ENROLL

Zaki Haidar

Arabic literature is a vibrant and humane tradition. At the same time, several Arab societies have experienced periods of exceedingly violent conflict throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. In this course, we will investigate the ways these two currents—war and the literary—converge in several Arab societies. As members of societies at war, but also as literary artists, how do authors represent these conflicting narratives? What sorts of war stories do they tell, how do they tell them, and what sort of literary practice is produced? We will study the birth of the Lebanese Civil War novel as a bona fide genre in the 1970s and 80s, how literature informed anti-colonial struggles in Palestine and Algeria from the 1950s to the present, and read some works of genre-bending horror and science fiction that have appeared in the wake of Iraq’s recent destruction. Taught in English, no knowledge of Arabic is required.

In translation

Wendy M. Sepponen

Ross Elfline

Wendy M. Sepponen

This course engages with the visual and material characteristics and practices particular to sculpture. Often relegated to the sidelines of art history classes, this course seeks to teach how to talk about sculptures and to explore the diverse contexts and processes with which sculptors worked. A medium-specific focus allows us to consider how sculptures functioned in the early modern period while allowing for effective bridges to the students' contemporary surroundings and viewing practices. While early modern European sculpture will be the course's core, direct engagement with sculptures and display practices will enliven our understanding of and appreciation for sculpture.

Prerequisite: Any one Art History course

Extra time required

Meghan Tierney

This course offers an investigation of ancient Maya art and architecture from the pre-Classic, Early, Middle, and Late Classic to the Post-Classic (conquest and post-conquest) and Spanish-Colonial periods. Focusing on a variety of artistic materials, monumental sites, approaches to city planning, including temple burial and entombment, and artistic conversation and cultural interactions with the Maya periphery, we will explore how ritual, death, and the afterlife are imagined, depicted, and enacted through the accouterment of Maya dynastic rulership. Discussion of the art-historical legacy of the ancient Maya as well as the artistic traditions of the present-day Maya will bookend the term.

Baird Jarman

This course surveys the history of European architecture while emphasizing firsthand encounters with actual structures. Students visit outstanding examples of major transnational styles--including Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Moorish, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical and Modernist buildings--along with regionally specific styles, such as Spanish Plateresque, English Tudor and Catalan Modernisme. Cultural and technological changes affecting architectural practices are emphasized along with architectural theory, ranging from Renaissance treatises to Modernist manifestoes. Students also visit buildings that resist easy classification and that raise topics such as spatial appropriation, stylistic hybridity, and political symbolism.

Requires participation in OCS Program: Architectural Studies in Europe

Baird Jarman

This course explores the theory and practice of cultural resource management by investigating how various architectural sites and urban historic districts operate. Students will consider cultural, financial, ethical and pedagogical aspects of contemporary tourism practices within a historical framework that roots the travel industry alongside religious pilgrimage customs and the aristocratic tradition of the Grand Tour. Interacting with professionals who help oversee architectural landmarks and archaeological sites, students will analyze and assess initiatives at various locations, ranging from educational programs and preservation plans to sustainability efforts and repatriation debates.

Participation in OCS Architectural Studies Program

Jay Beck

Sophomore Priority. Extra Time required for screenings

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: CAMS 110.WL0 (Synonym 49163)

Cecilia Cornejo

This course explores the relevance and influence of documentary films by closely examining the aesthetic concerns and ethical implications inherent in these productions. We study these works both as artistic undertakings and as documents produced within a specific time, culture, and ideology. Central to our understanding of the form are issues of technology, methodology, and ethics, which are examined thematically as well as chronologically. The course offers an overview of the major historical movements in documentary film along more recent works; it combines screenings, readings, and discussions with the goal of preparing students to both understand and analyze documentary films.

Extra Time Required, weekly evening in-person screenings Tuesdays

Dimitrios Pavlounis

As video games have emerged as a dominant cultural form, they have become deeply intertwined with broader cultural debates around identity. By analyzing a variety of specific games as well as the industry that creates them and the communities who play them, we will think through topics such as liberal multiculturalism, neoliberal capitalism, feminism, queerness, ethical design, the military-entertainment complex, GamerGate, and discourses of political correctness. This course will avoid categorizing games as having “positive” or “negative” social effects and will instead focus on how video games function as a window into issues of identity in U.S. culture.

Jay Beck

This course presents the broader field of Sound Studies, its debates and issues. Drawing on a diverse set of interdisciplinary perspectives, the seminar explores the range of academic work on sound to examine the relationship between sound and listening, sound and perception, sound and memory, and sound and modern thought. Topics addressed include but are not limited to sound technologies and industries, acoustic perception, sound and image relations, sound in media, philosophies of listening, sound semiotics, speech and communication, voice and subject formation, sound art, the social history of noise, and hearing cultures.

Prerequisite: Cinema and Media Studies 110 or instructor permission

Lei Yang

Students will read, discuss, and write about major literary works from twentieth century China in order to both improve their language abilities and increase their understanding of the artistic and intellectual milieu in which the works were produced. Readings will include selections from modern and contemporary Chinese literature, including poetry, fiction, novels, and letters in the original Chinese. 

Prerequisite: Chinese 206 or equivalent

Jessica Leiman

Jeremy P DeAngelo

King Arthur is a figure from Western tradition whose name conjures a clear series of associations: the Sword in the Stone, the Round Table, the Holy Grail. This course traces the development of this tradition, from its origins in an obscure corner of the British Isles to its dominance within both European literature and the popular imagination. Similarly, Arthur himself takes on multiple, sometimes contradictory guises—an enemy of the English and yet a symbol of England, the archetype of the perfect king but a champion of democracy, the epitome of Christian devotion yet suffused with pagan imagery. Our texts range from medieval Welsh legend to modern film; everything is in modern English translation.

