Courses Fall 2020
+ Core Courses
IS101 Plato’s Republic and Its Interlocutors
AY/BA1/Bard1 Core Course
Module: Greek Civilization
Instructors: Ewa Atanassow, Tracy Colony, David Hayes, Hans Stauffacher, Aaron Tugendhaft, Francesco Giusti, Jeffrey Champlin
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 14:00-15:30
Bard College Berlin's core curriculum begins with a semester-long engagement with Plato’s Republic in dialogue with the main works and movements that shaped its cultural and intellectual context. Republic offers a unique point of entry into the epochal literary, philosophical, and political achievements of fifth and fourth century Athens. It depicts, and draws us into, a conversation about ethical, political, aesthetic, religious, epistemic, and literary questions that are fundamental to human life. Rather than offering a series of separate treatises, Republic treats these questions as the subject of a single investigation that transcends disciplinary boundaries as we have come to conceive them. And while it may be said to contain a “social contract” theory, a theory of psychology, a theology, a critique of mimetic art, a theory of education, and a typology of political regimes, it is reducible to none of these. This book, perhaps in a manner unlike any other written before or after, offers an illuminating starting point for any set of inquiries one might wish to pursue today. In the course we shall be particularly attentive to the dialogic character of Plato’s writing and to its exchanges with other authors, works, genres and modes of thought. We read Republic alongside Homer’s Iliad; Aristophanes’ Clouds; selections from Sappho; Hesiod’s Works and Days; selections from Parmenides; the architecture of the Parthenon, Euripides’ Bacchae and Plato’s Apology. Attending to the interlocutors with which Republic is engaged, we will strive to better understand and evaluate its arguments and drama. Reading and discussing the dialogue together, we aim to become informed and engaging interlocutors for Plato and for one another.
Syllabus
IS102 Renaissance Florence
BA2 Core Course
Module: Renaissance Art and Thought
Instructors: Ian Lawson, Geoff Lehman, Katalin Makkai, Laura Scuriatti
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 10:45-12:15
In this course we examine the visual and intellectual culture of Renaissance Florence. A sustained engagement with a number of principal monuments in Florentine painting, sculpture, and architecture provides the basis for a consideration of key values within the development of Renaissance art that also shape, more broadly, the thought, cultural practices, and everyday experiences of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Renaissance could arguably be characterized as an historical period in which the visual arts played the leading role in the culture as a whole. Thus the focus on works of visual art, in a sustained dialogue with literary, philosophical, and political texts of the period, opens upon a consideration of trans-disciplinary problems such as the emergence of new models of subjectivity and objectivity, the relationship between religious and secular experiences, the framing of early modern political thought, and the origins of the scientific method. The course is structured around four principal topics, each a defining value for the visual arts between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries that is also central to the development of Renaissance thought: self-reflexivity, perspective, harmony and grace, humanism. The direct experience, evaluation, and interpretation of individual works of art are a crucial part of the course, and with this in mind there will be several visits to Berlin museums – specifically, the Gemäldegalerie and the Bode Museum, with their extensive Renaissance collections – to encounter works of art firsthand.
Syllabus
IS303 Origins of Political Economy
BA3/4 Core Course
Module: Origins of Political Economy
Instructor: Boris Vormann, Hanan Toukan, Aaron Tugendhaft, Aysuda Kölemen, Irwin Collier
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 9:00-10:30
This course explores the intellectual history of the contemporary disciplines of economics, political science and sociology, by examining the historical origins of the discourse and practice known as “political economy”: the means and processes by which societies and populations provide for their own survival and development. It offers an introduction to the reach and implications of this endeavor, its relationship to questions of law, sovereignty and political representation. It equally addresses changing state-market relationships and normative discourses about the best ways to organize societies. In keeping with its attention to the formative history of modern categories and disciplines of knowledge, the course also addresses the ways in which changes in the (understanding of) political economy have influenced literary texts and cultural exchange. It allows students to understand, draw upon and critique the historical formulation of contemporary problems and concerns such as inequality, the sources and circulation of wealth, and the connection and differentiation between the economic and political spheres.
Syllabus
IS123 Academic Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Module: Senior Core Colloquium
Instructor: James Harker, Simona Torotcoi, Laura López Paniagua
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times:
Groups A, B, C : Mon 9:00-10:30
Groups D, E, F: Mon 10:45-12:15
This seminar is a training in the methods of academic research. Focusing on representative contemporary research in the humanities and the social sciences, it supports students in proceeding with their own individual research projects by focusing on the essential elements of independent scholarly work: the choice of a topic or object of study; the outline of the main components of an article or scholarly paper; finding, gathering, collating and interpreting the sources needed for the project; correct citation, attribution, and bibliographical documentation, and lastly, the effective presentation of the final work in structure and style, as well as peer review and constructive feedback. Including the participation of thesis supervisors and other faculty members, this course meets in fall term and in spring term.
Syllabus (James Harker and Laura Lopez)
Syllabus Group A (Simona Torotcoi)
Syllabus Group D (Simona Torotcoi)
AY/BA1/Bard1 Core Course
Module: Greek Civilization
Instructors: Ewa Atanassow, Tracy Colony, David Hayes, Hans Stauffacher, Aaron Tugendhaft, Francesco Giusti, Jeffrey Champlin
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 14:00-15:30
Bard College Berlin's core curriculum begins with a semester-long engagement with Plato’s Republic in dialogue with the main works and movements that shaped its cultural and intellectual context. Republic offers a unique point of entry into the epochal literary, philosophical, and political achievements of fifth and fourth century Athens. It depicts, and draws us into, a conversation about ethical, political, aesthetic, religious, epistemic, and literary questions that are fundamental to human life. Rather than offering a series of separate treatises, Republic treats these questions as the subject of a single investigation that transcends disciplinary boundaries as we have come to conceive them. And while it may be said to contain a “social contract” theory, a theory of psychology, a theology, a critique of mimetic art, a theory of education, and a typology of political regimes, it is reducible to none of these. This book, perhaps in a manner unlike any other written before or after, offers an illuminating starting point for any set of inquiries one might wish to pursue today. In the course we shall be particularly attentive to the dialogic character of Plato’s writing and to its exchanges with other authors, works, genres and modes of thought. We read Republic alongside Homer’s Iliad; Aristophanes’ Clouds; selections from Sappho; Hesiod’s Works and Days; selections from Parmenides; the architecture of the Parthenon, Euripides’ Bacchae and Plato’s Apology. Attending to the interlocutors with which Republic is engaged, we will strive to better understand and evaluate its arguments and drama. Reading and discussing the dialogue together, we aim to become informed and engaging interlocutors for Plato and for one another.
Syllabus
IS102 Renaissance Florence
BA2 Core Course
Module: Renaissance Art and Thought
Instructors: Ian Lawson, Geoff Lehman, Katalin Makkai, Laura Scuriatti
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 10:45-12:15
In this course we examine the visual and intellectual culture of Renaissance Florence. A sustained engagement with a number of principal monuments in Florentine painting, sculpture, and architecture provides the basis for a consideration of key values within the development of Renaissance art that also shape, more broadly, the thought, cultural practices, and everyday experiences of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Renaissance could arguably be characterized as an historical period in which the visual arts played the leading role in the culture as a whole. Thus the focus on works of visual art, in a sustained dialogue with literary, philosophical, and political texts of the period, opens upon a consideration of trans-disciplinary problems such as the emergence of new models of subjectivity and objectivity, the relationship between religious and secular experiences, the framing of early modern political thought, and the origins of the scientific method. The course is structured around four principal topics, each a defining value for the visual arts between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries that is also central to the development of Renaissance thought: self-reflexivity, perspective, harmony and grace, humanism. The direct experience, evaluation, and interpretation of individual works of art are a crucial part of the course, and with this in mind there will be several visits to Berlin museums – specifically, the Gemäldegalerie and the Bode Museum, with their extensive Renaissance collections – to encounter works of art firsthand.
Syllabus
IS303 Origins of Political Economy
BA3/4 Core Course
Module: Origins of Political Economy
Instructor: Boris Vormann, Hanan Toukan, Aaron Tugendhaft, Aysuda Kölemen, Irwin Collier
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 9:00-10:30
This course explores the intellectual history of the contemporary disciplines of economics, political science and sociology, by examining the historical origins of the discourse and practice known as “political economy”: the means and processes by which societies and populations provide for their own survival and development. It offers an introduction to the reach and implications of this endeavor, its relationship to questions of law, sovereignty and political representation. It equally addresses changing state-market relationships and normative discourses about the best ways to organize societies. In keeping with its attention to the formative history of modern categories and disciplines of knowledge, the course also addresses the ways in which changes in the (understanding of) political economy have influenced literary texts and cultural exchange. It allows students to understand, draw upon and critique the historical formulation of contemporary problems and concerns such as inequality, the sources and circulation of wealth, and the connection and differentiation between the economic and political spheres.
Syllabus
IS123 Academic Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Module: Senior Core Colloquium
Instructor: James Harker, Simona Torotcoi, Laura López Paniagua
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times:
Groups A, B, C : Mon 9:00-10:30
Groups D, E, F: Mon 10:45-12:15
This seminar is a training in the methods of academic research. Focusing on representative contemporary research in the humanities and the social sciences, it supports students in proceeding with their own individual research projects by focusing on the essential elements of independent scholarly work: the choice of a topic or object of study; the outline of the main components of an article or scholarly paper; finding, gathering, collating and interpreting the sources needed for the project; correct citation, attribution, and bibliographical documentation, and lastly, the effective presentation of the final work in structure and style, as well as peer review and constructive feedback. Including the participation of thesis supervisors and other faculty members, this course meets in fall term and in spring term.
Syllabus (James Harker and Laura Lopez)
Syllabus Group A (Simona Torotcoi)
Syllabus Group D (Simona Torotcoi)
+ Art and Aesthetics Foundational Modules
AH218 Facing Germany’s Nazi Past: The Aesthetic Topography of the Third Reich
Module: Art and Artists in Context / Approaching Arts Through Theory
Instructor: Aya Soika
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Thu 15:45-19:00
Attempts to “come to terms” with Germany’s National Socialist past, the Second World War, and the Holocaust, have been at the forefront of the nation’s public discourse – with important contributions from visual artists and architects, often in dialogue with philosophers, writers or historians, many of them striving to find new forms of expression in response to unprecedented events and trauma. To several of these representatives of the post-war generation, one urgent issue was the way in which art had been pressed into the service of propaganda, and how filmmakers, architects, sculptors or painters had furthered the political agenda of the NS-regime. This class examines Nazi cultural politics in the light of post-war responses. As part of our inquiry, we will reflect upon the complex relationship between aesthetics, authenticity, and the historical education of contemporary visitors to Berlin’s defining sites.
Syllabus
FA103 Found Fragments & Layered Lines: mixed-media techniques for drawing and collage
Module: Art Objects and Experience / Artistic Practice
Instructor: John Kleckner
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Fri 14:00-17:15
This is a hands-on studio art course exploring contemporary and historical approaches to drawing and collage. The goal of this course is to develop and enhance each student's skills in visual thinking through the creation of mixed-media drawings and collages of found printed fragments. Students will gather printed materials from Berlin's famous Flohmärkte (flea markets) to use in creating original collages; students will also draw figures & object arrangements, make abstractions from nature by working outdoors, work collaboratively on large-scale drawings, develop their own systematic approach for generating compositions, and experiment with the expressive possibilities of combining text and imagery. A central focus will be exploring the potential to create new and surprising meanings and content resulting from the juxtaposition of found fragments and drawn lines. The semester culminates in the creation of a body of original artwork that will be shown during the “Open Studios” group exhibition. The majority of classes are studio sessions. There will also be a number of group critiques, image presentations, and artist studio / gallery visits. The ideal student will be highly motivated, with a strong interest in studying and producing art, and must be comfortable with presenting their artistic creations with peers in class discussions.
Syllabus
FA106 Beginners Black and White Photography: The Slow Photo
Module: Artistic Practice / Art Objects and Experience
Instructor: April Gertler
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Fri 9:00-12:15
This beginning Black and White photography class, titled The Slow Photo, will focus on learning how to use a manual camera and finding one’s way in an analogue darkroom. Students will be exposed to the rich photographic history of Berlin through presentations, discussions and a historical walk through parts of Berlin. The historical component of the class will cover works by Berlin based photographers from Helga Paris to Michael Schmidt. Assignments throughout the semester will mirror various photo techniques used in the historical examples discussed. Camera techniques and Black and White printing will be the fundamental basis of the class. Students will leave the class understanding the time commitment and concentration it takes to produce Black and White analog images.
Syllabus
AH211 Introduction to Twentieth-Century Art: From Van Gogh’s Starry Night to Jeff Koons’ Made in Heaven
Module: Art and Artists in Context / Art Objects and Experience
Instructor: Laura López Paniagua
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue 9:00-12:15
Around 1890, Vincent van Gogh painted his popular Starry Night (1890) and Bedroom in Arles (1888). A century later, Damien Hirst encased a shark in formaldehyde and displayed it as an artwork titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). In the same decade, Tracey Emin won the prestigious Turner Prize showing her own dirty bed (My Bed, 1998) and Jeff Koons produced sculptures and prints portraying himself and his then-wife, the former porn actress Ilona Staller (also known as Cicciolina), engaged in erotic acts in the series Made in Heaven (1989-1991). What happened in one century to transform art so radically? This course will examine the political and technological transformations—catastrophic, neutral, or beneficial—that precipitated alterations in views of representation and of the status of art itself. In our survey, we see the value of figurative realism interrogated and undermined by a myriad of different approaches. Dadaism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Viennese Actionism, Minimalism, Conceptual Art and the relation of each to contextual pressures will all be addressed in our question concerning the fate of art in the twentieth century.
This course is designed to accommodate remote learners.
Syllabus
MU124 Music for Masochists: Five centuries of “difficult listening” in Western Classical Music
Module: Art and Artists in Context / Art Objects and Experience
Instructor: Paul Festa
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon 15:45-19:00; plus weekly listening Mon 20:00-21:30
What makes music difficult to listen to? This course examines pieces of music notorious for their difficulty alongside contemporaneous works of music, literature, and the visual arts in an attempt to identify how music challenges us and what is pleasurable—or not—about the difficulty, and how the notion of a work’s difficulty changes over time. Methods under consideration include counterpoint, serialism, minimalism, microtonalism, and chance operations; works include Bach’s Art of the Fugue, Beethoven’s Great Fugue, Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso, Webern’s miniatures, Ligeti’s Grand Macabre, Messiaen’s dreaded Organ Book, and anything by Xenakis; texts include Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Possible field trips include a pilgrimage to Halberstadt, where Cage’s Organ²/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible) is currently in performance and scheduled to conclude in 2640. No prior musical training or knowledge required, only a certain gluttony for punishment.
The following course is cross-listed with Literature and Rhetoric:
Syllabus
TH180 Rethinking “Regie”: An Introduction to Directing
Module: Artistic Practice /Art Objects and Experience / Approaching Arts Through Theory
Instructor: Julia Hart
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Thu 15:45-19:00
This course will introduce students to the basics of directing theatre in the context of the contemporary German theater. In this exploration of theatre directing, students will first study the history of the role of the theatre director in Germany and discuss the various definitions of the controversial term Regietheater or “director’s theater.” How has the role of the director in Germany changed over time and what does directing look like in Germany today? Students will be then introduced to basic directing techniques in class and learn exercises for staging text-based material. What are the steps a director in Germany typically goes through when directing a play? What are different ways of developing a conceptual approach to a piece and how can this affect your work with actors? In addition to rehearsing scenes in class, students will attend several theater performances and analyze the staging of German directors currently working in Berlin.
Syllabus
Module: Art and Artists in Context / Approaching Arts Through Theory
Instructor: Aya Soika
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Thu 15:45-19:00
Attempts to “come to terms” with Germany’s National Socialist past, the Second World War, and the Holocaust, have been at the forefront of the nation’s public discourse – with important contributions from visual artists and architects, often in dialogue with philosophers, writers or historians, many of them striving to find new forms of expression in response to unprecedented events and trauma. To several of these representatives of the post-war generation, one urgent issue was the way in which art had been pressed into the service of propaganda, and how filmmakers, architects, sculptors or painters had furthered the political agenda of the NS-regime. This class examines Nazi cultural politics in the light of post-war responses. As part of our inquiry, we will reflect upon the complex relationship between aesthetics, authenticity, and the historical education of contemporary visitors to Berlin’s defining sites.
Syllabus
FA103 Found Fragments & Layered Lines: mixed-media techniques for drawing and collage
Module: Art Objects and Experience / Artistic Practice
Instructor: John Kleckner
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Fri 14:00-17:15
This is a hands-on studio art course exploring contemporary and historical approaches to drawing and collage. The goal of this course is to develop and enhance each student's skills in visual thinking through the creation of mixed-media drawings and collages of found printed fragments. Students will gather printed materials from Berlin's famous Flohmärkte (flea markets) to use in creating original collages; students will also draw figures & object arrangements, make abstractions from nature by working outdoors, work collaboratively on large-scale drawings, develop their own systematic approach for generating compositions, and experiment with the expressive possibilities of combining text and imagery. A central focus will be exploring the potential to create new and surprising meanings and content resulting from the juxtaposition of found fragments and drawn lines. The semester culminates in the creation of a body of original artwork that will be shown during the “Open Studios” group exhibition. The majority of classes are studio sessions. There will also be a number of group critiques, image presentations, and artist studio / gallery visits. The ideal student will be highly motivated, with a strong interest in studying and producing art, and must be comfortable with presenting their artistic creations with peers in class discussions.
Syllabus
FA106 Beginners Black and White Photography: The Slow Photo
Module: Artistic Practice / Art Objects and Experience
Instructor: April Gertler
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Fri 9:00-12:15
This beginning Black and White photography class, titled The Slow Photo, will focus on learning how to use a manual camera and finding one’s way in an analogue darkroom. Students will be exposed to the rich photographic history of Berlin through presentations, discussions and a historical walk through parts of Berlin. The historical component of the class will cover works by Berlin based photographers from Helga Paris to Michael Schmidt. Assignments throughout the semester will mirror various photo techniques used in the historical examples discussed. Camera techniques and Black and White printing will be the fundamental basis of the class. Students will leave the class understanding the time commitment and concentration it takes to produce Black and White analog images.
Syllabus
AH211 Introduction to Twentieth-Century Art: From Van Gogh’s Starry Night to Jeff Koons’ Made in Heaven
Module: Art and Artists in Context / Art Objects and Experience
Instructor: Laura López Paniagua
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue 9:00-12:15
Around 1890, Vincent van Gogh painted his popular Starry Night (1890) and Bedroom in Arles (1888). A century later, Damien Hirst encased a shark in formaldehyde and displayed it as an artwork titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). In the same decade, Tracey Emin won the prestigious Turner Prize showing her own dirty bed (My Bed, 1998) and Jeff Koons produced sculptures and prints portraying himself and his then-wife, the former porn actress Ilona Staller (also known as Cicciolina), engaged in erotic acts in the series Made in Heaven (1989-1991). What happened in one century to transform art so radically? This course will examine the political and technological transformations—catastrophic, neutral, or beneficial—that precipitated alterations in views of representation and of the status of art itself. In our survey, we see the value of figurative realism interrogated and undermined by a myriad of different approaches. Dadaism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Viennese Actionism, Minimalism, Conceptual Art and the relation of each to contextual pressures will all be addressed in our question concerning the fate of art in the twentieth century.
This course is designed to accommodate remote learners.
Syllabus
MU124 Music for Masochists: Five centuries of “difficult listening” in Western Classical Music
Module: Art and Artists in Context / Art Objects and Experience
Instructor: Paul Festa
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon 15:45-19:00; plus weekly listening Mon 20:00-21:30
What makes music difficult to listen to? This course examines pieces of music notorious for their difficulty alongside contemporaneous works of music, literature, and the visual arts in an attempt to identify how music challenges us and what is pleasurable—or not—about the difficulty, and how the notion of a work’s difficulty changes over time. Methods under consideration include counterpoint, serialism, minimalism, microtonalism, and chance operations; works include Bach’s Art of the Fugue, Beethoven’s Great Fugue, Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso, Webern’s miniatures, Ligeti’s Grand Macabre, Messiaen’s dreaded Organ Book, and anything by Xenakis; texts include Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Possible field trips include a pilgrimage to Halberstadt, where Cage’s Organ²/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible) is currently in performance and scheduled to conclude in 2640. No prior musical training or knowledge required, only a certain gluttony for punishment.
The following course is cross-listed with Literature and Rhetoric:
Syllabus
TH180 Rethinking “Regie”: An Introduction to Directing
Module: Artistic Practice /Art Objects and Experience / Approaching Arts Through Theory
Instructor: Julia Hart
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Thu 15:45-19:00
This course will introduce students to the basics of directing theatre in the context of the contemporary German theater. In this exploration of theatre directing, students will first study the history of the role of the theatre director in Germany and discuss the various definitions of the controversial term Regietheater or “director’s theater.” How has the role of the director in Germany changed over time and what does directing look like in Germany today? Students will be then introduced to basic directing techniques in class and learn exercises for staging text-based material. What are the steps a director in Germany typically goes through when directing a play? What are different ways of developing a conceptual approach to a piece and how can this affect your work with actors? In addition to rehearsing scenes in class, students will attend several theater performances and analyze the staging of German directors currently working in Berlin.
Syllabus
+ Economics Foundational Modules
EC110 Principles of Economics (Group A)
Module: Principles of Economics
Instructor: Marcus Giamattei
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 15:45-17:15
This course is an introduction to the essential ideas of economic analysis. It elaborates the basic model of consumer and firm behavior, including demand and supply, in the context of an idealized competitive market, and examines several ways in which the real world deviates from this model, including monopoly, minimum wages and other price controls, taxes, and government regulation. The assumptions concerning human behavior that underlie economics are presented and critiqued. The course is also concerned with the aggregate behavior of modern economies: growth and measurement of the economy, unemployment, interest rates, inflation, government spending and its impact, and international trade. Part of the course focuses on the government tools used to influence economic growth and individuals' behavior.
This course section is designed to accommodate remote learners.
Syllabus
EC110 Principles of Economics (Group B)
Module: Principles of Economics
Instructor: Martin Binder
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 15:45-17:15
This course is an introduction to the essential ideas of economic analysis. It elaborates the basic model of consumer and firm behavior, including demand and supply, in the context of an idealized competitive market, and examines several ways in which the real world deviates from this model, including monopoly, minimum wages and other price controls, taxes, and government regulation. The assumptions concerning human behavior that underlie economics are presented and critiqued. The course is also concerned with the aggregate behavior of modern economies: growth and measurement of the economy, unemployment, interest rates, inflation, government spending and its impact, and international trade. Part of the course focuses on the government tools used to influence economic growth and individuals' behavior.
Syllabus
MA120 Mathematics for Economics
Module: Mathematics for Economics
This course fulfills the mathematics and science requirement for humanities students
Instructor: Marcus Giamattei
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 10:45-12:15
This course focuses on the mathematical tools important for the study of economics: analytic geometry, functions of a single variable, functions of two variables, calculus, integrals and linear algebra (matrices, determinants, systems of linear equations and methods for solving them). A large part of the course will deal with optimization in one or more variables and its corresponding applications in economics (e.g. utility and profit maximization problems). The course will also be of interest for any student with a general interest in mathematics, or who does not intend advanced specialization in economics, but wishes to become informed regarding the essential mathematical building blocks of economics as a discipline.
This course is designed to accommodate remote learners.
Syllabus
EC210 Microeconomics for Social Sciences
Module: Microeconomics
Instructor: Israel Waichman
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 9:00-10:30
Microeconomics is the study of how individual economic units (households and firms) interact to determine outcomes (allocation of goods and services) in a market setting. This course further develops principles and analytical methods introduced by the Principles of Economics course. The first part of the course deals with consumer behavior, market demand and the extent to which a consumer’s decisions can be modeled as rational. The second part of the course deals with the theory of the firm and the positive and normative characteristics of alternative market structures—perfect competition, monopolistic competition, oligopoly, pure monopoly, and, in resource markets, monopsony—are studied in depth. Finally, the efficiency of market outcomes is studied as well as conditions (e.g. the presence of externalities) under which markets are not efficient. Part of the course is devoted to problem solving, in which students present solutions to specific case studies.
