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Indexseite Cultural Studies
Photo: Photograph Wolfram Burner, adapted from the original, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0

Overview

Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary field that analyses the production of socially relevant meanings across various forms of cultural representations, including literature, film, music, performance, exhibitions, video games or social media. In our research and teaching we analyse these representations with the aim of developing a better understanding of the political, social and economic interests of individual actors or groups that are inscribed in these cultural texts. We are particularly interested in how these representations establish, justify, sustain or destabilise ideologies of gender, race, class, age, ability and other categories of difference. In keeping with the decolonial/postcolonial orientation of literary and cultural studies in our department, we draw on a range of Anglophone cultural studies traditions and apply these in our analysis of concrete cultural productions – contemporary, as well as historical – from Anglophone societies around the world. Building on these traditions, our work increasingly also addresses material-semiotic phenomena that emerge from nature-culture assemblages.


Selection of Research Projects

Tupajas Map

Tupaia’s Map

Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz have extensively researched a legendary map of the Pacific, drawn in 1769/1770 by the Polynesian master navigator Tupaia for James Cook and his crew.

A wall with graffiti

RTG »Minor Cosmopolitanisms«

The Research Training Group (RTG) minor cosmopolitanisms establishes new ways of studying and understanding the cosmopolitan project beyond its Eurocentric legacies.

Potsdam Postcolonial Chair for Global Modernities

Coordinated by Anja Schwarz and funded by DAAD between 2020-2022 , the Postcolonial Chair hosted four Guest Professors who contributed to a diversification of the curriculum.

Drawing of a superb Australian fairywren bird by William Blandowski (1850).

Berlin's Australian Archive

Working collaboratively with First Nations, the project addresses the colonial legacies of natural history by investigating the Southeastern Australian collections of four prussian naturalists.