History

This course will provide a broad introduction to the political, social, cultural, and intellectual history of the Middle East from the late 18th century to the present. After a brief conceptual overview, the course will draw upon a wide array of primary and secondary sources to illuminate the manifold transformations and processes that have contributed over time to shaping what has meant to be “modern” in this remarkably diverse and dynamic region. Particular attention will be paid to the following themes: the question of modernization and reform within the Ottoman and Qajar empires; the experience of different forms of European imperialism in the Middle East; the integration of the Middle East into the world economy; World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire; state-building in both colonial and postcolonial contexts; transformations in religious thought; changing family norms and gender roles and the genesis of Middle Eastern women’s movements; nationalism; class politics, social movements, and revolution; Zionism and the Israel-Palestine conflict; post-World War II geopolitics and the Cold War in the Middle East; Nasserism and pan-Arabism; the role of United States power in the Middle East; the origins and spread of political Islam; the political economy of oil; globalization and neoliberalism; and the impact of various new cultural forms and media on the formation of identities across the region. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

“History is not merely something to read,” James Baldwin wrote in August 1965. “And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all we do.” This course will be focused not only on history—what we consciously and unconsciously carry within us—but on the acquisition of skills that will help you both as a college student and in life. Using the voices of the actors themselves, we will study the political and cultural work of Americans in order to read better, think better, write better, and articulate our ideas more effectively and persuasively. Rather than a representative survey of cultural history (which is, in this wonderfully diverse country, impossible), this course will take up the popular and the obscure, looking into the corners of American life for ideas, thoughts, and experiences of all kinds. Our focus will be on the themes of gender, race, and class but will ponder sexuality, region, religion, immigration, and migration, among other themes. It will be based on a spine of political history. The expectation is that students will come with some knowledge and will be attentive to what they do not know and will go find out about it! Class will revolve around close readings of stories, cultural criticism, speeches, novels, and memoirs—mostly, but not exclusively, published—where authors work to change the minds of their readers. Those primary sources will be buttressed by articles and chapters from history textbooks. It will be challenging! This course will ask you to read more substantial work, more carefully, than perhaps you have before. We will discuss this work in seminar in both small groups and large; and at the end of each semester, there will be an oral exhibition pulling together the themes of the course in a meaningful way. This intellectual practice will ready you for your college career to come. In fall, we will cover the late 18th century to the late 19th century; in spring, we will move from the turn into the 20th century to near its end. Texts will include short stories, poetry, memoir, letters, and (in spring) film. Fall examples include Thomas Paine’s Common Sense; the seduction novel Charlotte Temple by Suzanna Rowson; poetry by Phillis Wheatley; an unpublished novel on gender fluidity, titled The Hermaphrodite, by Julia Ward Howe; short stories by Herman Melville; Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott; and Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger. The spring book list will reflect the interests of the students. Writing will be ample and consistent—thought pieces along with short essays—with regular feedback so that you grow as both a reader and a writer. The subject of conference work can range widely within US cultural and political history: in fall, up to 1890; in spring, all the way to the present. Along the way, we will try to make sense of the way we carry history, the way that it is present in all that we do. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences may be weekly or biweekly.

It may be comforting to know that historians unanimously agree that an American Revolution did indeed occur. Less comforting, but more intriguing, may be the realization that historians do not agree on when it commenced and when it ended, much less on the full meaning of what exactly took place beyond the mere facts of the Revolution. Certainly, the question was profound enough to move John Adams to ask, “What do we mean by the Revolution?” This course will look at the many different answers that revolutionary Americans gave to Adams’ question by examining the political, intellectual, social, and cultural dimensions of this event. Was the Revolution simply a struggle for political independence, or was it also a social conflict over who would “rule at home”? Was the American Revolution a transformation in the “hearts and minds” of the people, as Adams believed, or was the War for Independence integral to the meaning and character of the Revolution? Did the Revolution end with the close of the war, or was the war, to use Benjamin Rush’s words, “but the first act of the great drama”? What was the relationship between the Constitution and the Revolution? Was the Constitution a conservative reaction against the radicalism of the Revolution, or did the Constitution extend and solidify what the Revolution had achieved? While the emphasis of this course will be on what the Revolution meant for those who participated in it, we will also look more broadly at the long-term legacy and memory of the Revolution. Through this examination, the course will ultimately seek to address the question: What was the basis for and nature of American national identity?

