History

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

As Empires expanded in the 18th-20th centuries, Europe witnessed a massive rise in collecting, measuring, counting, and describing myriad phenomena across the world, be they land masses, waterways, fossils, plants, animals, or human beings. And, domestically, there was deepening interest in the constitution and characteristics of different populations and the spaces they inhabited. In this seminar, we will examine a series of times and spaces in which gazes were focused, information gathered, and interpretations surmised in the context of Empire. Along the way we will see how some social sciences, primarily anthropology, geography, sociology, and selected area studies, have come to be formed in a variety of social and political contexts. The times and places we will study are diverse and will include, in no particular order: the rise of what we now know as scientific racism in France and Germany in the 19th century; the role of the Royal Engineers (the British military) in surveying and mapping vast territories of the British Empire; Charles Booth’s studies of the working class in 19th-century London, and Arthur Munby’s contemporary scopophilic obsession with working women. A century later, it was the Black population of Britain that was under the scrutiny of researchers from various institutions; and we will examine the myriad ways in which those communities resisted being studied. We will also look at the contradictory careers of several individuals including anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, who tried to show how deploying anthropological knowledge would permit colonial officers to administer the empires more efficiently. And, on the other hand, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kenyan anti-colonial activist who taught Kiswahili to colonial officers and studied anthropology during his time in London to bolster his case for Kenyan independence. We will also explore the work of anthropologists from the Manchester School in colonized Central Africa, including their activism supporting local miners unions. And we will learn about the significant contributions of African “research assistants,” and their contributions to social science. Our texts include writings and visual imagery from a broad array of sources including, scholarly readings, biographies, history, ethnography, and maps.

Faculty

• Mary A. Porter

First-Year Studies—Year

In modern terms, myth has come to be commonly understood as the antithesis of history. Whereas history is taken as a reasoned, factual account of the past and how things came to be, myth appears to operate in the realm of fiction or fantasy. Myths may have the claim of venerable tradition, but they are no longer accepted as an accurate record of events. The ancient world, however, made no such black-and-white distinctions. In antiquity, myth was accepted as early history. Its heroes were real, and their actions were thought to exemplify essential paradigms of political order and morality. Consequently, this course will apply a different approach in which myth is distinguished from history not by a truth test but, rather, by virtue of its function as a means of cultural self-representation. We shall examine the myths of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome—both in their literary form and in various media of visual art. Throughout, our goal will be to understand the potency of these narratives as vehicles of social or cultural values and as tools of power legitimizing and justifying closely entwined notions of religious and political authority. The course will close by considering how, in Late Antiquity, Christian narratives and ideologies in the literary and visual arts developed from the mythic traditions that preceded them. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

Faculty

• David Castriota

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

What was modern art? How did artists respond to a changing world—one altered by fascism, colonization and anti-colonial protest, war and mass migration, the legacies of enslavement, and rationalized forms of labor? What representational strategies did artists use to respond to modernity, to remake the world anew? This course will move in and out of canonical accounts of modernism (Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Dada, Mexican Muralism, Abstract Expressionism, etc.) to tell the story of modernism through the work of underrepresented artists—artists of the Black Atlantic and Latin America, queer and trans artists, artists of color, women artists, and artists seen as “outside” the canon. We will look to discourses of leftist politics and collectivity, feminist struggle, abolitionism and antiracist discourse. The emphasis of this course will be on the global plurality of modernism, shifting our understanding of where modernism was produced, when, and by whom. This course will serve as an introduction to art history in the sense that it will equip students with the basic tools of close, slow looking and of descriptive writing about art, art historical research, and practices of curatorial display while also introducing students to broad and diverse histories of modern art. The course will also include field trips to New York City museums. This course is a lecture with weekly seminars. One lecture a week will introduce you to the broader movements, while weekly seminars will look at specific case studies and scholarly approaches to writing about contemporary art.

Faculty

• Sarah Hamill

Open, Seminar—Fall

Although 19th-century art in the United States encompassed a wide range of stylistic movements––Impressionism, Realism, Romanticism, Tonalism, the Hudson River School, and Folk Art, among them––many artists shared a common fascination: water. Dangerous oceans, seductive shorelines, and industrial man-made waterways emerged as recurring subjects. While artists used images of maritime scenes to negotiate new understandings of the bounds of a new nation, water also offered possibilities for visualizing a fluid, borderless world that could connect regions, religions, ecosystems, and temporalities. Drawing on the emerging field of the Blue Humanities—an interdisciplinary approach that explores the cultural and historical significance of water—this seminar will examine how artists represented seas, rivers, ports, and coastal environments. Adding to traditional narratives of American art, we will explore how artists used waterways to examine the US’ relationship to Africa, Asia, Europe, and Central and South America. Topics will include painted waterscapes, port scenes, and ship portraits, including Childe Hassam’s impressionist dedication to fixing the “moment” long-traveling waters touched New England shores, Winslow Homer’s realist interpretation of transoceanic migration and inequity, and Fitz H. Lane’s romantic rendering of US ships triumphing over perilous, international seas. Our discussions will be augmented by attending to diverse makers working outside of traditional fine art, including within the material cultures of maritime trade, from pearls to shell souvenirs and carved whalebone; folk depictions of mariners and their relationship to constructions of race, gender, and sexuality at sea; popular visual cultures of enslavement, migration, and displacement across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds; military representations of naval warfare, imperialism, and resistance; and print illustrations of technologies that transformed global mobility, including steamships, canals, and underwater telegraph cables. Through artworks, readings, and museum visits in New York City and the Hudson River Valley, students will engage with historical and contemporary scholarship on water, fluidity, mobility, and interconnectedness. Together, we will investigate the history of 19th-century art from the perspective of the oceans, rivers, and waterways that linked artists to the wider world.

Faculty

• Suzie Oppenheimer

Open, Seminar—Year

Given their geographical setting at the northwestern extreme of Europe, the arts and cultures of “Albion,” or Britain and Ireland, have often been described by the term “insular” in the sense of isolated, discrete, or peripheral—yet nothing could be further from the truth. No less than six Roman emperors spent time in Britain, and four came to power there. To a great extent, Irish clerics were responsible for the survival of classical learning during the Dark Ages. Indeed, throughout history, cultural developments in the British Isles were intimately related to ideas and events on the European Continent and the Mediterranean. Following this basic premise, in the fall semester the course will examine civilization in Britain and Ireland from the late Stone Age or Megalithic period, through the Bronze and Early Iron Ages, to the coming of the Celts and the Roman conquest. In the spring, we will focus on later Roman Britain, Irish monasticism, and the emergence of Anglo-Saxon culture down to the arrival of the Vikings. At every turn, we will consider interactions with the urban civilizations to the south and west—the early Aegean, Greece, Rome, and the early medieval Continent—to discover that Albion was an integral part of the political, religious, and economic forces that shaped the art and history of Europe up to the present time.

Faculty

• David Castriota

Open, Lecture—Spring

This course will explore the art and architecture of Spain and of Latin America as its lands emerged from colonialism to forge strong independent identities. We will focus on selected topics, including extraordinary artists such as El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, Cabrera, and Aleijadinho, as well as on complex issues surrounding art and identity in contested and textured lands—in particular, Casta painting, colonialism, and arts of revolution and national identity.

Faculty

• Jerrilynn Dodds

Open, Small Lecture—Spring

Taking a global approach, this course will look at how artists redefined the mediums, materials, and hierarchies of modernism in the postwar period. We will look closely at how artists embraced radicality, by protesting for civil rights, Latinx, Black, and Indigenous rights, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and claiming an antiwar politics in the 1960s and 1970s. This radicality shifted in the 1990s with the rise of neoliberalism and the global art market, and we will investigate changes in contemporary art and its display after 1990. Movements this course will explore include: Gutai, Neoconcretism, Happenings, Pop Art, Fluxus, minimalism, global conceptualism, site-specificity, Earthworks, the Chicano Arts Movement, the Black Arts Movement, feminism, video art, institutional critique, installation, activist art, participatory art, Relational Aesthetics, Craft, new media, biennials, and the global art museum. Throughout, we will focus on specific artworks and gain a vocabulary for close looking, while also attending to primary sources (manifestos, letters, statements, poems) and secondary, art historical, and theoretical accounts. Assignments will include papers (based on works in New York City museums and galleries), peer reviews, presentations, reading responses, a contextual research essay, and a group curatorial assignment. This course will be taught in a lecture-seminar hybrid style. One lecture a week will be presented to introduce students to the broader movements. Weekly group conferences will look at case studies of artists and representational issues.

