Courses Fall 2021

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, Jeffrey Champlin, Sinem Kılıç

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. The Republic offers a unique point of entry into the epochal philosophical, political, and literary achievements of fifth and fourth-century Athens. Through its depiction of Socrates in conversation, it draws us into a dialogue about ethical, political, aesthetic, and epistemic questions that are fundamental to human life. As an exemplar of radical questioning, both in Plato’s time and beyond, the figure of Socrates will be a critical resource for our own engagements with the contemporary world. Rather than a series of separate treatises, the Republic addresses its themes 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. In its aspiration and scope, the Republic offers an illuminating starting point for the endeavour of liberal education. In this course, we will be particularly attentive to Socratic questioning and the dialogic character of Plato’s writing in its exchanges with other authors, genres and modes of thought. We will start with the Near Eastern poem The Epic of Gilgamesh, which anticipates many of the themes we will encounter throughout the course. We will also read the Republic alongside Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Homer’s Iliad, Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen, selections from Sappho, the architecture of the Parthenon, and Euripides’ The Bacchae. Attending to the interlocutors with which the Republic is engaged, we will strive to better understand and evaluate its arguments and drama. Concluding this course, we will trace some more recent engagements with Socrates in politics, liberal education and civil rights movements by reading selections from M.K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Syllabus

IS102 Renaissance Florence

BA2 Core Course

Module: Renaissance Art and Thought

Instructors: Geoff Lehman, Katalin Makkai, Laura Scuriatti, Andrea Ottone

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 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 dialogue with literary, philosophical, and political texts of the period, opens 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

Instructors: Irwin Collier, Aysuda Kölemen, Boris Vormann, Jeffrey Champlin

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course Times:

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 as they echo in the liberal and critical traditions of Western political thought. 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 led to disciplinary specializations and certain blind spots in linking development and underdevelopment, enlightenment and exclusion. It allows students to understand, draw upon and critique the historical formulation of contemporary problems and concerns such as the foundations of political freedom, the nature of markets, the sources and circulation of wealth, the social impact of inequality and racism, 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: Ulrike Wagner, Nassim Abi Ghanem

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Coure time: Mon 9:00-12:15

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

Art and Aesthetics Foundational Modules

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 time: Mon 9-12:15
 
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 displaced 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 be addressed in our question concerning the fate of art in the twentieth century. 

Syllabus

AH212 Utopia and Despair: German Art and the Question of National Identity

Module: Art and Artists in Context

Instructor: Aya Soika 

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Wed 14:00-17:15

Questions of national identity and belonging constitute a particularly complex issue in German art and culture. In the early 1800s painters such as Caspar David Friedrich – hoping for national unity in response to Napoleon’s conquests – looked back to the Gothic period and promoted the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire. With the development of Germany into an industrial powerhouse and a unified national-imperial state, artists felt the need to explore new ways of seeing. At the same time, they continued to struggle with questions of identity: was it ‘appropriate’ to look for aesthetic inspiration to Paris, to the ‘enemy nation’ defeated in 1870/71? How were artists to relate to modern ‘German’ society? Such questions intensified in the early decades of the twentieth century which witnessed cataclysmic conflict and collapse: the First World War, revolution, the end of monarchy, and the emergence of a liberal but fragile democracy which only lasted until 1933. Some artists responded to the highly partisan construct of ‘national identity’ of these decades with radical iconoclastic scepticism. After the catastrophe of Nazi dictatorship with its war and genocide, the relationship between art and its societal meaning became even more contested: Theodor Adorno proclaimed that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. Collective memories of the German past, and the Cold War conflict between capitalist democracy and socialist dictatorship, continued to influence artistic production. This class offers an introduction to Germany’s difficult history through the examination of artistic positions from early 19th century Romanticism to the memorial discourses in the post-reunification period of the 1990s. Field trips to museums and memorials are an integral part of the course.

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 time: 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. A central focus will be exploring the potential to create new content and meanings resulting from the juxtaposition of found fragments and drawn lines. The course work begins with directed assignments and moves toward more individual creative projects. Students will gather printed materials from Berlin's famous Flohmärkte (flea markets) to use in collages, they will hone their skills at drawing from observation, make abstractions from nature by working outdoors, work collaboratively on large-scale drawings, develop systematic approaches for creating compositions, and experiment with the expressive possibilities of combining text and imagery. 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 Class: The Slow Photo

Module: Art Objects and Experience / Artistic Practice // (fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate requirement)

Instructor: April Gertler

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: 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

FA121 Chronicle of a Season: Are you Happy?     
 
Module: Artistic Practice / Art and Artists in Context // (fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate requirement)
 
Instructor: Paul Festa
 
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Wed 15:45-19:00

Inspired by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch’s celebrated 1960 Paris documentary Chronicle of a Summer, this OSUN-sponsored film production course brings together students from six Bard campuses to create a documentary on the deceptively simple question, “Are you happy?” Using this device, Morin and Rouch provoked Parisians to consider how colonialism, war, capital, race and gender shaped their personal and social experiences. In our course, the question promises to expose the complexities and fault lines of contemporary life and reveal points of connection for course participants. Following Morin and Rouch, filmmakers will double as some of the project’s subjects, documenting their own observations about happiness throughout the process. 

Syllabus

FA199 Virtual Reality in The Artist’s Studio

Module: Artistic Practice

Instructor: John von Bergen

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Thu 15:45-19:00

For artists as different as Laurie Anderson to Jon Rafman, Virtual Reality has been embraced as an art-medium in recent years. Long lines and waitlists at museums prove the high degree of curiosity about this medium, which makes possible a range of sensory aesthetic experiences unknown to audiences in previous decades.
This course is mainly designed for learning about the Google VR software “Tilt Brush” which is becoming a new and exciting alternative to analog art production. By working from prompts, our goals will be to explore what is possible in VR while finding ways to push our artistic interests in a medium that presents itself with very few limitations. We will discuss and explore the conversations that have related to VR and other forms of both digital and physical art while responding to specific prompts that students work on outside of class time. The end of semester goal is to prepare short video documentation of selected projects while sharing some of these projects in VR to the BCB community.

Syllabus

TH162 Political Performance Practice

Module: Artistic Practice / Art and Artists in Context  // (fulfills Civic Engagement Certificate requirement)

Instructor: Nina Tecklenburg 

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Wed 9:00-12:15

How can performance art address social and political issues? How can theater operate as a practice of resistance rather than just reflecting on the current socio-political climate? Throughout the twentieth century artists have explored the political potential of theater and performance. To summarize the past efforts of the avant-garde, the political element of theater is to be found less in content than in form. Situated on the threshold between life and art, between ‘real life’ and ‘staged life’, performance and theater are designed to address questions of representation, (performing) identity and the fabrication of reality and truth. Moreover, as an art form that is based on social encounter, presence, and embodiment, theater and performance art maintain a medial proximity to engaged-art interventions, political activism and creative forms of civic engagement. This proximity can be observed especially since the turn of the millennium, when – in the course of a political turn in the arts – activism and performance art have created new crossovers. Starting with the most relevant political theater and performance makers of the last century (Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht, Augusto Boal, The Living Theatre, Carolee Schneemann, Valie Export, Adrian Piper, Viennese Actionists, Jeremy Deller, Christoph Schlingensief, etc.), we move on to current practices of performance and theater-related activism (especially in Berlin) at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We look at new participatory theater, (post)migrant theater, community theater, contemporary feminist and queer performance, post- and decolonial theater, radical humanism art, socially engaged practice, and “art as public space” (Malzacher). Students will be asked to respond to the class readings and art works discussed in theoretical and practical formats, and to develop their own performance activism projects. 

Syllabus

The following courses are cross-listed with Literature and Rhetoric: 

FM215 Living at the Edge: Outsiders in Film

Module: Art and Artists in Context

Instructor: Matthias Hurst

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits 

Course times: Mon & Wed 17:30-19:00 + weekly film screening on Mon 19:30-22:00

“The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated,” the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset once wrote. In film history, the “outsider” is, paradoxically, a standard trope. Whether because exceptionally gifted, criminal, perverse, victimized, or simply not in conformity with social expectations, this alienated figure holds a mirror up to the world around them, and is the centerpiece of a journey that may lead either to destruction or reconciliation. In this course we introduce film history and analysis through an examination of the trope of the outsider in a number of different contexts. The core text will be Colin Wilson’s seminal study The Outsider (1956). Other literary works, by Henri Barbusse (Hell), Albert Camus (The Stranger), Janet Frame (Towards Another Summer), Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf) and Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea) will support the exploration of existential aspects of the outsider. Among the films addressed will be Fear Eats the Soul (1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder), Vagabond (1985, Agnès Varda), An Angel at My Table (1990, Jane Campion), Moonlight (2016, Barry Jenkins), Joker (2019, Todd Phillips). As these and other examples show, “outsiders” can be marginalized or suppressed by prejudices related to origins, mental health, economic disadvantage, and sexuality. The challenge their stories pose can also extend—in unwelcome as well as transformative ways—beyond the medium of film itself.

Syllabus
     
TH141 Intrigue, Power, and Politics: Staging Friedrich Schiller’s Maria Stuart

Module: Artistic Practice / Approaching Arts through Theory / Art and Artists in Context

Instructor: Julia Hart

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Thu 15:45-19:00

One of the most enduring and resonant plays in the German theater tradition, Friedrich Schiller’s tragedy Maria Stuart (1800), examines questions of power and responsibility by focusing on another time and place: the England of the Reformation, where Mary, Catholic Queen of Scotland, accused of having murdered her husband and abandoning her own people, is hoping for political asylum from her Protestant cousin Queen Elizabeth I. The play shows a matrix of intrigue, partisanship and passion that no character can escape. It is also connected to Schiller’s fundamental ideals, expressed in his treatise “The Theatre Considered as a Moral Institution,” about the civilizing function of the theater. In this seminar, students stage pivotal scenes from Friedrich Schiller’s Maria Stuart as actors and directors, and consider the aesthetic, political or social reasons for staging the drama in today’s context. Different contemporary methods for working with this text as actors and directors will be tried out in the rehearsal room.  Maria Stuart continues to enjoy popularity in the German state theaters and has recently been rediscovered by a generation of young (often female) German theatermakers. Students will compare classical techniques and postdramatic methods in staging and deconstructing this two-hundred-year-old play for the modern stage. We will also visit director Anne Lenk’s production of Maria Stuart at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and look at recent productions by directors Alice Buddeberg and Claudia Bauer.   

Syllabus

The following course is cross-listed with Politics and with Ethics and Politics: 
     
PL205 The Gaze

Module: Approaching Arts through Theory

Instructor: Katalin Makkai

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 15:45-17:15

This course is being offered as an OSUN online course and will include students joining from other OSUN universities.

This course explores a range of ways in which human relationships—with each other, with society at large, with the world in which we live—have been conceived as structured in terms of a “gaze” or “look”. We begin with the idea of the human being as (in part) constituted by a need—or desire—for recognition in the eyes of another (Rousseau and Hegel). We then turn to analyses and critiques of modern Western society as based on a pernicious culture of seeing, drawing from work in philosophy (e.g., Sartre), cultural criticism (e.g., Foucault), feminist theory (e.g., Mulvey), psychoanalysis (Lacan), and film (Hitchcock).