It is 1637, and a woman’s life is in your hands: Do you vote to condemn Anne Hutchinson to exile—and likely death—simply for expressing her own religious beliefs and challenging the Puritan church? Or do you allow her to stay in Massachusetts, risking the destruction of the fragile young colony and the failure of its mission to be a “city on a hill” to the rest of the world? Now picture this: It is a century and half later, and you are now voting on whether to ratify the new Constitution of the United States. Will the proposed Constitution save the new nation from falling into anarchy, or is it an instrument of tyranny that threatens to destroy the freedoms that the revolutionaries fought so hard to defend? These are some of the dilemmas that the course will ask students to face as they engage in role-play simulations of events—such as the controversy over the religious dissenter Anne Hutchinson and the writing of the Constitution—based on the Reacting to the Past active-learning pedagogy developed by Mark Carnes at Barnard College. Students will be assigned roles representing the different contestants in these conflicts and asked to reenact the debates over them. To prepare for their roles, students will read relevant primary and secondary sources and write position papers expressing their character’s views. Students should be aware that the process of playing these historical roles and immersing themselves in an earlier time can be emotionally intense and even uncomfortable. To enter the world of the 17th and 18th centuries—one where people of European descent considered themselves more civilized than others, where women were viewed as subordinate to men, and where aristocrats saw themselves as superior to ordinary people—students should be prepared to engage in and express views that are alien and, indeed, at times aversive to them. The course thus aims to show how much “the past is a foreign country,” as the writer L. P. Hartley once put it, and to cultivate a sense of historical empathy by trying to understand that foreignness on its own terms.

This seminar will provide an interdisciplinary analysis of the phenomenon of propaganda and mass communications within modern society. How does propaganda “work”? How should we characterize the individuals and institutions that shape and disseminate it? What are the specific languages and visual symbols that propagandists have typically used to persuade and communicate with mass audiences? How have both “democratic” and “authoritarian” societies sought to generate consent? And how, in turn, have individuals and social groups drawn the line between what is truth and what is propaganda? Although the manipulation of information for political ends has been intrinsic to human societies across history, this course will focus on the so-called “axial age of propaganda”—beginning with World War I, which saw the emergence of tightly organized, large-scale, government-sponsored propaganda efforts across Europe and the United States. This course will utilize a variety of case studies to explore the symbolic content of specific kinds of propaganda and the institutional milieux that produce it, paying attention to propaganda that seeks both to overthrow social structures and to maintain them. We will place special emphasis on the interwar period, when—amid the onset of totalitarian regimes in Europe—the very nature of “public opinion” and mass society were hotly debated by intellectuals and interpretive experts. The course will also closely investigate the emergence of mass communications “experts” during World War II and trace their role in shaping social-science research throughout the Cold War. Finally, the course will consider the ubiquity of propaganda in contemporary society, focusing on the role of image-making professionals working in the spheres of political campaigning, advertising, and public relations. 

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

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

The term “realism” enjoyed an unprecedented vogue in 19th-century Europe. All manner of doctrines and ideologies prided themselves on their “realistic” understanding of the human predicament and the structure of the universe while disdaining rival doctrines as captive to illusions and prejudices. Students in this course will read and discuss texts illustrating influential forms of 19th-century European realism in philosophy, ethics, and politics. They will also consider realism in literature and painting. We will try to identify what exactly realism meant to each of these philosophical and artistic tendencies and to discover why 19th-century Europeans found the concept of realism so irresistible. Since the schools of thought to be investigated often conceived “reality” in diametrically opposed ways, the course will provide an introduction to a number of the most significant intellectual debates of the 19th century. Thinkers to be discussed include Malthus, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Weber, and Freud; creative artists studied will include Turgenev, Strindberg, Courbet, Manet, and Degas. 

