Fall 2017 EES Courses: Smith College – European Studies Resource Guide

? FYS-147-01: Power Lunch: The Archaeology of Feasting, with Rebecca Worsham
Throughout history, food and dining have formed some of the most fundamental expressions of cultural identity—in a very real sense, we are what we eat, and how we eat. This cross-cultural examination of the topic begins by exploring the various roles that feasting played in the world of the ancient Mediterranean, particularly the cultures of Greece and Rome. We then move through time to examine comparative material from contemporary societies. How does food define and create culture? In what ways does dining express or reinforce inequalities? These and other questions are tackled through the use of primary literature, anthropological studies, and archaeological material, along with hands-on approaches.

FYS-162-01: Ambition and Adultery: Individualism in the 19th-Century Novel, with Michael Gorra
We use a series of great 19th-century novels to explore a set of questions about the nature of individual freedom, and of the relation of that freedom—transgression, even—to social order and cohesion. The books are paired—two French, two Russian; two that deal with a woman’s adultery, and two that focus on a young man’s ambition—Balzac, Père Goriot; Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment; Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (there are some additional readings in history, criticism and political theory).

FYS-156-01: Rebels, Refugees, Rakes and Eccentrics: Fantasies of German-ness in American Popular Culture, with Joseph McVeigh
Although German immigrants faded as a distinct ethnic group in American society after World War I, American popular culture has consistently been fascinated with German-ness and all the strange and intriguing images it evokes. This course will explore the profound influence of German culture in the U.S. as well as the response of American popular culture to this influence in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. We will examine, among other things, various films, such as The Big Lebowski, Blazing Saddles, Dr. Strangelove and many others, as well as TV series such as The Simpsons, The X-Files, Saturday Night Live and more.

FYS-185-01: Style Matters: The Power of the Aesthetic in Italian Cinema, with Anna Botta
Examining Italian cinema from neorealism to today, this course investigates how major directors have negotiated two apparently independent postwar traditions: the aesthetic of realism (which purports to show Italian society and landscape without embellishments) and that search for beauty and style which has historically characterized Italian civilization and become its trademark in today’s global culture (Made in Italy). We study the Italian pinups of postwar cinema, the Latin lover figure, representations of Fascism, the Bel Paese myth, portraits of the lower classes and the immigrants. Directors include Amelio, Antonioni, Bertolucci, De Santis, De Sica, Germi, Moretti, Ozpetek, Pasolini, Sorrentino and Visconti. Conducted in English. Films with English subtitles.

LANGUAGES:

English Language and Literature:

ENG-210-01: Old English, with Craig Davis
A study of the language of Anglo-Saxon England (ca. 450–1066) and a reading of Old English poems, including The Wanderer and The Dream of the Rood. We also learn the 31-character Anglo-Frisian futhorc and read runic inscriptions on the Franks Casket and Ruthwell Cross.

ENG-232: London Fog: Victorian Secrets, Sensations and Subversions, with Michael Gorra
The deadly fog that hung over London throughout the 19th century was both a social reality and a pungent metaphor for a metropolis in which it seemed that almost anything could be hidden: secrets, crimes, identities. But sometimes the fog parts—and then comes scandal. We’ll begin with Dickens’ anatomy of the city in Bleak House; move on to sensation novels by Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, which contest and subvert the period’s gender roles; look at murder with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Jekyll; urban bombings with Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent; and end with a neo-Victorian novel by Sarah Waters.

ENG-249-01: Literatures of the Black Atlantic, with Andrea Stone
Visiting the pulpits, meeting houses and gallows of British North America to the colonial West Indies and docks of Liverpool to the modern day Caribbean, U.S., Canada, U.K. and France, this course analyzes the literatures of the Black Atlantic and the development of black literary and intellectual history from the 18th to the 21st century. Some key theoretical frameworks, which help inform our study of literature emerging from the Black Atlantic, include diaspora, transnationalism, internationalism and cosmopolitanism. Readings range from early African diasporic sermons, dying words, poetry, captivity and slave narratives to newspapers, essays, novels, drama and film.

ENG-250-01: Chaucer, with Nancy Bradbury
A contextualized close reading of Geoffrey Chaucer’s ambitious and enduring literary project, The Canterbury Tales, with attention to language change, narrative technique, the representation of varied and distinctive medieval voices, and the poem as vivid introduction to life and thought in the later Middle Ages.

