Previous Graduate Courses

Readings and discussion in classroom application of SLA theory.  Focus on quantitative as well as interpretive analysis. Primary audience is the current teaching staff of GER 101. In English.

The seminar focuses on the formation of `drives’ as a new anthropological concept since the beginning of the 19th century. We will discuss relevant texts of modern literature as well as scientific sources from early psychiatry to Sigmund Freud’s theory of drives.

This seminar explores turns to psychoanalysis in the history, theory, and criticism of art and literature. In reading psychoanalytic writings by Freud, Lacan, Klein, Laplanche, and others, paths and detours lead to problems of terminology, translation, mediation. In addressing works of art and literature, questions arise about how some might be understood as instances of psychoanalytic criticism and/or critiques of psychoanalysis. A need for critical reflection on the meaningfulness of psychoanalytic theories for current scholarship in the humanities is a guiding concern of this seminar. Seminar guests include practicing psychoanalysts.

In the wake of a series of recent events “Havana syndrome, “acoustic devices for suppressing protests, etc.—the weaponization of the acoustic has gained widespread public attention. But these dystopic accounts obscure the fact that sound has always been intimately connected to the political. This seminar will explore the many political dimensions of the acoustic: from tonality as a colonizing force to the algorithmization of listening; from acoustic regimes of urban space to the ecological dimensions of audio technologies; from acoustic regimes of urban space to the ecological dimensions of audio technologies; from questions of noise and sonic pleasure to the deployment of sound both for protest and as a mechanism of control.