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 14:00-15:30

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

EC110 Principles of Economics (Group B)

Module: Principles of Economics

Instructor: Ann-Kathrin Blankenberg

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon & Wed 14:00-15:30

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

Instructor: Marcus Giamattei

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon & Wed 15:45-17:15

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.

Syllabus

This course fulfills the mathematics and science requirement for humanities students.

EC210 Microeconomics for Social Sciences

Module: Microeconomics

Instructor: Ann-Kathrin Blankenberg

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon & Wed 10:45-12:15

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

Coordinator: Marion Detjen; Jeremy Adelman (Princeton University)

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon & Wed 15:45-17:15

Please note that it will not be possible to add this course during the add/drop period due to the network coordination. 

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 provides a thorough overview of global historical developments from Chinggis Khan’s armies conquering China and Baghdad in the thirteenth century to today. In addition, it offers tools and techniques to situate any historical event, place or person in broader, globally relevant narratives, and 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 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 taught by Marion Detjen on campus and will go through important historical events, places and people, and practice with you the narrative mapping techniques to connect them to each other and to the overarching histories. 3) The team meetings, also 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 opportunities and challenges posed by doing global or world history. 

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 & Thu 17:30-19:00

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.

Syllabus

The following courses are cross-listed with Politics:

IN110 Globalization and International Relations 

Module: Political Systems and Structures

Instructor: Boris Vormann
 
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 15:45-17:15

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 regard 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

PS114 Introduction to Comparative Politics 
 
Module: Political Systems and Structures
 
Instructor: Dave Braneck
 
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 9:00-10:30

Why and how do political systems differ from one another? Which processes have led to the formation of distinct political regimes? And how do these historical variations affect politics today? In addressing these questions in a wide set of contexts, this course provides an introduction to key theoretical approaches and concepts in the comparative study of politics. The focus will be on core topics in political development such as state and nation-building, the role of the state in the economy, its relationship to civil society and processes of democratization. We will also look at different types of political regimes, electoral and party systems—and the ways in which they affect the structure, functioning, and social role of political institutions. We explore these topics from a comparative perspective in combining theoretical texts with case studies. By the end of the course, students will be able to understand important topics in domestic politics, grasp the diversity of political systems and regimes, and analyze current political developments.

Syllabus

PS131 City, State and Justice in Turkey 
 
Module: Political Systems and Structures 
 
Instructor: Ayşe Çavdar
 
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits 

Course time: Fri 9:00-12:15
     
In the first decade of the twenty first century, Turkey was a candidate for EU membership, prompting debates on the nature of the union and its relationship to European and global history. In the second decade, a failed military coup sparked extensive political repression which ranged Turkey among the populist authoritarian regimes gaining strength around the world. During this time, Turkey has become home to a massive influx of displaced persons seeking to reach the EU from the Middle East, and has reached arrangements with its European neighbors to prevent migration across Europe’s borders. It has also seen the consequences of a program of internal forced migration, from Kurdish villages to large cities. These developments appear against the backdrop of Turkey’s own complex modern history as a nation of migrants to Europe and elsewhere, and as a country that has navigated transitions from empire to nation-state, dictatorship to democracy, as well as a negotiation between secularism and Islamism. We will focus in particular on the role of the urban transformation projects pursued by the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) in recent social and political change, and their relation to wealth distribution, internal and external forced migration, a move away from secularization, and a turn toward repression in public and intellectual life. Understanding the contradictions of modern Turkey is essential for grasping the predicament of those who find themselves within its borders as displaced people, and of those who belong to its diaspora.

Syllabus

PS185 Introduction to Policy Analysis  

Module: Political Systems and Structures // (fulfills Civic Engagement Certificate requirement)

Instructor: Gale Raj-Reichert

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 09:00-10:30

This course will introduce students to the definition of policy problems, the identification of a variety of 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: Nassim Abi Ghanem

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Fri 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 call state boundaries into question. Transnational challenges such as climate change, forced migration, epidemics, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism also require collective action on a global scale. In this context, global citizenship has been promoted both as a sensibility and as an emerging reality. This course explores the notion of "global citizenship" from its philosophical foundations. We also address cultural and political perspectives, thinking critically about what global citizenship can and should mean. Building on these investigations, we explore the contemporary experiences and movements through which a future idea or reality of global citizenship might be shaped. The heart of the course will be in an interdisciplinary exploration of two of the transnational problems already noted above – climate change and ethno-nationalist conflicts – through readings and discussion of novels, historical work, film, social theory, social scientific research, and policy documents. We present and compare rising political and social movements relevant to the definition of the category of the citizen across the globe. Texts will include essays by Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Edward Said, Martha Nussbaum, Craig Calhoun, along with Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, Tayib Salih's Season of Migration to the North, Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior and Michael Winterbottom's In This World. 

Syllabus

PT155 Truth and Power

Module: History of Political Thought 

Instructor: Hans Stauffacher

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 9:00-10:30

“No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues,” wrote Hannah Arendt in 1967. Our era counts among those in which the unfriendly relation between truth and politics appears to have developed into a full-scale destructive conflict. But the relation between truth and the exercise of power has always been complicated. On the one hand, power can seem volatile, arbitrary, and illegitimate, while truth seems stable, universal, and definitive. In this regard, truth appears as a counterforce to power that is needed to keep it in check and hold those in power accountable. But on the other hand, we know that truth is itself an unstable phenomenon that is hardly ever independent from the assertion of power. In this course, we will try to shed some light on the complicated relation between the two: first, we will consider power and truth individually and discuss seminal theories and definitions of these central concepts of (political) philosophy. In a second step, we will focus on the writings of two twentieth-century philosophers: Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Both of these thinkers put the complicated relation of power and truth at the center of their thought, but they come to very different conclusions. We will read Arendt’s and Foucault’s core writings on truth and power alongside works that influenced and informed them. 

Syllabus

Cross-Listed with Politics and with Arts and Aesthetics: 

PL205 The Gaze

Module: Ethics and Moral Philosophy

Instructor: Katalin Makkai

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 15:45-17:15

This course is being offered as an OSUN online course and will include students joining from other OSUN universities.

This course explores a range of ways in which human relationships—with each other, with society at large, with the world in which we live—have been conceived as structured in terms of a “gaze” or “look”. We begin with the idea of the human being as (in part) constituted by a need—or desire—for recognition in the eyes of another (Rousseau and Hegel). We then turn to analyses and critiques of modern Western society as based on a pernicious culture of seeing, drawing from work in philosophy (e.g., Sartre), cultural criticism (e.g., Foucault), feminist theory (e.g., Mulvey), psychoanalysis (Lacan), and film (Hitchcock).

Syllabus

Cross-Listed with Politics and with Literature and Rhetoric: 

PT142 Thucydides’ War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians

Module: History of Political Thought

Instructor: David Hayes 

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 17:30-19:00

This course is devoted to a careful reading of Thucydides’ masterpiece, his account of the nearly thirty-year war between cosmopolitan, democratic, imperialist Athens and insular, oligarchic, militarized Sparta. Thucydides has been regarded as the founder of political realism, the first critical historian, and even “the inventor of political science” (Josiah Ober). In addition, political philosophers have been drawn to Thucydides for his investigations of human nature and justice, and his extraordinary literary power has influenced much writing about the experience of war. Questions that we will ask include: What are the causes, character, and consequences of war? What role can (or must) justice play in a realist view of international relations? What difference can individual leadership make when the course of events seems determined by powerful impersonal forces, or by luck? Since the war was regarded by the Greeks themselves as a clash of values, as well as armies, do we find ourselves preferring one side to another? Whose stories engage our compassion as well as our critical scrutiny? Thucydides wrote that his book would be “a possession for all time.” In consideration of the time we live in, we will give special attention to his descriptions of the plague at Athens and its corrupting social effects, of populist demagoguery, and of the tragedy of civil war.

Syllabus
 

Literature and Rhetoric Foundational Modules

LT142 Writing Fiction

Module: Written Arts // (fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate requirement)

Instructor: Clare Wigfall

Credits 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Fri 12:30-15:45

With over fifteen years experience of teaching creative writing, British Faber & Faber author and BBC National Short Story Award winner Clare Wigfall has developed a method that guarantees to inspire your imagination. Whether you are a total beginner, or a writer with some prior experience keen to now work on your craft in collaboration with other writers, her intention is to break down the barriers that inhibit, so that the creative process can come naturally. Her maxim for teaching is that in creative writing there are no rules. You’ll be challenged to experiment with new writing techniques and different genres, such as dystopian fiction and writing in a historical context, as well as exploring how to mine your own experience for inspiration. You’ll also be introduced to inspirational and thought-provoking fiction by established authors, from Roxane Gay to Vladimir Nabokov, and will have a chance to hone your critical skills through discussion of these texts. Encouragement and guidance will be given to help you with shaping your ideas into fully developed writing, and of course you’ll gain invaluable feedback from the group through sharing your work in class. This course will work you hard and provide challenges and surprises, but it also promises lots of laughter, as well as much stimulation and encouragement from the others in the group. As per tradition, Clare’s workshops always conclude with a lively public reading to which friends and family are warmly invited, offering a chance for the group to share new work with the world together. You are very welcome to make contact with Clare before registration to introduce yourself and ask any questions.

Syllabus

LT168 Theories of the Body

Module: Critical and Cultural Theory

Instructor: Clio Nicastro

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 9:00-10:30

The body has always attracted the interest of thinkers and researchers from different disciplines, from philosophy to critical theory to neuroscience. The crucial challenge is to overcome the dichotomy between mind and body, reason and feeling, that has affected Western culture especially from Descartes on. What does it mean to think through the body and what are its ‘dialectics’ (Lisa Yun Lee)? Is there such a thing as a ‘natural’ body or are bodies always constructed by class, race, gender, and our personal stories? This course introduces the main theories of literature and culture by looking at the body as an object of the “medical gaze” (Barbara Duden, Michel Foucault) and of political/gender persecutions (Silvia Federici) as well as a site of both active and passive resistance and expression. 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. Furthermore, we will look at efforts to find a language to speak for/through the body, its desires, and its idiosyncrasies (Dodie Bellamy, Audre Lorde). What kinds of stories are mapped and inscribed in our physical bodies (Paul B. Preciado, Roxane Gay)? Does the body forget? And how are our bodies influenced by their narratives and representations? 

Syllabus

The following course is cross-listed with Politics and Ethics and Politics:

PT142 Thucydides’ War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians

Module: Close Reading / Literary History 

Instructor: David Hayes

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 17:30-19:00

This course is devoted to a careful reading of Thucydides’ masterpiece, his account of the nearly thirty-year war between cosmopolitan, democratic, imperialist Athens and insular, oligarchic, militarized Sparta. Thucydides has been regarded as the founder of political realism, the first critical historian, and even “the inventor of political science” (Josiah Ober). In addition, political philosophers have been drawn to Thucydides for his investigations of human nature and justice, and his extraordinary literary power has influenced much writing about the experience of war. Questions that we will ask include: What are the causes, character, and consequences of war? What role can (or must) justice play in a realist view of international relations? What difference can individual leadership make when the course of events seems determined by powerful impersonal forces, or by luck? Since the war was regarded by the Greeks themselves as a clash of values, as well as armies, do we find ourselves preferring one side to another? Whose stories engage our compassion as well as our critical scrutiny? Thucydides wrote that his book would be “a possession for all time.” In consideration of the time we live in, we will give special attention to his descriptions of the plague at Athens and its corrupting social effects, of populist demagoguery, and of the tragedy of civil war. 

