Humboldt University Berlin

This course for foreign students is designed to improve students’ language skills and vocabulary. Areas of focus include grammar, conversation, writing exercises, and listening and reading exercises. In addition, excursions are planned to introduce students to German culture. Students work with cultural and historical topics in everyday situations and broaden their intercultural knowledge. They are introduced to independent learning methods and familiarize themselves with typical learning situations at German universities. In this class at the A2/B1 level according to CEFR, students review and learn basic grammar points and are systematically introduced to basic vocabulary, and they also consolidate and systematically build further basic grammar points and vocabulary. All four skills are developed and applied to everyday situations and some study-related situations.

This seminar provides students with an introduction to the study of contemporary Chinese political economy. The early sessions of the course will place China’s economic development in global historical context before examining the characteristics of the Maoist command economy as well as reformers’ approach to marketization after 1978. Later sessions will focus on current issues relating to the state’s efforts to establish a sustainable, equitable and innovative economy. The final sessions examine China’s role in an increasingly turbulent global economy. Working closely with the instructor, students will write a research paper on a topic related to the contemporary Chinese political economy.

Berlin is a multi-cultural city with a diverse cultural life. The seminar presents this transcultural landscape connected to Asia. Starting with the fascination of collectors and travelers to Asia in the Barock period of the 18th century and the establishment of cabinets of curiosities, collections and material culture has lend contemporary relevance to ethnography, art history and anthropology. Asian collections and architecture presented in Berlin are confronted with the very colonial contexts from which substantial parts of them hail, giving contemporary relevance to the history of their origins. As issue today are questions of cultural heritage, cross-cultural methods and opening-up to non-western research, discourses, Arts and Asian communities.

This course provides an overview of the principles regulating the internal structure of complex words, focusing on English and how it compares with other languages. We will learn basic methods of determining this internal structure, and introduce the different strategies that language users may apply in forming new words. In particular, we will discuss processes like derivation, inflection, and compounding, and the rules that govern their application.

In line with notions from the Gender Revolution, gender inequalities within Western societies have narrowed or even reversed in some areas in the last half-century. For instance, women’s overall labor market participation has increased dramatically. Nevertheless, women have maintained primary responsibility for domestic tasks stalling overall progress towards gender equality. In the first half of each session, we synthesize the literature on gender inequalities in the labor market and the family focusing on heterosexual couples and aspects such as the division of labor, occupation, and income. To this end, we also discuss the underlying theoretical explanations and assumptions about such inequalities and the relevance of the country context. The second half of each session takes place in the PC pool. Here we explore gender inequalities using German panel data. We start with a brief introduction to the statistical software and the dataset before exploring gender inequalities descriptively and using regression approaches. Due to the complexity of the substantial topic, we predominantly focus on economic gender inequalities in these applied sessions. No prior knowledge of panel data is assumed, but a general interest in and knowledge of quantitative methods is expected.

In this course, students apply their background in linguistics to the field of machine learning. The course provides an overview of the machine learning sub-field of natural language processing. Students delve into mathematical/computer science aspects of the topic and learn about different types of machine learning, neural networks, how to work with data, and specific implementations to the field of linguistics. Students may complete a final coding project that relates to the field of linguistics. The course also covers philosophical/ethical aspects of the field, and students discuss issues like ChatGPT and its implications on higher education, the job market, and more. Because this course is in the linguistics department, there will be a heavy emphasis on syntax/semantics, and students should have a strong linguistic knowledge.  

This course introduces the students to the behavioral finance view on asset pricing. The first part of the course takes a historical perspective on development of securities markets. The second part discusses the foundations of the efficient markets hypothesis which is the basis for the traditional "rational" view on asset pricing. The third and fourth parts focus on theoretical and empirical challenges facing the efficient markets hypothesis and consider the alternative "behavioral" interpretations of the pricing of securities. The specific topics include noise trading, investor sentiment, limits to arbitrage, overreaction and underreaction to news, excess volatility, return predictability, market boom and busts, institutional trends in market development.

In no other city did the Cold War materialize itself more concretely than in Berlin. Set in the emblematic capital, this course offers students a glimpse of the Cold War, understood as both a stable bipolar system of spheres of influence in the European theater, and a dynamic, largely unstable, environment of power struggle (and resistance) in the so-called 'Third World'. Particularly in the Global South, superpower interference facilitated, exacerbated, and fueled internal conflicts, often leading to bloody proxy wars – which nevertheless allowed local actors to internationalize their greed and grievances. These conflicts might have seemed far away from Berlin – the quintessential 'frontier city' –, but the block confrontation had important consequences here as well. The Cold War’s lingering effects make its study essential to understanding the present. From the perspective of a free and reunited Berlin, students will have the unique opportunity of both studying and experiencing the past under the Iron Curtain, which divided the world, the country, and the city – and made, back then, Humboldt University the scientific center of the GDR, with its extensive networks to the Soviet world, only a mile away from the Berlin Wall.

What are the methodological implications of queer theory? What makes an article or a research project 'queer’ or ‘feminist’? This course provides students with a practical exploration of queer theory and feminist perspectives in research methods. We examine how societal norms and power structures impact research, including research design, data collection methods (such as surveys, interviews, and observations), data analysis techniques, and ethical considerations in research. We explore a range of concepts, such as intersectionality, homonormativity, and anti- and inter-disciplinarity, and discuss how they could shape and inform sociology and research. After covering these key concepts, we focus on ethnographic methods and address the ethics of conducting research with vulnerable groups, including the importance of consent, confidentiality, and reflexivity. Throughout the course, students develop critical thinking skills, engage in discussions and debates, and conduct research tasks under the supervision of the instructor. The course hosts guest speakers who are experienced in gender and sexuality research in Germany.  

Archives do not just preserve the past, they allow for new questions about the present to emerge. They contain remnants of specific places and times, and they are the ground for new relations to spring and new connections to be made. In this seminar, we ask: Why archiving and for whom? How do archives shape societies and constitute knowledge? We will engage with “awkward archives” in Berlin – archives posing problems and causing disquieting frictions. In each of the seminar’s modules, we address a particular modern ideology through a particular Berlin archive, including the following: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Colonial Neighbours Archive of SAVVY Contemporary, Naomi Wilzig Art Collection, Museum of Natural History, a database of German colonial punitive expeditions, and the Hahne-Niehoff Archive of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The seminar focuses on field visits with methodological exercises, which introduce students to diverse ways of doing research that they will build on to articulate their own research outcomes in a multimodal portfolio.