Humboldt University Berlin

Berlin is called the most sexually open capital of Europe today. In clubs, bars, workshops and festivals, a broad range and mix of sexual orientations are created in different and also crossing scenes and sex-positive spaces. Homosexual, transgender, tantric, polyamory, sex-positive and BDSM-oriented persons meet and celebrate and create new sexual techniques and lifestyles in so-called sex-positive spaces. The government of Berlin has already recognized the economic dimension of the liberal sexual culture. What does liberal sexual culture exactly mean? What kind of historical roots are important to analyze, e.g. the anonymity of the big city, the homosexual movement and the golden twenties? What was and is avant-garde and when does it turn into commerce? Four sub-items will structure the seminar: Sex-positive spaces, LGBTQI+ and Gender-Fluidity, Kink and Tantra, alternative porn films and literature. Excursions and interviews with experts will be part of the seminar. We will work with texts and films, and students will develop their own research question and project.

This course deals with syntactic change in the history of English (in comparison, in particular, with German and French). Phenomena to be discussed will include the loss of inflectional morphology, the loss of free word order, the change from OV to VO word order, the loss of verb movement and the development of do-support, and the shift from a general verb-second language to a residual verb-second language.

This course examines the rise of humanitarianism as a dominant way in which both powerful and weak actors conceptualize and respond to a range of social problems and processes, such as political conflict, emancipation, poverty, and migration. This is core terrain for anthropology, because the figure of the human lies at the center of humanitarian discourses and forms of action.  In this course we historicize humanitarianism and ethnographically investigate the possibilities and limits of humanitarian frameworks and action as ways of confronting the challenges that face our world.

The course focuses on mapping and listening to acoustic territories in Berlin. It allows academic research for exploring and understanding the city by sensing aural environments. Structured in theory and practice, the central questions of the course are: Which sonic elements can we encounter in navigating historical and contemporary maps? Which methods of research and practices exist in the act of mapping with sound? How can we generate sound maps? From a transdisciplinary approach, the course reflects the city‘s cultural, social, and political dimensions through analyzing and creating maps by listening. It aims to allow students to explore auditory territories, gain strength, and develop knowledge and individual perspective on cultural studies and urban studies. The mapping methods are practice-based on field recordings, soundwalk, and sound diagramming exercises. The academic readings and discussions introduce the student to the field of sound studies.

This course introduces Bachelor students to the evolution of African literary canons from the late 19th to the 21st centuries. Emphasis is laid on acquainting students to central debates that have preoccupied African writers and how these debates have unmasked the complexities of African societies before and at the dawn of colonialization. In exploring the texts, developing basic skills such as reading, interpreting, analyzing, and critiquing novels, short stories, drama, and poetry is a major objective of the seminar. Further, debates regarding the historical and cultural contexts of the literary productions shall be engaged in the course of the seminar. To have a better appreciation of African literatures, texts, and critical discourse from the African Diaspora shall be part of the literary corpus. The course also discusses major theoretical approaches to literature such as, structuralism, narratology, new historicism, and African feminist critical perspectives. The postcolonial theory is, however, a major critical discourse in the seminar.

Berlin’s rich museological landscape lends itself to in-depth exploration of Germany’s difficult heritage: How are the upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries, especially, remembered and represented? This course enables students to get to know a number of Berlin museums focusing on Memory and Post-WWII migration using anthropological methods and to analyze them within larger theoretical frameworks of “self” and “other” constructions.

This class is tailored to student life in Germany. The course introduces students to German language and culture and encourages and prepares them to speak German in everyday situations. Step by step, students increase their command of spoken and written German by practicing their speaking (including pronunciation), listening, reading, and writing skills. Particular attention is paid to vocabulary and grammar. The A1 level is split into two courses, the A1.1 course covers the first half of the level and the A1.2 course covers the second half of the level.