Faculty

• Sarah Hamill

First-Year Studies—Year

This seminar is a sustained look at the recent history of China and Japan, the major countries within East Asia. Placed alongside each other, the often wrenching history of Japan and China over the past three centuries raises important historical themes of Asian modernity—questioning both its sources and how we define it. Often portrayed as a direct import from the West in the 19th-century, we will ask whether modernity might instead be traced to legacies of Japan’s isolationist feudalism under the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1867) and China’s multiethnic Manchu dynasty (1644-1911) even as we acknowledge the far-reaching impact of Euro-American imperialism. For example, did the evolving samurai culture of the Tokugawa era lay socio-economic foundation for Japan’s political and economic modernity in the late 19th century? And did deep changes in Qing China society destabilize the dynastic balance of power as early as the 18th century? Both China and Japan have entrenched master narratives that portray themselves as victims of the West, but we will also investigate the contours of Asian imperialism. How and why were their empires built, and how did they end? How were the nation-states we now call China and Japan formed, and how was nationalism constructed (and re-constructed) in them? What role did socio-economic, cultural, and international crises play in fueling nationalist sentiments? How and where was radicalism (of various forms, including Maoism) incubated? The impact of war, preparing for it, waging it, and rebuilding in its wake will be a repeated theme, too. And finally, we will look at Asia’s economic dynamism, covering both Japan’s post-World War II capitalism (and its roots in the wartime imperialist project) and China’s transition to a market economy. Course readings will consist of historical scholarship regularly punctuated by primary sources, documents, fiction, and some film. 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, Seminar—Fall

This seminar will look to mainland and Taiwanese fiction as a window on recent Chinese history. In the 1980s, China emerged from the paroxysms of the Maoist period (1949-76) and began its transition toward a market-based economy. Accompanying this economic liberalization, many of the tight political controls on writers were loosened. All types of literature, but particularly fiction, boomed. China returned to its rich heritage of a book culture, with a mass book market sustained by avid consumers. And Chinese fiction has won an international audience and acclaim, culminating in 2011 with MO Yan’s Nobel Prize in literature. Literature, thus, stands at the heart of China’s postrevolutionary history. We will interrogate fictional works in postrevolutionary China for how they deal with and understand a rapidly changing society and economy. What are the legacies of decades of revolution for Chinese literature? By examining narratives that deal with the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), we will look at how writers have assessed and appropriated the Maoist period, especially the experience of intellectuals  “sent down” to the countryside. How did the “nativist” fiction of the 1980s and 1990s reevaluate Chinese tradition and traditional society? Urban fiction, often decadent and gritty, will raise issues of how authors and narratives portray China’s breakneck economic development? What is the relationship between art and politics in these works? Do they tacitly support or subtly resist political authoritarianism? We will also look at Taiwanese literature, from the 1960s through the 1990s, as it, too, grappled with economic development, its political basis, and social effects. Along the way, we will encounter MO Yan’s blood-drenched bandit heroes; YU Hua’s long-suffering peasant; SU Tong’s vicious sadists; disaffected urban youths in an age of sex, drugs, and rock and roll; HAN Shaogong’s novel written in the form of a dictionary; and BAI Xianyong’s homosexual young men searching for love. The majority of the course will consist of fiction from mainland China and Taiwan, but we will also read some short memoir pieces by novelists and the debates in Western media about MO Yan’s 2011 Nobel prize. No prior knowledge of China (history or literature) is required.

Faculty

• Kevin Landdeck

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

This course will explore China’s place as both an initiator and a subject of globalization between the second century (Han dynasty) and the 15th century (the Mongol, Yuan dynasty). To do so, we will follow the rise and development of the Silk Roads with the goal of uncovering the variety of cross-cultural influences among China and its closest neighbors (the Uighurs, Tibet, Central Asia, and the Russian steppe), as well as distant lands (including India, Europe, and South East Asia). More specifically, topics covered will include the following: political and state-sanctioned relations, including diplomacy and interregional wars; economic exchange and trade; the spread of religions (including Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity); and, finally, the exchange of technology, art, and material culture (including food, ceramics, and items of daily use). This will be a lecture course with weekly seminars. The lectures will be based on scholarly research and provide the broader historical and cultural context for a study of primary documents. In the seminar portion, we will undertake a closer reading and discussion of those primary documents.

Faculty

• Ellen Neskar

Open, Seminar—Year

This seminar is a sustained look at the recent history of China and Japan, the major countries within East Asia. Placed alongside each other, the often wrenching history of Japan and China over the past three centuries raises important historical themes of Asian modernity—questioning both its sources and how we define it. Often portrayed as a direct import from the West in the 19th-century, we will ask whether modernity might instead be traced to legacies of Japan’s isolationist feudalism under the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1867) and China’s multiethnic Manchu dynasty (1644-1911) even as we acknowledge the far-reaching impact of Euro-American imperialism. For example, did the evolving samurai culture of the Tokugawa era lay socio-economic foundation for Japan’s political and economic modernity in the late 19th century? And did deep changes in Qing China society destabilize the dynastic balance of power as early as the 18th century? Both China and Japan have entrenched master narratives that portray themselves as victims of the West, but we will also investigate the contours of Asian imperialism. How and why were their empires built, and how did they end? How were the nation-states we now call China and Japan formed, and how was nationalism constructed (and re-constructed) in them? What role did socio-economic, cultural, and international crises play in fueling nationalist sentiments? How and where was radicalism (of various forms, including Maoism) incubated? The impact of war, preparing for it, waging it, and rebuilding in its wake will be a repeated theme, too. And finally, we will look at Asia’s economic dynamism, covering both Japan’s post-World War II capitalism (and its roots in the wartime imperialist project) and China’s transition to a market economy. Course readings will consist of historical scholarship regularly punctuated by primary sources, documents, fiction, and some film.

Faculty

• Kevin Landdeck

Open, Seminar—Year

This course will look at China’s philosophical traditions—Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism—and seek to understand their role in developing notions of rulership and ideal governance. In fall, we will do close readings of the foundational texts in each of these traditions. Topics to be explored will include: notions of the Dao (Tao) and the ways in which it might be attained by individuals, rulers, and society; the essence of the mind, human nature, and the emotions and the ways in which they shape political action; the role of inner self-cultivation in producing appropriate social engagement. In spring, we will look at the ways in which later dynasties applied these philosophies to their political ideology and governments. We will also explore the ways in which individuals resisted the government and established their own practices of social action.

Faculty

• Ellen Neskar

Open, Seminar—Spring

In 1966, Mao Zedong launched what could well be the most radical, most adventurous mass political campaign in world history, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR), which set out to attack the very communist Party-State that Mao himself had established. Going through several phases, this utopian experiment lasted for a decade (1966-1976). Students in urban universities and middle schools were the first to respond to Mao's call—and in spectacular fashion: with attacks on authorities of all kinds, rallies of millions of Red Guards in Tiananmen Square, and vast numbers of young people making treks across the country. In Shanghai, radical workers took over the city from the government, establishing the (short-lived) Shanghai Commune. The Party-State fought back, however, and in many parts of the country, cycles of violence and revenge exploded. With the military brought in to restore order, the Cultural Revolution slowly slid into more managed forms of mass mobilization: tens of millions of urban youth were "sent down" to the countryside to learn from the peasants. The experiment ended only with Mao's death in 1976. This course will examine MAO's reasons for launching the GPCR, the famous Red Guards, the Shanghai Commune (its rise and demise), the causes behind the paroxysms of mass violence, the reassertion of control that began after 1969, the nature of the GPCR in rural areas, the Sent-Down Youth experience, the legacies of the GPCR for China, and its influence abroad (particularly among leftist intellectuals in Europe and the United States). Our sources will include a rich mixture of scholarship on mainland China's politics (both before and during the Cultural Revolution); contemporary primary sources (e.g., party documents, propaganda materials, a Model Opera, one of the few films made during these years); memoirs of Red Guards and intellectuals; and later art and literature written assessing the period and its legacies for China. In many ways, today's China is not understandable without an appreciation of this decade-long radical experiment, as the Party-State (still the dominant force in China) continues to bear scars of the Cultural Revolution, despite its attempt to enforce a peculiar form of amnesia on the whole country. No prior knowledge of China is required.

