Summer Semester 2025
Here are the classes taught by staff members of the Chair of English, Postcolonial and Media Studies during the winter semester 2024/25.
Prof. Dr. Mark U. Stein
AR Felipe Espinoza Garrido
Can Çakır
Rita Maricocchi
Dorit Neumann
Prof. Dr. Mark U. Stein
Caribbean Diasporas
090645 | Seminar | Tue 14-16
What is a diaspora? How does it come about? What are some of its features? Does it have a timeline? What characterises Caribbean diasporas specifically? Where do we find Caribbean diaspora literatures?In order to address and discuss questions such as these, we will read theoretical texts, literary texts, as well as contextual, historical, or sociological information. Our main aim is the engagement with cultural products of the Caribbean diasporas, thereby developing an appreciation of its complexity, legacy, and its significance.
Writing Empire
090730 | Seminar | Wed 10-12
"I am not trying to say that the novel - or the culture in the broad sense -
'causes' imperialism, but that the novel, as a cultural artefact of bourgeois
society, and imperialism are unthinkable without the other. ...
The novel is an incorporative, quasi-encyclopaedic cultural form."
(Edward Saïd, Culture and Imperialism 84)
This seminar engages with three kinds of texts: colonial novels which were enmeshed in the unfolding imperial process; postcolonial novels which critique and resist empire; and theoretical texts which engage with the relationships between writing and empire, resistance and writing, colonialism and postcolonialism. This distinction is not to suggest that these three kinds of textuality are completely separate from each other — instead, it is the overlap between them which is of interest, too.
Seminar participants are required to read the following three set texts during the term break and there’ll be a short reading test on them in April:
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)
NN, TBC
We will also read excerpts from Shakespeare’s Tempest, E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924), Beryl Gilroy, Black Teacher (1976), Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest (1989), Saïd’s Culture & Imperialism (1993); Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (2000); Chimamanda Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Adania Shibli, Touch (2010).
Postcolonial, Diaspora, and Migration Studies: Texts, Contexts, Theories
090639 | Lecture | Mon 14-16
This lecture engages with three material practices and corresponding discursive formations: migration, diaspora, and the postcolonial. Our focus is twofold, analysing literary texts and cultural products in the widest sense — from poem to image, from story to film — and considering related historicisation and theorisation. Our main aim is not only to familiarise students with key texts but also to motivate them to independently read and explore anglophone migratory, diasporic, and postcolonial literatures and cultures.
Postgraduate Class (Reading Theory)
090739 | Colloquium | Wed 14-16 (s.t.)
This Postgraduate Class is focussed on supporting MA NTS students who are seeking to finish their MA thesis. At the beginning of the semester, we will find out from participants how they can be supported. It's likely that this PG class will engage with students' research proposals; with questions of methodology, structure, and approach; with the construction of research corpora; and with finding supervisors. We'll also engage with the viva voce exam on your MA thesis at the end of the MA NTS programme and -- if participants want it -- offer practice vivas.
Moreover, we'll be reading and discussing a selection of recent theoretical interventions -- texts either from the research areas covered by students in their MA theses or based on my suggestions.
The NTS PG class works best if you are committed to attending regularly and to making it your own by suggesting discussion topics and texts.
PTTS Colloquium
090749 | Colloquium | Tue 10-12
AR Felipe Espinoza Garrido
Postgraduate Class (Transnational Literary and Cultural Studies)
090737 | Colloquium | Mo 10-12 (s.t.)
This class covers both, the Postgraduate Class (NTS, Research Module I) and Advanced Academic Skills (BAPS, Systematic Perspectives: Literary and Cultural Studies & Book Studies).
This class is particularly aimed at students interested in pursuing projects related to literary and cultural studies as well as book studies. Students will build on knowledge, experience and skills gained in previous semesters and will further develop specialised research interests. This class supports students in pursuing independent studies on one or several topics of their choice which may/will lead to (and later complement) their Master theses. It is specifically designed as a space for presenting ideas on individual MA thesis projects with peers and the course instructor providing feedback and as a class to engage with the academic genre of the book review. Students also receive guidance on how to plan for and write their MA theses in a timely manner. Information on academic writing, research methodologies and theoretical frameworks, including career advice will also be provided depending on students' needs.
Weekly classes will start on June 2, and there will be additional presentation days on two Fridays in early July.
For BAPS students: In this class your graded assignment consists of a 2000 word book review. We will work towards understanding this genre and analyse examples before you tackle this assignment independently.
For NTS students: In this second part of Research Module I, you will complete and hand in your research portfolio which you started working on in semester 1.
Can Çakır
Theory and Literature (Group IV) - Imagining Alternative Futures: Utopias and Dystopias
090649 | Practice course | Tue 12-14
The following texts will be read and discussed in class: Octavia Butler - Parable of the Sower (1993)
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (1973)
Cory Doctorow - Walkaway (2017)
Rita Maricocchi
"borderless and brazen": Aesthetics, Politics, and History of Black German Writing in English (Translation)
090641 | Seminar | Mon 16-18
Drawing on Christina Sharpe’s appeal for Black scholars to become undisciplined, Fatima El-Tayeb calls for the recovery of "undisciplined forms of knowledge production," those which are "appropriately disrespectful of the hierarchies and separations that will not generate a better future, or any future at all" (El-Tayeb, "Undisciplined Knowledge: Intersectional Black European Studies," 48). Taking inspiration from both Sharpe and El-Tayeb as well as May Ayim’s poem "grenzenlos und unverschämt" ("borderless and brazen"), this seminar adopts an undisciplined approach to the study of 20th-21st century Black diasporic literatures. Particularly attuned to writing produced by Black authors in/about Germany and in English/in English translation, the course is oriented around the following aims:
1. to recognize "the possibility of multiple layered and translucent categories" (Koepsell, "Literature and Activism," 44) within Black German literature and situate Black German writing within wider Black diasporic discourses and traditions. This will include the study of transatlantic and transnational exchange amongst Black diasporic authors across the 20th-21st centuries, the intersections between Black literary traditions across national contexts, and the circulation and reception of select Black German texts translated into English.
2. to conduct, distinguish, and combine historical, political, and aesthetic readings of Black German poetry and prose in English/English translation. In writing about the predominance of sociological readings of Black German literature, Jeannette Oholi formulates the following critical questions: "Why is the literature of Black authors often read only autobiographically? Why are the texts of Black authors often not contextualized? Why is it often only the content that is in the foreground and not the aesthetics? Why are so many readers of Black German literature so obsessed with finding racism in the texts?" (Oholi, "Why We Need to Read Black German Literature More Broadly in German Studies," 126). This course will pay particular attention to formal and aesthetic qualities of the Black German literary tradition and discuss the ways these are expressed in English-language writing and translation.
The seminar will include selections of poetry and prose by authors such as May Ayim, Ted Joans, Philipp Khabo Koepsell, Sylvie Kumah, Audre Lorde, Olumide Popoola, Musa Okwonga, Sharon Dodua Otoo, and Olivia Wenzel. While the majority of readings will be provided via Learnweb, students are expected to obtain their own copies of 1-2 texts, which will be announced in February. The course will also include a visit to the play ”May Landschaften” by Penda Diouf at Theater Münster (date and logistics to be discussed in class).
Dorit Neumann
Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies II: Group VI
090608 | Basic course | Mon 10-12
Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies II: Group VII
090609 | Basic course | Mon 14-16