ENG-274-01: The Pleasures of Not Thinking: Romanticism and the Irrational, with Lily Gurton-Wachter
Romantic writers were obsessed with uncertainty, ignorance, and the irrational, unthinking mind. Concerned with the unusual ideas that surface when we are sleeping or spaced out, absorbed or intoxicated, Romanticism embraced reason’s alternatives: forgetting, fragmentation, stupidity, and spontaneous, uncontrollable emotion. From Wordsworth’s suggestion that children are wiser than adults to Keats’s claim that great writers are capable of remaining uncertain without reaching for fact or reason, Romantic poets and novelists suggested that we have something to learn from not thinking. We will read texts by Austen, Blake, Burke, Coleridge, Cowper, De Quincey, Freud, Kant, Keats, Locke, and Rousseau.

ENG-333-01: Seminar: A Major British or American Writer: J. R. R. Tolkien, with Craig Davis
J. R. R. Tolkien was an Oxford don and professor of Old and Middle English literature who used fantasy fiction as a technique of moral philosophy and historical analysis, a way of pondering the meaning of human life on earth and the trajectory of human experience through time. We will explore Tolkien’s Middle-earth in The Hobbit (1936), The Lord of the Rings (1965) and The Silmarillion (2001) with special attention to the medieval and early modern sources of Tolkien’s literary imagination as intimated in his essays, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1936) and “On Fairy-Stories” (1947).

ENG-333-02: Seminar: A Major British or American Writer: Evelyn Waugh, with Douglas Patey
Reading and discussion of all Waugh’s novels (and some of his travel-books and journalism), from his early satires of the 1920s and 30s such as Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, through his turn to explicit religious polemic in Brideshead Revisited and Helena, to his re-creation of the Second World War in the trilogy Sword of Honour.

French Studies:

FRN-230-01: Colloquium in French Studies: Dream Places and Nightmare Spaces: French Literary Landscapes, with Ann Leone
Through texts by authors from Louis XIV to Colette, we discuss questions about literary uses of landscape: Why do we flee or search for a landscape? What makes us cherish or fear a particular place? What do landscapes tell us that the narrator or characters cannot or will not tell? Other authors may include Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Chateaubriand, Maupassant, Apollinaire, Robbe-Grillet and James Sacré.

FRN-230-02: Colloquium in French Studies: Consumers, Culture & the French Department Store, with Jonathan Gosnell
How have French stores and shopping practices evolved since the grand opening of Le Bon Marché in 1869? In what ways have megastores influenced French “culture”? This course examines representations of mass consumption in literature, the press, history, and analyses of French popular and bourgeois traditions, paying particular attention to the role of women in the transactions and development of culture.

FRN-251: The French Media, Now and Then: The French Press Online, with Jonathan Gosnell
A broad overview of the different media and their histories in the French and Francophone world as well as an overview of French social, economic, political and cultural issues. A study of contemporary French social, economic, political and cultural issues through daily readings of French magazines and newspapers online such as Le Monde, Le Figaro, Libération, Le Nouvel Observateur. Students acquire essential tools for media analysis: identifying political orientation, detecting bias, tracking controversies over time, putting quotes in context, and identifying missing voices in the narrative. Students can expect to read the leading newspapers every week and grapple with events as they happen.

FRN-265-01: Les Années Noires: Living through the Occupation, 1939-45, with Janie Vanpée
What was it like to live in Paris under the German occupation? What were the moral dilemmas and the political risks that Parisians faced as they struggled to survive? And how are we, today, to judge this historical period and those who lived through it? Students experience this difficult period through a global simulation in which each creates a character with a specific identity and past—a secret collaborator, a Jewish immigrant, a resistance fighter, a closeted homosexual, an avant-garde artist, a reporter, the widow of a soldier who fought under Maréchal Pétain in WWI—and representing the diversity of the Parisian population at the time. Each student writes her character’s “memoirs” reacting to historical as well as personal events from her unique perspective. Readings range from historical documents, speeches, and testimonials to drama, fiction. Weekly films. In French.