This course will introduce students to the best practices of oral history interviewing, theory, and methodology. Around the world, oral history has been used to uncover the perspectives of marginalized groups and to challenge “official” historical narratives. Oral history is a mainstay of social history, helping researchers uncover voices that might otherwise be ignored and giving people the opportunity to “speak back” to the past. In this regard, oral history is a crucial method in a historian’s toolkit. Life histories enable us to focus on individual experiences and consider the historical significance of one person’s life. Long used by anthropologists and sociologists, life history methods continue to be rediscovered by historians seeking to enrich their understanding of the past. Conducting oral history research involves a great deal more than sitting back and pressing play on a recording device. Researchers must approach their work with knowledge, rigor, respect, and compassion. Toward the goal of developing substantive research skills, this class will focus on several important questions associated with oral history: What is the role of memory, and how does memory function in the process of conducting oral history? What is the role of intersubjectivity, and how much does the researcher influence the interview process? How should researchers catalog and disseminate their work to make it accessible to a wide audience? What are the political and ethical considerations of doing oral history or life history research, and how are they different from other types of history methodologies? Final projects for this class may include podcasts, film, creative work, or an analytical paper.

The continent of Africa has variously been described as the birthplace of humanity, the "Motherland," a country, a continent, Mother Africa, and a “heart of darkness.” All of these descriptions reflect representations of Africa, but how accurately do they reflect reality? The goal of this course will be to study the intellectual history of what we know—or think we know—about modern Africa. Why is it that some of the most prominent images of Africa today are either negative (e.g., Africa as a diseased, hungry, and war-ravaged continent) or romanticized (e.g., Africa as a mother figure, birthplace of civilization, or lush nature preserve)? A central theme of our discussions will be that ideas have a history that is as powerful as radioactive isotopes. In other words, ideas maintain a shelf life, even when their origins have long become obscured. Unfortunately, this has profound implications for Africa’s place in a modern, media-driven, globalized world where image can be as important as reality. Through the use of historical documents, political manifestos, philosophical treatises, travel narratives, autobiographies, and current news sources, we will study how the image of Africa has changed over time. We will trace the “heart of darkness” narrative and analyze why it has become such an enduring trope of modern Africa. Near the end of the course, we will direct a significant proportion of our class discussions toward analyzing a contemporary event occurring on the African continent, preferably as a group project. Ultimately, our purpose will be to interrogate various descriptions of Africa over time and analyze where they originated from, why they exist, whether they are accurate, and what they mean for the future of African peoples in a globalized, interconnected, and increasingly hot world.

This course will provide a broad introduction to the political, social, cultural, and intellectual history of the Middle East from the late 18th century to the present. After a brief conceptual overview, the course will draw upon a wide array of primary and secondary sources to illuminate the manifold transformations and processes that have contributed over time to shaping what has meant to be “modern” in this remarkably diverse and dynamic region. Particular attention will be paid to the following themes: the question of modernization and reform within the Ottoman and Qajar empires; the experience of different forms of European imperialism in the Middle East; the integration of the Middle East into the world economy; World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire; state-building in both colonial and postcolonial contexts; transformations in religious thought; changing family norms and gender roles and the genesis of Middle Eastern women’s movements; nationalism; class politics, social movements, and revolution; Zionism and the Israel-Palestine conflict; post-World War II geopolitics and the Cold War in the Middle East; Nasserism and pan-Arabism; the role of US power in the Middle East; the origins and spread of political Islam; the political economy of oil; globalization and neoliberalism; and the impact of various new cultural forms and media on the formation of identities across the region. 

