Free University of Berlin

This lecture course begins with several recent historical and cultural assessments of Europe’s relationship to the orient in the early eighteenth century, together with an overview of the ways in which the popular taste for oriental tales was marginalized by the rise of the novel as the quintessential British literary form. Students examine the vogue of chinoiserie and the rise of sentimentalism and the man of feeling, before turning to an examination of works by British Romantic writers who variously imagine, engage with and negotiate cultures, lands and peoples from the East. Through an analysis of Coleridge’s Eastern fables, Percy Shelley’s evocations of the Indian muse, Byron’s oriental romances, Mary Shelley’s depictions of otherness and De Quincey’s encounter with the Malay, students interrogate the extent to which these tales, romances and musings are reflective of open engagement and productive influence, and to what extent they can be seen as attempts to control and subjugate an otherness.

This seminar introduces the methodological and epistemological underpinnings and contributions of ethnography. The class situates this within a critical and expansive overview of anthropology, including tackling crucial issues raised by feminist, postmodern, indigenous, and decolonial scholars on methods, representation, power, and ethics and how these have shaped the ethnographic practice. To further develop participants' understanding of ethnography, guest speakers share their ethnographies, be it in the form of monograph or film, to open a deeper conversation and reflection on ethnographic strategies, the methodological, ethical, affective, and theoretical challenges they faced, and the potentials and limits of ethnography in understanding, navigating, and addressing pressing issues such as racism, sexism, coloniality, and violence.

This colloquium prepares students for writing their bachelor’s thesis by guiding them through research design, literature review, theory development, and academic writing. Students learn to formulate strong research questions, identify research gaps, and structure their projects effectively. Through discussions, workshops, and peer feedback, the course builds essential research and analytical skills for successful independent thesis work.

This course covers the following subjects: representations of numbers and arithmetic error (floating point math), functions and roots, linear and non-linear systems of equations, interpolation and approximative representations of functions, numerical differentiation and integration, ordinary and partial differential equations, eigenvalue problems (wave equations), molecular dynamics simulations (planet systems, Lennard-Jones liquids, molecular chaos), stochastics, Monte-Carlo integration, Monte-Carlo metropolis simulation (lattice spin model), optimization of non-linear problems, steepest descent,  conjugate gradient, simulated annealing (traveling salesman problem), Fourier transforms, spectral analysis (analysis of acoustic signals, audio synthesis), networks, infection models, random walks, reaction-diffusion systems, predator-prey population dynamics, cellular automata (Game of Life), and artificial neural networks.

The class offers an introduction into the modern approaches to causal identification in quantitative political science research. Traditional view implying that quantitative work can establish only correlations, and no causal links, has been challenged recently by new research designs allowing scholars to identify causal effects using quantitative data. This class reviews these methods (such as appropriate strategies of selecting control variables in regressions, matching, instrumental variables, experiments and regression discontinuity design), as well as discuss their application to the practical problems of political science research. It uses specific examples to train students' ability to develop effective research designs.

The aim of this course is to understand why income and wealth inequality varies across space and time by focusing on one of the richest, but also one of the most unequal democracies of our time: The US. While in theory all citizens in a democracy have the same voting power - so one would expect democratic governments to act to keep inequality as low as possible - there are quite significant differences in economic inequality over time and space. Why is this? To answer these questions, the course examines different theories of inequality and different policy areas that affect inequality. It looks at long-term trends in inequality and the structural features of capitalism that tend to push inequality upwards. The course examines the wide range of policies in what is loosely termed the 'welfare state' that tend to mitigate the inequalities generated by market capitalism. Students discuss how demography, gender differences, migration and ethnicity relate to inequality. And they try to understand why elections sometimes produce governments that redistribute income and wealth from rich to poor, and sometimes produce governments that do the opposite. Finally, the course reviews how rising inequality - a clear trend in the rich world since the late 20th century - affects politics and democracy.

This course, comprised of a lecture and discussion section, includes the following topics: 1) Introduction (historical notes, coordinate dependence of Newton‘s equations, systems with constraints); 2) Lagrange equations (systems w/o constraints, non-inertial reference frames, constraints and generalized coordinates, virtual displacements, D’Alembert’s principle, systems w/ constraints); 3) Hamilton‘s principle (variational calculus, derivation of Lagrange equations from Hamilton’s principle, Lagrange multipliers and constraints); 4) Symmetries and conservation laws (cyclic coordinates and canonical momenta, translational and rotational invariance, Noether theorem, translational invariance in time and energy conservation, energy conservation in 1D systems, Galilei invariance and Lagrangian of free particles, relativistic mechanics of free particles, gauge invariance, mechanical similarity); 5) Oscillations (coupled oscillators, driven oscillators, Green function of damped oscillator, parametric resonance, motion in rapidly oscillating fields); 6) Rigid bodies (degrees of freedom, tensor of inertia and kinetic energy, angular momentum, principal axes of tensor of inertia, equations of motion, Euler angles, free symmetric top, heavy symmetric top, fast top).

Since the 1990s the term “new media” has become associated with digital media, but throughout the 20th century it was used to refer to any image technology of recent vintage. Thus, during the 1920s, artists would refer to photography or film as “new media.” This seminar picks up this history at a later point, in the late 1960s, when the “electronic” medium of video became available to visual artists. It traces how video was adopted by European and American artists and, in particular, how the medium was defined in relation to more conventional media, such as painting or sculpture, or in relation to television as a mass medium. Certain unique characteristics of video can be highlighted (e.g. liveness or feedback), however not all artists who used video were concerned with establishing a separate “discipline” of video art. Video was also instrumental to a form of “artivism” during the seventies, which mirrors comparable developments in contemporary art. Today, the terms “film” and “video” tend to be used interchangeably, but this is largely due to the introduction of digital video in the 1990s. The seminar pursues a genealogy of digital art, which originates in the 1960s, and trace it into the present, discussing the role of artistic practice within an “algorithmic culture” and the impact of artificial intelligence on the current status of the image.

Berlin and Warsaw were two central theaters of the Holocaust. While in Berlin the Nazis planned the global murder of the Jews and attempted to transform the city into the capital of Nazi Europe, it was in Warsaw that they created Europe’s biggest ghetto, in which 100,000 Jews died before the first deportations to the Treblinka death camp in July 1942. In this seminar, the course studies and compares how the Jews were persecuted and murdered in Berlin and Warsaw; who helped them, how and why; and how the local population reacted to their persecution. In studying the Holocaust in both cities, students concentrate on the general frameworks for understanding the Holocaust, the plans of the perpetrators, the behavior of the collaborators, and the fate of particular actors, especially survivors, while analyzing their diaries, memoirs, and interviews. In this seminar, students read theoretical texts about the Holocaust and discuss the urban aspect of the genocide, while concentrating on persecution, murder and help. The course includes visits to museums and memorial sites in Berlin.

Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone, published in German in 2015, is a politically charged novel about the situation of African refugees in Berlin. Richard, an older German with a GDR background, gets involved with, and befriends, a number of African refugees at a protest camp on Oranienplatz in Kreuzberg. A former Classics professor who was recently forced into retirement, he empathizes with the refugees, who are not allowed to work under German asylum laws. Richard researches their plight and helps them with administrative and everyday tasks, even giving piano lessons to one of them. After a break-in at Richard’s house, he and his friends question their own prejudices and attempt to learn from the experience. The novel serves as a starting point for the exploration of the political and human rights issues surrounding the situation of African refugees in Berlin. Some additional materials are provided to round out the discussion.