FRN-282-01: Topics in 19th- and 20th-Century French Studies: What’s Right? What’s Wrong? Stories About Moral Dilemmas, with Martine Gantrel
This course is about dilemmas, i.e. moments in life when one has to choose between two valid but mutually exclusive options, and how major writers of the 19th and 20th centuries have used moral conflicts in their works to embody and confront what they saw as the most pressing social, political, or personal issues of their times. A novel (Les Misérables), an autofiction (L’Immoraliste), a theater play (Les Justes), and a film (Hiroshima mon amour) provide us with four venues for examining and debating which values are at stake, what questions they bring up and what answers, if any, they provide. Readings by Hugo, Gide, Camus and Duras.

FRN-340-01: Topics in 17th- and 18th-Century Literature: Social Networking in Early Modern France–A Digital Humanities Approach, with Hélène Visentin
This course examines the social practices, spaces and networks that defined 17th- and 18th-century France, politically and culturally, from the height of the Ancien Régime up to the French Revolution. Students are also exposed to digital humanities methods and theories, combining the study and praxis of these approaches. As a jointly-taught, cross-campus course, students at Smith and Wellesley share a common syllabus and engage in parallel assignments. Through this endeavor we aim to foster digital collaboration among students in ways that lead them to reflect on how their use of digital methods and “virtual” teamwork change the ways in which they produce, share and disseminate knowledge.

FRN-380-01: Topics in French Cultural Studies: Immigration and Sexuality, with Mehammed Mack
This course explains how gender and sexuality have been politicized in immigration debates in France, from the 1920s to the present. Students examine both cultural productions and social science texts: memoirs, psychoanalytical literature, activist statements, sociological studies, feature films, fashion, performance art, blogs, and news reports. France has historically been the leading European host country for immigrants, a multiplicity of origins reflected in its current demographic make-up. Topics include: the hyper-sexualization of black and brown bodies, France as a Mediterranean culture, immigrant loneliness in Europe, intermarriage and demographic change, the veil and niqab, as well as sexual nationalism and homo-nationalism.

German Studies:

GER-300-01: Topics in German Culture and Society: How Martin Luther’s Reformation Shaped Europe (1517-2017), with Joseph McVeigh

GER-350-01: Seminar: Language and the German Media, with Judith Keyler-Mayer
A study of language, culture and politics in the German-language media; supplemental materials reflecting the interests and academic disciplines of students in the seminar. Practice of written and spoken German through compositions, linguistic exercises and oral reports.

Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies:

RES-126-01: Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature: Madmen, Conmen and Government Clerks, with Thomas Roberts
Populated with many unique and eccentric characters — from revolutionary socialists to runaway human noses — nineteenth-century Russian literature displays a startling experimentation and innovation that advanced Russia to the vanguard of Western literature. Encompassing poetry, fiction, and journalism, this survey explores how authors such as Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov positioned literature at the center of public discourse, as a venue for addressing important philosophical, political, religious, and social issues, including gender and class relations; personal and national identity; and the role of the writer in public life.

Spanish & Portuguese:

SPP-230-01: Latin American and Peninsular Literature: Maghribi Jewish Women: Cordoba, Casablanca, Tel Aviv, with Ibtissam Bouachrine
This course examines constructions and representations of Maghribi Jewish women from the western Mediterranean to Israel. The first part of the course focuses on Jewish women in Andalusi and Maghribi texts. Students are invited to think critically about concepts such as “tolerance,” “convivencia,” and “dhimma,” as well as what it means to be a woman and a religious minority in Muslim-majority communities. The second half of the course examines representations and realities of Jewish women of Moroccan descent in Israeli society. This part centers on questions of immigration, class, demography, gender, diaspora and identity.

SPP-245-01: Topics in Latin American and Peninsular Studies: Lorca: Hidden and Revealed, with Maria Estela Harretche
“Theater,” in the words of Federico Garcia Lorca, “is poetry that steps off the written page to become human.” All of Lorca’s dramatic work is a poetic construction, whose poetry comes to life thanks to its inherent dramatic tension. Yet how are we to lift this poetry from the book and make it human on stage? Beginning with his time in Madrid, at the Residencia de Estudiantes, we analyze the philosophical, political and aesthetic contexts that shaped Lorca’s personality as a creator: Lorca the folklorist, the visual artist, the stage director and the socially engaged writer. His stay in New York in 1929 is documented by a close reading of the two fundamental texts he wrote at this time, El Público and Poeta en Nueva York. Performance strategies are used during the course to enhance foreign language skills.

