Graduate School of North American Studies
The Graduate School of North American Studies was initiated in the framework of the Excellence Initiative. In harmony with the guiding principle of Freie Universität, the Graduate School of North American Studies is devoted to the analysis of the American ideal of freedom, the meaning of democratic values in the United States and Canada, and the challenges that these ideals face in today’s post-globalization world.
This set of research topics is aimed at achieving a fundamental, historically based understanding of the social change that the societies of the United States and Canada are experiencing at the beginning of the 21st century in the fields of domestic and foreign policy and economic development, the reordering of social relationships in a multiethnic society, and in the areas of media, the arts, culture, and religion. The school’s analysis of these aspects takes place on the basis of an interdisciplinary cooperation, coordinated in terms of both research and curricula, among six academic disciplines: culture, history, literature, political science, sociology, and economics and business.