ENROLL

Austin Mason

This course offers an experiential approach to crafts, technologies, and other material practices in premodern societies. Through hands-on activities and collaborations with local craftspeople, farmers, and other experts, this course will examine and test a variety of hypotheses about how people in the past lived their lives. How did prehistoric people produce stone tools, pottery, and metal? How did ancient Greeks and Romans feed and clothe themselves? How did medieval Europeans build their homes and bury their dead? Students will answer these questions and more by actively participating in a range of experimental archaeology and experiential history projects. Lab required.

Prerequisite: One previous Archaeology pertinent course

Pierre Hecker

Cross-listed with English 244

Cross-listed with ENGL 244.00

Pierre Hecker

Cross-listed with ENGL 144

Austin Mason

Why did barbarians invade? Traders trade? Pilgrims travel? Vikings raid? Medieval Europe is sometimes caricatured as a world of small villages and strong traditions that saw little change between the cultural high-water marks of Rome and the Renaissance. In fact, this was a period of dynamic innovation, during which Europeans met many familiar challenges—environmental change, religious and cultural conflict, social and political competition—by traveling or migrating to seek new opportunities. This course will examine mobility and migration in northern Europe, and students will be introduced to diverse methodological approaches to their study by exploring historical and literary sources, archaeological evidence and scientific techniques involving DNA and isotopic analyses.

Held for new first year students

Victoria Morse

Enthusiasm, artistry, invention, exploration.... How do these notions of Renaissance culture play out in sources from the period? Using a range of evidence (historical, literary, and visual) from Italy and France in the fourteenth-sixteenth centuries we will explore selected issues of the period, including debates about the meaning of being human and ideal forms of government and education; the nature of God and mankind's duties toward the divine; the family and gender roles; definitions of beauty and the goals of artistic achievement; accumulation of wealth; and exploration of new worlds and encounters with other peoples.

William North

What roles do images play in premodern societies? What are these images thought to be and to do? Why, at particular moments, have certain groups attempted to do away with images either completely or in specific settings? How do images create and threaten communities and how is the management of the visual integrated with and shaped by other values, structures, and objectives? This course will examine these and related questions by looking in depth at image-making and veneration and their opponents in a range of case studies (from the medieval west, Byzantium, Muslim lands, and Protestant Europe) and by examining theoretical discussions of images, vision, and cognition from the fourth through sixteenth centuries. This course is discussion intensive and each student will develop a research project on a topic of their own design.

Prerequisite: Previous history course or instructor consent

Allison Murphy

Are human beings radically individual and atomic by nature, political animals, or something else? However we answer that question, what difference does it make for our understanding of the ways in which larger political communities come into existence and are maintained? In this course we will explore these and related questions while reading two of the most foundational works in political theory, Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’s Leviathan, as well as several contemporary pieces influenced by these thinkers.

Allison Murphy

Is there a key to a happy and successful human life? If so, how do you acquire it? Ancient philosophers thought the key was virtue and that your chances of obtaining it depend on the sort of life you lead. In this course we’ll examine what these philosophers meant by virtue and how they understood its implications for your everyday life. We will situate the ancient understanding of virtue in the context of larger questions of metaphysics (the nature of being and reality), psychology, and ethics, as they arise in foundational works from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.

Chumie Juni

What is Judaism? Who are Jewish people? What are Jewish texts, practices, ideas? What ripples have Jewish people, texts, practices, and ideas caused beyond their sphere? These questions will animate our study as we touch on specific points in over three millennia of history. We will immerse ourselves in Jewish texts, historic events, and cultural moments, trying to understand them on their own terms. At the same time, we will analyze them using key concepts such as ‘tradition,’ ‘culture,’ ‘power,’ and ‘diaspora.’ We will explore how ‘Jewishness’ has been constructed by different stakeholders, each claiming the authority to define it.

Asuka Sango

Jorge Brioso

Prerequisite: Spanish 205 or above

Extra Time Required