SPP-250-01: Survey of Iberian Literatures and Society I: Sex and the Medieval City, with Ibtissam Bouachrine
This course examines the medieval understanding of sex and the woman’s body within an urban context. We read medieval texts on love, medicine and women’s sexuality by Iberian and North African scholars. We investigate the ways in which medieval Iberian medical traditions have viewed women’s bodies and defined their health and illness. We also address women’s role as practitioners of medicine, and how such a role was affected by the gradual emergence of “modern” medical institutions such as the hospital and the medical profession.

SPP-372-01: Seminar: Topics in Latin American and Iberian Studies: Blackness in Spain, with Reyes Lázaro
In this seminar we investigate the lives of individuals of African origin who lived or travelled in Spain at different historical times: painter Juan de Pareja (Velazquez’s slave) in the 17th century, whose breathtaking portrait by Velazquez hangs at the New York Metropolitan Museum; Arturo Schomburg, in the 1920s, a pioneer scholar of Afro-American Studies, who travelled to Spain in order to research Pareja; volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, such as poet Langston Hughes, singer-actor Paul Robeson and nurse Salarla Kea); migrant workers in the late 20th century; and finally Smith student Lori L. Tharp, author of a travel memoir of her Junior Year Abroad, Kinky Gazpacho (2008), which she describes as a “racial coming of age.” Through these different historical periods, people and situations we study the effects on racial ideology of factors such as class, marginality, love and the existence of shared projects of social transformation.

ANTHROPOLOGY:

ANT-352-01: Seminar: Topics in Anthropology: Anthropology of Multiculturalism, with Fernando Armstrong-Fumero
In the United States, the idea of multiculturalism has come to symbolize the right of communities with distinct cultures to maintain their own ways of living in a diverse national society. Similar politics of difference have developed in other countries in the world. But is multiculturalism the same idea in every national context? How do the different histories of countries in North or South America, Europe, Asia or Africa influence the way that these different national multiculturalisms develop? How do trans-national trends in the politics of culture and diversity get adapted to work in these different contexts? The course will focus on specific historic and ethnographic studies that document the relationship between the culture and history of different national and local communities and trends of contemporary multicultural traditions. A range of readings will introduce general topics which students will apply to specific contexts for their own research.

ART HISTORY:

ART-253-01: The Arts in Britain, 1714-1820, with John Moore
Artistic production under the first three Hanoverian kings of Great Britain. Topics include royal patronage; urban developments (London, Bath, Edinburgh); the English landscape garden; the English country house and its fittings; collecting and display; the Grand Tour; aesthetic movements (Gothic Revival, the Sublime, the Picturesque, Neoclassicism); artists’ training and careers (among others, the brothers Adam, Gainsborough, Hawskmoor, Hogarth, Reynolds, Roubiliac and Wright of Derby); maps, prints and books; center vs. periphery; city vs. country. Reading assignments culled from primary and secondary sources; including travel and epistolary literature.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE:

CLT-100-01: Introduction to Comparative Literature: The Pleasures of Reading: Cannibals, Witches & Virgins, with Katwiwa Mule
An examination of the rewritings and adaptations of the three iconic figures of Shakespeare’s The Tempest—Caliban the demi-devil savage other, Sycorax the devil-whore, and Miranda the virgin-goddess—by writers from different geographies, time periods and ideological persuasions. Using texts such as Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest, Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs. Caliban, Lemuel Johnson’s Highlife for Caliban, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day and Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, we seek to understand how postcolonial, feminist and postmodern rewritings of The Tempest transpose its language and characters into critiques of colonialism, nationhood, race, gender and difference.

