquiry, observation and representation in anthropology. Building on queer-feminist debates around participation and positionality and taking The Vulnerable Observer (Ruth Behar, 1996) as a starting point, students are asked to introspectively examine who they are in the world and how that unique location informs the questions they are able to pose and pursue. This includes an understanding of the politics of belonging, experiences of class and queerness, racial or gendered difference, de/coloniality and so on, but equally the ethical and emotional dilemmas posed by their research engagements. Students read works that call into question the sharp divides between academic and other forms of writing, theory and poetry, ethnography and memoir. The course is designed to be interactive and workshop-oriented. Participants engage in short writing exercises in class and are encouraged to draw on their own experiences of life and learning in research.

After the publication of the Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, American society came to be understood as a product of evolution. This class focuses on how Darwin's ideas advanced two different views of change that had a tremendous impact on American culture and cultural history. One view, a racial notion of change, presented larger entities, such as species or “human races,” as the driving forces behind societal development. In contrast, a different view located evolutionary change in the lives of individuals. These views had different implications: the racial view reified biological notions of races and emphasized a struggle for existence as a key dynamic of social life. The individual view, on the other hand, drew attention to the dynamics of the human psyche, the importance of (involuntary) memories and subjective perception of the world. In order to study these two dimensions of turn-of-the-century evolutionary thinking, students read texts by Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William James and others.

This seminar is a close reading of Joseph Raz‘s book, The Morality of Freedom, which has been influential in ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of law, and the philosophy of practical reason. Topics include the following: authority, liberty, autonomy, well-being and value pluralism.

This course introduces students to U.S. military history and covers the long history from the colonial era up to World War II. Themes the course discusses include: What is military history and what approaches are there to writing military history? Who and what are the subjects of military history? How have the US armed forces evolved in time and how have they shaped the course of events in US history? Why has the US waged wars and how have wars reflected back on US society, popular culture, and the military itself? What happens if one looks at the military through the lenses of race, class, and gender?

This course offers an intensive reading experience and lively seminar discussions about Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, published in 1929 and is the best-known big-city novel in the German language, a work of literary modernism frequently compared with James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer (1925). Students explore its literary, cultural, and political content and how the narrative technique of the novel, groundbreaking in its time, is fast-paced and experimental and montage-passages capture a cacophony of urban voices and disembodied discourses (politics, popular culture, advertising) of the so-called Golden Twenties. 

This course addresses the core concerns of power, domination, inequality, class formation, and transnational political economy, while grounding them ethnographically in urban space. Rather than treating these concepts abstractly, students encounter them through detailed case studies of how colonial spatial logics persist in contemporary cities and how urban residents navigate, reproduce, and contest these structures. The course traces connections between colonial urbanism and contemporary urban transformation across the Global South and in Berlin itself. Students develop analytical tools for understanding how political-economic processes materialize in urban form, social practice, and everyday experience.

In this seminar, students produce a program marking the 100th anniversary of the death of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, which is broadcasted as part of the “Buchfunken” series on Uniradio. Working in pairs or individually, participants create their own approximately 5-minute segment on a topic related to Rilke. No prior knowledge of audio production is required; it is taught during the seminar. In the first part of the seminar, students explore the Rilke-related topics they selected at the beginning through presentations and texts; in the second part, they produce their segments. The topics of the segments are open (as long as they relate to Rilke): Students can present and reinterpret a well-known Rilke poem, explore biographical aspects, address Rilke’s themes, such as death, painting, or acrobats, or review a recent book such as Rilke and Fascism by Hans-Peter Kunisch. 

This seminar explores the complex intersections of gender, nationhood, and emancipatory notions in contemporary Iran. The course critically engages with how Iranian women have historically navigated, contested, and redefined the meanings of feminism, resistance, and agency within varying political, religious, and cultural landscapes. Topics include: politics of veiling and unveiling, the role of women in protest and revolution, and the intersections of gender with class, religion, and sexuality. Emphasis is placed on Iranian women as intellectuals, activists, artists, and everyday agents of change.

The seminar focuses on contemporary narratives of migration, border crossings, and cultural encounters in a variety of media (short stories, novels, comics, and films). Discussions include the stories told by the migrants themselves as well as narratives about migrants, about the relationship between home and host country, questions of identity and difference, and the relation between the individual and the community. In many cases, such narratives deal with suffering, loss, and trauma.