History

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

In her study of transnational adoptees, Eleana Kim noted the profound differences between discourses about the immigration of Chinese brides to the United States and those describing the arrival of adopted Chinese baby girls: the former with suspicion and the latter with joy. Two ways that families form are by bringing in spouses and by having children. We tend to assume that family building involves deeply personal, intimate, and even “natural” acts; but, in actual practice, the pragmatics of forming (and disbanding) families are much more complex. There are many instances where biological pregnancy is not possible or not chosen, and there are biological parents who are unable to rear their offspring. Social rules govern the acceptance or rejection of children in particular social groups, depending on factors such as the marital status of their parents or the enactment of appropriate rituals. Western notions of marriage prioritize compatibility between two individuals who choose each other based on love; but, in many parts of the world, selecting a suitable spouse and contracting a marriage is the business of entire kin networks. There is great variability, too, in what constitutes “suitable.” To marry a close relative or someone of the same gender may be deemed unnaturally close in some societies; marriage across great difference—such as age, race, nation, culture, or class—can also be problematic. And beyond the intimacies of couples and the interests of extended kin are the interests of the nation state. This lecture will examine the makings and meanings of kinship connections at multiple levels, from small communities to global movements. Topics will include the adoption and fostering of children, both locally and transnationally, in Peru, Chile, Spain, Italy, Ghana, the USA, China, and Korea. We will look at technologies of biological reproduction, including the global movement of genetic material in the business of transnational gestational surrogacy. We will look at the ways in which marriages are contracted in a variety of social and cultural settings, including China and Korea, and the ways they are configured by race, gender, and citizenship. Our questions will include: Who are “real” kin? Who can a person marry? Which children are “legitimate”? Why do we hear so little about birth mothers? What is the experience of families with transgender parents or children? What is the compulsion to find genetically connected “kin”? How many mothers can a person have? How is marriage connected to labor migration? Why are the people who care for children in foster care called “parents”? The materials for this class include literature, scholarly articles, ethnographic accounts, historical documents, and film.

Faculty

• Mary A. Porter

Open, Small Lecture—Spring

This aphorism, “We are here because you were there," attributed to British anti-racist activist A. Sivanandan, is the response of contemporary Britons of color to white people who challenge the rights of Britons of color to British residency and citizenship. These resistances come, in part, from the inaccurate belief that Britain was a homogeneously white nation until the mid-20th century and from the ideology that “Black” and “British” are mutually exclusive categories. In fact, there have been people of color resident and participating in British society for hundreds of years; over six centuries, their numbers and their roles expanded steadily in direct relation to the expansion of the British Empire and the colonization of millions of British “subjects” around the world. At its peak in 1922, maps showed the red coloring of Great Britain ruling over of one-quarter of the globe. This course, taught from an anthropological perspective, will explore the ways in which myriad racial categories, including white, have been mutually constituted in Great Britain in the context of shifting cultural, economic, and political circumstances. This will include exploring the differences and conflicts among the four nations that now constitute the nation state that is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Hands-on class materials will be multidisciplinary (anthropology, history, geography, literature) and multimedia, with a particular focus on visual images, audio, maps, popular culture, and archival documents. We will look at the nature of British Imperial expansion through trade, settlement, and enslavement; but the main focus will be the resulting racialized landscapes in Great Britain. We will look at the lives of free Black people in Tudor times and the means, both formal and informal, by which enslaved people in Britain freed themselves and blended into Black English communities in the 18th century. We will learn about the merchant sailors who came from West Africa; the Lascars (Muslim sailors) from east of the Cape of Good Hope; and the Chinese seamen from Shanghai and Guangzhou, who established the first China Town in Europe in the London docklands in the 19th century. We will also learn about the Black men and women performing on the stages of theatres in England and Wales. Articulations of race, gender, and sexuality will be central, particularly as they play out in family formations. Intersections with class are critical, too, particularly in the 19th century when the burgeoning white middle class used the same racialized discourses lumping together the English working class, Irish immigrants, and “natives” overseas. We will devote a significant amount of attention to the 20th century, with its two World Wars that depended on the labor of colonized subjects. We will look at discourses about “race relations” in Britain after 1948, which include white nationalist movements, government white papers, and some misguided writings by anthropologists, among other things. Finally, we will explore examples of explosions in popular culture created by second- and third-generation children of Commonwealth immigrants and their allies: music genres, including reggae, ska, and two-tone; films such as Young Soul Rebels, Bend it Like Beckham, and The Stuart Hall Project; and literature, including writings by Fathima Zahra, Aizaz Hussain, Paul Gilroy, and Jackie Kay. Each student will attend the weekly lecture and one weekly seminar meeting. Assignments will include biweekly written reflections, leading seminar discussions, and collaborating in group research projects.

Faculty

• Mary A. Porter

Intermediate, Seminar—Spring

There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarity. —Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is one of the most important thinkers and writers of the 20th century. His many writings and innovative concepts, which continue to be discussed and debated today, are of pressing relevance for the contemporary moment, marked as it is by themes of technological and aesthetic transformations, political violence, and histories of exile and displacement. The purpose of this intensive seminar will be to delve into the textures of Benjamin’s life—from his childhood years in Berlin to his final days in France and Spain—while considering the diverse and intricate formations of Benjamin’s thought and writing. For this inquiry, we will be drawing from a number of biographical, historiographic, political, literary, and anthropological lines of analysis to gain an incisive sense of his groundbreaking writings on film and photography, literature and translation, concepts of history, and the politics of culture. Along the way, we will connect Benjamin’s thought to other significant writers and philosophers, including Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. We will focus on a number of key texts authored by Benjamin, including Berlin Childhood Around 1900, The Arcades Project, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” “The Task of the Translator,” “The Storyteller,” and “On the Concept of History.” In engaging with these and other challenging texts and giving thought to Benjamin’s life and death more generally, students will develop a richly informed understanding of the life and thought of this singularly compelling person while coming to terms with the haunted histories of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Faculty

• Robert R. Desjarlais

Open, Lecture—Fall

This course will explore the powerful architecture, sculpture, and painting styles that lie at the heart of the creation of Europe and the idea of the West. We will use a number of strategies to explore how expressive narrative painting and sculpture and new monumental architectural styles were engaged in the formation of a common European identity and uncover, as well, the artistic vestiges of diverse groups and cultures that challenge that uniform vision. These are arts that chronicle deep social struggles between classes, intense devotion through pilgrimage, the rise of cities and universities, and movements that could both advocate genocide and nurture enormous creativity in styles both flamboyant and austere, growing from places as diverse as castles and rural monasteries to Gothic cathedrals. The course will explore those aspects of expressive visual language that link works of art to social history, the history of ideas, and political ideology.

Faculty

• Jerrilynn Dodds

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

The context of the 17th-century Dutch Republic presents a distinct case for a global approach to art history, poised for the exchange of images, objects, and knowledge through the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the West India Company (WIC), the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, and as both a young republic and a colonial empire. In this course, we will look at paintings, prints, drawings, maps, sculpture, and decorative art, investigating efforts by Dutch artists to visualize global encounters and distant places, Dutch interests in collecting and displaying rarities, and various types of artistic exchange and influence. We will consider connections not only between the Dutch Republic and its territories in current-day Indonesia, Brazil, and South Africa but also those established through trade and diplomacy elsewhere, including cross-border with the southern Netherlands, with other European cultures, with Asia, and with the Americas. Rejecting methods of world history or of comparative history across cultures, as well as the fallacies of Eurocentrism and center-versus-periphery, this course will employ the lens of global integration. We will consider processes and mechanisms of early-modern globalization, including imperialism, enslavement, colonization, evangelization, trade, consumption, collecting, and the diffusion of prints. This course will involve visits to area museums to study 17th-century objects in person.

Faculty

• Katherine Gobel Hardy

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

Focusing on Europe and its intersections with the Americas, Africa, and the Caribbean, this course will explore how artists in the long 19th century responded to the economic, political, and social upheavals of modernity and imperialism. We will look to artists depicting plantation economies, sanitizing the slave trade, and abolitionists forging a new visual rhetoric to depict bodily freedom and personhood. We will consider how artists reveled in capitalist spectacle, leisure, and entertainment, including through the nascent medium of photography. We will also grapple with how realism and materialism became tools to voice politics amidst revolution and nationalism, social inequality, and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Readings and lectures will introduce the movements of neoclassicism, romanticism, realism, impressionism, aestheticism, and neo-impressionism— and dig deeper to take up questions of collective and individual; center and periphery; gender, race, class, and sexuality; and land, landscape, and industry. This lecture-seminar hybrid will also entail field trips to area museums.

Faculty

• Sarah Hamill

Open, Seminar—Year

Although the Romans come to mind most immediately as the people who absorbed and passed on the achievements of Greek civilization to the Western world, the transmission of Greek culture to Western posterity was a far more complex process initially involving various other peoples across the Italian peninsula. In fall, beginning with the Italian peninsula itself, the course will focus on how the early Greeks colonized southern Italy and Sicily. We will examine how their culture then affected a range of native Italian peoples such as the Etruscans, Osci, Latins, and the early Romans, who eventually emerged as the dominant political force in Italy and then across the Mediterranean and southern Europe. We will consider how the process of Hellenization enabled the Romans to assume the management of the Greek world in military, political, and material cultural or artistic terms. In spring, now emphasizing the art of the Roman Empire, the course will explore the outcome of this development between the first and third centuries, as Rome came to dominate the entire Mediterranean basin along with much of Europe and western Asia. The course will apply a varied approach, concentrating largely on art in various media, especially architecture, while also incorporating literary and historical data to achieve a larger cultural perspective.

