BA Transculturality
Welcome to the BA Transculturality!
The interdisciplinary degree program examines processes of cultural entanglement in the past and present. It combines transdisciplinary perspectives on media, texts, and languages in a globalized world with the acquisition of research skills.
Information about the BA program
What is the BA in Transculturality about?
We take an inter- and transdisciplinary approach to historical and current cultural entanglements between individuals, groups, and societies. We examine how these are formed and conveyed through material and immaterial forms of expression, including image and text media, as well as diverse practices reaching beyond language or physical objects.
Therefore, the focus is not only on the temporal and spatial dynamics of transcultural interrelationships, but also on their conditions, conflicts, and limitations. Transcultural studies are particularly well suited to critically questioning outdated, static, but socio-politically influential modern notions of cultures as homogeneous, nationally conceived entities and to better understanding the social, ethnic, linguistic, economic, media, and aesthetic complexity of cultural phenomena.
Transculturality is thus a key concept for understanding complex historical and contemporary constellations. Such constellations require an understanding of culture that draws on the expertise of the humanities but cannot be represented within the framework of single disciplines alone.
What does the program convey and how?
The three-year interdisciplinary program innovatively combines the diversity of humanities research and teaching at HHU. It introduces students to theoretical and empirical knowledge from different, complementary subject areas. Using a multi-perspective approach, it imparts knowledge from the fields of history, art history, literature and linguistics in German, English, Japanese, Yiddish, and Romance languages, as well as media and cultural studies. Students are free to select from further subjects.
Which skills do students acquire?
Step by step, students develop their own areas of focus by independently pursuing research on topics and presenting their own contributions at one of the BA forums.
In this way, the program conveys various skills, including communication techniques, multilingualism, empirical and interpretative methodological skills. These are prerequisites for a distinguished transition to further academic education, while at the same time opening key qualifications for numerous professional fields.