This year widely-read texts from authors such as Kant, Freud, Benjamin, Adorno, Deleuze and Foucault are combined with recent reactions and alternatives by Derrida, Spivak, Butler, Rose, focusing on the issue of culture, including connected issues such as multiculturalism, popular culture and aesthetics. These texts are read in order to achieve a productive integration of background knowledge and especially, the skills of reading in detail and of positioning the content within a historical and cultural context, as well as actualising the issues raised. Subsequently the confrontation of the texts with the research topics of the students will serve to probe to what extent these texts and the ideas they offer continue to be actively mobilised in the practice of cultural analysis. Tutorials A number of area-oriented tutorials, focusing on projects and topics, are devoted to the intellectual skills necessary for specialising in an interdisciplinary context. They are offered in a limited number of variants and aims to establish relationships between interdisciplinary and disciplinary research.
Students are in charge of presenting their own projects for debate.
Tutorials are offered by broadly defined areas such as Film and Television Studies, Philosophy, Study of Religion, Visual and Literary Studies. The Bible in the Twenty-first Century, Political Theologies, Postcolonial Reason, Representation and its Discontents, Islam in Contemporary Art, Phantasm and Fiction, Psychoanalytic Theory and Literary Practice. The phenomena to be discussed include war, health and sex through the ages, religion, agriculture, city life, art and writing. Top Tutorials Tutorials will discuss Capita Selecta of European culture and history, as well as relevant research methodology. Even more than the Research Seminars, which deal with the forces profondes of European culture and history, the Tutorials focus on topics which should make MPhil research at the Universiteit van Amsterdam's Graduate School especially rewarding.