An interdepartmental program in European Cultural Studies

Last updated: August 14, 2014 at 4:29 p.m.

Objectives

The European Cultural Studies Program (ECS) offers students the opportunity to study English and continental literature in translation in conjunction with one or more related disciplines: fine arts, history, music, philosophy, politics, sociology, and theater arts.

ECS is for those students who feel intellectually adventurous, who want to explore the interrelationships of literature with various other disciplines in order to gain a broader perspective of what constitutes "culture." With the advent of an ever-changing Europe, students in ECS will be better prepared, in all areas, to keep abreast with current and future events.

Many of our students spend some time abroad to get a feel for the cultures in which they are most interested. ECS majors have gone on to graduate school (in history, politics, English, and other fields), law school, business school, and advanced programs in international studies.

Learning Goals

The guiding premise of European Cultural Studies (ECS) is this: art and literature are not luxury commodities. Rather they are a crucial way of knowing and understanding the world. ECS explores European literature, art, music, architecture, dance, and philosophy beyond and across the boundaries of single nations, languages, and historical periods, always in concert with the historical, political, and social realities that underpin and illuminate any art form. This interdepartmental major offers a way of thinking about literature rather than any specific body of information. The overarching aim of the major is to discover how European cultures have ordered reality in the past and present, how they have made sense of the world morally and aesthetically, and how literature and the arts express, preserve, and embody these understandings. Because ECS embraces the whole of European culture, especially literature, and a great diversity of critical methods for understanding it, no one faculty member could possibly encompass the field of study. Consequently, the interdisciplinary, interdepartmental approach is a highly dynamic and collaborative endeavor that reflects the diverse interests of our students and faculty in the liberal arts. ECS brings together professors and undergraduates from a number of departments in the Humanities and the Social Sciences in a spirit of common inquiry.

The ECS major’s core course, ECS100a, introduces students to the wide range of interdisciplinary approaches possible in the study of liberal arts, and it serves as the point of embarkation for students’ individualized exploration of literature and the other arts from across Europe and from a wide variety of hermeneutic perspectives. The concept of interpretation is central: we all live by the act of interpretation, whether in ordinary daily life or in a seminar setting. ECS100a also focuses on developing the research skills, writing and speaking habits, and the basics of critical interpretation specific to the interdisciplinary study of literature and the arts. The ECS major also encourages the study of literature and culture in languages other than English. Courses are taught by distinguished faculty from across the university at Brandeis but especially in the humanities.

As an interdepartmental major, ECS is inherently critical, multicultural, and interdisciplinary. Its flexible curriculum is designed to serve the interests and needs of a changing student body and to encourage student collaboration at all levels of program planning.

The Major: Students completing the major in ECS will:

1. Achieve a deepened understanding of European civilization and its specific place in the global context;
2. Interpret aspects of literature and the other arts that can or must be studied cross-culturally, such as: form and genre; the movement of beliefs and ideas across boundaries, including through translation; exile arts and literatures; and literary, artistic, and philosophical movements that span multiple cultures, such as Enlightenment, romanticism, modernism and the avant-garde;
3. Develop the habit of independent critique, intellectual self-reliance, and self-confidence from the perspective of a variety of disciplines; 4. Become conversant with the major questions, concepts, theories, traditions, and techniques of humanistic enquiry;
5. Have the opportunity to work closely with faculty and fellow students in small seminars and the opportunity to be mentored on a senior thesis.

Core Skills: ECS majors from will develop the capacity to:

1. perform a strong and revealing close reading of any text (whether image, music, or literary)
2. understand the implications of different interpretive techniques, weighing the benefits against limitations of different methods and strategies;
3. effectively use library and online resources to identify, document, and exploit primary and secondary research materials;
4. construct a rhetorically persuasive argument about literary and artistic problems by identifying and articulating a compelling and productive question about literature and synthesizing relevant critical literature;< br /> 5. recognize the profound difference between knowledge and mere information, to distinguish between human, humane understanding and mere technique.
6. The ultimate aim of humane understanding is emancipation from all forms of falsehood, distortion, and illegitimate authority through the exercise of public, reasoned discourse.

Upon Graduating: A Brandeis student with a ECS major will be prepared to use the knowledge and skills gained from the sustained study of literatures and cultures to pursue professional training and a range of careers that demand a global perspective or a knowledge of and appreciation for diverse cultures, including those in academics, law, government, non-governmental organizations and non-profits, and international business.

How to Become a Major

It is highly advisable that students make a decision no later than the middle of their sophomore year in order to take full advantage of the ECS major.

Normally, students will choose to focus on either the early period (from the Middle Ages to the mid-1700s) or the modern period (from the mid-1700s to the present day). Variations within the scheme can be worked out with the coordinator.

Each major will plan a program in consultation with the coordinator.

Committee

Stephen Dowden, Chair and Undergraduate Advising Head
(German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature)

Dian Fox
(Romance Studies)

Jane Hale
(Romance Studies)

Gila Hayim
(Sociology)

Arthur Holmberg
(Theater Arts)

Edward Kaplan
(Romance Studies)

Jytte Klausen
(Politics)

Robin Feuer Miller 
(German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature)

Michael Randall
(Romance Studies)

Jerry Samet
(Philosophy)

Nancy Scott
(Fine Arts)

Eugene Sheppard
(Near Eastern and Judaic Studies)

Affiliated Faculty (contributing to the curriculum, advising and administration of the department or program)
Jane Hale (Romance Studies)
Robin Feuer Miller (German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature)
Michael Randall (Romance Studies)

Requirements for the Major

The major consists of ten semester courses (eleven, if the student elects to write a thesis):

A. ECS 100a or 100b (ECS Proseminar), to be completed, if possible, no later than the junior year.

B. Two comparative literature seminars, or HUM 10a (The Western Canon) and one comparative literature seminar. The student is particularly encouraged to select this second course from COML 102a through COML 106b. Any COML offering is acceptable, however, as long as its subject matter is European and it is otherwise relevant to the student's program.