Syllabus
Module: Principles of Economics
Instructor: Marcus Giamattei
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 15:45-17:15
This course is an introduction to the essential ideas of economic analysis. It elaborates the basic model of consumer and firm behavior, including demand and supply, in the context of an idealized competitive market, and examines several ways in which the real world deviates from this model, including monopoly, minimum wages and other price controls, taxes, and government regulation. The assumptions concerning human behavior that underlie economics are presented and critiqued. The course is also concerned with the aggregate behavior of modern economies: growth and measurement of the economy, unemployment, interest rates, inflation, government spending and its impact, and international trade. Part of the course focuses on the government tools used to influence economic growth and individuals' behavior.
This course section is designed to accommodate remote learners.
Syllabus
EC110 Principles of Economics (Group B)
Module: Principles of Economics
Instructor: Martin Binder
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 15:45-17:15
This course is an introduction to the essential ideas of economic analysis. It elaborates the basic model of consumer and firm behavior, including demand and supply, in the context of an idealized competitive market, and examines several ways in which the real world deviates from this model, including monopoly, minimum wages and other price controls, taxes, and government regulation. The assumptions concerning human behavior that underlie economics are presented and critiqued. The course is also concerned with the aggregate behavior of modern economies: growth and measurement of the economy, unemployment, interest rates, inflation, government spending and its impact, and international trade. Part of the course focuses on the government tools used to influence economic growth and individuals' behavior.
Syllabus
MA120 Mathematics for Economics
Module: Mathematics for Economics
This course fulfills the mathematics and science requirement for humanities students
Instructor: Marcus Giamattei
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 10:45-12:15
This course focuses on the mathematical tools important for the study of economics: analytic geometry, functions of a single variable, functions of two variables, calculus, integrals and linear algebra (matrices, determinants, systems of linear equations and methods for solving them). A large part of the course will deal with optimization in one or more variables and its corresponding applications in economics (e.g. utility and profit maximization problems). The course will also be of interest for any student with a general interest in mathematics, or who does not intend advanced specialization in economics, but wishes to become informed regarding the essential mathematical building blocks of economics as a discipline.
This course is designed to accommodate remote learners.
Syllabus
EC210 Microeconomics for Social Sciences
Module: Microeconomics
Instructor: Israel Waichman
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 9:00-10:30
Microeconomics is the study of how individual economic units (households and firms) interact to determine outcomes (allocation of goods and services) in a market setting. This course further develops principles and analytical methods introduced by the Principles of Economics course. The first part of the course deals with consumer behavior, market demand and the extent to which a consumer’s decisions can be modeled as rational. The second part of the course deals with the theory of the firm and the positive and normative characteristics of alternative market structures—perfect competition, monopolistic competition, oligopoly, pure monopoly, and, in resource markets, monopsony—are studied in depth. Finally, the efficiency of market outcomes is studied as well as conditions (e.g. the presence of externalities) under which markets are not efficient. Part of the course is devoted to problem solving, in which students present solutions to specific case studies.
Syllabus
+ Ethics and Politics Foundational Modules
HI109 Global History Lab: A History of the World since 1300
Module: Methods in Social and Historical Studies
Instructor: Marion Detjen (coordination and team meetings), Amna Qayyum (Teacher Assistant), and Jeremy Adelman (Princeton University)
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon 15:45-17:15 & Tue 15:45-17:15
Please note that the Tuesday session at 15:45-17:15 is held as an online town hall together with students at Princeton University. Please read course description for more information.
This course is part of a longer term effort, by Princeton University's "Global History Lab", to work towards an integrated, encompassing, and multi-faceted history of the world. It gives you a thorough overview over global historical developments from Chinggis Khan’s armies conquering China and Baghdad in the thirteenth century until today. In addition it provides tools and techniques to situate any historical event, place or person in broader, globally relevant narratives, and to eventually be able to tell your own stories in broader contexts. You will explore models and concepts for explaining the cycles of world integration and disintegration, like the rise and fall of empires and the role of free trade, religious conversion and global governance. Do earlier modes of globalization help us to understand our own age? What explains European global expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? How can one explain the staggering wealth of China in the centuries up to 1750, as well as China’s recent ascent? How have world wars and revolutions shaped the international system over time? What role have diseases and pandemics played? The aim of this course is to understand some of the vital forces that pull the parts together as well as those that drive them apart. The course has three components: 1) The lectures by Princeton Professor Jeremy Adelman are online, to be watched asynchronously. They provide the overview, they ask questions and give explanations. 2) The town halls are also online but synchronous: a Teaching Assistant from Princeton will go together with you through important historical events, places and people, and practice with you the narrative mapping techniques to connect them to each other and to the over-arching histories. 3) The team meetings are small, taught by Marion Detjen on campus, and will tackle original sources, focussed on the theme of statehood and statelessness. You will collaboratively work on case studies and discuss them in relation to other case studies, done by other classes from other universities around the world, on a common platform at Princeton University. There will also be time to reflect on the methodological chances and challenges of doing global or world history. The students who successfully graduate from this course will be able to enroll in Global History Lab's successive course, „History in Dialogue“, taught by Princeton University faculty in Spring Semester 2021.
Syllabus
SO104 Methods in Social Studies
Module: Methods in Social and Historical Studies
Instructor: Simona Torotcoi
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 15:45-17:15
The main focus of the course is to familiarize students with basic concepts in research design (i.e., variables, literature review, research questions, case selection, analysis, recommendations) and to equip them with the necessary techniques and skills to use research design tools and methods, and to conduct research individually. The second aim is to help students express and articulate the main argument/idea from an academic article and to critically evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of existing research designs and methodology in social sciences research, as well as assess results from general scientific research.
The course will start by introducing different types of research and research methodology, followed by a general overview of the main components of a research proposal/ outline. We will then delve into each of these components, including: how we select a research topic and how we formulate a research question, how to conduct a literature review, the role of theory and analytical frameworks, differences and specificities of different quantitative and qualitative research designs, reflect on how to analyze data, and how to present and disseminate research findings.
The materials used for this course combine academic and non-academic sources (i.e., reports from international organizations) which exemplify or relate to the topic discussed in class. In parallel with the course development students will work on a research paper based on a topic of their interests (within the field of social sciences), and are encouraged (on a voluntary basis) to submit assignments for consultation with the instructor. In order to ensure students are advancing with their research, several deadlines will be set throughout the semester for small assignments (graded) on the different sections of the research paper. With students’ agreement a public presentation of their research projects can take place within the campus, with peer students as discussants of their papers.
Syllabus
SO105 Researching Social Life
Module: Methods in Social and Historical Studies
Instructor: Joshua Paul
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue 15:45-19:00
This module aims to introduce students to the methods that social researchers have developed to analyse their societies and to produce knowledge to richly describe and explain the social world. Students will develop core skills in methods of research through an introduction to the different theories undergirding those methods and more crucially through their practical use in research exercises. The methods explored (i.e. participant observation and interviewing) are introduced in relation to key topics and research traditions that are closely identified with them, thus allowing students to confront methods as real practices rather than abstractions. Among other topics and activities, students will hone their sociological imaginations with regular entries in their field notebooks, explore through readings and discussions the complex ethical entanglements of doing research, be assisted with formulating meaningful research questions and developing coherent research designs. Ultimately, the course aims to develop skills in the critical evaluation of qualitative research, to equip students with practical methods experience and inculcate a critical imagination for how knowledge is produced. Taken collectively, this skill set will enable the students to robustly engage with social research methods and methodologies in their final year dissertations.
This course is designed to accommodate remote learners.
Syllabus
The following courses are cross-listed with Politics
PT141 Theories of Justice
Module: History of Political Thought
Instructor: Hans Stauffacher
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 17:30-19:00
Questions of justice have always occupied center stage in ethical, political, social, and legal theory. And they have always been crucial for our everyday lives: More often than not the question of whether it is right or wrong to do something seems to boil down to a question of justice. This course, therefore, aims at being both, an introduction to political and social philosophy and a discussion of the questions of justice we face in our own political, social, and personal lives. Reading seminal theories of justice from Aristotle to the 20th Century we will encounter different approaches to justice like eudaimonism, utilitarianism, contractualism, and egalitarianism, and discuss core concepts and distinctions like distributive and corrective justice, conservative and ideal justice, substantive and procedural justice, comparative and non-comparative justice. We will discuss all the texts in two different ways: In a first step, we will attempt to understand them in their historical and systematical specificity. And in a second step, we will confront them with problems of justice from our own lives and ask whether, how, and to what extent these historical positions are applicable to the questions of justice we face today.
Syllabus
HI126 Discovering, Inventing, and Making India: On the Historiography of the Subcontinent
Module: Methods in Social and Historical Studies
Instructor: Till Luge
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 9:00-10:30
This course will offer a critical introduction to the major approaches to understanding Indian culture(s) and history. To this end, historiographical narratives of the subcontinent from the early modern period onwards will be examined within the contexts of their production. Critical examinations of European colonialist and romanticist historiography and Indian anticolonial and nationalist history writing will help us gain an understanding of history as continually produced and contested. "India" can be very different things at once: a cradle of otherness as imagined by romantic Western Indologists, a vast and populous land to be tamed by colonialist administrators, a lost culture bemoaned by Indian writers, or a nation to be (re)created by independence fighters and communalists.
Syllabus
PL120 Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
Module: Ethics and Moral Philosophy
Instructor: David Hayes
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed17:30-19:00
How should a person live? Instead of applying universal principles of reason (deontology) or maximizing benefit (consequentialism), Aristotle argues that we should strive to become persons who possess numerous social, political, and intellectual virtues. The Nicomachean Ethics is an account of what these virtues are, how to acquire them, and why they lead to happy lives. While this class is a close reading of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in its entirety, supplementary material from psychoanalytic theory, literature, painting, and film will be offered in order to see what it would be like to fill in what Aristotle suggests can only be given “in outline.” Additionally, we will consider a contemporary philosophic challenge (John Doris) to the viability of any virtue-ethical project.
Syllabus
PL105 Introduction to Ethics
Module: Ethics and Moral Philosophy
Instructor: Thomas Hilgers
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 US credits
Course Times: Thu 15:45-19:00
What does it mean to lead a good life? What makes a person – or rather her character – good or bad? What makes a particular action good or bad? Can we universally determine what to do in general, and what not to do in general? Is it, for instance, always wrong for a person to kill, to steal, or to lie – and if so, how could we justify such universal rules or laws? What is the nature of evil? What is the nature of morality? These are some of the most fundamental questions asked in the philosophical field of enquiry called “ethics.” In this course, we will address all of these questions by studying and discussing some of the most influential texts within the history of Western philosophy and some more contemporary texts. More precisely, we will read and discuss texts by Aristotle, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Philippa Foot, John Rawls, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, Cora Diamond, and Jorge L. A. Garcia.
Syllabus
SC203 Bioethics and Biosciences
Module: Ethics and Moral Philosophy
Instructor: Ian Lawson
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 17:00-19:00 & Thu 15:45-17:15
This course fulfills the mathematics and science requirement for humanities students.
Traditional ethics considers the question of the good life. This course asks what life itself is. And how is its end, death, defined? What about the qualities of life: what are health, disability, gender or addiction? What distinguishes human from animal or plant life? We will concentrate on the practical ethical aspects of these questions raised by technologies such as genetic manipulation and practices such as factory farming, informed by contemporary ideas in the biological sciences. An underlying concern is the ways in which scientific theories and technologies do or should inform our behaviour. Conversely, we will explore the extent to which scientific theories of the nature of morality itself can (or should) do the same. Readings will not focus on traditional ethical theory but rather be drawn from bio- and medical ethics, cognitive psychology, the sociology of science and technology, and posthumanist discourse to create an eclectic syllabus based around four main topics: the moral sense, health, animals, and the law.
Syllabus
PS179 Postcolonial Politics: The Middle East and Beyond
Module: Political Systems and Structures
Instructor: Hanan Toukan
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 10:45-12:15
While postcolonial scholars have had enduring impact on disciplines such as anthropology, history, art history and comparative literature, their influence on the study of the political systems and political thought from and about the “Global South,” or the non-western world, has been less impactful. This opposition to postcolonialism as a theoretical and conceptual lens in the study of Comparative Politics is related to the endurance of Eurocentric perspectives on the Global South and the impact of their colonial histories. Dominant theories of democracy, revolutions, displacement, humanitarianism and civil wars, for instance, continue to be trapped in orientalist frameworks of analysis. Against this backdrop, this course has two central aims. The first is to encourage students to question the epistemological foundations of the study of postcolonial societies and politics so they learn to critically question the context in which the scholarly body of knowledge about non-western history, politics and society has been constructed and produced. The second aim of the course is to contextualize such theories by focusing on the region known as the “Middle East” with some cross-reference to various countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America in order to uncover the relationship between the political and the postcolonial. The course will run thematically and cover topics such as colonialism and decolonization, the authoritarian state, nationalism(s), the politics of gender and sexuality, the politics of culture, military states, development and humanitarian aid, oil, the “global war on terror”, wars, displacement and revolutions.
This course is designed to accommodate remote learners.
Syllabus
IN110 Globalization and International Relations
Module: Political Systems and Structures
Instructor: Boris Vormann
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 17:30-19:00
In the social sciences, globalization is often defined as an increase in the mobility of various factors and actors. This definition includes heightened flows of finance capital, the rise of global production networks in expanding divisions of labor as well as the movement of people and ideas. This course uses standard international relations theories as a starting point to examine how growing networks of exchange and circulation have altered political calculation, economic geographies, and governmental arrangements. A particular focus will be placed on the political processes that have facilitated and increased mobility over time, from the emergence of the interstate system in the late nineteenth century, to the globalization of trade and interdependence in our own historical moment. We will explore new actor constellations and shifting power arrangements in more detail with regards to transnational environmental issues, asymmetric warfare, and humanitarian interventions. In so doing, we consider the ways in which the phenomena and levels of globalization challenge the traditional paradigms of the social sciences and prompt a new formulation of the field of international relations.
Syllabus
PS185 Introduction to Policy Analysis
Module: Political Systems and Structures
Coordinator: Betsy Leimbigler
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 17:30-19:00
This course will introduce students to the definition of policy problems, the identification of alternative solutions to these, and the criteria governing the choice between these alternatives. Students are exposed to the various sources of evidence upon which assessment of alternatives is carried out as well as to the basis for considering policy impact. Through case studies, presentations and reviews of professionally-conducted policy analyses, students will receive a first-hand exposure to both the basic steps of this undertaking, and will have an opportunity to critique real-world policy decisions. Cases for analysis will include public health policies and social policies relating to housing and community development. The course will involve both individual and team work. Key outcomes will include an introductory knowledge of various forms of policy analysis, an ability to engage with policy problems and to decide on the best policy solution.
Syllabus
PT150 Global Citizenship
Module: Political Systems and Structures
Instructor: Ramona Mosse
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon 14:00-17:15
Citizenship is traditionally a concept associated with nation-states, and at base signifies the status of belonging to a bounded political order and the rights and duties this entails. Yet economic, legal and technological globalization increasingly calls state boundaries into question, and borderless problems such as climate change, forced migration, epidemics, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism require collective action on an equally global scale. In this context, global citizenship has been promoted as a sensibility and indeed as an emerging reality. This course explores the notion of “global citizenship” from the philosophical, cultural, and political perspectives and challenges students to think critically about what global citizenship can and should mean. We will explore the history of this concept, with its roots in ancient philosophy as well as in modern definitions of national borders and processes of globalization; critiques of it; and contemporary experiences and movements through which it might be forged. The heart of the course will be in an interdisciplinary exploration of two of the borderless problems already noted above—climate change and forced migration—through readings and discussion of novels, film, social theory, social scientific research, and policy documents from international institutions like the UN. Texts may include essays by Kant, Martha Nussbaum and Craig Calhoun, Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun, Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior and Michael Winterbottom's In This World. An important part of the course will be exchange between students enrolling in this course in different locations across the Bard network (USA, Russia, Lithuania, Palestine, Kyrgyzstan).
Syllabus
Module: Methods in Social and Historical Studies
Instructor: Marion Detjen (coordination and team meetings), Amna Qayyum (Teacher Assistant), and Jeremy Adelman (Princeton University)
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon 15:45-17:15 & Tue 15:45-17:15
Please note that the Tuesday session at 15:45-17:15 is held as an online town hall together with students at Princeton University. Please read course description for more information.
This course is part of a longer term effort, by Princeton University's "Global History Lab", to work towards an integrated, encompassing, and multi-faceted history of the world. It gives you a thorough overview over global historical developments from Chinggis Khan’s armies conquering China and Baghdad in the thirteenth century until today. In addition it provides tools and techniques to situate any historical event, place or person in broader, globally relevant narratives, and to eventually be able to tell your own stories in broader contexts. You will explore models and concepts for explaining the cycles of world integration and disintegration, like the rise and fall of empires and the role of free trade, religious conversion and global governance. Do earlier modes of globalization help us to understand our own age? What explains European global expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? How can one explain the staggering wealth of China in the centuries up to 1750, as well as China’s recent ascent? How have world wars and revolutions shaped the international system over time? What role have diseases and pandemics played? The aim of this course is to understand some of the vital forces that pull the parts together as well as those that drive them apart. The course has three components: 1) The lectures by Princeton Professor Jeremy Adelman are online, to be watched asynchronously. They provide the overview, they ask questions and give explanations. 2) The town halls are also online but synchronous: a Teaching Assistant from Princeton will go together with you through important historical events, places and people, and practice with you the narrative mapping techniques to connect them to each other and to the over-arching histories. 3) The team meetings are small, taught by Marion Detjen on campus, and will tackle original sources, focussed on the theme of statehood and statelessness. You will collaboratively work on case studies and discuss them in relation to other case studies, done by other classes from other universities around the world, on a common platform at Princeton University. There will also be time to reflect on the methodological chances and challenges of doing global or world history. The students who successfully graduate from this course will be able to enroll in Global History Lab's successive course, „History in Dialogue“, taught by Princeton University faculty in Spring Semester 2021.
Syllabus
SO104 Methods in Social Studies
Module: Methods in Social and Historical Studies
Instructor: Simona Torotcoi
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 15:45-17:15
The main focus of the course is to familiarize students with basic concepts in research design (i.e., variables, literature review, research questions, case selection, analysis, recommendations) and to equip them with the necessary techniques and skills to use research design tools and methods, and to conduct research individually. The second aim is to help students express and articulate the main argument/idea from an academic article and to critically evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of existing research designs and methodology in social sciences research, as well as assess results from general scientific research.
The course will start by introducing different types of research and research methodology, followed by a general overview of the main components of a research proposal/ outline. We will then delve into each of these components, including: how we select a research topic and how we formulate a research question, how to conduct a literature review, the role of theory and analytical frameworks, differences and specificities of different quantitative and qualitative research designs, reflect on how to analyze data, and how to present and disseminate research findings.
The materials used for this course combine academic and non-academic sources (i.e., reports from international organizations) which exemplify or relate to the topic discussed in class. In parallel with the course development students will work on a research paper based on a topic of their interests (within the field of social sciences), and are encouraged (on a voluntary basis) to submit assignments for consultation with the instructor. In order to ensure students are advancing with their research, several deadlines will be set throughout the semester for small assignments (graded) on the different sections of the research paper. With students’ agreement a public presentation of their research projects can take place within the campus, with peer students as discussants of their papers.
Syllabus
SO105 Researching Social Life
Module: Methods in Social and Historical Studies
Instructor: Joshua Paul
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue 15:45-19:00
This module aims to introduce students to the methods that social researchers have developed to analyse their societies and to produce knowledge to richly describe and explain the social world. Students will develop core skills in methods of research through an introduction to the different theories undergirding those methods and more crucially through their practical use in research exercises. The methods explored (i.e. participant observation and interviewing) are introduced in relation to key topics and research traditions that are closely identified with them, thus allowing students to confront methods as real practices rather than abstractions. Among other topics and activities, students will hone their sociological imaginations with regular entries in their field notebooks, explore through readings and discussions the complex ethical entanglements of doing research, be assisted with formulating meaningful research questions and developing coherent research designs. Ultimately, the course aims to develop skills in the critical evaluation of qualitative research, to equip students with practical methods experience and inculcate a critical imagination for how knowledge is produced. Taken collectively, this skill set will enable the students to robustly engage with social research methods and methodologies in their final year dissertations.
This course is designed to accommodate remote learners.
Syllabus
The following courses are cross-listed with Politics
PT141 Theories of Justice
Module: History of Political Thought
Instructor: Hans Stauffacher
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 17:30-19:00
Questions of justice have always occupied center stage in ethical, political, social, and legal theory. And they have always been crucial for our everyday lives: More often than not the question of whether it is right or wrong to do something seems to boil down to a question of justice. This course, therefore, aims at being both, an introduction to political and social philosophy and a discussion of the questions of justice we face in our own political, social, and personal lives. Reading seminal theories of justice from Aristotle to the 20th Century we will encounter different approaches to justice like eudaimonism, utilitarianism, contractualism, and egalitarianism, and discuss core concepts and distinctions like distributive and corrective justice, conservative and ideal justice, substantive and procedural justice, comparative and non-comparative justice. We will discuss all the texts in two different ways: In a first step, we will attempt to understand them in their historical and systematical specificity. And in a second step, we will confront them with problems of justice from our own lives and ask whether, how, and to what extent these historical positions are applicable to the questions of justice we face today.
Syllabus
HI126 Discovering, Inventing, and Making India: On the Historiography of the Subcontinent
Module: Methods in Social and Historical Studies
Instructor: Till Luge
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 9:00-10:30
This course will offer a critical introduction to the major approaches to understanding Indian culture(s) and history. To this end, historiographical narratives of the subcontinent from the early modern period onwards will be examined within the contexts of their production. Critical examinations of European colonialist and romanticist historiography and Indian anticolonial and nationalist history writing will help us gain an understanding of history as continually produced and contested. "India" can be very different things at once: a cradle of otherness as imagined by romantic Western Indologists, a vast and populous land to be tamed by colonialist administrators, a lost culture bemoaned by Indian writers, or a nation to be (re)created by independence fighters and communalists.
Syllabus
PL120 Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
Module: Ethics and Moral Philosophy
Instructor: David Hayes
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed17:30-19:00
How should a person live? Instead of applying universal principles of reason (deontology) or maximizing benefit (consequentialism), Aristotle argues that we should strive to become persons who possess numerous social, political, and intellectual virtues. The Nicomachean Ethics is an account of what these virtues are, how to acquire them, and why they lead to happy lives. While this class is a close reading of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in its entirety, supplementary material from psychoanalytic theory, literature, painting, and film will be offered in order to see what it would be like to fill in what Aristotle suggests can only be given “in outline.” Additionally, we will consider a contemporary philosophic challenge (John Doris) to the viability of any virtue-ethical project.
Syllabus
PL105 Introduction to Ethics
Module: Ethics and Moral Philosophy
Instructor: Thomas Hilgers
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 US credits
Course Times: Thu 15:45-19:00
What does it mean to lead a good life? What makes a person – or rather her character – good or bad? What makes a particular action good or bad? Can we universally determine what to do in general, and what not to do in general? Is it, for instance, always wrong for a person to kill, to steal, or to lie – and if so, how could we justify such universal rules or laws? What is the nature of evil? What is the nature of morality? These are some of the most fundamental questions asked in the philosophical field of enquiry called “ethics.” In this course, we will address all of these questions by studying and discussing some of the most influential texts within the history of Western philosophy and some more contemporary texts. More precisely, we will read and discuss texts by Aristotle, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Philippa Foot, John Rawls, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, Cora Diamond, and Jorge L. A. Garcia.
Syllabus
SC203 Bioethics and Biosciences
Module: Ethics and Moral Philosophy
Instructor: Ian Lawson
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 17:00-19:00 & Thu 15:45-17:15
This course fulfills the mathematics and science requirement for humanities students.
Traditional ethics considers the question of the good life. This course asks what life itself is. And how is its end, death, defined? What about the qualities of life: what are health, disability, gender or addiction? What distinguishes human from animal or plant life? We will concentrate on the practical ethical aspects of these questions raised by technologies such as genetic manipulation and practices such as factory farming, informed by contemporary ideas in the biological sciences. An underlying concern is the ways in which scientific theories and technologies do or should inform our behaviour. Conversely, we will explore the extent to which scientific theories of the nature of morality itself can (or should) do the same. Readings will not focus on traditional ethical theory but rather be drawn from bio- and medical ethics, cognitive psychology, the sociology of science and technology, and posthumanist discourse to create an eclectic syllabus based around four main topics: the moral sense, health, animals, and the law.
