Critical Theory and Literary Theory studies a wide range of  theoretical approaches to literature and culture, which challenge and enrich the ways in which cultural objects are viewed. You will discuss cultural objects from a critical standpoint and bring them in dialogue with concepts and ideas developed in aesthetics, phenomenology, feminist and queer theory, cultural studies, ecocriticism, posthuman and decolonial studies.

Interculturality, Diversity and Inclusion begins from the standpoint that the world is composed of intercultural meetings, where each cultural self seems to be created in response to others. If literature was once studied as the privileged medium for the creation of a national self, today scholars often focus on the way in which literature articulates emerging trans-national, intercultural and migrant identities. The theoretical component of the programme is dedicated to a comparative discussion of the key-concepts, theories and methodologies developed to analyse the literature of modernity, (post-)colonialism, gender, and globalisation. You will follow a variety of courses which will illuminate the genealogy of these concepts and approaches, tracing both their origins in specific cultural and political contexts, and their trans-national, intercultural trajectories.

Literature, Politics and the Law, studies how literature (and culture in the larger sense of the term) has responded to the legal dilemmas and political crises of our time. By studying cultural texts about the ongoing ecological disaster, the refugee crisis, or the transformations of capitalism, we discuss how literature and the arts can help develop new modes of thinking about these issues. By reading literary texts, theatrical plays and films that respond to legal debates and historical trials we discuss culture as a terrain in which dilemmas of justice are dramatized and new conceptualizations of justice are introduced.

Popular Culture and Critical Theory studies various critical approaches to popular music and explores the ways in which pop music has introduced new ideas about identity, creativity, the body, collectivity, pleasure and consumption.