Spring 2018 EES Courses: Mount Holyoke College – European Studies Resource Guide

FYSEM-110FD: Italian Food Culture Between Tradition and Modern Business, with Ombretta Frau
Food is essential for Italian family and society, and the food industry is an important part of the Italian economy. Starting with Carlo Petrini’s Italian Slow Food revolution, we will explore and analyze the strong relationship between food, culture and business in modern Italian society. We will read and discuss literary and historical texts, films, and cookbooks. The course includes a field trip to an organic local ‘Italian’ farm and a cooking night. Taught in English.

FYSEM-110WR: The West and the Rest: Muslims in Post-9/11 Europe and the U.S., with Elif Babül
This course traces the administrative and popular categorizations of Muslim populations in Europe and the United States following the events of September 11, 2001. The course examines the mechanisms through which Muslims are designated as a coherent, timeless category associated with backwardness, violence, and an urgent threat. By the end of the semester, the students will gain a critical, comparative perspective to identify and analyze some common mechanisms such as racialization, securitization, and gendering, as well as practices of border-making and border-crossing that travel across time and space to define certain groups as “dangerous others.”

LANGUAGES:

English:

ENGL-211 / THEAT-281: Shakespeare, with Suparna Roychoudhury
A study of some of Shakespeare’s plays emphasizing the poetic and dramatic aspects of his art, with attention to the historical context and close, careful reading of the language. Eight or nine plays.

ENGL-217GE: Topics in English: ‘Global English: Its Written and Spoken Forms,’ with Mark Shea
What is the relationship between language and social and political power? This course is an interdisciplinary study of the global role of the English language. Migration, education, and identity are major themes of the course, and we look at how linguists, policy-makers, and individuals grapple with these complex topics. This course also focuses on students’ development of their written and spoken communication skills and is open to students in all disciplines. Our approach to writing and speaking may be particularly effective for students who do not identify as native speakers of English.

ENGL-218TR / JWST-225TR: Topics in English: ‘Trauma, Transition, and Memory: The Jewish Literary Imagination in the Twentieth Century,’ with Donald Weber
This course maps the range of Jewish literary expression in the Twentieth Century, Beginning with the folktales of Sholem Aleichem and parables and stories by Franz Kafka, we will move on to novels and films that explore Jewish family life across nations and historical eras (Eastern Europe, America, Israel). Among the core themes will be the literary response to the Shoah in works by Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld, and Anne Michaels. The course concludes with more recent works that continue to explore the relation among history, memory, and trauma — core themes of Jewish experience in modern times.

ENGL-317MJ / THEAT-334MJ: Studies in Renaissance Literature: ‘Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton,’ with Sally Sutherland
A seminar on three major early modern dramatists–Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton–focusing on the range of genres, characters, conflicts, and aspirations explored in their plays. These playwrights, along with their contemporary Shakespeare, shaped the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century theatre into a site for performing authority and conquest, national and individual identity, trickery and carnival, desire and sexuality, and complex unfoldings of revenge. Readings of two or three plays by each of the three dramatists will be supplemented by recent studies of early modern theatricality.

ENGL-321WD: Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: ‘William Wordsworth and George Eliot,’ with Nigel Alderman
William Wordsworth and George Eliot grew up in a revolutionary age: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, wars of independence and of imperial conquest, and, behind it all, the social transformations arising from the industrial revolution. Both Wordsworth and Eliot wrestled with how to adapt their art to these new realities: he introduced dramatically new content into poetry and experimented with a startling variety of poetic forms; she transformed the various prose genres to construct a novelistic form able to represent the totality of British society. By so doing, they forged a revolution in literary forms with the emergence of the modern lyric and the realist novel.

ENGL-339 / AFCNA-339 / CST-339: The Visual Culture of Protest, with Kimberly Juanita Brown
This course examines social protests from the perspective of the visual. Examining cultural productions from 1948-2015 we will focus on the geographical specificity of planned and spontaneous protests that have mobilized people into action. We will use a black studies framework to engage the possibilities present in resisting disparate power structures of race, gender, sexuality, class, and region. Artists, musicians, activists, writers, and grassroots organizers of social movements have been ever cognizant of the role of the visual in subverting power structures. We will use this opportunity to place visual culture at the center of a conversation concerning resistance, human rights, political agency, citizenship, and freedom.

