American Studies

This course introduces students to the core themes and debates in the history of science and technology in modern America, examining how both shaped and were shaped by broader U.S. political, social, and economic developments and interests. Questions posed include what role did science and technology play in shaping twentieth-century U.S. history, and which major STEM figures and institutions drove this transformation? Topics covered include the rise of Big Science; research in wartime and during the Cold War; the relationship between scientific expertise and the state; science and public health policy; the development of technological hubs such as Silicon Valley; and the rise of environmentalism. Readings include contributions by figures such as Rachel Carson, Richard Feynman, Mae Jemison, Katherine Johnson, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Chien-Shiung Wu, alongside relevant historical scholarship. No prior STEM background is required. The course includes at least one science-focused field trip.

After the publication of the Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, American society came to be understood as a product of evolution. This class focuses on how Darwin's ideas advanced two different views of change that had a tremendous impact on American culture and cultural history. One view, a racial notion of change, presented larger entities, such as species or “human races,” as the driving forces behind societal development. In contrast, a different view located evolutionary change in the lives of individuals. These views had different implications: the racial view reified biological notions of races and emphasized a struggle for existence as a key dynamic of social life. The individual view, on the other hand, drew attention to the dynamics of the human psyche, the importance of (involuntary) memories and subjective perception of the world. In order to study these two dimensions of turn-of-the-century evolutionary thinking, students read texts by Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William James and others.

This course introduces students to U.S. military history and covers the long history from the colonial era up to World War II. Themes the course discusses include: What is military history and what approaches are there to writing military history? Who and what are the subjects of military history? How have the US armed forces evolved in time and how have they shaped the course of events in US history? Why has the US waged wars and how have wars reflected back on US society, popular culture, and the military itself? What happens if one looks at the military through the lenses of race, class, and gender?

The firm plays a central role in contemporary capitalist societies. Firms not only shape economic outcomes, but also concentrate power and produce conflict within society. Understanding the firm, therefore, requires moving beyond a purely economic perspective to examine how firms organize power and authority within broader social and political contexts. The course uses case studies and empirical examples from the United States to assess the applicability of theoretical perspectives. The first block introduces foundational theories of the firm, emphasizing the centrality of the means of production in capitalist societies. The second block focuses on the role of workers and the organization of labor within the firm. This section covers workers’ relations with capital and output, as well as the division of labor and changes in bargaining power. The last block explores multinational corporations as central actors in globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and examines how the expansion of global value chains and accelerating technological change have increased their power and transformed their role in society.

From the intensifying assaults on abortion rights in the United States to the targeting of LGBTQIA+ communities and the racialized policing of bodies, gender and sexuality remain key sites of cultural and political struggle. In the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and amid escalating far-right attacks on healthcare access, trans rights, and gender-affirming care, the lecture series “Gender, Sexuality, Power: Critical Perspectives on the US and Beyond” examines how gendered and sexual norms continue to shape public life. The series brings together researchers from the Free University Berlin and international colleagues whose work advances current debates in Gender, Sexuality, and Queer Studies. Approaching the topic from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, the speakers trace how power has been organized through gender and sexuality, both historically and in the current political moment.

America was an invention, not a discovery. It is as much an idea or an art project as it is a place or a polity. This course investigates the many and fragile meanings of something called “America” in literary history. Students investigate the first contacts between Indigenous peoples and European colonizers in the early modern era, the monopolization of the term “American” by the United States in the nineteenth century, and more modern interrogations of what America might be and what it represents. The course moves through North America, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean as it investigates how empire, colonialism, slavery, transnational dynamics, and cross-cultural transformations among Indigenous, European, and African civilizations impacted the literary and cultural legacies of “America. The course questions how America was invented, and often contested, in literary forms and genres that range from colonial records and natural histories to poems and more contemporary forms. In the many ways of writing about America, what did the place and term come to mean to different people at different times in the past? What was America then, and how does it help us understand what it is today?

This course examines the intricate relationship between two of perhaps the most central concepts in the disciplines of political economy and economic sociology: Capitalism and Democracy. It will explore both the complementarities and conflicts that arise from the interaction of these concepts, tracing the ideational history of both, as well as the ideational history of the relationship between capitalism and democracy. Building on key classical perspectives from economic sociology and political economy, students develop a nuanced understanding of how capitalism and democracy have shaped, challenged, and coexisted throughout history, and explore their relationship to today's major political challenges.