C. Three courses in European literature. The six European literatures offered are English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. The foreign literature courses listed below have been specifically designed for use in the ECS curriculum and are taught in translation. Courses in English literature may be used to fulfill this requirement. For courses in comparative literature consult the appropriate section of this Bulletin.

D. Three courses selected from the following seven related disciplines: fine arts, history and history of ideas, music, philosophy, politics, sociology, and theater arts. In consultation with the coordinator, students may be able to use courses from additional departments (for example, NEJS, anthropology) so long as such courses are appropriate to the student's program in ECS.

E. Students who elect to write a senior thesis will enroll in ECS 99d. Before enrolling, students should consult with the coordinator. An appropriate GPA is required to undertake the writing of a thesis. Honors are awarded on the basis of cumulative GPA in the major and the grade on the honors thesis.

F. All seniors not enrolling in ECS 99d (that is, not electing to write a senior thesis) have a choice of electing one additional course in any of the three segments of the major: either an additional course in comparative literature or an additional course in any of the six European literatures or an additional course in any of the seven related areas.

G. No course with a final grade below C+ can count toward fulfilling the major requirements in European Cultural Studies.

H. No course taken pass/fail may count toward the major requirements.

Special Notes Relating to Undergraduates

Courses in the seven related disciplines are generally available for ECS majors. Any questions should be addressed directly to the appropriate representative of the department (fine arts, Ms. Scott; history, Mr. Binion; philosophy, Mr. Samet; politics, Ms. Klausen; sociology, Ms. Hayim; theater arts, Mr. Holmberg).

ECS majors are encouraged to pursue study abroad, either in England or on the continent. Credit will be applied for appropriate equivalent courses. Interested students should consult with the coordinator and the Office of Academic Services.

Special Note About Courses

The following courses are appropriate for the ECS major and his or her respective foreign literature majors: French, German, Russian, and Spanish. The course abbreviations have the following values:

FECS = French and European Cultural Studies

GECS = German and European Cultural Studies

HECS = Hispanic and European Cultural Studies

RECS = Russian and European Cultural Studies

Courses of Instruction

(1-99) Primarily for Undergraduate Students

ECS 98a Independent Study
May be taken only by majors with the written permission of the ECS program coordinator.
Usually offered every year.
Staff

ECS 98b Independent Study
May be taken only by majors with the written permission of the ECS program coordinator.
Usually offered every year.
Staff

ECS 99d Senior Thesis
Independent research under the supervision of the thesis director. Usually offered every year.
Staff

(100-199) For Both Undergraduate and Graduate Students

ECS 100a European Cultural Studies Proseminar: Modernism
[ hum wi ]
Explores the interrelationship of literature, music, painting, philosophy, and other arts in the era of high modernism. Works by Artaud, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Mann, Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Kandinsky, Schiele, Beckett, Brecht, Adorno, Sartre, Heidegger, and others. Usually offered every fall semester.
Mr. Dowden

ECS 110a Thinking about Infinity
[ hum ]
Explores the attempts of the finite human mind to think about infinity. Readings in mathematics, history of science, philosophy, literature, and art, including Euclid, Plato, Cantor, Poincaré, Einstein, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Wordsworth, Shelley, Joyce, Beckett, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch

Comparative Literature Seminars

COML 100a Comparing Literatures and Cultures: Theory and Practice
[ hum wi ]
Core course for COML major and minor.
What is common and what is different in literatures of different cultures and times? How do literary ideas move from one culture to another? In this course students read theoretical texts, as well as literary works from around the world. Usually offered every year.
Staff

COML 103b Madness and Folly in Renaissance Literature
[ hum wi ]
A study of the theme of madness and folly as exemplified by the major writers of the Renaissance, including Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Shakespeare, Petrarch, and Cervantes. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Lansing

COML 117a Magical Realism and Modern Myth
[ hum ]
An exploration of magical realism, as well as the enduring importance of myth, in twentieth and twenty-first century fiction and film from the United States, Latin American, and beyond. authors include Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Salman Rushdie; films include Wings of Desire and Hero. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sherman

COML 120b Dangerous Writers and Writers in Danger
[ hum wi ]
Examines the works of modern, twentieth-century writers from different areas of the world who have suffered exile, imprisonment, or death for their free thinking. Writers include: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Wole Soyinka, Gao Xinjan, Breyten Breytenbach, Reynoldo Arenas, and Salman Rushdie. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Ratner

COML 150b Critique of Erotic Reason
[ hum ]
Explores transformations in erotic sensibilities in the novel from the early nineteenth century to the present. Works by Goethe, Austen, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Bronte, Chekhov, Garcia-Marquez, Kundera, and Cormac McCarthy. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Dowden

COML 165a Reading, Writing, and Teaching across Cultures
[ hum nw wi ]
Examines contemporary literary representations of literacy, schooling, and language from a cross-cultural perspective. Students also analyze their own educational trajectories and experiences with writing and reading. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Hale

COML 166b Literacy, Language and Culture
[ hum nw ]
Examines contemporary cross-cultural literary representations of the relationships among languages and cultures. We will read texts such as Hoffman's Lost in Translation, Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, and Ngugi's Decolonising the Mind as well as poetry and essays from Haiti, French Guyana, the Navajo Nation and a variety of immigrant communities in the US. Questions we will consider include: Does language carry culture? When is language an instrument of power? What's the difference between learning to speak and/or write a particular language? What happens when children must learn a new language when they enter school? Students will share their own richly diverse linguistic experiences. Usually offered every year.
Staff

