Please click on the course titles in order to see full descriptions and faculty names.<\/p>\n
FIRST-YEAR SEMINARS:<\/strong><\/p>\n LANGUAGES:<\/strong><\/p>\n ANTHROPOLOGY:<\/strong><\/p>\n ART HISTORY:<\/strong><\/p>\n COMPARATIVE LITERATURE:<\/strong><\/p>\n DANCE, MUSIC, THEATRE:<\/strong><\/p>\n ECONOMICS, GOVERNMENT:<\/strong><\/p>\n HISTORY:<\/strong><\/p>\n JEWISH STUDIES, RELIGION:<\/strong><\/p>\n PHILOSOPHY:<\/strong><\/p>\n SOCIOLOGY:<\/strong><\/p>\n FIRST-YEAR SEMINARS:<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/a>? FYS-147-01: Power Lunch: The Archaeology of Feasting, with Rebecca Worsham<\/a><\/strong> <\/a>FYS-162-01: Ambition and Adultery: Individualism in the 19th-Century Novel, with Michael Gorra<\/a><\/strong> <\/a>FYS-156-01:\u00a0Rebels, Refugees, Rakes and Eccentrics: Fantasies of German-ness in American Popular Culture, with Joseph McVeigh<\/a><\/strong> <\/a>FYS-185-01: Style Matters: The Power of the Aesthetic in Italian Cinema, with Anna Botta<\/a><\/strong> LANGUAGES:<\/strong><\/p>\n English Language and Literature:<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/a>ENG-210-01: Old English, with Craig Davis<\/a><\/strong> <\/a>ENG-232:\u00a0London Fog: Victorian Secrets, Sensations and Subversions, with Michael Gorra<\/a> <\/a>ENG-249-01: Literatures of the Black Atlantic, with Andrea Stone<\/a><\/strong> <\/a>ENG-250-01: Chaucer, with Nancy Bradbury<\/a><\/strong> <\/a>ENG-274-01:\u00a0The Pleasures of Not Thinking: Romanticism and the Irrational, with Lily Gurton-Wachter<\/a>\n
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\nThroughout history, food and dining have formed some of the most fundamental expressions of cultural identity\u2014in 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.<\/p>\n
\nWe 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\u2014transgression, even\u2014to social order and cohesion. The books are paired\u2014two French, two Russian; two that deal with a woman’s adultery, and two that focus on a young man\u2019s ambition\u2014Balzac, P\u00e8re Goriot;<\/em> Flaubert, Madame Bovary;<\/em> Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment;<\/em> Tolstoy, Anna Karenina<\/em> (there are some additional readings in history, criticism and political theory).<\/p>\n
\nAlthough 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 20th<\/sup>\u00a0and 21st<\/sup>\u00a0centuries. We will examine, among other things, various films, such as\u00a0The Big Lebowski<\/em>,\u00a0Blazing Saddles<\/em>,\u00a0Dr. Strangelove<\/em>\u00a0and many others, as well as TV series such as\u00a0The Simpsons, The X-Files<\/em>,\u00a0Saturday Night Live<\/em>\u00a0and more.<\/p>\n
\nExamining 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\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nA study of the language of Anglo-Saxon England (ca. 450\u20131066) and a reading of Old English poems, including The Wanderer <\/em>and The Dream of the Rood<\/em>. We also learn the 31-character Anglo-Frisian futhorc and read runic inscriptions on the Franks Casket and Ruthwell Cross.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>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\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n
\nVisiting 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.<\/p>\n
\nA contextualized close reading of Geoffrey Chaucer\u2019s ambitious and enduring literary project, The Canterbury Tales,<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n