Faculty

• David Castriota

Open, Seminar—Year

The popular imagination has come to see the Vikings of the early medieval period as primarily raiders and pirates who exploited their maritime and warlike skills to cut a swath of terror across northwestern Europe between the late eighth and 11th centuries. Yet, this is only part of a far more complex picture, whose beginnings went back to ancient times and whose effects lasted into the early modern period. Scandinavian peoples were also skilled craftsmen, merchants, politicians, mercenaries, and explorers who established vast trade networks and settlements reaching deep into Russia, to the Islamic world, and westward to Britain, Ireland, Iceland, and beyond. The course will approach these issues by establishing a larger, unified global perspective on Scandinavian culture and history, beginning with Scandinavian interaction with the Roman world and its formative role in the larger development of European early medieval culture. We will examine how this development would culminate in the Viking Age and how, over time, Vikings would become important players in the Byzantine world and founders of the medieval Russian State, while also developing a “Norman” military culture that came to dominate England and the central Mediterranean. In time, the Viking settlement of Iceland became a springboard for further colonization in Greenland and the initial European “exploration” of the North American continent. Back in Europe, Viking culture would lay the foundations of the medieval and early modern states of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The course will take a broad, synthetic approach, treating art or material culture within a larger economic, political, and historical perspective.

Faculty

• David Castriota

Open, Seminar—Year

The visual arts and architecture constitute a central part of human expression and experience, both growing from and influencing our lives in profound ways that we might not consciously acknowledge. We will explore intersections between the visual arts and cultural, political, and social history with the goal of using art-history methods and theories to deal critically with works of art. This course is not a survey; rather, it will include a limited number of artists and works of art and architecture, which students will learn about in depth through formal analysis, readings, discussion, research, and debate. We will endeavor to understand each work from the point of view of its creators and patrons and by following its changing reception by audiences throughout time, including the ways in which those changes evoke political and social meanings. To accomplish this, we will need to understand some of the languages of art. The course, then, is also a course in visual literacy: the craft of reading and interpreting visual images on their own terms. We will also discuss a number of issues of contemporary concern; for instance, the destruction of art, free speech and respect of religion, the art market, and the museum.

Faculty

• Jerrilynn Dodds

Open, Lecture—Spring

In this course, we will trace the history of Paris from its foundation until World War II, using the arts that both defined and emanated from this remarkable city. We will use works of art, architecture, and urban design as documents of history, of social and cultural values, and of the history of ideas. Student projects will chart these relationships graphically and construct a visual history of Paris from Roman Lutetia to the Paris of Josephine Baker and Picasso.

Faculty

• Jerrilynn Dodds

Open, Seminar—Spring

We are told, in one of the earliest accounts of the life and work of the Netherlandish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-1569), that his prints and paintings elicited laughter. From pictures of carnival celebrations and children’s games to peasant weddings and riotous hellscapes, the comic artist makes his viewers, both in the late 16th century and today, question whether any of it should be taken seriously. This course will explore the humor element in the work of Bruegel and many others in early modern Europe, examining the possible beginnings of a recognition of the artistic value of comedy and the contributions of these artists to the culture of laughter. Following art historians, as well as cultural historians who have theorized about the emergence of new comic techniques and the impulse to produce pictures in a “comic mode,” we will explore innovative creative practices and the social contexts of humor throughout Europe—from Bruegel in the Netherlands to Annibale Carracci in Italy to Albrecht Dürer in Germany to Jacques Callot in France and beyond. Topics of discussion will include early modern medical perspectives on laughter, shifting notions about humor in relation to civility and decorum, the functions of tragicomedy, the secularization of the image, and the dual roles of entertainment and didacticism in art. This course will involve visits to area museums to study paintings and prints in person.

Faculty

• Katherine Gobel Hardy

First-Year Studies—Year

In 1902, China’s leading intellectual and political theorist, Liang Qichao, observed, “If one intends to renovate the people of a nation, one must first renovate its fiction.” In the century that followed, reformers, radicals, and regimes repeatedly placed fiction at the center of the national project of modernity. Exploring literature’s contribution to the construction of the Chinese national body, this yearlong seminar uses short stories and novels as windows on a cataclysmic century filled with wars, political revolutions, cultural change, and social upheaval. As writers participated in and commented on these traumatic events, fiction was a key battleground for political, social, and cultural change. In fall, we will encounter short stories and novels that carried forward radical demolitions of the Confucian cultural tradition and political critiques in the first half of the century. Beginning in the 1920s, urban feminists wrote to promote the emancipation of the individual, while a decade later leftist writers exposed the evils of Western imperialism and capitalist exploitation. How did these works contribute to revolutionary movements? Despite an overall focus on the political dimension, we will take time out to consider some more lyrically inclined writers who explored China’s ethnic margins and the more private dramas of love and despair. In spring, we will delve into the socialist realism of Communist fiction to identify its unique qualities and role in Maoist political life before turning to the literary reassessments of Maoist excesses in the reform era (1980s) and the place of literature in the neoliberal atmosphere of post-Tiananmen (1989) China. We will interrogate fictional works in postrevolutionary China for how they deal with and understand China’s revolutionary past, its ragged cultural tradition, and a rapidly changing society and economy. What is the relationship between art and politics in these ostensibly (even studiously) apolitical works? And finally, we will also cover Taiwanese literature from the 1960s-1990s, as it, too, grappled with economic development, its political basis, and social effects. Readings will include many of the great characters in early 20th-century literature, such as Lu Xun’s cannibalistic madman and hapless Ah Q, Ding Ling’s tubercular Miss Sophie, Shen Congwen’s Hmong villagers, and Zhang Ailing’s college student turned mistress-assassin. We will also meet blood-drenched bandits, long-suffering peasants, and disaffected urban youths in an age of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. No prior knowledge of China (history or literature) is required. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for group conferences and biweekly for individual conferences. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

Faculty

• Kevin Landdeck

Open, Lecture—Fall

In January 2018, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set the hands of the Doomsday Clock (yes, it’s a thing) at two minutes to midnight, the nearest it has been to catastrophe since 1953. In late 2019, Putin announced that Russia had developed “invincible” hypersonic nuclear missiles capable of hitting virtually anywhere on the globe. The conflict in Ukraine harbors nuclear nightmares that haunt our world again. With world leaders flirting with the prospect of nuclear holocaust, an understanding of the only instance of nuclear warfare is again relevant, even crucial. Through a rich variety of sources (textual, visual, and cinematic), this lecture-seminar hybrid will examine, from three major perspectives, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. First, reading scholarship and primary documents, we will look at the decision to drop the bombs, as well as the postwar claims justifying them. We will interrogate the American narrative that the bombings were militarily necessary and the assumption that they ended the war while also putting them into the historical context of World War II—specifically, strategic bombing of non-military targets, prospects of Japanese surrender in the final months of the conflict, and the looming Cold War with Russia. Second, we will confront the effects of the bombs on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and their populations. Technical descriptions and firsthand accounts will help us grasp the unique destructiveness of the atomic bombs on both bodies and buildings, as well as how people coped with that destructiveness. The diary of Michihiko Hachiya, for example, will reveal a medical doctor’s observations on the breakdown of society and how ordinary Japanese dealt with the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima. Finally, the course will examine the impact of the bombs on Japan’s postwar culture, including the profound sense of victimization that they imparted, which has complicated Japanese narratives about World War II and inspired an abiding pacifism in Japanese society. In a different vein, serious literature written by survivors will open up the relevance of atomic narratives by exploring the social alienation endured by the hibakusha (bomb survivors) in postwar Japan. Shōmei Tōmatsu’s photography of Nagasaki and its hibakusha will provide a visual window on the bombs’ legacy, as well. We will also examine some popular culture—the original (1954) Godzilla (Gojirō) movie and some anime or manga—for the ways the bombs were appropriated and invoked in apocalyptic imagery, imagery that expressed a distinctive understanding of the dark side of science and technology and made a lasting contribution to wider global culture. This course will consist of weekly lectures paired with weekly seminars for close discussion of our readings.

Faculty

• Kevin Landdeck

Open, Seminar—Year

In 1902, China’s leading intellectual and political theorist, Liang Qichao, observed, “If one intends to renovate the people of a nation, one must first renovate its fiction.” In the century that followed, reformers, radicals, and regimes repeatedly placed fiction at the center of the national project of modernity. Exploring literature’s contribution to the construction of the Chinese national body, this yearlong seminar uses short stories and novels as windows on a cataclysmic century filled with wars, political revolutions, cultural change, and social upheaval. As writers participated in and commented on these traumatic events, fiction was a key battleground for political, social, and cultural change. In fall, we will encounter short stories and novels that carried forward radical demolitions of the Confucian cultural tradition and political critiques in the first half of the century. Beginning in the 1920s, urban feminists wrote to promote the emancipation of the individual, while a decade later leftist writers exposed the evils of Western imperialism and capitalist exploitation. How did these works contribute to revolutionary movements? Despite an overall focus on the political dimension, we will take time out to consider some more lyrically inclined writers who explored China’s ethnic margins and the more private dramas of love and despair. In spring, we will delve into the socialist realism of communist fiction to identify its unique qualities and role in Maoist political life before turning to the literary reassessments of Maoist excesses in the reform era (1980s) and the place of literature in the neoliberal atmosphere of post-Tiananmen (1989) China. We will interrogate fictional works in postrevolutionary China for how they deal with and understand China’s revolutionary past, its ragged cultural tradition, and a rapidly changing society and economy. What is the relationship between art and politics in these ostensibly (even studiously) apolitical works? And finally, we will also cover Taiwanese literature from the 1960s to the 1990s, as it, too, grappled with economic development, its political basis, and social effects. Our readings include many of the great characters in early 20th-century literature, such as Lu Xun’s cannibalistic madman and hapless Ah Q, Ding Ling’s tubercular Miss Sophie, Shen Congwen’s Hmong villagers, and Zhang Ailing’s college student turned mistress-assassin. We will also meet blood-drenched bandits, long-suffering peasants, and disaffected urban youths in an age of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. No prior knowledge of China (history or literature) is required.