ENG 50a Love Poetry from Sappho to Neruda
[ hum ]
This course explores the relationship between love and poetry. Starts with the ancient Greek poet Sappho and proceeds through the centuries, reading lyrics by Catullus, Ovid, Propertius, Petrarch, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Rossetti, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Targoff

ENG 78b Modernism, Atheism, God
[ hum ]
Explores European and U.S. literature after Nietzche's proclamation, at the end of the 19th century, that God is dead. How does this writing imagine human life and the role of literature in God's absence? How does it imagine afterlives of God, and permutations of the sacred, in a post-religious world? How, or why, to have faith in the possibility of faith in a secular age? What does "the secular" actually mean, and how does it persuade itself that it's different than "religion"? Approaches international modernism as a political and theological debate about materialism and spirituality, finitude and transcendence, reason and salvation. Readings by Kafka, Joyce, Rilke, Faulkner, Eliot, Beckett, Pynchon, and others. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sherman

HUM 10a The Western Canon
[ hum ]
May not be taken by students who have taken ENG 10a or FYS 18a in prior years.
Foundational texts of the Western canon: the Bible, Homer, Vergil, and Dante. Thematic emphases and supplementary texts vary from year to year.
Staff

POL 194a Politics and the Novel
[ ss ]
Selected works of fiction as sources of political ideas and pictures of political and social life. How modern fiction helps us understand social change, societies in transition and decay, revolution, law, bureaucracy, and ethnicity. Authors such as Kafka, Conrad, Borges, Dostoevsky, Ford Madox Ford, Babel, Greene, Malraux, and Carpenter. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Levin

Courses in European Literature

CLAS 151a Greece, Rome, Myth, and the Movies
[ hum ]
Explores classical mythology through several key texts to demonstrate the strong connections between antiquity and our own society, especially as revealed in an array of modern cinematic experiments. Charts the transformation of these myths for our own cultural needs. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Koloski-Ostrow

CLAS 165a Roman Sex, Violence, and Decadence in Translation
[ hum wi ]
Famous Roman texts (200 BCE-200 CE) are read from social, historical, psychological, literary, and religious viewpoints. The concept of "Roman decadence" is challenged both by the Roman literary accomplishment itself and by its import on subsequent periods. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Koloski-Ostrow

CLAS 166a Medieval Literature: A Millennium of God, Sex, and Death
[ hum wi ]
A survey of medieval Latin literature in translation, beginning with the fourth-century church fathers and ending with the early Renaissance. Includes Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Egeria, Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Isidore of Seville, Bede, Alcuin, Einhard, Hroswitha, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Hildegard, Anselm, and others. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Walker

CLAS 170a Classical Mythology
[ hum ]
An introduction to Greek and Roman mythology. Considers ancient song cultures, and the relationship between myth, drama, and religion. Also explores visual representations of myth. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Muellner

ENG 1a Introduction to Literary Studies
[ hum ]
This course is designed to introduce students to basic skills and concepts needed for the study of Anglophone literature and culture. These include skills in close reading; identification and differentiation of major literary styles and periods; knowledge of basic critical terms; definition of genres. Usually offered every semester.
Staff

ENG 4a The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century
[ hum ]
1660-1800: The age of reason and contradiction, enlightenment, and xenophobia. Surveys literary, critical, philosophical, political, and life writing, investigating the emergence of a literary public sphere, a national canon, and the first professional women writers. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. King

ENG 5a British Literature in the Age of Darwin and Dickens
[ hum ]
Offers general coverage of the major literary genres in the nineteenth century. The course studies the cultural context forged by the interaction of fiction, prose, and poetry. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Plotz

ENG 11a Close Reading: Theory and Practice
[ hum ]
Examines the theory, practice, technique, and method of close literary reading, with scrupulous attention to a variety of literary texts to ask not only what but also how they mean, and what justifies our thinking that they mean these things. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

ENG 18a Irish Literature, from the Peasantry to the Pogues
[ hum ]
Explores Irish poetry, fiction, drama, and film in English. Begins with the tradition's roots among subjugated peasants and Anglo-Irish aristocracy and ends in the modern post-colonial state. Authors include Swift, Yeats, Wilde, Bowen, Joyce, O'Brien, and Heaney. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Plotz

ENG 18b Writing the Holocaust
[ hum wi ]
Examines fiction, poetry, memoir, diaries, letters, testimonials, interviews, and historical records; explores written representations of the Holocaust. Considers the role second, third, and fourth generation responses to the Holocaust, including the responses of students, who will write their own post-Holocaust narratives. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Skorczewski

ENG 33a Shakespeare
[ hum ]
A survey of Shakespeare as a dramatist. From nine to twelve plays will be read, representing all periods of Shakespeare's dramatic career. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Flesch or Ms. Targoff

ENG 43a Major English Authors, Chaucer to Milton
[ hum ]
A survey of major English authors from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, including Chaucer, Wyatt, Spencer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Sidney, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Milton. No prior experience in medieval or Renaissance literature is required. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Targoff

ENG 50a Love Poetry from Sappho to Neruda
[ hum ]
This course explores the relationship between love and poetry. Starts with the ancient Greek poet Sappho and proceeds through the centuries, reading lyrics by Catullus, Ovid, Propertius, Petrarch, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Rossetti, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Targoff

ENG 63a Renaissance Poetry
[ hum ]
Examines lyric and narrative poetry by Wyatt, Surrey, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, and Herbert. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Flesch or Ms. Targoff

ENG 64b From Libertinism to Sensibility: Pleasure and the Theater, 1660-1800
[ hum ]
Investigates the exchange between performance texts and contemporaneous discussions of class, nationality, and political party. Emphasizes the emergence of modern gender and sexual roles and the impact of the first professional women actors. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. King