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

A friend put her arms around Edna Pontellier, feeling her shoulder blades, in Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel, The Awakening. Why? To see if her wings were strong. “The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings,” she told Edna. “It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.” In this course, we will read the work of US women writers who soar “above the level plain of tradition and prejudice” and study women artists, workers, and activists of all kinds over two centuries. Historians will help us understand the worlds in which they lived and, hence, the strength they must use to offer their voices. We will focus on women both inside and outside of the worlds of privilege in which Edna lived. In fall, the focus will include the life of Martha Ballard, a Maine midwife; the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, an early African American poet; the cultural criticism of abolitionist activists like Harriet Jacobs and Lydia Maria Child; the essays of early critics of gender convention like Judith Sargent Murray, Sarah Grimke, and Margaret Fuller; and resistance among women workers and the women who wrote about their “mighty hunger and thwarted dreams.” We will also read Julia Ward Howe’s unfinished mid-century novel, The Hermaphrodite, in which she explores the constraints of the gender binary, and consider the lives and resistance of Native American women. In spring, we will look at the work and life of recent immigrants like Jewish American Anzia Yezierska, Harlem Renaissance writers like Nella Larsen, struggling white Midwestern radicals like Meridel Le Sueur, early environmentalist activists like Josephine Johnson, closeted radical women in lesbian pulps like that of Patricia Highsmith, early Civil Rights activists like Ann Petry, and powerful cultural critics like Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros, among others. We will analyze political cartoons and manifestas from the women’s liberation movement and watch a few notable films directed by women. Taught mainly through primary sources, this course will bracket those novels and stories with scholarship to provide a sense of historical context. Themes will include race, class, ethnicity, immigration and migration, sexuality, and, of course, gender. This is not a classic survey but, rather, readings in the cultural history of the nation framed with political and social history. Assessments will be oral as well as written, with an emphasis on developing analytic and historical arguments. There will be opportunities to explore individuals and groups, based on student interest, through historical research.

In the 16th century, Europe entered upon a religious crisis that was to permanently alter the character of Western Christianity. Between 1520 and 1580, the religious unity of Catholic Christendom was destroyed, as believers throughout Central and Northern Europe severed their ties with the papacy to form new “Protestant” communities. But the impact of the religious crisis was by no means confined to the emergence of the churches of the Reformation. Luther’s revolt against the Roman church ushered in an era of soaring religious creativity and savage religious conflict that lasted for nearly two centuries and revolutionized thought, art, music...and politics. The modern state is ultimately a product of the Reformation crisis, as is the system of international law that still governs the relations among sovereign states. Students in this course will examine multiple aspects of the religious, intellectual, and political history of Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. Readings will focus attention on the diversity of religious thinking and religious experience in this era. Besides tracing the rise of the Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican churches and the complex history of the “Radical Reformation,” we will consider forms of belief independent of any church and new varieties of skepticism and doubt. We will also devote considerable attention to the reform movements that transformed Roman Catholicism during those two centuries and the upsurge of missionary energy and mystical spirituality that accompanied them. We will investigate the effects of the Reformation crisis on politics and the state and on the social order that Europe inherited from the Middle Ages. As part of this investigation, we will examine the most important political struggles waged in the name of religion between 1524 and 1689: the Peasants’ Revolt and Thirty Years’ War in Germany, the Dutch revolt against Spain, the French Wars of Religion, and the English Revolution. Texts will include works by Luther, Calvin, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Ávila, Queen Marguerite of Navarre, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Pascal. 

By the 20th century, African Americans produced a distinctive ethos and aesthetic of pleasure not only in music and dance but also in sports and other creative arts. Artists like Paul Robeson, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane were paradigmatic in that cultural production. In turn, the blues ethos and jazz aesthetics influenced the African American imagination in social, political, economic, and cultural life, as well as in architecture and science.

This course will examine the distinctive leadership of women in the formation of the Black Freedom Movement. Departing from older scholarship that presents a “leading man” narrative of self-emancipation, this seminar will explore the rich lives and legacies of women, recognizing that they were their own liberators. From Harriet Tubman and Ida B. Wells to Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, and Assata Shakur, generations of leaders shaped the Black radical tradition. Students are invited to learn the epic yet untold stories of the “war on terror” pioneered by Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Claudia Jones, Esther Cooper Jackson, Denise Oliver-Velez, Ericka Huggins, Queen Mother Moore, Gloria Richardson, Septima Clark, Diane Nash, Ella Baker, and Vicki Garvin, alongside rethinking the legacies of Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Yuri Kochiyama, and so forth. Rather than examining one-dimensional caricatures of those leaders, this course will explore three-dimensional lives as well as their levers of power from cultural workshops to grassroots organizations.