Faculty

• Kevin Landdeck

Open, Seminar—Spring

This seminar will explore the realm of private life and individual identity and their relationship to the historical events and changes taking place in modern China from late Qing (1644-1911) up into the Reform era (2000s). Investigations will cover an eclectic mix of “personal” writings: diaries, letters, memoirs, oral testimony, autobiographies, third-party anthropological reconstructions of individuals, and (auto)biographical fiction. Among others, we will encounter late imperial Confucian radicals and mystics, petty literati, young urban women and their mothers with bound feet, peasants, radical revolutionaries, intellectuals, Maoist Red Guards, and factory workers. These personal narratives not only open up windows on the lives and times of their writers but also allow us to investigate the intersection between the practice of writing and identity construction in modern China. Primary readings will be contextualized with historical scholarship and supplemented with selections from some important theorists (Benedict Anderson, Anthony Giddens, and René Girard) that provide interdisciplinary analytical tools to explore the construction of personal identity and the self. We will ask how the personal narrative writers present themselves: What are their self-conceptions and self-deceptions? Where does their sense of “self” come from, and how do they construct private selves through writing? We should even dare to ask whether these categories of “private” and “self” are relevant. The rapid, often traumatic, changes of modern China will cause us to consider how these people understood and situated themselves in wider society and the events of their time and, thus, will raise questions about the imaginative constructions of national (or social) communities that are smuggled inside these “personal” stories.

Faculty

• Kevin Landdeck

Open, Seminar—Spring

This course will offer a three-part approach to the study of law in premodern China, focusing on legal theory, courts and the implementation of law, and the relationship between law and popular culture. The first part of the course will provide an overview of the philosophical basis of law, the state’s development of civil and penal law codes, and its creation of courts and judicial institutions. The second part will look more closely at the application of the law code to criminal cases in the medieval period. Here, we will study case books and judicial judgments, precedent texts, magistrates’ manuals, forensic guidelines, and journal accounts. Topics that we will examine include: the role and function of local judges, the processes by which penal cases were judged and punishments determined, and the rights and obligations of the various parties in a legal suit. The third part of the course will examine the ways in which the judicial system both influenced and was influenced by popular culture. Our readings will include religious tracts, folktales, and popular fiction. Topics will include the ways in which the court system shaped popular notions of justice, karma, and revenge; the contribution of the legal system to increasingly complicated notions of heaven and hell; and the rise of popular “detective” fiction centered on the courtroom and judges.

Faculty

• Ellen Neskar

First-Year Studies—Year

As the frontiers of science are pushed forward, conflicts naturally emerge between new hypotheses and established ideas. Biology is no exception to this rule. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, new proposals examining the biological nature of humans and the living world have initially met with resistance and even ridicule before becoming established as modern paradigms. What appears obvious now was once regarded as revolutionary, while it is conceivable that our current ideas will be regarded someday as bordering on the absurd. Oftentimes, these conflicts arise not only due to the convergence of scientific principles but also result from personality clashes of the individuals involved in the research area. Paradigm shifts have occurred in a variety of biological fields, ranging from early ideas on heredity, sex determination, and evolution to more recent advances in prions and vaccines, animal model usage, genetic engineering, cutting-edge cancer therapies, and the interplay between genes and environment. Using these and other examples, we will examine the progress of biological thought and the persistence of the scientific method in changing our understanding of life. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences. In spring, individual conferences with the instructor may be weekly or biweekly. 

Faculty

• Drew E. Cressman

Open, Seminar—Spring

Tracing its origins back to ancient Egypt, alchemy was a dark—often forbidden—art, whose practitioners wrote cryptic, encoded, symbolic, and often secretive texts. Driven by the desire to turn base metals into gold and to discover the Philosopher’s Stone and, with it, the secret of immortality, alchemists studied the transmutation of physical substances. Despite its unsavory reputation, alchemy was practiced by some of the most extraordinary individuals in the history of humanity’s intellectual development: Jabir ibn Hayyan, Roger Bacon, Paracelsus, and Robert Boyle. Indeed, Isaac Newton—widely regarded as the father of modern science—wrote more alchemical manuscripts than on any other subject. In this course, we will investigate the essence of alchemy and its turbulent history. The course will then explore the legacy of alchemy: how the work of the alchemists enabled the scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries to transform alchemical lore into the modern science of chemistry. 

Faculty

• Colin Abernethy

Open, Small Lecture—Year

This seminar, broadly speaking, will cover introductory microeconomics and macroeconomics from a wide range of theoretical perspectives, including neoclassical, post-Keynesian, Marxian, feminist, and institutional political economy perspectives. The course will enable students to understand the more “technical aspects” of economics (e.g., usage of supply/demand analysis within and outside neoclassical economics), as well as significant economic history and the history of economic thought. Theoretical issues will be applied to contemporary policy debates such as industrial policy, foreign trade, global warming, and inequality.

Faculty

• Jamee Moudud

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year

What factors determine the status of women in different societies and communities? What role is played by women’s labor, both inside and outside of the home? By cultural norms regarding sexuality and reproduction? By religious traditions? After a brief theoretical grounding, this course will address these questions by examining the economic, political, social, and cultural histories of women in the various racial/ethnic and class groupings that make up the United States. Topics to be explored include: the role of women in the Iroquois Confederation before white colonization and the factors that gave Iroquois women significant political and social power in their communities; the status of white colonist women in Puritan Massachusetts and the economic, religious, and other factors that led to the Salem witch trials of 1692; the position of African American women under slavery, including the gendered and racialized divisions of labor and reproduction; the growth of competitive capitalism in the North and the development of the “cult of true womanhood” in the rising middle class; the economic and political changes that accompanied the Civil War and Reconstruction and the complex relationships between African American and white women in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements; the creation of a landless agricultural labor force and the attempts to assimilate Chicana women into the dominant culture via “Americanization” programs; the conditions that encouraged Asian women’s immigration and their economic and social positions upon immigrating; the American labor movement and the complicated role organized labor has played in the lives of women of various racial/ethnic groups and classes; the impact of US colonial policies on Puerto Rican migration and Puerto Rican women’s economic and political status on both the Island and the mainland; the economic/political convulsions of the 20th century—from the trusts of the early 1900s to World War II—and their impact on diverse women’s paid and unpaid labor; the impact of changes in gendered economic roles on LGBT communities; the economic and political upheavals of the 1960s that led to the so-called “second wave” of the women’s movement; and the current position of women in the US economy and polity and the possibilities for more inclusive public policies concerning gender and family issues. In addition to class participation and the conference project, requirements for the course will include regular essays that synthesize class materials with written texts. Possibilities for conference work include traditional conference papers, group conference papers, “dialogue” papers, and on- or off-campus service projects.

Faculty

• Kim Christensen

Open, Seminar—Fall

This course will take an industrial approach to the study of global film and film history, highlighting box-office hits, fans, stars, workers, and dream factories from multiple (trans)national contexts. Foregrounding questions of labor, technology, circulation, and genre, we will examine popular cinema as an industrial film form with a particular emphasis on melodrama, comedy, and the musical. This seminar is framed by some of film history’s most persistent questions: What is “popular” culture? What is a “mass” medium? Is cinema a universal language? Can art be separated from commerce? Proceeding chronologically from the 1920s through the present, we will first explore “classical Hollywood cinema” as an exportable style and mass reproducible system. Next, we will follow the rise of other “-ollywoods” around the world, contextualizing and comparing several major film industries and their popular cinemas. Ranging from Western Europe to the Soviet Union and the Global South, topics will include the studio lot as dream site, urban film cultures, vernacular modernism, colonial film production and cultural imperialism, cine-workers as global workers, divisions of voice labor in Hollywood vs. Bollywood, the transnational feminization of film handiwork, and the relationship between new film industries and new media from polyglot talkies to Nollywood video-films.

Faculty

• Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen

Intermediate, Seminar—Year

What happened to women in the silent-film industry? How did typewriters invert the gender of writing? Can patriarchal aesthetic regimes be dismantled through “feminine” filmmaking? Should dead stars and inventors be revived as feminist icons? How do we excavate invisible women’s histories? This course offers an overview of the main questions and methods of feminist film and media history. Readings will cover a wide range of feminist film and media scholarship, from psychoanalytic feminist film theory to cyberfeminism and feminist media archaeology. The focus will be primarily on European and US film and media, but conference projects may exceed these bounds. In fall, we will study film history through the lens of female- and feminist-identifying filmmakers, workers, critics, and historians. Weekly screenings will highlight a mix of obscure and canonical narrative, experimental, and documentary films from the silent era to the end of the 20th century. In spring, we will zoom out from film to explore the relatively new field of feminist media studies. Starting in the Enlightenment, we will trace an alternative cultural history of modern gendered media, media machines, and media workers, using formative feminist conceptual frameworks to study spindles, novels, “female thermometers,” fictional androids, telegraphic romances, and computers. In place of a weekly screening, students will examine primary sources across multiple media through a mix of reading, viewing, and listening assignments.

Faculty

• Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen

Open, Lecture—Spring

Since the Lumière brothers filmed their female employees leaving the factory in 1895, the “working girl” has become a fixture of global cinema. This lecture approaches this archetypal modern character as a foundational figure for film history and an important vernacular link for national film industries competing with Hollywood. We will begin by asking: What is a working girl? How has the category changed over the course of the 20th century as it has circulated around the globe, despite its fraught ideological construction? And how can we turn the category into a tool for intersectional feminist film history? With these questions in mind, we will launch our investigation in the United States and Europe and then move on to the Soviet Union, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Mexico, Senegal, and Cameroon. We will read classic film theory, short fiction, and local histories of film culture and gendered labor alongside films about shopgirls, dancing girls, telephone girls, factory girls, office girls, laundresses, and maids. Topics to be discussed will include working girls as moviegoers, cultural imperialism and vernacular modernism, migration and mass reproduction, sex work, workplace romance, and contradictions of capital and care. In this class, students will conduct comparative, multimedia analyses of film texts and read global film history through the globalization of modern gendered labor. 