Syllabus

The following course is cross-listed with Art and Aesthetics:

FM215 Living at the Edge: Outsiders in Film

Module: Critical and Cultural Theory

Instructor: Matthias Hurst

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits 

Course times: Mon & Wed 17:30-19:00 + weekly film screening on Mon 19:30-22:00

“The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated,” the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset once wrote. In film history, the “outsider” is, paradoxically, a standard trope. Whether because exceptionally gifted, criminal, perverse, victimized, or simply not in conformity with social expectations, this alienated figure holds a mirror up to the world around them, and is the centerpiece of a journey that may lead either to destruction or reconciliation. In this course we introduce film history and analysis through an examination of the trope of the outsider in a number of different contexts. The core text will be Colin Wilson’s seminal study The Outsider (1956). Other literary works, by Henri Barbusse (Hell), Albert Camus (The Stranger), Janet Frame (Towards Another Summer), Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf) and Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea) will support the exploration of existential aspects of the outsider. Among the films addressed will be Fear Eats the Soul (1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder), Vagabond (1985, Agnès Varda), An Angel at My Table (1990, Jane Campion), Moonlight (2016, Barry Jenkins), Joker (2019, Todd Phillips). As these and other examples show, “outsiders” can be marginalized or suppressed by prejudices related to origins, mental health, economic disadvantage, and sexuality. The challenge their stories pose can also extend—in unwelcome as well as transformative ways—beyond the medium of film itself.

Syllabus

TH141 Intrigue, Power, and Politics: Staging Friedrich Schiller’s Maria Stuart

Module: Literary History 

Instructor: Julia Hart

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Thu 15:45-19:00

One of the most enduring and resonant plays in the German theater tradition, Friedrich Schiller’s tragedy Maria Stuart (1800), examines questions of power and responsibility by focusing on another time and place: the England of the Reformation, where Mary, Catholic Queen of Scotland, accused of having murdered her husband and abandoning her own people, is hoping for political asylum from her Protestant cousin Queen Elizabeth I. The play shows a matrix of intrigue, partisanship and passion that no character can escape. It is also connected to Schiller’s fundamental ideals, expressed in his treatise The Theatre Considered as a Moral Institution, about the civilizing function of the theater. In this seminar, students will stage pivotal scenes from Friedrich Schiller’s Maria Stuart as actors and directors, and consider the aesthetic, political or social reasons for staging the drama in today’s context. Different contemporary methods for working with this text as actors and directors will be tried out in the rehearsal room.  Maria Stuart continues to enjoy popularity in the German state theatres and has recently been rediscovered by a generation of young (often female) German theatermakers. Students will compare classical techniques and postdramatic methods in staging and deconstructing this two-hundred-year-old play for the modern stage. We will also visit director Anne Lenk’s production of Maria Stuart at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and look at recent productions by directors Alice Buddeberg and Claudia Bauer.  

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 15:45-17:15

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

PS114 Introduction to Comparative Politics 
 
Module: Comparative Politics

Instructor: Dave Braneck
 
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Tue & Thu 9:00-10:30

Why and how do political systems differ from one another? Which processes have led to the formation of distinct political regimes? And how do these historical variations affect politics today? In addressing these questions in a wide set of contexts, this course provides an introduction to key theoretical approaches and concepts in the comparative study of politics. The focus will be on core topics in political development such as state and nation-building, the role of the state in the economy, its relationship to civil society and processes of democratization. We will also look at different types of political regimes, electoral and party systems—and the ways in which they affect the structure, functioning, and social role of political institutions. We explore these topics from a comparative perspective in combining theoretical texts with case studies. By the end of the course, students will be able to understand important topics in domestic politics, grasp the diversity of political systems and regimes, and analyze current political developments.

Syllabus

PS131 City State and Justice in Turkey 

Module: International Studies and Globalization 
 
Instructor: Ayşe Çavdar
 
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits 

Course time: Fri 9:00-12:15
 
In the first decade of the twenty first century, Turkey was a candidate for EU membership, prompting debates on the nature of the union and its relationship to European and global history. In the second decade, a failed military coup sparked extensive political repression which ranged Turkey among the populist authoritarian regimes gaining strength around the world. During this time, Turkey has become home to a massive influx of displaced persons seeking to reach the EU from the Middle East, and has reached arrangements with its European neighbors to prevent migration across Europe’s borders. It has also seen the consequences of a program of internal forced migration, from Kurdish villages to large cities. These developments appear against the backdrop of Turkey’s own complex modern history as a nation of migrants to Europe and elsewhere, and as a country that has navigated transitions from empire to nation-state, dictatorship to democracy, as well as a negotiation between secularism and Islamism. We will focus in particular on the role of the urban transformation projects pursued by the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) in recent social and political change, and their relation to wealth distribution, internal and external forced migration, a move away from secularization, and a turn toward repression in public and intellectual life. Understanding the contradictions of modern Turkey is essential for grasping the predicament of those who find themselves within its borders as displaced people, and of those who belong to its diaspora.

Syllabus

PS185 Introduction to Policy Analysis  

Module: Policy Analysis // (fulfills Civic Engagement Certificate requirement)

Instructor: Gale Raj-Reichert

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 09:00-10:30

This course will introduce students to the definition of policy problems, the identification of a variety 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

PT150 Global Citizenship

Module: International Studies and Globalization

Instructor: Nassim Abi Ghanem

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Fri 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 call state boundaries into question. Transnational challenges such as climate change, forced migration, epidemics, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism also require collective action on a global scale. In this context, global citizenship has been promoted both as a sensibility and as an emerging reality. This course explores the notion of "global citizenship" from its philosophical foundations. We also address cultural and political perspectives, thinking critically about what global citizenship can and should mean. Building on these investigations, we explore the contemporary experiences and movements through which a future idea or reality of global citizenship might be shaped. The heart of the course will be in an interdisciplinary exploration of two of the transnational problems already noted above – climate change and ethno-nationalist conflicts – through readings and discussion of novels, historical work, film, social theory, social scientific research, and policy documents. We present and compare rising political and social movements relevant to the definition of the category of the citizen across the globe. Texts will include essays by Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Edward Said, Martha Nussbaum, Craig Calhoun, along with Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, Tayib Salih's Season of Migration to the North, Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior and Michael Winterbottom's In This World. 

Syllabus

PT155 Truth and Power

Module: Political and Moral Thought

Instructor: Hans Stauffacher

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 9:00-10:30

“No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues,” wrote Hannah Arendt in 1967. Our era counts among those in which the unfriendly relation between truth and politics appears to have developed into a full-scale destructive conflict. But the relation between truth and the exercise of power has always been complicated. On the one hand, power can seem volatile, arbitrary, and illegitimate, while truth seems stable, universal, and definitive. In this regard, truth appears as a counterforce to power that is needed to keep it in check and hold those in power accountable. But on the other hand, we know that truth is itself an unstable phenomenon that is hardly ever independent from the assertion of power. In this course, we will try to shed some light on the complicated relation between the two: first, we will consider power and truth individually and discuss seminal theories and definitions of these central concepts of (political) philosophy. In a second step, we will focus on the writings of two twentieth-century philosophers: Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Both of these thinkers put the complicated relation of power and truth at the center of their thought, but they come to very different conclusions. We will read Arendt’s and Foucault’s core writings on truth and power alongside works that influenced and informed them. 

Syllabus

The following course is cross-Listed with Literature and Rhetoric: 

PT142 Thucydides’ War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians

Module: Political and Moral Thought

Instructor: David Hayes 

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 17:30-19:00

This course is devoted to a careful reading of Thucydides’ masterpiece, his account of the nearly thirty-year war between cosmopolitan, democratic, imperialist Athens and insular, oligarchic, militarized Sparta. Thucydides has been regarded as the founder of political realism, the first critical historian, and even “the inventor of political science” (Josiah Ober). In addition, political philosophers have been drawn to Thucydides for his investigations of human nature and justice, and his extraordinary literary power has influenced much writing about the experience of war. Questions that we will ask include: What are the causes, character, and consequences of war? What role can (or must) justice play in a realist view of international relations? What difference can individual leadership make when the course of events seems determined by powerful impersonal forces, or by luck? Since the war was regarded by the Greeks themselves as a clash of values, as well as armies, do we find ourselves preferring one side to another? Whose stories engage our compassion as well as our critical scrutiny? Thucydides wrote that his book would be “a possession for all time.” In consideration of the time we live in, we will give special attention to his descriptions of the plague at Athens and its corrupting social effects, of populist demagoguery, and of the tragedy of civil war. 

Syllabus
 

Art and Aesthetics Advanced Modules

AH216 Berlin’s Museum Controversies

Module: Exhibition and Performance Culture

Instructor: Aya Soika, co-taught with Andrea Meyer (TU Berlin)

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Fri 10:00-17:00 (This course will only meet during the second half of the semester, i.e. weeks 8-14)
 
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 crucial 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.

Syllabus

AH281 Contemporary Art and The Anthropocene

Module: Exhibition and Performance Culture / Artists, Genres, Movements

Instructor: Laura López Paniagua 

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits 

Course time: Tue 9-12:15

Can art provide alternative ways of conceptualizing and inhabiting the planet? This course will examine how contemporary art exhibitions, such as “May You Live in Interesting Times” (Venice Biennale 2019), “Down to Earth” (Gropius Bau, 2020), or Sun Rise / Sun Set (Schinkel Pavillon, 2021), and artists like Tomás Saraceno, Pierre Huyghe, Tino Sehgal, or Laure Provost, approach this issue. “Anthropocene” was the term proposed in 2000 by scientists Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer to designate the new geological epoch starting in the eighteenth century, in which “the global effects of human activities have become clearly noticeable.” Though the destructive effects of our actions have been addressed by artists for decades, the topic has acquired a central importance during the last years, in which the effects of climate change and other global upheavals have become apparent, as well as a permanent source of controversy and political animosity. Aided by thinkers such as Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, we will define the basic theoretical framework of this discourse in art, and apply it in the analysis of anthropocene-related works of contemporary artists and curators. The seminar will be enriched by multiple field trips to contemporary art exhibitions in museums and galleries.

Syllabus
 
AH313 Photography and Modernity

Module: Media, Practices, Techniques / Aesthetics and Art Theory

Instructor: Geoff Lehman

Credits 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 15:45-17:15

Invented in the early nineteenth century, the new medium of photography has since then occupied a crucial place within visual culture. This course considers photography in terms of the conditions and concerns specific to its medium, as well as in its relationship to painting, to the origins of cinema, to key aspects of modernism and postmodernism, and to broader categories of existence (affective, social, scientific, oneiric). Major topics for the course include: photography’s theoretical and technical origins in Renaissance perspective and the camera obscura; memory, presence, and affective response, with a particular focus on portraiture; the “reality effect,” documentation, and social criticism; originality and replication in relation both to avant-garde practices and to mass culture. Special attention will be given to the early history of photography and to photography within the broader context of modernism. The course will also involve a sustained dialogue between photography and painting (Renaissance portraiture, Goya, the Pre-Raphaelites, Impressionism, Surrealism). Recent developments in digital photographic practice, especially in relation to online replication and dissemination, will be a topic towards the end of the term. We will be guided throughout by close reading of individual works by photographers such as Daguerre, Talbot, Nadar, Cameron, Atget, Man Ray, Lange, Arbus, Sherman, and Lawler, among others. Visits to galleries, museums, and installation sites to experience works of art firsthand are an integral part of the course. 