ENGL-349: Cosmopolitanism, with Suparna Roychoudhury
Nothing that is human can be alien to me.” This is the motto of cosmopolitanism, a philosophy first formed by the Greeks, which emphasizes our common status as citizens of the world and urges us to value the universal as highly as the local. Today, this view can seem naïve: is it advisable, even possible, to privilege absent strangers and lofty ideals above the needs of those nearby? This course considers the promise and perils of cosmopolitanism through the lens of contemporary transnational literature – through representations of immigration, asylum, transnational capital, tourism, terrorism, and environmentalism. Authors may include Rushdie, Naipaul, Coetzee, Adichie, Hemon, and Bulawayo.

ENGL-383: Reading James Joyce, with Katherine O’Callaghan
This course will include all of James Joyce’s major works: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake (extracts). Students will be encouraged to explore the oral, interpretative, performative, and musical aspects of Joyce’s writing. The texts will be explored in the context of politics and colonialism, and will be contextualized through discussions of modernism, postmodernism, and the Irish literary tradition.

French:

FREN-215: Intermediate Level Courses in Culture and Literature: Introduction to the Literature and Culture of France and the French-Speaking World, with Elissa Gelfand or Catherine LeGouis
This course introduces students to literature and culture from a variety of perspectives. It will increase confidence and skill in writing and speaking; integrate historical, political, and social contexts into the study of literary texts from France and the French-speaking world; and bring understanding of the special relevance of earlier periods to contemporary French and Francophone cultural and aesthetic issues. Students explore diversified works – literature, historical documents, film, art, and music – and do formal oral and written presentations.

FREN-219: Intermediate Level Courses in Culture and Literature: Introduction to the French-Speaking World, with Samba Gadjigo
This course introduces the literatures of French-speaking countries outside Europe. Readings include tales, novels, plays, and poetry from Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, and other areas. Discussions and short papers examine the texts as literary works as well as keys to the understanding of varied cultures. Students will be asked to do formal oral and written presentations.

FREN-225: Intermediate Level Courses in Culture and Literature: Introduction to Contemporary Culture and Media of France and the French-Speaking World, with Christopher Rivers
This course will introduce students to contemporary popular culture in France and the French-speaking world, largely through the study of recent (post-1990) best-selling novels, popular music, and feature films. Students will be asked to give formal oral presentations based on up-todate materials gathered from the Internet and/or French television and to participate actively in class discussion.

FREN-311LM: Period Courses: ‘Les Misérables,’ with Catherine LeGouis
Hugo’s epic masterpiece, written in exile, has everything: ceaseless adventures, crimes and punishments, love, hate, obsession, heroes, villains, the battle of Waterloo, and civil war. The sympathetic everyman, Jean Valjean, condemned to hard labor for stealing bread and relentlessly pursued by the pitiless policeman Javert, encounters unforgettable characters. We will examine how Hugo situates Valjean’s escapes within a framework of social injustice and good triumphing over evil, balancing his political and romantic ideas. Reading, discussion, film screenings.

FREN-321HE / ROMLG-375HE / SPAN-360HE / ITAL-361HE: Genre Courses: ‘Heroes & Infidels: Masculine Identity and The Birth of Europe in Medieval Romance Classics,’ with Martino Lovato
In this course we will read the canonical works that have shaped the national identity of European Romance countries such as Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, and Romania: from the medieval Chanson the Roland and Cantar del mio Cid to the early modern Don Quixote, Os Lusíadas, Orlando Furioso, and Mesterul Manole. We will discuss the performed masculinity of heroes, enemies, and mediators at the threshold between worlds. We will employ a decolonial critical approach to the Medieval, to question past and present wars against the infidel and their roles in the shaping of a modern European identity