Faculty

• Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen

Intermediate, Seminar—Year

This course will offer a systematic review of French grammar and is designed to strengthen and deepen students’ mastery of grammatical structures and vocabulary. Students will also develop their French writing skills, with an emphasis on analytical writing. The events of the French Revolution of 1789 to 1799—what the French call “la Grande Révolution”—were so dramatic and foundational that revolution has become a basic paradigm of French thought in politics and culture. In order to understand this legacy, one must first study the “Grande Révolution” itself. Thus, this course will be divided into two parts. In fall, we will study the original French Revolution, beginning with the forming of the Estates-General and the storming of the Bastille in 1789. We will familiarize ourselves with the Revolution’s unusual characters—from Marie Antoinette to Robespierre—and with major events and debates of the time. Students will study a variety of sources: histories, film, and primary materials such as caricatures and revolutionary posters. We will stage debates and act out scenes to better understand what was at stake in this shift from ancien régime to nouveau régime. In spring, we will focus on the relationship between politics and culture, studying five subsequent episodes of revolution: the Haïtian Revolution, Les Trois Glorieuses (otherwise known as the July Revolution), the Revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune, and the events of May 1968. Course materials in spring will include poems, short stories, excerpts of Hugo’s novel Les Misérables, films, and posters. At the end of spring, we will also look at the use of revolutionary rhetoric and tactics in present-day movements in France, such as the environmental movement, riots in the banlieue, and the #MeToo (or #BalanceTonPorc) movement.

Faculty

• Nicole Asquith

Open, Seminar—Year

This course will provide an intensive introduction to Ancient Greek grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, with the aim of reading the language as soon as possible. By fall mid-semester, students will be reading authentic excerpts of Ancient Greek poetry and prose. Students will also read and discuss English translations of selected works of Plato, Aristophanes, Thucydides, and Pseudo-Xenophon. In spring, while continuing to refine their knowledge of Greek grammar and their reading skills, students will read extended selections of Plato’s Apology in the original Greek. Biweekly individual conferences with the instructor, in addition to class sessions, will be required.

Faculty

• Emily Anhalt

Open, Lecture—Fall

In January 2018, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set the hands of the Doomsday Clock (yes, it’s a thing) at two minutes to midnight, the nearest it has been to catastrophe since 1953. In late 2019, Putin announced that Russia had developed “invincible” hypersonic nuclear missiles capable of hitting virtually anywhere on the globe. The conflict in Ukraine harbors nuclear nightmares that haunt our world again. With world leaders flirting with the prospect of nuclear holocaust, an understanding of the only instance of nuclear warfare is again relevant, even crucial. Through a rich variety of sources (textual, visual, and cinematic), this lecture-seminar hybrid will examine, from three major perspectives, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. First, reading scholarship and primary documents, we will look at the decision to drop the bombs, as well as the postwar claims justifying them. We will interrogate the American narrative that the bombings were militarily necessary and the assumption that they ended the war while also putting them into the historical context of World War II—specifically, strategic bombing of non-military targets, prospects of Japanese surrender in the final months of the conflict, and the looming Cold War with Russia. Second, we will confront the effects of the bombs on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and their populations. Technical descriptions and firsthand accounts will help us grasp the unique destructiveness of the atomic bombs on both bodies and buildings, as well as how people coped with that destructiveness. The diary of Michihiko Hachiya, for example, will reveal a medical doctor’s observations on the breakdown of society and how ordinary Japanese dealt with the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima. Finally, the course will examine the impact of the bombs on Japan’s postwar culture, including the profound sense of victimization that they imparted, which has complicated Japanese narratives about World War II and inspired an abiding pacifism in Japanese society. In a different vein, serious literature written by survivors will open up the relevance of atomic narratives by exploring the social alienation endured by the hibakusha (bomb survivors) in postwar Japan. Shōmei Tōmatsu’s photography of Nagasaki and its hibakusha will provide a visual window on the bombs’ legacy, as well. We will also examine some popular culture—the original (1954) Godzilla (Gojirō) movie and some anime or manga—for the ways the bombs were appropriated and invoked in apocalyptic imagery, imagery that expressed a distinctive understanding of the dark side of science and technology and made a lasting contribution to wider global culture. This course will consist of weekly lectures paired with weekly seminars for close discussion of our readings.

Faculty

• Kevin Landdeck

Open, Lecture—Fall

In a global landscape pocked by genocide, wars of choice, piracy, and international terrorism, what good is international law? Can it mean anything without a global police force and a universal judiciary? Is “might makes right” the only law that works? Or is it true that “most states comply with most of their obligations most of the time”? These essential questions frame the contemporary practice of law across borders. This lecture will provide an overview of international law—its doctrine, theory, and practice. The course addresses a wide range of issues, including the bases and norms of international law, the law of war, human-rights claims, domestic implementation of international norms, treaty interpretation, and state formation and succession.

Faculty

• Mark R. Shulman

Open, Seminar—Year

In 1902, China’s leading intellectual and political theorist, Liang Qichao, observed, “If one intends to renovate the people of a nation, one must first renovate its fiction.” In the century that followed, reformers, radicals, and regimes repeatedly placed fiction at the center of the national project of modernity. Exploring literature’s contribution to the construction of the Chinese national body, this yearlong seminar uses short stories and novels as windows on a cataclysmic century filled with wars, political revolutions, cultural change, and social upheaval. As writers participated in and commented on these traumatic events, fiction was a key battleground for political, social, and cultural change. In fall, we will encounter short stories and novels that carried forward radical demolitions of the Confucian cultural tradition and political critiques in the first half of the century. Beginning in the 1920s, urban feminists wrote to promote the emancipation of the individual, while a decade later leftist writers exposed the evils of Western imperialism and capitalist exploitation. How did these works contribute to revolutionary movements? Despite an overall focus on the political dimension, we will take time out to consider some more lyrically inclined writers who explored China’s ethnic margins and the more private dramas of love and despair. In spring, we will delve into the socialist realism of communist fiction to identify its unique qualities and role in Maoist political life before turning to the literary reassessments of Maoist excesses in the reform era (1980s) and the place of literature in the neoliberal atmosphere of post-Tiananmen (1989) China. We will interrogate fictional works in postrevolutionary China for how they deal with and understand China’s revolutionary past, its ragged cultural tradition, and a rapidly changing society and economy. What is the relationship between art and politics in these ostensibly (even studiously) apolitical works? And finally, we will also cover Taiwanese literature from the 1960s to the 1990s, as it, too, grappled with economic development, its political basis, and social effects. Our readings include many of the great characters in early 20th-century literature, such as Lu Xun’s cannibalistic madman and hapless Ah Q, Ding Ling’s tubercular Miss Sophie, Shen Congwen’s Hmong villagers, and Zhang Ailing’s college student turned mistress-assassin. We will also meet blood-drenched bandits, long-suffering peasants, and disaffected urban youths in an age of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. No prior knowledge of China (history or literature) is required.

Faculty

• Kevin Landdeck

Open, Seminar—Year

This course, for students with no previous knowledge of Italian, will aim to provide a complete foundation in the Italian language with particular attention to oral and written communication and all aspects of Italian culture. The course will be conducted in Italian after the first month and will involve the study of all basic structures of the language—phonological, grammatical, and syntactical—with practice in conversation, reading, composition, and translation. In addition to material covering basic Italian grammar, students will be exposed to fiction, poetry, songs, articles, recipe books, and films. Held once a week, group conferences will aim to enrich the students’ knowledge of Italian culture and develop their ability to communicate; this goal will be achieved by readings that deal with current events and topics relative to today’s Italian culture. Activities in pairs or groups, along with short written assignments, will be part of the group conference. In addition to class and the group conferences, the course has a conversation component in regular workshops with the language assistant. In small groups, conversation classes will be held twice a week and will center on the concept of Viaggio in Italia: a journey through the regions of Italy through cuisine, cinema, art, opera, and dialects. The Italian program will organize trips to the Metropolitan Opera and relevant exhibits in New York City, as well as the possibility of experiencing Italian cuisine firsthand as a group. By the end of this course, students will attain a basic competence in all aspects of the language. While there are no individual conferences with the instructor, regular individual meetings with an Italian language assistant, in addition to class sessions, will be required.

Faculty

• Tristana Rorandelli

Intermediate, Seminar—Year

This course will aim to improve and perfect the students’ speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills, as well as their knowledge of Italy’s contemporary culture and literature. In order to acquire the necessary knowledge of Italian grammar, idiomatic expressions, and vocabulary, a review of all grammar will be carried out throughout the year. As an introduction to modern Italian culture and literature, students will be introduced to a selection of short stories, poems, and passages from novels, as well as specific newspaper articles, music, and films in the original language. Some of the literary works studied will include selections from Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg, Gianni Rodari, Marcello D’Orta, Clara Sereni, Dino Buzzati, Stefano Benni, Antonio Tabucchi, Alberto Moravia, Achille Campanile, and Elena Ferrante. In order to address the students’ writing skills, written compositions will be required as an integral part of the course. Biweekly conference topics might include the study of a particular author, literary text, film, or any other aspect of Italian society and culture that might be of interest to the student. In small groups, conversation classes will be held twice a week with the language assistant; students will have the opportunity to reinforce what they have learned in class and hone their ability to communicate in Italian. When appropriate, students will be directed to specific internship opportunities in the New York City area, centered on Italian language and culture. 

Faculty

• Tristana Rorandelli

Intermediate, Seminar—Year

In this course, students will develop their comprehension of Latin grammar, vocabulary, word inflection patterns, and syntax by close reading of selected works of Catullus and Cicero in fall and Ovid and Livy in spring. The ancient Roman Republic lasted 450 years before imploding into a military dictatorship. The democratic republic in the United States, modeled on the ancient Roman Republic, has lasted just 237 years and now confronts forces threatening to replace it with dictatorship or some form of authoritarian populism. Examining works of poetry and prose, both accompanying and following the advent of autocracy in ancient Rome, we will consider the value and limits of literature for exposing, challenging, or affirming hierarchical and tyrannical ideals, institutions, and norms.