Syllabus
 
FA291 “far-feeling”: telepathic improvisations and expanded cinema

Module: Media, Practices, Techniques / Aesthetics and Art Theory 

Instructor: Isabell Spengler

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Thu 10-12 & 13:00-15:30 (this course will meet 10 times during the semester)
 
What does telepathy - the art of "far-feeling" - have to do with film? How can film, a perfect medium to reproduce the outer appearance of things, transmit inner worlds? And which alternative relations do works of "expanded cinema" set up between senders and receivers - between film-authors and viewers? In this experimental film class, we will examine contemporary and classic works of expanded cinema (since 1960), which explore the concept of telepathy in a broader sense and propose new ways of relating in human and non-human worlds. Together, we will investigate how expanded-cinema works can be appropriated as models of thought. In their film installation "Telepathic Improvisation" (2017) Berlin-based artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz interpret a performance-score of the same title by composer Pauline Oliveros from 1974. In the artists' words, "Telepathic Improvisation explores the ways in which others (including other objects) might become part of our striving for alternative political and sexual imaginations." Starting with practical research, students will engage in a number of telepathic improvisations and performance experiments, and document them on video. In a second step, they will develop conceptual approaches to "transmit" their findings to an audience and create new works of expanded cinema. Students will work in teams and collaborate in the production of their final film project.

Syllabus

FA302 Advanced Painting: Oil Paint and After

Module: Media, Practices, Techniques

Instructor: John Kleckner

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: 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 painting techniques with the aim of synchronizing chosen materials and methods with personal expression and content. Classes will feature technical demonstrations of airbrushing, marbling, masking, projecting, stamping, stencils, collaging, 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 prior painting experience and be highly motivated to make a body of original work. The semester culminates in an “Open Studios” group exhibition.

Syllabus 

FA308 Finding the Stories  

Module: Media, Practices, Techniques // (fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate requirement)

Instructor: Carla Åhlander

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Fri 14:00-17:15

This course combines photo analysis and practical photo work. Consciousness will be raised of what a narrative constitutes 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

FM271 The Films of Wim Wenders

Module: Artists, Genres, Movements

Instructor: Matthias Hurst

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Fri 14:00-17:15 + weekly film screening on Wed 19:30-22:00

Wim Wenders is one of Germany’s best known and most prolific filmmakers. He was a major representative of New German Cinema and the so-called Autorenfilm in the 1970s and 1980s, and an important artistic voice for the post-war generation. In addition, he became a celebrated figure in international cinema, making films in locations all over the world, and contributing to the genre of documentary as well as the development of the feature film. As film historians have noted, Wenders is notoriously difficult to classify in terms of cultural traditions or cinematic movements; thus exploring Wenders’s development as filmmaker involves an examination of highly distinctive aesthetic and narrative approaches to the medium, from auteur cinema to modern and postmodern film. His two most famous works Paris, Texas (1984), set in the desolate American West, and Wings of Desire (1987), a gripping portrait of the divided city of Berlin, encapsulate his wide-ranging scope and experimental power. We will consider these two works within Wim Wenders’s career, which includes Alice in the Cities (1974), Kings of the Road (1976), The American Friend (1977), The End of Violence (1997), Buena Vista Social Club (1999), The Million Dollar Hotel (2000), Land of Plenty (2004), Don’t Come Knocking (2005), Every Thing Will Be Fine (2015), and Submergence (2017). 

Syllabus

TH261(Post)pandemic Theater in Berlin and New York

Module: Media, Practices, Techniques / Exhibition Culture and Public Space

Instructor: Nina Tecklenburg and Ramona Mosse

In partnership with Miriam Felton-Dansky (Bard Annandale, Theater and Performance)

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Tue 15:45-19:00

The year 2020-2021 witnessed profound and historic changes in the relationships among theater making, media, and society: from productions abruptly cancelled and theater venues closing, to new digital and hybrid theater forms on social media, to a powerful racial justice movement, particularly in the US-theater community. The global health crises has forced performance makers to redefine theater and its central social and cultural functions. This course investigates theater of the past year and a half, asking how contemporary theater's relationship to its own social and political moment has changed, perhaps for good, at a time when audiences cannot gather in person. We will explore questions of institutional shift, examine significant digital performances made during the COVID-19 pandemic and trace movements for racial justice in the theater world. Our semester-long project will be the creation of a living archive – digital and physical – of Berlin and New York-based pandemic theater. The living archive will be composed of short documentary videos, visual collages, audio encounters, and hybrid performances. Our two collaborating courses at Bard College Berlin and Bard Annandale will hold regular in-person and virtual meetings, and conduct parallel investigations into pandemic theater. We will invite artists and curators from the performing arts sector, discuss the stakes and cultural implications of archival practice, and compare notes about how to document, describe, and understand the history we have all been living through together.

Syllabus

Economics Advanced Modules

EC221 Sustainability Economics 
 
Modules: Behavioral Economics / Choice, Resources, Development / Ethics and Economic Analysis

Instructor: Ann-Kathrin Blankenberg

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue 10:45-12:15 & 14:00-15:30

This course focuses on the relation between the discipline of behavioral economics  and the question of the state of the natural environment. Humanity is drawing closer to its ecological limits and faces increasingly complex challenges such as resource scarcity, climate change, loss of biodiversity, the consequences of increasing wealth inequality and (of course), the unexpected renewal of an old threat: epidemics. Economic development that is ecologically sustainable and socially just as well as efficient is of crucial importance for the future of society. To bring it about, actors at all levels (individuals, companies, and political decision-makers) must be involved. Public policies have to be developed that are grounded on empirical evidence about how people actually behave. We will explore the potential of behavioral economics to drive environmental protection and to contribute to the efficient design of policy instruments, as well as discussing pro-environmental behavior and how it is perceived or experienced. Topics covered in the course include: the basic relationship between the economy and ecology; the causes of environmental problems; the overexploitation of the natural basis of life; the essential meaning of the term “sustainable development”; relevant differences between schools of economic thought; instruments for environmental protection; the valuation of non-marketable effects/goods (stated & revealed preferences, SWB); environmental behavior (is it a sacrifice?); pro-environmental identity; and the connection between environmentally-friendly behavior and life satisfaction.

Syllabus

EC310 Global Economics

Module: Global Economic Systems

Instructor: Marcus Giamattei

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits 

Course times: Tue 15:45-17:15 & Wed 9:00-10:30

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
 

Ethics and Politics Advanced Modules

All courses are cross-listed with Politics

PL281 What was (and is) Enlightenment?

Module: Movements and Thinkers

Instructor: Vanessa de Senarclens

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Thu 15:45-19:00

In contemporary debates, we often hear an appeal to the Enlightenment in the context of the defense of scientific standards of evidence (especially in opposition to conspiracy theories), or in calls for reason and tolerance in opposition to religious fanaticism and obscurantism. What is the “Enlightenment” being invoked here? The Enlightenment as an intellectual movement has ancient and diverse philosophical roots, and the term does not ultimately refer to a homogenous time-period or a normative body of work. It is however still often associated with French philosophers of the pre-Revolutionary era. What were their main principles, methods and objects of inquiry? A determination to question tradition, to critique prejudice, a wish to go back to “nature”, to challenge existing forms of authority and power, and to gather and make accessible all forms of reliable knowledge. The thinkers of the Enlightenment were dedicated anthropologists, analyzing other cultures the better to understand and change their own. Of course, the universalistic and rationalistic philosophical premises of this intellectual movement have not gone uncontested over the centuries, especially in regard to matters of race, gender, colonialism and other questions of political domination and control.  In this course, we will read some of its key texts, by Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot and d’Alembert, but also twentieth-century and more recent responses and critiques. We will visit the Staatsbibliothek at Unter den Linden, to consider how works that have been decisive for modern thought were originally circulated and presented in physical form. 

Syllabus

PL320 Nietzsche: Philosophy at the Limit

Module: Movements and Thinkers

Instructor: Tracy Colony

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 17:30-19:00
 
The influence of Nietzsche’s work upon later continental philosophy is perhaps unparalleled. In this advanced course we will read selections from his major works in order to introduce central themes of his philosophy such as the will to power, the eternal recurrence and the death of god. Reading chronologically, we will trace through the development of Nietzsche’s thought with special attention to Nietzsche’s understanding of metaphysics and his preparations for an alternative future for philosophy. Of particular importance will be the role which Nietzsche’s understanding of genealogy plays in these preparations. In this course we will also chart the history of the reception of Nietzsche’s philosophy and become familiar with seminal works in the secondary literature such as those of Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, and Malabou. All texts will be read in translation, however, parallel readings in the original German will be supported and encouraged. 

Syllabus

PS306 The European Union: Its Institutions, Laws, and Citizens

Module: Law, Politics and Society // (fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate and Civic Engagement Certificate requirements)

Instructor: Berit Ebert

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Fri 9:00-12:15

Brexit, the rise of populist movements, and a growing suspicion of international organizations do not seem to offer a promising future for the European Union. However, the concept of supranationality that governs it is a unique one in the history of global collaboration, and has allowed the achievement of goals set 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 evolution of EU institutions over their more than seventy-year history. In addition, we trace the landmark decisions of the European Court of Justice and how they have shaped the Union’s political advancement. We consider the European Union’s much-discussed “democratic deficit” and look at political processes, including recent European electoral-law reform and the reform of the judicial system in Poland. These processes shed new light on the way the EU deals with gender, human rights and the rule of law. The records of individual court cases will also 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 conclusions regarding the future of the European project.

Syllabus

PS302 Global Public Policies and Their Impact on the Global South

Module: Law, Politics, Society / Global Social Theory // (fulfills Civic Engagement Certificate requirement)

Instructor: Gale Raj-Reichert

Credits: 8 ECTS credits, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 10:45 -12:15

This course focuses on examining global public policies and their impacts on lower-income countries located in the Global South. We understand ‘global’ public policy to mean policies which have a cross-border or transnational effect both directly and indirectly. This includes policies developed and enforced at the national level which ‘reach’ countries in the Global South and policies established at the intergovernmental or international level which set out rules for many countries. The aim of the course is for students to understand which questions to ask and generally to critically examine the analytical tools available to assess global policy impacts on economies, communities, and the environment in the Global South. An important aspect of our discussions will be focused on understanding the ways in which different policymaking institutions function and the influence different actors (and their politics) have on the policymaking process and outcomes. The specific global policies and issues covered in the course are climate change, intellectual property rights rules (and their impacts on vaccines), international trade, international labour standards, migration, and foreign aid.