Syllabus
PS179 Postcolonial Politics: The Middle East and Beyond
Module: Political Systems and Structures
Instructor: Hanan Toukan
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 10:45-12:15
While postcolonial scholars have had enduring impact on disciplines such as anthropology, history, art history and comparative literature, their influence on the study of the political systems and political thought from and about the “Global South,” or the non-western world, has been less impactful. This opposition to postcolonialism as a theoretical and conceptual lens in the study of Comparative Politics is related to the endurance of Eurocentric perspectives on the Global South and the impact of their colonial histories. Dominant theories of democracy, revolutions, displacement, humanitarianism and civil wars, for instance, continue to be trapped in orientalist frameworks of analysis. Against this backdrop, this course has two central aims. The first is to encourage students to question the epistemological foundations of the study of postcolonial societies and politics so they learn to critically question the context in which the scholarly body of knowledge about non-western history, politics and society has been constructed and produced. The second aim of the course is to contextualize such theories by focusing on the region known as the “Middle East” with some cross-reference to various countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America in order to uncover the relationship between the political and the postcolonial. The course will run thematically and cover topics such as colonialism and decolonization, the authoritarian state, nationalism(s), the politics of gender and sexuality, the politics of culture, military states, development and humanitarian aid, oil, the “global war on terror”, wars, displacement and revolutions.
This course is designed to accommodate remote learners.
Syllabus
IN110 Globalization and International Relations
Module: Political Systems and Structures
Instructor: Boris Vormann
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 17:30-19:00
In the social sciences, globalization is often defined as an increase in the mobility of various factors and actors. This definition includes heightened flows of finance capital, the rise of global production networks in expanding divisions of labor as well as the movement of people and ideas. This course uses standard international relations theories as a starting point to examine how growing networks of exchange and circulation have altered political calculation, economic geographies, and governmental arrangements. A particular focus will be placed on the political processes that have facilitated and increased mobility over time, from the emergence of the interstate system in the late nineteenth century, to the globalization of trade and interdependence in our own historical moment. We will explore new actor constellations and shifting power arrangements in more detail with regards to transnational environmental issues, asymmetric warfare, and humanitarian interventions. In so doing, we consider the ways in which the phenomena and levels of globalization challenge the traditional paradigms of the social sciences and prompt a new formulation of the field of international relations.
Syllabus
PS185 Introduction to Policy Analysis
Module: Political Systems and Structures
Coordinator: Betsy Leimbigler
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 17:30-19:00
This course will introduce students to the definition of policy problems, the identification of alternative solutions to these, and the criteria governing the choice between these alternatives. Students are exposed to the various sources of evidence upon which assessment of alternatives is carried out as well as to the basis for considering policy impact. Through case studies, presentations and reviews of professionally-conducted policy analyses, students will receive a first-hand exposure to both the basic steps of this undertaking, and will have an opportunity to critique real-world policy decisions. Cases for analysis will include public health policies and social policies relating to housing and community development. The course will involve both individual and team work. Key outcomes will include an introductory knowledge of various forms of policy analysis, an ability to engage with policy problems and to decide on the best policy solution.
Syllabus
PT150 Global Citizenship
Module: Political Systems and Structures
Instructor: Ramona Mosse
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon 14:00-17:15
Citizenship is traditionally a concept associated with nation-states, and at base signifies the status of belonging to a bounded political order and the rights and duties this entails. Yet economic, legal and technological globalization increasingly calls state boundaries into question, and borderless problems such as climate change, forced migration, epidemics, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism require collective action on an equally global scale. In this context, global citizenship has been promoted as a sensibility and indeed as an emerging reality. This course explores the notion of “global citizenship” from the philosophical, cultural, and political perspectives and challenges students to think critically about what global citizenship can and should mean. We will explore the history of this concept, with its roots in ancient philosophy as well as in modern definitions of national borders and processes of globalization; critiques of it; and contemporary experiences and movements through which it might be forged. The heart of the course will be in an interdisciplinary exploration of two of the borderless problems already noted above—climate change and forced migration—through readings and discussion of novels, film, social theory, social scientific research, and policy documents from international institutions like the UN. Texts may include essays by Kant, Martha Nussbaum and Craig Calhoun, Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun, Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior and Michael Winterbottom's In This World. An important part of the course will be exchange between students enrolling in this course in different locations across the Bard network (USA, Russia, Lithuania, Palestine, Kyrgyzstan).
Syllabus
+ Literature and Rhetoric Foundational Modules
LT177 Narrative Non-Fiction
Module: Close Reading
Instructor: Fatin Abbas
Credits 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 17:30-19:00
In this course, we will close-read classic works of narrative non-fiction with an eye towards understanding a form of creative non-fiction that is driven by what can be termed “narrative storytelling.” This genre of writing raises compelling questions about the line between fact and fiction, as well as the ways in which “truth” is constituted through re-membering and re-telling. Through deep analysis of a range of narrative non-fiction, including memoir, historical narrative, narrative essay, narrative journalism, biography and autobiography, we will address questions such as: what is narrative non-fiction, and how does it overlap with or diverge from other genres of writing? How do works of narrative non-fiction constitute “truth” through the act of writing? What do these works suggest about the line between fact and fiction? Can such a line in fact be defined? Readings will include excerpts from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, among others.
Syllabus
LT142 Writing Fiction
Module: Written Arts
Instructor: Rebecca Rukeyser
Credits 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 14:00-17:15
This class introduces creative writing theory and methodology through the study of, and work within, the genre of fiction. We'll examine the formal and structural components necessary to crafting fiction before tackling craft elements of tone, character building, point of view, temporality, dialogue, and scene. We'll read widely, spending equal time with both canonical writers (e.g. James Baldwin, Katherine Mansfield, Yasunari Kawabata, J.G. Ballard) and contemporary writers (e.g. Carmen Maria Machado, Etgar Keret, Mariana Enriquez, Helen Oyeyemi). This class's assignments include: discussing the distinctive qualities and the malleability of various genres, completing generative writing assignments, and an overview of the process of workshopping written pieces. Students will complete a portfolio of revised short pieces based on in-class prompts as well as a 1,000-5,000-word short story.
Syllabus
LT178 Theory of the Elegy
Module: Close Reading / Literary History
Instructor: Francesco Giusti
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 15:45-17:15
Elegy is perhaps the most traditional of poetic genres, yet it remains a vital space for cultural reflection, transmission, and reinvention. For friends or partners, public figures or collective ideas, vulnerable social groups, endangered species or even a dying planet, the elegiac voice still performs a significant function in contemporary private and public discourse. By looking closely at examples from different traditions (in English translation), the course will both trace the developments of this poetic genre, from its ancient roots up to the digital age, and open up to broader cultural issues: the politics of memory and mourning, identity formation, online afterlives, negotiations with personal and collective past(s), as well as environmental emergencies and postcolonial urgencies. Today, artistic practices — not only in writing, but also in visual and performing arts (reenactment and archival strategies are widespread in contemporary art) — appear to be increasingly committed to rethinking our relations with the past, with a growing effort to do justice to what or who is no longer here and bear witness to their past existence. The elegiac mode thus becomes a kind of discourse for reckoning with love, grief, and social power, which needs to be re-discussed in a transcultural and transtemporal perspective. While examining also other forms of artistic and cultural production, students will read poems by Catullus, Propertius, Ovid, Petrarch, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walt Whitman, W.H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Anne Sexton, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, Adrienne Rich, Gary Snyder, Mark Doty, Kamau Brathwaite, and several others. The theoretical texts will include, among others, fundamental essays by Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Jahan Ramazani, and Diana Fuss.
Syllabus
LT168 Theories of the Body
Module: Critical and Cultural Theory
Instructor: Clio Nicastro
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 9:00-10:30
The experience of the body is often at the limit of the expressible, and challenges the artistic and verbal forms we have available to articulate and give meaning to it. This course introduces the main theories of literature and culture by looking at the site of the body and the way in which it is the locus of feeling, symptom, ailment, illness and states of mind that transcend the ordinary and everyday. Thinkers/artists addressed will include Dodie Bellamy, Renate Bertlmann, Maya Deren, Barbara Duden, Michel Foucault, Roxane Gay, Elisabeth Grosz, Amy Hollywood, Julia Kristeva, Clarice Lispector, Carla Lonzi, Audre Lorde, and Aby Warburg. In the first half of the course we will look specifically at efforts to find a language to speak for/through the body, its desires and its idiosyncrasies. In the second, we turn to the question of mimesis or imitation. This is a classical concept that has acquired new meanings and potential in the digital age. We examine its rewriting in art history through Aby Warburg’s concepts of Pathosformel and of “image-symptoms,” two ideas he used to analyze the recurrence of specific gestures and expressions in art. In this connection, we consider both how art combines old and new, and how the body is influenced by its own representation.
Syllabus
LT166 Utopias
Module: Literary History
Instructor: Ramona Mosse
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 10:45-12:15
How do we imagine alternative forms of political community? Utopia, as a literary genre and as a radical thought experiment that describes the possibility of a perfect society has a long tradition in Western culture. It has offered a possibility of critiquing existing social structures but has also served to justify authoritarianism and racism, particularly in the context of 20th century socialist and fascist ideologies. This contradiction between the good place and the no-place that utopia implies raises the question whether utopia necessarily implies its opposite, dystopia. We will examine this tension throughout the seminar and trace how utopia responds to the historical developments of its day, responding to issues such as collectivity, feminism, colonialism and environmentalism. We will also probe the idea that utopia is an entirely Western phenomenon by expanding our reading list beyond the classical utopias to include authors from non-Western context. In doing so, the course provides a survey of utopias as a form of speculative fiction that hovers between fantasy novel, political pamphlet, satire, and science fiction. Beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), we will read examples from various centuries but focus particularly on the 19th and 20th century. Readings will include works by Margaret Cavendish, Karl Marx, Samuel Butler, Karel Capek, Aldous Huxley, Ursula LeGuin, Buchi Emecheta, and Abdourahman A. Waberi. We will be supplementing these readings with utopian examples from architecture, urban planning, the visual arts and film.
This course is designed to accommodate remote learners.
Syllabus
The following courses are cross-listed with Art and Aesthetics:
TH180 Rethinking “Regie”: An Introduction to Directing
Module: Literary History
Instructor: Julia Hart
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Thu 15:45-19:00
This course will introduce students to the basics of directing theatre in the context of the contemporary German theater. In this exploration of theatre directing, students will first study the history of the role of the theatre director in Germany and discuss the various definitions of the controversial term Regietheater or “director’s theater.” How has the role of the director in Germany changed over time and what does directing look like in Germany today? Students will be then introduced to basic directing techniques in class and learn exercises for staging text-based material. What are the steps a director in Germany typically goes through when directing a play? What are different ways of developing a conceptual approach to a piece and how can this affect your work with actors? In addition to rehearsing scenes in class, students will attend several theater performances and analyze the staging of German directors working in currently working in Berlin.
Syllabus
Module: Close Reading
Instructor: Fatin Abbas
Credits 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 17:30-19:00
In this course, we will close-read classic works of narrative non-fiction with an eye towards understanding a form of creative non-fiction that is driven by what can be termed “narrative storytelling.” This genre of writing raises compelling questions about the line between fact and fiction, as well as the ways in which “truth” is constituted through re-membering and re-telling. Through deep analysis of a range of narrative non-fiction, including memoir, historical narrative, narrative essay, narrative journalism, biography and autobiography, we will address questions such as: what is narrative non-fiction, and how does it overlap with or diverge from other genres of writing? How do works of narrative non-fiction constitute “truth” through the act of writing? What do these works suggest about the line between fact and fiction? Can such a line in fact be defined? Readings will include excerpts from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, among others.
Syllabus
LT142 Writing Fiction
Module: Written Arts
Instructor: Rebecca Rukeyser
Credits 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 14:00-17:15
This class introduces creative writing theory and methodology through the study of, and work within, the genre of fiction. We'll examine the formal and structural components necessary to crafting fiction before tackling craft elements of tone, character building, point of view, temporality, dialogue, and scene. We'll read widely, spending equal time with both canonical writers (e.g. James Baldwin, Katherine Mansfield, Yasunari Kawabata, J.G. Ballard) and contemporary writers (e.g. Carmen Maria Machado, Etgar Keret, Mariana Enriquez, Helen Oyeyemi). This class's assignments include: discussing the distinctive qualities and the malleability of various genres, completing generative writing assignments, and an overview of the process of workshopping written pieces. Students will complete a portfolio of revised short pieces based on in-class prompts as well as a 1,000-5,000-word short story.
Syllabus
LT178 Theory of the Elegy
Module: Close Reading / Literary History
Instructor: Francesco Giusti
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 15:45-17:15
Elegy is perhaps the most traditional of poetic genres, yet it remains a vital space for cultural reflection, transmission, and reinvention. For friends or partners, public figures or collective ideas, vulnerable social groups, endangered species or even a dying planet, the elegiac voice still performs a significant function in contemporary private and public discourse. By looking closely at examples from different traditions (in English translation), the course will both trace the developments of this poetic genre, from its ancient roots up to the digital age, and open up to broader cultural issues: the politics of memory and mourning, identity formation, online afterlives, negotiations with personal and collective past(s), as well as environmental emergencies and postcolonial urgencies. Today, artistic practices — not only in writing, but also in visual and performing arts (reenactment and archival strategies are widespread in contemporary art) — appear to be increasingly committed to rethinking our relations with the past, with a growing effort to do justice to what or who is no longer here and bear witness to their past existence. The elegiac mode thus becomes a kind of discourse for reckoning with love, grief, and social power, which needs to be re-discussed in a transcultural and transtemporal perspective. While examining also other forms of artistic and cultural production, students will read poems by Catullus, Propertius, Ovid, Petrarch, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walt Whitman, W.H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Anne Sexton, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, Adrienne Rich, Gary Snyder, Mark Doty, Kamau Brathwaite, and several others. The theoretical texts will include, among others, fundamental essays by Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Jahan Ramazani, and Diana Fuss.
Syllabus
LT168 Theories of the Body
Module: Critical and Cultural Theory
Instructor: Clio Nicastro
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 9:00-10:30
The experience of the body is often at the limit of the expressible, and challenges the artistic and verbal forms we have available to articulate and give meaning to it. This course introduces the main theories of literature and culture by looking at the site of the body and the way in which it is the locus of feeling, symptom, ailment, illness and states of mind that transcend the ordinary and everyday. Thinkers/artists addressed will include Dodie Bellamy, Renate Bertlmann, Maya Deren, Barbara Duden, Michel Foucault, Roxane Gay, Elisabeth Grosz, Amy Hollywood, Julia Kristeva, Clarice Lispector, Carla Lonzi, Audre Lorde, and Aby Warburg. In the first half of the course we will look specifically at efforts to find a language to speak for/through the body, its desires and its idiosyncrasies. In the second, we turn to the question of mimesis or imitation. This is a classical concept that has acquired new meanings and potential in the digital age. We examine its rewriting in art history through Aby Warburg’s concepts of Pathosformel and of “image-symptoms,” two ideas he used to analyze the recurrence of specific gestures and expressions in art. In this connection, we consider both how art combines old and new, and how the body is influenced by its own representation.
Syllabus
LT166 Utopias
Module: Literary History
Instructor: Ramona Mosse
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 10:45-12:15
How do we imagine alternative forms of political community? Utopia, as a literary genre and as a radical thought experiment that describes the possibility of a perfect society has a long tradition in Western culture. It has offered a possibility of critiquing existing social structures but has also served to justify authoritarianism and racism, particularly in the context of 20th century socialist and fascist ideologies. This contradiction between the good place and the no-place that utopia implies raises the question whether utopia necessarily implies its opposite, dystopia. We will examine this tension throughout the seminar and trace how utopia responds to the historical developments of its day, responding to issues such as collectivity, feminism, colonialism and environmentalism. We will also probe the idea that utopia is an entirely Western phenomenon by expanding our reading list beyond the classical utopias to include authors from non-Western context. In doing so, the course provides a survey of utopias as a form of speculative fiction that hovers between fantasy novel, political pamphlet, satire, and science fiction. Beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), we will read examples from various centuries but focus particularly on the 19th and 20th century. Readings will include works by Margaret Cavendish, Karl Marx, Samuel Butler, Karel Capek, Aldous Huxley, Ursula LeGuin, Buchi Emecheta, and Abdourahman A. Waberi. We will be supplementing these readings with utopian examples from architecture, urban planning, the visual arts and film.
This course is designed to accommodate remote learners.
Syllabus
The following courses are cross-listed with Art and Aesthetics:
TH180 Rethinking “Regie”: An Introduction to Directing
Module: Literary History
Instructor: Julia Hart
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Thu 15:45-19:00
This course will introduce students to the basics of directing theatre in the context of the contemporary German theater. In this exploration of theatre directing, students will first study the history of the role of the theatre director in Germany and discuss the various definitions of the controversial term Regietheater or “director’s theater.” How has the role of the director in Germany changed over time and what does directing look like in Germany today? Students will be then introduced to basic directing techniques in class and learn exercises for staging text-based material. What are the steps a director in Germany typically goes through when directing a play? What are different ways of developing a conceptual approach to a piece and how can this affect your work with actors? In addition to rehearsing scenes in class, students will attend several theater performances and analyze the staging of German directors working in currently working in Berlin.
Syllabus
+ Politics Foundational Modules
All courses are cross-listed with Ethics and Politics
IN110 Globalization and International Relations
Module: International Studies and Globalization
Instructor: Boris Vormann
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 17:30-19:00
In the social sciences, globalization is often defined as an increase in the mobility of various factors and actors. This definition includes heightened flows of finance capital, the rise of global production networks in expanding divisions of labor as well as the movement of people and ideas. This course uses standard international relations theories as a starting point to examine how growing networks of exchange and circulation have altered political calculation, economic geographies, and governmental arrangements. A particular focus will be placed on the political processes that have facilitated and increased mobility over time, from the emergence of the interstate system in the late nineteenth century, to the globalization of trade and interdependence in our own historical moment. We will explore new actor constellations and shifting power arrangements in more detail with regards to transnational environmental issues, asymmetric warfare, and humanitarian interventions. In so doing, we consider the ways in which the phenomena and levels of globalization challenge the traditional paradigms of the social sciences and prompt a new formulation of the field of international relations.
Syllabus
PS185 Introduction to Policy Analysis
Module: Policy Analysis
Coordinator: Betsy Leimbigler
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 17:30-19:00
This course will introduce students to the definition of policy problems, the identification of alternative solutions to these, and the criteria governing the choice between these alternatives. Students are exposed to the various sources of evidence upon which assessment of alternatives is carried out as well as to the basis for considering policy impact. Through case studies, presentations and reviews of professionally-conducted policy analyses, students will receive a first-hand exposure to both the basic steps of this undertaking, and will have an opportunity to critique real-world policy decisions. Cases for analysis will include government policies on aging populations and social policies relating to housing and community development. The course will involve both individual and team work. Key outcomes will include an introductory knowledge of policy analysis, an ability to engage with policy problems and to decide on the best policy solution.
Syllabus
PS179 Postcolonial Politics: The Middle East and Beyond
Module: Comparative Politics
Instructor: Hanan Toukan
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 10:45-12:15
While postcolonial scholars have had enduring impact on disciplines such as anthropology, history, art history and comparative literature their influence on the study of the political systems and political thought from and about the “Global South”, or the non-western world, has been less impactful. This opposition to postcolonialism as a theoretical and conceptual lens in the study of Comparative Politics is related to the endurance of Eurocentric perspectives on the Global South and the impact of their colonial histories. Dominant theories of democracy, revolutions, displacement, humanitarianism and civil wars, for instance, continue to be trapped in orientalist frameworks of analysis. Against this backdrop, this course has two central aims. The first is to encourage students to question the epistemological foundations of the study of postcolonial societies and politics so they learn to critically question the context in which the scholarly body of knowledge about non-western history, politics and society has been constructed and produced. The second aim of the course is to contextualize such theories by focusing on the region known as the “Middle East” with some cross-reference to various countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America in order to uncover the relationship between the political and the postcolonial. The course will run thematically and cover topics such as colonialism and decolonization, the authoritarian state, nationalism(s), the politics of gender and sexuality, the politics of culture, military states, development and humanitarian aid, oil, the “global war on terror”, wars, displacement and revolutions.
This course is designed to accommodate remote learners.
Syllabus
HI126 Discovering, Inventing, and Making India: On the Historiography of the Subcontinent
Module: Political and Moral Thought
Instructor: Till Luge
Credits 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 9:00-10:30
This course will offer a critical introduction to the major approaches to understanding Indian culture(s) and history. To this end, historiographical narratives of the subcontinent from the early modern period onwards will be examined within the contexts of their production. Critical examinations of European colonialist and romanticist historiography and Indian anticolonial and nationalist history writing will help us gain an understanding of history as continually produced and contested. "India" can be very different things at once: a cradle of otherness as imagined by romantic Western Indologists, a vast and populous land to be tamed by colonialist administrators, a lost culture bemoaned by Indian writers, or a nation to be (re)created by independence fighters and communalists.
Syllabus
PL120 Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
Module: Political and Moral Thought
Instructor: David Hayes
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 17:30-19:00
How should a person live? Instead of applying universal principles of reason (deontology) or maximizing benefit (consequentialism), Aristotle argues that we should strive to become persons who possess numerous social, political, and intellectual virtues. The Nicomachean Ethics is an account of what these virtues are, how to acquire them, and why they lead to happy lives.
While this class is a close reading of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in its entirety, supplementary material from psychoanalytic theory, literature, painting, and film will be offered in order to see what it would be like to fill in what Aristotle suggests can only be given “in outline.” Additionally, we will consider a contemporary philosophic challenge (John Doris) to the viability of any virtue-ethical project.
Syllabus
PL105 Introduction to Ethics
Module: Political and Moral Thought
Instructor: Thomas Hilgers
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 US credits
Course Times: Thu 15:45-19:00
What does it mean to lead a good life? What makes a person – or rather her character – good or bad? What makes a particular action good or bad? Can we universally determine what to do in general, and what not to do in general? Is it, for instance, always wrong for a person to kill, to steal, or to lie – and if so, how could we justify such universal rules or laws? What is the nature of evil? What is the nature of morality? These are some of the most fundamental questions asked in the philosophical field of enquiry called “ethics.” In this course, we will address all of these questions by studying and discussing some of the most influential texts within the history of Western philosophy and some more contemporary texts. More precisely, we will read and discuss texts by Aristotle, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Philippa Foot, John Rawls, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, Cora Diamond, and Jorge L. A. Garcia.
Syllabus
SC203 Bioethics and Biosciences
Module: Political and Moral Thought
Instructor: Ian Lawson
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 17:00-19:00 & Thu 15:45-17:15
This course fulfills the mathematics and science requirement for humanities students.
Traditional ethics considers the question of the good life. This course asks what life itself is. And how is its end, death, defined? What about the qualities of life: what are health, disability, gender or addiction? What distinguishes human from animal or plant life? We will concentrate on the practical ethical aspects of these questions raised by technologies such as genetic manipulation and practices such as factory farming, informed by contemporary ideas in the biological sciences. An underlying concern is the ways in which scientific theories and technologies do or should inform our behaviour. Conversely, we will explore the extent to which scientific theories of the nature of morality itself can (or should) do the same. Readings will not focus on traditional ethical theory but rather be drawn from bio- and medical ethics, cognitive psychology, the sociology of science and technology, and posthumanist discourse to create an eclectic syllabus based around four main topics: the moral sense, health, animals, and the law.