Faculty

• Emily Anhalt

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

Contradictory assumptions about the relation of homosexuals to groups have dominated accounts of modern LGBT life. In Western Europe and the United States, from the late 19th century onward, queers have been presented as profoundly isolated persons—burdened by the conviction that they are the only ones ever to have had such feelings when they first realize their deviant desires and immediately separated by those desires from the families and cultures into which they were born. Yet, at the same time, these isolated individuals have been seen as inseparable from one another, part of a worldwide network always able to recognize their peers by means of mysterious signs decipherable only by other group members. Homosexuals were denounced as persons who did not contribute to society. Homosexuality was presented as the hedonistic choice of reckless, self-indulgent individualism over sober social good. Nevertheless, all homosexuals were implicated in a nefarious conspiracy, stealthily working through their web of connections to one another in order to take over the world or the political establishment of the United States; for example, its art world, theatre, or film industries. Such contradictions could still be seen in the battles that have raged since the 1970s, when queers began seeking public recognition of their lives within existing social institutions from the military to marriage. LGBT persons were routinely attacked as threats (whether to unit cohesion or the family) intent on destroying the groups they were working to openly join. In this class, we will use these contradictions as a framework for studying the complex social roles that queers have occupied alongside some of the complex social worlds that they have created—at different times and places and shaped by different understandings of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and nationality—within the United States over the past century and a half. Sources will include histories, sociological and anthropological studies, the writings of political activists, fiction, and film. 

Faculty

• Julie Abraham

First-Year Studies—Year

Where and how did democratic ideals emerge? Throughout the history of the world, hierarchies of power and privilege have predominated. Democracy is not the norm. Democracy is the bizarre exception. But 3,000 years ago, ancient Greek epic poetry began to undermine the moral validity of political hierarchies and tyrannical abuses of power. From the eighth through the fifth centuries BCE, ancient Greek literature cultivated ideals of humanity, equality, and justice vital to sustaining humane, egalitarian values, norms, and institutions. Over centuries, ancient Greeks came to understand—as by now we must—that not only individuals but also groups, both large and small, can wield power tyrannically by using violence and intimidation to subjugate others and silence dissenting opinions. Reading selected works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Euripides, Plato, and others, we will investigate how and why the Greeks developed democratic ideals, why they themselves failed to attain them, and how we might do better. This course is reading- and writing-intensive. We will also encounter ideas that are uncomfortable and troubling in various predictable and unpredictable ways. The course is designed for anyone who welcomes open-minded critical inquiry and is eager to read and calmly discuss texts that are challenging, both intellectually and emotionally. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

Faculty

• Emily Anhalt

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

This lecture will focus on the interpretation and appreciation of the most influential lyric poetry written in English in the tumultuous decades between the French Revolution and the Reform Act of 1832. Over the course of two generations, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats invented a new kind of autobiographical poem that largely internalized the myths they had inherited from literary and religious traditions. The poet’s inward, subjective experience became the inescapable subject of the poem—a legacy that continues to this day. We will explore ways in which the English Romantic poets responded to the political impasse of their historical moment and created poems out of their arguments with themselves, as well as their arguments with one another. The preeminent goal will be to understand each poet’s unique contributions to the language.

Faculty

• Neil Arditi

Open, Seminar—Fall

When we consider some of the “great” works of early modern English poetry—Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example—we are often tempted to treat them as the product of unique inspiration and individual craft when they are, in fact, heavily invested in creating and sustaining collaborative relationships. The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost were published with dedicatory poems by Sir Walter Ralegh and Andrew Marvell, respectively, that stand as some of the best interpretive readings of each work to date; Shakespeare’s Sonnets reflect the intimacies of patron-client relationships, which forcefully shaped the early modern literary marketplace. Indeed, framing poetic authorship in the early modern period as the work of aloof geniuses can obscure the poetic forms that honored creative communities: verse letters, epitaphs, country house poems, song settings, and unfinished works “completed” after a poet’s death, to name a few. In this course, we will explore collaborative authorship in early modern English poetry. Besides reading selections from The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and Paradise Lost, we will survey poetry that illuminates the community ethics of these major texts: Spenser’s friendly verse epistles to his friends and desperate dedications to his patrons; works circulated through the poetic circles fostered by Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke; and the poems written by royalists and revolutionaries to promote new kinds of community during the English Civil War. Along the way, we will also encounter poems that show the unique characteristics of early modern English literary collaboration: Ben Jonson’s verses for his adopted poetic “sons,” Mary Sidney’s heartbreaking completion of her late brother’s psalm translations, and George Herbert’s partnership with the experimental bookbinders Anna and Mary Collett. Course work will include a collaborative “journal” project that will help us explore what it means to read and write in relationship with one another.

Faculty

• Aidan Selmer

Open, Lecture—Fall

Masques are the “forgotten genre” of English Renaissance drama, rarely appearing on syllabi or studied with the same frequency as works for the popular stage. Yet, during the first half of the 17th century, they exerted a political and artistic influence that arguably exceeds that of the plays that Shakespeare and company were staging at the Globe Theatre. Masques were bombastic entertainments performed for and by the Stuart court. They were studies in excess, with lavish sums spent upon well-documented costumes and scenery. They were commentaries on the state of things in England, where playwrights like Ben Jonson could speak directly (and critically) to the royalty themselves. They were avant-garde experiments, where creatives like the architect Inigo Jones could reinvent the visual style of theatre for centuries to come and where women—at least aristocratic women—could break ground by performing in dramatic roles at a time when male actors alone occupied the popular stage. In this course, we will dive into the hidden world of the early modern English masque. We will read and discuss Ben Jonson’s pioneering works that established many masque conventions, including The Masque of Blackness, The Masque of Queens, and Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue. We will discuss how masques offered a vehicle for dramatists to comment on current political affairs, colonial projects, and even salacious “true crimes” while reading George Chapman’s The Memorable Masque and John Milton’s innovative masque about chastity and liberation, Comus. Finally, we will encounter texts that reveal just how far these entertainments influenced literary culture more broadly. This will include Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which shows him trying to “keep up” with masque innovations, as well as Margaret Cavendish’s “The Contract,” a romance that details the complex traditions of attending masques—and the thrilling possibility that audience members might become spectacles themselves.

Faculty

• Aidan Selmer

Open, Seminar—Fall

The alternate history, which imagines a different present or future originating in a point of divergence from our actual history—a branching point in the past—is both an increasingly popular form of genre fiction and a decreasingly disreputable form of analysis in history and the social sciences. While fictions of alternate history were, until very recently, only a subgenre of science fiction, celebrated American literary novelists Philip Roth and Michael Chabon published well-regarded novels of alternate history—The Plot Against America and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, respectively—earlier in this century. Similarly, while counterfactual historical speculation is at least as old as Livy, academic historians have, until recently, scorned the practice as a vulgar parlor game; but this is beginning to change. In the early 1990s, Cambridge University Press and Princeton University Press both published intellectually rigorous books on alternate history and counterfactual analysis in the social sciences; Cambridge more recently published a volume analyzing alternate histories of World War II; and in 2006, the University of Michigan Press published an interesting collection of counterfactual analyses, Unmaking the West. This course will examine a number of fictions of alternate history, some reputable and some less reputable, and also look at some of the academic work noted above. We shall attempt to understand what it might mean to think seriously about counterfactuals and about why fictions of, and academic works on, alternate history have become significantly more widespread. The course will also grapple with what makes an alternate history aesthetically satisfying and intellectually suggestive rather than ham-fisted, flat, and profoundly unpersuasive.

Faculty

• Frederic Smoler

Open, Lecture—Year

The performance of a play is a complex cultural event that involves far more than the literary text upon which it is grounded. First, there is the theatre itself—a building of a certain shape and utility within a certain neighborhood of a certain city. On stage, we have actors and their training, gesture, staging, music, dance, and costumes alongside scenery and lighting. Offstage, we have the audience, its makeup, and its reactions; the people who run the theatre and the reasons why they do it; and finally the social milieu in which the theatre exists. In this course, we will study these elements as a system of signs that convey meaning (semiotics)—a world of meaning whose lifespan is a few hours but whose significances are ageless. The plays of Shakespeare will be our texts. Reconstructing the performances of those plays in the England of Elizabeth I and James I will be our starting place. Seeing how those plays have been approached and re-envisioned over the centuries will be our journey. Tracing their elusive meanings, from within Shakespeare’s Wooden O to their adaptation in contemporary film, will be our work. 

Faculty

• Joseph Lauinger

Open, Lecture—Year

What if the roots of English literature were not wholly English? How were the origins of Italian literature pollinated with Arabic philosophy? This course will explore these questions and more through two foundational texts—Dante’s Divine Comedy and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Often read in isolation, we will instead study these works together—in historical, intellectual, and comparative context—charting how the high tide of Italian literary culture reached the shores of medieval England, how Dante’s vernacular epic of the afterlife helped shape Chaucer’s vernacular epic of earthly life. In fall, we will focus on Dante, treating his formation as a poet and thinker as a window into the formation of Italian literature itself. We will explore his engagement with the Occitan, Sicilian, and Tuscan lyric traditions; his reading of Aristotle through Arabic and Latin commentators; and his response to the burgeoning—and fraught—political and intellectual climate of medieval Florence. Having immersed ourselves in the life, times, and mind of Dante, we will then turn to the Comedy itself, reading all three canticles—the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—with special attention to Dante’s evolving understanding of love and desire. In spring, we will turn to Chaucer and his role in inaugurating vernacular English literature through a rich, self-conscious dialogue with Dante and the other “corone,” or crowns, of Italian literature—Boccaccio and Petrarch. Chaucer’s travels to Genoa and Florence in 1373 and Milan in 1378 were formative for him as a person and poet. At a time when hardly anyone in England had heard of Dante, Boccaccio, or Petrarch, Chaucer read them in the original and responded to them by creating new literary forms. In doing so, Chaucer fashioned a future English literary audience; in a real sense, he wrote for us. We will read Chaucer’s House of Fame (a direct response to the Comedy) and Canterbury Tales, pairing each tale with its Italian analogues and influences. Throughout the year, we will practice comparative reading and source study, mapping how ideas and literary forms travel across, cultures, languages, and borders. In the process, we will encounter the profoundly interconnected intellectual world of Dante’s and Chaucer’s Middle Ages.

