Felipe Garcia
Fabio Braun Carrasco

English B2, German A2-B1

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

Berlin is often seen as left-leaning and progressive due to its multicultural image, but the city's socio-political landscape is more nuanced. The Berlin Wall's legacy still shapes socio-economic divides between East and West, influencing political positions. The city center, inside the Ringbahn, leans left/green, while the conservative/right lies outside this transport boundary. Historical changes include the integration of GDR infrastructure and the revival of Prussian heritage, alongside the gentrification of some areas. Rising rent prices have sparked debates over housing, with a plebiscite by Deutsche Wohnen und Co. Enteignen proposing communal control of real estate. This highlights tensions on the role of the market. Berlin also reflects global trends like the rise of far-right movements and neoliberalism rooted partly in historical East-West societal divides. These conflicts, however, reveal broader debates on societal value(s) and the common good; this course will explore these debates through subtopics such as gentrification, inequality, and political polarization (e.g. on environmental and housing policy).

Dr. Sasha Shapiro
Dr. Felix Helbing

English B2

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

This interdisciplinary seminar examines Berlin as a crucible of revolutionary thought and action across two transformative centuries. Rather than simply surveying historical events, the course investigates how revolutionary ideas—about the state, freedom, justice, and human emancipation—have evolved, collided, and been reimagined from the Napoleonic era through contemporary social movements. Students will engage with canonical texts in philosophy and political theory (Hegel, Marx, Luxemburg, the Frankfurt School) alongside historical analysis and on-site exploration of Berlin's revolutionary landscapes—from the Berlin Wall Memorial to former Stasi prisons to sites of student uprising. Throughout, the course emphasizes critical connections between past and present, examining how Berlin's revolutionary traditions inform contemporary debates about surveillance, resistance, urban space, and democratic participation. Students will develop skills in comparative historical analysis, philosophical argumentation, and critical citizenship, learning to recognize how understanding revolutionary history can illuminate present-day struggles for social transformation.

Lea Bero
Laura Bertagno

English B2

Monday, 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.

Azakhiwe Nocanda

English B2

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

How are individual and collective differences manipulated by structures of power, privilege, and oppression? How does this legacy of systemic inequality shape our global and national experiences today? Studying the works of African and Western theorists, this course introduces how race, class, gender, and sexuality have been intertwined in a globally connected world. This course not only explores the fundamental concepts, theories, and historical experiences that form the basis of scholarly work in comparative race, gender, sexuality, and class studies but also provides a global perspective. Through an interdisciplinary framework, we critically examine the creation, transmittal, interpretation and institutionalisation of difference-based systems of oppression. We then apply this international and historical understanding to a modern domestic lens, examining how these histories mould and proliferate inequality throughout Germany. Students will leave this course with a heightened connection to their global community and the ability to critically apply classic and critical race feminist theory to power, privilege, and oppression structures, all while broadening their international perspective. The African continent and the ancestral homeland are central to any informed analysis and understanding of the dispersal of its people. With its cultural richness and diversity, Africa continues to influence receiving societies as various ethnic groups create new cultures and revive old ways as circumstances allow. Scholars engaging with the African diaspora must be cautious not to oversimplify the experiences of its diverse people. In this course, students are not only learning theories but are also encouraged to apply them practically. They are urged to undo – unlearn and dismantle unjust practices, assumptions,and institutions – and to take persistent action to create and build alternative spaces and ways of knowing, particularly concerning the Black (African) Diaspora. Berlin will be used as a case study for the themes covered. Still, students are encouraged to reflect on their identities and the expressions of various identities around the city. The course sessions, composed of lectures, online discussion forums, and an excursion through Berlin’s Black History, are designed to give students a wide interdisciplinary introduction into the othering of (Black) Africans so that they can interpret contemporary African issues with an informed historical background.

Dr. Victoria Bishop Kendzia

 English B2, German not required, but helpful

Thursday, 12-16
Please note the individual session dates: 
16 April, 23 April, 30 April, 21 May, 28 May, 04 June, 11 June
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, 14-18
Please note the individual session dates:
24 April, 08 May, 15 May, 29 May, 05 June, 12 June, 19 June, 03 July
Hausvogteiplatz 5-7, Room 0323-26 (and other locations)

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, both physical and ephemeral, 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 migration: The critical debate surrounding preserving, relocating or transforming the material and immaterial 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 – and 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 colonial legacies and minority histories of different communities from Asia.

Dr. Carrie Bly

English B2

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

What is at stake in reading and writing the histories of Berlin’s architectural and urban landscape? How do historical and analytical frameworks shape scholarly understandings of the city? This course uses recent architectural and urban histories of 20th century Berlin, as well as archival media, to engage students in the exploration of themes and methods—from femininity to migration, politics to privatization—by which the entanglement of Berlin’s physical and social landscapes are narrated. Each class session consists of group discussion of the assigned readings and skill workshops that prompt students to situate their own worldly experience in the past, present and future of Berlin. The premise of the course is that engaging the narrative can lead to ‘changing the narrative,’ opening the door for students to develop an original final project.

Maria Morata

English B2

Thursday, 16:00-19:30
Please note the individual session dates: 
23 April, 07 May, 21 May, 28 May, 11 June, 18 June, 25 June, 02 July 
Hausvogteiplatz 5-7, Room 0323-26

This course explores the 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 tool of communications for disabled or chronically 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 Charité Hospital, the TA T, Tieranatomisches Theater Humboldt Universitiy, Casinoooo-Berlin-Anticapitalist cafe and bar for social Medicine and Casa Kúa Berlin, Trans* Inter* Queer Community and Health.

Dr. Christian Wollin

English B2, German A2

Wednesday, 14-16

From the 1790s to the 1840s, a Berlin-based network of 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, Novalis, Henriette Herz, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Bettina and Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and the brothers Grimm, 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.

Dr. Deniz Günes Yardimci

English B1, German A1

Friday, 14-18
Please note the individual session dates:
17 April, 15 May, 29 May, 12 June, 26 June, 10 July
Hausvogteiplatz 5-7, Room 0323-26

The labour migration from Southern European countries to Germany, which began in the mid-1950s, had significant socio-economic and socio-cultural impacts on the societies of these countries and influenced their film cultures. German filmmakers began depicting the struggles of guestworkers in films like Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher (1969). In the 1990s, second- and third-generation Turkish-German directors such as Fatih Akın and Thomas Arslan marked the end of what was called ‘guestworker cinema’ and started creating a transnational and diasporic cinema that showcased a culturally diverse and hybrid Germany. Berlin (especially Kreuzberg) has always been a popular setting in all of these migration movies. The transformation of Berlin’s first ‘Guestworker Ghettos’ to culturally hybrid urban districts over the course of 60 years is very well reflected in all of these cinema cultures. This interdisciplinary course crosses and connects the academic fields of migration studies, film studies, and cultural studies. In the first part of the course, we will examine how migration, immigrants, and diasporas are portrayed in cinema. The second part then becomes more specific as we focus on the depiction of Berlin in these migration films.