Syllabus

PT306 Liberalism and Empire: The Case of India

Module: Movements and Thinkers

Instructor: Ewa Atanassow  

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 10:45-12:15

What is liberalism: a philosophical outlook or a set of institutions; a mode of public discourse or an economic program; a Western ideology or the first global political movement? Are liberalism and imperialism antithetical, or are they mutually constitutive? In this course we will grapple with these questions both historically and conceptually, by scrutinizing liberalism's relationship to the construction and deconstruction of colonial empires of the 19th and 20th centuries. We'll encounter thinkers and political actors, activists and artists on both sides of the colonial divide. Our main (though not exclusive) focus will be liberalism's contested articulation as the ruling philosophy in 19th century Britian, and two of its policy priorities: the abolition of slavery and the consolidation of British rule in India. We'll engage with works by B.R. Ambedkar, Mahatma Gandhi, Karl Marx, Karuna Mantena, Uday Mehta, James and J.S. Mill, T. B. Macaulay, Jawaharlal Nehru, George Orwell, Satyajit Ray, Arundhati Roy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Alexis de Tocqueville.

Syllabus

PT316 Germany after Covid-19 and Chancellor Angela Merkel

Module: Law, Politics and Society // (fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate and Civic Engagement Certificate requirements)

Instructor: Timo Lochocki

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Wed 9:00-12:15

This autumn the 16-year reign of chancellor Angela Merkel comes to an end. At the very same time, the handling of Covid-19 is altering the balance between legislative and executive in Germany, while the German budget is undergoing severe revisions in the light of the responses to Covid-19 as much as for fighting climate change. The federal elections of September 2021 will function as a major catalyst for change in German politics.
In particular 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 first German government that will form without Angela Merkel at its helm. Ideally, students will already have a fundamental knowledge of Germany's history and social structure, and of its financial and political systems.

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

SO284 Cultures of Migration

Module: Global Social Theory / Movements and Thinkers // (fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate requirement)

Instructor:  Özlem Savaş

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 10:45-12:15

This course focuses on everyday cultural practices and forms that emerge through migration experiences. It addresses how the unbounded, complex, fluid, and plural cultural spheres that are created and transformed by migrants shape societies as a whole, rather than confining them to a sphere of “migrant” culture. The course critically discusses a range of concepts and debates that are significant to the study of migration such as belonging, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, translocalism, multiculturalism, and postmigrant society, as well as the key concepts of culture, identity, and place. Mainly drawing on anthropological approaches to migration and ethnographic case studies, it explores everyday production and transformation of cultures of migration through practices of belonging and place-making, urban spaces of encounter and conviviality, uses of digital media both in private and public contexts, and various forms of everyday activisms, among others. The course pays special attention to Berlin, the city that originated the concept of the postmigrant, through extra-curricular visits to public events and guest-lectures as well as ethnographic studies.

Syllabus

SO302 Science in Translation     

Module: Movements and Thinkers // (fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate requirement)

Instructor: Qiao Yang

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Fri 9:00-12:15

This course fulfills the mathematics and science requirement for humanities students.

Arabic and Persian texts on Islamic astronomy, which mostly originated from Hellenistic traditions, existed in the Chinese imperial library in the mid-thirteenth century. It was only in the late fourteenth century that these texts were translated into Chinese. Chinese astronomers, however, encountered formidable difficulties in putting the texts into actual use. Almost three centuries later, in the mid-seventeenth century, a German Jesuit (re)introduced European astronomy into the Chinese world. But after the death of the Shunzhi Emperor, he fell victim to internal struggles for influence, and was accused of errors in his calendrical calculations as they pertained to the royal family. His fate, and his role in mediating diverse cultural legacies, shows the contingent and surprising ways in which science traverses (or is sometimes obstructed and rediverted) by distinctive traditions and languages. This course explores the relation between science and languages from premodern times to the present. How does science move through and across languages? Does scientific translation weaken or reinforce cultural boundaries? What role do translators play in the transmission of scientific knowledge? We tackle these questions by combining fascinating historical records with recent scholarship in history, literature and translation studies. We will think broadly about the transmission of knowledge, and how language and science are related to authority and power. We will meet translators in the eighth-century House of Wisdom in Baghdad, in Renaissance Europe, in Chinese imperial courts, and in Meiji Japan. We will follow scientific texts across geographic, religious, and cultural boundaries, ultimately turning a critical eye to our own era, and rethinking the universality of science. 

Syllabus

The following courses are cross-listed with Literature and Rhetoric and Politics:

HI270 Technology and Culture: The Invention of the Printing Press

Module: Movements and Thinkers / Global Social Theory
 
Instructor: Andrea Ottone

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon & Wed 10:45-12:15

We are currently living through a rapid technological revolution in communication, the implications of which have not yet been fully grasped      or addressed. But human societies have been here before. The invention of the moveable type printing press is thought to have produced a revolution not only in communication but in society, affecting the development of language and usage, the formation of beliefs, and the structures of authority and governance. To what extent did it really bring about irreversible, radical change? Our exploration of this question will start in the late Middle Ages when the collapse of feudalism coincided with a general reset of communication infrastructures and a progressive growth of literacy and scribal practices. We will examine the transition between manuscript and print culture and the nature of its relationship to social conditions. Our journey will then touch on key cultural and political shifts of the early modern period including the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the liberal revolutions of the eighteenth century to end with the advent of industrialization and the beginning of mass society. How does looking at these developments through a focus on the physical basis of communication change our understanding of their significance and dynamics? Throughout, we will look at analogies between the past and today, to develop an analysis of the common mistakes that arise from taking a deterministic view of technological development. 

Syllabus

LT355 Critical Diversity and Decolonial Methodology in the (Liberal) Arts 

Module: Movements and Thinkers / Global Social Theory 

Instructor: Kathy-Ann Tan

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits 

Course time: Fri 14:00-17:15

This course is being offered as an OSUN online course and will include students joining from other OSUN universities.

In this class, we will combine theory and practice to develop a critical methodology that harnesses the potential of a Liberal Arts higher education in fostering antiracist, critical diversity and decolonial ways of thinking and doing. This is a methodology that draws on a growing body of intersectional research and scholarship from the fields of literary and cultural theory, as well as the cultural politics of education, in particular, decolonial and antiracist education. It engages with pedagogies of dissent, survival, and resistance, and provide one means of answering the question that postcolonial feminist scholar Chandra Mohanty asks, "What does it mean to think through, theorize, and engage in questions of difference and power?" The objective of this class is thus to address the conditions of cultural and knowledge production and dissemination in higher education, particularly in the Liberal Arts, the oldest program of higher education in Western history, while attuned to notions of accountability and social justice. Texts will include: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. We Should All Be Feminists, Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Julie Cupples and Ramón Grosfoguel (eds.), Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University, Kimberlé Crenshaw, On Intersectionality, Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, bell hooks, Engaged Pedagogy, bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. 

Syllabus

PT241 Feminism and Community

OSUN network course at Bard College Berlin and CEU

Module: Movements and Thinkers // (fulfills Civic Engagement Certificate requirement)

Instructors: Laura Scuriatti and Ulrike Wagner (BCB); Francisca de Haan; Jasmina Lukić (CEU)

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon & Wed 14:00-15:30

As a political project with deep roots in the Enlightenment, feminism has been concerned with the relationship between individuals and their political and social communities from its inception. For centuries women had experienced that the societies they inhabited did not consider them as individuals, citizens and members of the community with equal rights. The course examines a variety of feminist projects as they grew out of these experiences, and took on distinctive shapes, developing practices and theoretical frameworks all geared toward assessing, questioning and refashioning women’s places, voices and legal status in their respective societies, thus also addressing notions of community, collectivity, and democracy. We will also look at today’s globally connected community-building practices and examine how these joint efforts have given way to newly conceived notions of society and community in intersectional feminist theories. Students will examine texts and practices of reading, writing, and conversation ranging from the sociability cultivated by elite women during the Haskala (the Jewish Enlightenment in Germany) to contemporary feminist theories of intersectionality, via the literary and political works of feminist artists and activists through the twentieth century. Amongst the authors read in the course are: Henriette Herz, Rahel Varnhagen, Hannah Arendt, Fanny Lewald, George Sand, Germaine de Stael, Mary Wollstonecraft, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai, Virginia Woolf, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Claudia Jones, Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies, Uma Narayan, Saba Mahmood, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alice Walker, Luisa Passerini, bell hooks, Adrienne Rich, Silvia Federici, Judith Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Amina Jamal, Michael Hart, Antonio Negri, Ann Ferguson, Dubravka Ugresic, and Carmen Gaite.  As part of the course, students from both campuses (BCB and CEU) will work on group assignments throughout the semester, aimed at preparing a course lexicon and online resources together with faculty. The results of the collaborative work will be presented at a final workshop with all participants in Berlin.

Syllabus

PT320 Discussing Deutschland: What Germans Are Talking About Today (in German)

Module: Law, Politics and Society / Civic Engagement and Social Justice // (fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate and Civic Engagement Certificate requirements)

Instructor: Michael Thomas Taylor

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Wed 9:00-12:15

This course engages pressing debates in German media today, asking about the issues and forms of discourse that shape German politics and social life. It is structured around visits to cultural sites, events, and organizations in Berlin, along with topics chosen from current media by the participants in cooperation with the instructor. These may include visits to museums, political parties, NGOs, or media producers. Reflecting the ongoing shift of public life to online venues, we will also examine the virtual presence of these traditionally site-based forms of publicness in relation to old and new media. In addition to the study of current public debates and 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. 
NB: Students taking the class should have a B2 proficiency level in German or higher

Syllabus

The following courses are cross-listed with Literature and Rhetoric:

LT322 The Reinstatement of the Vague: Indistinct/Confused/Unconscious/Intuitive/Fuzzy Thinking in Modern Fiction and Psychology
 
Module: Movements and Thinkers 
 
Instructor: Ross Shields
 
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits 

Course time: Mon 14:00-17:15
 
According to the old arrangement, brokered by Alexander Baumgarten in the early eighteenth century, the difference between literature and psychology was grounded in the mode of cognition involved in either case: here confused, there distinct. As plausible as this may sound today, the relatively sharp division between confusion and distinctness began to blur over the course of the nineteenth century, which culminated in two related phenomena. On the one hand, the birth of the modern psychological novel, which sought—somewhat paradoxically—to render unconscious mental processes distinct. On the other, the “reinstatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life”—as William James described the program of his own Principles of Psychology (1890). As the line between vagueness and distinctness itself became fuzzy, psychology and literature were enmeshed in a disciplinary chiaroscuro that led to their mutual redefinition. This course will interrogate the concept of vagueness through a series of close readings of psychological and literary texts. We will explore how the meaning and status of vagueness underwent a dramatic shift as a result of discoveries in experimental psychology and psychoanalysis, and ask how this shift is reflected and refracted in the work of contemporaneous literary authors. Our aim is not so much to apply psychological theories of vagueness to literary texts, but to understand how the insights communicated through fiction can nuance and complicate hardened systems of thought—very much in the spirit of Franz Kafka’s observation that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.” Readings by William and Henry James, Karl Philipp Moritz, George Elliot, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler; Alexander Baumgarten, Hermann von Helmholtz, Franz Brentano, Carl Stumpf, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud; and a film by Stanley Kubrick.