We were told that George Washington never told a lie and confessed to his much chagrined father that he chopped down the fabled cherry tree. Was this the myth to inspire trust in the "Founding Fathers" and the infant democracy? Yet, the myths continue. For more than two centuries, the “Founding Fathers” have been a touchstone for American identity. Americans have expressed their fascination with the “Founders” not only in the political arena but also in the realm of fiction in works ranging from James Fenimore Cooper’s novel, The Spy, to the HBO series, John Adams, and the Broadway musical, Hamilton. What is the source of this fascination? But, most importantly, who were the “Founders” that have such a hold on the American historical imagination, and what did they actually stand for? The course will explore these questions by looking at the different ways that the “Founders” have been represented in film and fiction from their own time to the present. We will consider a variety of media, including novels, art, plays, films, and television. We will look at how these fictional portrayals reflected larger cultural changes and at the different political and social purposes they served. Would the musical glorification of Alexander Hamilton have been a hit during the Great Depression? We will also examine the extent to which these portrayals conformed to historical reality, using them to look more broadly at the relationship between history and fiction. What can fiction contribute to historical understanding, and what are its limits as a medium of historical representation?

Americans often like to think of the United States as a nation founded on ideals, but the United States also was, as one historian has put it, a nation "founded in blood." Valley Forge was once our Statue of Liberty. After all, the American Revolution was not just a struggle for the ideals of liberty and equality that Thomas Jefferson so eloquently expounded in the Declaration of Independence; it was also a war for independence from Britain, an international conflict that included France and Spain, and, let us not forget, a bitter and cruel civil war among Americans themselves. In effect, we were birthed as a nation divided. How did this legacy of bloodshed shape American identity? To what extent did Americans sacralize bloodshed and thus conflate it with idealism? We remember the Alamo, but can anyone recall the basis of our claim to that territory? Are we not here going further and actually equating bloodshed with idealism? To what extent did Americans see their later wars as an extension of the Revolutionary War? Was the Civil War a second American Revolution, or was the American Revolution the nation's first civil war? The course will examine these questions by looking at how Americans perceived and remembered the wars in which they fought from the American Revolution to the Vietnam War. Among the wars to be considered are the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. The course will culminate with a role-play simulation of the debate over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In effect, the course offers an exploration into how we may "see things not as they are but as we are."

History is replete with rabid pogroms, merciless religious wars, tragic show trials, and even genocide. For as long as people have congregated, they have defined themselves, in part, as against an other—and have persecuted that other. But history has also yielded systems of constraints. So, how can we hope to achieve a meaningful understanding of the human experience without examining both the wrongs and the rights? Should the human story be left to so-called realists, who claim that power wins out over ideals every time? Or is there a logic of mutual respect that offers better solutions? This lecture will examine the history of international human rights and focus on the claims that individuals and groups make against states in which they live. 

Depending on the level of his or her resources, a sick person in Africa potentially has access to a variety of options for treatment. How illness is perceived becomes a crucial determinant in how people seek care. Unfortunately, despite an array of treatment options, the state of public health in many African countries has become woefully inadequate. While the reasons for this decline in health status are related to questions of international political economy, they can also be traced historically. This course will study the history of health, healing, and medical practices in Africa to identify the social, historical, and economic factors that influence how therapeutic systems in Africa have changed over time. We will investigate a range of topics, including the place of traditional healers in providing care, the impact of the COVID and AIDS pandemics on overall public health, and the changing structure of healthcare delivery. Students will analyze the impact of funding cuts to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program. We will also study how African governments have modified their public-health infrastructure to cope with the economic and political changes that are reordering health care delivery models worldwide. Some of the questions that this course will address include: How have traditional healers and biomedical professionals addressed various health-related questions in Africa? What factors contribute to health and well-being? What has been the impact of epidemic disease? How have colonial conquest and religious diversity influenced the types of treatment that people both seek and receive? How have African healing systems changed over time?