Faculty

• Kevin Landdeck

Open, Seminar—Spring

This course will explore a variety of forms of traditional popular culture that continue to survive in China and abroad. Among the topics we will cover are: folktales (Mulan, Butterfly Lovers), festivals (New Year’s, Dragon Boat, Herdboy, and Weaving Maid), popular deities (Mazu, Guanyin), and religious practices (All Souls, Hell, ancestor worship). Our focus will be on their historical origins and transformations through a variety of cultural forms. Particular attention will be paid to their entertainment, political, ideological, and sociological functions. This course will aim to build different—and sometimes competing—conceptions of “tradition” and understand their continuing relevance today. Since many of these practices and beliefs reside outside the lens of elite taste and political authority, our materials will include opera, drama, popular fiction, and visual arts. 

Faculty

• Ellen Neskar

Open, Seminar—Year

How can movement inform critical analysis? What can dancing teach us about the workings of our world? In this seminar, we will begin with an extended reading/exploration of Alice Walker’s collection of poems, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing (2010) as entry into the multiple layers of meaning and complexity that movement can convey, pointing to the ways in which we move and are moved as individuals and as collectives. Readings from fields including dance, performance, literary criticism, feminism, science fiction, cultural studies, ethno-ecology, and activism, as well as examples of live and recorded performance events (formal and informal) will serve as inspiration for seeing, thinking, conversing and writing throughout the year. Students’ multiple histories and perspectives will illuminate vigorous examination of these materials. Class activities will include reading, writing, discussion, presentation, and accessible movement practices, as well as viewing art and film images. Assignments will build upon class activities, with opportunities to work with partners and small groups. For yearlong conference projects, supported through biweekly individual conferences, each student will develop one or more substantive lines of inquiry connected to our subject matter. Conference projects may draw upon various disciplines, including those within humanities and creative arts. The aim of this course is to expand our recognition of movement and dancing as essential aspects of existence, and to sharpen our use of the unique theoretical potentials inherent in this study to enliven adjacent studies as well.

Faculty

• Peggy Gould

First-Year Studies—Year

We live in the world of monopoly capitalism—a market economy dominated by big rent-seeking corporations with immense political and economic power domestically and internationally. What economic methods and theories are suited for understanding the historical development, current turbulence, and future tendencies of monopoly capitalism? We will engage in a series of critical conversations about various schools of economics and their logics of economic policy-making, in order to gain a well-rounded and holistic understanding of the business of global monopoly capitalism and its economic, social, and political ills. How did the financial market get so big? Why do artificial intelligence and manufacturing robots have to replace human work? How will global monopoly capitalism evolve socially, economically, and politically? And many other questions. Students will encounter not only the so-called “standard” economics and business thinking, but also a plurality of classical political economists such as Smith; Ricardo and Mill and their descendants; feminist economists; critical management scholars; the old and new institutionalists; the Marxian and Keynesian challengers; contemporary behavioral economists; and so on. 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

• An Li

First-Year Studies—Year

The 2024 Presidential Election result will have far-reaching implications for economic, social, and environmental policies. It will also be significant in terms of the future of American democracy and social wellbeing. In this course, we will situate current economic and political challenges in a theoretical and historical context by drawing on insights from difference schools of thought in economics as well as other disciplines such as law, politics, sociology, and history. Some of the key questions to be addressed are as follows: How can the central debates in political economy help us understand some of the unprecedented challenges we face, such as new gilded age style wealth concentration and power, economic insecurity, and the climate crisis? Why is the study of history a central methodological priority for many economists and why not so for others? Why do people distinguish between “regulation” and laissez-faire and is this a false dichotomy? What is the history of industrial and social policy in the United States and other countries? How do we understand the relationship between political and corporate power and the “rule of law” with regard to market outcomes? What is Project 2025 and how can we understand its theoretical basis and implications? These and others will be some of the questions that we will be tackling throughout the course of the year, thereby ensuring that students develop a solid foundation to the fundamental debates in economic theory and policy and understand the key role of methodology in the study of political economy. Finally, the goal is to ensure that students develop the ability to critically engage scholarly work in economics. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Faculty

• Jamee Moudud

Open, Small Lecture—Year

This course on business history will situate business in its social and political contexts. At the core of the course is the argument that the economy is embedded in the political society and is thus subject to historical change. The study of business cannot be separated from politics and political struggle, which determine how society is legally constructed in any given moment in history. Thus, what is of often called “private enterprise” sits on a contextually determined set of power relations which shape and are in turn shaped by current legal institutions. Challenging the idea, common to conventional discourse, that economies can be more or less regulated, this course will focus on the politics of business regulation, which in some contexts has produced socially progressive outcomes and in others regressive ones. Regulation is ubiquitous and subject to variation given changed circumstances due say to an economic crisis, new technologies, global competition, socio-political pressures etc. In this course, the nature and politics of business regulation will be studied in different national and historical contexts, involving countries in the Global South (e.g. Mauritius, Chile, Brazil, the Indian state of Kerala, South Africa etc.) and the Global North (e.g. United States, Sweden, Germany, etc.). It will address a wide range of topics that include: (a) slavery, cotton, banking, and property rights in early American industrialization; (b) legal struggles between corporations and society over constitutional rights (e.g. what brought about the landmark Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. FEC (2010)?); (c) corporations and colonialism (e.g. the British East India Company, the Virginia Company, etc.); (d) business regulation during the post-Civil War Reconstruction Period; (e) late industrialization and social well being; (f) using the United States and Sweden as case studies, the construction of welfare states and workers’ attempts to secure social and economic rights; and (g) the history of the relationship between business associations and anti-democratic politics, including the links between Silicon Valley technolibertarians and digital capitalism (i.e. artificial intelligence and crypto currencies). At a theoretical level, the study of business history will be grounded in debates in microeconomics, theories of business investment and pricing, and the relationship between law, politics, history, and economics. This course will be of interest to students who wish to understand contemporary social and political challenges in a theoretically and historically informed way.

Faculty

• Jamee Moudud

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

In this course, we will explore the economic, political, and cultural factors that have contributed to the rise of authoritarianism in the United States and abroad. We will begin with a detailed examination of the current economic context; i.e., the crisis of neoliberal, globalized capitalism and its impact on various strata of the United States population. Next, we will examine several political economic perspectives on the rise of authoritarianism, including works by such theorists as Hobsbawm, Poulantzas, Gramsci, Paxton, and Gessen. We will examine Ehrenreich and Foer’s theories of the “professional managerial class” and recent reporting on techno-radicals to explore the class interests and adversaries of the current U.S. regime. We will discuss the contributions of patriarchal ideologies and institutions to the reproduction of hierarchical, gendered practices within homes and public institutions. We will examine the contributions of discriminatory immigration law and the histories of institutionalized racism to current immigration policies. Finally, using the works of, among others, McAlevey and Nakagawa, we will discuss ways to defend democratic communities and resist authoritarianism. Requirements will include frequent, short papers on the readings and co-leading class discussions. In lieu of individual conference papers, students will be asked to form small groups to investigate, write, and present on the rise of authoritarianism in another country or the history of an authoritarian movement (such as the KKK) within the United States. Possibilities may also exist for service-learning placements.

Faculty

• Kim Christensen

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

How do we understand humans and their relationship to nature—and how do these understandings shape the ways we design our societies, relate to each other and the natural world, and imagine our world into the future? This lecture course will introduce political theory through environmental questions, focusing on two central themes. First: how does introducing a concern for “the Earth” or “ecology” deepen, and often complicate, our understanding of key political concepts like justice, freedom, democracy, and power? Second: how do the perspectives and methods of political theory relate to those of other disciplines—ecology, climate science, history, anthropology—which approach similar questions in very different ways? We will begin by examining what political theory is and exploring how different understandings of human nature and the natural world have shaped political thinking across traditions. We will then explore how environmental concerns reshape core political questions about governance, collective action, and social change—and how we might imagine and practice political futures within planetary limits.

