Humboldt University Berlin

This course offers a study of the norms, textual dimensions, and techniques of English essay writing by critically analyzing selected essays in English and by writing extended essays. The course focuses on cultural, literary, and political themes that relate to Britain. Students work upon and improve their own argumentative, reflective-discursive, and descriptive style of writing, focusing in particular on structural, ideational, and rhetorical appropriacy in different essay types.

Aside from the joy that they offer us, festivals and communal rituals give meaning, rhythm, and identity in community life. This is especially visible in the case of religious communities. This seminar reviews this phenomenon by studying the case of Islamic festivals and rituals in Africa. It studies their historical evolution in the “longue durée” and their impact on the life of today's global modernity.

In recent decades, a growing interest in material cultures and the sociology of space has elevated the status of architecture in sociological discussions. This seminar examines how different architectural forms take part in a range of different social practices. To what extent are they part of social practices, support or suppress them? The course adopts a simple scheme of spatial directions to discuss forms of enclosure (prisons), verticality (skyscrapers), liminality (borders), flows (logistics), etc.

 

As a central paradigm of pictorial representation, the linear perspective in art history is closely linked to mimetic conventions of representation and classical pictorial concepts. Their departure on the path to abstraction and non-objectivity in modern art was often accompanied by a critique of the linear perspective, which questioned the normativity of spatial vision and the postulate of a sovereign subject. However, if one shifts attention from the perspective-constructed image to the processes of perspective construction, perspective proves to be a transformative medium in which indefiniteness and unavailability are already structurally inscribed. The lecture explores the question of how Leonardo's conceptualization of perspective sheds another light on perspective-critical positions of art from modernism to the 1970s. Based on Marcel Duchamp's intensive examination of the perspective literature of the early modern period, it explores the transformative and intermediate potentials which perspective also offered to the critics of mimesis and illusion.

This course teaches students the most important methods to identify and evaluate water usage in agricultural production. Students assess indicators of company usage of water and they study measures to increase water efficiency. Students also learn about irrigation methods and how to assess and evaluate them.

Ranked as one of the most popular German authors and playwrights of the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) became globally known even in life, and his texts, artistic ideas, and experiments have been around ever since. In Berlin, he witnessed the turbulent times of the Weimar Republic before fleeing the National Socialists in 1933, and it was here that he saw the founding of the German Democratic Republic after returning from exile in 1948. The socio-political incidents and developments of these years strongly influenced his life and work, which in turn allow us to relive the history and culture of Germany in general and Berlin in particular. Focusing mainly on Brecht's poetry (i.e. MANUAL OF PIETY, SVENDBORG POEMS, BUCKOW ELEGIES) and stage plays (i.e. THE THREEPENNY OPERA, MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN) while also consulting autobiographical and theoretical writings, the bilingual seminar traces possible connections between art, society, and politics and discusses aspects like artistic purpose and responsibility and political censorship. The course includes a visit to the Berlin Ensemble and Brecht's former residence in midtown (with museum and archive) as well as a theatre performance as part of the course.

This course approaches the history of the institutionalization of the age cohort in a transnational perspective. The age cohort is a grouping form in which bureaucratic guidelines sort students into grades according to their age. The course covers other grouping forms such as denomination and gender, in addition to subject-specific ways of sorting, which group students according to their level of performance. The implications of age grouping are discussed along with the resulting forms of measurement, sorting, and selection which tend to move towards homogenization. The institutionalization process is analyzed in its regional, national, and transnational dimensions, using the United States as an example of an early adopter of the age group. As part of this, different types of sources –primarily statistics and text documents– are taken into account.

The course focuses on the conceptual work that terms like aura and mimesis, totem and animism, taboo and the sacred, have encompassed in the past and in the present. The works of key figures such as Benjamin, Freud, and Adorno, early anthropological texts, and more recent reinterpretations or re-adaptations are all covered in the course. The goal is to gain an overview of the different histories and approaches towards thinking about the power of objects and materials. By doing so, the course also opens up the question of how useful these terms are in thinking about how we relate to the objects and materials around us, whether in museum collections, as consumer items, or as the waste and ruins of capitalist landscapes; and for understanding dynamics of attraction, attachment, and seduction that are central to contemporary political dynamics.

The term “postcolonial” has been a subject of debate since it first entered our critical vocabulary. One of the main challenges to the temporal marker “post,” is that for indigenous peoples living under a settler colonial regime, colonialism is far from over. Recent years have seen a vast increase of scholarly interest in the particular structures and problems of settler colonial societies. This seminar looks at some of the legal narratives that provide a firm basis for settler colonialism and its expansion across the American continent, and how those narratives and the ideologies that sustain them continue to shape the US's own perception of itself and its place in the world. By looking at legal cases as well as other cultural texts such as films, TV shows, genre fiction, and media accounts, students try to discern the specific contours of the US American settler colonial imaginary from the legal justifications of early settlers to the colonial anxieties of twenty-first century sci-fi and dystopian fiction. Special attention is paid to the processes of differentiation that are part and parcel of the settler colonial logic, which include labor exploitation, differential racialization, and the consolidation of heteronormative gender binaries.