ENG 75b The Victorian Novel: Secrets, Lies, and Monsters
[ hum ]
The rhetorical strategies, themes, and objectives of Victorian realism. Texts may include Eliot's Middlemarch, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Brontë's Villette, Gaskell's Mary Barton, Dickens' Bleak House, and Trollope's The Prime Minister. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. Plotz

ENG 78a Virginia Woolf
[ hum ]
An immersion in Woolf's astonishing body of writing. How did her fiction and non-fiction re-imagine the self in the changing social worlds of the early twentieth century? How did her experiments with narrative open new understandings of gender, sexuality, war, the knowing subject, the dimensions of space and time> A chronological survey of her diverse forms of writing that energized, all at once, modernist aesthetics, feminist politics, and philosophical speculation. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Sherman

ENG 78b Modernism, Atheism, God
[ hum ]
Explores European and U.S. literature after Nietzche's proclamation, at the end of the 19th century, that God is dead. How does this writing imagine human life and the role of literature in God's absence? How does it imagine afterlives of God, and permutations of the sacred, in a post-religious world? How, or why, to have faith in the possibility of faith in a secular age? What does "the secular" actually mean, and how does it persuade itself that it's different than "religion"? Approaches international modernism as a political and theological debate about materialism and spirituality, finitude and transcendence, reason and salvation. Readings by Kafka, Joyce, Rilke, Faulkner, Eliot, Beckett, Pynchon, and others. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sherman

ENG 80b The Tale
[ hum wi ]
The oral form of the story; also a non-realist modern literary genre. Students study and create myths, ballads, folktales, ritual drama, and ethnographic approaches to the transmission of tales, including Genesis, Metamorphosis, fairy tales, pre-Columbian myths, Poe, Angela Carter. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Campbell

ENG 88b Contemporary British Literature
[ hum ]
British fiction, poetry, drama, and film since WWII that tackles the changing politics of empire, sexuality, and social class, especially. A close look at the weird pleasure of British humor, includes Jean Rhys, Philip Larkin, Martin Amis, Angela Carter, Harold Pinter, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Sherman

ENG 103a Exploring the Self in Seventeenth-Century Poetry
[ hum ]
Examines the poetry of Donne and his contemporaries, including George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and Andrew Marvell. These "metaphysical poets" will be read alongside critical accounts by Samuel Johnson, T. S. Eliot, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Targoff

ENG 104a Eighteenth-Century British Poetry, from Dryden to Blake
[ hum ]
The major British poets of the eighteenth century, from Dryden to Blake, with an emphasis on the expressive experiments in form and content which set the terms and showed the possibilities available to all subsequent English poetry. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch

ENG 111a How Fiction Works: Narrative in Theory and Practice
[ hum ]
We will explore the forms and functions of fictional narrative, emphasizing the workings of plot, narration, character, time and point of view, and studying the variety of effects produced by the diverse, historically shifting practices of short stories and novels. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Lanser

ENG 123a Dream Visions: Genre, History, and the Mysterious
[ hum ]
A study of the mysterious function of imaginary dreams in medieval and Renaissance writing, along with actual dream dictionaries and dream transcriptions of the period. Visions of Hell, prophetic dreams, apocalypse, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Nashe, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Campbell

ENG 125b Romanticism II: Byron, Shelley, and Keats
[ hum ]
The "younger generation" of Romantic poets. Byron, Shelley, and Keats continue and react against poetic, political, and philosophical preoccupations and positions of their immediate elders. Examines their major works, as well as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Burt, Mr. Flesch, or Ms. Quinney

ENG 128a Alternative Worlds: Modern Utopian Texts
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: ENG 1a or ENG 11a.
British, European, and American works depicting alternate, often "better" worlds, including More's Utopia, Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, Voltaire's Candide, Casanova's Icosameron, selections from Charles Fourier, Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star, Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis: Dawn, Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye Lenin! Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Campbell

ENG 132b Chaucer I
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: ENG 1a or ENG 10a or ENG 11a.
In addition to reading Chaucer's major work The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, pays special attention to situating the Tales in relation to linguistic, literary, and social developments of the later Middle Ages. No previous knowledge of Middle English required. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Campbell

ENG 133a Advanced Shakespeare
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: ENG 33a or equivalent.
An intensive analysis of a single play or a small number of Shakespeare's plays. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch

ENG 134b Subjectivity
[ hum ]
Studies how the experience of subjectivity and selfhood is represented in literature and philosophy of the early modern period, primarily in Britain. Authors include Renaissance lyric poets, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Blake, with philosophical texts by Descartes, Pascal, Locke, Hume, and Kant. Usually offered third year.
Ms. Quinney

ENG 137a Postimperial Fictions
[ hum ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 37a in prior years.
In what ways, and for what purposes, has postcolonial Britain sought imaginatively to recreate its imperial past? Discusses recent literary and cinematic representations of empire, in which critique, fascination, and nostalgia are, often problematically, blended. Authors include Paul Scott, Rushdie, Ishiguro, and Zadie Smith. Usually offered every fourth year.
Staff

ENG 144b The Body as Text
[ hum ]
How are our bodies the material for our presentations of self and our interactions with others? Examines contemporary theories and histories of the body against literary, philosophical, political, and performance texts of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King

ENG 145b Just Jane Austen: Gender, Justice, and the Art of Fiction
[ hum ]
Explores the novels of Jane Austen in historical context, with particular attention to the ways in which they engage ethical questions, address the economic and social implications of gender, and negotiate tensions between social justice and narrative form. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Lanser

