National and Transnational Studies - Literature, Culture, Language University of Münster

Overview

The National and Transnational Studies - Literature, Culture, Language from University of Münster offers a specialisation in anglophone literatures and cultures from around the world, and in English linguistics, combined with an interdisciplinary orientation towards other modern languages and literatures, history, and social anthropology. The programme also draws on scholarship from other fields such as sociology or political science.

Keyfacts:

• Reflections on nationalism and nationality as cultural (rather than merely political) phenomena: How are nationalism and nationality constructed through literature, language and other forms of cultural expression? 
• (with topics including theories of nationalism, tradition and memory, national aesthetics, canon formation, and varieties of English)
• Research on the global role of English with a focus on New English varieties in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. The programme offers the possibility to apply different approaches to the study of World Englishes, including for example sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, language attitude research, phonetics, or (variational) pragmatics.
• Explorations of complex cultural dynamics beyond national frameworks in an increasingly globalised world
• (with topics including colonialism & postcolonialism, migration & diasporas, transculturalism, English as a world language and the sociolinguistics of globalization)
• Studies in a wide range of literature, cultures and varieties of English
• (e.g. British Isles, North America, Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, South Pacific)
• Advanced understanding of theoretical approaches from literary and cultural studies as well as sociolinguistics, including reflections on selected approaches from the social sciences (e.g. social anthropology, sociology, political science)