Summer School Urdu Intensive Course
Key Information
Time: 1st-19th September 2025
Venue: South Asia Institute Heidelberg
Fee: 350 Euro
Deadline: 31st May 2025
Contact: urdu-nsp@sai.uni-heidelberg.de
Intensive Courses in Spoken and Written Urdu
The South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University, Germany, will offer introductory and advanced courses in Urdu during the summer vacations 2025.
In the introductory course, students develop speaking, reading, listening and writing skills and acquire basic vocabulary as well as knowledge of the main grammatical structures and conversational etiquette of Urdu.
The advanced course is designed to develop communicative skills, grammatical accuracy and the ability to understand complex texts. Particular stress will also be laid on listening comprehension.
Participants are asked to acquire a basic knowledge of the Urdu script prior to the course. For this purpose, we recommend: Richard Delacy, Read and write Urdu script. (Teach Yourself Series), ISBN 978-1444103939. However, there will be sufficient opportunity during class to clarify difficulties and practice the script.
On the intermediate and advanced level, we will mainly use our own teaching material. Participants of the introductory course are asked to purchase the book Urdu für Anfänger von Christina Oesterheld and Amtul Manan Tahir, Buske 2016, ISBN 978-3-87548-776-3. Participants who are not acquainted with German are advised to refer to Beginning Urdu: A Complete Course by Joshua H. Pien and Fauzia Farooqui, Georgetown University Press 2012, ISBN 978-1589017788.
Classes are scheduled to take place from Monday to Friday, 9.30 am to 3.30 pm. Participants who take part in the full programme and pass the written tests will be awarded 7 ECTS or equivalent credits.
Participants will be classed to the different levels will in the beginning of the course. It will be possible to change between the levels at any time during the course and an individual combination of the teaching units of different levels is also possible.
Payment for the course fee has to be made to the following account:
Acc. holder: Heidelberg University
IBAN: DE69 6005 0101 7421 5004 36
BIC: SOLADEST
Baden-Wuerttembergische Bank Stuttgart
Re: K-Stelle: 97025000, SAI Urdu Summer School 2025
(This is very important!)
Teacher Profiles
Table
| Kristof Szitar is a PhD candidate in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Lausanne. He is a historian of medieval Central and South Asian literatures (Persian, Urdu, Turkic), and is interested in the cultural and literary traditions of the Caucasus. Prior to his doctoral studies, he worked as an interpreter in Urdu and Hindi. |
| Thomas Dahnhardt is currently Associate Professor of Urdu and Hindi language and literature at Ca' Foscari, University of Venice. He was awarded his PhD from SOAS University of London with a thesis on Hindu-Muslim spiritual relationship in 19-20th century Northern India. He has been involved in a number of research projects concerning Sufi environments in both India and Pakistan, his work focuses on traditional Urdu poetry (ghazal and mathnawi) and didactic Sufi texts (risalat) in both Urdu and Persian. |
| Bushra Iqbal Malik earned her master’s degrees in Urdu literature and journalism, as well as a B.Ed. from the University of Peshawar, Pakistan. She commenced her teaching career at Beacon House School, Peshawar in 1994. In 2001, she relocated to Germany and took on a part-time role as a Urdu language teacher at Erfurt University, where she taught until 2009. Currently, she is teaching Urdu language courses in Bonn, and has been actively involved in the Urdu Summer School programs in Germany since their inception. Bushra is a short-story writer who has published two anthologies titled “Hayat-e Nawyafta” (Renaissance) and “Majma‘ ki dusri ‘Awrat” (The other woman of the crowd ) in 2019. Additionally, she initiated a project titled “Tanisiyat ka naya dawr” (The new phase of feminism), and the first book in this series, “Naya aslub, nay ‘awrat (aik baith),” is released which is serving as a discussion platform for discovering a new woman in Pakistani society. Some of her short stories have also been translated in German. |
| Dr. Justyna Kurowska is a Hindi lecturer at the Department of Indology, University of Würzburg, Germany. Her academic qualifications include Hindi and Urdu studies at the universities of Warsaw and Jawaharlal Nehru in New Delhi. In 2019, she received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Oriental Studies, University of Warsaw, with a focus on the aesthetics of death and dying in contemporary Hindi literature. She was an assistant professor at the Department of Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures in the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg. Furthermore, she held the position of lecturer at the Department of Linguistics and Philology at Uppsala University, and worked as a research assistant and Hindi and Urdu lecturer at the University of Bonn. Her research areas centre on prison literature, memory studies, culinary cultures, and written and spoken accounts of offenders from the penal settlement in the Andaman Islands. |
| Dr. Arian Hopf is Urdu lecturer since 2018 at the South Asia Institute, University Heidelberg from where he has earned his M.A. in “Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures” in 2014 as well as his Ph.D. in 2018 on the topic of “The Dynamics of the Concept of Religion in Colonial South Asia.” His research areas focus on conceptions of Pakistan, language ideologies, with special regard to Urdu as symbol of an Indo-Muslim culture and identity marker for Pakistan and (Islamic) popular literature in Pakistan. |