Schnupperstudium

Welcome to the Schnupperstudium page of the Chair of American Studies at University of Regensburg!

Thank you for your interest in studying American studies at Regensburg. If you are interested in US culture, literature, history, and politics, American studies might be for you. As you can see from this brief list already, American studies is not simply a discipline. Rather it is an interdisciplinary field of study that brings together the perspectives of many different disciplines to better understand ‘America’ (put in quotation marks here to indicate that this is much more than a country, or a continent, and rather a complex, often contradictory cultural object). Put differently, American studies is a much more wide-ranging academic endeavor than the classical philological disciplines are. It is also a very political field of study—always interested in how culture and power come to interact. As a student, doing American studies will therefore not only give you a better understanding of the US but of how culture works more generally, and of how one can bring together different disciplinary perspectives to produce a deeper, more nuanced understanding of an object of study.

The Chair of American Studies is at the heart of a uniquely rich network of American studies related initiatives and institutions here at Regensburg of which REAF, the Regensburg European American Forum, is just the most visible. These initiatives and institutions will allow you to explore America more deeply and more fully, to learn more about contemporary and historic developments on both sides of the Atlantic and to get to know important scholars in the field. This rich network is one of the reasons why Regensburg is such a well-regarded place to do American studies in Germany.

As a student, you can encounter American studies in three different forms at Regensburg

•    As a student in our B.A. American studies program (BA Amerikanistik), you focus your studies on understanding American culture, literature, history, and politics. This will give you detailed, nuanced knowledge of this object of study, America, but it will also equip you with interdisciplinary skills that can help you in a wide variety of jobs later on.
•    If you already have a BA degree and want to deepen your understanding of America and its entanglement with Europe, the M.A. European American Studies (MEAS) is right for you. In this intensive and demanding program, you will work in a small cohort of fellow MA students to develop your own academic interest regarding the complex and often contradictory relationship between the US and Europe.
•    Finally, you can encounter American studies at Regensburg as a Lehramt student as part of your education in English, or as a BA student majoring in another program.

If this sounds like something you might be interested in, please explore our Schnupperstudium pages. The Regensburger Hochschultag takes place each February. We invite you to check out the freely available public resources linked below. If you want to learn more, you can easily get access to a password protected page with more information. This page will also list time slots during which you can sit in on some of our lectures to get a hands-on feeling for what American studies at Regensburg is like.

Public Resources

• Exemplary Schedule for a typical first semester in the B.A. program
• Studienplan B.A. Amerikanistik
• Presentation from Regensburger Hochschultag 2022

Additional Password Protected Resources

GRIPS course "Schupperstudium American Studies" (please email us at american.studies@ur.de)