  I discuss the chemical and spectrophotometric evolution of galaxies over
cosmological timescales and present a first attempt to treat both aspects in a
chemically consistent way. In our evolutionary synthesis approach, we account
for the increasing metallicity of successive generations of stars and use sets
of stellar evolutionary tracks, stellar yields, spectra, etc. for various
metallicities. This gives a more realistic description of nearby galaxies,
which are observed to have broad stellar metalllicty distributions, as well as
of young galaxies at high redshift. Selected results are presented for the
chemo-cosmological evolution of galaxies as compared to QSO absorption line
observations and for the spectrophotometric evolution of galaxies to very high
redshifts. On cosmological timescales, intercations are important drivers of
galaxy evolution. Neglecting dynamical aspects we study the effects of
interaction-induced starbursts on the spectrophotometric and chemical evolution
of galaxies and briefly discuss the formation of star clusters and Tidal Dwarf
Galaxies in this context.

Astrophysics