In recent decades, historians have become increasingly interested in the unique role and power of memory in public life. Historians have sought to understand the innumerable ways that collective memory has been constructed, experienced, used, abused, debated, and reshaped. This course will focus on the rich literature on historical memory within the field of modern Middle Eastern history in order to explore a number of key questions: What is the relationship between history and memory? How are historical events interpreted and rendered socially meaningful? How is public knowledge about the past shaped and propagated? How and why—and in what contexts—do particular ways of seeing and remembering the past become attached to various political projects? Particular attention will be paid to the following topics: the role of memory in the Palestine-Israel “conflict”; postcolonial state-building and “official memory”; debates over national remembering, forgetting, and reconstruction following the Lebanese Civil War; Middle Eastern diaspora formation and exilic identity; the myth of a “golden age” of Arab nationalism; Turkish nostalgia for the Ottoman imperial past; and the role of museums, holidays, and other commemorative practices in the construction of the national past across the region. Throughout the course, we will attend to the complex interplay between individual and collective memory (and “countermemory”), particularly as this has played out in several formulations of Middle Eastern nationalism. 

This course will examine aspects of European culture in the last two decades of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century. This was the era of the Decadent and Symbolist movements, of Secessionist art and architecture, of the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and William James, and of early psychoanalysis. Though in the eyes of some Europeans, looking back at the period nostalgically across the smoking battlefields of World War I, these decades were la belle époque—the “beautiful time” of peace and security—others remembered them as “the gay apocalypse,” a hectic burst of cultural experiment against a background of political paralysis which together heralded the end of the old Europe. While the primary focus of this course will be creative figures active in Vienna and other parts of the Habsburg monarchy, we will also consider writers, artists, and thinkers from Russia, Scandinavia, Germany, France, and the English-speaking world. These figures will include August Strindberg, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan Zweig, Andrei Bely, Gustav Klimt, and Edvard Munch. We will also look at the Nietzsche cult, “life-philosophy,” and Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A number of contemporary politicians would have us believe that Medieval Europe was an almost uniquely Christian place and that the other two Abrahamic religions—Judaism and Islam—were fleeting and insignificant forces in the development of Europe and the Mediterranean. The arts, however, tell a different story. It is not a story of a utopia of tolerance and understanding, nor is it one of constant hostility and opposition between religious groups. The arts, instead, reveal multiple different ways that relations between different religious groups are constructed in societies, in times of war and peace, and in times of tension and productive interaction between different religious groups. The works we will explore are fascinating and historically revealing. The themes will be traced in mosques, churches, and synagogues; in palaces and gardens; in paintings, costume, and luxury arts, seeing how rich the act of grappling with difference can make a society. To understand these relations, we will also explore theories of interaction and question some of the ways in which religious difference has been characterized in the arts in the past.

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

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

This course will center on the close, detailed reading of a small number of foundational texts in classical Confucianism and Taoism. Our focus will be to explore how these texts might fit “virtue ethics,” which emphasizes moral character and the pursuit of a worthwhile life. Some attention will be paid to other forms of ethics, including those that stress either the adherence to duties and obligations or the social consequences of ethical action. The primary goal, however, will be to examine the ways in which classical Chinese philosophers regarded personal virtues and “good character” as both a prerequisite to and an explanation of appropriate action and its consequences. Among the more specific topics to be explored include: ideal traits of virtue, the links between moral values and different understandings of human nature, the psychological structures of virtue, practices leading to the cultivation of virtue, the roles of family and friendship in developing moral values, and what constitutes a good life. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This course will seek to understand the origins and rise of the New Right in the United States and elsewhere as it has taken shape in the latter half of the 20th century to the present. We will seek to identify the origins of the New Right and what defines it, alongside exploring the varied geographies of the movement and its numerous strands and identifying the constituents of the contemporary right coalition. In addition, we will explore the actors and institutions that have played a role in the expansion of the New Right (e.g., courts, state and local governments, the Tea Party movement, conservative think tanks, lawyers, media platforms, evangelical Christians, billionaires, militias, and more) and the issues that motivate the movement (e.g., anti-communism, immigration, environment, white supremacy and nationalism, voter suppression, neoliberal economic policies, anti-globalization, free speech). This is a reading-intensive, discussion-oriented seminar in which we will survey a broad sweep of the recent literature on the New Right. While the course will focus most specifically on United States context, conference papers based on international/comparative case studies are welcome. Students will be required to attend associated talk and film viewings; write weekly essays and engage classmates in conversation online the night before seminar; and write two short research papers that link the themes of the class with their own interests, creative products, research agenda, and/or political engagement. Students will also conduct two associated creative projects/expressions. Transdisciplinary collaborative activities across the college and community are encouraged. Film, performance, written commentary, podcasts, workshops, and other forms of action can provide additional outlets for student creative projects and engagement.