Syllabus
PT150 Global Citizenship
Module: International Studies and Globalization
Instructor: Ramona Mosse
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon 14:00-17:15
Citizenship is traditionally a concept associated with nation-states, and at base signifies the status of belonging to a bounded political order and the rights and duties this entails. Yet economic, legal and technological globalization increasingly calls state boundaries into question, and borderless problems such as climate change, forced migration, epidemics, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism require collective action on an equally global scale. In this context, global citizenship has been promoted as a sensibility and indeed as an emerging reality. This course explores the notion of “global citizenship” from the philosophical, cultural, and political perspectives and challenges students to think critically about what global citizenship can and should mean. We will explore the history of this concept, with its roots in ancient philosophy as well as in modern definitions of national borders and processes of globalization; critiques of it; and contemporary experiences and movements through which it might be forged. The heart of the course will be in an interdisciplinary exploration of two of the borderless problems already noted above—climate change and forced migration—through readings and discussion of novels, film, social theory, social scientific research, and policy documents from international institutions like the UN. Texts may include essays by Kant, Martha Nussbaum and Craig Calhoun, Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun, Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior and Michael Winterbottom's In This World. An important part of the course will be exchange between students enrolling in this course in different locations across the Bard network (USA, Russia, Lithuania, Palestine, Kyrgyzstan).
Syllabus
PT141 Theories of Justice
Module: Political and Moral Thought
Instructor: Hans Stauffacher
Credits 8 ECTS, 4 US credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 17:30-19:00
Questions of justice have always occupied center stage in ethical, political, social, and legal theory. And they have always been crucial for our everyday lives: More often than not the question of whether it is right or wrong to do something seems to boil down to a question of justice. This course, therefore, aims at being both, an introduction to political and social philosophy and a discussion of the questions of justice we face in our own political, social, and personal lives. Reading seminal theories of justice from Aristotle to the 20th Century we will encounter different approaches to justice like eudaimonism, utilitarianism, contractualism, and egalitarianism, and discuss core concepts and distinctions like distributive and corrective justice, conservative and ideal justice, substantive and procedural justice, comparative and non-comparative justice. We will discuss all the texts in two different ways: In a first step, we will attempt to understand them in their historical and systematical specificity. And in a second step, we will confront them with problems of justice from our own lives and ask whether, how, and to what extent these historical positions are applicable to the questions of justice we face today.
Syllabus
IN110 Globalization and International Relations
Module: International Studies and Globalization
Instructor: Boris Vormann
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 17:30-19:00
In the social sciences, globalization is often defined as an increase in the mobility of various factors and actors. This definition includes heightened flows of finance capital, the rise of global production networks in expanding divisions of labor as well as the movement of people and ideas. This course uses standard international relations theories as a starting point to examine how growing networks of exchange and circulation have altered political calculation, economic geographies, and governmental arrangements. A particular focus will be placed on the political processes that have facilitated and increased mobility over time, from the emergence of the interstate system in the late nineteenth century, to the globalization of trade and interdependence in our own historical moment. We will explore new actor constellations and shifting power arrangements in more detail with regards to transnational environmental issues, asymmetric warfare, and humanitarian interventions. In so doing, we consider the ways in which the phenomena and levels of globalization challenge the traditional paradigms of the social sciences and prompt a new formulation of the field of international relations.
Syllabus
PS185 Introduction to Policy Analysis
Module: Policy Analysis
Coordinator: Betsy Leimbigler
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 17:30-19:00
This course will introduce students to the definition of policy problems, the identification of alternative solutions to these, and the criteria governing the choice between these alternatives. Students are exposed to the various sources of evidence upon which assessment of alternatives is carried out as well as to the basis for considering policy impact. Through case studies, presentations and reviews of professionally-conducted policy analyses, students will receive a first-hand exposure to both the basic steps of this undertaking, and will have an opportunity to critique real-world policy decisions. Cases for analysis will include government policies on aging populations and social policies relating to housing and community development. The course will involve both individual and team work. Key outcomes will include an introductory knowledge of policy analysis, an ability to engage with policy problems and to decide on the best policy solution.
Syllabus
PS179 Postcolonial Politics: The Middle East and Beyond
Module: Comparative Politics
Instructor: Hanan Toukan
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 10:45-12:15
While postcolonial scholars have had enduring impact on disciplines such as anthropology, history, art history and comparative literature their influence on the study of the political systems and political thought from and about the “Global South”, or the non-western world, has been less impactful. This opposition to postcolonialism as a theoretical and conceptual lens in the study of Comparative Politics is related to the endurance of Eurocentric perspectives on the Global South and the impact of their colonial histories. Dominant theories of democracy, revolutions, displacement, humanitarianism and civil wars, for instance, continue to be trapped in orientalist frameworks of analysis. Against this backdrop, this course has two central aims. The first is to encourage students to question the epistemological foundations of the study of postcolonial societies and politics so they learn to critically question the context in which the scholarly body of knowledge about non-western history, politics and society has been constructed and produced. The second aim of the course is to contextualize such theories by focusing on the region known as the “Middle East” with some cross-reference to various countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America in order to uncover the relationship between the political and the postcolonial. The course will run thematically and cover topics such as colonialism and decolonization, the authoritarian state, nationalism(s), the politics of gender and sexuality, the politics of culture, military states, development and humanitarian aid, oil, the “global war on terror”, wars, displacement and revolutions.
This course is designed to accommodate remote learners.
Syllabus
HI126 Discovering, Inventing, and Making India: On the Historiography of the Subcontinent
Module: Political and Moral Thought
Instructor: Till Luge
Credits 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 9:00-10:30
This course will offer a critical introduction to the major approaches to understanding Indian culture(s) and history. To this end, historiographical narratives of the subcontinent from the early modern period onwards will be examined within the contexts of their production. Critical examinations of European colonialist and romanticist historiography and Indian anticolonial and nationalist history writing will help us gain an understanding of history as continually produced and contested. "India" can be very different things at once: a cradle of otherness as imagined by romantic Western Indologists, a vast and populous land to be tamed by colonialist administrators, a lost culture bemoaned by Indian writers, or a nation to be (re)created by independence fighters and communalists.
Syllabus
PL120 Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
Module: Political and Moral Thought
Instructor: David Hayes
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 17:30-19:00
How should a person live? Instead of applying universal principles of reason (deontology) or maximizing benefit (consequentialism), Aristotle argues that we should strive to become persons who possess numerous social, political, and intellectual virtues. The Nicomachean Ethics is an account of what these virtues are, how to acquire them, and why they lead to happy lives.
While this class is a close reading of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in its entirety, supplementary material from psychoanalytic theory, literature, painting, and film will be offered in order to see what it would be like to fill in what Aristotle suggests can only be given “in outline.” Additionally, we will consider a contemporary philosophic challenge (John Doris) to the viability of any virtue-ethical project.
Syllabus
PL105 Introduction to Ethics
Module: Political and Moral Thought
Instructor: Thomas Hilgers
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 US credits
Course Times: Thu 15:45-19:00
What does it mean to lead a good life? What makes a person – or rather her character – good or bad? What makes a particular action good or bad? Can we universally determine what to do in general, and what not to do in general? Is it, for instance, always wrong for a person to kill, to steal, or to lie – and if so, how could we justify such universal rules or laws? What is the nature of evil? What is the nature of morality? These are some of the most fundamental questions asked in the philosophical field of enquiry called “ethics.” In this course, we will address all of these questions by studying and discussing some of the most influential texts within the history of Western philosophy and some more contemporary texts. More precisely, we will read and discuss texts by Aristotle, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Philippa Foot, John Rawls, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, Cora Diamond, and Jorge L. A. Garcia.
Syllabus
SC203 Bioethics and Biosciences
Module: Political and Moral Thought
Instructor: Ian Lawson
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 17:00-19:00 & Thu 15:45-17:15
This course fulfills the mathematics and science requirement for humanities students.
Traditional ethics considers the question of the good life. This course asks what life itself is. And how is its end, death, defined? What about the qualities of life: what are health, disability, gender or addiction? What distinguishes human from animal or plant life? We will concentrate on the practical ethical aspects of these questions raised by technologies such as genetic manipulation and practices such as factory farming, informed by contemporary ideas in the biological sciences. An underlying concern is the ways in which scientific theories and technologies do or should inform our behaviour. Conversely, we will explore the extent to which scientific theories of the nature of morality itself can (or should) do the same. Readings will not focus on traditional ethical theory but rather be drawn from bio- and medical ethics, cognitive psychology, the sociology of science and technology, and posthumanist discourse to create an eclectic syllabus based around four main topics: the moral sense, health, animals, and the law.
Syllabus
PT150 Global Citizenship
Module: International Studies and Globalization
Instructor: Ramona Mosse
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon 14:00-17:15
Citizenship is traditionally a concept associated with nation-states, and at base signifies the status of belonging to a bounded political order and the rights and duties this entails. Yet economic, legal and technological globalization increasingly calls state boundaries into question, and borderless problems such as climate change, forced migration, epidemics, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism require collective action on an equally global scale. In this context, global citizenship has been promoted as a sensibility and indeed as an emerging reality. This course explores the notion of “global citizenship” from the philosophical, cultural, and political perspectives and challenges students to think critically about what global citizenship can and should mean. We will explore the history of this concept, with its roots in ancient philosophy as well as in modern definitions of national borders and processes of globalization; critiques of it; and contemporary experiences and movements through which it might be forged. The heart of the course will be in an interdisciplinary exploration of two of the borderless problems already noted above—climate change and forced migration—through readings and discussion of novels, film, social theory, social scientific research, and policy documents from international institutions like the UN. Texts may include essays by Kant, Martha Nussbaum and Craig Calhoun, Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun, Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior and Michael Winterbottom's In This World. An important part of the course will be exchange between students enrolling in this course in different locations across the Bard network (USA, Russia, Lithuania, Palestine, Kyrgyzstan).
Syllabus
PT141 Theories of Justice
Module: Political and Moral Thought
Instructor: Hans Stauffacher
Credits 8 ECTS, 4 US credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 17:30-19:00
Questions of justice have always occupied center stage in ethical, political, social, and legal theory. And they have always been crucial for our everyday lives: More often than not the question of whether it is right or wrong to do something seems to boil down to a question of justice. This course, therefore, aims at being both, an introduction to political and social philosophy and a discussion of the questions of justice we face in our own political, social, and personal lives. Reading seminal theories of justice from Aristotle to the 20th Century we will encounter different approaches to justice like eudaimonism, utilitarianism, contractualism, and egalitarianism, and discuss core concepts and distinctions like distributive and corrective justice, conservative and ideal justice, substantive and procedural justice, comparative and non-comparative justice. We will discuss all the texts in two different ways: In a first step, we will attempt to understand them in their historical and systematical specificity. And in a second step, we will confront them with problems of justice from our own lives and ask whether, how, and to what extent these historical positions are applicable to the questions of justice we face today.
Syllabus
+ Art and Aesthetics Advanced Modules
AH216 Berlin’s Museum Controversies
Module: Exhibition Culture and Public Space
Instructor: Aya Soika, co-taught with Andrea Meyer (TU Berlin)
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Fridays all day (9:00-17:15) starting on 30 October
Berlin has a long history as a museum center, possessing collections to rival Paris and London. Recently, the institution of the museum – quintessentially a nineteenth-century invention – has been the subject of radical transformation, resulting in changing modes of display and communication and a critical revision of existing notions of its public function. This class looks at some of the crucial themes within the current curatorial discourse, focusing on three sites that are at the center of contemporary German and international discussion of museum politics. The first is the Humboldt Forum, a reconstruction of the former Prussian City Palace and the new home to Berlin’s ethnographic collections. Controversy regarding the Forum hinges on the wider issue of European treatment of the colonial past, and the rightful status of objects which had very different functions and meanings in the original contexts from which they were appropriated. Our second site of investigation will be the historical complex on Museum Island, including the recently opened James Simon Gallery. Thirdly, we will examine the planning of a new building for the National Gallery’s twentieth-century collection near Potsdamer Platz by Herzog & de Meuron architects. This scheme has raised questions of aesthetic and topographical continuity and compatibility, as well as issues of cost. Pursuing these investigations will give us a unique insight into the decision-making processes, choices, and public discourse surrounding the modern display and understanding of art.
Please note: This course will take place as a block seminar.
Syllabus
FA302 Advanced Painting: Oil Paint and After
Module: Media, Practices, Techniques
Instructor: John Kleckner
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Fri 9:00-12:15
This advanced studio course is designed to connect the gamut of materials and techniques in contemporary painting with the development of an individual aesthetic style. Weekly sessions will expose students to a wide range of experimental paint applications with the aim of synchronizing chosen materials and methods with personal expression and content. Classes will feature demonstrations of techniques such as airbrushing, marbling, masking, projecting, stamping, stencils, collage, and inkjet printing on canvas. Students will gain experience working with oil, acrylic, enamel, vinyl, and gouache paints. Material demonstrations will be augmented by readings, slideshows, gallery tours, and studio visits. The syllabus begins with directed assignments that become increasingly more personalized and independent as the course progresses. The ideal student will have previous painting experience and be highly motivated to make a body of original work. The semester culminates in an “Open Studios” group exhibition.
Syllabus
TH312 Postdramatic and Contemporary Theater in Berlin
Module: Artists, Genres, Movements / Media, Practices, Techniques
Instructor: Nina Tecklenburg
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 14:00-17:15
The term "postdramatic theater" was coined by the theorist and critic Hans-Thies Lehmann in the late 90s to describe a radical new mode of performance that repudiated "traditional" practices and assumptions. Driven by technological and social transformation, this kind of theater came to be associated with a range of features such as aesthetic innovation, emancipation from text-based theater, self-reflexiveness, political intervention, low-hierarchical working conditions. Though the concept is over two decades old, it has proved durable, and is often invoked to characterize Berlin's theater world in particular. Through an intensive theoretical and practical exploration of contemporary performing art in the city, we will look at the way in which postdramatic theater has changed and diversified. We will study works by current postdramatic theater makers such as Gob Squad, She She Pop, andcompany&co, René Pollesch, Gintersdorfer/Klaßen, Rimini Protokoll, as well as works by an emerging generation and ask the question: what new aesthetic, technological and socio-political parameters are reflected in contemporary performing arts? What comes after the postdramatic theater? We will look at (post)migrant and decolonial theater, immersive and participatory theater, feminist and queer performance, posthuman, (post)digital and (post)Corona theater. Besides readings from performance studies, culture studies and social science we will create (postpostdramatic) theater, hold lecture-performances and write manifestos. No previous experience in theater and performance is necessary. Open to all students with a curiosity for experimenting with thought and theater.
Syllabus
FA308 Finding the Stories
Module: Media, Practices, Techniques
Instructor: Carla Åhlander
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon 9:00-12:15
This course combines photo analysis and practical photo work. We will look at what narrative constitutes a narrative and how the meaning of a photograph is created. In addition to producing their own photo series, the participants will become skilled at looking at, reading and talking about photographs. We will deal with issues such as subjectivity and objectivity, private and public, as well as technical issues like light situations. The workshop will include collaborations between students together we will explore a variety of aesthetic, practical and conceptual issues, asking questions like "What is my attitude to the topic?" or "Where does this narrative begin or end?"
Syllabus
FA329 Playing with Perception
Module: Media, Practices, Techniques / Aesthetics and Art Theory
This course fulfills the mathematics and science requirement for Humanities students
Instructor: Nick Houde
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue 9:00-12:15
Rather than simply make music that is provided to a listener, experimental composers in the late 20th century such as Maryanne Amacher and R. Murray Schafer tinkered with how sounds are met by the ear and body through working with the material structure of the inner ear (cochlea), haptic (touch/vibration) sensations, and the subtleties of the sonic environment in which they were heard. Their work explored went beyond making “music” by pursuing the frontiers of human perception and experience using scientific understanding as a framework for composition and, subsequently, challenging how perception rather than mere reception could be moulded through sonic experiments.
Starting from these innovative ideas, this class will unpack the human perceptual apparatus for “hearing” from evolutionary, cognitive, cultural, and aesthetic perspectives to provide a more considered and curious way of approaching sonic experiences. The idea is to take hearing and sound out of the restrictions of the musical context so that it can be explored and played with as an innate part of human experience.
The core of the class will be structured around understanding the anatomical and cognitive capacities for the human perception and experience of “sounds” as they have developed over the long course of human biological and cultural evolutions. This will also involve negotiating norms around what it means to “hear” through within the context of technological augmentation and notions of disability. Psychoacoustic experiments of later 20th century composers will then be explored through the prism of these evolutionary processes, affording a broad understanding of why this could be a compelling aesthetic and philosophical project.
This class does not require any background in music composition or theory and aims to be transdisciplinary in scope. The course will, however, involve listening to lots of sonic material and also making recordings of sound in some fashion. As this is a studio class, students will be asked to create and share sonic material but this should be seen as explorative and tied to any field of interest.
Syllabus
AH219 Landscape, Land Art, and the City
Module: Artists, Genres, Movements / Aesthetics and Art Theory
Instructor: Geoff Lehman
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue 15:45-19:00
This course will examine landscape art as a mode of representation, of experience, and of site-specific intervention, through close readings of a small number of major works. For much of the course, we will focus on European landscape paintings, from the Renaissance to modernism (where landscape plays a foundational role), as well as exploring the landscape tradition of Song dynasty China. In the latter part of the term, we will turn our attention to land art, an artistic practice in which the engagement with landscape becomes a direct intervention in, and experience of, the actual physical landscape, and consider its relationship to landscape painting as well as its place within the transition from modernism to postmodernism. Topics for the course include: nature and human experience; perspective, landscape representation, and knowledge; subjectivity and the aesthetics of landscape; the materiality of the art object and the “post-medium condition” in site-specific work; art and environmentalism; and the relationship of land art to the experience of urban space. Among the artists whose works will be our focus are Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgione, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Fan Kuan, Xia Gui, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Robert Smithson, Mary Miss, and Richard Serra. Readings will include art historical, philosophical, and literary texts. Visits to Berlin museums, installation sites, and public spaces to experience works of art firsthand are an integral part of the course.
Syllabus
FA328 Embodied Storytelling Through Video
Module: Media, Practices, Techniques
Instructor: Dafna Maimon
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue: 15:45-19:00
This advanced video class will explore embodied ways to approach storytelling and script creation within video by working with our own autobiography as experienced through the body. Our aim will be creating video works that do not merely tell a story but allow viewers to experience it viscerally. We will relate to the filmed medium as an extension of our senses, and to the body itself, as a stage for an emotional landscape that can be both personal and political at once. Our goal is to unravel new approaches in communicating empathy, memories, feelings and sensations through video. As such, experiments with different self- empowering movement techniques such as Body Mind Centering, Authentic Movement, Improvisation, collaboration and drawing will be at the center of our curriculum, and applied to different video assignments. These methods will help us gain bodily awareness and creativity, as well as a sensitivity for time and space: the two major elements we need to learn to control as video artists. Prepare to move, play, and perform utilizing your own body as material and subject within on-site class workshops; extreme curiosity, group participation and open-mindedness will be expected. Students applying for this course should already have some experience in filming and be self-sufficient in editing. We will also analyze works from artists and filmmakers who work with the body and autobiography as their starting point. Likewise, visiting body practitioners will be invited to host workshops within the class. The focus of this course will not be on technical video instruction. Instead, students will delve into a rigorous process and develop their own visual language that can at once analyze, criticize, and transmit visceral experiences reflecting on our existence and potential as humans in this highly digital age.
Syllabus
AH302 The Idea of the Aesthetic
Module: Aesthetics and Art Theory
Instructor: Katalin Makkai
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 15:45-17:15
“Aesthetics” and “aesthetic” are terms that are often taken for granted inside as well as outside academic discourse. We speak of aesthetic experiences and judgments and qualities, and we employ “aesthetics” to designate the study of such matters. Although their root is taken from the Greek, the now-familiar terms (in their now-familiar usages) are, however, comparatively new. They are commonly regarded as having been introduced into the philosophical lexicon in the eighteenth century—a few hundred years ago. This course studies some of the texts that were key to the discovery, or perhaps the invention, of the “aesthetic”. What work was the idea meant to do? How did its evolution retain or reconfigure its original senses and purposes? Is the idea of the aesthetic problematic, ideological, or chimerical? Do we need an idea of the aesthetic to think about art? Authors include Plato, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Edward Bullough, Clive Bell, Clement Greenberg, John Dewey, Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Susan Sontag, Noel Carroll, Alexander Nehamas, Jacques Rancière, and Yuriko Saito.
Syllabus
FA330 Politics, Practices and Theories of Contemporary Art
Module: Exhibition Culture and Public Space / Aesthetics and Art Theory
Instructor: Dorothea von Hantelmann
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Fri 14:00-17:15
Where is art situated in modern societies? Is it part of everyday life, or something apart? How did its social function evolve historically – and how is it transformed today? Are concepts such as “autonomy” and “criticality” still appropriate to describe the position and function of art in society? These are among the questions we will explore in this course, which combines the study of texts by scholars of philosophy, art theory and sociology with excursions into Berlin's art scene. In the theory part we will discuss authors such as Immanuel Kant and Theodor W. Adorno. The aim will be to understand art's double character as “autonomous” and “social fact” (Adorno). How can we comprehend this ambiguous condition that situates art simultaneously in and outside of society? How does the fact that “creativity” today has become a major social force, even a cultural imperative, challenge this position? In order to understand how politics, economy and creativity are linked in the 21st century, we will read several chapters of Andreas Reckwitz’ seminal book “The Invention of Creativity” (2019). Our discussions will be complemented by field trips to artist studios and exhibitions. As far as Covid-19 regulations allow, we will spend several sessions visiting the 11th Berlin Biennial and the exhibition “Down to Earth” at Gropius-Bau. Some of these field trips will take place on Saturdays and schedule changes may occur.
Syllabus
The following courses are cross-listed with Literature and Rhetoric
AR317 Critical Fabulation
Module: Artists, Genres, Movements
Instructor: Clio Nicastro
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 10:45-12:15
What happens when cinema tries to recover and “repair” stories that have never been entirely told – due to the lack of archival material and witnesses, or because they belong to minoritized groups, or are simply considered inexplicable? And what if, in fact, repairing does not mean to fill the gaps, to seize and freeze a past event but rather to intentionally fail in reconstructing a history of violence, injustice and domination? In the article “Venus in two acts” (2008), Saidiya Hartman wrestles with the erasure of the murders of two women on a slave ship crossing the infamous Middle Passage. With the method of “critical fabulation”, Hartman proposes a reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history in order “to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling,” to reconstruct “what could have been.” This temporality at the fictional crossroads between past and future wants to impede a cathartic experience in the spectator, pointing out how the aftermaths of that story still affect the present. By following Hartman’s research method, this course will look at films that combine different genres and styles (documentary, historical, supernatural) to challenge the unidirectional linear representation of marginalized stories and characters. We will watch and discuss, among others, Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019), Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Harun Farocki, 1991) Lazaro Felice (Alice Rohrwacher, 2019), The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer, 2015).
Syllabus
LT328 The Modernist Fringe: Writing at the Edge of Experience
Module/s: Aesthetics and Art Theory
Instructor: Ross Shields
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 14:00-17:15
In 1892, William James defines the psychic fringe as a “halo of relations” surrounding any definite mental image or thought and associating it with others. Although we are not generally aware of this fringe, it directs the stream of our consciousness and supposedly plays an essential role in both religious and aesthetic experience. This seminar will pursue James’s insight by examining seminal texts of literary modernism against the background of contemporaneous psycho-physiological, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic theories of the fringe. On the one hand, we will interrogate scientific and philosophical concepts of perception and association, focusing on the limits of discursive thought and its pre/un-conscious other. On the other hand, we will consider literary explorations of the fringe, reflecting on the strategies used by the modernists to articulate the ineffable. We will ask: How does literary experience inform theoretical concepts of the psychic fringe? To what extent do these ‘fringe theories’ in turn condition and regulate literary production? Does literature succeed in showing what science cannot say? What is it that emerges in the particular encounters between theorist and authors at the turn of the century?
Texts by Proust, Musil, H. James, Wolff, Valéry, Stein, Kafka, Hofmannsthal, Rilke; Bergson, Husserl, Helmholtz, Mach, W. James, Freud, Benjamin, Whitehead, Wittgenstein. Readings by Adorno, Dewey, Greenberg, Eisenstein, H.D., Kandinsky, Klee, Kulbin, Picasso, Pound, Schönberg, Stein, Valéry, Webern, etc.