Faculty

• Ben Mylius

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

What is environmental writing, and what politics, ethics, and visions of human-nature relations does it embody? This seminar will examine canonical and contemporary environmental writing through close reading, tracing the genre’s evolution from 19th century Romanticism through contemporary multispecies and Indigenous perspectives. We will read broadly chronologically, beginning with foundational texts like Thoreau and Muir, moving through Leopold's land ethic and Carson's environmental advocacy, and continuing into contemporary voices that challenge and expand the tradition. As we read, we will ask: How do different writers imagine the human place in nature? What narrative forms and voices has the genre privileged, and what has been excluded? Whose relationship to “nature” gets to count as a part of the genre? How has environmental writing responded to ecological crisis, and what futures does it make imaginable? Through close reading and discussion, we will develop skills in literary analysis while examining environmental writing as a political and ethical practice. The course will investigate both the beauty of the genre and its limitations, attending to questions of access, social position, and the changing meanings of “nature” itself. Topics may include: Romantic and transcendentalist traditions; conservation and the land ethic; environmental advocacy and Silent Spring; solitude and contemplation; Indigenous perspectives and reciprocity; multispecies writing; place and belonging; the politics of wilderness; and environmental justice.

Faculty

• Ben Mylius

Sophomore and Above, Small Lecture—Spring

What is technology, and how does it shape our relationship with nature—especially amid environmental crisis? These questions might sound abstract, but they are central to how we understand the causes of environmental issues and the kinds of responses we think are possible. Some environmental thinkers see technology as the source of all our ecological and social problems; others see it as the solution to them. In order to evaluate these positions, let alone identify our own, we need to understand what different thinkers mean by technology, how deep down its mediation goes, and why it is so often framed as either the cause of our problems or a silver bullet fix. In this course, we will approach these questions by broadening what counts as technology. We start with familiar examples: things like solar, or artificial intelligence (AI). But then we ask what happens to our thinking as we expand the category. How does our view of “environmental problems” change if we imagine agriculture as a form of technology? Or writing? Or even language itself? Drawing on work from environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and philosophy, we will explore perspectives that see technology as fundamental to human existence, perspectives that see it as alienating or destructive, and perspectives that see it as enabling care and attention. Our goal will be, working together, to understand how different ways of thinking about technology open or foreclose different responses to environmental crisis. Lectures will introduce conceptual frameworks through readings, discussion, and collaborative exercises. Group conferences will provide opportunities for students to examine specific technologies, building practical skills in technological analysis and developing their own perspectives. Some of our topics may include: philosophy of technology; perception and mediation; writing and symbolic thought; AI and computational systems; technologies; Indigenous technological traditions; separation and embeddedness.

Faculty

• Ben Mylius

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 begin to use linguistic concepts as tools for developing their analytic writing. More than other countries, France’s identity was shaped by centuries of what is now perceived by the French as a historically coherent past. In this course, we will explore the complexities of today’s French identity—or, rather, identities—following relevant contemporary controversies that have shaken French society in the past 30 years while simultaneously exploring historical influences and cultural paradigms at play in these débats franco-français. Thus, in addition to newspapers, online resources, recent films, television series, and songs, we will study masterpieces of the past in literature and in the arts. Topics discussed will include, among others, school and separation from faith; cuisine and traditions; immigration and urban ghettos; women and feminism in France; France’s relation to nature and the environment; the heritage of French Enlightenment (les Lumières), duty to remember (devoir de mémoire), and France's relationship with dark episodes of its history (slavery, Régime de Vichy and Nazi occupation, and the Algerian war). Authors studied will include Marie de France, Montaigne, Voltaire, Hugo, Flaubert, Proust, Colette, Duras, Césaire, Djebar, Chamoiseau, and Bouraoui. In addition to conferences, a weekly conversation session with a French language assistant will be required. Attendance at the weekly French lunch table and French film screenings are both highly encouraged. This course is specifically designed to help prepare students to study in the Paris global education program.

Faculty

• Eric Leveau

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 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 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

Advanced, Small seminar—Fall

The aim of this course is to allow students of Italian at an advanced level to work on translating works from Italian to English to better their knowledge of the language and of Italian vocabulary and syntax. Each student will choose a different text to work on independently, but will be responsible for sharing the draft of their translation with the group; in our weekly meetings, we will go through each student’s translation and make suggestions as well as examine the original text's style and tone. For students who are interested in participating on a joint project with a historian from Università degli Studi di Firenze, the texts to be translated will be biographical and historical texts from a digital humanities project on intellectuals displaced from fascist Italy. Select translations from the latter project will be published under the student’s own name in the host institution's portal: https://intellettualinfuga.com/.

Faculty

• Tristana Rorandelli

First-Year Studies—Year

Different historians trace the invention of homosexuality to different historical moments, from the 16th to the mid-19th centuries. The invention of heterosexuality, it would seem, followed after. Certainly the term “heterosexual” appeared only after the term “homosexual” was coined in the later 19th century. Neither meant, at first, what they mean today. In this course, we will study the development of modern understandings of same-sex desire in relation to understandings of sex, gender, race, class, nation, nature, culture, and opposite-sex desire. We will be drawing centrally on literary works, especially novels, which have been crucial sites for the construction and dissemination of modern conceptions of sexuality. But we will also be reading histories, science, laws, letters, and polemics, and watching films. Although we will be considering some earlier materials, we will focus on two periods: first, from the 1880s to the 1960s; then, the 1960s to the present. By the 1880s, almost everyone agrees, a recognizably modern understanding of homosexuality was becoming available. The sexual/cultural landscapes that subsequently developed were not radically rearranged until the 1960s, when the gay and women’s liberation movements insisted on a political analysis of sexuality. Over the past 50 years, that political analysis and the activism it has fostered have had profound consequences for LGBT lives and cultural presences, even as earlier understandings still persist. This course will serve as an introduction to a broad range of modern literature; to fundamental works in the history of sexuality and contemporary queer studies; and to critical thinking about how we talk, read, and write about sex. Although class materials will be generally focused on Europe and North America from the 1880s to the present, and conference work may deal with histories, politics, or cultural works from this context, conference projects may also be focused on other times and places. The class will be based on students’ discussion of our materials, which will be read on paper. Electronic devices will generally not be permitted in class, and use of artificial intelligence (AI) will not be allowed. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Faculty

• Julie Abraham

First-Year Studies—Year

As our societies address the challenges of climate change, it is important that we explore the implications of the concept of “nature” in the Western and Judeo-Christian tradition. In this course, we will read literary classics—such as Sophocles, Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison, among many others—and examine how they represent the environment, animals and the natural world in ways that directly shape our own perception of nature. We will take different approaches by comparing, for example, stories of world creation from Indigenous nations with narratives taken from the Bible and Greek and Roman texts, or exploring the combination of Celtic magic and Christian symbolism in medieval Arthurian romances, or examining how the aesthetic concept of the sublime is present in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as well as in the written account of the Lewis and Clark expedition up the Missouri River. Going in different directions, we will analyze how feminism developed new ways of relating to nature as counter-narratives to masculine domination, explore the questions of science, machines and technology, or examine how writers and philosophers have integrated animals in their thinking as a way to move beyond the “human-ist” understanding of nature inherited from European Renaissance. In previous iterations of this first-year studies course, students have developed a variety of personal projects: from how flowers are featured in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, or how a community farm in the Bronx challenges outdated urban-planning decisions, to the depiction of nature in Hayao Miyazaki’s films or in Jane Austen’s novels. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside weekly small group activities.

Faculty

• Eric Leveau

Open, Lecture—Fall

Without the literature of classical antiquity, William Shakespeare would not—and could not—have written some of his most beloved plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, The Comedy of Errors, and The Tempest—not to mention his two longer poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece—all owe much of their plot, style, form, and content to authors such as Ovid, Virgil, Plautus, and Lucan. This course will explore Shakespeare’s relationship with the literature of ancient Greece and Rome and the opportunities that literature afforded him for exploring ideas of gender, sexuality, politics, race, class, and the connection between past and present. Reading works like Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the plays of Plautus and Terence alongside Shakespeare’s plays and poems, students will explore the formation of literary canon and tradition, gain familiarity with some major works of classical antiquity, and discover Shakespeare’s complex, innovative approach to the authors who shaped his education and literary milieu. In your work for this course, students will chart Shakespeare’s transformation of classical works, learn to engage with and evaluate early modern printed books, and master not only Shakespeare’s English, but the ancient source material from which his most compelling drama springs. As we discuss Shakespeare’s relationship to his classical counterparts, we will gain a new understanding of the ways Shakespeare’s use of literature of the past came to define the social, sexual, and political structures of our present.

