American Studies

This course introduces sociology and social science through the study of prominent social problems in the United States. It examines a diverse sample of social problems and analyzes issues of power, inequality, privilege and oppression. Topics include social stratification/inequality, crime and deviance, culture, health, environment, immigration, education, racial/ethnic conflict, gender inequality, and technology work. The course explores America's importance and uniqueness by examining both its problems and solutions to important societal trends.  

This course focuses on important moments and crucial cultural texts and performances from roughly the 1920s through the 1990s and thus aspires to come to terms with the changes and continuities of the last century in U.S. pop-cultural production. The performers, artifacts, or performances the course considers here were often popular and unpopular at the same time – not only, but often, depending on the kind of audiences they spoke to or were discussed by. Consider, for example, the 1990s boyband phenomenon, but also performers like Madonna, who are adored by some, but hated by others. It is thus the question of (un)popularity that serves as a guiding light for the seminar at hand to make sense of U.S. cultural production in the 20th century and across media.

This course educates students on the history, process, and sources of American foreign policy. The course is divided into four sections. The first section focuses on the field of foreign policy analysis as a subfield in International Relations. An overview of the various analytical perspectives on U.S. foreign policy is covered. This first section also considers the importance of examining American foreign policy in today's world. Section two concentrates on the history of U.S. foreign policy, covering such events as the Founding of the United States, World War I, the inter-war years, World War II, the making of a Superpower, the Cold War, the Post-Cold War world, September 11th, and ending with recent world events, such as the Iraq War and the Global War on Terror. Part three examines the politics and the policy-making process of American foreign policy. Topics for discussion in this section include the institutions involved in the policy-making process, such as the President, various bureaucracies like the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the CIA, plus Congress and the Courts. This section also considers the role the American public plays in the process of making U.S. foreign policy. The final part of this course studies the instruments used to implement American Foreign Policy. This section includes a discussion of America's use of open or diplomatic instruments, secret instruments, economic instruments, and also its military instruments. This final section ends with a task that discusses the future of American Foreign Policy. Prerequisites for this course include an introductory international relations or political science course and at least one intermediate-level social science course.

This course reviews and analyzes various aspects of economic inequality. Household heterogeneities related to credit restrictions, indebtedness, or marginal propensities to consume out of different sources of income or wealth are important to explain aggregate consumption behavior. Measures that directly aim to affect inequality at the aggregate level, such as wealth taxes, inheritance taxes etc., are often perceived as detrimental to economic efficiency. The course discusses key concepts of the economics discipline such as economic efficiency and welfare as they often are building blocks for economic advice on policy measures. This course sheds light on the trade-offs and distributional consequences of macroeconomic policies and trains students to explicitly articulate the underlying value assumptions. Students should have introductory knowledge in economics and statistics.

This course is designed to provide a comprehensive description and analysis of contemporary United States of America and help the learners to know better about America's current development and the possible future.

This course takes a closer look at some of the historical developments that have shaped North American literature and culture, and have been shaped by them in turn. The course also addresses the question of how an understanding of history is informed by one's standpoint as well as social hierarchies more generally. Some of the topics the course discusses include the ongoing significance of settler colonialism; slavery and its afterlives; the American Revolution; the constitution of the United States; abolitionism; feminism; U.S. imperialism; the Civil Rights Movement, Indigenous rights movements; the Black Lives Matter movement; and the historical roots of the Trump presidency. The course foregrounds an understanding of ongoing historiographical debates and methods of interpreting primary sources.