Syllabus
 

Literature and Rhetoric Advanced Modules

LT308 Contemporary Selves: Autofiction and Autotheory

Module: Literary Movements and Forms / Writer and World

Instructor: James Harker

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits 

Course times: Tue & Thu 15:45-17:15

Autofiction,” a hybrid literary genre combining autobiography and fiction, has seen such a rapid rise in popularity that the critic Jonathan Sturgeon went so far as to declare recently, “The postmodern novel is dead.” This course asks: why has autofiction gained so much attention in recent years? Are these works different from their predecessors? What kinds of stories or insights do they make possible? How do these works demand new thinking about fundamental terms of literary study: character, narrative, fiction, novel? Finally, how does autofiction engage with gender, race, sexuality, displacement, and nationality? Authors will include Lucia Berlin, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner, Tao Lin, Ayad Akhtar, and Tope Folarin. After surveying recent works of autofiction, we will look at “autotheory,” a hybrid of autobiography, essay, and critical theory, in the works of Roland Barthes, Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Maggie Nelson, and Yiyun Li.

LT326 Creative Writing: Writing Workshop

Module: Producing Literature / Writer and World // (fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate requirement)

Instructor: Gavin McCrea

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits 

Course times: Tue & Thu 10:45-12:15

As writers, we’re constantly learning how to do what we do. There will never come a moment in our writing career when we will be able to say, “Now I know for certain how this is done.” Ours is, and will remain, the role of the doubter, the questioner, the analyzer, the student. Where does our writing come from? The answer, simply, is other writing. It is by learning how to read writing that we become writers. In order to grow and develop as writers, we must read regularly and widely. But the quantity of works we read will count for nothing if we do not learn how read carefully. If we do not approach every book, chapter, page, paragraph, sentence as an opportunity to find out what we like and why we like it, what we dislike and why we dislike it, and, importantly, what we will choose to emulate or to recast in our own work. Reading carefully in this way, for this purpose, means slowing down. It means forgetting the race to the end, overcoming the desire to get on to the next story, the next book, and instead approaching each page as a world to immerse ourselves in.
This course, then, is an antidote to fast judgements, fast fashions, speed reading, speed writing. In it, we will slowly and carefully analyze a number of short fictional texts in order to learn specific lessons about certain themes relevant to all fiction writing. We will then put these lessons into practice in our own writing.  Each week, at home, we will read a short story or a novel extract. In class we will perform close textual analyses of a number of passages from that week’s text. During these analyses, we will not be overly concerned with rhetorical jargon (although some of that might be useful). Our focus, really, will be on identifying what information the writer is transmitting in a specific unit of text, how she conveys that information, what she seems to hide or elide, what questions she is trying to answer and what further questions her answers raise. Why did the writer convey the information in this way, and not in another? What specific techniques did she use? Faced with the task of conveying similar sort of information, how would we ourselves proceed? 
In addition to the reading, we will perform a series of writing experiments. These experiments will spring from our in-class textual analyses. For example, having spent some time in class looking at how the writer constructs a specific transition between the narrative present and the narrative past, we might set ourselves the task of writing a short piece of prose containing a similar kind of transition. We will be invited to share our experiments in class. Here, the idea is to show our writing in a raw state, as fragments that have yet to be built upon or integrated into larger narrative bodies. Structured around specific themes, seminars will be devoted to sharing writing experiments and performing close textual analyses and writing exercises. 

Syllabus

LT329 The Writing Life

Module: Writer and World / Producing Literature // (fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate requirement)

Instructor: Martin Widmann

Credits: 8 ECTS Credits, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon & Wed 10:45-12:15

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

The following courses are cross-listed with Ethics and Politics:

LT332 The Reinstatement of the Vague: Indistinct/Confused/Unconscious/Intuitive/Fuzzy Thinking in Modern Fiction and Psychology
 
Module: Writer and World / Theories of Literature and Culture
 
Instructor: Ross Shields
 
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits 

Course time: Mon 14:00-17:15
 
According to the old arrangement, brokered by Alexander Baumgarten in the early eighteenth century, the difference between literature and psychology was grounded in the mode of cognition involved in either case: here confused, there distinct. As plausible as this may sound today, the relatively sharp division between confusion and distinctness began to blur over the course of the nineteenth century, which culminated in two related phenomena. On the one hand, the birth of the modern psychological novel, which sought—somewhat paradoxically—to render unconscious mental processes distinct. On the other, the “reinstatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life”—as William James described the program of his own Principles of Psychology (1890). As the line between vagueness and distinctness itself became fuzzy, psychology and literature were enmeshed in a disciplinary chiaroscuro that led to their mutual redefinition. This course will interrogate the concept of vagueness through a series of close readings of psychological and literary texts. We will explore how the meaning and status of vagueness underwent a dramatic shift as a result of discoveries in experimental psychology and psychoanalysis, and ask how this shift is reflected and refracted in the work of contemporaneous literary authors. Our aim is not so much to apply psychological theories of vagueness to literary texts, but to understand how the insights communicated through fiction can nuance and complicate hardened systems of thought—very much in the spirit of Franz Kafka’s observation that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.” Readings by William and Henry James, Karl Philipp Moritz, George Elliot, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler; Alexander Baumgarten, Hermann von Helmholtz, Franz Brentano, Carl Stumpf, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud; and a film by Stanley Kubrick. 

Syllabus
     
The following courses are cross-listed with Politics and Ethics and Politics:

HI270 Technology and Culture: The Invention of the Printing Press

Module: Writer and World / Producing Literature
 
Instructor: Andrea Ottone

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon & Wed 10:45-12:15

We are currently living through a rapid technological revolution in communication, the implications of which have not yet been fully grasped or addressed. But human societies have been here before. The invention of the moveable type printing press is thought to have produced a revolution not only in communication but in society, affecting the development of language and usage, the formation of beliefs, and the structures of authority and governance. To what extent did it really bring about irreversible, radical change? Our exploration of this question will start in the late Middle Ages when the collapse of feudalism coincided with a general reset of communication infrastructures and a progressive growth of literacy and scribal practices. We will examine the transition between manuscript and print culture and the nature of its relationship to social conditions. Our journey will then touch on key cultural and political shifts of the early modern period including the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the liberal revolutions of the eighteenth century to end with the advent of industrialization and the beginning of mass society. How does looking at these developments through a focus on the physical basis of communication change our understanding of their significance and dynamics? Throughout, we will look at analogies between the past and today, to develop an analysis of the common mistakes that arise from taking a deterministic view of technological development. 

Syllabus

LT355 Critical Diversity and Decolonial Methodology in the (Liberal) Arts

Module: Writer and World / Producing Literature 

Instructor: Kathy-Ann Tan

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits 

Course time: Fri 14:00-17:15

This course is being offered as an OSUN online course and will include students joining from other OSUN universities.

In this class, we will combine theory and practice to develop a critical methodology that harnesses the potential of a Liberal Arts higher education in fostering antiracist, critical diversity and decolonial ways of thinking and doing. This is a methodology that draws on a growing body of intersectional research and scholarship from the fields of literary and cultural theory, as well as the cultural politics of education, in particular, decolonial and antiracist education. It engages with pedagogies of dissent, survival, and resistance, and provides one means of answering the question that postcolonial feminist scholar Chandra Mohanty asks, "What does it mean to think through, theorize, and engage in questions of difference and power?" The objective of this class is thus to address the conditions of cultural and knowledge production and dissemination in higher education, particularly in the Liberal Arts, the oldest program of higher education in Western history, while attuned to notions of accountability and social justice. Texts will include: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. We Should All Be Feminists, Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Julie Cupples and Ramón Grosfoguel (eds.), Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University, Kimberlé Crenshaw, On Intersectionality, Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, bell hooks, Engaged Pedagogy, bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. 

Syllabus

PT241 Feminism and Community

OSUN network course at Bard College Berlin and CEU

Module: Theories of Literature and Culture / Writer and World // (fulfills Civic Engagement Certificate requirement)

Instructors: Laura Scuriatti and Ulrike Wagner (BCB); Francisca de Haan; Jasmina Lukić (CEU)

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon & Wed 14:00-15:30

As a political project with deep roots in the Enlightenment, feminism has been concerned with the relationship between individuals and their political and social communities from its inception. For centuries women had experienced that the societies they inhabited did not consider them as individuals, citizens and members of the community with equal rights. The course examines a variety of feminist projects as they grew out of these experiences, and took on distinctive shapes, developing practices and theoretical frameworks all geared toward assessing, questioning and refashioning women’s places, voices and legal status in their respective societies, thus also addressing notions of community, collectivity, and democracy. We will also look at today’s globally connected community-building practices and examine how these joint efforts have given way to newly conceived notions of society and community in intersectional feminist theories. Students will examine texts and practices of reading, writing, and conversation ranging from the sociability cultivated by elite women during the Haskala (the Jewish Enlightenment in Germany) to contemporary feminist theories of intersectionality, via the literary and political works of feminist artists and activists through the twentieth century. Amongst the authors read in the course are: Henriette Herz, Rahel Varnhagen, Hannah Arendt, Fanny Lewald, George Sand, Germaine de Stael, Mary Wollstonecraft, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai, Virginia Woolf, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Claudia Jones, Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies, Uma Narayan, Saba Mahmood, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alice Walker, Luisa Passerini, bell hooks, Adrienne Rich, Silvia Federici, Judith Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Amina Jamal, Michael Hart, Antonio Negri, Ann Ferguson, Dubravka Ugresic, and Carmen Gaite.  As part of the course, students from both campuses (BCB and CEU) will work on group assignments throughout the semester, aimed at preparing a course lexicon and online resources together with faculty. The results of the collaborative work will be presented at a final workshop with all participants in Berlin.

Syllabus

PT320 Discussing Deutschland: What Germans Are Talking About Today (in German)

Module: Writer and World / Literary Movements and Forms // (fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate and Civic Engagement Certificate requirements)

Instructor: Michael Thomas Taylor

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Wed 9:00-12:15

This course engages pressing debates in German media today, asking about the issues and forms of discourse that shape German politics and social life. It is structured around visits to cultural sites, events, and organizations in Berlin, along with topics chosen from current media by the participants in cooperation with the instructor. These may include visits to museums, political parties, NGOs, or media producers. Reflecting the ongoing shift of public life to online venues, we will also examine the virtual presence of these traditionally site-based forms of publicness in relation to old and new media. In addition to the study of current public debates and 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. 

NB: Students taking the class should have a B2 proficiency level in German or higher

Syllabus
 

Politics Advanced Modules

PS292 Urbanization and the Nation State 

Module: Advanced Topics in Global and Comparative Politics // (fulfills Civic Engagement Certificate requirement)

Instructor: Boris Vormann

Credits: 8 ECTS credits, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 14:00-15:30

This course is being offered as an OSUN online course and will include students joining from other OSUN universities.

