Fall 2017 EES Courses: Hampshire College

Please click on the course titles in order to see full descriptions and faculty names.

CRITICAL SOCIAL INQUIRY:

HUMANITIES, ARTS, CULTURE:

 

CRITICAL SOCIAL INQUIRY:

CSI-0108-1: Genocide and Justice, with Flavio Risech-Ozeguera
War crimes, torture and genocides demonstrate all too frequently that “never again” remains an elusive ideal. What role does the international system of human rights and humanitarian law play in deterring abuses of power? We examine the debates over the definition, adjudication and punishment of such acts, and evaluate how effective domestic and international legal and extra-legal strategies can be in preventing such crimes in the future, redressing those that do occur, and shaping collective memory and reconciliation after the fact, often called transitional justice. The Nuremberg trial legacy, the ICC, and varied approaches to justice after state violence in South Africa, Rwanda, the Balkans, Chile and Argentina, among others, will provide primary material for critical reflection. The course constitutes an introduction to international human rights discourses and to legal modes of analysis.

CSI-0117-1: Resolving Conflict Through Ethnic Cleansing, with Aaron Berman and Uditi Sen
In the twentieth century, the ideals of “national self determination” and “national liberation” created powerful political movements throughout the world. But what happened when two peoples claiming the right of “self determination” lived amongst each other? In India, Palestine and Ireland, the British sought to solve the problem through partition: dividing a territory to accommodate conflicting national aspirations. Rather than solving a problem, this solution led to some of the century’s longest conflicts and ethnic cleansing. In this course we will study how the idea of partition developed and how it was practiced in India, Palestine and Ireland. We will explore how partition relates to changing concepts of nationhood, and how the repercussions of these partitions continue to shape politics today.

CSI-157T-1: Women’s Literature, Art, and Music (1300-1800), with Jutta Sperling
This course is an introductory history course based entirely on primary literature, art, and music written and produced by women from various parts of Europe, Mexico, and Ethiopia. We will read letters, scientific treatises, autobiographies, and political writings by prominent mystics (Saints Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and Walatta Pretos), proto-feminist writers (Christine de Pizan and Moderata Fonte), female physicians and midwives (Trotula, Olivia Sabuco de Nantes Barrera, Jane Sharp), Jewish businesswomen (Glickl van Hameln), fake saints (Cecilia Ferazzi), courtesans (Veronica Franco), cross-dressing soldiers (Catalina/o de Erauso), and French revolutionaries (Olympe de Gouges). In addition, we will listen to music by Francesca Caccini and Italian nuns and view the art of Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavinia Fontana, and Sofonisba Anguissola. Mix of creative writing assignments and analytical papers.

CSI-0226-1: Image, Icon, Object, Fetish, with Jutta Sperling
This course is about interlocking theories of visual culture, materiality, and desire. It will start out by examining miracle-working art of the medieval period, move into early modern iconoclasm, and consider European encounters with visual cultures in Latin America and Africa. Among others, we will ask, in W. T. Mitchell’s words: “What do pictures want?” to theorize the particular address of certain figurative art works on the viewer. We might also consider questions concerning the materiality of Neapolitan Baroque art, and trace the colonial history of the concept of “fetish,” first coined by 16th century Portuguese explorers of Africa, who encountered what they called magic and witchcraft (feitico).

CSI-0239-1: Coffeehouses, Catastrophe, and Culture: East Central Europe in a Century of Upheaval, with James Wald
In the past century, Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland have been transformed from provinces of a multiethnic empire into a series of small successor states whose experience went from independence to Nazi occupation and communist dictatorship and back again. Today, they are members of NATO and the European Union. These three regions, with their dynamic and at times unstable population mixture of Germans, Slavs, Magyars, and Jews, embodied the tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, tolerance and intolerance, the persistence of tradition and the exuberance of modernity. Our course will treat the histories of the countries and cultures, the people who lived those histories and the literature, music, and art that gave voice to those tensions. In addition, we will consider the appropriation and transformation of history through memory and memorialization in the present. The course is strongly recommended for participants in a summer 2017 program in Prague and Krakow, but is open to all students.

HUMANITIES, ARTS, CULTURE:

HACU-131T-1: Reforming Fiction: Literature and Social Change in the Nineteenth Century, with Lise Sanders
What is the role of the literary text in making, calling for, or fomenting social change? How have poets and novelists used literature as both a creative mode and a political act? How did nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers engage with the most pressing issues of their time, particularly with respect to race, class, gender and sexuality? In this tutorial, we will read the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Dickens, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others; these texts will be examined against the backdrop of historical events and social reform efforts including the movement for the abolition of slavery, labor legislation, and voting rights. This course is designed to appeal to students interested in literature, history, and cultural studies, and will provide opportunities to develop proficiency in public speaking, analytical writing, and project-based work.

HACU-0232-1: Forms of Intimacy in Shakespeare’s Plays, with Jane Degenhardt
What forms did intimacy take on the Shakespearean stage, and how was it shaped by new understandings of global distance, as well as by the material and social conditions of the live theater? This course offers in-depth explorations of a wide range of Shakespeare’s plays with special consideration of new forms of intimacy between lovers, spouses, friends, family members, adversaries, and strangers. In particular, we will consider how new scales and experiences of space and time transformed interpersonal relationships. For example, how did global travel, trade, and colonialism affect understandings of difference, sameness, and intimacy? How did Shakespeare’s plays imagine new possibilities for intimate forms of violence, empathy, and understanding? We will address these questions through close readings of the plays, supplemented by considerations of social, economic, and scientific history. Likely readings include Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Two Noble Kinsmen, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Othello, and Cymbeline.

HACU-0249-1: Marxism and Literature, with Jennifer Bajorek
This course will look at the relationship between Marxism and literature in diverse contexts, and will pose a series of questions about the relationship between the material conditions of production and cultural production more generally. Readings will be historical, exploring the links between Marxism, socialist movements, and literary form that evolve in the 19th century, and contemporary, looking at work by diverse writers and thinkers who have interrogated, in various ways through their work, the cultural logics of late capitalism. Possible readings in Baudelaire, Benjamin, Blanqui, Proudhon, Flaubert, Melville, Stuart Hall, Frederic Jameson, Fred Moten, and Edouard Glissant.

HACU-0257-1: The Power of the Novel, with Jeffrey Wallen
In the nineteenth century, the novel becomes the dominant literary form. In this class, we will look at forms of power within the novel, and also examine the power of the novel in society. In particular, we will explore various quests for identity and purpose in a changing society, and examine the ambitions and contrasting social possibilities for the male and female protagonists. We will also consider such questions as the roles of gambling and speculation in modern society, and the transgressive violence of erotic desire against the conventions of the bourgeoisie. Readings will be primarily 19th-C. British and French novels, by writers such as Balzac, Bronte, Dickens, Flaubert, Eliot, and Zola.