CLT-204-01: Writings and Rewritings: Queering Don Quixote, with Reyes Lázaro
This course is devoted to a slow reading of Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605–15), allegedly the first and most influential modern novel. Our approach to this hilarious masterpiece by Cervantes is through a “queering” focus, i.e., as a text that exposes all sorts of binary oppositions (literary, sexual, social, religious and ethnic), such as: high-low, tradition vs. individual creativity, historical vs. literary truth, man vs. woman, authenticity vs. performance, Moor vs. Christian, humorous vs. tragic. The course also covers the crucial role played by Don Quixote in the development of modern and postmodern novelistic concepts (multiple narrators, fictional authors, palimpsest, dialogism) and examples of its worldwide impact. With an optional 1-credit course in Spanish (SPN 356) for those who want to perfect their linguistic and literary skills by reading, translating and commenting selected sections of Miguel de Cervantes’ masterpiece and additional secondary literature in Spanish.

CLT-220-01: Colloquium: Imagining Language, with Margaret Bruzelius
This course explores the ways in which philosophers and artists have imagined the links between language and the world. We read mostly pre-20th century theories of language—Plato’s Cratylus, St. Augustine’s On the Teacher, Locke on language from the Essay, Herder and Rousseau on The Origin of Language, Freud on jokes—and link them to novels, poems and other artwork by (mostly) 20th-century artists such as Louis Zukofsky, May Swenson, Lewis Carroll, Richard Powers, Xu Bing, Russell Hoban and others who focus on the materiality of language, on words as things. Readings are accompanied by weekly exercises such as rebuses, invented etymologies, alphabet poems, portmanteau words, emoticons and so on.

CLT-264-01: Dostoevsky, with Maria Nemcová Banerjee
A close reading of all the major literary works by Dostoevsky, with special attention to the philosophical, religious and political issues that inform Dostoevsky’s search for a definition of Russia’s spiritual and cultural identity. In translation.

CLT-273-01 / RES-273-01: Cosmic Cold War: Russian and Western Science Fiction in Political Context, with Thomas Roberts
How did the “final frontier” of space become a “front” in the Cold War? As the US and USSR competed in the Space Race, science fiction reflected political discourses in literature, film, visual art, and popular culture. This course explores Russian and Western science fiction in the contexts of twentieth-century geopolitics and artistic modernism (and postmodernism), examining works by Bogdanov, Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Butler, Haraway, Pelevin, and others. The survey considers science fiction’s utopian content and political function, as well as critical and dystopian modes of the genre.

CLT-300-01: Literary Theory and Literary Practice: Conflicts and Consensus, with Anna Botta
This course presents a variety of practices and positions within the field of literary theory. Approaches include structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, gender and queer studies, cultural studies and postcolonial studies. Emphasis on the theory as well as the practice of these methods: their assumptions about writing and reading and about literature as a cultural formation. Readings include Freud, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Bakhtin, Gramsci, Bhabba, Butler, Said, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Žižek. The class is of interest to all students who wish to explore a range of approaches and methodologies within the humanities as well to students who plan to go to graduate school in literature programs.

CLT-342-01: Seminar: A Double Vision: Heroine/Victim, with Maria Nemcová Banerjee
We examine how the iconic status of woman as moral redeemer and social pathbreaker is shadowed by a darker view of female self and sexuality in some representative works by male authors of the Russian 19th century. The primary texts are Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Turgenev’s On The Eve, Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?, Dostoevsky’s A Gentle Spirit and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and the Kreutzer Sonata. These novelistic narratives are supplemented with theoretical essays by Belinsky, J.S. Mill, Schopenhauer and Vladimir Soloviev.

DANCE, MUSIC, THEATRE:

Dance:

DAN-171-01: Studies in Dance History: Concert Dance in the US and Europe (1900s–Today): Concert Dance in the US and Europe (1900s to Present), with Lester Tomé
The course offers an overarching historical survey of multiple idioms in dance, focusing on the traditions of ballet, modern dance and jazz. The study of major artists, dance works, trends and events from the past illuminates the dance lineages, sociocultural contexts and cross-pollinations between genres that have led to contemporary practices in European and North American concert dance. The acquisition of skills in historical research and writing constitutes a main goal of the course. Particular attention is paid to the location, evaluation and interpretation of primary sources in dance. Also, the course introduces discussions on the nature of history as a discipline and mode of inquiry.

