The tasks and structure of the Faculty are set out in the Faculty Regulations

Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities convey in-depth and theory-based knowledge about the world’s languages and literature and its wealth of culture, history and philosophy. Teaching as well as research focuses on how values and ideas, theories and models spread and develop. The Faculty is thus a genuine locus of interdisciplinarity. Here, students are educated to become personalities who – being superbly qualified for many professional fields – possess both disciplinary and interdisciplinary academic competences, as well as being capable of developing new ideas and models of thought in a productive, clear and distinct way.

Languages are the fundament of any culture. At the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, a great many languages are taught and analysed, including not only many European tongues like Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, English and nearly all Romance languages, but also the Slavic languages and those outside Europe, such as Chinese and Japanese, Arabic and Persian, Sanskrit, Tamil and Hindi, along with the main African languages such as Swahili, Bambara and Ewe, and naturally the languages of the ancient cultures – Hebrew, Greek and Latin.Languages not only furnish direct access to the world’s cultures, they are themselves part of these cultures. Important academic sub-disciplines deal extensively with the subject of language: history, philosophy, sociology and psychology of language.

Exploring cultures as conceptual forms of how our world is ordered and interpreted is a prime focus of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities – based on time horizons (Antiquity, the Middle Ages, Early Modern Times, the Modern Era and the Present), as well as on regions and with a view to their media. The cultures, their moral concepts, traditions and time-honoured practices, have shaped human perceptions and modes of behaviour.
The Faculty’s research and teaching offer embraces just about the complete spectrum of cultural studies on the subjects of “old Europe”: prehistory and early history, the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean area (ancient history, Byzantine studies, classical philology, archaeology and Jewish studies), medieval studies and their formative influence on Cologne (notably in the fields of philosophy, history, Islamic and Jewish studies, Medieval Latin, literature and visual arts), and the culture of the Early Modern Period and the period after the French Revolution up to the present (history, literature, philosophy, visual arts, music, and so forth). The non-European cultures, too, occupy a prominent position in the research and teaching landscape of Cologne’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities: the cultures of Anglo- and Latin America, the Islam-centred oriental cultures of the Arab, Persian and Indonesian world, as well as the African and Asian cultures including China, India and Japan.

Reality, nature, society and culture would remain inaccessible without experience- and knowledge-based tenets. Catholic and Protestant theology, philosophy and academic theories offer constructs that seek to explain, describe and structure our world. Theology and philosophy, but also the individual disciplines, examine how historical theories originated and what claims they have to validity. All the Faculty’s disciplines are oriented in equal measure to both subjects and theories. The latter are suffused with the two cultures of knowledge – that of the humanities and that of the natural sciences, notably in domains where they collaborate closely, namely pre- and early history, archaeology, philosophy or media studies.

Alongside
teacher training (for elementary and secondary school types, as well
as for gymnasiums [academic high schools]/ comprehensive schools and
business colleges), one of the Faculty’s particular attractions
lies in the diversity of its research-oriented cultural studies
programmes. These do not only impart specialist skills and knowledge,
they also equip students with a wide range of key qualifications:
ability to structure and comprehend highly complex problems,
systematic reflection of one’s own and other people’s cognitive
perspectives, intercultural competence, language skills, and
proficiency in communicating complicated facts and interactions.<BR>In
27 institutes and departments, internationally renowned professors
and staff members teach and conduct research. The Faculty offers a
total of 24 bachelor’s degree courses: a six-semester study path
equips graduates with what they need to access the employment market.
A four-semester major in one of the 28 master’s degree courses
affords additional opportunity for in-depth, research-led studies.
The structuring of the teaching programme in modules, in tandem with
the introduction of the credit transfer and accumulation system,
makes studies easy to survey and fosters student mobility across
Europe.<BR>A number of disciplines have joined forces to form
innovative “combination studies”. These include Media Studies,
Ancient Languages and Cultures, Asian Cultures and Societies, and
European Legal Linguistics, along with the Regional Studies on
Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and China (including the
electives Business Administration, Economics, Social Sciences or
Law).