ENG 161b The Death and Life of the Subject
[ hum ]
Studies the disintegration of the unified self in modern philosophy, literature and critical theory, primarily of the twentieth century. Topics include empiricist, existential and psychoanalytic accounts of the self. Literary works by Woolf, Proust, Beckett, Blanchot and Duras. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Quinney

ENG 165b Victorian Poetry and Its Readers
[ hum ]
Studies how poetry was written and read during the last time poetry held a prominent role in England's public life. The course centers on Tennyson's career as poet laureate, but also gives full attention to Robert Browning's work. The course also surveys the work of E. B. Browning, the Pre-Raphaelites, and others, and concludes with the poetry of Hardy and of the early Yeats. Usually offered every fourth year.
Staff

ENG 171a The History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to Postmodernism
[ hum wi ]
Explores major documents in the history of criticism from Plato to the present. Texts will be read as representative moments in the history of criticism and as documents of self-sufficient literary and intellectual interest. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Morrison or Ms. Quinney

ENG 173a Spenser and Milton
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: ENG 10a, 11a, or HUM 10a (may be taken concurrently) or by permission of the instructor.
A course on poetic authority: the poetry of authority and the authority of poetry. Spenser and Milton will be treated individually, but the era they bound will be examined in terms of the tensions within and between their works. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch

ENG/HIST 118b London from Restoration to Regency: People, Culture, City
[ hum ss ]
Sponsored by the Mandel Center for the Humanities as part of its thematic focus on 'The Human and the Inhuman'.
Explores the history and culture of London from the Great Plague of 1665 to the onset of the industrial age. Topics include the natural and built environments, the city's changing population, and its literary, visual, and musical cultures. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Kamensky and Ms. Lanser

FECS 120b In Search of Marcel Proust in Translation
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English with readings in English translation.
While reading Proust's novel, In Search of Lost Time, students will focus on four themes (love and jealousy, art and idolatry, imagination and disappointment, and the passage of time and its redemption through involuntary memory) that contribute to the narrator's decision to become a writer. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Harder

FREN 110a Cultural Representations
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
A foundation course in French and Francophone culture, analyzing texts and other cultural phenomena such as film, painting, music, and politics. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Harder, Mr. Randall or Staff

FREN 111a The Republic
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
The "Republic" analyzes how the republican ideal of the citizen devoid of religious, ethnic, or gender identity has fared in different Francophone political milieux. Course involves understanding how political institutions such as constitutions, parliaments, and court systems interact with reality of modern societies in which religious, ethnic, and gender identities play important roles. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Randall

FREN 113a Great French Novels
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Power, passion, and creativity in the French novel. Major novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Balzac, Stendhal, George Sand, Flaubert, Zola, and Proust reflect France's social and political upheavals. Topics include psychological analysis, revolution and class conflicts, male and female relationships, and the creative process. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Kaplan

FREN 114b Quest for the Absolute
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Imagination, the drug experience, even madness can convey absolute meaning. We read creative journeys in prose and poetry by Balzac, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Maria Krysinska, Senghor, Bonnefoy to explore topics of good and evil; racial and gender identity; love and intimacy; spiritual faith. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kaplan

FREN 122b The Renaissance: When France Became France
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
At a moment when the modern nation-state is perhaps coming to an end in supranational institutions like the European Union, it is important to look at how that nation-state came into being in the sixteenth century. During a time of both political and religious turmoil and intense artistic creation, writers of the Renaissance created works that helped define us as both public and private individuals. Works studied include Rabelais' Gargantua, Montaigne's Essays, Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, as well as the poetry of Ronsard, du Bellay, and Louise Labé. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Randall

FREN 131a Orientalism and Literature
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
An examination of how French literature has often represented the "Orient" or "the East," in particular North Africa, parts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, as its opposite, its imaginary "other." Will also look at how some twentieth-century writers of North-African backgrounds have reacted to these misrepresentations. The course includes paintings, film, and readings in many different genres (novels, travel literature, etc.). Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Voiret

FREN 133b Visions of Change in Eighteenth-Century French Literature
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Examines how 18th century French literature generated new frames of thinking and how these visions influenced contemporary values in such areas as religion, politics, society, education, and the family. Readings from Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Voiret

FREN 137a Literary Responses to Mass Violence
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Studies writers’ responses to humanitarian and political crises of the past hundred years, e.g., Camus’ La peste, Duras’ Hiroshima mon amour, Beckett’s Catastrophe, Diop’s Murambi, Sijie’s Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise, and Laferrière’s Tout bouge autour de moi. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

FREN 139b Proust's Artistic Vision and the Beauty of Ordinary Life
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b.
Key readings from Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu engage students in an interdisciplinary exploration of themes (imagination and disappointment, time and memory, jealousy and desire, everyday life and redemption through art) and the author's revolutionary writing techniques. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Harder

FREN 142b City and the Book
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Analyzes the symbolic appearance of the city in French literature and film from the Middle Ages to the present day. The representation of the city in literature and film is contextualized in theoretical writings of urbanists and philosophers. Literary texts include medieval fabliaux, Pantagruel (Rabelais) and Nana (Zola) as well as theoretical texts by Descartes, Ledoux, Le Corbusier, Salvador Dalí, and Paul Virillo. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Randall

FREN 143a Existentialism: Identity and Commitment
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Sartre and Camus are known as the founders of French existentialism, a philosophy of the absurd, loneliness, freedom, and responsibility. Novels, plays, and essays are read on moral commitment and on black, Jewish, female identities in light of war, colonialism, and the Holocaust. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kaplan

FREN 155b Contemporary Theater: Literature or Performance?
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Reading and in-class performance of plays ranging from Jarry’s Ubu roi and Beckett’s Godot to more traditional texts by Sartre and Giraudoux. Concludes with Yasmina Reza’s Le Dieu du carnage. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