Music:

MUS-102-01: First Nights, with Andrea Moore
This course serves as an introduction to the history of Western music by studying in detail the first performances of a small number of singularly important works in the Western tradition including Orfeo (Monteverdi), Messiah (Handel), the Ninth Symphony (Beethoven), the Symphonie fantastique (Berlioz), and Le Sacre du printemps (Stravinsky). Using Thomas Kelly’s textbook First Nights (which treats these five compositions), we analyze musical monuments as aesthetic objects and consider their relation to such issues as exoticism, politics and religious belief, as well as the status of this canon in the early 21st century.

Theatre:

THE-217-01: Modern European Drama 1870s-1930s, with Len Berkman
The plays, theatres and playwrights of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe. A leap from Büchner to Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Chekhov, Wedekind and Gorky onwards to the widespread experimentation of the 1920s and earlier avant garde (e.g., Jarry, Artaud, Stein, Witkiewicz, Pirandello, Mayakovsky, Fleisser, early Brecht). Special attention to issues of gender, class, warfare and other personal/political foci.

ECONOMICS, GOVERNMENT:

Economics:

? ECO-319-01: Seminar: Economics of Migration, with Yuanyuan Liu

Government:

GOV-100-01: Introduction to Political Thinking, with Gary Lehring
A study of the leading ideas of the Western political tradition, focusing on such topics as justice, power, legitimacy, revolution, freedom, equality and forms of government—democracy especially.

GOV-223-01: Russian Politics, with Alia Baranovsky
This course examines recurring issues facing the Russian state and its citizens: the complex interplay between formal institutions and informal politics, patterns of cooperation and antagonism in relationships with other countries, and the “resource curse.” It also addresses the importance of public opinion in a hybrid political regime; the use of the Internet and the mass media; and human rights in contemporary Russia. It examines history to provide sufficient context, but will concentrate on the period between the end of the Soviet Union and the present day.

GOV-262-01: Early Modern Political Theory, 1500-1800, with John Patrick Coby
A study of Machiavellian power-politics and of efforts by social contract and utilitarian liberals to render that politics safe and humane. Topics considered include political behavior, republican liberty, empire and war; the state of nature, natural law/natural right, sovereignty and peace; limitations on power, the general will, and liberalism’s relation to moral theory, religion and economics. Readings from Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Smith and others; also novels and plays.

HISTORY:

HST-202-01: Ancient Greece, with Richard Lim
A survey of the history of the ancient Greeks during their most formative period, from the end of the Bronze Age to the end of the Classical Age. We examine the relationship between mythology, archaeology and historical memory, the evolution of the city-state, games and oracles, colonization, warfare and tyranny, city-states Sparta and Athens and their respective pursuits of social justice, wars with Persia, cultural interactions with non-Greeks, Athen’s naval empire and its invention of Democracy, family and women, and traditional religions and forms of new wisdom, and the trial and death of Socrates in 399 B.C.

HST-224-01: History of the Early Middle Ages, with Joshua Birk
The Mediterranean world from the fall of Rome to the age of conversion. The emergence of the Islamic world, the Byzantine state and the Germanic empire. Topics include the monastic ideal, Sufism and the cult of saints; the emergence of the papacy; kinship and kingship: Charlemagne and the Carolingian renaissance, the high caliphate, and the continuation of the Eastern Roman Empire; literacy and learning. The decline of public authority and the dominance of personal power in societies built on local relations.

HST-238-01: Gender and the British Empire, with Jennifer Hall-Witt
Traditionally, historians portrayed the British Empire as the province of male explorers, merchants, missionaries, soldiers and bureaucrats. This course treats such men as gendered subjects, investigating intersections between the empire and masculinity. It surveys debates about white women’s colonial experiences and studies the experience of women who were colonized and enslaved. It examines the gendered structure of racial ideologies and the imperial features of feminist concerns. Focus is on the West Indies, Africa, and India from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries.

HST-246-01: Memory and History, with Darcy Buerkle
Contemporary debates among European historians, artists and citizens over the place of memory in political and social history. The effectiveness of a range of representational practices from the historical monograph to visual culture, as markers of history, and as creators of meaning.

HST-252-01: Women and Gender in Modern Europe, 1789-1918, with Darcy Buerkle
A survey of European women’s experiences and constructions of gender from the French Revolution through World War I, focusing on Western Europe. Gendered relationships to work, family, politics, society, religion and the body, as well as shifting conceptions of femininity and masculinity, as revealed in novels, films, treatises, letters, paintings, plays and various secondary sources.

