ENROLL

Pierre Hecker

1st 5 weeks

Constance Walker

Constance Walker

What can and should be the role of literature in times of bitter political conflict? Caught in partisan strife, Irish writers have grappled personally and painfully with the question. We will read works by Joyce, Yeats, and Heaney, among others, and watch films (Bloody Sunday, Hunger) that confront the deep and ongoing divisions in Irish political life.

Peter J Balaam

A combination of background readings, guided site visits, and personal exploration will give students tools for understanding the history of multicultural London. Starting with the city's early history and moving to the present, students will gain an understanding of how the city has been defined and transformed over time and of the complex cultural narratives that shape its standing as a global metropolis.

OCS London Program

Peter J Balaam

Readings in literature, urban studies, and the environmental humanities will ground practical exercises helping students to explore cosmopolitan theories of walking, mapping, paying attention, and reading the city. Honing practices of journeying, observing, curating, and collecting, students will make themselves locally expert on one or more of London’s streets or neighborhoods. Designated film screenings, lectures, exhibits, and the natural and built environment will help us to read London’s ever-changing human text over the last two millenia. What human processes are at work on any street in London; and how might they include you?

Prerequisite: Participation in OCS London Program

For students participating in OCS London Program

Peter J Balaam

Students will attend productions of both classic and contemporary plays in London and Stratford-on-Avon and do related reading. Class discussions will focus on dramatic genres and themes, dramaturgy, acting styles, and design. Guest speakers may include actors, critics, and directors. Students will take backstage tours, keep a theater journal, and work on theater criticism and reviews.

Participation in OCS London Program

Jessica L Leiman

This course traces the development of a sensational, morally dubious genre that emerged in the eighteenth-century: the novel. We will read some of the most entertaining, best-selling novels written during the first hundred years of the form, paying particular attention to the novel’s concern with courtship and marriage, writing and reading, the real and the fantastic. Among the questions we will ask: What is a novel? What distinguished the early novel from autobiography, history, travel narrative, and pornography? How did this genre come to be associated with women? How did early novelists respond to eighteenth-century debates about the dangers of reading fiction? Authors include Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen.

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

Peter J Balaam

Readings in literature, urban studies, and the environmental humanities will ground practical exercises helping students to explore cosmopolitan theories of walking, mapping, paying attention, and reading the city. Honing practices of journeying, observing, curating, and collecting, students will make themselves locally expert on one or more of London’s streets or neighborhoods. Designated film screenings, lectures, exhibits, and the natural and built environment will help us to read London’s ever-changing human text over the last two millenia. What human processes are at work on any street in London; and how might they include you?

Prerequisite: One English foundations course and one other 6 credit English course or permission of instructor

For students pariticipating in OCS London Program

Sarah Anthony

Through readings, discussions, analysis of media, and other activities, this course increases students’ skill and confidence in French. Continuing the emphasis on all modes of communication begun in French 101-103, French 204 focuses on Francophone cultures, contemporary issues, and an iconic text in French. Taught three days a week in French.

Prerequisite: French 103 or equivalent

Juliane Schicker

What products in literature, film, and other media did German-speaking audiences consume in the recent past? What topics do artists address and media outlets discuss? In this course, we will read, watch, and examine various texts and films that were published or premiered in the last ten years or so in the German language. These works, written by a diverse range of artists, reflect on and respond to the turbulent recent history not only in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, but also more globally. They will help us determine how people express their most urgent challenges and how these texts participate in public debates. 

Prerequisite: German 204 or the equivalent.

David G Tompkins

William L North

Acknowledged by contemporaries as one of the leading intellects of her time, Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364-ca. 1431) became an author of unusual literary range, personal resilience, and perceptiveness in a time of ongoing warfare, civil strife, and intellectual ferment. In addition to composing romances, poetry, quasi-autobiographical works, royal biography, and political theory, she became an articulate critic of the patriarchy and misogyny of her world, contemporary patterns and cultures of violence, and a critical voice in defense of female capability. Using Christine's writings together with other contemporary voices, we will examine how contemporaries confronted fundamental questions of identity, status, violence, ethics, and love in domestic and public spheres in late medieval France. 

Anna M Dotlibova

Prerequisite: Russian 204 or equivalent

Laura Goering

How did the Russian peasant stove shape culinary culture? Why did Catherine the Great force her subjects to cultivate potatoes? How did the October Revolution change the way Soviet citizens ate? In this course we will study key aspects of Russian history and culture through the lens of culinary history. Topics will include: food and fasting in Russian Orthodoxy; food, class and power under the tsars; high Russian (or is it French?) culture of the nineteenth century; Soviet policies for feeding the worker; non-Russian cuisines in the Soviet Union; drinking culture and anti-alcohol campaigns; food and nationalism in the twenty-first century. Includes hands-on sessions on Russian food preparation. In English.

In translation

Victoria Y Thorstensson

What is Russia’s problem? Why is the country famous for its great “soul” and culture waging a bloody war and becoming increasingly anti-Western? This course explores the cultural mythology that characterizes the state of contemporary Russian society and its “soul,” using critical approaches from trauma and memory studies, as well as theories of ressentiment and nostalgia. Authors to be studied include ideologues of Putin’s Russia (Surkov, Prilepin), its critics (Sorokin), and other writers, artists, and filmmakers who reflect, define, question, and challenge the direction in which country is moving and give it a cultural diagnosis. In English.

In translation

Palmar Álvarez-Blanco

Have you ever wondered if not capitalism, then what? In this course we will critically approach the historical background, the causes and, most importantly, the consequences of the civil and ecological crisis unleashed globally in 2008. Both in its origin and its consequences, this crisis went beyond the financial field, extending into the realms of politics, economics, culture, media and ecology. In light of this context, we will take a transdisciplinary approach to the study of capitalist culture and analyze the main changes that have developed from the cycle of social mobilizations surrounding the "indignados" movement or Spanish 15M in 2011. With a primary focus on Spain, we will concentrate on analyzing cultural artifacts that mark a paradigm shift from a capitalist culture towards the development of a culture of the commons that seeks to improve the living conditions of the social majority, defending both human rights and ecological justice.

Prerequisite: Spanish 205 or equivalent