Humboldt University Berlin

This course provides an introduction to linguistics. The theoretical focus is on the core areas of the discipline: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Students apply theoretical concepts when analyzing concrete linguistic data, primarily from English, with a focus on North American varieties.

In this course, students investigate how music influences our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Students study foundational methods, concepts, and theories of music psychology and critically debate empirical studies. Students get an overview of the wide range of topics in the subject, and they carry out independent literature research on a music psychological issue, to create experimental designs and to be able to assess experiments.

How do our unconscious biases impact the way we view people within the African Diaspora? This course explores intersectional inequalities of citizenship and the politics of Belonging and how our unconscious biases impact the way we view (Black) Africans and people within the African Diaspora. The relationship between migration, social cohesion, and national German identity has become an increasingly contentious political issue. Historically, the settlement of migrant groups and the formation of minority ethnic groups have changed the socio-cultural, political and economic fabric of receiving societies. The course explores the relationship between racial and ethnocultural diversity. Students are encouraged to the intentional notion of undoing – unlearning and dismantling unjust practices, assumptions, and institutions – as well as persistent action to create and build alternative spaces and ways of knowing, particularly concerning the Black (African) Diaspora. Berlin is used as a case study for themes covered, however, students are encouraged to reflect on their own identities and the expressions of various identities around the city.

The European Renaissance was an age of revolutions: in thought and discourse, politics and government, philosophy and religion, and science and technology. According to an older view of history, these revolutions inaugurated the modern world, thus giving birth to a glorious age of enlightenment and progress. More recently this narrative has been seriously challenged from a variety of standpoints, including from feminist, postcolonial, and global paradigms. The value of Western culture has been deconstructed, the history of “the West” and its place in global history soberly re-evaluated. In 2017 a new study appeared that invites us to revisit the Renaissance and its importance for world history: Bernd Roeck’s DER MORGEN DER WELT. Integrating comparative and counterfactual approaches, it asks what was special about the Renaissance, why it did not happen elsewhere or at another point in time, and what its legacy is today.

Lower intermediate level B1 allows students to progress from the elementary command of language of the basic course level to the independent language use of level B2. Students develop reading, listening, writing and speaking skills in these courses with the purpose of improving the understanding of the lectures, seminars and exercises in their own field of study in Germany. This helps students carry out assignments in their own subject successfully. The B1 level is split into two consecutive courses, the B1.1 course covers the first half of the level and the B1.2 course covers the second half of the level.

This is a hands-on course that invites students to discover and engage with artists who have come to Berlin from abroad. Berlin’s thriving and dynamic arts scene has long drawn theater-makers, writers, actors, poets, musicians, and visual artists from all over the world. This course examines the experience of displacement and dislocation, the challenges of mobility and the demands of integration, but also the positive aspects of finding oneself in a new place and making it one‘s own, establishing a life and finding a community here. In addition to this theory-driven component, students also learn and apply basic journalistic skills as part of a hands-on exploration of the worlds created by these artists from abroad, in Berlin. Finally, students meet and speak with artist guest speakers from a range of fields, in addition to doing a deep dive on the life and work of one artist from abroad, who they profile for their final project.

The Brexit referendum of 2016 was a clash between two types of political representation in Britain: the "people’s will" versus the sovereignty of parliamentary sovereignty. Is this such a new phenomenon? This course explores this tension between the popular control of Parliament and the doctrine of indirect representation by Members of Parliament over the last 200 years British history.