Much of contemporary discussions about global city networks tend to put little emphasis on how flows of trade and exchange depend on the persistent work of states. Instead, since the late 1980s, many authors have argued that, as command and control centers in networks of global flows, world and global cities grew more and more disconnected from their national hinterlands. But this way of looking at things risks pitting cities against states in a way that distorts the actual processes at play. Networks of cities, from that perspective, seem to be superseding the traditional order of the nation-state system, implanting a new governance logic on existing institutions and ultimately rendering them obsolete. This course explores the intricate relationships between cities and nation-states through a theoretical, historical lens and reflects on questions of global governance at the current moment in which traditional power hierarchies are increasingly in question. Our debates about urbanization and the social and political relationships at stake will be informed by urban and state theory.

Syllabus

PS302 Global Public Policies and Their Impact on the Global South

Module: Public Policy / Advanced Topics in Global and Comparative Politics // (fulfills Civic Engagement Certificate requirement)

Instructor: Gale Raj-Reichert

Credits: 8 ECTS credits, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 10:45 -12:15

This course focuses on examining global public policies and their impacts on lower-income countries located in the Global South. We understand ‘global’ public policy to mean policies which have a cross-border or transnational effect both directly and indirectly. This includes policies developed and enforced at the national level which ‘reach’ countries in the Global South and policies established at the intergovernmental or international level which set out rules for many countries. The aim of the course is for students to understand which questions to ask and generally to critically examine the analytical tools available to assess global policy impacts on economies, communities, and the environment in the Global South. An important aspect of our discussions will be focused on understanding the ways in which different policymaking institutions function and the influence different actors (and their politics) have on the policymaking process and outcomes. The specific global policies and issues covered in the course are climate change, intellectual property rights rules (and their impacts on vaccines), international trade, international labour standards, migration, and foreign aid.

Syllabus

The following courses are cross-listed with Ethics and Politics:

PL281 What was (and is) Enlightenment?

Module: Philosophy and Society 

Instructor: Vanessa de Senarclens

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Thu 15:45-19:00

In contemporary debates, we often hear an appeal to the Enlightenment in the context of the defense of scientific standards of evidence (especially in opposition to conspiracy theories), or in calls for reason and tolerance in opposition to religious fanaticism and obscurantism. What is the “Enlightenment” being invoked here? The Enlightenment as an intellectual movement has ancient and diverse philosophical roots, and the term does not ultimately refer to a homogenous time-period or a normative body of work. It is however still often associated with French philosophers of the pre-Revolutionary era. What were their main principles, methods and objects of inquiry? A determination to question tradition, to critique prejudice, a wish to go back to “nature”, to challenge existing forms of authority and power, and to gather and make accessible all forms of reliable knowledge. The thinkers of the Enlightenment were dedicated anthropologists, analyzing other cultures the better to understand and change their own. Of course, the universalistic and rationalistic philosophical premises of this intellectual movement have not gone uncontested over the centuries, especially in regard to matters of race, gender, colonialism and other questions of political domination and control.  In this course, we will read some of its key texts, by Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot and d’Alembert, but also twentieth-century and more recent responses and critiques. We will visit the Staatsbibliothek at Unter den Linden, to consider how works that have been decisive for modern thought were originally circulated and presented in physical form. 

Syllabus

PL320 Nietzsche: Philosophy at the Limit

Module: Philosophy and Society

Instructor: Tracy Colony

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thurs 17:30-19:00
 
The influence of Nietzsche’s work upon later continental philosophy is perhaps unparalleled. In this advanced course we will read selections from his major works in order to introduce central themes of his philosophy such as the will to power, the eternal recurrence and the death of god. Reading chronologically, we will trace through the development of Nietzsche’s thought with special attention to Nietzsche’s understanding of metaphysics and his preparations for an alternative future for philosophy. Of particular importance will be the role which Nietzsche’s understanding of genealogy plays in these preparations. In this course we will also chart the history of the reception of Nietzsche’s philosophy and become familiar with seminal works in the secondary literature such as those of Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, and Malabou. All texts will be read in translation, however, parallel readings in the original German will be supported and encouraged. 

Syllabus

PS306 The European Union: Its Institutions, Laws, and Citizens

Module: Public Policy / Advanced Topics in Global and Comparative Politics // (fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate and Civic Engagement Certificate requirements)

Instructor: Berit Ebert

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Fri 9:00-12:15

Brexit, the rise of populist movements, and a growing suspicion of international organizations do not seem to offer a promising future for the European Union. However, the concept of supranationality that governs it is a unique one in the history of global collaboration, and has allowed the achievement of goals set 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 evolution of EU institutions over their more than seventy-year history. In addition, we trace the landmark decisions of the European Court of Justice and how they have shaped the Union’s political advancement. We consider the European Union’s much-discussed “democratic deficit” and look at political processes, including recent European electoral-law reform and the reform of the judicial system in Poland. These processes shed new light on the way the EU deals with gender, human rights and the rule of law. The records of individual court cases will also 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 conclusions regarding the future of the European project.

Syllabus

PT306 Liberalism and Empire: The Case of India

Module: Philosophy and Society 

Instructor: Ewa Atanassow  

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 10:45-12:15

What is liberalism: a philosophical outlook or a set of institutions; a mode of public discourse or an economic program; a Western ideology or the first global political movement? Are liberalism and imperialism antithetical, or are they mutually constitutive? In this course we will grapple with these questions both historically and conceptually, by scrutinizng liberalism's relationship to the construction and deconstruction of colonial empires of the 19th and 20th centuries. We'll encounter thinkers and political actors, activists and artists on both sides of the colonial divide. Our main (though not exclusive) focus will be liberalism's contested articulation as the ruling philosophy in 19th century Britian, and two of its policy priorities: the abolition of slavery and the consolidation of British rule in India. We'll engage with works by B.R. Ambedkar, Mahatma Gandhi, Karl Marx, Karuna Mantena, Uday Mehta, James and J.S. Mill, T. B. Macaulay, Jawaharlal Nehru, George Orwell, Satyajit Ray, Arundhati Roy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Alexis de Tocqueville.

Syllabus

PT316 Germany after Covid-19 and Chancellor Angela Merkel

Module: Public Policy / Advanced Topics in Global and Comparative Politics // (fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate and Civic Engagement Certificate requirements)

Instructor: Timo Lochocki

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Wed 9:00-12:15

This autumn the 16-year reign of chancellor Angela Merkel comes to an end. At the very same time, the handling of Covid-19 is altering the balance between legislative and executive in Germany, while the German budget is undergoing severe revisions in the light of the responses to Covid-19 as much as for fighting climate change. The federal elections of September 2021 will function as a major catalyst for change in German politics.
In particular 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 first German government that will form without Angela Merkel at its helm. Ideally, students will already have a fundamental knowledge of Germany's history and social structure, and of its financial and political systems.

Syllabus

SO284 Cultures of Migration

Module: Advanced Topics in Global and Comparative Politics // (fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate requirement)

Instructor:  Özlem Savaş

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Tue & Thu 10:45-12:15

This course focuses on everyday cultural practices and forms that emerge through migration experiences. It addresses how the unbounded, complex, fluid, and plural cultural spheres that are created and transformed by migrants shape societies as a whole, rather than confining them to a sphere of “migrant” culture. The course critically discusses a range of concepts and debates that are significant to the study of migration such as belonging, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, translocalism, multiculturalism, and postmigrant society, as well as the key concepts of culture, identity, and place. Mainly drawing on anthropological approaches to migration and ethnographic case studies, it explores everyday production and transformation of cultures of migration through practices of belonging and place-making, urban spaces of encounter and conviviality, uses of digital media both in private and public contexts, and various forms of everyday activisms, among others. The course pays a special attention to Berlin, the city that originated the concept of the postmigrant, through extra-curricular visits to public events and guest-lectures as well as ethnographic studies.

Syllabus

SO302 Science in Translation
 
Module: Philosophy and Society // (fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate requirement)

Instructor: Qiao Yang 

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Fri 9:00-12:15

Arabic and Persian texts on Islamic astronomy, which mostly originated from Hellenistic traditions, existed in the Chinese imperial library in the mid-thirteenth century. It was only in the late fourteenth century that these texts were translated into Chinese. Chinese astronomers, however, encountered formidable difficulties in putting the texts into actual use. Almost three centuries later, in the mid-seventeenth century, a German Jesuit (re)introduced European astronomy into the Chinese world. But after the death of the Shunzhi Emperor, he fell victim to internal struggles for influence, and was accused of errors in his calendrical calculations as they pertained to the royal family. His fate, and his role in mediating diverse cultural legacies, shows the contingent and surprising ways in which science traverses (or is sometimes obstructed and rediverted) by distinctive traditions and languages. This course explores the relation between science and languages from premodern times to the present. How does science move through and across languages? Does scientific translation weaken or reinforce cultural boundaries? What role do translators play in the transmission of scientific knowledge? We tackle these questions by combining fascinating historical records with recent scholarship in history, literature and translation studies. We will think broadly about the transmission of knowledge, and how language and science are related to authority and power. We will meet translators in the eighth-century House of Wisdom in Baghdad, in Renaissance Europe, in Chinese imperial courts, and in Meiji Japan. We will follow scientific texts across geographic, religious, and cultural boundaries, ultimately turning a critical eye to our own era, and rethinking the universality of science. 

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

Cross-Listed with Literature and Rhetoric and Ethics and Politics:

HI270 Technology and Culture: The Invention of the Printing Press

Module: Philosophy and Society
 
Instructor: Andrea Ottone

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon & Wed 10:45-12:15

We are currently living through a rapid technological revolution in communication, the implications of which have not yet been fully grasped      or addressed. But human societies have been here before. The invention of the moveable type printing press is thought to have produced a revolution not only in communication but in society, affecting the development of language and usage, the formation of beliefs, and the structures of authority and governance. To what extent did it really bring about irreversible, radical change? Our exploration of this question will start in the late Middle Ages when the collapse of feudalism coincided with a general reset of communication infrastructures and a progressive growth of literacy and scribal practices. We will examine the transition between manuscript and print culture and the nature of its relationship to social conditions. Our journey will then touch on key cultural and political shifts of the early modern period including the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the liberal revolutions of the eighteenth century to end with the advent of industrialization and the beginning of mass society. How does looking at these developments through a focus on the physical basis of communication change our understanding of their significance and dynamics? Throughout, we will look at analogies between the past and today, to develop an analysis of the common mistakes that arise from taking a deterministic view of technological development.

Syllabus

LT355 Critical Diversity and Decolonial Methodology in the (Liberal) Arts 
 
Module: Philosophy and Society 

Instructor: Kathy-Ann Tan

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits 

Course time: Fri 14:00-17:15

This course is being offered as an OSUN online course and will include students joining from other OSUN universities.

In this class, we will combine theory and practice to develop a critical methodology that harnesses the potential of a Liberal Arts higher education in fostering antiracist, critical diversity and decolonial ways of thinking and doing. This is a methodology that draws on a growing body of intersectional research and scholarship from the fields of literary and cultural theory, as well as the cultural politics of education, in particular, decolonial and antiracist education. It engages with pedagogies of dissent, survival, and resistance, and provide one means of answering the question that postcolonial feminist scholar Chandra Mohanty asks, "What does it mean to think through, theorize, and engage in questions of difference and power?" The objective of this class is thus to address the conditions of cultural and knowledge production and dissemination in higher education, particularly in the Liberal Arts, the oldest program of higher education in Western history, while attuned to notions of accountability and social justice. Texts will include: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. We Should All Be Feminists, Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Julie Cupples and Ramón Grosfoguel (eds.), Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University, Kimberlé Crenshaw, On Intersectionality, Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, bell hooks, Engaged Pedagogy, bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.

