Dr. Dorian Alt

English B2

Wednesday 14-16
Hausvogteiplatz 5-7, Room 0323-26

Set in Berlin—the historic epicenter of competing economic ideologies—this course explores how economic discourses shape our politics and material reality. It investigates the evolution of economic thought by analyzing two era-defining crises: 1929 and 2008. The curriculum is structured into four parts: Conceptual Introduction: Basics of discourse analysis; The 1929 Crisis: Ideological responses like Keynesianism, Fascism, and Neoliberalism; The 2008 Crisis: Resurgent Keynesianism and the rise of the hard right; Contemporary Zeitgeist: Evaluating the modern return of state intervention. Students will bridge local and global perspectives through four Berlin-based excursions and a collaborative research project. Utilizing qualitative interviews and discourse analysis, groups will investigate economic discourses in their home countries. Ultimately, this course equips students to critically analyze public economic arguments, demonstrating how past ideological confrontations continue to shape today's thoughts.

Dr. Betiel Wasihun

English B2

Friday 14-18
Please note the individual session dates:
23.10., 06.11., 20.11., 04.12., 18.12. 2026, 15.01., 29.01., 12.02.2027
Hausvogteiplatz 5-7, Room 0323-26

What does it mean to live in a surveillance society? How does the digital age challenge questions of privacy, individuality, and freedom, and when does surveillance as care tip over into surveillance as control? This interdisciplinary course examines the impact of surveillance on society by exploring the relationship between technologies, social practices, and the arts, including representations of surveillance in contemporary literature, film, visual culture, and popular culture. It brings the history of the GDR and the Stasi into dialogue with contemporary surveillance methods, asking how the Stasi system of vigilance prefigures contemporary surveillance culture. Drawing on key approaches in Surveillance Studies, we examine surveillance, power, social control, visibility, identity, and privacy. Field trips to relevant historical sites, museums, archives, and architectural spaces, together with guest lectures, including a panel discussion with contemporary GDR witness Dr Peter Keup, are pivotal to the course.

Dr. Victoria Bishop-Kendzia

English B2

Thursday 14-18
Please note the individual session dates:
15.10., 22.10., 24.10. (Saturday), 29.10., 05.11., 12.11., 03.12., 10.12.
Hausvogteiplatz 5-7, Room 0323-26

Berlin’s rich museological landscape lends itself to in-depth exploration of Germany’s difficult heritage: How are the upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries, especially, remembered and represented? This course aims to enable the students to get to know a number of Berlin museums focusing on Memory and Post-WWII migration using anthropological methods and to critically analyse them within larger theoretical frameworks of “self” and “other” constructions. The aim is to explore the role of museums in rendering such constructions visible and therefore debatable. In addition to visiting the sites, there are scholarly readings and in-class discussions. The discussions will be based on the museum visits and the students’ questions on the readings.

Dr. Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz

English B2

Friday 14-17
Please note the individual session dates:
16.10., 23.10., 13.11., 27.11., 04.12., 11.12.2026, 08.01., 22.01., 05.02., 12.02.2027
Hausvogteiplatz 5-7, Room 0323-26

Berlin is a multi-cultural city with a diverse cultural life and rich heritage. The course is designed to foster active learning practices while advancing complex relationships between materiality, migration, and identity formation, with particular attention to how material culture, art and cultural practices mediate experiences of displacement, belonging, memory, and transformation. The excursions to museums and cultural institutions present a platform for engaged debates about current challenges of transculturality, diaspora art or other lived realities of transculturality. The critical debate surrounding preserving, relocating or transforming the legacies of Asia includes theories of heritage and museum studies as well as provenience research, concepts of outreach and material culture studies. We invite students to consider how material and immaterial dimensions of culture – including objects, music, religious heritage – as well as conceptual frameworks reflect and reshape the lived realities of migration and memorialization. We will discuss solutions for restitution and decolonization, the ethical value of exhibition displays, links between academic research, artistic production and museum stakeholders. Berlin offers rich legacies and transcultural histories of different communities from Asia.

Azakhiwe Nocanda

English B2

Friday 12-14
Hausvogteiplatz 5-7, Room 0323-26

This course explores how identities are shaped by systems of power, privilege, and oppression, and how the legacy of inequality continues to influence societies globally and within Germany. Drawing on African and Western scholarship, it examines the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality through an interdisciplinary lens. Students engage with key theories and historical perspectives while critically analysing how systems of inequality are created, maintained, and challenged. The course emphasises the importance of Africa and the African diaspora in understanding the diverse experiences of people of African descent, encouraging students to avoid oversimplified narratives and recognise the complexity of Black identities across different contexts. Moving beyond theory, students apply critical perspectives to contemporary issues by reflecting on unjust assumptions, institutions, and ways of knowing while exploring more inclusive alternatives. Berlin serves as a case study, enabling students to connect historical and global processes to local realities through lectures, online discussions, and a guided Black History excursion. By examining the city's histories and contemporary expressions of identity, students gain the knowledge and critical skills to analyse issues affecting the African diaspora and broader systems of inequality, while developing a deeper understanding of the relationship between global histories and present-day social justice challenges.