FREN 186b Literature and Politics
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
We will be interested in how the literary is political and the political literary. We will organize the class around the relationship of the individual and the community. Texts include: Montaigne’s Essais, Corneille’s Horace, Genet’s Les nègres, Arendt’s What is Politics?, Dumont’s Essays on Individualism, Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Randall

FYS 44a JustBooks: Tragedy, Right vs. Right?
[ hum ]
Most stories are about good vs. evil. Even if they end unhappily, we know what the happy alternative would be. But tragedy often seems about elemental, irresolvable conflict. Is such conflict inevitable? Can there be just solutions to tragic situations? Offered as part of the JustBooks program.
Ms. Quinney (English)

GECS 130b The Princess and the Golem: Fairy Tales
[ hum wi ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English.
An introduction to the genre of fairy tale in German literature, focusing especially on the narratives collected by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, but also exploring the Kunstmärchen and calendar stories composed by German writers from Romanticism into the twentieth century. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. von Mering

GECS 167a German Cinema: Vamps and Angels
[ hum wi ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English with readings in English translation.
From silent film to Leni Riefenstahl and Nazi cinema, from postwar cinema in the East and West to new German film after unification, this course traces aesthetic strategies, reflections on history, memory, subjectivity, and political, cultural, and film-historical contexts with an emphasis on gender issues. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. von Mering

GER 103a German Culture Through Film
[ fl hum oc ]
Prerequisite: GER 30a.
Approaches an understanding of contemporary German culture through film by focusing on one of the most fascinating and turbulent of national cinemas. Landmark films from the 1920s to the present and pertinent essays, articles and studies will provide a historical perspective on decisive social and cultural phenomena. Major themes include Vergangenheitsbewältigung, multi-ethnic societies, terrorism, life in the GDR, and cultural trends at the beginning of the 21st century. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Seidl

GER 104a Let's Talk! Shall We?
[ fl hum oc ]
Prerequisite: GER 30a.
Designed to focus on fostering students' oral skills. Numerous mock situations and roleplaying exercises provide students with the opportunity to develop and polish oral competency in the German language. Various mock social gatherings like student outings and parties, festive family events, romantic dates, academic and professional interview situations offer the know-how for interns to be successful and gain the most out of their experience abroad, travel and restaurant "language," and also a certain amount of business German. All this and more are practiced in this course. Usually offered every year.
Staff

GER 105a Writing on the Wall: Literature, the Arts, and the Fall of the Wall
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: GER 30a or the equivalent.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 drastically changed Germany’s geographical and political landscape. This course focuses on the role of literature, music and the arts in this historical process, and on changes in conceptual frameworks for the perception of borders, language, space and tradition. Students expand their vocabulary, improve their oral/written use of idiomatic German, and hone reading strategies and analytical skills. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Seidl

GER 109b Meisterwerke Deutscher Kurzprosa
[ hum ]
Conducted in German.
Tailored to suit the needs of advanced intermediate students, this course explores in detail several short prose masterworks by writers including Martin Buber, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Arthur Schnitzler. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Dowden

GER 110a Goethe
[ hum ]
Intensive study of many of Goethe's dramatic, lyric, and prose works, including Goetz, Werther, Faust I, and a comprehensive selection of poetry. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. von Mering

GER 121a Der Eros und das Wort: Lyrik, Prosa, Drama
[ hum ]
Focuses on the prose, poetry, and drama of love in German literature since Goethe. Workes by Goethe, Kleist, Novalis, Tieck, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Treichel, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Dowden

GER 140a Bertolt Brecht und das Theater des 20.Jahrhunderts
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: GER 103a or equivalent. Conducted in German.
Examines the role of theater and drama as "moral institution" and entertainment. How does theater hold postwar Germans accountable for remembering the past and promoting social justice? Students will also work collaboratively on a performance project. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. von Mering

GER 181a Franz Kafka's Erzählungen
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisites: GER 105a is recommended.
A detailed exploration of Kafka's works, life, and thought. Emphasis will be given to his place in the larger scheme of literary modernism. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Dowden

HECS 150a Staging Early Modern Spain: Drama and Society
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English with readings in English translation.
Explores readings and representations of seventeenth-century Spanish drama in social and political contexts. Special attention to gender and violence in texts dealing with seduction, cross-dressing, revolution, and wife-murder, by writers such as Cervantes, Lope, Caro, and Calderón. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Fox

HISP 110a Medieval and Early Modern Spanish Literature: Gender, Class, Religion, Power
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: HISP 106b, or HISP 108a, or permission of the instructor.
Was el Cid a political animal? How do women, Jews, and Muslims fare in classical Spanish literature? Study of major works, authors, and social issues from the Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century. Texts covered range from lyric love poetry and the epic Cantar del Cid to Cervantes and masterpieces of Spanish Golden Age theater. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Fox

HISP 120b Don Quijote
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: HISP 109b, or HISP 110a, or HISP 111b, or permission of the instructor.
A reading for fun and critical insight into what is often called "the first modern novel." Discusses some reasons for its reputation as a major influence on fiction and films throughout the Western world. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Fox

HISP 121b Teatro Español: Lope y Lorca
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: HISP 109b, or HISP 110a, or HISP 111b, or permission of the instructor.
Examines drama of Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) in the context of that of Lope de Vega (1561-1635), considering theories of theater, gender, and sexuality. Both writers were renowned during their lifetimes and mythicized afterwards for their art and their remarkable personal lives. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Fox

HISP 125b Literary Women in Early Modern Spain
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: HISP 109b, or HISP 110a, or HISP 111b, or permission of the instructor.
Examines works by and about women in early modern Spain, with particular attention to engagements with and subversions of patriarchal culture in theater, prose, and poetry. Writers include Caro, Zayas, Cervantes, and Tirso de Molina. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Fox

