North-American Culture Studies 

The North American Culture Studies Master's programme combines literary and linguistic instruction and provides a broad cultural overview of the countries in North America, combining Anglophone and Francophone and Spanish-speaking regions, from Canada, through the United States to Mexico and the Caribbean. The programme is designed so that the students gain an overview of each of the cultural areas and are instructed on their mutual linguistic, literary, and cultural influences. For this reason, the programme is structured in a modular manner.

The mandatory part of the curriculum consists of core courses that have a methodological section in which students learn the basic theoretical approaches toward the concept of identity of self, of the other, and of various social groups, and focus on the concept and its various manifestations in literature, linguistics, and culture. The core section is followed by a variety of in-depth courses in which students gain orientation in the specific cultural phenomena in the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone worlds. The two compulsory specializations combine either the Anglophone-Francophone area or the Anglophone-Spanish-speaking area, allowing for an informed comparison.

The unique value of the North American degree programme is the opportunity it offers to study several highly topical issues in today’s world, such as otherness, migration, immigration, and cultural and linguistic phenomena associated with integration in areas where different ethnic groups, languages, and cultures interact. In this respect, North America represents a model laboratory allowing us to study the processes that increasingly confront societies across the world.