The seminar offered students a glimpse into the conversations taking place in the humanities surrounding the aesthetics of computer games. Computer games are a fascinating artform with a complicated relationship to the established aesthetic vocabulary, challenging and thereby enriching notions such as authorship, meaning or beauty. At the same time, they are a highly commercialized as well as politicized form, being implicated, for instance, both in the economic history of “digital capitalism” (Phillip Staab), as well as the cultural history of the Alt-Right. By reading and discussing a selection of canonical game studies texts, participants acquired an introductory theoretical toolkit that can help them navigate this young and highly relevant field of research.

This seminar invites advanced BA and MA students to dive into the audiovisual essay as both a creative and academic practice. Instead of writing about films, you’ll explore how moving images, sound, and editing – the stuff that films are made of – can be used to think through and communicate complex ideas. We’ll look at examples by creators like Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López, Catherine Grant, and Christian Keathley to see how video essays expand what academic work can look like. Alongside these discussions, you’ll make your own short audiovisual pieces using tools like Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve. The focus is on learning by doing: developing your ideas through experimentation, feedback, and workshop sessions. By the end, your work will be shown in peer-reviewed screenings and published online, giving you experience in both critical thinking and creative expression. Overall, the seminar brings together media philosophy, film theory, and hands-on production in a collaborative, practice-based setting.

What is close reading? Only the most important method in Anglophone literary studies. But how did it come to be so central, and what exactly is close reading? The seminar explores various debates around the method, ending in contemporary debates that have not yet been resolved.

In Of Plymouth Plantation, a journal describing the Pilgrims’ arrival in Plymouth Bay on the Mayflower in 1620, William Bradford imagined the Indigenous population as “savage people,” who, shockingly, even devoured human flesh. European settlers would soon use a trope which American Studies scholar Richard Slotkin has called “savage war” in order to make sense of their encounter with Indigenous nations. This trope holds that coexistence with the latter was impossible which is why they needed to be exterminated.

This seminar proposes that today’s zombie narratives, which emerged with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), are contemporary iterations of this old settler colonial myth. We will thus trace the history of cultural representations of monstrously mobile “savages” from seventeenth-century Puritan writings to the zombie films of the present.

The figure of the young, unmarried woman earning her own living began to occupy a prominent place in the American literary and cultural imagination around 1900. Until then, working women were largely underrepresented in American literature. This changed when rapid industrialization and technological advancements opened new avenues for paid female labor: as factory workers, sales clerks, typists, and teachers. Due to their low economic status and their social status as unmarried women, “working girls” found themselves in a particularly vulnerable social position. Subjected to various forms of economic and sexual exploitation, they often viewed marriage as a potential route to social mobility. This complicated the “working girl’s” navigation of work, independence, and romantic aspiration. The seminar explores these themes by discussing novels and films that center on the figure of the “working girl” alongside scholarship from cultural sociology and cultural history.

Queer and transgender people are once again under attack. At this moment, learning from and grappling with the queer past could not be more urgent—especially as right-wing groups and governments attempt to erase queer and trans people not only from history, but in the present. Drawing on insights from queer and trans studies, this course takes the twentieth century, the “queer century,” as its subject. Not only does this course assume the centrality of trans and non-binary people to any narrative of queer history, but it will also be particularly sensitive to the ways in which matters of race, class, and gender intersect with concerns over sexuality at every turn, complicating and critiquing monolithic conceptions of queerness both from within and without. In this spirit, this class is meant both to enrichen students’ academic understanding of specific historical and theoretical topics, and to contribute to our shared political education in these dark times.

In this class, you probably won’t learn new details about your favorite star, but you will better understand what it means to call your favorite star a “star.”

The seminar introduces you to the emergence of democratic stardom in the U.S. We study key moments and figures in the nineteenth century, the emergence of the star system in Hollywood, the development of popular culture as a celebrity system in the mid-20th century, and the impact of the internet on celebrity culture in the early 21st century (including the rise of a new type of celebrity: the influencer).

While the quest for fame and honor can be traced back to antiquity, U.S. culture has developed distinctly modern concepts of celebrity and stardom: the aspiration to stardom has become democratized. Everyone, we are led to believe, can be a star. And yet, stars can only be stars if they differ from everyone else.

The American Civil War is one of the most significant events in U.S. history. It represents the culmination of a long-festering conflict over the expansion of slavery between the North and the South during the first half of the 19th century, eventually leading to a bloody war that killed almost 750,000 soldiers. After the defeat of the Southern Confederacy in 1865, however, a new type of conflict emerged: the war over the memory of the Civil War. Americans were struggling with the question of how they should remember a conflict that cost so many lives and that left Southerners bitter and resentful. This undergraduate seminar will introduce students to the history of the Civil War and to the many different ways in which it was commemorated. It covers the various factors that led to sectional conflict, the experiences of soldiers and African Americans, as well as the period that followed the North’s victory, known as Reconstruction. In addition, the seminar sheds light on how white and African American citizens memorialized the war in the 19th and 20th centuries. Students will be analyzing historical scholarship, historical documents, images, and movies.