HISP 170a Topics in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Spanish Literature
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: HISP 109b, or HISP 110a, or HISP 111b, or permission of the instructor. Course may be repeated for credit.
Topics will vary from year to year, but might include Spanish Enlightenment and romanticism: costumbrismo, Romantic drama, Bécquer, Galdós (the novelas contemporáneas), or eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry of the sublime. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Mandrell

HISP 185b España 20XX
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisites: HISP 109b, HISP 110a, HISP 111b, or permission of the instructor.
Looks at cultural production and its context in Spain for an entire calendar year. The goal is to familiarize students with what has been read and watched in Spain most recently and to understand it in terms of contemporary politics and society. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Mandrell

HIST 170a Italian Films, Italian Histories
[ ss wi ]
Explores the relationship between Italian history and Italian film from unification to 1975. Topics include socialism, fascism, the deportation of Jews, the Resistance, the Mafia, and the emergence of an American-style star fixation in the 1960s. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Kelikian

HIST 192b Romantic and Existentialist Political Thought
[ ss ]
Readings from Camus, Sartre, Beckett, and others. Examination and criticism of romantic and existentialist theories of politics. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Hulliung

ITAL 106a Advanced Readings in Italian
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: ITAL 30a, ITAL 105a, or the equivalent. Students enrolling for the first time in an Italian Studies course at Brandeis should refer to www.brandeis.edu/registrar/newstudent/testing.html#italtest.
Close study and analysis of representative Italian texts (prose, poetry, drama) and culture. Each year, emphasis will be given to a specific theme, for example, works by Italian women writers. Reading and listening activities followed by in-class discussions and presentations are designed to enhance the student's reading skills. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Servino or Staff

ITAL 110a Introduction to Italian Literature
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: ITAL 30a, 105a, 106a, or the equivalent.
Surveys the masterpieces of Italian literature from Dante to 1700. It is designed to introduce the student to the major authors and literary periods, styles, and genres and present an overview of the history of the literature. Conducted in Italian. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Servino

ITAL 120b Modern Italian Literature
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: ITAL 30a, 105a, 106a, or the equivalent.
Focuses on the literature of twentieth-century writers such as Sciascia, Lampedusa, Calvino, and Moravia as well as contemporary writers, such as Baricco, Tamaro, Mazzantini, and Giordano with emphasis on the theme of historical, individual, and familial identity within the context of traumatic socio-economic upheaval and transformative cultural events. Several films based on these works will also be examined, with emphasis on an analysis of cinematic innovation. Conducted in Italian. Usually offered every other year.
Ms. Servino

PHIL 146a Idea of God
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: PHIL 1a or PHIL 66b or one course numbered PHIL 35a through PHIL 38b.
Engages in a philosophical investigation, not of religion as an institution but of the very idea of God. Studies the distinction between human being and divine being and addresses the issue of the relation of God's essence to his existence. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Yourgrau

PHIL 177b Simone Weil
[ hum ]
Studies the French philosopher Simone Weil, revolutionary and mystic. Is divine perfection reconcilable with human suffering? Weil shook the foundations of Christianity and Judaism attempting to answer this question and this course will rejoin her quest. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Yourgrau

POL 194a Politics and the Novel
[ ss ]
Selected works of fiction as sources of political ideas and pictures of political and social life. How modern fiction helps us understand social change, societies in transition and decay, revolution, law, bureaucracy, and ethnicity. Authors such as Kafka, Conrad, Borges, Dostoevsky, Ford Madox Ford, Babel, Greene, Malraux, and Carpenter. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Levin

POL 195b Shakespeare and the Politics of Leadership
[ ss ]
Shakespeare as sources for understanding selected work of the role of leaders and followers, elites and masses, class and ethnicity, social change, the relations between disparate social orders, and societies ins transition. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Levin

RECS 130a The Russian Novel
[ hum wi ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Students may choose to do readings either in English translation or in Russian.
A comprehensive survey of the major writers and themes of the nineteenth century including Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and others. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Miller

RECS 131a The Twentieth-Century Russian Novel
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Students may choose to do readings either in English translation or in Russian.
An introduction to the major novels of the modernist, Soviet, and post-Soviet eras, including the emigration, such as those by Sologub, Bely, Olesha, Bulgakov, Pasternak, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, Erofeev, and Pelevin. Also includes some short stories. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. Powelstock

RECS 147b Tolstoy: Freedom, Chance, and Necessity
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Students may choose to do readings either in English translation or in Russian.
Studies the major short stories and novels of Leo Tolstoy against the backdrop of nineteenth-century history and with reference to twentieth-century critical theory. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Miller

RECS 148a Russian Drama: Text and Performance
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Students may choose to do readings either in English translation or in Russian.
Examines the rich tradition of Russian drama and theater. Readings include masterpieces of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including those by Chekhov, Pushkin, Gogol, Ostrovsky, Mayakovsky, Erdman, and others. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Powelstock

RECS 149b Russian Modernism in: Culture and Arts
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Students may choose to do readings either in English translation or in Russian.
An interdisciplinary immersion in the period, emphasizing the connections between historical and artistic trends and employing prominent theories of culture. Focuses on major figures, works, and events in film, literature, the performing and visual arts, and political, philosophical, and religious thought. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. Powelstock

RECS 150a Russian and Soviet Cinema
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Readings in English.
Examines the Russian/Soviet cinematic tradition from the silent era to today, with special attention to cultural context and visual elements. Film masterpieces directed by Bauer, Eisenstein, Vertov, Parajanov, Tarkovsky, Mikhalkov, and others. Weekly screenings. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Powelstock