Faculty

• Joseph Romano

Open, Seminar—Spring

While Dostoevsky is often praised for the universality of his themes, in his own day he was a working journalist deeply engaged with the issues facing his own contemporary Russia. This course will seek to contextualize a few of Dostoevsky’s major works by reading them as they were originally written: as part of an ongoing and often heated debate with his contemporaries. We will begin with the distinction between the 1840s and the 1860s that Dostoevsky made famous first in Notes from Underground (1864), then moving on to read Crime and Punishment (1866) and Demons (1872) in the context of the intense debates that drove the latter decade. Our particular focus will be Russian nihilism, above all as it was defined by Turgenev and Chernyshevsky, and also the “woman question,” especially as developed in the works of two women writers, Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya and Sofiia Kovalevskaya. We will finish with Nabokov’s extravagant send-up of Chernyshevsky and Russian nihilism in The Gift (1938).

Faculty

• Melissa Frazier

Open, Seminar—Spring

What is in a feeling, and what does it do? This course will explore how medieval writers understood the emotions—what they called the passions—as forces that move the soul, affect the mind, transform the body, and raise pressing questions about free will and moral responsibility. Because the passions operate at the threshold of the soul and body, virtually every domain of medieval thought had something to say about them—from poetry and medicine to philosophy and contemplative devotion. For instance, physicians like Peter of Spain diagnosed lovesickness and melancholia as genuine medical conditions. Philosophers like Aquinas compiled catalogues of the passions—from joy and sorrow to fear and courage to despair and hope—and offered phenomenological descriptions of how the passions arise through both embodied sensation and ensouled experience. Occitan troubadours like Arnaut Daniel and Italian lyric poets like Cavalcanti and Dante could write of love as the bondage of mind and will or the source of ethical nobility and spiritual freedom. (Dante did both.) Mystics like Walter Hilton and Julian of Norwich explored how emotional awareness could be refined into subtler modes of spiritual attention and how, at the same time, the inmost experience of divine love could be expressed as ecstatic, passionate feeling. In addition to the themes and writers above, this course will examine how the passions open onto questions of habitus and disposition—how repeated action shapes how we feel and how the way we repeatedly feel shapes our action. We will also consider how emotion is at the center of vice and virtue—how the quality of our feeling determines the quality of our inner life and our life with others. With the help of contemporary scholarship, we will approach the medieval passions with historical and phenomenological methods of analysis. Through these lenses, we will see how the passions in the Middle Ages serve as a unique site for comparative intellectual history, spanning disciplines and bridging ancient, medieval, and modern traditions. At the same time, studying the medieval passions offers something more personal: the chance to recover forms of feeling and attention from the past that might expand the borders of our own in the present.

Faculty

• Joseph Romano

Open, Seminar—Spring

When the iconoclastic poet John Milton published his masterpiece, Paradise Lost (1667), he had already lost the fight he had spent most of his adult life waging: A king had returned to the throne of England, and the radical energy of the English Civil War seemed to have consumed itself. Why write Paradise Lost—an epic poem about the biblical Creation, the Fall of Man, and the dignity of human freedom—at all? Among other things, Milton’s epic is an act of faith: faith in religious and political imagination; faith in the revolutionary potential of love; and, ultimately, faith in poetry as a means to express his passionate “great argument.” In this course, we will take our time reading all of Paradise Lost, considering its revisionary relationship with the Bible, its complex gender politics, its experimental poetic form, and its bold engagement with scientific advances and philosophical problems. Along the way, we will consider a range of theoretical approaches that literary scholars have taken to comprehend a text that one early reader described as a book that “contains all things.” Finally, we will explore the influence of Paradise Lost on later works, such as William Blake’s mystic poetry, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Toni Morrison’s Paradise.

Faculty

• Aidan Selmer

Open, Seminar—Spring

Whose voices matter in Shakespeare’s plays? In this class, we will draw upon diverse perspectives in the fields of voice and sound studies to explore questions of identity and agency, performance and play, in the works of Shakespeare. We will read and watch stagings of Hamlet, Henry VIII, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, and Macbeth—texts that insist upon understanding voices as powerful, though unpredictable, modes of expression. As we do so, we will learn about the history of early modern dramatic performance. What did voices sound like in the acoustic spaces of 16th/17th-century London’s indoor and outdoor theatres, and how are modern writers and artists responding to the “voice” of Shakespeare today? How did psychology, religion, and stories about witches combine to shape Shakespeare’s theatre music? How might familiar characters and plots become unfamiliar when we approach them through the context of children’s performance? We will also consider the ways that Shakespearean voices challenge our expectations about the performance of gender, race, class, and neurotypicality. “Mad” songs, hyper-drag theatrics, curses, jokes, and choked-up confessions: the variety of speech acts in Shakespeare’s works underscores the wide scope of perspectives that his plays offer. Readings from modern voice theorists like Nina Sun Eidsheim, Amanda Weidman, and Patricia Akhimie will help guide our discussion of the resonant social problems and possibilities that Shakespeare’s voices continue to speak, sing, and shout about.

Faculty

• Aidan Selmer

First-Year Studies—Year

This course will offer an introduction to the history of Western art music from antiquity to the present. The main activities will be focused on listening attentively and creatively to many musical compositions that show the development of genres and styles of classical music over 2,000 years and on creating a language to discuss our experiences and insights. We will learn about the various elements of musical structures and how they combine to create each work. We will also study the historical and societal contexts of those compositions and see how this knowledge informs our listening and how those pieces can illuminate our understanding of the societies in which they were created. The course will feature regular in-class performances, and we will attend a number of concerts. No prior musical knowledge, such as reading of musical scores or music theory background, is required (though it can be utilized in conference work). While the main emphasis of the seminar will be on Western classical music, music that students choose to study for their conference work can also be drawn from popular music traditions and non-Western cultures. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

Faculty

• Carsten Schmidt

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

What is being? What is time? What is justice? What is truth? What is the best way to live, and should we fear death? More than 2,500 years ago in Ancient Greece, a tradition of asking this sort of question developed under the name “philosophy,” which is Greek for “love of wisdom.” Veering away from the mythological and religious traditions dominant at the time, the first writers we now recognize as “philosophers” broke radically new ground for self-understanding and set the stage for modern scientific, political, and theological ideas. In this course, we will read the earliest surviving texts of this tradition by a group of authors who are now known collectively as the “Pre-Socratics.” These include Thales, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Ancient Atomists, to name a few. These texts are fragmentary, since the full works are lost. The ideas that we find in them are creative, inspiring, and often funny. Studying them is an opportunity to reflect on what “philosophy” means and an invitation to philosophize, perhaps becoming philosophers ourselves. This survey course on the origins of philosophy is designed both for beginners, for whom it would serve as an introduction, and for those more experienced in philosophy who wish to enrich their knowledge of its roots. We will accompany our readings of the first philosophers with commentaries by later thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, and with occasional reference to non-Greek or non-philosophical sources.

Faculty

• Roy Ben-Shai

Open, Seminar—Fall

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often regarded as a foundational figure in the development of the Western ideal of authenticity—the belief that a moral life entails uncompromising loyalty to one’s true self. Rousseau dedicated his life to the pursuit of a formula in which authenticity could serve as a path to happiness. And yet, time and again, he found himself entangled in paradoxes that were not merely philosophical but vividly reflected in his own life. His educational theory is a cornerstone of modern humanistic educational thought, yet he entrusted all five of his children to a public foundling hospital shortly after birth. He denounced popular entertainment but authored the best-selling novel of the 18th century. He professed deep Christian faith, while his books were burned as heretical. He argued that romantic love is an essential part of human existence while spending his final years in near-total solitude. This seminar welcomes anyone interested in modern philosophy, theories of the self, and the fragile threshold where bold ideas encounter human vulnerability. Rousseau was not only a thinker of inner conflict, he was also a political revolutionary whose writings have been interpreted as foundational to modern communism, liberal democracy, and even totalitarianism. His influence stretches across the ideological spectrum, making him a key figure for understanding both the promises and the perils of modernity.

Faculty

• Yuval Eytan

Open, Seminar—Spring

What is education for? And what kind of human being does it aim to shape? This seminar will invite students to explore education not merely as a set of practices but, rather, as a reflection of our deepest convictions about human nature, freedom, and society. Through philosophical inquiry, students will develop critical, reflective, and ethically grounded perspectives on their role as educators. The seminar will be structured around four compelling visions of the human being, each giving rise to a distinct educational ideal and each delivering a pointed critique of dominant educational paradigms. Through readings in Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates, we will examine classical humanism and its belief in a universal human essence that education must actualize through the pursuit of virtue, fulfillment, and happiness. We will then turn to the Romantic-Naturalist tradition—Montaigne, Rousseau, and Fröbel—who emphasized the child’s innate goodness and warned against educational systems that suppress natural growth. The existentialist approach, represented by Nietzsche, Sartre, and Greene, shifts from self-realization to self-creation, challenging us to resist conformity. Finally, we will explore critical pedagogy through the works of Freire, Giroux, hooks, Arendt, and Adorno, who argue that education must address broader social injustices and guard against the political dangers of uncritical obedience. This seminar will offer students not only a rich encounter with the history of educational thought but also an invitation to take a stand—to reflect on who we are, who we aspire to become, and what kind of education might lead us there.

