Teaching with a focus on: Romance world of media (academic year of 2022/23)
Media connect and overcome distances, media store and transfer, media represent, duplicate and sometimes distort reality, media transmit signs, information, images and - in the case of transportation media - goods or people. Media distribute power and make us powerless, media shape our perception and our feelings, they 'format' our brains, control our desires and yet they are also media of consciousness, knowledge and enlightenment. As conditions of possibility for human existence, media thus create the worlds in which we live and in which we learn, in which we act communicatively and which often become virtual counter - or otherwords that leave empiricism behind.
As a result, the Department of Romance Studies organized a teaching focus in the academic year of 2022/23 under the title Medienwelt Romania, which students, lecturers and all interested parties were invited. In an interdisciplinary lecture series and in numerous courses from all Romance studies subjects (linguistics, didactics, cultural studies, literary studies, language training), dia- and synchronic media effects in oral or written communication were discussed as well as the consequences of historical media upheavals, the staging of sophisticated media couplings and the exploration of media-supported teaching settings and their associated skills.
Numerous students took the opportunity to create thematic 'synergies' between the attended courses, worked in interactive and production-oriented educational formats on the teaching focus and presented their highly creative results to a large audience at a final event (end of May 2023): From scientifically instructive posters and literary texts to theatrical performances and video clips - the Medienwelt Romania was made visible, audible and understandable in a multimedia and multimodal way on this evening.
Romance Studies focus: The Mediterranean cultural area (academic year of 2018/19)
In the academic year 2018/2019, the Department of Romance Studies, under the direction of Steffen Schneider, organized a teaching and research focus on the Mediterranean and its cultural significance in Romance-speaking Europe and Francophone Africa.
As part of an interdisciplinary lecture series, numerous courses, inspiring readings and panel discussions and a themed excursion (to Sicily), students and academics from the Department of Romance Studies and experts explored the diversity of Mediterranean languages, literatures and cultures.
The final event in October 2019 was the international conference A Sea of Literatures: Theories, Concepts and Methodes of Mediterranean Literary Studies.
This resulted in the book Sea of Literatures Towards a Theory of Mediterranean Literature (edited by Angela Fabris, Albert Göschl and Steffen Schneider; De Gruyter 2023)
In 2023, the Faculty of Humanities also initiated the academic focus area Trans-Mediterranean Entanglements - Movements and Relationships in the Mediterranean and Beyond , headed by Steffen Schneider (Department of Romance Studies) and Ursula Gärtner (Department of Antiquity).