FREN-321MD / SPAN-360MD / ITAL-361MD / GNDST-333MD / ROMLG-375MD: Genre Courses: ‘Mothers & Daughters,’ with Elissa Gelfand
Study of this crucial and problematic relationship in modern novels and films from Romance cultures. Exploration of the mother-daughter bond as literary theme, social institution, psychological dynamic, and metaphor for female creativity. Readings include Western myths and diverse theories of family arrangements (Rousseau, Freud, Chodorow, Rich, Irigaray, Giorgio, Mernissi, Nnaemeka). Authors and films will be grouped cross-culturally by theme and chosen from among: Colette, Vivanti, Morante, Ernaux, Tusquets, Roy, Roig, Rodoreda, Martin Gaite, Ramondino, Pineau, Beyala, Bouraoui; films: Children of Montmartre (La maternelle); Indochine; The Silences of the Palace; My Mother Likes Women.

FREN-351VR / GNDST-333VR: Courses on Women and Gender: ‘Viragos, Virgins, and Visionaries,’ with Christopher Rivers
In this course, we will study the three most celebrated French female saints: Jeanne d’Arc, Thérèse de Lisieux and Bernadette de Lourdes. Their stories are similar: ordinary young women to whom extraordinary things happened, who became symbols of France and inspired a rich verbal and visual iconography. Yet they are profoundly different: Joan was a warrior, Thérèse a memoirist, Bernadette a visionary. We will study the facts of their lives, in their own words and those of others, but also the many fictions, semi-fictions, myths and legends based on those lives. We will analyze a number of films and visual images as well as literary and non-literary texts in our attempt to understand these cases of specifically female, specifically French sainthood.

German Studies:

GRMST-221SH: German Culture Today: ‘Stories and Histories,’ with Nora Gortcheva
This course examines historical, cultural, and political developments that continue to frame debates about the twentieth century, World War II, the former GDR, and German unification. Thematic focus helps students develop accuracy, fluency, and complexity of expression. Reading, writing, and speaking are consistently integrated. Special emphasis is placed on text organization toward expanding students’ language abilities, with a gradual movement from personal forms of expression to written and public discourse.

GRMST-223AR: Topics in German Studies: ‘The Art and Science of Revolution in German Cultures from 1789 to the Present,’ with Karen Remmler
Revolutions are deeply embedded in cultural, economic, political, and environmental structure. Some are violent, some are peaceful; some evolve out of historical processes over long periods of time; and others emerge spontaneously without warning. Still others are material in nature, such as the industrial revolution or the end of the Berlin wall. The seminar explores the causes, forms, and impact of major revolutions in German cultures from the invention of the printing press to the most recent “Wende” that led to unification. Other revolutions include the French Revolution, the German Revolution of 1848, the founding of the Weimar Republic, and the student movement in 1968.

Italian:

ITAL-311MD: Advanced Topics in Italian: ‘Modern Dictators: Italian Fascism,’ with Ombretta Frau
This course explores the birth of Italian fascism and Mussolini’s dictatorship (1922-1943). From Futurism to the end of World War II, we will follow the birth and development of fascism and its consequences for people’s lives. From Silone to Ginzburg, to Viganò to Primo and Carlo Levi, we will discuss intellectual life, daily life, architecture and the visual arts.

Russian and Eurasian Studies:

RES-211TW: Topics in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature: ‘Found in Translation: Rediscovered Gems of Twentieth Century Russian Literature,’ with Peter Scotto
The work of a new generation of talented translators has brought to light hidden treasures of twentieth and twenty-first century Russian literature. From the memoirs of a Russian woman fleeing the chaos of the 1917 Revolution (Teffi), to a slapstick hunt for czarist diamonds hidden in the stuffing of a chair a chair (Ilf and Petrov), to a writer caught in the infinitely expanding space of his apartment (Krizhanovsky) to the tales told by beautiful young werefox, this course will sample some of those discoveries. Something for everyone and fun for all!

RES-231FA: Anna Karenina and Contexts: ‘Tolstoy on Love, Death, and Family Life,’ with Peter Scotto
Anna Karenina (1873) is one of a series of important works Tolstoy wrote pondering love, death, the nature of happiness, and the foundations of family life. Our reading of Anna Karenina will be the centerpiece of this course which will also include works ranging from Childhood (1852) to The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), which shocked and repelled readers with its unsparing depictions of human sexuality and murderous jealousy. Film versions of works will be screened.