Syllabus
Module: Exhibition Culture and Public Space
Instructor: Aya Soika, co-taught with Andrea Meyer (TU Berlin)
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Fridays all day (9:00-17:15) starting on 30 October
Berlin has a long history as a museum center, possessing collections to rival Paris and London. Recently, the institution of the museum – quintessentially a nineteenth-century invention – has been the subject of radical transformation, resulting in changing modes of display and communication and a critical revision of existing notions of its public function. This class looks at some of the crucial themes within the current curatorial discourse, focusing on three sites that are at the center of contemporary German and international discussion of museum politics. The first is the Humboldt Forum, a reconstruction of the former Prussian City Palace and the new home to Berlin’s ethnographic collections. Controversy regarding the Forum hinges on the wider issue of European treatment of the colonial past, and the rightful status of objects which had very different functions and meanings in the original contexts from which they were appropriated. Our second site of investigation will be the historical complex on Museum Island, including the recently opened James Simon Gallery. Thirdly, we will examine the planning of a new building for the National Gallery’s twentieth-century collection near Potsdamer Platz by Herzog & de Meuron architects. This scheme has raised questions of aesthetic and topographical continuity and compatibility, as well as issues of cost. Pursuing these investigations will give us a unique insight into the decision-making processes, choices, and public discourse surrounding the modern display and understanding of art.
Please note: This course will take place as a block seminar.
Syllabus
FA302 Advanced Painting: Oil Paint and After
Module: Media, Practices, Techniques
Instructor: John Kleckner
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Fri 9:00-12:15
This advanced studio course is designed to connect the gamut of materials and techniques in contemporary painting with the development of an individual aesthetic style. Weekly sessions will expose students to a wide range of experimental paint applications with the aim of synchronizing chosen materials and methods with personal expression and content. Classes will feature demonstrations of techniques such as airbrushing, marbling, masking, projecting, stamping, stencils, collage, and inkjet printing on canvas. Students will gain experience working with oil, acrylic, enamel, vinyl, and gouache paints. Material demonstrations will be augmented by readings, slideshows, gallery tours, and studio visits. The syllabus begins with directed assignments that become increasingly more personalized and independent as the course progresses. The ideal student will have previous painting experience and be highly motivated to make a body of original work. The semester culminates in an “Open Studios” group exhibition.
Syllabus
TH312 Postdramatic and Contemporary Theater in Berlin
Module: Artists, Genres, Movements / Media, Practices, Techniques
Instructor: Nina Tecklenburg
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 14:00-17:15
The term "postdramatic theater" was coined by the theorist and critic Hans-Thies Lehmann in the late 90s to describe a radical new mode of performance that repudiated "traditional" practices and assumptions. Driven by technological and social transformation, this kind of theater came to be associated with a range of features such as aesthetic innovation, emancipation from text-based theater, self-reflexiveness, political intervention, low-hierarchical working conditions. Though the concept is over two decades old, it has proved durable, and is often invoked to characterize Berlin's theater world in particular. Through an intensive theoretical and practical exploration of contemporary performing art in the city, we will look at the way in which postdramatic theater has changed and diversified. We will study works by current postdramatic theater makers such as Gob Squad, She She Pop, andcompany&co, René Pollesch, Gintersdorfer/Klaßen, Rimini Protokoll, as well as works by an emerging generation and ask the question: what new aesthetic, technological and socio-political parameters are reflected in contemporary performing arts? What comes after the postdramatic theater? We will look at (post)migrant and decolonial theater, immersive and participatory theater, feminist and queer performance, posthuman, (post)digital and (post)Corona theater. Besides readings from performance studies, culture studies and social science we will create (postpostdramatic) theater, hold lecture-performances and write manifestos. No previous experience in theater and performance is necessary. Open to all students with a curiosity for experimenting with thought and theater.
Syllabus
FA308 Finding the Stories
Module: Media, Practices, Techniques
Instructor: Carla Åhlander
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon 9:00-12:15
This course combines photo analysis and practical photo work. We will look at what narrative constitutes a narrative and how the meaning of a photograph is created. In addition to producing their own photo series, the participants will become skilled at looking at, reading and talking about photographs. We will deal with issues such as subjectivity and objectivity, private and public, as well as technical issues like light situations. The workshop will include collaborations between students together we will explore a variety of aesthetic, practical and conceptual issues, asking questions like "What is my attitude to the topic?" or "Where does this narrative begin or end?"
Syllabus
FA329 Playing with Perception
Module: Media, Practices, Techniques / Aesthetics and Art Theory
This course fulfills the mathematics and science requirement for Humanities students
Instructor: Nick Houde
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue 9:00-12:15
Rather than simply make music that is provided to a listener, experimental composers in the late 20th century such as Maryanne Amacher and R. Murray Schafer tinkered with how sounds are met by the ear and body through working with the material structure of the inner ear (cochlea), haptic (touch/vibration) sensations, and the subtleties of the sonic environment in which they were heard. Their work explored went beyond making “music” by pursuing the frontiers of human perception and experience using scientific understanding as a framework for composition and, subsequently, challenging how perception rather than mere reception could be moulded through sonic experiments.
Starting from these innovative ideas, this class will unpack the human perceptual apparatus for “hearing” from evolutionary, cognitive, cultural, and aesthetic perspectives to provide a more considered and curious way of approaching sonic experiences. The idea is to take hearing and sound out of the restrictions of the musical context so that it can be explored and played with as an innate part of human experience.
The core of the class will be structured around understanding the anatomical and cognitive capacities for the human perception and experience of “sounds” as they have developed over the long course of human biological and cultural evolutions. This will also involve negotiating norms around what it means to “hear” through within the context of technological augmentation and notions of disability. Psychoacoustic experiments of later 20th century composers will then be explored through the prism of these evolutionary processes, affording a broad understanding of why this could be a compelling aesthetic and philosophical project.
This class does not require any background in music composition or theory and aims to be transdisciplinary in scope. The course will, however, involve listening to lots of sonic material and also making recordings of sound in some fashion. As this is a studio class, students will be asked to create and share sonic material but this should be seen as explorative and tied to any field of interest.
Syllabus
AH219 Landscape, Land Art, and the City
Module: Artists, Genres, Movements / Aesthetics and Art Theory
Instructor: Geoff Lehman
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue 15:45-19:00
This course will examine landscape art as a mode of representation, of experience, and of site-specific intervention, through close readings of a small number of major works. For much of the course, we will focus on European landscape paintings, from the Renaissance to modernism (where landscape plays a foundational role), as well as exploring the landscape tradition of Song dynasty China. In the latter part of the term, we will turn our attention to land art, an artistic practice in which the engagement with landscape becomes a direct intervention in, and experience of, the actual physical landscape, and consider its relationship to landscape painting as well as its place within the transition from modernism to postmodernism. Topics for the course include: nature and human experience; perspective, landscape representation, and knowledge; subjectivity and the aesthetics of landscape; the materiality of the art object and the “post-medium condition” in site-specific work; art and environmentalism; and the relationship of land art to the experience of urban space. Among the artists whose works will be our focus are Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgione, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Fan Kuan, Xia Gui, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Robert Smithson, Mary Miss, and Richard Serra. Readings will include art historical, philosophical, and literary texts. Visits to Berlin museums, installation sites, and public spaces to experience works of art firsthand are an integral part of the course.
Syllabus
FA328 Embodied Storytelling Through Video
Module: Media, Practices, Techniques
Instructor: Dafna Maimon
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue: 15:45-19:00
This advanced video class will explore embodied ways to approach storytelling and script creation within video by working with our own autobiography as experienced through the body. Our aim will be creating video works that do not merely tell a story but allow viewers to experience it viscerally. We will relate to the filmed medium as an extension of our senses, and to the body itself, as a stage for an emotional landscape that can be both personal and political at once. Our goal is to unravel new approaches in communicating empathy, memories, feelings and sensations through video. As such, experiments with different self- empowering movement techniques such as Body Mind Centering, Authentic Movement, Improvisation, collaboration and drawing will be at the center of our curriculum, and applied to different video assignments. These methods will help us gain bodily awareness and creativity, as well as a sensitivity for time and space: the two major elements we need to learn to control as video artists. Prepare to move, play, and perform utilizing your own body as material and subject within on-site class workshops; extreme curiosity, group participation and open-mindedness will be expected. Students applying for this course should already have some experience in filming and be self-sufficient in editing. We will also analyze works from artists and filmmakers who work with the body and autobiography as their starting point. Likewise, visiting body practitioners will be invited to host workshops within the class. The focus of this course will not be on technical video instruction. Instead, students will delve into a rigorous process and develop their own visual language that can at once analyze, criticize, and transmit visceral experiences reflecting on our existence and potential as humans in this highly digital age.
Syllabus
AH302 The Idea of the Aesthetic
Module: Aesthetics and Art Theory
Instructor: Katalin Makkai
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 15:45-17:15
“Aesthetics” and “aesthetic” are terms that are often taken for granted inside as well as outside academic discourse. We speak of aesthetic experiences and judgments and qualities, and we employ “aesthetics” to designate the study of such matters. Although their root is taken from the Greek, the now-familiar terms (in their now-familiar usages) are, however, comparatively new. They are commonly regarded as having been introduced into the philosophical lexicon in the eighteenth century—a few hundred years ago. This course studies some of the texts that were key to the discovery, or perhaps the invention, of the “aesthetic”. What work was the idea meant to do? How did its evolution retain or reconfigure its original senses and purposes? Is the idea of the aesthetic problematic, ideological, or chimerical? Do we need an idea of the aesthetic to think about art? Authors include Plato, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Edward Bullough, Clive Bell, Clement Greenberg, John Dewey, Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Susan Sontag, Noel Carroll, Alexander Nehamas, Jacques Rancière, and Yuriko Saito.
Syllabus
FA330 Politics, Practices and Theories of Contemporary Art
Module: Exhibition Culture and Public Space / Aesthetics and Art Theory
Instructor: Dorothea von Hantelmann
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Fri 14:00-17:15
Where is art situated in modern societies? Is it part of everyday life, or something apart? How did its social function evolve historically – and how is it transformed today? Are concepts such as “autonomy” and “criticality” still appropriate to describe the position and function of art in society? These are among the questions we will explore in this course, which combines the study of texts by scholars of philosophy, art theory and sociology with excursions into Berlin's art scene. In the theory part we will discuss authors such as Immanuel Kant and Theodor W. Adorno. The aim will be to understand art's double character as “autonomous” and “social fact” (Adorno). How can we comprehend this ambiguous condition that situates art simultaneously in and outside of society? How does the fact that “creativity” today has become a major social force, even a cultural imperative, challenge this position? In order to understand how politics, economy and creativity are linked in the 21st century, we will read several chapters of Andreas Reckwitz’ seminal book “The Invention of Creativity” (2019). Our discussions will be complemented by field trips to artist studios and exhibitions. As far as Covid-19 regulations allow, we will spend several sessions visiting the 11th Berlin Biennial and the exhibition “Down to Earth” at Gropius-Bau. Some of these field trips will take place on Saturdays and schedule changes may occur.
Syllabus
The following courses are cross-listed with Literature and Rhetoric
AR317 Critical Fabulation
Module: Artists, Genres, Movements
Instructor: Clio Nicastro
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 10:45-12:15
What happens when cinema tries to recover and “repair” stories that have never been entirely told – due to the lack of archival material and witnesses, or because they belong to minoritized groups, or are simply considered inexplicable? And what if, in fact, repairing does not mean to fill the gaps, to seize and freeze a past event but rather to intentionally fail in reconstructing a history of violence, injustice and domination? In the article “Venus in two acts” (2008), Saidiya Hartman wrestles with the erasure of the murders of two women on a slave ship crossing the infamous Middle Passage. With the method of “critical fabulation”, Hartman proposes a reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history in order “to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling,” to reconstruct “what could have been.” This temporality at the fictional crossroads between past and future wants to impede a cathartic experience in the spectator, pointing out how the aftermaths of that story still affect the present. By following Hartman’s research method, this course will look at films that combine different genres and styles (documentary, historical, supernatural) to challenge the unidirectional linear representation of marginalized stories and characters. We will watch and discuss, among others, Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019), Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Harun Farocki, 1991) Lazaro Felice (Alice Rohrwacher, 2019), The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer, 2015).
Syllabus
LT328 The Modernist Fringe: Writing at the Edge of Experience
Module/s: Aesthetics and Art Theory
Instructor: Ross Shields
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 14:00-17:15
In 1892, William James defines the psychic fringe as a “halo of relations” surrounding any definite mental image or thought and associating it with others. Although we are not generally aware of this fringe, it directs the stream of our consciousness and supposedly plays an essential role in both religious and aesthetic experience. This seminar will pursue James’s insight by examining seminal texts of literary modernism against the background of contemporaneous psycho-physiological, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic theories of the fringe. On the one hand, we will interrogate scientific and philosophical concepts of perception and association, focusing on the limits of discursive thought and its pre/un-conscious other. On the other hand, we will consider literary explorations of the fringe, reflecting on the strategies used by the modernists to articulate the ineffable. We will ask: How does literary experience inform theoretical concepts of the psychic fringe? To what extent do these ‘fringe theories’ in turn condition and regulate literary production? Does literature succeed in showing what science cannot say? What is it that emerges in the particular encounters between theorist and authors at the turn of the century?
Texts by Proust, Musil, H. James, Wolff, Valéry, Stein, Kafka, Hofmannsthal, Rilke; Bergson, Husserl, Helmholtz, Mach, W. James, Freud, Benjamin, Whitehead, Wittgenstein. Readings by Adorno, Dewey, Greenberg, Eisenstein, H.D., Kandinsky, Klee, Kulbin, Picasso, Pound, Schönberg, Stein, Valéry, Webern, etc.
Syllabus
+ Economics Advanced Modules
EC212 Experimental Economics
Modules: Behavioral Economics
Instructor: Israel Waichman
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 10:45-12:15
Experimental economics is the application of experimental methods to economic questions. Experiments are used in economics to test the descriptiveness of economic models, to study behaviour in cases where theory provides ambiguous predictions (or no predictions), and also to test economic policies. The course aims at introducing experimental economics and its various applications in economics. We will conduct some of the experiments in the classroom, providing the participants in the course with first-hand experience of the economic situations that are being thought. The course consists of three parts: In the first part: “the methodology of experimental economics,” we introduce experimental economics. We discuss the merits (and limits) of experiments, and the principles of conducting and analyzing an experiment. In the second part “Applications: Influential experiments in economics”, we survey some of the seminal research in experimental (and behavioral) economics (e.g. market experiments, bargaining experiments, biases and heuristics under uncertainty, public good games, etc.). In the third (short) part, students will present their own small pilot studies. This will be done in pairs.
Syllabus
EC310 Global Economics
Module: Global Economic Systems
Instructor: Marcus Giamattei
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue 14:00-15:30 & Wed17:30-19:00
Dealing with advanced topics of macroeconomics, such as trade and financial aspects of open economic systems, this course addresses real flows of goods in international trade as well as the flow of assets and liabilities in international financial markets. Key theories of trade are discussed and evaluated along with the role played by money, credit, and banking within modern economies. The course analyses the role of exchange rate systems and the balance of payments. It provides students with a unified model to evaluate fiscal and monetary policy within an international framework to enable an economic discussion of current international problems.
Syllabus
The following course is cross-listed with Advanced Politics:
EC320 Econometrics
Module: Econometrics
Instructor: Martin Binder
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 14:00-15:30
Economics is in many ways an applied science deeply anchored in real-world phenomena that can be measured and quantified. In order to answer important quantitative questions, the economist needs to collect data and assess the empirical relationships between objects of interest. Since much economic data is observational, a main task of the econometrician is trying to find out whether events that are correlated also stand in causal relationship with each other and in what order of priority. In order to answer such questions, the economist needs the toolkit of multivariate regression analysis as well as a number of sophisticated techniques that expand on the simple linear regression model (time series and panel data models, vector-autoregressive models, non- and semiparametric econometric techniques, and various methods to assess the degree to which such models fit). This course expands on the basic statistics course by applying and developing core statistical notions within an economic context. It develops literacy in applied economics, and capacity to assess claims made in that field through critique of methods of econometric analysis. The course will introduce students to the statistical software package R, which will be used to analyze data applying the methods learned.
Syllabus
Modules: Behavioral Economics
Instructor: Israel Waichman
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 10:45-12:15
Experimental economics is the application of experimental methods to economic questions. Experiments are used in economics to test the descriptiveness of economic models, to study behaviour in cases where theory provides ambiguous predictions (or no predictions), and also to test economic policies. The course aims at introducing experimental economics and its various applications in economics. We will conduct some of the experiments in the classroom, providing the participants in the course with first-hand experience of the economic situations that are being thought. The course consists of three parts: In the first part: “the methodology of experimental economics,” we introduce experimental economics. We discuss the merits (and limits) of experiments, and the principles of conducting and analyzing an experiment. In the second part “Applications: Influential experiments in economics”, we survey some of the seminal research in experimental (and behavioral) economics (e.g. market experiments, bargaining experiments, biases and heuristics under uncertainty, public good games, etc.). In the third (short) part, students will present their own small pilot studies. This will be done in pairs.
Syllabus
EC310 Global Economics
Module: Global Economic Systems
Instructor: Marcus Giamattei
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue 14:00-15:30 & Wed17:30-19:00
Dealing with advanced topics of macroeconomics, such as trade and financial aspects of open economic systems, this course addresses real flows of goods in international trade as well as the flow of assets and liabilities in international financial markets. Key theories of trade are discussed and evaluated along with the role played by money, credit, and banking within modern economies. The course analyses the role of exchange rate systems and the balance of payments. It provides students with a unified model to evaluate fiscal and monetary policy within an international framework to enable an economic discussion of current international problems.
Syllabus
The following course is cross-listed with Advanced Politics:
EC320 Econometrics
Module: Econometrics
Instructor: Martin Binder
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 14:00-15:30
Economics is in many ways an applied science deeply anchored in real-world phenomena that can be measured and quantified. In order to answer important quantitative questions, the economist needs to collect data and assess the empirical relationships between objects of interest. Since much economic data is observational, a main task of the econometrician is trying to find out whether events that are correlated also stand in causal relationship with each other and in what order of priority. In order to answer such questions, the economist needs the toolkit of multivariate regression analysis as well as a number of sophisticated techniques that expand on the simple linear regression model (time series and panel data models, vector-autoregressive models, non- and semiparametric econometric techniques, and various methods to assess the degree to which such models fit). This course expands on the basic statistics course by applying and developing core statistical notions within an economic context. It develops literacy in applied economics, and capacity to assess claims made in that field through critique of methods of econometric analysis. The course will introduce students to the statistical software package R, which will be used to analyze data applying the methods learned.
Syllabus
+ Ethics and Politics Advanced Modules
All courses are cross-listed with Politics
PL290 Philosophy Versus God
Module: Movements and Thinkers /Law, Politics and Society
Instructor: Jeffrey Champlin
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Fri 9:00-12:15
Since the 18th century, European philosophy has enacted a sustained critique of religion largely aimed at freeing humanity from irrational intellectual dogma and unquestioned moral authority. This course engages major challenges to religion with a view to comprehending the alternative modes of thinking that emerge, and carefully tracking the religious concepts that are transformed or (supposedly) discarded in each philosophical revision. Attention to contemporary insights from evolutionary biology (regarding the emergence of the ability to create symbols and the growth of cities) and aesthetics (use of narrative, personification, metaphor) aim to question the assumptions of the secularization hypothesis that sees only a gradual rationalization of thinking in the critique of God. Authors include Hume, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Arendt, and Derrida.
Syllabus
PL318 The Thought of Martin Heidegger
Module: Movements and Thinkers
Instructor: Tracy Colony
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 17:30-19:00
This advanced course addresses the thought of Martin Heidegger, its distinctive phases, and its influence on and interpretation within philosophy today. We begin by examining Heidegger’s early radicalization of Husserlian phenomenology and his turn to ontology. We will then read sections of Heidegger’s seminal Being and Time (1927) and trace Heidegger’s transition toward the preoccupations of his later works. With an eye to articulating the development of Heidegger’s thought, we will engage in close readings of: The Origin of the Work of Art (1936), Letter on Humanism (1947) and The Question Concerning Technology (1954). We will conclude with selections from Heidegger’s later period. Against the background of this chronological introduction we will also read important secondary texts on Heidegger’s work and present crucial aspects of Heidegger’s reception in Germany and France. As part of this course we will also confront the important question of the relation of Heidegger to National Socialism in light of key texts from that period and the only recently available Ponderings or Black Notebooks (1931-1938). All texts and discussion will be in English, however, simultaneous readings of Heidegger in the original German will be encouraged and supported.
Syllabus
SO283 Urban Sounds and Migration
Module: Global Social Theory / Movements and Thinkers
Instructor: Agata Lisiak
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 9:00-12:15
The dominant mode of apprehending society has been identified with seeing (Bull & Back 2003) and looking (Berger 1974), but everyday life is experienced in multisensory ways and so human experience can only be accounted for through what Joachim-Ernst Berendt called “a democracy of the senses”. While the visual continues to dominate the study of migration and cities, this class encourages students to listen – “with depth and humility” (Bull & Back 2003) – to the sounds of urban worlds. As migration contributes to linguistic diversity in contemporary cities, certain sounds and languages tend to be singled out as foreign and, as such, puzzling, threatening, unwanted. In the current political atmosphere, with the prevalent fear-mongering rhetoric against everything and everyone that seems foreign, critical engagement with urban sounds is not only academically exciting, it is politically urgent. The class aims at deepening students’ understanding of social experiences of migration and diversity in urban contexts and developing ways of addressing and countering exclusionary practices where they occur. Through a series of workshops, off-campus excursions, and guest lectures, students will familiarize themselves with a range of methods including sensory ethnography, sound walks, sonic mappings, and sound-artist interventions.
Syllabus
PT305 Colonization and Democracy: The Case of Algeria
Module: Movements and Thinkers
Instructor: Ewa Atanassow
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 10:45-12:15
How did the colonial empires of the past two centuries impact the peoples over whom they ruled? What is the relation between (de)colonization and democratization? What were the ethical and political stakes of the anti-colonial movements? What kind of social and political alternatives did post-colonial societies face in the past, and continue to face in the present?
In this course we will explore these analytical and historical questions by closely examining the case of Algeria whose colonial experience and war of independence against France is often considered as a paradigmatic example of a modern anti-colonial struggle. We will study the Algerian case through multiple lenses: history, politics, literature, and film; and by critically engaging with thinkers, writers, and artists who themselves critically engaged with these questions, and elaborated conceptual frameworks and practical avenues for addressing them. Readings/viewings will include works by Abd al-Kader, Tocqueville, Marx, Fanon, Camus, Daoud, Derrida, Walzer, Pontecorvo.
Syllabus
PT316 From the Ivory Tower to the Executive: Helping the German government build the post-Corona society
Module: Law, Politics and Society
Instructor: Timo Lochocki
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 9:00-12:15
The advent and wider consequences of the “Corona virus” have the potential to alter the dynamics of international cooperation and the socio-economic arrangements of liberal democracies. According to one view, the virus calls for more international cooperation and a much stronger role for the welfare state. However, this perspective diverges from the populist neo-nationalism that has recently been electorally successful in the US and the UK. In this setting, the centrist governments of Western Europe – led by France and Germany – must square a circle: They want to win back voters attracted by a neo-nationalist agenda, while at the same time safeguarding a culture of international cooperation crucial to their own interests. They also need to update their wealth redistribution policies in the face of skepticism from some voters about an expansion of the welfare state. This course will try to develop a possible solution to this paradox, focusing on Germany as a case study. After addressing the influence of populist attitudes on foreign policy and the impact of the Corona virus on liberal democracies, we will try to craft policy recommendations for the German government. Ideally, students will already have a fundamental knowledge of Germany's history and social structure, and of its financial and political systems.
Syllabus
PS306 The European Union: Its Institutions, Laws, and Citizens
Module: Law, Politics and Society
Instructor: Berit Ebert
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Fri 10:45-12:15
Brexit, the rise of populist movements, and a growing suspicion towards international organizations do not seem to offer a promising future for the European Union. However, the concept of supranationality in the European Union represents is a unique one in the history of international collaboration and was developed with clear goals by the founding members. This course will examine this early context of the former European Community for Steel and Coal – the forerunner of the Union – and the bloc’s painstaking integration. It will also analyze the institutions that have developed over the more than 70-year history and major cases tried in the European Court of Justice that have shaped the Union’s political advancements. We will discuss the European Union’s “democracy deficit” and delve into slightly more theoretical deliberations by looking at political processes, including the recent European electoral-law reform, as well as court cases, which will give an insight into how the European Union’s citizens used—or tried to use—established mechanisms to advocate for their interests. Finally, the course will provide an understanding of the Union’s characteristics in comparison with those of the nation-state and of traditional international organizations, enabling clearer judgement regarding the future of the European project.
