Department of Culture

In the Department of Culture, students study American cultural history from colonial times (the 16th and 17th centuries) to the present. We offer introductory courses on theories of (American) culture, highlighting approaches focused on political economy, mediality, and the history of ideas. Advanced seminars pay particular attention to questions of cultural self-definition and contacts between different cultural groups within American societies; we regularly offer courses on ethnic cultures (African American, Native American, Asian American, and others) and on shifting paradigms of gender and sexuality.

In sum, the seminars offered by the Department of Culture cover five focus areas:

• American history of ideas (from the 16th to the 21st centuries);
• the cultural history and cultural economy of different media and forms of expression such as literary fiction, film, television, photography, theater, poetry, popular music, video games, and American painting;
• social differentiation and the politics of cultural self-descriptions (especially concerning race, class, and gender); as well as
• theories and methods of “American Studies” and “Cultural Studies.”
• In addition, the Department of Culture cooperates with the Terra Foundation for American Art, whose generous funding enables one international Visiting Scholar from the field of art history each year to join our faculty. The Terra Visiting Professor offers courses, lectures, and seminars both in the B.A. and the M.A. degree programs. Click the box at the bottom of this page to view a list of recent Terra Visiting Scholars. 

Courses from previous semesters include:

• Theorizing American Culture
• Rhetorics of Continuity and Change: A Survey of American Cultural History
• Urban Interventions: Art and the City
• Video Games and American Culture
• Race and Representation in the United States since 1890
• Political (In)Correctness and Stand-Up Comedy as Cultural Practice
• A Social History of Photography in the United States
• Affective Affinities: The New Left and the New Right in the Long 1970s
• Celebrity Feminism
• New Deal Art: The Visual Culture of 1930s America
• Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Female Empowerment and Male Identification in American Horror Films
• The Bauhaus in America
• Porn in the USA

For more information, please visit https://www.jfki.fu-berlin.de/en/faculty/culture