RES-241 / POLIT-264: Russia, the West, and the Challenge of Putinism, with Stephen Jones
Since its creation at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union dominated the minds of Western foreign policymakers. None of the West’s policies in the Middle East, the Third World, Europe, or China after World War II can be understood without the study of Soviet foreign policy. We will examine the development of Soviet foreign policy since 1917 and, following the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the role played by Russia and Russia and the former Soviet republics in the far more complex and multipolar ‘New World Order.’ What should U.S. policy be toward the emerging new states of the Baltics, Central Asia, and Caucasia?

Spanish:

SPAN-230GV / GNDST-204GV: Identities & Intersections: An Introduction: ‘Assault, Rape, and Murder: Gendered Violence from Medieval to Contemporary Spain,’ with Nieves Romero-Díaz
This survey course will review the complex interaction of gender and violence as a personal and institutional issue in Spain from Medieval times to the present. What are the ideological and sociocultural constructs that sustain and perpetuate violence against women? What are the forms of resistance women have put into play? Among the texts, we will study short stories by Lucanor (thirteenth century) and María de Zayas (seventeenth century), song by Bebé and movie by Boyaín (twentieth century), contemporary news (twenty-first century), and laws (from the thirteenth century to the present).

ANTHROPOLOGY:

? ANTHR-275: Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology, with Elif Babül
This course examines anthropological fieldwork techniques, including interviewing and participant observation, as well as qualitative approaches to the analysis of cultural data. Topics include cross-cultural field techniques, research design, ethical dilemmas, and the difference between academic and applied research. Research projects are an integral part of this course.

ART HISTORY:

ARTH-216: Empire: The Visual World of Ancient Rome, with Bettina Bergmann
At its height, the Roman Empire spanned a vast area, from modern Scotland to Libya and Iraq. Within that territory lived peoples of multiple races, languages, and religions. The course explores the art and architecture created in this global culture from its beginning in 30 BCE to the dedication of the first Christian capital, Constantinople, in 330 CE. Subjects include the arts of engineering and city planning, public propaganda, arena spectacles, homes of life and the afterlife, and mystery religions.

ARTH-222: Age of the Cathedrals: Gothic Art in Europe, 1100-1500, with Michael Davis
A historical survey of medieval architecture, monumental sculpture, and painting of France, England, Germany, and Italy. The course concentrates on the great church as a multimedia environment and on the religious, political and social roles of art in society.

ARTH-244: Global Modernisms, with Anthony Lee
This course examines the great ruptures in late 19th and early 20th century art that today we call modernist. It relates aspects of that art to the equally great transformations outside the studio: political revolution, the rise and consolidation of industrial capitalism, colonization and its discontents, and world war. It compares different kinds of modernisms, including those in Austria, France, Germany, Mexico, Spain and Russia.

ARTH-290PM: Issues in Art History: ‘Pompeii,’ with Bettina Bergmann
Buried in the volcanic eruption of 79 CE, Pompeii provides an astounding level of preservation for fresco, sculpture, and luxury arts in addition to temples, baths, houses, shops, theaters, and streets. The rediscovery of the ancient site since the eighteenth century had a significant impact upon European art and literature. The course examines the surviving environment and artifacts created in the late republic and early empire and considers the history of archaeological and art historical methods and the romantic visions of Pompeii in art, theatre, and film up to the present.

ARTH-340AM: Seminar in Modern Art: ‘After Impressionism,’ with Anthony Lee
This seminar focuses on the works of Seurat, Gauguin, van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec and to the feverish debates about painting in the 1880s and 1890s that the previous generation’s Impressionism brought about. As we will discover, the four artists were hardly a unified group, took distinct paths away from Impressionism, and pursued projects that had limited allegiance to its main tenets or, indeed, to the ideas and practices of each other.