Faculty

• Katherine Horgan

Open, Seminar—Fall

Virginia Woolf was a novelist of the future: a hyper-modern literary innovator, a pioneer of psychological forms, a theorist of gender and sexuality, and champion of women’s literary progress whose radical vision revolutionized literature of the 20th century. Woolf’s thinking about the future, however, was grounded in an equally robust fascination with the past. Throughout her fiction and nonfiction writing, Woolf articulates an insatiable need for history’s stabilizing, guiding, and authorizing power—a history that she, and queer women authors at large—often lacked. This course will explore Virginia Woolf’s career-long mission to write the history she—and women writers at large—needed to support her literary endeavors. We will examine how Woolf made and remade literary history for herself in works of criticism, such as the first and second Common Readers, and in novels such as To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, and Between the Acts. Charting Woolf’s idea of literature from antiquity, through the Middle Ages and early modernity, to the 20th century, we will read Woolf’s criticism alongside excerpts from the historical texts that inspired it, such as Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Sappho’s fragments, Dickens’ David Copperfield and Brontë’s Jane Eyre. We will chart the ways Woolf assembles female characters and authors from literature of the past and attend to the ways her fictions both attempt to fill the gendered gaps of history and move marginalized figures to the center of literary conversations. Students will become familiar with feminist, queer theoretical, new-historical, and post-colonial approaches to Woolf’s work as we discuss issues of canonicity, reception, gender, sexuality, and authorship. Throughout the course, we will think through the ways other marginalized peoples—especially queer people, trans people, and people of color—have struggled to restore their own buried histories, and the ways in which Woolf’s methods might aid, hinder, damage, and support these ongoing projects. As Woolf well knew, one needs a past to imagine a future: in this course we will take the real lessons Woolf gives us in recovering pasts to create a history that is lively, reparative, and ultimately, generative.

Faculty

• Katherine Horgan

Open, Seminar—Fall

Tom Stoppard, born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, died in late November of 2025. For much of his life, Stoppard was widely considered among the greatest of contemporary English-language playwrights, and at his death, compared to both Shakespeare and Shaw. Over this semester, we will read and think about a number of Stoppard's greatest plays, and in seminar discussions, we will go wherever the plays take us. Stoppard dramatized the mind and defended the body: he was always funny, never only funny, and invariably worth our attention, which we will now give him.

Faculty

• Frederic Smoler

Open, Seminar—Year

In this seminar, we will examine the First and Second World Wars, two vast and savage armed conflicts which shaped the 20th century and its aftermath. In the first semester, we will study the course, outcome, and aftermath of the First World War, and our syllabus will focus on theories of the war’s origins, some of its literature and its representation in other media, the logic of its development, the experience of combat, the experience of the home fronts, and the effect of the war on cultural history, including the much-debated question of the war’s relationship to modernism and modernity. The second semester will focus on the Second World War, and we will be looking at many of the same questions. Our own era remains shaped by the memories of these wars and by their outcomes and afterlives. Both wars shaped and reshaped our cultures, including our understanding of the nature of war itself, which in their wake we have successively mythologized, demythologized, re-mythologized, and serially reimagined. Memories and interpretations of these wars have produced the rise and fall of modern ideas of the heroic, the false heroic, the anti-heroic, and the post-heroic. We shall explore all of these ideas.

Faculty

• Frederic Smoler

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year

Against the backdrop of the bloodiest half-century in human history, continental European culture produced an astonishingly rich and diverse body of lyric poetry. Robert Frost famously remarked that "poetry is what gets lost in translation," but the unmistakable genius of modern European poetry largely survives its passage into English, thanks to the inspired efforts of its translators. In this course, we will learn to hear the voices they have made available to English-language readers, often comparing multiple translations of a single poem, or referring to the original in bilingual editions. We will read selections from twelve poets translated from seven languages: Cavafy, Valéry, Rilke, Trakl, Pessoa, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Lorca, Cernuda, Montale, and Celan.

Faculty

• Neil Arditi

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year

In popular culture, Dante’s name is virtually synonymous with his Inferno and associations of fire and brimstone. Yet, in the Divine Comedy the point is to leave hell: to emerge from darkness into the light and steadily climb the mountain of Purgatorio in order to ascend to Paradiso, to experience the love that moves the sun and other stars, the divinity that underlies all things and is our true nature. Much more than of the diabolical, Dante is a poet of divine love: “I am one who when / Love breathes in me, I take note, and as / it dictates within, so I go signifying” (Purgatorio 24.52-4). For Dante, poetry becomes a vehicle of truth when it is itself moved by the love that is not merely a passing feeling, but the very ground of being. This course will be an exploration into the ways Dante is a poet and philosopher of love, truth, and being. In the fall, we will embark on a close reading of all three realms of the Comedy, paying particular attention to these themes, and the way Dante’s poetry is both profoundly philosophical and even more profoundly experiential. In writing the Comedy, Dante seeks to transform not only his life but also our own: he writes “to remove those living in this life from a state of misery and bring them into a state of happiness” (Letter to Can Grande XIII.39). So, to read the Comedy is to read our own lives into the poem and to read the poem into our own lives. In the spring, we will read Dante’s philosophical treatise, the Convivio (the Banquet), as well as selections from his treatise on language, On Eloquence in the Vernacular, and on politics, Monarchy. Alongside these texts, we will read Dante’s major philosophical sources, especially Aristotle, his Arabic commentators, and Thomas Aquinas. All the while, we will revisit selected cantos from the Comedy, grouped by philosophical themes such as the essence of human happiness, vice and virtue, and the prime mover—being, truth, and love.

Faculty

• Joseph Romano

Open, Seminar—Spring

The conflation of Russian nationalism and Russian imperialism that so often marks our understanding of cultural production in the Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet spaces has often gone unnoticed in the West. As the extraordinary resistance of Ukraine in the face of current Russian aggression makes clear, a remapping of that literary landscape is long overdue. This course will supply some historical context while centering our attention on the remarkable flowering of Polish, Belarusian, and Ukrainian literature currently underway. We will begin with the curious emptiness of Russian nationalism as expressed first in Russian-American journalist M. Gessen’s recent contribution to This American Life, “Eight Fights,” and then in a classic text of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1831). While still in the 19th century, we will make a brief foray into Polish and Ukrainian literature as written at a time when neither Poland nor Ukraine existed as sovereign nations: our reading here will include Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz’s long narrative poem “Pan Tadeusz” and then in a classic text of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1834); a few shorter poems by the Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko; and a few short stories by the Ukrainian writer Mikolay Hohol, better known by his Russian name, Nikolai Gogol. We will then jump to the 20th century with Viktor Shklovsky’s account of the Bolshevik Revolution in Sentimental Journey (1921). With the Russian empire re-established now in Soviet terms, we will trace the rise of contemporary Polish, Belarusian, and Ukrainian literature in turn. In the Polish context, we will read Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles (1934) as written in the shadow of the Nazi invasion; Witold Gombrowicz’s gender-bending tale of post-World War II exile in Trans-Atlantyk (1953); and watch Andrzej Wajda’s tribute to the Solidarity movement in his 1977 film, Man of Marble. We will then finish with the 21st century and 2018 Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights (2007). For Belarus, we will return to World War II with The Ordeal (1972), first as originally written by the Soviet-Belarusian writer Vasil Bykaŭ (in Russian, Vasilii Bykov) and then as adapted by Soviet-Ukrainian filmmaker Larisa Shepitko in her 1977 film, The Ascent. We will then read Voices From Chernobyl (1997) by the 2015 Nobel Prize-winning writer, Svetlana Alexievich. From Alexievich’s Russian-language account of a disaster that struck Belarusians and Ukrainians alike, we will turn to Markiian Kamysh’s more narrowly Ukrainian reflection on life after Chernobyl, Stalking the Atomic City (2014), before exploring just a few of the works that mark the vibrant contemporary Ukrainian scene: Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996), Evgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks (2022), Serhiy Zhadan’s The Orphanage (2017), and Halyna Kruk’s recent collection of poems, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails (2023).