Syllabus
PL376 Medieval Conceptions of Happiness
Module: Movements and Thinkers
Instructor: Tracy Wietecha, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 9:00-10:30
Happiness is often defined as a chief goal of human life, or as a state that can be achieved when striving for external affirmation is relinquished. A look at past traditions of thought on the subject reveals a diversity that goes far beyond contemporary conceptions, while also giving us an insight into their origin and development. This course explores Medieval conceptions of happiness as found in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian thinkers, such as al- Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Tufail, Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas. We examine the sources used by these authors, especially the influence of Ancient Greek philosophy, as well as the other concepts and values that played a role in their conclusions. Our aim will be to determine the degrees of continuity and difference between contemporary ideas of happiness and their medieval antecedents.
Syllabus
PT358 Critical Human Rights and Humanitarian Advocacy/ Scholars At Risk
Module: Civic Engagement and Social Justice
Instructor: Kerry Bystrom
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 15:45-17:15
Scholars, students, and other researchers around the world are routinely threatened, jailed, or punished. Sometimes they are simply trapped in a dangerous place, while in other cases they are deliberately targeted because of their identity or their work. Academic freedom, or freedom of thought and inquiry, is usually considered a basic human right, but its definition and content is essentially contested. This seminar will explore the idea of academic freedom by examining - and attempting to intervene in - situations where it is threatened. In conjunction with the human rights organization Scholars at Risk, we will investigate the cases of scholars currently living under threat and develop projects aimed at releasing them from detention or securing refuge for them. This will involve direct hands-on advocacy work with SAR, taking public positions and creating smart and effective advocacy campaigns for specific endangered students, teachers, and researchers. In order not to do this naively or uncritically, our action-oriented work will be paired throughout the semester with critical reflection on human rights and humanitarian advocacy more generally. Through readings about the historical rise of human rights and humanitarianism as paradigms for creating a better world--as well as the pitfalls of these paradigms--and by engaging with texts that outline the ethical and practical challenges of doing advocacy, we will together work towards creating an intellectual framework that allows us to be more attentive, deliberate and effective advocates for social change.
Syllabus
The following courses are cross-listed with Literature and Rhetoric:
PL355 Stories of Conversion
Module: Movements and Thinkers/Law, Politics and Society
Instructor: Alberto Tiburcio, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue 15:45-19:00
This course focuses on a crucially important genre in the history of religion, namely stories or accounts of conversion. Our context will be the Early Modern Islamic and European world. We begin by examining early Muslim-Christian encounters and the history of these two religions’ mutual knowledge and awareness of each other’s scriptural tradition. Then we look at the reasons for the rise and the significance of the trope of conversion. Indispensable background for considering this trope is the debate on whether Islam in the Ottoman Empire underwent a comparable process of division into distinct confessional groups to that of Western Christian society. An equally relevant issue for our subject is the spread of the teaching of Middle Eastern languages in European universities as part of the conversion efforts of the Roman church. Finally, we look at the rhetorical framework for the trope of conversion: the religious polemics that proliferated in this period and the modes of expression they used.
Syllabus
PT320 Discussing Deutschland: What Germans Are Talking About Today (in German)
Module: Law, Politics and Society / Civic Engagement and Social Justice
Instructor: Michael Thomas Taylor
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Thu 14:00-17:15
This course examines the interconnections between today’s most pressing concerns in the German public discourse with organizations and institutions dedicated to actively intervening in and shaping social issues. We combine investigations of the crisis of democracy debates in German media and current research with visits to sites of civil society activism and community organizations as they have developed in past and present East and West Germany. And we engage with the topic of cultural pluralism in light of recent social, political, and religious tensions related to migration, not only in the seminar room but also through visits to local groups invested in contributing to resolving these tensions through various initiatives. Navigating a wide range of platforms for news and discussion, we look at how modern social media promotes civil movements from the political left and right, and ask what this pluralization of forms of communication means for Germany’s established public-media services. In addition to the study of current public debates and forms of civic engagement, the purpose of this course is to refine and advance your ability to articulate yourself verbally and in writing through constant vocabulary building. Students taking the class should have a B2 proficiency level.
Syllabus
PL290 Philosophy Versus God
Module: Movements and Thinkers /Law, Politics and Society
Instructor: Jeffrey Champlin
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Fri 9:00-12:15
Since the 18th century, European philosophy has enacted a sustained critique of religion largely aimed at freeing humanity from irrational intellectual dogma and unquestioned moral authority. This course engages major challenges to religion with a view to comprehending the alternative modes of thinking that emerge, and carefully tracking the religious concepts that are transformed or (supposedly) discarded in each philosophical revision. Attention to contemporary insights from evolutionary biology (regarding the emergence of the ability to create symbols and the growth of cities) and aesthetics (use of narrative, personification, metaphor) aim to question the assumptions of the secularization hypothesis that sees only a gradual rationalization of thinking in the critique of God. Authors include Hume, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Arendt, and Derrida.
Syllabus
PL318 The Thought of Martin Heidegger
Module: Movements and Thinkers
Instructor: Tracy Colony
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 17:30-19:00
This advanced course addresses the thought of Martin Heidegger, its distinctive phases, and its influence on and interpretation within philosophy today. We begin by examining Heidegger’s early radicalization of Husserlian phenomenology and his turn to ontology. We will then read sections of Heidegger’s seminal Being and Time (1927) and trace Heidegger’s transition toward the preoccupations of his later works. With an eye to articulating the development of Heidegger’s thought, we will engage in close readings of: The Origin of the Work of Art (1936), Letter on Humanism (1947) and The Question Concerning Technology (1954). We will conclude with selections from Heidegger’s later period. Against the background of this chronological introduction we will also read important secondary texts on Heidegger’s work and present crucial aspects of Heidegger’s reception in Germany and France. As part of this course we will also confront the important question of the relation of Heidegger to National Socialism in light of key texts from that period and the only recently available Ponderings or Black Notebooks (1931-1938). All texts and discussion will be in English, however, simultaneous readings of Heidegger in the original German will be encouraged and supported.
Syllabus
SO283 Urban Sounds and Migration
Module: Global Social Theory / Movements and Thinkers
Instructor: Agata Lisiak
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 9:00-12:15
The dominant mode of apprehending society has been identified with seeing (Bull & Back 2003) and looking (Berger 1974), but everyday life is experienced in multisensory ways and so human experience can only be accounted for through what Joachim-Ernst Berendt called “a democracy of the senses”. While the visual continues to dominate the study of migration and cities, this class encourages students to listen – “with depth and humility” (Bull & Back 2003) – to the sounds of urban worlds. As migration contributes to linguistic diversity in contemporary cities, certain sounds and languages tend to be singled out as foreign and, as such, puzzling, threatening, unwanted. In the current political atmosphere, with the prevalent fear-mongering rhetoric against everything and everyone that seems foreign, critical engagement with urban sounds is not only academically exciting, it is politically urgent. The class aims at deepening students’ understanding of social experiences of migration and diversity in urban contexts and developing ways of addressing and countering exclusionary practices where they occur. Through a series of workshops, off-campus excursions, and guest lectures, students will familiarize themselves with a range of methods including sensory ethnography, sound walks, sonic mappings, and sound-artist interventions.
Syllabus
PT305 Colonization and Democracy: The Case of Algeria
Module: Movements and Thinkers
Instructor: Ewa Atanassow
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 10:45-12:15
How did the colonial empires of the past two centuries impact the peoples over whom they ruled? What is the relation between (de)colonization and democratization? What were the ethical and political stakes of the anti-colonial movements? What kind of social and political alternatives did post-colonial societies face in the past, and continue to face in the present?
In this course we will explore these analytical and historical questions by closely examining the case of Algeria whose colonial experience and war of independence against France is often considered as a paradigmatic example of a modern anti-colonial struggle. We will study the Algerian case through multiple lenses: history, politics, literature, and film; and by critically engaging with thinkers, writers, and artists who themselves critically engaged with these questions, and elaborated conceptual frameworks and practical avenues for addressing them. Readings/viewings will include works by Abd al-Kader, Tocqueville, Marx, Fanon, Camus, Daoud, Derrida, Walzer, Pontecorvo.
Syllabus
PT316 From the Ivory Tower to the Executive: Helping the German government build the post-Corona society
Module: Law, Politics and Society
Instructor: Timo Lochocki
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 9:00-12:15
The advent and wider consequences of the “Corona virus” have the potential to alter the dynamics of international cooperation and the socio-economic arrangements of liberal democracies. According to one view, the virus calls for more international cooperation and a much stronger role for the welfare state. However, this perspective diverges from the populist neo-nationalism that has recently been electorally successful in the US and the UK. In this setting, the centrist governments of Western Europe – led by France and Germany – must square a circle: They want to win back voters attracted by a neo-nationalist agenda, while at the same time safeguarding a culture of international cooperation crucial to their own interests. They also need to update their wealth redistribution policies in the face of skepticism from some voters about an expansion of the welfare state. This course will try to develop a possible solution to this paradox, focusing on Germany as a case study. After addressing the influence of populist attitudes on foreign policy and the impact of the Corona virus on liberal democracies, we will try to craft policy recommendations for the German government. Ideally, students will already have a fundamental knowledge of Germany's history and social structure, and of its financial and political systems.
Syllabus
PS306 The European Union: Its Institutions, Laws, and Citizens
Module: Law, Politics and Society
Instructor: Berit Ebert
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Fri 10:45-12:15
Brexit, the rise of populist movements, and a growing suspicion towards international organizations do not seem to offer a promising future for the European Union. However, the concept of supranationality in the European Union represents is a unique one in the history of international collaboration and was developed with clear goals by the founding members. This course will examine this early context of the former European Community for Steel and Coal – the forerunner of the Union – and the bloc’s painstaking integration. It will also analyze the institutions that have developed over the more than 70-year history and major cases tried in the European Court of Justice that have shaped the Union’s political advancements. We will discuss the European Union’s “democracy deficit” and delve into slightly more theoretical deliberations by looking at political processes, including the recent European electoral-law reform, as well as court cases, which will give an insight into how the European Union’s citizens used—or tried to use—established mechanisms to advocate for their interests. Finally, the course will provide an understanding of the Union’s characteristics in comparison with those of the nation-state and of traditional international organizations, enabling clearer judgement regarding the future of the European project.
Syllabus
PL376 Medieval Conceptions of Happiness
Module: Movements and Thinkers
Instructor: Tracy Wietecha, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 9:00-10:30
Happiness is often defined as a chief goal of human life, or as a state that can be achieved when striving for external affirmation is relinquished. A look at past traditions of thought on the subject reveals a diversity that goes far beyond contemporary conceptions, while also giving us an insight into their origin and development. This course explores Medieval conceptions of happiness as found in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian thinkers, such as al- Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Tufail, Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas. We examine the sources used by these authors, especially the influence of Ancient Greek philosophy, as well as the other concepts and values that played a role in their conclusions. Our aim will be to determine the degrees of continuity and difference between contemporary ideas of happiness and their medieval antecedents.
Syllabus
PT358 Critical Human Rights and Humanitarian Advocacy/ Scholars At Risk
Module: Civic Engagement and Social Justice
Instructor: Kerry Bystrom
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 15:45-17:15
Scholars, students, and other researchers around the world are routinely threatened, jailed, or punished. Sometimes they are simply trapped in a dangerous place, while in other cases they are deliberately targeted because of their identity or their work. Academic freedom, or freedom of thought and inquiry, is usually considered a basic human right, but its definition and content is essentially contested. This seminar will explore the idea of academic freedom by examining - and attempting to intervene in - situations where it is threatened. In conjunction with the human rights organization Scholars at Risk, we will investigate the cases of scholars currently living under threat and develop projects aimed at releasing them from detention or securing refuge for them. This will involve direct hands-on advocacy work with SAR, taking public positions and creating smart and effective advocacy campaigns for specific endangered students, teachers, and researchers. In order not to do this naively or uncritically, our action-oriented work will be paired throughout the semester with critical reflection on human rights and humanitarian advocacy more generally. Through readings about the historical rise of human rights and humanitarianism as paradigms for creating a better world--as well as the pitfalls of these paradigms--and by engaging with texts that outline the ethical and practical challenges of doing advocacy, we will together work towards creating an intellectual framework that allows us to be more attentive, deliberate and effective advocates for social change.
Syllabus
The following courses are cross-listed with Literature and Rhetoric:
PL355 Stories of Conversion
Module: Movements and Thinkers/Law, Politics and Society
Instructor: Alberto Tiburcio, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue 15:45-19:00
This course focuses on a crucially important genre in the history of religion, namely stories or accounts of conversion. Our context will be the Early Modern Islamic and European world. We begin by examining early Muslim-Christian encounters and the history of these two religions’ mutual knowledge and awareness of each other’s scriptural tradition. Then we look at the reasons for the rise and the significance of the trope of conversion. Indispensable background for considering this trope is the debate on whether Islam in the Ottoman Empire underwent a comparable process of division into distinct confessional groups to that of Western Christian society. An equally relevant issue for our subject is the spread of the teaching of Middle Eastern languages in European universities as part of the conversion efforts of the Roman church. Finally, we look at the rhetorical framework for the trope of conversion: the religious polemics that proliferated in this period and the modes of expression they used.
Syllabus
PT320 Discussing Deutschland: What Germans Are Talking About Today (in German)
Module: Law, Politics and Society / Civic Engagement and Social Justice
Instructor: Michael Thomas Taylor
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Thu 14:00-17:15
This course examines the interconnections between today’s most pressing concerns in the German public discourse with organizations and institutions dedicated to actively intervening in and shaping social issues. We combine investigations of the crisis of democracy debates in German media and current research with visits to sites of civil society activism and community organizations as they have developed in past and present East and West Germany. And we engage with the topic of cultural pluralism in light of recent social, political, and religious tensions related to migration, not only in the seminar room but also through visits to local groups invested in contributing to resolving these tensions through various initiatives. Navigating a wide range of platforms for news and discussion, we look at how modern social media promotes civil movements from the political left and right, and ask what this pluralization of forms of communication means for Germany’s established public-media services. In addition to the study of current public debates and forms of civic engagement, the purpose of this course is to refine and advance your ability to articulate yourself verbally and in writing through constant vocabulary building. Students taking the class should have a B2 proficiency level.
Syllabus
+ Literature and Rhetoric Advanced Modules
LT326 Advanced Fiction Writing Workshop
Module: Producing Literature / Writer and World
Instructor: Clare Wigfall
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Fri 12:30-15:45
With over fifteen years experience of teaching creative writing, British author Clare Wigfall has developed a method that aims to break down the barriers that inhibit so that the creative process can come naturally. Under her gentle guidance, you will develop a body of new work, learning craft organically through practice and exposure to great writing. The carefully-structured workshops are a springboard, designed to stimulate ideas and encourage experimentation; one or two might even move off campus – how might a museum prove a source of inspiration, for example? A park? The city we live in? Focus will be given to new genres you might not yet have considered, such as fantasy, or magic realism, or how you might weave myths and legends into your work. Also explored will be the subject of how our own experience can shape our fiction, while also considering the issue of how writing fiction can give us scope to imagine places and experiences we’ve never lived in our own lives. You have already begun to develop a voice that is uniquely your own, and will take this further now with opportunities to share your work with a group of fellow writers who you can trust to give you invaluable critique. Alongside this, the reading element of this course will be key; from writers such as Toni Morrison, to Sally Rooney, to Neil Gaiman, the selected reading will cast the net wide to throw you in to the literary sea. With a proven track record of inspiring her students to produce award-winning, publishable writing, Clare will talk with you about how to submit work to literary journals – the class may even produce a journal of its own – plus, there’ll be a chance to share new work with the world with a public reading. Open to students who have already taken an introductory fiction workshop, as well as new students with some writing experience under their belt, you are very welcome to make contact with Clare before registration to introduce yourself and ask any questions.
Syllabus
LT323 African Narratives of Migration: from Colonialism to Globalization
Module: Literary Movements and Forms / Writer and World
Instructor: Fatin Abbas
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue 14:00-17:15
This course examines African narratives of migration, exploring literary engagements beginning in the early/mid-20th century to the present day. The course will consider the ways in which African writers have inscribed the migrant experience in relation to the historical processes of colonialism and globalization. We will first examine the links between migration and colonialism in the early work of African writers such as Léopold Senghor, Tayeb Salih and Ama Ata Aidoo. We will then go on to consider new migrant literatures within the context of globalization, tracing how the theme of migration is revised and re-constituted under new global conditions (which nonetheless hark back to colonialism) in the texts of contemporary African writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, Dinaw Mengistu and Shailja Patel, among others. Finally, we will engage with and critically explore key concepts—such as “Pan-Africanism” and “Afropolitanism”—that are central to debates around contemporary African migration. The course will pay special attention to the ways in which gender, class, ethnicity and race inform representations of the African migrant experience in the works under consideration. By the end of the semester, students will have a deeper grasp of the constitution and evolution of this theme in the African literary canon, as well as related historical processes.
Syllabus
AR317 Critical Fabulation
Module: Theories of Literature and Culture / Writer and World
Instructor: Clio Nicastro
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 10:45-12:15
What happens when cinema tries to recover and “repair” stories that have never been entirely told – due to the lack of archival material and witnesses, or because they belong to minoritized groups, or are simply considered inexplicable? And what if, in fact, repairing does not mean to fill the gaps, to seize and freeze a past event but rather to intentionally fail in reconstructing a history of violence, injustice and domination? In the article “Venus in two acts” (2008), Saidiya Hartman wrestles with the erasure of the murders of two women on a slave ship crossing the infamous Middle Passage. With the method of “critical fabulation”, Hartman proposes a reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history in order “to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling,” to reconstruct “what could have been.” This temporality at the fictional crossroads between past and future wants to impede a cathartic experience in the spectator, pointing out how the aftermaths of that story still affect the present. By following Hartman’s research method, this course will look at films that combine different genres and styles (documentary, historical, supernatural) to challenge the unidirectional linear representation of marginalized stories and characters. We will watch and discuss, among others, Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019), Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Harun Farocki, 1991) Lazaro Felice (Alice Rohrwacher, 2019), The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer, 2015).
Syllabus
LT329 The Writing Life
Module: Writer and World / Producing Literature
Instructor: Martin Widmann
Credits: 8 ECTS Credits, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 17:30-19:00
This course is designed for students who are interested in the various and multiple intersections of literary studies, creative writing and the publishing world. To find out how the literary scene works and develops in Berlin and elsewhere, we will examine lines of tradition and at current trends in German writing, both literary and other. Students will learn to engage with literature beyond the page by exploring questions such as: how do manuscripts get published and/or become books? What role do journals and magazines play, both corporate and independent, in the literary scene? How do writers make a living and what are the functions of literary awards, fellowships etc.? Where do the German and international literary communities interact? And how do writers and publishers respond to the challenges of the digital era? Areas to be covered by the reading material include translation, non-fiction, graphic novel, audiobooks and the book market. In addition to seminar discussions there will be field trips to literary institutions, publishing houses, magazines and events, such as readings and talks during the internationales literaturfestival berlin (ilb) in September. Guest speakers will include professionals from the world of publishing: editors, translators, journalists and writers.
NB: Reading material and discussions will be both in German and English; students should therefore have B2 level competence of German.
Syllabus
PL355 Stories of Conversion
Module: Writer and World / Literary Movements and Forms
Instructor: Alberto Tiburcio, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue 15:45-19:00
This course focuses on a crucially important genre in the history of religion, namely stories or accounts of conversion. Our context will be the Early Modern Islamic and European world. We begin by examining early Muslim-Christian encounters and the history of these two religions’ mutual knowledge and awareness of each other’s scriptural tradition. Then we look at the reasons for the rise and the significance of the trope of conversion. Indispensable background for considering this trope is the debate on whether Islam in the Ottoman Empire underwent a comparable process of division into distinct confessional groups to that of Western Christian society. An equally relevant issue for our subject is the spread of the teaching of Middle Eastern languages in European universities as part of the conversion efforts of the Roman church. Finally, we look at the rhetorical framework for the trope of conversion: the religious polemics that proliferated in this period and the modes of expression they used.
Syllabus
PT320 Discussing Deutschland: What Germans Are Talking About Today (in German)
Module: Writer and World / Literary Movements and Forms
Instructor: Michael Thomas Taylor
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Th 14:00-17:15
This course examines the interconnections between today’s most pressing concerns in the German public discourse with organizations and institutions dedicated to actively intervening in and shaping social issues. We combine investigations of the crisis of democracy debates in German media and current research with visits to sites of civil society activism and community organizations as they have developed in past and present East and West Germany. And we engage with the topic of cultural pluralism in light of recent social, political, and religious tensions related to migration, not only in the seminar room but also through visits to local groups invested in contributing to resolving these tensions through various initiatives. Navigating a wide range of platforms for news and discussion, we look at how modern social media promotes civil movements from the political left and right, and ask what this pluralization of forms of communication means for Germany’s established public-media services. In addition to the study of current public debates and forms of civic engagement, the purpose of this course is to refine and advance your ability to articulate yourself verbally and in writing through constant vocabulary building. Students taking the class should have a B2 proficiency level.
Syllabus
The following course is cross-listed as an Arts and Aesthetics advanced module.
LT328 The Modernist Fringe: Writing at the Edge of Experience
Module/s: Theories of Literature and Culture / Writer and World
Instructor: Ross Shields
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 14:00-17:15
In 1892, William James defines the psychic fringe as a “halo of relations” surrounding any definite mental image or thought and associating it with others. Although we are not generally aware of this fringe, it directs the stream of our consciousness and supposedly plays an essential role in both religious and aesthetic experience. This seminar will pursue James’s insight by examining seminal texts of literary modernism against the background of contemporaneous psycho-physiological, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic theories of the fringe. On the one hand, we will interrogate scientific and philosophical concepts of perception and association, focusing on the limits of discursive thought and its pre/un-conscious other. On the other hand, we will consider literary explorations of the fringe, reflecting on the strategies used by the modernists to articulate the ineffable. We will ask: How does literary experience inform theoretical concepts of the psychic fringe? To what extent do these ‘fringe theories’ in turn condition and regulate literary production? Does literature succeed in showing what science cannot say? What is it that emerges in the particular encounters between theorist and authors at the turn of the century?
Texts by Proust, Musil, H. James, Wolff, Valéry, Stein, Kafka, Hofmannsthal, Rilke; Bergson, Husserl, Helmholtz, Mach, W. James, Freud, Benjamin, Whitehead, Wittgenstein. Readings by Adorno, Dewey, Greenberg, Eisenstein, H.D., Kandinsky, Klee, Kulbin, Picasso, Pound, Schönberg, Stein, Valéry, Webern, etc.
Syllabus
Module: Producing Literature / Writer and World
Instructor: Clare Wigfall
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Fri 12:30-15:45
With over fifteen years experience of teaching creative writing, British author Clare Wigfall has developed a method that aims to break down the barriers that inhibit so that the creative process can come naturally. Under her gentle guidance, you will develop a body of new work, learning craft organically through practice and exposure to great writing. The carefully-structured workshops are a springboard, designed to stimulate ideas and encourage experimentation; one or two might even move off campus – how might a museum prove a source of inspiration, for example? A park? The city we live in? Focus will be given to new genres you might not yet have considered, such as fantasy, or magic realism, or how you might weave myths and legends into your work. Also explored will be the subject of how our own experience can shape our fiction, while also considering the issue of how writing fiction can give us scope to imagine places and experiences we’ve never lived in our own lives. You have already begun to develop a voice that is uniquely your own, and will take this further now with opportunities to share your work with a group of fellow writers who you can trust to give you invaluable critique. Alongside this, the reading element of this course will be key; from writers such as Toni Morrison, to Sally Rooney, to Neil Gaiman, the selected reading will cast the net wide to throw you in to the literary sea. With a proven track record of inspiring her students to produce award-winning, publishable writing, Clare will talk with you about how to submit work to literary journals – the class may even produce a journal of its own – plus, there’ll be a chance to share new work with the world with a public reading. Open to students who have already taken an introductory fiction workshop, as well as new students with some writing experience under their belt, you are very welcome to make contact with Clare before registration to introduce yourself and ask any questions.