CLASSICS:

CLASS-205: Cleopatra: ‘The Not Humble Woman,’ with Bruce Arnold
In this course Cleopatra will be considered both as a political figure of importance in her own right and also as an enemy queen, representing a presumptuous challenge to the political hegemony and cultural values of the Romans. She may serve, therefore, as a lens through which one may view social and political tensions within Roman society over the nature of authority and empire. Readings include Vergil, Horace, Propertius, Lucan, Caesar, Sallust, Plutarch and the plays of Shakespeare and Shaw, where she is ambivalently portrayed as a woman who desires power or, contrariwise, as a romantic idealist who scorns temporal powers in fulfillment of private desires.

CLASS-211: Ancient Greek and Roman Myth, with Paula Debnar
We will accompany Odysseus on his return from Troy, retrieve the Golden Fleece with Jason, and race with Ovid through his witty — and often troubling — retelling of Greek myths from a Roman perspective. This course examinies how Greek and Roman authors and artists from very different periods used myth to explore questions about life, art and politics. Works may include: Homer, Odyssey; Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica; Ovid, Metamorphoses and Heroides; Greek tragedy, and ancient images representing myths.

CLASS-229 / HIST-229: The Tyrant and Gladiator: Bad Roman Emperors from Caligula to Commodus, with Geoffrey Sumi
Caligula was a god (or so he thought); Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Commodus dressed as a gladiator and fought man and beast in the arena.The history of the Roman empire is replete with scandalous stories about eccentric and even insane emperors whose reigns raise questions about the nature of the emperor’s power and his role in administering the empire. In this course a close study of Roman imperial biography and historiography–the source of so many of these stories of bad emperors– will be weighed against documentary and archaeological evidence in order to reveal the dynamic between the emperor, his court, and his subjects that was fundamental to the political culture of imperial Rome.

CRITICAL SOCIAL THOUGHT:

CST-248 / HIST-248: Science, Revolution, and Modernity, with Donald Cotter
Introduces critical analysis of science and technology by tracing the historiography of the Scientific Revolution. The significance of this extended intellectual episode has been assessed in radically different ways throughout the intervening centuries. As such, it provides a fertile ground on which to pose and answer important questions about science and its role in society. What does it mean to regard science as ‘revolutionary’? How are scientific developments shaped by, and how do they shape, the social, economic, and political worlds in which they are embedded? How is our contemporary understanding of science and technology influenced by the stories we tell about the past?

CST-249EM / GRMST-231EM / GNDST-204EM: Topics in Critical Social Thought: ‘Embodiment in Theory: Precarious Lives from Marx to Butler,’ with Karen Remmler
We examine the writing of major nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century theorists, such as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Dubois, Arendt, Fanon, Foucault, Butler, and others through the lens of embodiment. Rather than read theory as an abstract entity, we explore how theory itself is an embodiment of actual lives in which human beings experience life as precarious. What are the social conditions that create vulnerable bodies? How do thinkers who lived or are living precarious lives represent these bodies? Through a series of case studies based on contemporary examples of precarity, we examine the legacy and materiality of critical social thought.

CST-346 / ENGL-346: Irish Gothic, with Amy Martin
This advanced seminar will study the gothic as a genre and as a malleable yet persistent discursive site in Irish literary and political tradition. From the eighteenth century to the present, the gothic has been used to explore aspects of Irish history, in particular colonialism. The course will focus on texts that engage with three primary problems that the Irish gothic is used to explore: violence and terror, famine, and vampirism as a political metaphor. We will read novels, short fiction, poetry, and archival newspaper writing, including work by Maturin, Edgeworth, Lady Wilde, Mangan, LeFanu, Stoker, Joyce, Bowen, Enright, Deane, Boland, and Heaney.

FILM STUDIES:

FLMST-212: History of World Cinema Through 1960, with Nora Gortcheva
This course offers an historical survey of the cinema as a developing art form and a means of communication. We will examine the history of this international medium from its 19th-century beginnings through the mid-20th century. The national and thematic focus of the course shifts through the semester. For example, we will focus on U.S. film in studying the earliest developments in film technology and narrative, and on Soviet and French films to study the formal and social experimentation of the 1920s. The course provides a background for understanding film history and pursuing further studies in the field.