JEWISH STUDIES, RELIGION:

Jewish Studies:

JUD-110-01: Introduction to Yiddish Culture, with Justin Cammy
An introduction to Yiddish, the Jewish language of dreamers, scholars, workers, and rebels for almost 1,000 years in Europe and its diaspora. Explores folktales, short stories, theater, film, and popular culture in historical context. How does Yiddish continue to function today as a site of radical political engagement and cultural disruption?

? JUD-215-01: George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, with Justin Cammy

JUD-255-01: 20th-Century European Thought, with Adi Gordon
The intersection of intellectual history and Jewish history, including Hebrew prophets as archetypes for many European public intellectuals. The Dreyfus Affair saw the birth of the intellectual, and over the 20th century, many of Europe’s leading thinkers prominently addressed the so-called Jewish Question. Liberalism, Conservatism, Communism, and Fascism – all were created by intellectuals, and all relied on intellectuals in their ideological struggle over the present and future. What were the roles, responsibility and accountability of public intellectuals in Europe’s Age of Extremes? To what extent was the public intellectual a distinctively 20th-century or distinctively Jewish phenomenon?

Religion:

REL-223-01: The Modern Jewish Experience, with Lois Dubin
A thematic survey of Jewish history and thought from the 16th century to the present, examining Jews as a minority in modern Europe and in global diaspora. We analyze changing dynamics of integration and exclusion of Jews in various societies as well as diverse forms of Jewish religion, culture and identity among Sefardic, Ashkenazic and Mizrahi Jews. Readings include major philosophic, mystical and political works in addition to primary sources on the lives of Jewish women and men, families and communities, and messianic and popular movements. Throughout the course, we explore tensions between assimilation and cohesion, tradition and renewal, and history and memory.

REL-242-01 / RES 242: The Russian Icon: Culture, Politics, and the Sacred, with Vera Shevzov
As devotional object, political symbol and art commodity, the Russian icon has been revered as sacred, vilified as reactionary, and displayed and sold as masterpiece. This course examines the complex and multifaceted world of the Russian icon from its Byzantine roots to its contemporary re-emergence in the public sphere of post-Soviet Russia. Consideration of the iconographic vocation and craft, beauty and the sacred, devotions and rituals, the icon and Russian national identity, the “discovery” of the icon by the modern art world, controversial images and forms of iconoclasm. In addition to icons themselves, sources include historical, devotional, liturgical, philosophical and literary texts.

PHILOSOPHY:

PHI-124-01: History of Ancient and Medieval Western Philosophy, with Susan Levin
A study of Western philosophy from the early Greeks to the end of the Middle Ages, with emphasis on the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Epicureans, and some of the scholastic philosophers.

PHI-226-01: Topics in the History of Philosophy: Hume, with Jeffry Ramsey
An examination of Hume’s arguments and his influence in matters of epistemology, philosophy of religion, morals, aesthetics, political theory and economic theory. We read Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. Additional readings include excerpts from some of Hume’s other works and contemporary and recent commentary on Hume.

PHI-246: Race Matters: Philosophy, Science and Politics, with Albert Mosley
This course will examine the origins, evolution, and contemporary status of racial thinking. It will explore how religion and science have both supported and rejected notions of racial superiority; and how preexisting European races became generically white in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The course will also examine current debates concerning the reality of racial differences, the role of racial classifications, and the value of racial diversity.

SOCIOLOGY:

SOC-320-01: Seminar: Special Topics in the Sociology of Culture: Pierre Bourdieu and Culture, with Rick Fantasia
Pierre Bourdieu left a remarkably rich analytical legacy, and especially with regard to our perceptions and understanding of Culture. From his studies of the Algerian peasantry; to his work on social reproduction in the French education system; to studies of taste and class, museum attendance, photography, and the symbolic revolutions in literature and painting; Bourdieu treated culture as a crucial site for understanding contemporary social life. In this seminar we will pick through this rich legacy, gathering up the most important, and intellectually exciting elements. The goal is not to just read key works by Bourdieu and his critics, but to think with Bourdieu and work with his powerful relational perspective.