Humboldt University Berlin

How has over 300 years of colonialism left its mark on Britain? Whilst some scholars assert that the British were indifferent to empire – that empire was acquired in a “fit of absence of mind” (JR Seeley) – others point to the many traces of empire left in British society and culture to this day. This course analyses these effects and legacies by focusing on the artefacts of empire. Empire seems to be everywhere across British history: in consumer goods and fashion, the built environment and the domestic interior, advertising, visual media and museums, as well as institutions such as the monarchy and the BBC. But is this culture of empire, or simply a random mix of influences from around the world? To what extent is this material culture mediated by narratives of colonial power and racial superiority? This course considers the conquest of Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries and the onset of slavery in the Caribbean, then looks at the colonization of North America and parts of the Pacific, before moving through the British Raj in India and onto the colonial conquests of Africa and the Middle East, finishing with the end of empire after 1945 and the imperial nostalgia that feeds Brexit. Throughout the course the focus is on cultural objects, their context, and their interpretation.

At the center of this course is film as historical sources. The course presents and applies the methods for analyzing audiovisual sources, and it examines how historical events were depicted. Using the example of the history of National Socialism, students examine both documentaries and feature films with regard to their handling of National Socialism and its (audio) visual legacy.

This is an introductory course to studying screen cultures in their medium specificity by looking at adaptations that make narrative borrowings explicit. Students learn how to diagnostically write about and think with films, which rework popular and literary tales.

This introductory seminar gives a survey of historical change in phonology, morphology/syntax, and the lexicon across the Old, Middle, and (Early/Late) Modern English periods to the present day as well as of current geographical and socio-functional variation in the English language. It thus emphasizes the close relationship between language change and variation. It introduces the concept of the sociolinguistic situation with its various parameters and presents language change and variation as complex processes determined by the interaction of language-internal forces and extralinguistic factors.