FLMST-370SE / FREN-341SE: Topics in National/Transnational Cinemas: ‘A Rebel with a Camera: the Cinema of Ousmane Sembène,’ with Samba Gadjigo
Born in 1923 in Senegal, the writer/filmmaker Ousmane Sembène is one of the rare witnesses of the three key periods of contemporary African history: the colonial period; the period of struggle for political and economic independence; and the period of effort to eliminate neocolonialism through the rehabilitation of African cultures. This course is entirely devoted to the works of Ousmane Sembène and will explore the key moments of his life, his activism in European leftist organizations, his discovery of writing, and most of all the dominant features of his film work.

FLMST-380PA / SPAN-340PA / GNDST-333PA: Topics in Film Authorship: ‘Natural’s Not in It: Pedro Almodóvar,’ with Justin Crumbaugh
This course studies the films of Pedro Almodóvar, European cinema’s favorite bad boy turned acclaimed auteur. On the one hand, students learn to situate films within the context of contemporary Spanish history (the transition to democracy, the advent of globalization, etc.) in order to consider the local contours of postmodern aesthetics. On the other hand, the films provide a springboard to reflect on larger theoretical and ethical debates. For instance, what can a weeping transvestite teach us about desire? What happens when plastic surgery and organ transplants become metaphors? Under what circumstances, if any, can spectators find child prostitution cute?

GENDER STUDIES:

GNDST-333GG / HIST-301RG: Advanced Seminar: ‘Race, Gender, and Empire: Cultural Histories of the United States and the World,’ with Mary Renda
Recent cultural histories of imperialism–European as well as U.S.–have illuminated the workings of race and gender at the heart of imperial encounters. This course will examine the United States’ relationship to imperialism through the lens of such cultural histories. How has the encounter between Europe and America been remembered in the United States? How has the cultural construction of ‘America’ and its ‘others’ called into play racial and gender identities? How have the legacies of slavery been entwined with U.S. imperial ambitions at different times? And what can we learn from transnational approaches to ‘the intimacies of empire?’

GNDST-333WT / THEAT-350WT: Advanced Seminar: ‘Witches in the Modern Imagination,’ with Erika Rundle
From the middle ages to the present day, witches have evoked both fear and fascination. Their fellowships (real or fantastic) challenged the prevailing power structures of church and state patriarchies and upset the ordered precepts of the modern world. This seminar offers an overview of the history of witchcraft in Atlantic cultures, with special attention to the early modern British and American colonial eras. We will examine figures of the witch in European art; religious and legal texts that document the persecution of sorcerers; and dramatic, literary, and cinematic representations of witches that have helped to shape our understanding of gender, nature, theatricality, and power.

GEOGRAPHY:

? GEOG-206 Political Geography, with Girma Kebbede
Systematically studies political phenomena and their geographic expression, at a variety of spatial scales – national, regional, and international. Major themes include nation-state formation, boundary, territory, and ethnic issues, regional blocs and spheres of influence, and conflicts over access to and use of resources.

GEOG-312SR Seminar: ‘Comparative Settler Colonialism: Land, the ‘Logic of Elimination,’ and Structures of Race,’ with Sara Hughes
This seminar focuses on the spatial practices and place-based implications of settler colonialism as distinct from metropole colonialism. Through a series of case studies beginning in the 17th century, this course delves into the evolution of settler colonial framework(s) and theory, the structuring similarities of settler formations across space and time, and the way race continues to structure relationships (between people and to the land) in settler colonial contexts. Additional course themes include: the exploitation of land vs. labor, the conflict between settlers and natives and the “logic of elimination,” colonization as a structure vs. event, the relationship between settler colonialism and the emergence of (global) capitalism, historical precursors to the field of comparative settler colonialism, and critiques of the field. Throughout the course, analyses will emphasize the territorial dimensions, strategies, and aspirations of settler colonialism.