Faculty

• Yuval Eytan

First-Year Studies—Year

Winston Churchill purportedly remarked that “we shape our buildings; thereafter, they shape us,” suggesting that the built environment and geography, more generally, have a profound impact on society, culture, and politics. This course explicitly will take the study of politics and the social world out of the narrow and traditional views of political science—views that regularly see individuals as “atoms” that are, in the words of Kenneth Shepsle, “unconnected to the social structure in which he or she is embedded”—and, instead, look at how “politics and people” are embedded in particular spaces and places and networks are highly conditioned, based on specific locational qualities, histories, and features. This course rejects the idea that individuals are atoms and explicitly brings geography into the picture in our study of American politics at the start of the 21st century—in a moment of intense rancor and polarization. After examining theory and methodology, students will tackle a number of big issues that are hotly debated in academic, political, and policy circles vis-à-vis the built environment. One example is the ever-growing literature on geographic differences and regionalism in the United States as an underlying cause of American division and fractionalization. These geographic fissures do not fall along easy‐to‐map state lines but, rather, along a variety of regions in the United States that have been described and mapped by scholars in a number of social-science disciplines. We will examine and review a number of literatures and large amounts of localized data that will enable us to look more precisely into the numerous claims that there are nontrivial regional differences in terms of political beliefs, behaviors, and distinct regional political cultures. While American regions display varied histories and cultures, the question that we will attempt to answer is whether these histories and cultures have an impact on contemporary political attitudes, behaviors, and social values. We will take on similar empirical topics throughout the year, using many tools available from the social sciences—from GIS to historical election and economic data—to examine issues of welfare, mobility, and “hollowing out the middle”; employment; innovation; gerrymandering and issues of representation; competition over natural resources; mass transit and the impact of transportation and highways on sociopolitical development; and urban and rural differences. Many of these topics will be familiar, but the tools through which we examine them will be via a geospatial lens; and the way in which we understand the surrounding politics will, hopefully, be more complete when compared to the traditional lenses of political science. This seminar will be an open, nonpartisan forum for discussion and debate and, as such, driven by data, not dogma. We will use a variety of approaches based in logic and evidence to find answers to various puzzles about American policy and will treat this material as social scientists, not ideologues. Comfort with numbers and statistics is expected, and group work along with fieldwork will be a regular feature of this seminar. Biweekly in fall and spring, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities that will include research and fieldwork.

Faculty

• Samuel Abrams

Open, Seminar—Fall

How should societies commemorate and respond to past injustices that continue to impact community members? This course will investigate various approaches, including apology, repatriation, reparation, and remembrance. What is the best course of action in the aftermath of gross violations of human rights? Which responses are feasible in a particular context, and how might the possibilities shift over time? Where have repatriation efforts been successful? Why have reparations been won in some cases but not others? Our discussions will consider the needs of victims, as well as the interests of states and the possible contradictions between the two. We will focus on the role of power in the international system and international law, as well as the ways in which seemingly less powerful groups have engaged and challenged prominent domestic and international actors. Case studies will include, but are not limited to, Native American demands for the repatriation of remains, postcolonial states’ demands for the return of cultural artifacts, Jewish struggles for restitution in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Japanese American and African American campaigns for reparations, as well as debates over environmental reparations. We will also consider the role of art, narratives, and memorials in expanding discussion in each of these case studies.

Faculty

• Elke Zuern

Intermediate, Seminar—Spring

This course will provide a unique opportunity to investigate key questions of democracy in a diverse group at a crucial moment in American history. We will begin by exploring theoretical arguments regarding the merits of various forms of democracy over other regime types. If democracy is presumed to be a better system than its alternatives, why might this be the case and how might we evaluate this? We will consider key historical moments in the rise and decline of democracy—from the ideals of early American democracy and its shortcomings, to the Nazi seizure of power and the end of democracy in 1930s Germany, to the triumph of nonracial democracy with the end of apartheid in South Africa. We will investigate whether and how democracies might outperform other regimes. The class will engage empirical research, comparing democratic, transitioning, and authoritarian regimes as far as economic growth and development, human development indicators, interstate and intrastate wars, human rights, and business innovation, including artificial intelligence. Students will consider the role of free speech and censorship by exploring the ways in which a free press and open social networks support basic principles of democracy, as well as how misinformation and disinformation can starkly undermine it. The course will employ theory, history, and empirical data to evaluate the state of democracy in the United States and the possible impact of recent changes to American institutions.

Faculty

• Elke Zuern

Open, Seminar—Fall

Few people dispute the enormous impact that the Ancient Greeks have had on Western culture—and even on the modern world, in general. This seminar will introduce the interested student to this culture, mainly through reading salient primary texts in English translation. Our interest will range broadly. Along with some background reading, we will discuss mythology (Hesiod), epic hymns and poetry (Homer), history (Herodotus), politics, religion, and philosophy. By the end of the course, students should have a basic understanding of the cultural contribution of the Ancient Greeks, as well as a basic timeline of their history through the Hellenistic age. 

Faculty

• Ron Afzal

Open, Seminar—Year

Perhaps no one has not heard the name of a seemingly obscure carpenter’s son executed by the Romans around 33 CE. Why? The religion that we call Christianity shaped the Western world for at least 1,500 years. This course will study the origins of that tradition. As we study those origins, we will explore Judaism in the strange and fertile Second Temple period (515 BCE–70 CE). We will encounter the learned societies of holy men like the Pharisees and the Qumran sectarians, as well as the freedom fighters/terrorists called the Zealots. Our main source will be the New Testament of the Christian Bible, though our sources will be supplemented by other primary materials. Excerpts from the Dead Sea Scrolls and rabbinic literature, as well as other Hellenistic texts from that period, will provide the cultural backdrop in which Christianity has its roots. We will learn about the spread of the new movement of “Christians,” as they were called by their detractors in Antioch, from its roots in the Holy Land into the greater Greco-Roman world. How did that movement, which began among the Jews of the Eastern Mediterranean, come to be wholly associated with Gentiles by the end of the second century? Who became Christian? Why were they hated so much by the greater Greco-Roman society? What did they believe? How did they behave? What are the origins of Christian antisemitism? What kind of social world, with its senses of hierarchy and gender relations, did these people envision for themselves?

Faculty

• Ron Afzal

Open, Seminar—Spring

The Fourth Gospel and the epistles associated with its authors, 1-3 John, have been particularly significant for the development of Christian thought. In this course, we will study the Gospel of John closely, engaging in the hermeneutical arts with an eye to the development of Christian theology, as well as uncovering the history and growth of the early Christian community responsible for its unique prose and views regarding Jesus of Nazareth and the role of Christian discipleship. We will immerse ourselves in the Hellenistic world, especially as it relates to Mediterranean Judaism. In doing so, we will examine the roots of Christian antisemitism and the development of Gnosticism and Christian docetism.

Faculty

• Ron Afzal

First-Year Studies—Year

At a time of great crisis in Russia and in Ukraine, the study of Russian remains essential to the understanding of Russian politics, history, and culture. It is also an easy move from Russian to the study of other Slavic languages, including not just Ukrainian but also Belarusian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, etc. To learn a new language is to open yourself to another worldview, both as you gain entry into another culture and as your own sense of self is transformed. In another language, you are still you; but the tools that you use to create and express that identity change. As English speakers find themselves in Russian, they first need to come to terms with an often complicated grammar. We will tackle that aspect of our work through a degree of analytical thought, a great deal of memorization, and the timely completion of often lengthy, biweekly homework assignments. As students reflect on the very different means of expression that Russian offers, they will engage in basic, but fully functional, conversational Russian at every point along the way. Our four hours of class each week will be devoted to actively using what we know in both pair and group activities, role play, dialogues, skits, songs, etc. As a final project at the end of each semester, students will create their own video skits. Weekly individual meetings with a Russian language assistant, in addition to class sessions, will be required. Attendance at weekly Russian Table is strongly encouraged. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences. 

Faculty

• Melissa Frazier

Open, Seminar—Year

At a time of great crisis in Russia and in Ukraine, the study of Russian remains essential to the understanding of Russian politics, history, and culture. It is also an easy move from Russian to the study of other Slavic languages, including not just Ukrainian but also Belarusian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, etc. To learn a new language is to open yourself to another worldview, both as you gain entry into another culture and as your own sense of self is transformed. In another language, you are still you; but the tools that you use to create and express that identity change. As English speakers find themselves in Russian, they first need to come to terms with an often complicated grammar. We will tackle that aspect of our work through a degree of analytical thought, a great deal of memorization, and the timely completion of often lengthy, biweekly homework assignments. Even as I encourage students to reflect on the very different means of expression that Russian offers, I also ask that they engage in basic, but fully-functional, conversational Russian at every point along the way. Our four hours of class each week will be devoted to actively using what we know in both pair and group activities, role play, dialogues, skits, songs, etc. As a final project at the end of each semester, students will create their own video skits. While there are no individual conferences with the instructor, weekly individual meetings with a Russian language assistant, in addition to class sessions, will be required. Attendance at weekly Russian Table is strongly encouraged. 

Faculty

• Melissa Frazier

Intermediate, Seminar—Year

Ahead of intermediate study, students already know the basics of Russian grammar; thus, this course will emphasize grammar review, ever more vocabulary, and more speaking of what is already known. We will turn to more reading, starting with a variety of texts with a strong oral orientation. Past studied texts have included: Daniil Kharms’ absurdist play, The Circus Shardam; the Soviet children’s classic, Mister Twister; and the famous Russian translation of Winnie the Pooh. At the end of this course, students should feel that they have a fairly sophisticated grasp of the language. Students will also participate in individual conference work with the instructor. While students may incorporate films and/or music into their conference projects, the hope of this one-on-one time is to prioritize additional reading, including song lyrics and/or screenplays, as well as poetry and short stories. As cultural opportunities in Russia remain limited, students will also be encouraged to use conference to explore the more broadly postcolonial but russophone world. As the crisis in Russia and Ukraine continues, that is where the interesting questions are being asked. Regular written homework will be required, along with weekly conversation sessions with the Russian assistant. Attendance at weekly Russian Table is strongly encouraged.

