Finding Berlin - on Archives and Archiving - Detailseite

Language requirements: min. English B2.

This research seminar will provide students with approaches to “the archive,”
understood as repositories of records from the past that can serve as source material
for critical analysis and aesthetic invention.

Field visits to archives in Berlin will provide “hands-on” experiences for exploring archives, offering possibilities for developing a
focused written and/or artistic research project.

Readings in history, literature, social sciences, and the visual arts will provide a critical framework for analyzing archives as
sites of artistic creation, academic discovery, and theoretical construction.

Students from all fields and different levels of proficiency in German are welcome.

In addition to a diverse selection of case studies and interdisciplinary readings, the main
theoretical texts to which we will be returning to throughout this course are:

Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. “Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books.
Benjamin, Walter. [1927-1940] 2002. The Arcades Project, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press..
Farge, Arlette. [1989] 2013. The Allure of the Archive. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Foucault, Michel. [1969] 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, Michel. [1966] 1997. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London:
Routledge.
Steedman, Carolyn. 2002. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Trouillot, Michel Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon
Press.

For international exchange students.

NO registration via AGNES.

Application ONLY VIA Berlin Perspectives: https://www.hu-berlin.de/de/einrichtungen-organisation/verwaltung/bolognalab/projekte-des-bologna.labs/berlin-perspectives/bewerbung