Pierre Hecker

1st 5 Week.

Pierre Hecker

Timothy Raylor

Peter Balaam

We will set out after Herman Melville's sublime romance of whale-hunting, researching as we go the myriad cultural contexts that speak within it-- romanticism, nationalism, humanism, religion, idealism, capitalism, science, race, labor, gender, sexuality, masculinity, whiteness. Attention to Melville’s life, career, and other works, his nineteenth-century obscurity and twentieth-century canonization, will lead us to a history of interpretations of Moby-Dick from 1851 to the present.

Michael Kowalewski

Extra Time required.

Nancy Cho

Prerequisite: One English Foundations course and one prior 6 credit English course

First Year Students Cannot Register

Jessica Leiman

Prerequisite: One English foundations course and one other 6 credit English course

Arnab Chakladar

Prerequisite: One English foundations course and one additional 6 credit English course

Sandra Rousseau

Through texts, images and films coming from different continents, this class will present Francophone cultures and discuss the connections and tensions that have emerged between France and and other French speaking countries. Focused on oral and written expression this class aims to strengthen students’ linguistic skills while introducing them to the academic discipline of French and Francophone studies. The theme will be school and education in the Francophone world.

Prerequisite: French 204 or equivalent

Cathy Yandell

How to transcribe the self? How is a self created, examined, or reinvented through storytelling? Is cultural context inextricable from the writing of a memoir? Such readings as Montaigne, Descartes, Nathalie Sarraute, and Assia Djebar, as well as the films of Agnès Varda and Gillaume Galienne, the graphic novel L’Arabe du futur, and the Franco-Rwandan singer Gaël Faye, will inform our inquiry. During the course of the term, students will also produce their own autobiographical/ autofictional projects.

Prerequisite: One French course beyond French 204 or instructor permission

Josiah B Simon

Would you sell your soul to the devil? In this course, we will explore the legend of Faust and portrayals of the devil from the Renaissance and Enlightenment to the present day, drawing on examples from classic and popular literature, film and music. Through the lens of the Faustian theme, students of all disciplines and majors are invited to survey key moments and figures in German-language culture and history. Taught in English.

Juliane Schicker

The course introduces students to the joys and challenges of reading short German fictional and non-fictional texts of various genres from three centuries, including fairy tales, aphorisms, short stories, novellas, tweets, essays, and newspaper articles. We will read slowly and with an eye to grammar and vocabulary building, while also concentrating on developing an understanding of German cultural history. Texts and class discussions will be in German.

Prerequisite: German 204 or equivalent

William North

This course offers students an introduction to post-classical Latin (250-1450) through readings in prose and poetry drawn from a variety of genres and periods. Students will also gain experience with medieval Latin paleography and codicology through occasional workshops in Special Collections.

Prerequisite: Latin 204 or equivalent, Latin placement exam or instructor's permission

Sandra Rousseau

This class introduces students to the various theoretical frameworks and the many approaches scholars can use when analyzing a text (whether this text is a film, an image, a literary piece or a performance). What do words like ‘structuralism,’ ‘ecocriticism,’ 'cultural studies,' and ‘postcolonial studies’ refer to? Most importantly, how do they help us understand the world around us? This class will be organized around interdisciplinary theoretical readings and exercises in cultural analysis.

Prerequisite: At least one 200- or 300-level course in Literary/Artistic Analysis (in any language) or instructor permission

Stacy Beckwith

As a crossroads of diverse perspectives such a multicultural, but fraught environment in the Middle East, Israeli and Palestinian literature and film offer a kaleidoscopic socio-cultural introduction to Middle East Studies, in microcosm. We will focus on how mental pictures of home, self, and other have been created, perpetuated, and/or challenged in local fiction since the 1940s and in film since the 1990s, by authors and artists of Middle Eastern Jewish, European Jewish, and Palestinian backgrounds. We will also explore community, generational, and gender-relevant responses to their projections of post/colonial history and national life in Israel/ Palestine.

In Translation

Andy Flory

A survey of American music with particular attention to the interaction of the folk, popular, and classical realms. No musical experience required.

Justin London

An investigation into the nature of musical sounds and the way they are combined to form rhythms, melodies, harmonies, and form. Topics include the spectral composition of musical pitches, the structure of musical scales and their influence on melody, chords and their interval content, and the symmetry and complexity of rhythmic patterns. Student work includes building a musical instrument, programming a drum machine, analyzing the statistical distribution of pitches in a folksong corpus, and form in the music of the Grateful Dead.

Prerequisite: The ability to read music in one clef

Megan E Sarno

Prerequisite: Music 110 or 204 or instructor permission

Andy Flory

Barbara Allen

Humberto Huergo

Prerequisite: Spanish 204 or equivalent

Jose Cerna-Bazan

Prerequisite: Spanish 204 or equivalent

Jorge Brioso

Prerequisite: Spanish 204 or equivalent

Silvia Lopez

Prerequisite: Spanish 204 or proficiency

Not open to seniors

Yansi Perez

Prerequisite: Spanish 204 or equivalent

Jorge Brioso

Prerequisite: Spanish 205 or above

Becky Boling

Prerequisite: Spanish 205 or above

Kate M Powers-Kusio

A study of women playwrights, performance-makers, and performers and the representations of women they create on stage. Playwrights addressed will range from historical figures like Lillian Hellman to their more recent descendants, such as Caryl Churchill, Suzan Lori-Parks, and Young Jean Lee. More broadly, the course will look at women who have figured prominently as directors or creators of non-traditional performance, such as Hallie Flanagan, founder of the Federal Theater Project, or more recently, Elizabeth LeCompte, artistic director of the experimental Wooster Group.