Despite widespread daily reporting on China’s rise to superpower status, and both its challenge to and necessary partnership with the United States, what do we really know about the country? We will explore China’s evolving place in the world through political-economic integration and globalization processes. Throughout the seminar, we will compare China with other areas of the world within the context of broader theoretical and thematic questions. We will consistently focus efforts on reframing debates, both academic and in mass media, to enable new insights and analyses not only concerning China but also in terms of the major global questions—in theory, policy, and practice—of this particular historical moment. The course will begin with an overview of contemporary China, discussing the unique aspects of China’s modern history and the changes and continuities from one era to the next. We will explore Revolutionary China and the subsequent socialist period to ground the primary focus of post-1978 reform and transformation to present day. Rooted in the questions of agrarian change and rural development, we will also study seismic shifts in urban and industrial form and China’s emergence as a global superpower on its way to becoming the world’s largest economy. We will analyze the complex intertwining of the environmental, political-economic, and sociocultural aspects of these processes as we interpret the geography of contemporary China. Using a variety of theoretical perspectives, we will analyze a series of contemporary global debates: Is there a fundamental conflict between the environment and rapid development? What is the role of the peasantry in the modern world? What is the impact of different forms of state power and practice? How does globalization shape China’s regional transformation? How does China’s global integration impact development in every other country and region of the world? Modern China provides immense opportunities for exploring key theoretical and substantive questions of our time. A product of its own complex history, other nation-states and international actors and institutions—such as the World Bank, transnational corporations, and civil society—have also heavily influenced China. The “China Model” of rapid growth is widely debated in terms of its efficacy as a development pathway, yet it defies simple understandings and labels. Termed everything from neoliberalism, to market socialism, to authoritarian Keynesian capitalism, China is a model full of paradoxes and contradictions, not least of which is China’s impact on global climate change. Other challenges include changing gender relations, rapid urbanization, and massive internal migration. In China today, contentious debates continue on land reform, the pros and cons of global market integration, the role of popular culture and the arts in society, how to define ethical behavior, the roots of China’s social movements—from Tiananmen to contemporary widespread social unrest and discontent among workers, peasants, students, and intellectuals—and the meaning and potential resolution of minority conflicts in China’s hinterlands. Land and resource grabs in China and abroad are central to its rapid growth and role as the largest industrial platform for the world. But resulting social inequality and environmental degradation challenge the legitimacy of China’s leadership like never before—as recent protests in Hong Kong and elsewhere attest. The COVID-19 pandemic and the state’s response revealed new challenges to state legitimacy. And China’s role as a foil for the Trump administration, in its tariff wars, accompanies the nationalistic turn in both countries. As China borders many of the most volatile places in the contemporary world—and increasingly projects its power to the far corners of the planet and beyond—the seminar will conclude with a discussion of global security issues, geopolitics, and potential scenarios for China’s future. Weekly selected readings, films, mass media, and books will be used to inform debate and discussion. A structured conference project will integrate closely with one of the diverse topics of the seminar.