Faculty

• Melissa Frazier

Open, Small Lecture—Spring

Why do people believe the promises of tyrants? How do you tell the difference between truth and lies? How do people use words to gain power over others? How can we stop them from doing so? These questions worried Renaissance readers as much as they worry us today. Taking their cue from their predecessors in antiquity—Plato, Cicero, Caesar, and many others—the early moderns were fascinated by rhetoric, or the study of persuasive speech. While they rejoiced in rhetoric’s power to create the charming poems and plays that enchant us to this day, authors like Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Milton were equally worried about the power of words to dominate, control, and even to shape reality according to the will of the speaker. In this course, we will examine some of history’s most famous tyrants through the literature of early modernity—Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Richard III, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko—as well as the ancient texts that underpinned the Renaissance discussion of rhetoric: Gorgias’ Helen, Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus, Cicero’s De Oratore, Lucan’s Bellum Civile. In our examination of these texts, we will ask how tyrants create themselves, how they gain power over others, and how they establish, repeat, and amplify vocabularies of oppression, gaining power over real-world institutions through their control of language. We will then extend our study to the ways tyranny works outside of the political sphere: in relationships, in the home, and in society at large. As we will come to understand through our reading, the tyrant’s most disturbing legacy is not his power to self-create, but his power to limit the self-creation of others. In close reading the texts that contain these tyrants and their victims, students will come to understand that tyranny—and its resistance—begins at the level of the individual word.

Faculty

• Katherine Horgan

Open, Seminar—Spring

Sappho has been famous for a very long time: born in the sixth century BCE (a couple hundred years after Homer), Sappho has been considered one of the greatest poets of the western canon for millennia, a writer whose poetry has influenced authors from Plato to Anne Carson. Sappho’s fame was such that it outlived even her poems: today, Sappho’s poetry survives only in 600 fragments, with only one complete poem remaining. This course will consider the reception of Sappho—as both a literary character and a corpus of poetry—over 2,600 years. Beginning with the composition of her poems, we will discuss the possible contexts of their creation, their critical reception, and their thematic material. We will also explore the formation of Sappho as a character, in plays, poems, and testimonia and her simultaneous characterization as the Tenth Muse, the gender-bending personification of queer erotic desire, and the self-destroying victim of cultural forces. As we chart the intertwined reception of both poems and character over two millennia—through Plato, Menander, Catullus, Horace, Boccaccio, Sidney, Donne, Katherine Philips, Swinburne, H.D., Woolf, Mary Barnard, Anne Carson, and many others—students will become familiar with the larger currents of Sappho’s long afterlife. We will gain experience applying a variety of theories and methodologies, including lyric theory, historicism, queer theory and historiography, book history, feminist theory, and reception theory. Through our reading, we will come to understand that the only question more interesting than who Sappho was is the question of what she has meant to people over time and what about her poetry, persona, and potential has kept us going back to her for more than 20 centuries.

Faculty

• Katherine Horgan

Open, Seminar—Spring

Some of the greatest dramatic literature is set in an era preceding its composition. This is always true of a form of dramatic literature we usually call by a different name (Plato’s dialogues), but it is also true of some of the most celebrated drama—plays we identify with the core of the Western theatrical tradition (for example, much of Greek tragedy)—and it is very famously true of some of the greatest work by Shakespeare, Schiller, and Corneille. Some of the best contemporary playwrights also set some of their work in the past: Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, and The Coast of Utopia are all, in one or another sense, history plays. Setting a play in the past can create and exploit dramatic irony (the audience knows the history to come, the protagonists usually cannot), but there is no single reason for setting a play in the past. For some playwrights, history provided the grandest kind of spectacle, a site of splendid and terrible (hence dramatic) events. Their treatment of the past may not depict it as radically discontinuous with the present or necessarily different in kind. Other playwrights may make the past setting little more than an allegory of the present; Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) seems to be a celebration of Victorian liberal imperialism. The playwright may set work in the past as part of an urgent analysis of the origins of his own situation: Michael Frayn’s fascinating play, Benefactors, was written in 1984 but set in the late 1960’s and attempted to locate the causes of the then-recent collapse of political liberalism, seeking in history an answer that could be found only there. But another of Frayn’s plays with a historical setting, Copenhagen, does not necessarily focus on something irretrievably past; its interests may rather be concentrated on a living problem of undiminished urgency. Peter Weiss’s Marat/ Sade, arguably the most successful work of 1960’s political theatre, was a history play focused on what then seemed the explicit and unbreakable link between late 18th century politics and the politics of the present. A play by Alan Bennett, The History Boys, sought to illuminate something about the political present by examining a changing fashion in the teaching of history. In this course, we will read a number of works of dramatic literature, all of them, in one sense or another, history plays, written for various purposes and of generally very high quality. We may or may not discover anything common to all history plays, but we will read some good books.

Faculty

• Frederic Smoler

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Spring

Marcel Proust’s multivolume novel In Search of Lost Time is a towering monument of 20th-century literature, one that continues to fascinate and intimidate readers to this day. At its heart, Proust’s novel traces the intellectual and sentimental development of its narrator as he moves from childhood to adulthood, eventually discovering his vocation as a writer. Through its historical arc, the novel also portrays the nuances of a French society transitioning from the late 19th to the early 20th century. One of the main goals of this course will be to understand Proust’s contributions to the novel in the age of modernism and modernity. We will see how he pushed the limits of the genre by blurring the boundaries between fiction, autobiography, and essay, and we will analyze in detail his singular style characterized by a digressive prose rich in associations. We will also explore how the expansiveness of Proust’s narrative allows for the inclusion of extensive reflections on a vast variety of different topics: time, memory, art, social class, sexuality, jealousy, religion, history, speech, and the writing of life itself. Our primary focus will be on a close reading of the novel in order to better understand Proust’s narrative, voice, and worldview. We will read in English translation the first volume, Swann’s Way, and the final volume, Time Regained, in their entirety, alongside key scenes from other volumes. We will also read a selection of secondary texts that adopt different approaches to reading Proust, including biography, psychology, sociology, gender studies, and philosophy. In conference, students will be able to explore diverse aspects of Proust’s novel in more depth, or pursue projects that help us situate Proust in his literary, historical, and cultural contexts.

Faculty

• Jason Earle

Open, Large seminar—Fall

The impact of The Beatles has been immeasurable. In their seven years as an international touring and recording band, they explored and enlarged every aspect of song-writing technique, producing musical milestones with almost every album. This course will trace the development of The Beatles chronologically and will focus on the ways the Beatles used harmony, phrase structure, rhythm, structural ambiguity, sonority and production techniques in continuously innovative and beautiful ways. The background to this course will be the political events and social transformations of the 1960s, as well as the musical styles and cultural phenomena that The Beatles assimilated and transformed. No previous musical training or experience is required.

Faculty

• Martin Goldray

Open, Large seminar—Year

Jazz music of all styles and periods will be listened to, analyzed, and discussed. The course will begin with a study in the history of slavery that began in 1619 in the United States. Time will be spent on understanding what led to two unique American art forms of music, blues and jazz, that are related but early on take separate and very different paths. Skills in listening to and enjoying some of the finer points of the music will be enhanced by the study of elements such as rhythm, form, melody, timbre, phrasing, instrumentation, instrumental technique, style, and one of the most important and defining elements of the music, improvisation. We will initially discover and listen to music in a chronological order so as to clearly understand the developments of the music through time. Once the foundational elements of this music have been studied and established, special emphasis will be placed on the development of modern jazz and its relationship to older styles. Some topics to be studied: Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, roots and development of the Big Band Sound, Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, lineage of pianists, horn players, evolution of the rhythm section, Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, bebop, cool jazz, jazz of the 1960s and 1970s, fusion and jazz-rock, jazz of the 1980s, and modern trends. The crossover of jazz into other styles of modern music, such as rock and R&B, will be discussed, as will the influence that modern concert music and world music has had on jazz styles creating third stream music and more. In the second semester, we will look at the clear and direct influence that jazz had on rock ’n’ roll and groups like The Allman Brothers Band, Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Chicago, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and on and on.

Faculty

• Glenn Alexander

Open, Lecture—Spring

We will begin in Babel itself, the ancient site of Babylon, where archaeologists have discovered many tablets about music. Nearby sites have the earliest examples of musical notation, some dating as far back as 1400 BCE. We will learn some aspects of how their music worked and begin building a vocabulary for talking about and notating music in general. Across the course of the semester, we will learn many different musical languages, such as the music of Ancient Greece, the old court music of Japan, drum ensembles of central Africa, and the world of European classical music. We will also delve into many different modern musics, including the rise of sampling and turntablism in hip-hop, the theory of so-called “atonal” music, and the development of electronic sound. In short, the course will be devoted to learning a sampling of crucial aspects of the multitudinous vocabularies and grammars that pervade music across the world and across time. No prior study of nor the ability to read music is required. By the end of the semester, students will be able to read basic musical ideas in a few different notation systems and will have some understanding of important aspects of not only standard European music theories but also many others that are too-often learned only by specialists.

