ENROLL

Summer Forester

In the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. launched the Global War on Terror to purportedly find, stop,and defeat every terrorist group with a global reach. Without question, the Global War on Terror has radically shaped everything from U.S. foreign policies and domestic institutions to civil liberties and pop culture. In this course, we will examine the events of 9/11 and then critically assess the immediate and long-term ramifications of the endless Global War on Terror on different states and communities around the world. While we will certainly spend time interrogating U.S. policies from the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, we will also examine reactions to those policies across both the global north and the global south.

Sonja Anderson

Who was Jesus? What’s in the Bible? How did Christianity begin? This course is an introduction to the oldest Christian documents we have (27 books in the New Testament) as well as several ancient texts that did not become part of the Bible. We will study this literature critically and historically by situating it within its ancient Jewish, Greco-Roman context, but we will also learn about the different ways modern readers have interpreted it. As we work our way through the texts, we will pay special attention to three topics of enduring debate and political significance in the history of biblical interpretation: (1) suffering, liberation, and empire; (2) antisemitism, and (3) gender, sexuality, and marriage.

Chumie Juni

How does gender shape the Jewish tradition, and how have Jewish historical moments, texts, and practices shaped Jewish notions of gender? Taking Judaism as a test case, this course will explore the relationship between historical circumstance, positionality, and the religious imaginary. We will examine the ways that Jewish gender and theology inform each other. We will see how gender was at play in Jewish negotiations of economic and social class, racial and ethnic status, even citizenship. Following the threads of practice and narrative, we will think about how intersectional gender has shaped the stories Jews tell, and the stories that are told about them.

Sonja Anderson

When will the world end, and how? What’s wrong with the world—morally, politically, naturally—such that people have seen its destruction as necessary or inevitable? Are visions of “The End” a form of sophisticated resistance literature, aimed at oppressive systems of power? Or are they evidence of a disturbed mind disconnected from reality? This seminar takes a deep dive into the contours of apocalyptic thought, which in its most basic form is about unmasking the deceptions of the given world by revealing the secret workings of the universe. We will begin with the earliest apocalypses, found in ancient Jewish and Christian texts, and move into modern religious and “secular” visions of cosmic collapse. Our approach will be historical and comparative, and we will explore topics ranging from doomsday cults to climate catastrophe, visions of heaven to tours of hell, malevolent angels to meddling UFOs, all the while asking how the apocalyptic imagination creates, as one thinker put it, “another world to live in.”