Lea Baro, Laura Bertagno

English B2

Tuesday 16-18
Hausvogteiplatz 5-7, Room 0323-26

Berlin has long been imagined as a site of queer freedom, experimentation, and resistance. This advanced undergraduate course explores how queerness is shaped by and shapes urban space, using Berlin as a lens to examine intersections of sexuality, space, and power. Drawing from queer theory, urban studies, and architecture, students investigate how queer spaces are produced, contested, and remembered, and how they intersect with race, class, gender, and transnational histories. Through readings, discussions, exercise and fieldwork, participants will critically reflect on what makes a space "queer," who has access to it, and how Berlin's reputation as a queer capital both reveals and obscures broader social dynamics. Designed for exchange students, the course combines theoretical inquiry with experiential learning and invites critical engagement with the ethics of researching queer urban life. 

Dr. Marita Meyer

This course is taught in German, including the readings. For the understanding of the texts and the discussions in class, language B2 is required. There are some options in English. So it is possible to write the final essay in English and parts of the reading can be done in English.

Tuesday 14-16
Hausvogteiplatz 5-7, Room 0323-26

From the Enlightment up to the present Berlin has been a preferred home for poets, novelists, playwrights, journalists and creative writers of any kind. Their stories and visions not only represented but also shaped the idea of the city. This course includes selected works of literature (and some works of visual art as well) written in different periods in Berlin. The works are contextualized to the dynamic and multilayered history of the city and are connected to the urban spaces of today. Enhanced as well through excursions our readings and discussions help students gain insight into the rich cultural history and the current discourses in and about Berlin.

Dr. Christian Wollin

English B2, German A2

Thursday 16-18
Hausvogteiplatz 5-7, Room 0323-26

From the 1790s to the 1840s, a Berlin-based network of writers, artists, and intellectuals developed novel ways of writing, thinking, feeling, and living under the conceptual banner of the 'Romantic.' Drawing on key texts by Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Henriette Herz, Novalis, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Bettina and Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and Germaine de Staël, we will explore the central areas and practices of their romantic discourse of radical aesthetic, philosophical, political, and sociocultural modernity. We will critically examine how the romantics manifested and confronted the defining conflicts of their political and cultural present as these crystallized in Berlin, the capital of Prussia, 19th century Germany's emerging hegemonic power. We will also survey influential contemporary critiques of the romantic movement (Goethe, Hegel, Heine) and follow its legacies in the 20th century.

Maria Morata

English B2

Thursday 10:30-13:45
Please note the individual session times:
22.10., 05.11., 19.11., 03.12., 17.12., 07.01., 21.01, 04.02
Hausvogteiplatz 5-7, Room 0323-26

This course explores how contemporary artistic practices approach, challenge, subvert and create new perspectives to overcome the binome Health/ Illness that medical and institutional narratives have perpetuated within social, economic and cultural areas. Framed within Disability Studies and Crip Theory we will explore how individual and collective artworks and projects critically interpret the experience of illness, fragility and vulnerability as a platform for social transformation, and as an emancipatory tool to navigate a normative and ableist world. We will approach the different models of disability (medical, social and cultural), get familiar with terms like crip time, ableism, cure, intersectionality, care, eugenics and disability justice. The course will have a special focus on accessibility in art institutions, small organizations and collectives, and will approach the practice of access rider as a tool of communications for disabled or chronic ill artists to work with art institutions.
Coursework includes reading theoretical texts, essays, manifestos and analysing artworks, films and video pieces related to the topic of the course. We will welcome as guests Berlin-based artists and collectives, curators, scholars and activist. We will enjoy guided tours to institutional and collectively organized spaces working with different narratives about Health and Sickness: Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité Hospital and the TA T, Tieranatomisches Theater Humboldt University.
This course will be part of the COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) program and will be realized in collaboration with students at the University of Vienna.

Dr. George Athanasopoulos

English B2, German A2

Friday 10-12

This course explores how migration, displacement, and exile have shaped Berlin’s musical life, and how music responds to changing experiences of identity, memory, and belonging. Using historical documents, recordings, and contemporary case studies, students examine musical practices from the forced departure of musicians under National Socialism and the divided city’s Cold War scenes to the emergence of techno after reunification and the diverse musical cultures of contemporary Berlin. The course considers how musical knowledge and traditions are transmitted, transformed, and renegotiated across generations and cultural contexts, with particular attention to heritage, hybridity, and transnational exchange. Students also explore the community and institutional settings in which migrant music-making takes place. A fieldwork visit to the Berlin Open Music School provides an opportunity to engage with community music-making involving migrant and refugee musicians. The diverse and interdisciplinary nature of the course makes it ideal for those curious about the cultural dynamics of Berlin and the role of music in reflecting and shaping its history. No prior musical or ethnographic training is required.