ENROLL

Jessica Keating

This course examines European artistic production in Italy, Spain, France, and the Netherlands from the end of the sixteenth century through the seventeenth century. The aim of the course is to interrogate how religious revolution and reformation, scientific discoveries, and political transformations brought about a proliferation of remarkably varied types of artistic production that permeated and altered the sacred, political, and private spheres. The class will examine in depth select works of painting, sculpture, prints, and drawings, by Caravaggio, Bernini, Poussin, Velázquez, Rubens, and Rembrandt, among many others.

Susannah Ottaway

Thabiti Willis

William North

In a series of letters written after the abrupt and violent ending of their sexual relationship, Peter Abelard, a controversial and creative teacher and philosopher, and Heloise, a respected abbess and thinker, explored central questions about the nature of gender roles, love, authority, and the place of reason in human affairs. In other works, Abelard articulated new approaches to ethical judgment (the primacy of intention), the status of universals, and the potential of logical argument to foster interreligious dialogue. Through their use of dialectic, his works modelled new approaches to metaphysics, ontology, anthropology, and the nature and use of authorities. Through close reading and discussion of these works and those of select contemporaries, this course will explore the key philosophical, social, and institutional dynamics of a moment of profound change in medieval thought and culture.

1st 5 weeks

William North

Acknowledged by contemporaries as one of the leading intellects of her time, Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364-ca. 1431) was an author of unusual literary range, resilience, and perceptiveness. In addition to composing romances, poetry, quasi-autobiographical works, royal biography, and political theory, she became one of the most articulate critics of the patriarchy and misogyny of her world and a critical voice in defense of female capability. Using Christine's writings along with other contemporary documents as a foundation, we will explore perceptions of gender, the analysis and resistance to misogyny, the ethics love and personal relations, and the exercise of patriarchal power (and resistance to it) in domestic and public spheres in late medieval France.

Laurence Cooper

This course will be devoted to close study of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, which has plausibly been described as the best book ever written about democracy and the best book every written about America. Tocqueville uncovers the myriad ways in which equality, including especially the passion for equality, determines the character and the possibilities of modern humanity. Tocqueville thereby provides a political education that is also an education toward self-knowledge.

Mihaela Czobor-Lupp

Stoic philosophers saw themselves as citizens of the world (cosmopolitans), a position that Kant enthusiastically revived in the eighteenth century. After the end of the Cold War cosmopolitanism was back in fashion. Even the favorite drink of the girls on TV's Sex and the City was called Cosmopolitan. However, today it seems that nationalism and xenophobia are making a powerful comeback. Is cosmopolitanism dead? This course explores the promises and dangers of globalization, as well as the inexhaustible attraction of nationalism. The attempt is to show that the escape from the unsettling complexity of globalization is not within tribalistic nationalism, but rather in the cosmopolitan transformation of identity, as well as of the sense of being at home and of belonging.

Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg

In our contemporary world-on-the-move, people forge ties across countries and continents. This course introduces students to an Africanist transnational anthropology, emphasizing practices of care and connection among African migrants in both the U.S. and Europe. In families, migrant organizations, and workplaces, diasporic Africans circulate stories and strategies that respond to nationalist and often racist attitudes they encounter in their places of migration. Through readings by African/diaspora scholars and creative multi-method assignments, this course engages with the back-and-forth, profoundly transnational movement of connections, people, ideas, and institutions.

Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg

Prerequisite: Sociology/Anthropology 110 or 111 and 226 or 262; or instructor permission