Where does the food we eat come from? Why do some people have enough food to eat and others do not? Are there too many people for the world to feed? Who controls the world’s food? Will global food prices continue their recent rapid rise and, if so, what will be the consequences? What are the environmental impacts of our food-production systems? How do answers to these questions differ by place or the person asking the question? How have they changed over time? This course will explore the following fundamental issue: the relationship between development and the environment, focusing in particular on agriculture and the production and consumption of food. The questions above often hinge on the contentious debate concerning population, natural resources, and the environment. We will begin by critically assessing the fundamental ideological positions and philosophical paradigms of “modernization,” as well as critical counterpoints that lie at the heart of this debate. Within this context of competing sets of philosophical assumptions concerning the population-resource debate, we will investigate the concept of poverty and the making of the “Third World,” access to food, hunger, grain production and food aid, agricultural productivity (e.g., the Green and Gene revolutions), biofuels, the role of transnational corporations (TNCs), the international division of labor, migration, globalization and global commodity chains, and the different strategies adopted by nation states to develop natural resources and agricultural production. Through a historical investigation of environmental change and the biogeography of plant domestication and dispersal, we will look at the creation of indigenous, subsistence, peasant, plantation, collective, and commercial forms of agriculture. We will analyze the physical environment and ecology that help shape but rarely determine the organization of resource use and agriculture rather, through the dialectical rise of various political-economic systems—such as feudalism, slavery, mercantilism, colonialism, capitalism, and socialism—we will study how humans have transformed the world’s environments. The course will follow with studies of specific issues: technological change in food production; commercialization and industrialization of agriculture and the decline of the family farm; food and public health, culture, and family; land grabbing and food security; the role of markets and transnational corporations in transforming the environment; and the global environmental changes stemming from modern agriculture, dams, deforestation, grassland destruction, desertification, biodiversity loss, and the interrelationship with climate change. Case studies of particular regions and issues will be drawn from Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the United States. The final part of the course will examine the restructuring of the global economy and its relation to emergent international laws and institutions regulating trade, the environment, agriculture, resource extraction treaties, the changing role of the state, and competing conceptualizations of territoriality and control. We will end with discussions of emergent local, regional, and transnational coalitions for food self-reliance and food sovereignty, alternative and community-supported agriculture, community-based resource-management systems, sustainable development, and grassroots movements for social and environmental justice. Films, multimedia materials, and potential distinguished guest lectures will be interspersed throughout the course. Attendance will be required for one farm/factory field trip. Regular postings of short essays will be required, as well as follow-up commentaries with classmates. There will be occasional in-class essays and a final quiz at the end of the semester. Group conferences will focus on in-depth analysis of certain course topics and will include debates, a film, workshopping, and small-group discussions. Students will prepare a poster project over the semester on a related topic presented at the end of the course in the final group conference.

This seminar will begin by examining competing paradigms and approaches to understanding “development” and the “Third World.” The course will set the stage by answering the question: What did the world look like 500 years ago? The purpose of this part of the course is to acquaint us with and to analyze the historical origins and evolution of a world political-economy of which the Third World is an intrinsic component. We will thus study the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the rise of merchant and finance capital, and the colonization of the world by European powers. We will analyze case studies of colonial "development" to understand the evolving meaning of this term. These case studies will help assess the varied legacies of colonialism apparent in the emergence of new nations through the fitful and uneven process of decolonization that followed. The next part of the course will look at the United Nations and the role some of its associated institutions have played in the post-World War II global political-economy, one marked by persistent and intensifying socioeconomic inequalities as well as frequent outbreaks of political violence across the globe. By examining the development of institutions that have emerged and evolved since 1945, the course will attempt to unravel the paradoxes of development in different eras. We will deconstruct the measures of development through a thematic exploration of population, resource use, poverty, access to food, the environment, agricultural productivity, and different development strategies adopted by Third World nation states. We will then examine globalization and its relation to emergent international institutions and their policies; for example, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization. The course will then turn to contemporary development debates and controversies; for example, the widespread land grabbing (by sovereign wealth funds, China, hedge funds, etc.), rising nationalism and anti-state populism, the contested role of international aid, and the climate-change crisis. Throughout the course, investigations of international institutions, transnational corporations, the role of the state, and civil society will provide the backdrop for the final focus of the class—the emergence of regional coalitions for self-reliance, environmental and social justice, and sustainable development. Our analysis of development in practice will draw upon case studies primarily from Africa, but also from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the United States. Conference work will be closely integrated with the themes of the course, with a two-stage substantive research project. Project presentations will incorporate a range of formats, from traditional papers to multimedia visual productions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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