Syllabus

PT241 Feminism and Community

OSUN network course at Bard College Berlin and CEU

Module: Philosophy and Society / Advanced Topics in Global and Comparative Politics // (fulfills Civic Engagement Certificate requirement)

Instructors: Laura Scuriatti and Ulrike Wagner (BCB); Francisca de Haan; Jasmina Lukić (CEU)
Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon & Wed 14:00-15:30

As a political project with deep roots in the Enlightenment, feminism has been concerned with the relationship between individuals and their political and social communities from its inception. For centuries women had experienced that the societies they inhabited did not consider them as individuals, citizens and members of the community with equal rights. The course examines a variety of feminist projects as they grew out of these experiences, and took on distinctive shapes, developing practices and theoretical frameworks all geared toward assessing, questioning and refashioning women’s places, voices and legal status in their respective societies, thus also addressing notions of community, collectivity, and democracy. We will also look at today’s globally connected community-building practices and examine how these joint efforts have given way to newly conceived notions of society and community in intersectional feminist theories. Students will examine texts and practices of reading, writing, and conversation ranging from the sociability cultivated by elite women during the Haskala (the Jewish Enlightenment in Germany) to contemporary feminist theories of intersectionality, via the literary and political works of feminist artists and activists through the twentieth century. Amongst the authors read in the course are: Henriette Herz, Rahel Varnhagen, Hannah Arendt, Fanny Lewald, George Sand, Germaine de Stael, Mary Wollstonecraft, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai, Virginia Woolf, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Claudia Jones, Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies, Uma Narayan, Saba Mahmood, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alice Walker, Luisa Passerini, bell hooks, Adrienne Rich, Silvia Federici, Judith Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Amina Jamal, Michael Hart, Antonio Negri, Ann Ferguson, Dubravka Ugresic, and Carmen Gaite.  As part of the course, students from both campuses (BCB and CEU) will work on group assignments throughout the semester, aimed at preparing a course lexicon and online resources together with faculty. The results of the collaborative work will be presented at a final workshop with all participants in Berlin.

Syllabus

PT320 Discussing Deutschland: What Germans Are Talking About Today (in German)

Module: Civic Engagement and Social Justice // (fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate and Civic Engagement Certificate requirements)

Instructor: Michael Thomas Taylor

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Wed 9:00-12:15

This course engages pressing debates in German media today, asking about the issues and forms of discourse that shape German politics and social life. It is structured around visits to cultural sites, events, and organizations in Berlin, along with topics chosen from current media by the participants in cooperation with the instructor. These may include visits to museums, political parties, NGOs, or media producers. Reflecting the ongoing shift of public life to online venues, we will also examine the virtual presence of these traditionally site-based forms of publicness in relation to old and new media. In addition to the study of current public debates and 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. 

NB: Students taking the class should have a B2 proficiency level in German or higher.

Syllabus
 

Electives

IS331 Berlin Internship Seminar: Working Cultures, Urban Cultures

Instructor: Florian Duijsens, Asli Vatansever

Fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate and Civic Engagement Certificate requirements

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits (in combination with an internship)

Course time: 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.
Participation in this seminar depends on successful and timely application for the Internship Program.

Syllabus

EL202 ESL Writing Intensive

Instructor: Ariane Simard

Fulfills Civic Engagement Certificate requirement

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Mon 15:45-19:00

When Joan Didion commented that, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she may as well have been referring to Louise Erdrich’s National Book Award winning novel, The Round House. Set on a fictionalized Ojibwe Reservation in North Dakota, Erdrich’s novel is told by Antone ‘Joe’ Coutts, a tribal lawyer, recounting the violent sexual assault and attempted murder of his mother Geraldine. Joe, who is thirteen at the time of the incident, tells, through a series of flashbacks, how he enlists three friends to help him sort out the grisly event and find the perpetrator. Looking into the crime against his mother re-opens older, unsolved crimes against reservation women. As Joe gets closer to the facts, he is haunted by wiindigoo, an Ojibwe ancestral spirit that aids humans in time of need. Lies and old stories fall away, revealing not only the perpetrator, but also a new understanding of the adult life that lay before him. As we work through the novel as a class, we will explore related topics including human rights, postcolonial identity, feminism, gender identity, masculine studies, racial justice and forced migration through outside texts, written assignments and class discussion. In addition to The Round House, we will look at some other texts to help us explore and possibly contextualize the fictional world Erdrich creates, as well as read some of the treaties the US Government signed with the American Indians, and listen to (via podcasts) some recent real life accounts of disappeared American Indian women. To better understand the assault in the novel, we will begin the class with Primo Levi’s essay called “Useless Violence” and some selections from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (class handout). Please note that as the subject matter of violence can be triggering, every effort will be made to keep the classroom setting safe.

Syllabus

FA107 An Introduction to the Art of Ceramics

Instructor: Chris Scherer

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits 

Course time: Mon 14:00-20:00 (Meeting weeks 1-6 + a final meeting in December TBD)

An introduction to the art of ceramics through the production of functional homewares. This course will cover basic wheel throwing technique and a variety of hand building processes using stoneware clay. We will examine clay preparation, decoration techniques and both the glazing / firing process in an electric kiln. This practical based course will focus on the production of homeware objects such as crockery and small vessels with an analysis of form, aesthetic and functionality. Historical and contemporary objects will be taken into consideration and through the learning and application of a variety of techniques such as pinch pots, coiling, kurinuki and sgraffito, students will be provided with an introduction of skills in which they can independently develop, refine and extend a ceramics practice. 
Through experiencing this foundation in hand building and wheel thrown technique, the students will be expected to gain familiarity in a variety of processes, which will be applied to specific design projects throughout the semester. The creative elements of this course will be matched in technique, craftsmanship, and functionality of objects. 

Syllabus

FA132 Architecture and Urbanism: Fall Break in Venice

Instructor: Caroline Wolf, Attila Saygel

Credits: 4 ECTS, 2 U.S. credits

Venice today has become a fragile urban system that faces the challenges of time that are also addressed in this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale “How Will We Live Together?” In our 5 days excursion, students will be asked to reflect upon this central question by exploring the Biennale and Venice in a personal field study by means of a conceptual filmic work on their mobile phones. Students will be encouraged to work in groups and will be asked to present their final video at the end of the week.

Please note: The trip to Venice will take place during fall break. There is a fee of €350 for participation in this course to cover travel to and accommodation in Venice. In the unfortunate case of another lockdown that renders a trip to Venice impossible a substitutional course will take place in Berlin.

Syllabus

FA156 Dance Lab: Body Space Image. Dance and Visual Arts

Instructor: Eva Burghardt

Fulfills Civic Engagement Certificate requirement

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Fri 14:00-17:15

In addition to the ongoing movement training as an essential base, the focus of this course will be in exploring 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 surroundings 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
 
PT209 Visual Storytelling for Civic Engagement

Instructor: Adam Stepan

Fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate requirement

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits 

Course times: Thu 14:30-15:40 + 5x Tuesday workshops 14:30-15:40 There will also be weekly office hours with the OSUN assistant for this course.
 
This class introduces students to the uses of video for civic engagement and development projects, and trains students in the basics of smartphone-based documentary film techniques.  The class is built around a series of case studies in which students explore theoretical readings on the use of media in social movements, as well as the practical aspects of documentary film technique,  and culminates in a team documentary project. Guest speakers will explore documentary and media production issues, as well as their experiences in using video and other media in advocacy and reporting projects. This is a group- and project-based class, in which students will work in teams of 3-5 student on semester-long video projects, including at least 4 days of location based filming (to be done over the course of the semester). Classwork is in three parts: pre-recorded videos and tutorials, live class meetings on Zoom, and a series of small group trainings and follow-ups to support teams in their class projects. Students will learn the basics of visual storytelling, field production, interviewing techniques, and basic video editing. It is open to OSUN students across four campuses (Annandale, Berlin, Palestine, Bishkek).  All participating campuses will have smartphone stabilizers, tripods, lights and audio kits available for student use. All required gear and software will be provided.

This course is open to all students. Students enrolled in an OSUN common course can use their work in the Visual Storytelling Workshop for their final assignment in their common course.
 

Language Courses

GM101 German Beginner A1 (Group A)

Instructor: Manuel Gebhardt

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon, Wed, Fri 9:00-10:30

Syllabus

GM101 German Beginner A1 (Group B)

Instructor: Dorothe Gonska

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon, Wed, Fri 9:00-10:30

Syllabus

GM101 German Beginner A1 (Group C)

Instructor: Dorothe Gonska

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon, Wed, Fri 10:45-12:15

Syllabus

GM101 German Beginner A1 (Group D)

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 E)

Instructor: Julia Gehring

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon, Wed, Fri 14:00-15:30

Syllabus

GM101 German Beginner A1 (Group F)

Instructor: Ariane Faber

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon, Wed, Fri 15:45-17:15

Syllabus

GM151 German Beginner A2 (Group A)

Instructor: Julia Gehring

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon, Wed, Fri 9:00-10:30

Syllabus

GM151 German Beginner A2 (Group B)

Instructor: Laura Gemsemer

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon, Wed, Fri 14:00-15:30

Syllabus

GM201 German Intermediate B1 (Group A)

Instructor: Ariane Friedländer

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon, Wed, Fri 9:00-10:30

Syllabus

GM201 German Intermediate B1 (Group B)

Instructor: Ariane Friedländer

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon, Wed, Fri 10:45-12:15

Syllabus

GM201 German Intermediate B1 (Group C)

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 D)

Instructor: Christiane Bethke

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon, Wed, Fri 15:45-17:15

Syllabus

GM251 German Intermediate B2

Instructor: Vincent Hessling

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon, Wed, Fri 15:45-17:15

Syllabus

GM301 German Advanced C1

Instructor: Vincent Hessling

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon, Wed, Fri 14:00-15:30

Syllabus

GM150 German Conversation

Instructor: Tabea Weitz

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Wed & Fri 9:00-10:30

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.

Syllabus

LT329 The Writing Life

Instructor: Martin Widmann

(fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate requirement)

Credits: 8 ECTS Credits, 4 U.S. credits

Course times: Mon & Wed 10:45-12:15

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
     
PT320 Discussing Deutschland: What Germans Are Talking About Today (in German)

Instructor: Michael Thomas Taylor

(fulfills Transnational Media and Journalism Certificate requirement)

Credits: 8 ECTS, 4 U.S. credits

Course time: Wed 9:00-12:15

This course engages pressing debates in German media today, asking about the issues and forms of discourse that shape German politics and social life. It is structured around visits to cultural sites, events, and organizations in Berlin, along with topics chosen from current media by the participants in cooperation with the instructor. These may include visits to museums, political parties, NGOs, or media producers. Reflecting the ongoing shift of public life to online venues, we will also examine the virtual presence of these traditionally site-based forms of publicness in relation to old and new media. In addition to the study of current public debates and 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.

NB: Students taking the class should have a B2 proficiency level in German or higher

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.