HISTORY:

HIST-151: Modern and Contemporary Europe, with Desmond Fitz-Gibbon or Jeremy King
Surveys the major movements and developments in Europe during the era of European expansion and dominance–from the devastations of the Thirty Years War to the Second World War–and up to the current era of European Union. Topics include: the French Revolution and the birth of nationalism; the scientific and industrial revolutions; the modern history of international relations; imperialism, fascism, the Holocaust, the two World Wars, and the present and potential roles of Europe at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

HIST-161: British Empire and Commonwealth, with Kavita Datla
This course is an introduction to the expansion, consolidation, and eventual disintegration of the modern British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will examine this history with an eye to understanding the causes of empire, and its effects. Themes include formal and informal imperialism, the emergence of anti-colonial nationalism, the roles of gender and culture, and the legacies of British colonialism. We will discuss British attitudes and policies toward empire, and toward particular colonies, what role empire played in the growth of the British economy, in short, how colonial ideologies and practices were shaped and in turn affected vast regions of the globe.

? HIST-214: History of Global Inequality, with Holly Hanson
Why are some nations so much richer and more powerful than others? This course demonstrates that global inequality is not natural; it has a history. Exploring patterns of exchange that developed among regions of the world over the past 600 years, we will ask about the role of power in the establishment of practices of production and exchange. We will explore how cross-regional productive systems benefited some participants at the expense of others. Having traced the consequences of unequal exchange over several centuries, we will ask how global trade and production would have to change for all participants to benefit equally. The course includes a community-based learning component.

HIST-234: The Atlantic World, with Christine DeLucia
Early Americans inhabited an interconnected world through which people, beliefs, and objects circulated. This course explores the ‘Atlantic World’ as both a place and a concept: an ocean surrounded by diverse communities and empires, and an imagined space of shared or competing affiliations. Moving from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, it examines ecological, cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and religious exchanges among Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans. It will introduce both conceptual dimensions of this Atlantic paradigm and case studies that investigate its human subtleties, with the goal of examining early American history through a transnational lens.

HIST-246: 20th Century Europe, with Jeremy King
A survey of European events, themes, and trends between 1900 and the new millennium, centered on discussion of a rich mix of primary sources that include fiction and film. Students will range from the Balkans to the Baltic, from the Urals to the United Kingdom, from death camps to the welfare state, from Bolshevism to neoliberalism, from European civil and cold war to European Union. This course complements History 151, does not repeat high school history, and pays close attention to developing historical consciousness and analytical skills.

HIST-271 / ENVST-271: Place and Power in the American West and Pacific World, with Christine DeLucia
The vast region of North America between the Mississippi River and Pacific Ocean has been a site of many migrations, conflicts, political transformations, and environmental changes. This course examines dynamic histories of Native American tribes, Euro-American “explorers” and colonists, cowboys and miners, Asian immigrant laborers, and mariners, all of whom helped create interior and oceanic worlds. It focuses on natural and human changes in specific locales, and also explores how public histories at these places shape the present and future.

HIST-326: Comparative History of Early Modern Empires, with Lan Wu
This research seminar examines the history of Qing China (1644-1911), the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922), and the Russian Empire (1721-1917) in the early modern era. The course is organized thematically and introduces important conceptual frameworks in historical inquiries. Students are to explore emergent research in state formation, economic development, social changes, and cultural dynamics. The central questions to be considered include the role of the state as well as its negotiation with varied ruling mechanisms within each of the three expansive landmass empires. Comparisons are to be drawn with maritime empires when needed to address the issue: what we talk about when we talk about empire.

? HIST-361DA / BIOL-308: Topics in Modern Europe: The Nineteenth Century: ‘Darwin,’ with Stan Rachootin
This course looks at the scientific content and intellectual context of Darwin’s theory of evolution – his facts, metaphors, hypotheses, and philosophical assumptions. Readings from Darwin and his sources, and examination of the organisms he studied. A background in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history or whole organism biology is recommended.

MUSIC, THEATRE:

Music:

MUSIC-282: History of Western Music II, with Adeline Mueller
The second in a three-semester survey of Western music history, Music 282 examines the cultures of art music in Europe and the Americas from 1700-1900, focusing on the evolution of styles and genres and the changing roles of composers, performers, and audiences.