Faculty

• Patrick Muchmore

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is one of the most influential philosophers and historians of the second half of the 20th century, famous for developing Nietzsche’s thesis that knowledge is not a progressive quest for objective truth, but a historical construct produced in the service of socio-political power structures. Our readings will trace a gradual evolution in Foucault’s thinking on power, from perceiving it as a mechanism of control (confinement, exclusion, incarceration, and punishment, but also curing, disciplining, educating, and surveilling) to perceiving it as a mechanism of producing pleasure (through practices, regulations, and inhibitions of sexuality as well as their transgressions). Foucault’s special talent is his capacity to produce, through historical study and insight, new narratives and perspectives, which can alter our understanding of our history, our culture, our institutions, our upbringing, and ourselves in the deepest and most unexpected ways. When it works (and much of it depends on our own commitment to the reading process), his writing can liberate us from bonds and preconceptions we never even knew we had. This will be a guided reading and discussion-centered seminar, with weekly reading responses. For the conference component of the course—unless you have a well-defined and executable alternative in mind, which we would agree upon in advance—each student will conduct an independent study of one philosophical text of their choice out of a list of options. Options will include philosophers who influenced Foucault, such as Plato and Nietzsche, and ones whose thought was influenced by him, such as Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler.

Faculty

• Roy Ben-Shai

Open, Small Lecture—Year

Philosophy is deeply entwined with comedy. In fall, we shall begin by studying their relation in the ancient world. Plato, like the comic playwright Aristophanes, saw the relation of philosophy to common sense as inherently comical. Plato and Aristophanes will be our main focus in fall, though we may take a look at other writers, such as Xenophon, Lucian, Apuleius, Terence, and the Roman satirists. In spring, our focus will be on the use of comedy to introduce modern science and on the use of comedy to oppose fanaticism, religious or otherwise. Some authors we may draw on are Kepler and Galileo, Shaftesbury, Kant, and Heine. In group conference, we will read selections from Montaigne’s Essays. Students will be expected to bring written questions on the reading to each class; they may also be asked to give short, informal presentations on the reading, possibly in groups. Logs of questions and notes for presentations will be submitted at the end of each semester. In addition, students will be asked to submit short responses to the readings for class and group conference, and at the end of the semester to submit a portfolio of these.

Faculty

• Abraham Anderson

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year

Despite frequent pleas for unity from United States presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, alongside the rise of groups such as BridgeUSA, Third Way, and No Labels to promote political centrism and compromise, the seemingly never-ending sociopolitical polarization appears to be the new norm in American political life—and it may not have reached its violent peak back in January 2021. To many politicians, pundits, and others alike, the social and political scene in the United States in the 21st century appears to be one of turmoil, disagreement, division, and instability. We regularly hear about a polarized and deadlocked political class; we read about increasing class and religious differences—from the alleged divides between Wall Street and Main Street to those who are secular and those who are religious; and we often see disturbing, dangerous, and violent images and actions from various politically-oriented groups. This seminar will look at the history of division in America and explore the puzzle of how to move on from this divided state. While the course will briefly examine the veracity of these recent impressions of the American sociopolitical scene, we will center our course on the question: Is policymaking forever deadlocked, or can real political progress be made? Moreover, what are the social and policy implications of polarization? How does the nation govern and function in the Trumpian political epoch, and are the political parties representing the will of the people? What about the impact of the 2024 elections? What are we to make of the frequent calls for change and for healing America’s divisions? In this seminar, we will examine these questions and deeper aspects of American political culture today. Covering a lot of ground from America’s founding to today, after reviewing some basics of the political economy, students will study American political cultures from a variety of vantage points with a number of different stories emerging. We will look at numerous aspects of American social and political life—from examining the masses, political elites, Congress, and policymaking communities to social movements, the media, and America’s position in a global community—all with a focus on policy and moving the country forward. This course will be driven by data, not dogma. We will use modern political-economy approaches based in logic and evidence to find answers to contemporary public-policy problems and questions of polarization. The material will be treated as social scientists, not as ideologues. Students should anticipate extensive reading. Comfort with data and statistics will be expected.

Faculty

• Samuel Abrams

Open, Seminar—Fall

The Christian Apostle Paul has left a profound legacy to the history of Western thought. His theology is preserved for us in a handful of letters which are included in the canon of the Christian New Testament. We will study Paul in the context of the Hellenistic culture of which he was a part in order to better understand his ideas and appreciate their place in the emerging world of Christianity. This will include studying Greek Religion, the Mystery Cults and religious gender roles in ancient Greece. In this course we will learn to read ancient texts closely, practice exegesis, and exercise the hermeneutical art. How can a modern reader access the world of a writer separated by nearly two millennia, a writer whose thoughts have been continually reinterpreted and sown into the fabric of Western culture to such a degree that any reading necessarily embodies this complex interpretive tradition—blurring the world of the Apostle with the interests and agendas of the succeeding centuries?

Faculty

• Ron Afzal

Open, Seminar—Year

The Hebrew Bible stands at the foundation of Western culture. Its stories permeate our literature, our art—indeed, our sense of identity. Its ideas inform our laws, have given birth to our revolutions and social movements, and have thereby made most of our social institutions possible (as well as the movements to remove them). What is this book? How was it written? Who wrote it? Who preserved it for us? Why has all or part of this body of literature been considered holy to the practitioners of Judaism and Christianity? Four thousand years ago, various groups from small tribe-wandering nomads would get together and tell stories. These stories were not preserved on stone tombs but in the hearts and memories of the people to whom they belonged. We will read the collection of traditions in a book called Genesis and compare these stories with other texts (written in mud and stone) such as The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Babylonian Creation Epic, which were contemporary with biblical traditions. We will read the Biblical epic of liberation, Exodus; the historical books that weave theology into a history of a nation; and the oracles of the great Hebrew Prophets of Israel—those reformers, judges, priests, mystics, and poets to whom modern culture owes its grasp of justice. We will trace the social, intellectual, and political history of the people formed by these traditions from the Late Bronze Age until the Roman Age.

Faculty

• Ron Afzal

Open, Seminar—Spring

There is perhaps no one who has not heard the name of a seemingly obscure carpenter’s son, executed by the Romans around the year 33 CE. Why? His friends and followers preserved the memory of his life and teaching orally and then, after the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE, in written records we have today in the Christian Bible’s New Testament. This course will focus on the Synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Why were they written, what do they have to say, and how were they intended to be read? To do this, we will immerse ourselves in the religion of the Holy Land—that is, the various forms of Judaism and the role of the dominant world empire of Rome. Our study will consist mainly of primary texts in the New Testament, but we will also have recourse to some rabbinic materials, as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Faculty

• Ron Afzal

Open, Lecture—Fall

This lecture will introduce major areas of study in the sociology of deviance, detention, and illegality through a global and transnational lens. Rather than asking simply why individuals break rules, the course will examine how societies create rules, decide who counts as a problem, and build institutions to manage that decision, from everyday policing to migration control and humanitarian governance. We will begin by learning about foundational theories by Émile Durkheim on anomie and the social function of deviance, Robert Merton’s strain theory, and later developments including conflict theory, labeling theory, stigma, and the controversial “broken windows” model. These frameworks will provide tools for understanding how behaviors become categorized as criminal, pathological, risky, or merely tolerated—and why those distinctions rarely fall evenly across populations. From there the course will move outward to contemporary forms of regulation and global population management. Readings will examine detention regimes, border enforcement, and the administration of displaced populations, alongside transnational sectors where legality is negotiated rather than fixed, with case studies including industrial fishing and maritime labor exploitation (Ian Urbina’s The Outlaw Ocean), informal and illicit global trade (Carolyn Nordstrom’s Global Outlaws), and transnational sex work and trafficking (Christine Chin and Kimberly Hoang). Through these cases, students will consider how states, markets, and humanitarian institutions classify people as “deviant,” “criminal,” or “illegal,” and how those categories function as tools of governance and political leverage. The course will also explore resistance movements such as prison hunger strikes, struggles against apartheid, undocumented activism, and other social movements that challenge official classifications and reshape public discourse and morality. We will conclude by examining how the COVID-19 pandemic produced new forms of deviance tied to public health, surveillance, and biopolitical regulation, which reveal how quickly norms of acceptable behavior can shift under conditions of crisis. Conference work will be conducted in collaborative research groups. Each group will produce a portfolio on a chosen topic related to deviance, detention, or illegality, including presentations, guided discussions, and individual critical essays that integrate theoretical and empirical material from the course. By the end of the semester, students should be able to see deviance not as a property of particular people but as an ongoing social process—one through which societies define order, distribute punishment, and negotiate belonging.