Syllabus
LT323 African Narratives of Migration: from Colonialism to Globalization
Module: Literary Movements and Forms / Writer and World
Instructor: Fatin Abbas
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue 14:00-17:15
This course examines African narratives of migration, exploring literary engagements beginning in the early/mid-20th century to the present day. The course will consider the ways in which African writers have inscribed the migrant experience in relation to the historical processes of colonialism and globalization. We will first examine the links between migration and colonialism in the early work of African writers such as Léopold Senghor, Tayeb Salih and Ama Ata Aidoo. We will then go on to consider new migrant literatures within the context of globalization, tracing how the theme of migration is revised and re-constituted under new global conditions (which nonetheless hark back to colonialism) in the texts of contemporary African writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, Dinaw Mengistu and Shailja Patel, among others. Finally, we will engage with and critically explore key concepts—such as “Pan-Africanism” and “Afropolitanism”—that are central to debates around contemporary African migration. The course will pay special attention to the ways in which gender, class, ethnicity and race inform representations of the African migrant experience in the works under consideration. By the end of the semester, students will have a deeper grasp of the constitution and evolution of this theme in the African literary canon, as well as related historical processes.
Syllabus
AR317 Critical Fabulation
Module: Theories of Literature and Culture / Writer and World
Instructor: Clio Nicastro
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 10:45-12:15
What happens when cinema tries to recover and “repair” stories that have never been entirely told – due to the lack of archival material and witnesses, or because they belong to minoritized groups, or are simply considered inexplicable? And what if, in fact, repairing does not mean to fill the gaps, to seize and freeze a past event but rather to intentionally fail in reconstructing a history of violence, injustice and domination? In the article “Venus in two acts” (2008), Saidiya Hartman wrestles with the erasure of the murders of two women on a slave ship crossing the infamous Middle Passage. With the method of “critical fabulation”, Hartman proposes a reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history in order “to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling,” to reconstruct “what could have been.” This temporality at the fictional crossroads between past and future wants to impede a cathartic experience in the spectator, pointing out how the aftermaths of that story still affect the present. By following Hartman’s research method, this course will look at films that combine different genres and styles (documentary, historical, supernatural) to challenge the unidirectional linear representation of marginalized stories and characters. We will watch and discuss, among others, Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019), Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Harun Farocki, 1991) Lazaro Felice (Alice Rohrwacher, 2019), The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer, 2015).
Syllabus
LT329 The Writing Life
Module: Writer and World / Producing Literature
Instructor: Martin Widmann
Credits: 8 ECTS Credits, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 17:30-19:00
This course is designed for students who are interested in the various and multiple intersections of literary studies, creative writing and the publishing world. To find out how the literary scene works and develops in Berlin and elsewhere, we will examine lines of tradition and at current trends in German writing, both literary and other. Students will learn to engage with literature beyond the page by exploring questions such as: how do manuscripts get published and/or become books? What role do journals and magazines play, both corporate and independent, in the literary scene? How do writers make a living and what are the functions of literary awards, fellowships etc.? Where do the German and international literary communities interact? And how do writers and publishers respond to the challenges of the digital era? Areas to be covered by the reading material include translation, non-fiction, graphic novel, audiobooks and the book market. In addition to seminar discussions there will be field trips to literary institutions, publishing houses, magazines and events, such as readings and talks during the internationales literaturfestival berlin (ilb) in September. Guest speakers will include professionals from the world of publishing: editors, translators, journalists and writers.
NB: Reading material and discussions will be both in German and English; students should therefore have B2 level competence of German.
Syllabus
PL355 Stories of Conversion
Module: Writer and World / Literary Movements and Forms
Instructor: Alberto Tiburcio, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue 15:45-19:00
This course focuses on a crucially important genre in the history of religion, namely stories or accounts of conversion. Our context will be the Early Modern Islamic and European world. We begin by examining early Muslim-Christian encounters and the history of these two religions’ mutual knowledge and awareness of each other’s scriptural tradition. Then we look at the reasons for the rise and the significance of the trope of conversion. Indispensable background for considering this trope is the debate on whether Islam in the Ottoman Empire underwent a comparable process of division into distinct confessional groups to that of Western Christian society. An equally relevant issue for our subject is the spread of the teaching of Middle Eastern languages in European universities as part of the conversion efforts of the Roman church. Finally, we look at the rhetorical framework for the trope of conversion: the religious polemics that proliferated in this period and the modes of expression they used.
Syllabus
PT320 Discussing Deutschland: What Germans Are Talking About Today (in German)
Module: Writer and World / Literary Movements and Forms
Instructor: Michael Thomas Taylor
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Th 14:00-17:15
This course examines the interconnections between today’s most pressing concerns in the German public discourse with organizations and institutions dedicated to actively intervening in and shaping social issues. We combine investigations of the crisis of democracy debates in German media and current research with visits to sites of civil society activism and community organizations as they have developed in past and present East and West Germany. And we engage with the topic of cultural pluralism in light of recent social, political, and religious tensions related to migration, not only in the seminar room but also through visits to local groups invested in contributing to resolving these tensions through various initiatives. Navigating a wide range of platforms for news and discussion, we look at how modern social media promotes civil movements from the political left and right, and ask what this pluralization of forms of communication means for Germany’s established public-media services. In addition to the study of current public debates and forms of civic engagement, the purpose of this course is to refine and advance your ability to articulate yourself verbally and in writing through constant vocabulary building. Students taking the class should have a B2 proficiency level.
Syllabus
The following course is cross-listed as an Arts and Aesthetics advanced module.
LT328 The Modernist Fringe: Writing at the Edge of Experience
Module/s: Theories of Literature and Culture / Writer and World
Instructor: Ross Shields
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 14:00-17:15
In 1892, William James defines the psychic fringe as a “halo of relations” surrounding any definite mental image or thought and associating it with others. Although we are not generally aware of this fringe, it directs the stream of our consciousness and supposedly plays an essential role in both religious and aesthetic experience. This seminar will pursue James’s insight by examining seminal texts of literary modernism against the background of contemporaneous psycho-physiological, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic theories of the fringe. On the one hand, we will interrogate scientific and philosophical concepts of perception and association, focusing on the limits of discursive thought and its pre/un-conscious other. On the other hand, we will consider literary explorations of the fringe, reflecting on the strategies used by the modernists to articulate the ineffable. We will ask: How does literary experience inform theoretical concepts of the psychic fringe? To what extent do these ‘fringe theories’ in turn condition and regulate literary production? Does literature succeed in showing what science cannot say? What is it that emerges in the particular encounters between theorist and authors at the turn of the century?
Texts by Proust, Musil, H. James, Wolff, Valéry, Stein, Kafka, Hofmannsthal, Rilke; Bergson, Husserl, Helmholtz, Mach, W. James, Freud, Benjamin, Whitehead, Wittgenstein. Readings by Adorno, Dewey, Greenberg, Eisenstein, H.D., Kandinsky, Klee, Kulbin, Picasso, Pound, Schönberg, Stein, Valéry, Webern, etc.
Syllabus
+ Politics Advanced Modules
PS299 American Government in Perspective
Module: Advanced Topics in Global and Comparative Politics / Public Policy
Instructor: Boris Vormann
Credits: 8 ECTS credits, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 14:00-15:30
This class is structured around the 2020 US Presidential elections. In the first section of the course we will explore the main political actors, institutions and processes of the US political system, from its political culture and development to its federal structures and the workings of the separation of powers. The second section turns to the mechanisms of the electoral system as well as to the specific domestic and foreign policy issues dominating the 2020 election cycle. Election day will take place during that section of the course, and we will devote sessions to analyzing predictions in the latest run-up to election day, as well as its outcomes and immediate implications. The final section of the core seeks to put the election results into a broader perspective. As a backdrop for this discussion we examine the standing of liberal democracy at home and internationally, and examine the feasibility of some of the major promises made on the president-elect's campaign trail in a number of policy fields, incl. health, immigration, taxation, and trade.
Syllabus
The following courses are cross-listed with Ethics and Politics:
PT358 Critical Human Rights and Humanitarian Advocacy/ Scholars At Risk
Module: Civic Engagement and Social Justice
Instructor: Kerry Bystrom
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 15:45-17:15
Scholars, students, and other researchers around the world are routinely threatened, jailed, or punished. Sometimes they are simply trapped in a dangerous place, while in other cases they are deliberately targeted because of their identity or their work. Academic freedom, or freedom of thought and inquiry, is usually considered a basic human right, but its definition and content is essentially contested. This seminar will explore the idea of academic freedom by examining - and attempting to intervene in - situations where it is threatened. In conjunction with the human rights organization Scholars at Risk, we will investigate the cases of scholars currently living under threat and develop projects aimed at releasing them from detention or securing refuge for them. This will involve direct hands-on advocacy work with SAR, taking public positions and creating smart and effective advocacy campaigns for specific endangered students, teachers, and researchers. In order not to do this naively or uncritically, our action-oriented work will be paired throughout the semester with critical reflection on human rights and humanitarian advocacy more generally. Through readings about the historical rise of human rights and humanitarianism as paradigms for creating a better world--as well as the pitfalls of these paradigms--and by engaging with texts that outline the ethical and practical challenges of doing advocacy, we will together work towards creating an intellectual framework that allows us to be more attentive, deliberate and effective advocates for social change.
Syllabus
PL290 Philosophy Versus God
Module: Philosophy and Society
Instructor: Jeffrey Champlin
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Fri 9:00-12:15
Since the 18th century, European philosophy has enacted a sustained critique of religion largely aimed at freeing humanity from irrational intellectual dogma and unquestioned moral authority. This course engages major challenges to religion with a view to both comprehending the alternative modes of thinking that emerge and also carefully tracking the religious concepts that are transformed or (supposedly) discarded in each philosophical revision. Attention to contemporary insights from evolutionary biology (regarding the emergence of the ability to create symbols and the growth of cities) and aesthetics (use of narrative, personification, metaphor) aim to question the assumptions of the secularization hypothesis that sees only a gradual rationalization of thinking in the critique of God. Authors include Hume, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Arendt, and Derrida.
Syllabus
PL318 The Thought of Martin Heidegger
Module: Philosophy and Society
Instructor: Tracy Colony
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 17:30-19:00
This advanced course addresses the thought of Martin Heidegger, its distinctive phases, and its influence on and interpretation within philosophy today. We begin by examining Heidegger’s early radicalization of Husserlian phenomenology and his turn to ontology. We will then read sections of Heidegger’s seminal Being and Time (1927) and trace Heidegger’s transition toward the preoccupations of his later works. With an eye to articulating the development of Heidegger’s thought, we will engage in close readings of: The Origin of the Work of Art (1936), Letter on Humanism (1947) and The Question Concerning Technology (1954). We will conclude with selections from Heidegger’s later period. Against the background of this chronological introduction we will also read important secondary texts on Heidegger’s work and present crucial aspects of Heidegger’s reception in Germany and France. As part of this course we will also confront the important question of the relation of Heidegger to National Socialism in light of key texts from that period and the only recently available Ponderings or Black Notebooks (1931-1938). All texts and discussion will be in English, however, simultaneous readings of Heidegger in the original German will be encouraged and supported.
Syllabus
SO283 Urban Sounds and Migration
Module: Global Social Theory
Instructor: Agata Lisiak
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 9:00-12:15
The dominant mode of apprehending society has been identified with seeing (Bull & Back 2003) and looking (Berger 1974), but everyday life is experienced in multisensory ways and so human experience can only be accounted for through what Joachim-Ernst Berendt called “a democracy of the senses”. While the visual continues to dominate the study of migration and cities, this class encourages students to listen – “with depth and humility” (Bull & Back 2003) – to the sounds of urban worlds. As migration contributes to linguistic diversity in contemporary cities, certain sounds and languages tend to be singled out as foreign and, as such, puzzling, threatening, unwanted. In the current political atmosphere, with the prevalent fear-mongering rhetoric against everything and everyone that seems foreign, critical engagement with urban sounds is not only academically exciting, it is politically urgent. The class aims at deepening students’ understanding of social experiences of migration and diversity in urban contexts and developing ways of addressing and countering exclusionary practices where they occur. Through a series of workshops, off-campus excursions, and guest lectures, students will familiarize themselves with a range of methods including sensory ethnography, sound walks, sonic mappings, and sound-artist interventions.
Syllabus
PT305 Colonization and Democracy: The Case of Algeria
Module: Advanced Topics in Global and Comparative Politics
Instructor: Ewa Atanassow
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 10:45-12:15
How did the colonial empires of the past two centuries impact the peoples over whom they ruled? What is the relation between (de)colonization and democratization? What were the ethical and political stakes of the anti-colonial movements? What kind of social and political alternatives did post-colonial societies face in the past, and continue to face in the present?
In this course we will explore these analytical and historical questions by closely examining the case of Algeria whose colonial experience and war of independence against France is often considered as a paradigmatic example of a modern anti-colonial struggle. We will study the Algerian case through multiple lenses: history, politics, literature, and film; and by critically engaging with thinkers, writers, and artists who themselves critically engaged with these questions, and elaborated conceptual frameworks and practical avenues for addressing them. Readings/viewings will include works by Abd al-Kader, Tocqueville, Marx, Fanon, Camus, Daoud, Derrida, Walzer, Pontecorvo.
Syllabus
PT316 From the Ivory Tower to the Executive: Helping the German government build the post-Corona society
Module: Advanced Topics in Global and Comparative Politics / Public Policy
Instructor: Timo Lochocki
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 9:00-12:15
The advent and wider consequences of the “Corona virus” have the potential to alter the dynamics of international cooperation and the socio-economic arrangements of liberal democracies. According to one view, the virus calls for more international cooperation and a much stronger role for the welfare state. However, this perspective diverges from the populist neo-nationalism that has recently been electorally successful in the US and the UK. In this setting, the centrist governments of Western Europe – led by France and Germany – must square a circle: They want to win back voters attracted by a neo-nationalist agenda, while at the same time safeguarding a culture of international cooperation crucial to their own interests. They also need to update their wealth redistribution policies in the face of skepticism from some voters about an expansion of the welfare state. This course will try to develop a possible solution to this paradox, focusing on Germany as a case study. After addressing the influence of populist attitudes on foreign policy and the impact of the Corona virus on liberal democracies, we will try to craft policy recommendations for the German government. Ideally, students will already have a fundamental knowledge of Germany's history and social structure, and of its financial and political systems.
Syllabus
PS306 The European Union: Its Institutions, Laws, and Citizens
Module: Advanced Topics in Global and Comparative Politics / Public Policy
Instructor: Berit Ebert
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Fri 10:45-12:15
Brexit, the rise of populist movements, and a growing suspicion towards international organizations do not seem to offer a promising future for the European Union. However, the concept of supranationality in the European Union represents is a unique one in the history of international collaboration and was developed with clear goals by the founding members. This course will examine this early context of the former European Community for Steel and Coal – the forerunner of the Union – and the bloc’s painstaking integration. It will also analyze the institutions that have developed over the more than 70-year history and major cases tried in the European Court of Justice that have shaped the Union’s political advancements. We will discuss the European Union’s “democracy deficit” and delve into slightly more theoretical deliberations by looking at political processes, including the recent European electoral-law reform, as well as court cases, which will give an insight into how the European Union’s citizens used—or tried to use—established mechanisms to advocate for their interests. Finally, the course will provide an understanding of the Union’s characteristics in comparison with those of the nation-state and of traditional international organizations, enabling clearer judgement regarding the future of the European project.
Syllabus
PL376 Medieval Conceptions of Happiness
Module: Philosophy and Society
Instructor: Tracy Wietecha
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 9:00-10:30
Happiness is often defined as a chief goal of human life, or as a state that can be achieved when striving for external affirmation is relinquished. A look at past traditions of thought on the subject reveals a diversity that goes far beyond contemporary conceptions, while also giving us an insight into their origin and development. This course explores Medieval conceptions of happiness as found in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian thinkers, such as al- Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Tufail, Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas. We examine the sources used by these authors, especially the influence of Ancient Greek philosophy, as well as the other concepts and values that played a role in their conclusions. Our aim will be to determine the degrees of continuity and difference between contemporary ideas of happiness and their medieval antecedents.
Syllabus
The following courses are also cross-listed with Literature and Rhetoric:
PL355 Stories of Conversion
Module: Philosophy and Society
Instructor: Alberto Tiburcio
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue 15:45-19:00
This course focuses on a crucially important genre in the history of religion, namely stories or accounts of conversion. Our context will be the Early Modern Islamic and European world. We begin by examining early Muslim-Christian encounters and the history of these two religions’ mutual knowledge and awareness of each other’s scriptural tradition. Then we look at the reasons for the rise and the significance of the trope of conversion. Indispensable background for considering this trope is the debate on whether Islam in the Ottoman Empire underwent a comparable process of division into distinct confessional groups to that of Western Christian society. An equally relevant issue for our subject is the spread of the teaching of Middle Eastern languages in European universities as part of the conversion efforts of the Roman church. Finally, we look at the rhetorical framework for the trope of conversion: the religious polemics that proliferated in this period and the modes of expression they used.
Syllabus
PT320 Discussing Deutschland: What Germans Are Talking About Today (in German)
Module: Civic Engagement and Social Justice
Instructor: Michael Thomas Taylor
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Thu 14:00-17:15
This course examines the interconnections between today’s most pressing concerns in the German public discourse with organizations and institutions dedicated to actively intervening in and shaping social issues. We combine investigations of the crisis of democracy debates in German media and current research with visits to sites of civil society activism and community organizations as they have developed in past and present East and West Germany. And we engage with the topic of cultural pluralism in light of recent social, political, and religious tensions related to migration, not only in the seminar room but also through visits to local groups invested in contributing to resolving these tensions through various initiatives. Navigating a wide range of platforms for news and discussion, we look at how modern social media promotes civil movements from the political left and right, and ask what this pluralization of forms of communication means for Germany’s established public-media services. In addition to the study of current public debates and forms of civic engagement, the purpose of this course is to refine and advance your ability to articulate yourself verbally and in writing through constant vocabulary building. Students taking the class should have a B2 proficiency level.
Syllabus
The following course is cross-listed with Advanced Economics:
EC320 Econometrics
Module: Quantitative Methods in Social Science
Instructor: Martin Binder
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 14:00-15:30
Economics is in many ways an applied science deeply anchored in real-world phenomena that can be measured and quantified. In order to answer important quantitative questions, the economist needs to collect data and assess the empirical relationships between objects of interest. Since much economic data is observational, a main task of the econometrician is trying to find out whether events that are correlated also stand in causal relationship with each other and in what order of priority. In order to answer such questions, the economist needs the toolkit of multivariate regression analysis as well as a number of sophisticated techniques that expand on the simple linear regression model (time series and panel data models, vector-autoregressive models, non- and semiparametric econometric techniques, and various methods to assess the degree to which such models fit). This course expands on the basic statistics course by applying and developing core statistical notions within an economic context. It develops literacy in applied economics, and capacity to assess claims made in that field through critique of methods of econometric analysis. The course will introduce students to the statistical software package R, which will be used to analyze data applying the methods learned.
Syllabus
Module: Advanced Topics in Global and Comparative Politics / Public Policy
Instructor: Boris Vormann
Credits: 8 ECTS credits, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 14:00-15:30
This class is structured around the 2020 US Presidential elections. In the first section of the course we will explore the main political actors, institutions and processes of the US political system, from its political culture and development to its federal structures and the workings of the separation of powers. The second section turns to the mechanisms of the electoral system as well as to the specific domestic and foreign policy issues dominating the 2020 election cycle. Election day will take place during that section of the course, and we will devote sessions to analyzing predictions in the latest run-up to election day, as well as its outcomes and immediate implications. The final section of the core seeks to put the election results into a broader perspective. As a backdrop for this discussion we examine the standing of liberal democracy at home and internationally, and examine the feasibility of some of the major promises made on the president-elect's campaign trail in a number of policy fields, incl. health, immigration, taxation, and trade.
Syllabus
The following courses are cross-listed with Ethics and Politics:
PT358 Critical Human Rights and Humanitarian Advocacy/ Scholars At Risk
Module: Civic Engagement and Social Justice
Instructor: Kerry Bystrom
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 15:45-17:15
Scholars, students, and other researchers around the world are routinely threatened, jailed, or punished. Sometimes they are simply trapped in a dangerous place, while in other cases they are deliberately targeted because of their identity or their work. Academic freedom, or freedom of thought and inquiry, is usually considered a basic human right, but its definition and content is essentially contested. This seminar will explore the idea of academic freedom by examining - and attempting to intervene in - situations where it is threatened. In conjunction with the human rights organization Scholars at Risk, we will investigate the cases of scholars currently living under threat and develop projects aimed at releasing them from detention or securing refuge for them. This will involve direct hands-on advocacy work with SAR, taking public positions and creating smart and effective advocacy campaigns for specific endangered students, teachers, and researchers. In order not to do this naively or uncritically, our action-oriented work will be paired throughout the semester with critical reflection on human rights and humanitarian advocacy more generally. Through readings about the historical rise of human rights and humanitarianism as paradigms for creating a better world--as well as the pitfalls of these paradigms--and by engaging with texts that outline the ethical and practical challenges of doing advocacy, we will together work towards creating an intellectual framework that allows us to be more attentive, deliberate and effective advocates for social change.
Syllabus
PL290 Philosophy Versus God
Module: Philosophy and Society
Instructor: Jeffrey Champlin
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Fri 9:00-12:15
Since the 18th century, European philosophy has enacted a sustained critique of religion largely aimed at freeing humanity from irrational intellectual dogma and unquestioned moral authority. This course engages major challenges to religion with a view to both comprehending the alternative modes of thinking that emerge and also carefully tracking the religious concepts that are transformed or (supposedly) discarded in each philosophical revision. Attention to contemporary insights from evolutionary biology (regarding the emergence of the ability to create symbols and the growth of cities) and aesthetics (use of narrative, personification, metaphor) aim to question the assumptions of the secularization hypothesis that sees only a gradual rationalization of thinking in the critique of God. Authors include Hume, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Arendt, and Derrida.
Syllabus
PL318 The Thought of Martin Heidegger
Module: Philosophy and Society
Instructor: Tracy Colony
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 17:30-19:00
This advanced course addresses the thought of Martin Heidegger, its distinctive phases, and its influence on and interpretation within philosophy today. We begin by examining Heidegger’s early radicalization of Husserlian phenomenology and his turn to ontology. We will then read sections of Heidegger’s seminal Being and Time (1927) and trace Heidegger’s transition toward the preoccupations of his later works. With an eye to articulating the development of Heidegger’s thought, we will engage in close readings of: The Origin of the Work of Art (1936), Letter on Humanism (1947) and The Question Concerning Technology (1954). We will conclude with selections from Heidegger’s later period. Against the background of this chronological introduction we will also read important secondary texts on Heidegger’s work and present crucial aspects of Heidegger’s reception in Germany and France. As part of this course we will also confront the important question of the relation of Heidegger to National Socialism in light of key texts from that period and the only recently available Ponderings or Black Notebooks (1931-1938). All texts and discussion will be in English, however, simultaneous readings of Heidegger in the original German will be encouraged and supported.
Syllabus
SO283 Urban Sounds and Migration
Module: Global Social Theory
Instructor: Agata Lisiak
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 9:00-12:15
The dominant mode of apprehending society has been identified with seeing (Bull & Back 2003) and looking (Berger 1974), but everyday life is experienced in multisensory ways and so human experience can only be accounted for through what Joachim-Ernst Berendt called “a democracy of the senses”. While the visual continues to dominate the study of migration and cities, this class encourages students to listen – “with depth and humility” (Bull & Back 2003) – to the sounds of urban worlds. As migration contributes to linguistic diversity in contemporary cities, certain sounds and languages tend to be singled out as foreign and, as such, puzzling, threatening, unwanted. In the current political atmosphere, with the prevalent fear-mongering rhetoric against everything and everyone that seems foreign, critical engagement with urban sounds is not only academically exciting, it is politically urgent. The class aims at deepening students’ understanding of social experiences of migration and diversity in urban contexts and developing ways of addressing and countering exclusionary practices where they occur. Through a series of workshops, off-campus excursions, and guest lectures, students will familiarize themselves with a range of methods including sensory ethnography, sound walks, sonic mappings, and sound-artist interventions.