MUSIC-147F / DANCE-128: Early Music Ensembles: ‘Renaissance and Baroque Dance II,’ with Nona Monáhin and Margaret Pash
Continuation of Renaissance and Baroque Dance I. Sixteenth- through eighteenth-century European social dance, contemporary with the eras of Elizabeth I and Shakespeare in England, the Medicis in Italy, Louis XIV in France, and colonial America. The focus will be on learning the dances, supplemented by historical and social background, discussion of the original dance sources, and reconstruction techniques.

Theatre:

? THEAT-220CH: Topics in Design: ‘Costume History for the Costume Designer,’ with Elizabeth Pangburn
Research-driven weekly discussions on the history of Western clothing as it intersects with social, political and technological changes, and drawing sessions using the Mount Holyoke Antique Clothing Collection. Course covers clothing circa 1100-2016.

PHILOSOPHY:

PHIL-202: Philosophical Foundations of Western Thought: The Modern Period, with Samuel Mitchell
Philosophy was transformed during the 17th and 18th centuries, in a period known as the Modern period, or the Enlightenment. This period is important for the background of our current views both in Philosophy and in intellectual endeavor generally. In this course, we’ll look at the major figures involved in this transformation, and the positions about knowledge and reality that they defended. We’ll have selections from the work of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. We might not cover all of these, but will get to most.

PHIL-205: Ethics, with Katia Vavova
This course will focus on classic and contemporary work on central topics in ethics. The goal will be to see whether there is anything to be said in a principled way about what to do and how to live. The core of the course will be an examination of the central traditions in moral philosophy in the West, typified by Aristotle, Kant, and Mill. We will also examine vexing contemporary moral issues with an eye to whether moral theories can give us practical guidance. Finally, we will step back and ask whether any of the moral theorizing we have been engaging in is really capable of uncovering objective moral truths.

POLITICS:

POLIT-230: Resistance and Revolution, with Calvin Chen
This course examines the dynamics and causes of protest, rebellion, and revolution. Topics include the three ‘great’ revolutions – the French, Russian, and Chinese – as well as such social science theories as moral economy, rational choice, resource mobilization, political culture, and relative deprivation. Attention will be devoted to peasant protest and elite responses to resistance movements. The objectives of the class are to familiarize students with alternative explanations of revolutionary change and to provide students with an opportunity to link general theories to specific case studies.

RELIGION:

? RELIG-112 / JWST-112: Introduction to Judaism, with Mara Benjamin
Judaism is a 3,500-year-old tradition that has developed over time as Jewish communities all over the world creatively interacted with the different cultural and historical milieus in which they lived. This course explores the ways in which Judaism has sought to transform ordinary life into sacred life. What are the ways in which Judaism conceives of God, and what is the meaning of life? What roles do study, prayer, ethics, sex, marriage, family, rituals of the life cycle, and community play in Judaism? These and other questions will be taken up through study of diverse types of religious literature and historical evidence.

RELIG-225HM: Topics in Religion: ‘Heretics, Martyrs, and Saints,’ with ?
‘Heretics, Martyrs, and Saints’ investigates how early Christians described holy people as well as their nemeses. It explores how descriptions of martyrs, saints, heretics, demons, and even Satan himself were used to shore up the ever-contested boundaries of Christian orthodoxy and how the depiction of such figures forever changed the trajectory of Christian beliefs and practices. In the course of the semester we will read sources such as a letter from a Christian bishop wanting to be thrown to the lions, the dream journal of a female martyr, Gnostic gospels, wisdom from desert monks, and an ancient exorcism manual.

RELIG-258BD Topics in the Study of Christianity: ‘The Body, Sex, and Early Christianity,’ with Luis Salés
An introduction to early Christian understandings of the body and sex that aims at familiarizing students with a culturally and geographically diverse range of relevant primary sources and at equipping students with the critical-theoretical methodologies necessary to analyze, interpret, and assess these sources in their historical context. Students will read sources penned between the first and seventh centuries CE within the geopolitical limits of the Roman and Persian Empires and originally written in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Coptic. The course will be supplemented with theoretical literature, including feminist, gender, and postcolonial theory, discourse analysis, and so on.