Faculty

• Melissa Frazier

First-Year Studies—Year

How does the setting up of a textile factory in Malaysia connect with life in the United States? Or of ship building in Bangladesh? What was the relationship of mothers to children in 17th-century, upper-class French households? What do we expect of the same relationships today? In the United States? In other societies? Across rural and urban areas? How do contemporary notions of leisure and luxury resemble, or do they, notions of peoples in other times and places regarding wealth and poverty? What is the relation between the local and the global, the individual and society, the self and “other”? How is the self constructed? How do we connect biography and history, fiction and fact, objectivity and subjectivity, the social and the personal? These are some of the questions that sociology and sociologists attempt to think through. In this seminar, we will ask how sociologists, and social thinkers in general, analyze and simultaneously create reality. What questions do we/they ask? How does one explore these questions and arrive at subsequent findings and conclusions? Through a perusal of comparative and historical materials, we will look afresh at things that we take for granted; for example, the family, poverty, identity, travel and tourism, progress, science, and subjectivity. The objective of the seminar will be to enable students to critically read sociological texts and become practitioners in “doing” sociology (something we are always already involved in, albeit often unself-consciously). This last endeavor is both designed to train students in how to undertake research and intended as a key tool in interrogating the relationship of the researcher and the researched, the field studied, and the (sociological) text. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

Faculty

• Shahnaz Rouse

Open, Lecture—Fall

In an era of unprecedented global connectivity, why do economic and social inequalities continue to deepen? This lecture will provide students with a critical introduction to the sociological study of global inequalities, moving beyond national boundaries to examine the transnational structures, institutions, and processes that produce and sustain disparities in wealth, power, and opportunity. We will explore key themes—such as human rights, migration, labor, health, climate justice, and development—analyzing how these intersect with racial, gendered, and class-based inequalities across different societies. Rather than treating nations as isolated “containers” of social issues, we will focus on the ways in which global forces—such as capitalism, colonial legacies, and international policy regimes—shape patterns of privilege and precarity. Students will engage with interdisciplinary sources, including sociological research, ethnographies, policy reports, and case studies from regions in the Global South and Global North. Topics will include the rise of transnational migration networks, the impact of neoliberal economic policies on developing economies, the persistence of racial hierarchies in global labor markets, and the consequences of climate change for displaced communities. As part of group conferences, students will identify a key global issue and develop a research portfolio using a variety of methods—statistical analysis, historical records, qualitative interviews, and ethnographic sources—to investigate how inequality is shaped and contested in different contexts. The course will encourage students to think critically about solutions, exploring social movements, policy interventions, and alternative models of economic and social justice. This course is open to all students interested in understanding the dynamics of inequality on a global scale. No prior course work in sociology is required, but students should be prepared for rigorous reading, discussion, and research.

Faculty

• Parthiban Muniandy

Advanced, Seminar—Fall

Much of our lives is spent dealing with organizations in one fashion or another; they are a staple of our everyday lives, whether directly or indirectly, and we rarely escape them. They include government and nongovernmental structures, ranging from government bureaucracies to schools, hospitals, religious spaces, and less formal entities such as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Because of their ubiquitousness—and the assumption that bureaucracies exemplify “modernity” and “value-free” systems—the study of organizations has been a key subfield within sociology. This course will address the veracity of the claims made on behalf of bureaucracies, as well as critiques directed at organizational theory and behavior. Overarching objectives include examining the manner in which organizations have been conceptualized, as well as the processes and practices through which they operate and change and their implications for those who are “subjected” to them. Beginning with Max Weber, a seminal figure in the field, we will examine underlying assumptions regarding “objectivity” and “subjectivity,” the rule of law, bureaucratic activism and inertia, the relation between organizations and their larger political and economic milieu, as well as ongoing organizational struggles. In addition to Weber, we will read other classics, such as Sloan Wilson’s novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and William Whyte’s The Organization Man. These and more contemporary critiques of organizations—both written and visual—will enable us to go beyond simplistic and normative understandings of bureaucracies and classic sociological theories and texts to rethink historical and contemporary organizations in order to analyze the functioning of power at an everyday and structural level alongside its attendant outcomes. While applicable to sociology students and those studying social sciences, this course will also be of direct relevance to rethinking the workings of science and medicine, the law, education, the business world, the media, and/or the arts. For conference, working in small groups, students will undertake archival and/or ethnographic research on a specific aspect of organizational practice at Sarah Lawrence—historical and/or contemporary. Possible topics include an examination of space and design, changes in the student body and/or curricular design, processes of decision making, student governance and activism, and/or the relationship between the school and its environs.

Faculty

• Shahnaz Rouse

Open, Seminar—Year

Cities are shaped not only by official policies and infrastructures but also by the informal and everyday interactions that blur boundaries between legality and illegality, local and global, self and other. This seminar will explore informality as a defining feature of urban life and globalization, examining how people navigate unregulated economies; build informal networks of care and survival; and redefine cosmopolitanism through daily acts of negotiation, adaptation, and contamination. Using a transnational and ethnographic lens, we will look at how informal economies—street vending, unregistered housing, underground labor networks—shape cities from the margins. We will also examine cultural and social “contaminations,” where urban residents of different class, racial, ethnic, and migratory backgrounds encounter and transform each other’s ways of life—sometimes in conflict, sometimes in collaboration. Rather than viewing informality as a “problem” to be solved, we will investigate how it can be a form of survival, resistance, and even innovation. Key themes include the role of informal housing and precarious urbanism, as seen in slums, refugee camps, and do-it-yourself architecture, as well as the dynamics of street economies and alternative labor structures. We will explore how migrant communities shape transnational place making; the politics of food, music, and everyday cultural hybridity; and how public space is governed, contested, and informally negotiated in cities. These intersecting themes highlight the ways in which urban life is constantly being reshaped through both structural constraints and human agency. Readings will include works by Teresa Caldeira, Asef Bayat, AbdouMaliq Simone, Ananya Roy, and Saskia Sassen, alongside ethnographic case studies of cities in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and North America. Students will conduct ethnographic fieldwork—exploring the informal landscapes of urban spaces, neighborhoods, and/or digital communities around them—as part of conference work. These projects can culminate in ethnographic essays, photo essays, digital maps, or multimedia storytelling. This course is designed for students interested in urban studies, migration, globalization, and the sociology of everyday life. No previous background in sociology is required, but students should be ready to engage in active field observation, lots of field note-writing, discussion, and critical and creative thinking.

Faculty

• Parthiban Muniandy

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

More often than not, sports and the arts are seen as two distinct fields with little in common. Those interested in international sports events rarely pay attention to international arts events and/or world expos, and vice versa. News organizations and mainstream media overall accentuate their differences. In this course, we will connect these frequently separated fields to parse out their identicality and differences. Through a close examination of international sports, expos, and biennales, we will tease out what they share, as well as how and where they depart from each other. We will start with Raymond William’s The Sociology of Culture, following it up with writings by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on sports and the arts. We will build on these texts by reading specific accounts of historical and contemporary events, as well as interrogating visual materials. All three international events are normatively represented as sites of leisure and consumption. Going beyond these twin dimensions, an examination of their underlying practices of production will enable us to see the centrality of money, work, and labor in each of these activities/events. This examination will then allow us to interrogate the claim that art is “superior” to sports and, instead, see the relation of each to politics and market forces. In this vein, we will examine their relationship to gentrification, nationalism, tourism, and corporate power, as well as to their ability to serve as sites of resistance and as critique of local, national, and global inequities. In other words, we will see these events in terms of their multiplicity of meaning, complexity, and contradictions. Among possible conference topics, students could examine specific international events and their relationship to local sites, peoples, or politics; undertake analyses of media coverage; examine policy perspectives and justifications for location choices and/or the re-making of space; and/or examine these events, individually or collectively, in relation to issues of class, gender, race, and/or nation.

Faculty

• Shahnaz Rouse

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

What might it mean for a writer to be useful to a state? How have states used writers, witting and unwitting, in projects aimed at influence and hegemony? How might a state make use of language as a weapon? What might it mean for a writer to attempt to avoid being useful to a state? How might a state inflect and influence the intimacy between a writer and what we may write? In this course, we will discuss an array of choices that writers have made in relation to state power, focusing particularly on the United States from just after World War II until the present. Students will be asked to read excerpts from six texts: Joel Whitney’s Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers; Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters; Eric Bennett’s Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War; Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism; and two long poems, Peter Dale Scott’s “Coming to Jakarta” and Dionne Brand's “Inventory.” Group conferences will function as writing workshops to offer students feedback on their letters in progress in addition to various writing exercises. The lens of this course will be that of a writer—using deep study and playful practice to figure out the dilemmas and best practices of the present. 

Faculty

• Suzanne Gardinier

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

This course will examine and produce a range of work—from the journalistic to the critical, from the practical to the mystical, from the factual to the fictional—in the vast landscape of arts writing. We will write short pieces along the lines of liner notes, catalogue copy for gallery shows, and short reviews. We will approach long reviews, critical essays, and deep and subjective interior meditations on our experience of artists and their work by reading broadly across time. Topics may include, but are not limited to: Samuel Johnson on Richard Savage; William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge on themselves; Friedrich Nietzsche on Richard Wagner; Theodor W. Adorno via Thomas Mann on Beethoven’s Opus 111; V. S. Naipaul on Gustave Flaubert; Amiri Baraka on Billie Holiday; Virginia Woolf on Thomas Hardy; Glenn Gould on Barbra Streisand; Mark Strand on Edward Hopper; Rosalind Krauss on photography; Susan Sontag on Leni Riefenstahl; Jean-Luc Godard on Nicholas Ray; Pauline Kael on Sam Peckinpah; the art criticism of Donald Judd; and contemporary phenomena such as fan fiction, crossovers, and alternate universes made up of familiar literary characters. Students should feel confident in their familiarity with one or two art forms, broadly understood, and should expect, along with the reading, to write several small and two larger (7-12 pages) pieces to be presented to the entire class. Conference work will comprise research projects on those artists or works of art, or both, that students, in consultation with the instructor, decide on as their special province.

Faculty

• Vijay Seshadri