NOTE: This course is only open for students in the MA E-SC, BA-ESC and MA TnL programmes. It is not open for any other courses of studies.

This class focuses on the practice of analysing films in the academic context. We will look into different genres and discuss topics significant to the cinematic sphere.

Materials are provided via StudIP.

This seminar examines the largely under-researched social, legal, and cultural status of musicians of sub-Saharan African descent in early modern Europe. Through case studies, we explore Black musicians at the courts of Portugal and Spain, Black trumpeters and kettledrummers in the Holy Roman Empire, Black singers in seventeenth-century Florence, and Black composers and performers in the urban musical cultures of France and England. The course also analyzes musical constructions of Blackness in different musical genres, such as the villancicos de negros from early modern Iberia and its colonies, and the figure of Monostatos in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
Situating these examples within broader histories of race-making, enslavement and freedom, mobility, and labor, we consider musical performance as both exploitation and potential agency within courtly and colonial power structures. Drawing on key English-language works on critical race, postcolonial, and court studies, students learn to interpret the biographies and sonic practices of Black musicians as part of Europe’s entangled histories of music/sound, power, race, and empire.

The course uses English in pop music to explore language varieties and global culture. Topics covered include phonology and accent, lexical variation and slang, grammar and syntax, code switching and multilingualism, and cultural and global context.
The course is only open for BA ESC, MA ESC and MA TnL!

Recent work in sensory history has highlighted how sound and listening shape human experience and historical change. Rather than treating music and sound as mere background, this seminar approaches them as active forces that structure power relations, social hierarchies, and cultural practices. We examine how “sonic spaces” emerge not only from architecture and acoustics but also from political, religious, gendered, and racialized contexts, as well as listening conventions and programming choices.
Through case studies, we will explore churches as sites reflecting cosmic order, courts and gardens as acoustic technologies of princely power, women’s convents and salons as spaces of musical agency, and the military, epistemological, and extractive uses of sound in colonial settings. By analyzing the interplay between space, sound, and practice, the course invites us to rethink early modern history through a sensory and spatial lens and to understand how power was embodied, performed, and contested through sound.

NOTE: This course is only open for the students of the following programmes: BA E-SC, MA E-SC and MA TnL.

This course deals with the Gothic genre in (almost) all its facets. We will look into the roots of the genre in the 18th century as well as contemporary iterations of Gothic tropes thus tracking the evolution of what is "Gothic" across different media.

Materials will be provided via StudIP

In this workshop, we will explore and experiment with contemporary methods of improvisational theater, which is the art of making up theatrical moments on the spot, without a script. It is one of the most vibrant and current forms of theater of today and is deeply ingrained in US popular culture.

You will first learn the basic principles of improvisational theater and how to apply them to improvised scenework. Later, you will encounter a specific performance structure that will serve as our format for a public performance.

Through this work, you will build confidence in public speaking, explore practical approaches to collaborative creation, and gain insight into the production and marketing process of a theatre production. In addition, we will reflect on how these skills can be beneficial both in academic contexts as well as the professional world beyond academia.

There will be a regular class on Thursday 12.15-1.45pm during the semester, in which we will cover the basics of improvisational theater, followed by an intensive in the lecture-free period (31 August-3 September and 7 September - 10 September 2026, 10am-1.30pm), in which we will prepare for public performances on 11 and 12 September 2026. If you participate in the theatre workshop, you can participate as a performer or take on a behind-the-scenes role in production and marketing.