Faculty

• Parthiban Muniandy

Open, Seminar—Year

What kinds of social worlds emerge when people are expected to live temporarily for years or decades? Across the contemporary world, refugees, undocumented migrants, and other displaced populations inhabit spaces organized around waiting, in camps, detention regimes, asylum systems, informal settlements, and humanitarian infrastructures. Yet these are not only sites of crisis. They are places where families form, schools struggle to operate, economies stabilize, and political movements grow, even in environments designed to prevent permanence. This seminar will examine displacement not simply as movement across borders but as a reorganization of time, legality, belonging, and everyday coexistence. We will explore how people become categorized as “temporary”—asylum seekers, guest workers, foreign laborers, seasonal migrants—and what this status does to their lives, rights, and futures. The course will situate migration within broader global realities: more than a billion people move internally or internationally, while climate change, conflict, and economic restructuring continue to produce new forms of displacement and precariousness. We will ask how states manage mobility, why certain populations become national “problems,” and how migrants craft livable worlds within administrative uncertainty. Readings will introduce key theoretical approaches to citizenship, governance, and mobility, including Hannah Arendt on statelessness and the “right to have rights,” Giorgio Agamben on exception and camp rule, Michel Foucault on discipline and regulation, and Aihwa Ong on flexible citizenship and graduated sovereignty. Ethnographic and urban scholarship from Liisa Malkki, Didier Fassin, Miriam Ticktin, Peter Nyers, Asef Bayat, and Ananya Roy anchor these ideas in everyday practice, while literary and climate perspectives—including Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement—push us to think beyond policy frameworks toward imagination, narrative, and planetary change. We will also examine how displacement is represented across media—photography, film, fiction, and interactive worlds—and how societies are responding to an era increasingly defined by hyper-diversity and permanent precarity. The seminar will be writing-intensive and research-oriented. Students will practice observation and analytic writing throughout the semester and develop a conference project based on an original research question related to migration, bordering practices, or urban coexistence. Students will be encouraged to experiment with unconventional forms of analysis and storytelling that grapple with vulnerability, temporariness, and being out-of-place in the contemporary world.

Faculty

• Parthiban Muniandy

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Year

Much of our lives are spent dealing with organizations in one fashion or another. They are a staple of our everyday lives, whether directly or indirectly: 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 not only within sociology, but also within the fields of public and business administration. This course is designed to address the veracity of the claims made on behalf of bureaucracies, as well as critiques directed at organizational theory and behavior. Our overarching objective is to examine 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. Starting 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 Grey 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, and its attendant outcomes. For conference, working in small groups, participants will undertake primary research on a specific aspect of organizational practice at Sarah Lawrence College. Possible topics include an examination of space and design, changes in the student body and/or curricular design, the shift from same sex to co-education at the College, workers’ struggles at the College, outsourcing of certain college offices/tasks, attendant processes of decision making, student and/or faculty governance and organization, the College board and donors, community partnerships and/or the relationship between the school and its environs. To facilitate research in the College archives, we will rely on and work with our College Archivist who will provide us with her knowledge and expertise. Other than historical research based on the College Archives, interviews with present and past faculty, administrators, donors, alums or some combination of these sources could also be drawn upon for conference work. Finally, students will be expected to tie their analyses to larger questions such as the political economy of education, institutional structures, social movements, and struggles for change.

Faculty

• Shahnaz Rouse

Advanced, Seminar—Year

In recent years, gender and nationalism have been at the center of local, national, and global politics and concerns in the United States, but also globally. Starting with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, attempts to overturn availability of contraception in numerous states in the United States, as well as at the national level, struggles over gender and/or heteronormativity continue to be ongoing. Overall, nationalism can be understood as a project simultaneously involving construction(s) of bodies, memory, history, and identity. In this seminar, we will identify the multiple and shifting dimensions of nationalism as a world historical phenomenon. Central to our focus will be the centrality and particular constructions of gender in different national projects. Attention will be paid to nationalism in its colonial and contemporary trajectories. Questions to be addressed will include the following: What is the relationship between nationalism and identity? Which symbols/languages are called upon to produce/evoke collective identity? What are the various inclusions, exclusions, and silences that particular historically-constituted nationalisms involve? Is nationalism necessarily a positive force? If not, under what circumstances, in what ways, and for whom does it pose problems? What is the relationship of nationalism(s) to socially and politically marginalized groups? How is pluralism and difference constructed and treated? How do the same issues, such as those regarding cultural authenticity and identity, take on a different meaning at diverse historical moments? How is the insider/outsider relationship conceptualized, and what shifts occur in different periods? Women have been interpellated and have participated within nationalist movements in a variety of ways. The dynamics and contradictions of such involvement will be analyzed closely. We will strive to explore the implications of these processes for women's and non-binary individuals' sense of self, citizenship, and belonging at specific periods and over time. In the spring semester, we will turn our attention more specifically to performances of nationalism through institutional and popular cultural arrangements. Under the former category, we will look at issues of migration, immigration, and exile; public policy and international relations; war and conflict. In the arena of popular culture, we will examine the production of nationalism(s) through the mass media, sports, film, museums and exhibitions, and tourism. Conference work can include an examination of a specific nationalist movement, theoretical issues pertaining to nationalism(s), memory, identity, performances of nationalism(s) in popular culture and the mass media, and the interplay between institutional and everyday constructions of nationalism in specific settings.

Faculty

• Shahnaz Rouse

Open, Seminar—Fall

A multi genre course involving practice in the elements of writing, and an exploration of structures that help put apparently unrelated pieces together to make a whole. We will write short weekly pieces focusing on time, character, place, dialogue, pacing, and editing, then use what's significant in our work to create a series of episodes that reverberate against each other. Weekly assignments, along with 100-word pieces to sharpen editing skills, will be assigned. Conference work will involve using what we have done and revising, arranging, or creating new episodes and an overall sense of structure. Readings will include essays, poems, and fiction, in an anthology from many times and places, with a focus on the ways people have put significant words together.

Faculty

• Myra Goldberg

Open, Seminar—Spring

This course will be an opportunity to write from life, in any genre, from overheard conversations, beloved landscapes, old photographs, memories, and events happening around us, public and private, in dormitories, families, commuter trains and cars, on our phones, laptops, in nature, shops, laundromats, campus walks, classrooms and dinner tables. We will carry notebooks at times and use our notes as the start of weekly pieces, and we will transform short practice pieces into a longer work for conference work. Students will be asked to bring in and present writing that is meaningful to them and connect it to our focus.

Faculty

• Myra Goldberg

Open, Seminar—Spring

Who doesn’t love Frog and Toad? Have you ever wanted to write something like it—or like Charlotte’s Web or A Snowy Day? Why do our favorites work so well and so (almost) universally? We will begin by reading books we know and books we missed and discuss what makes them so good. We will be looking at read-to books, early readers, instructional books for children, rude books, chapter books, books about friendship, and (possibly) young adult books. We may consider what good children’s history and biography might be like. We will talk about the place of the visual, the careful and conscious use of language, notions of appropriateness, and what works at various age reading levels. Invariably, we will talk about childhood, our own and as part of an ever-changing set of social conditions. We will try our hand at writing picture books, early readers, friendship stories, collections of poems like Mother Goose. Conference works have involved making a finished children’s book for any age, a chapter of a middle school book, an educational game, meaningful items of dress, and anything else you can talk me into that will speak to the class.

Faculty

• Myra Goldberg

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 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." This is not a history or a literature course; our lens will be that of a writer, using deep study and playful practice to figure out the dilemmas and best practices of the present. Although this is a lecture course, students will be asked to participate, improvise, and work with a partner, as well as participate in one seminar a week, which will function as a writing workshop. At the end of the course, students will be asked to present what they have learned in the form of an 8- to 10-page letter—to your partner, to me, or to anyone else you choose, living or dead—addressing some of our class questions and your responses to them. The only expectation is the courage to think out loud with other people—a.k.a. the courage required to learn.

Faculty

• Suzanne Gardinier