Syllabus
PT305 Colonization and Democracy: The Case of Algeria
Module: Advanced Topics in Global and Comparative Politics
Instructor: Ewa Atanassow
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 10:45-12:15
How did the colonial empires of the past two centuries impact the peoples over whom they ruled? What is the relation between (de)colonization and democratization? What were the ethical and political stakes of the anti-colonial movements? What kind of social and political alternatives did post-colonial societies face in the past, and continue to face in the present?
In this course we will explore these analytical and historical questions by closely examining the case of Algeria whose colonial experience and war of independence against France is often considered as a paradigmatic example of a modern anti-colonial struggle. We will study the Algerian case through multiple lenses: history, politics, literature, and film; and by critically engaging with thinkers, writers, and artists who themselves critically engaged with these questions, and elaborated conceptual frameworks and practical avenues for addressing them. Readings/viewings will include works by Abd al-Kader, Tocqueville, Marx, Fanon, Camus, Daoud, Derrida, Walzer, Pontecorvo.
Syllabus
PT316 From the Ivory Tower to the Executive: Helping the German government build the post-Corona society
Module: Advanced Topics in Global and Comparative Politics / Public Policy
Instructor: Timo Lochocki
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed 9:00-12:15
The advent and wider consequences of the “Corona virus” have the potential to alter the dynamics of international cooperation and the socio-economic arrangements of liberal democracies. According to one view, the virus calls for more international cooperation and a much stronger role for the welfare state. However, this perspective diverges from the populist neo-nationalism that has recently been electorally successful in the US and the UK. In this setting, the centrist governments of Western Europe – led by France and Germany – must square a circle: They want to win back voters attracted by a neo-nationalist agenda, while at the same time safeguarding a culture of international cooperation crucial to their own interests. They also need to update their wealth redistribution policies in the face of skepticism from some voters about an expansion of the welfare state. This course will try to develop a possible solution to this paradox, focusing on Germany as a case study. After addressing the influence of populist attitudes on foreign policy and the impact of the Corona virus on liberal democracies, we will try to craft policy recommendations for the German government. Ideally, students will already have a fundamental knowledge of Germany's history and social structure, and of its financial and political systems.
Syllabus
PS306 The European Union: Its Institutions, Laws, and Citizens
Module: Advanced Topics in Global and Comparative Politics / Public Policy
Instructor: Berit Ebert
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Fri 10:45-12:15
Brexit, the rise of populist movements, and a growing suspicion towards international organizations do not seem to offer a promising future for the European Union. However, the concept of supranationality in the European Union represents is a unique one in the history of international collaboration and was developed with clear goals by the founding members. This course will examine this early context of the former European Community for Steel and Coal – the forerunner of the Union – and the bloc’s painstaking integration. It will also analyze the institutions that have developed over the more than 70-year history and major cases tried in the European Court of Justice that have shaped the Union’s political advancements. We will discuss the European Union’s “democracy deficit” and delve into slightly more theoretical deliberations by looking at political processes, including the recent European electoral-law reform, as well as court cases, which will give an insight into how the European Union’s citizens used—or tried to use—established mechanisms to advocate for their interests. Finally, the course will provide an understanding of the Union’s characteristics in comparison with those of the nation-state and of traditional international organizations, enabling clearer judgement regarding the future of the European project.
Syllabus
PL376 Medieval Conceptions of Happiness
Module: Philosophy and Society
Instructor: Tracy Wietecha
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue & Thu 9:00-10:30
Happiness is often defined as a chief goal of human life, or as a state that can be achieved when striving for external affirmation is relinquished. A look at past traditions of thought on the subject reveals a diversity that goes far beyond contemporary conceptions, while also giving us an insight into their origin and development. This course explores Medieval conceptions of happiness as found in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian thinkers, such as al- Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Tufail, Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas. We examine the sources used by these authors, especially the influence of Ancient Greek philosophy, as well as the other concepts and values that played a role in their conclusions. Our aim will be to determine the degrees of continuity and difference between contemporary ideas of happiness and their medieval antecedents.
Syllabus
The following courses are also cross-listed with Literature and Rhetoric:
PL355 Stories of Conversion
Module: Philosophy and Society
Instructor: Alberto Tiburcio
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Tue 15:45-19:00
This course focuses on a crucially important genre in the history of religion, namely stories or accounts of conversion. Our context will be the Early Modern Islamic and European world. We begin by examining early Muslim-Christian encounters and the history of these two religions’ mutual knowledge and awareness of each other’s scriptural tradition. Then we look at the reasons for the rise and the significance of the trope of conversion. Indispensable background for considering this trope is the debate on whether Islam in the Ottoman Empire underwent a comparable process of division into distinct confessional groups to that of Western Christian society. An equally relevant issue for our subject is the spread of the teaching of Middle Eastern languages in European universities as part of the conversion efforts of the Roman church. Finally, we look at the rhetorical framework for the trope of conversion: the religious polemics that proliferated in this period and the modes of expression they used.
Syllabus
PT320 Discussing Deutschland: What Germans Are Talking About Today (in German)
Module: Civic Engagement and Social Justice
Instructor: Michael Thomas Taylor
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Thu 14:00-17:15
This course examines the interconnections between today’s most pressing concerns in the German public discourse with organizations and institutions dedicated to actively intervening in and shaping social issues. We combine investigations of the crisis of democracy debates in German media and current research with visits to sites of civil society activism and community organizations as they have developed in past and present East and West Germany. And we engage with the topic of cultural pluralism in light of recent social, political, and religious tensions related to migration, not only in the seminar room but also through visits to local groups invested in contributing to resolving these tensions through various initiatives. Navigating a wide range of platforms for news and discussion, we look at how modern social media promotes civil movements from the political left and right, and ask what this pluralization of forms of communication means for Germany’s established public-media services. In addition to the study of current public debates and forms of civic engagement, the purpose of this course is to refine and advance your ability to articulate yourself verbally and in writing through constant vocabulary building. Students taking the class should have a B2 proficiency level.
Syllabus
The following course is cross-listed with Advanced Economics:
EC320 Econometrics
Module: Quantitative Methods in Social Science
Instructor: Martin Binder
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon & Wed 14:00-15:30
Economics is in many ways an applied science deeply anchored in real-world phenomena that can be measured and quantified. In order to answer important quantitative questions, the economist needs to collect data and assess the empirical relationships between objects of interest. Since much economic data is observational, a main task of the econometrician is trying to find out whether events that are correlated also stand in causal relationship with each other and in what order of priority. In order to answer such questions, the economist needs the toolkit of multivariate regression analysis as well as a number of sophisticated techniques that expand on the simple linear regression model (time series and panel data models, vector-autoregressive models, non- and semiparametric econometric techniques, and various methods to assess the degree to which such models fit). This course expands on the basic statistics course by applying and developing core statistical notions within an economic context. It develops literacy in applied economics, and capacity to assess claims made in that field through critique of methods of econometric analysis. The course will introduce students to the statistical software package R, which will be used to analyze data applying the methods learned.
Syllabus
+ Electives
FA188 The Art of Making Videos
Instructor: Janina Schabig
Credits: 8 ECTS Credits, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Every second Sat 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-17:30 (beginning on 12 September)
This beginners’ introduction course teaches the technical foundations of videomaking. You will be introduced to different kinds of cameras, learn all about your camera and how to use its manual settings, work with natural and studio lighting, record and design your own sound and learn how to edit in Adobe Premiere. We will look at feature films, documentaries, as well as experimental video art and vlogging to examine a range of different creative shooting styles and will use that for inspiration in hands-on workshops and small assignments throughout the semester. We will work on individual as well as group projects and create a body of work ranging from short sound pieces to full videos.
The goal of this course is to give you an understanding of the various creative choices within the art of making a video and the technical knowledge to help realize your visions.
Syllabus
FA156 Dance Lab: Body Space Image. Dance and Visual Arts
Instructor: Eva Burghardt
Credits: 8 ECTS Credits, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Fri 14:00-17:15
In addition to the ongoing movement training as an essential base, the focus of this course will be the crossover of dance and visual arts, looking at dance and choreography outside of its usual context, the theatre space. Drawing from contemporary dance and improvisation techniques, students will train their body as an “instrument,” deepening its awareness, sense of presence and musicality, practicing listening to oneself as well as others. Starting from this inner awareness, we bring the attention to our surroundings, making connections to other bodies, objects, space and architecture. Weather permitting, we will leave the dance floor and take our explorations out into the neighborhood to work site-specifically. How can we refresh our eyes and reshape experiences of known places with our present body? How can the experience of the surrounding inspire, inform and bring form to the dances within us or create relationships with the environment we live in. How does our body relate to forms, lines, textures, colors, sounds, the history or memories of a place? How does it change our experience of a place as a dancer or spectator? Open score improvisations and tasks will be given to be explored individually and with the group. A final presentation, including sketches, experiments and scores created by the students, will be shown at the end of the semester.
Throughout the course, we will look at- and discuss works from artists who had a big impact in widening the understanding of dance and choreography, crossing the borders between dance and visual arts. From postmodern artists Trisha Brown, Simone Forti and Anna Halprin to contemporary artists, such as Tino Sehgal, William Forsythe, Willi Dorner or Anne Imhoff.
Two off-site excursions to performances in Berlin, including discussions and a written reflection afterwards, will be an integral part of the course.
Syllabus
IS331 Internship Course: Urban Cultures, Working Cultures
Bard in Berlin Program Course
Instructor: Agata Lisiak
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits (in combination with an internship)
Course Times: Thu 14:00-15:30
Students enrolled in the Bard College Berlin Internship Program are required to complete the Berlin Internship Seminar, an interdisciplinary course designed to accompany the internship experience. We will meet on a weekly basis and discuss contemporary ways of living and working in Berlin and beyond: What do we mean when we talk about work? Do we need to love what we do? What renders work in/visible? How is work gendered and classed? How is work organized temporally and spatially and how does it, in turn, affect the city and its residents? What distinguishes the spaces in which we live and work today? Which new forms of work have recently emerged in Berlin? Which of them seem to thrive? How do Berlin’s art institutions and citizen-activist organizations operate? Besides in-class discussions, invited lectures, and off-campus visits, the seminar offers a platform for the exchange of observations, reflections, and comments on individual internships.
Syllabus
EL202 ESL Writing Intensive Seminar
Instructor: Ariane Simard
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon 14:00-17:15
This course is designed to develop the writing skills of non-native English speakers to prepare for academic work in American Standard English (ASE). Over the semester, students will review grammar, learn how to cite academic sources, as well as develop an effective and original academic writing voice. We will put into practice essential writing techniques such as drafting, research, critical reading skills, rewriting and workshop. Students will be graded on three short essays (2-3 pp) and one in-class essay. Upon successful completion of the class, students should be able to think critically, as well as construct compelling narratives and effective written academic arguments. In addition to some poems, short stories, and non-fiction, we will explore Berlin to help us examine ideas about identity in a rapidly changing city.
Syllabus
PL150 Introduction to Symbolic Logic
This course fulfills the mathematics and science requirement for humanities students.
Instructor: Robert Martin
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: wed & Fri 9:00-10:30
An introduction to logic, requiring no prior knowledge of philosophy or mathematics. This course aims mainly at imparting the ability to recognize and construct correct formal deductions and refutations. Our text (available on-line free of charge) covers the first order predicate calculus with identity; we will cover as much of that as feasible in one semester. There is software for the course, called Logic 2010, developed by Robert Martin and David Kaplan at UCLA in the 1990s and subsequently rewritten for the internet, that will assist students by providing feedback on exercises.
Syllabus
Instructor: Janina Schabig
Credits: 8 ECTS Credits, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Every second Sat 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-17:30 (beginning on 12 September)
This beginners’ introduction course teaches the technical foundations of videomaking. You will be introduced to different kinds of cameras, learn all about your camera and how to use its manual settings, work with natural and studio lighting, record and design your own sound and learn how to edit in Adobe Premiere. We will look at feature films, documentaries, as well as experimental video art and vlogging to examine a range of different creative shooting styles and will use that for inspiration in hands-on workshops and small assignments throughout the semester. We will work on individual as well as group projects and create a body of work ranging from short sound pieces to full videos.
The goal of this course is to give you an understanding of the various creative choices within the art of making a video and the technical knowledge to help realize your visions.
Syllabus
FA156 Dance Lab: Body Space Image. Dance and Visual Arts
Instructor: Eva Burghardt
Credits: 8 ECTS Credits, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Fri 14:00-17:15
In addition to the ongoing movement training as an essential base, the focus of this course will be the crossover of dance and visual arts, looking at dance and choreography outside of its usual context, the theatre space. Drawing from contemporary dance and improvisation techniques, students will train their body as an “instrument,” deepening its awareness, sense of presence and musicality, practicing listening to oneself as well as others. Starting from this inner awareness, we bring the attention to our surroundings, making connections to other bodies, objects, space and architecture. Weather permitting, we will leave the dance floor and take our explorations out into the neighborhood to work site-specifically. How can we refresh our eyes and reshape experiences of known places with our present body? How can the experience of the surrounding inspire, inform and bring form to the dances within us or create relationships with the environment we live in. How does our body relate to forms, lines, textures, colors, sounds, the history or memories of a place? How does it change our experience of a place as a dancer or spectator? Open score improvisations and tasks will be given to be explored individually and with the group. A final presentation, including sketches, experiments and scores created by the students, will be shown at the end of the semester.
Throughout the course, we will look at- and discuss works from artists who had a big impact in widening the understanding of dance and choreography, crossing the borders between dance and visual arts. From postmodern artists Trisha Brown, Simone Forti and Anna Halprin to contemporary artists, such as Tino Sehgal, William Forsythe, Willi Dorner or Anne Imhoff.
Two off-site excursions to performances in Berlin, including discussions and a written reflection afterwards, will be an integral part of the course.
Syllabus
IS331 Internship Course: Urban Cultures, Working Cultures
Bard in Berlin Program Course
Instructor: Agata Lisiak
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits (in combination with an internship)
Course Times: Thu 14:00-15:30
Students enrolled in the Bard College Berlin Internship Program are required to complete the Berlin Internship Seminar, an interdisciplinary course designed to accompany the internship experience. We will meet on a weekly basis and discuss contemporary ways of living and working in Berlin and beyond: What do we mean when we talk about work? Do we need to love what we do? What renders work in/visible? How is work gendered and classed? How is work organized temporally and spatially and how does it, in turn, affect the city and its residents? What distinguishes the spaces in which we live and work today? Which new forms of work have recently emerged in Berlin? Which of them seem to thrive? How do Berlin’s art institutions and citizen-activist organizations operate? Besides in-class discussions, invited lectures, and off-campus visits, the seminar offers a platform for the exchange of observations, reflections, and comments on individual internships.
Syllabus
EL202 ESL Writing Intensive Seminar
Instructor: Ariane Simard
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon 14:00-17:15
This course is designed to develop the writing skills of non-native English speakers to prepare for academic work in American Standard English (ASE). Over the semester, students will review grammar, learn how to cite academic sources, as well as develop an effective and original academic writing voice. We will put into practice essential writing techniques such as drafting, research, critical reading skills, rewriting and workshop. Students will be graded on three short essays (2-3 pp) and one in-class essay. Upon successful completion of the class, students should be able to think critically, as well as construct compelling narratives and effective written academic arguments. In addition to some poems, short stories, and non-fiction, we will explore Berlin to help us examine ideas about identity in a rapidly changing city.
Syllabus
PL150 Introduction to Symbolic Logic
This course fulfills the mathematics and science requirement for humanities students.
Instructor: Robert Martin
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: wed & Fri 9:00-10:30
An introduction to logic, requiring no prior knowledge of philosophy or mathematics. This course aims mainly at imparting the ability to recognize and construct correct formal deductions and refutations. Our text (available on-line free of charge) covers the first order predicate calculus with identity; we will cover as much of that as feasible in one semester. There is software for the course, called Logic 2010, developed by Robert Martin and David Kaplan at UCLA in the 1990s and subsequently rewritten for the internet, that will assist students by providing feedback on exercises.
Syllabus
+ Language Courses
GM101 German Beginner A1 (Group A)
Instructor: Julia Gehring
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed & Fri 9:00-10:30
Syllabus
GM101 German Beginner A1 (Group B)
Instructor: Julia Gehring
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed & Fri 10:45-12:15
Syllabus
GM101 German Beginner A1 (Group C)
Instructor: Christine Nilsson
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed, & Fri 14:00-15:30
Syllabus
GM101 German Beginner A1 (Group D)
Instructor: Narges Roshan
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed, & Fri 10:45-12:15
GM151 German Beginner A2 (Group A)
Instructor: Ariane Friedländer
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed, & Fri 9:00-10:30
Syllabus
GM151 German Beginner A2 (Group B)
Instructor: Christiane Bethke
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed, & Fri 14:00-15:30
Syllabus
GM201 German Intermediate B1 (Group A)
Instructor: Christiane Bethke
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed, & Fri 15:45-17:15
Syllabus
GM201 German Intermediate B1 (Group B)
Instructor: Ryan Carroll
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed, & Fri 14:00-15:30
Syllabus
GM201 German Intermediate B1 (Group C)
Instructor: Ryan Carroll
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed, & Fri 9:00-10:30
Syllabus
GM251 German Intermediate B2
Instructor: Vincent Hessling
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed, & Fri: 10:45-12:15
Syllabus
GM301 German Advanced C1
Instructor: Vincent Hessling
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed, & Fri 15:45-17:15
Syllabus
GM150 German Conversation
Instructor: Narges Roshan
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed & Fri 14:00-15:30
The course is designed to help students boost their speaking skills and communicate in German with ease and confidence. Understanding and responding to what people speak on the street and in everyday situations poses challenges for many language learners; the course will tackle these challenges hands-on and from multiple angles, always with an eye toward what is most useful for students stepping beyond the “English language bubble” on campus. Classes will be structured around topics of student interest and combine vocabulary building and pronunciation exercises with the creation of various speaking scenarios where students practice expressing themselves spontaneously and explore dialects, accents and modes of intonation. The course is open to students who have completed A1 or have at least a basic understanding of the German language; the objective of the course is to create a comfortable speaking environment for beginners to advanced learners.
PT320 Discussing Deutschland: What Germans Are Talking About Today (in German)
Module: Literary Movements and Forms / Social Commitment and the Public Sphere
Instructor: Michael Thomas Taylor
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Thu 14:00-17:15
Students taking the class should have B2 proficiency level in German.
This course examines the interconnections between today’s most pressing concerns in the German public discourse with organizations and institutions dedicated to actively intervening in and shaping social issues. We combine investigations of the crisis of democracy debates in German media and current research with visits to sites of civil society activism and community organizations as they have developed in past and present East and West Germany. And we engage with the topic of cultural pluralism in light of recent social, political, and religious tensions related to migration, not only in the seminar room but also through visits to local groups invested in contributing to resolving these tensions through various initiatives. Navigating a wide range of platforms for news and discussion, we look at how modern social media promotes civil movements from the political left and right, and ask what this pluralization of forms of communication means for Germany’s established public-media services. In addition to the study of current public debates and forms of civic engagement, the purpose of this course is to refine and advance your ability to articulate yourself verbally and in writing through constant vocabulary building.
Syllabus
All Bard College Berlin language courses address the development of skills in reading and listening comprehension, conversation and writing within the context of the European Framework of Languages from level A1 through C2.
Beginner German A1
Emphasis on familiar vocabulary building, listening comprehension and speaking with gradual introduction to grammar and writing skills.
Beginner German A2
Continued emphasis on listening comprehension and routine communication. Students read and write short, simple texts.
Intermediate German B1
Emphasis on communication skills including comprehension of standard speech and descriptive reading passages, topical conversation and simple, descriptive composition.
Intermediate German B2
Continued emphasis on communication skills including comprehension of extended speeches and lectures, reading of newspapers and general periodicals, spontaneous conversational interaction with native speakers and writing clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects.
Advanced German Language C1
Development of listening and reading comprehension levels to include extended speech and some literary texts. Emphasis on conversational and writing skills to express ideas and opinions and present detailed descriptions expressing points of view.
Advanced German Language C2
Development of comprehension skills to allow for understanding of all forms of spoken language and written texts. Emphasis on communication skills for the fluent expression of ideas and argument both orally and in written form.
Instructor: Julia Gehring
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed & Fri 9:00-10:30
Syllabus
GM101 German Beginner A1 (Group B)
Instructor: Julia Gehring
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed & Fri 10:45-12:15
Syllabus
GM101 German Beginner A1 (Group C)
Instructor: Christine Nilsson
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed, & Fri 14:00-15:30
Syllabus
GM101 German Beginner A1 (Group D)
Instructor: Narges Roshan
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed, & Fri 10:45-12:15
GM151 German Beginner A2 (Group A)
Instructor: Ariane Friedländer
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed, & Fri 9:00-10:30
Syllabus
GM151 German Beginner A2 (Group B)
Instructor: Christiane Bethke
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed, & Fri 14:00-15:30
Syllabus
GM201 German Intermediate B1 (Group A)
Instructor: Christiane Bethke
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed, & Fri 15:45-17:15
Syllabus
GM201 German Intermediate B1 (Group B)
Instructor: Ryan Carroll
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed, & Fri 14:00-15:30
Syllabus
GM201 German Intermediate B1 (Group C)
Instructor: Ryan Carroll
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed, & Fri 9:00-10:30
Syllabus
GM251 German Intermediate B2
Instructor: Vincent Hessling
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed, & Fri: 10:45-12:15
Syllabus
GM301 German Advanced C1
Instructor: Vincent Hessling
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Mon, Wed, & Fri 15:45-17:15
Syllabus
GM150 German Conversation
Instructor: Narges Roshan
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Wed & Fri 14:00-15:30
The course is designed to help students boost their speaking skills and communicate in German with ease and confidence. Understanding and responding to what people speak on the street and in everyday situations poses challenges for many language learners; the course will tackle these challenges hands-on and from multiple angles, always with an eye toward what is most useful for students stepping beyond the “English language bubble” on campus. Classes will be structured around topics of student interest and combine vocabulary building and pronunciation exercises with the creation of various speaking scenarios where students practice expressing themselves spontaneously and explore dialects, accents and modes of intonation. The course is open to students who have completed A1 or have at least a basic understanding of the German language; the objective of the course is to create a comfortable speaking environment for beginners to advanced learners.
PT320 Discussing Deutschland: What Germans Are Talking About Today (in German)
Module: Literary Movements and Forms / Social Commitment and the Public Sphere
Instructor: Michael Thomas Taylor
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits
Course Times: Thu 14:00-17:15
Students taking the class should have B2 proficiency level in German.
This course examines the interconnections between today’s most pressing concerns in the German public discourse with organizations and institutions dedicated to actively intervening in and shaping social issues. We combine investigations of the crisis of democracy debates in German media and current research with visits to sites of civil society activism and community organizations as they have developed in past and present East and West Germany. And we engage with the topic of cultural pluralism in light of recent social, political, and religious tensions related to migration, not only in the seminar room but also through visits to local groups invested in contributing to resolving these tensions through various initiatives. Navigating a wide range of platforms for news and discussion, we look at how modern social media promotes civil movements from the political left and right, and ask what this pluralization of forms of communication means for Germany’s established public-media services. In addition to the study of current public debates and forms of civic engagement, the purpose of this course is to refine and advance your ability to articulate yourself verbally and in writing through constant vocabulary building.
Syllabus
All Bard College Berlin language courses address the development of skills in reading and listening comprehension, conversation and writing within the context of the European Framework of Languages from level A1 through C2.
Beginner German A1
Emphasis on familiar vocabulary building, listening comprehension and speaking with gradual introduction to grammar and writing skills.
Beginner German A2
Continued emphasis on listening comprehension and routine communication. Students read and write short, simple texts.
Intermediate German B1
Emphasis on communication skills including comprehension of standard speech and descriptive reading passages, topical conversation and simple, descriptive composition.
Intermediate German B2
Continued emphasis on communication skills including comprehension of extended speeches and lectures, reading of newspapers and general periodicals, spontaneous conversational interaction with native speakers and writing clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects.
Advanced German Language C1
Development of listening and reading comprehension levels to include extended speech and some literary texts. Emphasis on conversational and writing skills to express ideas and opinions and present detailed descriptions expressing points of view.
Advanced German Language C2
Development of comprehension skills to allow for understanding of all forms of spoken language and written texts. Emphasis on communication skills for the fluent expression of ideas and argument both orally and in written form.
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