This course introduces students to the basic terms, analytical techniques and interpretive strategies commonly employed in Cultural Studies. Participants will learn to analyse concrete cultural phenomena in Anglophone countries with the help of some of the field’s key concepts, including power, ideology, subjectivity, class, race, gender and nation. Through classroom discussion and independent reading students will acquire the foundation for more advanced course work in Cultural Studies.

This research-oriented seminar will engage with the British East India Company focusing, among other things, on its status between the poles of being a formal colonial power as well as a private trading company. Throughout the semester we will read writing from within and about the East India Company both as literature as well as historical sources shedding some light on the ideologies of Empire and anticolonial resistance. This will give students the chance to develop their own fields of interest and research projects.
The grand finale will be a conference-style presentation of the students research projects pursued throughout the semester.