Free University of Berlin

This course regards autotheory, autoethnography, and autofiction as critical methods, modes of inquiry, and forms of representation in anthropological research. Against the background of debates around positionality, students will learn and explore how the self even when intimate, vulnerable and ambivalent can be a public archive; that it offers a rich mode for thinking through our affective embroilments in the world. We will discuss how writing can embrace but also respond to issues of belonging, experiences of class and queerness, racial or gendered difference, de/coloniality and so on. We will read works that call into question the sharp divides between academic and other forms of writing, theory and poetry, ethnography and fiction. The course is designed to be interactive and workshop-oriented. Participants will engage in short writing exercises in class and will be encouraged to draw on their own experiences of life and learning in research.

This course offers a study of terrorism from ancient times to the present. The course examines the changing understanding and definitions of political violence from ancient times to the September 11th attack in 2001. The course reviews research methods and approaches by examining relevant studies of terrorism definitions and concepts. Terrorism is discussed in relation with freedom, human rights, and security.

Scottish folk tales have always been haunted by ghosts, witches or the devil – and these creatures haunt Scottish literature up to this day. One of the most persistent is the Doppelgänger. It has always been fascinating to writers, but it certainly reached a peak in the nineteenth century. In this period of high moral standards and utilitarian business acumen, questions of how to distinguish between good and evil became more and more pertinent to society – and incidents where moral categories collapsed were as much feared as a financial break-down. In this seminar we will start with the most famous pair, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, before looking at their successors in Emma Tennant's Two Women of London and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. We will also trace their history on film.

This seminar introduces students to a series of crucial texts in the development of radical theories of the politics of sexuality. Taking its title from Gayle Rubin's seminal 1984 intervention into the field, this seminar takes seriously her challenge to use the politics of sexuality – pleasures, desires, transformations, and the regulations thereof – as a point of departure from which to reconsider the ways we make and understand our world. Beginning with Rubin’s essay as a guide to our general approach, the seminar will then focus around five main points of departure: firstly, gay liberation and its discontents; secondly, queer challenges to those politics around both infectious disease and gender; thirdly, sexuality in women-of-color feminism; fourthly, queer theory’s move from queer lives as its object of inquiry to a nebulous ‘queering’ as its mode of analysis; and finally, the reintegration of queer theory and materialist analysis. Throughout, we will be attentive to our location in Berlin and to how manifestations of sexual politics in Berlin are similar to and different from those articulated in the canonical texts in the field. Students will leave with a broad sense of the evolution of and relationship between activist and academic debates about sex and sexual politics, and will be able to apply these theoretical insights and approaches to the analysis of a broad variety of research questions in the study of political theories, actors, institutions, and conflicts.

Knowledge seems to matter a great deal to us. We want to know the answers to various questions and are often willing to pay a high price to find out. And in evaluating other people's actions, we often care about what they knew and when they knew it. But why should we care so much about knowledge in particular? Is it important only because true belief is important? And why, for that matter, is true belief important? In this seminar we will examine some of the roles knowledge plays in our lives and evaluate a range of proposals attempting to explain its significance. Readings will be drawn primarily from contemporary analytic philosophy.

Amid political revolutions and widespread social movements, the interwar period in Europe (1918–39) witnessed a dramatic reinvention of the figure of the artist and a broad questioning of the role of art in everyday life. Centered around movements such as Dada, Constructivism, and De Stijl as well as institutions like the Bauhaus and Vkhutemas, these activities engaged directly with technological shifts and industrial production, generating new formats and avenues for artistic production (textiles, photomontage, graphic design, exhibition displays, and more). Surveying this rich field of experimentation, this seminar places special emphasis on the role of women and the productive breakdown of notions of art, craft, and design.

Old English was the language spoken and preserved in written texts up to the mid-eleventh century CE in the regions of the British Isles. It developed from the languages spoken by Germanic peoples coming to Britain from the continental mainland and presents the earliest precursor of Modern English. In this course, we will focus on Old English texts written in verse, exploring their themes, styles, meanings, and the challenges of dealing with a language surviving only in a small number of often unique and damaged manuscripts. Texts we will be reading include heroic poetry, such as Beowulf, elegies, as well as Old English versions of Biblical texts. The focus of our readings will be on the question of how such texts portray concepts of gender, how they construct but also deconstruct gender roles, and how they relate to gender theory in the 21st century. Students will be introduced to the grammar and pronunciation of Old English and will use their knowledge to work with the original texts alongside Modern English translations.

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 B2.2/C1 level according to CEFR, students consolidate their knowledge of grammar and study complex structures and do in-depth study of grammatical structures that are typical of academic writing and its application in text production and reception. The course includes exercises to improve oral and written communication such as doing research, structuring, presenting, and discussing. Writing skills are enhanced through different types of academic texts and handouts. Students critically analyze different types of texts and systematically expand their vocabulary (including abstract vocabulary) and stylistic ways of expression.

Towards the end of postmodernism, and at the dawn of the "internet age," thinkers such as Michel de Certeau and Marc Augé developed a conceptual model to describe the rather vague feeling of arbitrariness and interchangeability of space they experienced in modern cities, the idea that the few remaining identifiable "places" in our contemporary urban environments were mere remnants of earlier, culturally inscribed sites, re-manufactured for commercial (touristic) purposes. The vast remaining areas of the city were "non-places" and urban "filaments" that did not provide a sense of belonging. This freed city dwellers to (artistically or otherwise) misappropriate or re-inscribe objects of the urban fabric. In the early 1990s, the term hypermodernism (or supermodernism) was introduced to provide a framework for these observations in fields ranging from philosophy to anthropology and architecture. We will consider this concept and its more recent iterations with respect to new and planned buildings in Berlin (by international firms such as OMA and Herzog & de Meuron), to places of infrastructure (train stations, airports), shopping centers, so-called POPS (privately owned public spaces) and urban wilderness areas. Course participants will be encouraged to explore the city on their own and "respond" to particular sites through visuals, audio recordings, (creative) texts and other forms of artistic expression

In this bridge class on the A2/B1 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. In addition, students learn to understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, etc. They deal with most situations likely to arise while traveling to an area where German is spoken. Students learn to produce simple connected texts on topics that are familiar or of personal interest. They acquire skills to describe experiences and events, dreams, hopes and ambitions and briefly give reasons and explanations for opinions and plans. Topics are taken from Berlin and German history and culture and also include politics as well as intercultural topics and current events.