RECS 154a The Art of Vladimir Nabokov
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Readings in English.
A concentrated study of Vladimir Nabokov, the most noted Russian author living in emigration and one of the most influential novelists of the twentieth century. Focuses on the major Russian- and English-language novels. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Powelstock

RECS/THA 166a Chekhov's Stories on Stage
[ ca hum ]
Examines Chekhov's stories and plays as models of their genres. Students will explore these forms and ways of adapting a story or group of stories into drama. Each student will create a dramatic adaptation. Some of these will be staged for class presentation. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Miller and Ms. Morrison

RUS 153a Russian Poetry and Prose in Russian: Undergraduate Seminar
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: RUS 29b, RUS 40b or RUS 50b with a grade of C- or higher, or the equivalent as determined by placement examination. Taught in Russian.
An undergraduate seminar focusing on the advanced study of Russian literataure in the original Russian and development of Russian oral and written language skills needed to analyze and discuss poetry. Includes a selection of the very best Russian poetry and prose of the nineteenth century. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Powelstock

THA 76a British, Irish, and Postcolonial Theater
[ ca wi ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took THA 106a in prior years.
An exploration of the playwrights, political struggles, and aesthetic movements that shaped the evolution of British, Irish, and post-colonial drama in the twentieth century. Attention paid to race, class, gender, sexuality, and theater in performance. Playwrights include: Shaw, Yeats, Synge, O'Casey, Orton, and Churchill. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Holmberg

ECS Related Electives

ANTH 105a Myth and Ritual
[ nw ss ]
Studies myth and ritual as two interlocking modes of cultural symbolism. Evaluates theoretical approaches to myth by looking at creation and political myths. Examines performative, processual, and spatial models of ritual analysis through study of initiation, sacrifice, and funerals. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Schattschneider

ANTH 108b History, Time, and Tradition
[ ss ]
Explores topics relating to the historical dimension of societies in cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives: the cultural construction of the past, temporal and calendrical systems, the invention of tradition, ethnohistorical narrative, cultural memory and forgetting, historical monuments, and museums. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Parmentier

ANTH 114b Verbal Art and Cultural Performance
[ ss ]
Cross-cultural and interdisciplinary study of genres of verbal art and oral performance. Complex social uses of verbal arts in festival, drama, ritual, dance, carnival, and spectacle. Difficulty of reconstructing original context of narrative, oratory, poetry, and epic. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Parmentier

ANTH 115b Borderlands: Space, Place, and Landscape
[ ss ]
Studies human behavior framed by and creating the spaces and landscapes in which we live. This seminar examines archaeological and ethnographic understandings of the relationships between culture, space, and landscapes with a particular focus on the political and social dynamics of borderlands. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Golden

ANTH 127a Medicine, Body, and Culture
[ nw ss ]
Examines main areas of inquiry in medical anthropology, including medicine as a sociocultural construct, political and economic dimensions of suffering and health, patients and healers in comparative medical systems, and the medical construction of men's and women's bodies. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Lamb or Ms. Hannig

ANTH 130b Visuality and Culture
[ ss ]
Explores the nature of the visual image in sociocultural theory and in ethnographic representation. Topics include the history of ethnographic film, development of indigenous arts, visuality in popular culture and mass consumption, and film in postcolonial representation. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Schattschneider

ANTH 139b Language, Ethnicity, and Nationalism
[ ss ]
It is often assumed that language differences divide people, while a common language unites them. To what extent is this true? Taking cross-cultural and historical approaches, we examine the role of language in creating concepts of tribe, ethnicity, and nation. Explores what kinds of social groupings these terms might label, some ideologies connected with their use, and their relationship with communication systems. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. McIntosh

ANTH 144a The Anthropology of Gender
[ nw ss wi ]
Examines gender constructs, sexuality, and cultural systems from a comparative perspective. Topics include the division of labor, rituals of masculinity and femininity, the vexing question of the universality of women's subordination, cross-cultural perspectives on same-sex sexualities and transsexuality, the impact of globalization on systems, and the history of feminist anthropology. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Hannig, Ms. Lamb or Ms. Schattschneider

ANTH 145a Anthropology of the Body
[ ss ]
Explores a range of theories that use the body to understand society, culture, and gender. Topics include how social values and hierarchies are written in, on, and through the body; the relationship between body and gender identity; and experiences and images of the body cross-culturally. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Lamb or Ms. Schattschneider

ANTH 153a Writing Systems and Scribal Traditions
[ nw ss ]
Explores the ways in which writing has been conceptualized in social anthropology, linguistics and archaeology. A comparative study of various forms of visual communication, both non-glottic and glottic systems, is undertaken to better understand the nature of pristine and contemporary phonetic scripts around the world and to consider alternative models to explain their origin, prestige, and obsolescence. The course pays particular attention to the social functions of early writing systems, the linkage of literacy and political power, and the production of historical memory. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Urcid

ANTH 155b Psychological Anthropology
[ ss ]
An examination of the relationship between sociocultural systems and individual psychological processes with a critical evaluation of selected theories and studies bearing on this problem. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. McIntosh

ANTH 156a Power and Violence: The Anthropology of Political Systems
[ nw ss ]
Political orders are established and maintained by varying combinations of overt violence and the more subtle workings of ideas. The course examines the relationship of coercion and consensus, and forms of resistance, in historical and contemporary settings. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Ferry

ANTH 159a Museums and Public Memory
[ ss ]
Explores the social and political organization of public memory, including museums, cultural villages, and memorial sites. Who has the right to determine the content and form of such institutions? Working with local community members, students will develop a collaborative exhibition project. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

ANTH 186b Linguistic Anthropology
[ ss ]
Advanced topics in linguistic anthropology, including the study of linguistic meaning in context, pragmatics, the construction of social relationships through language, language and authority, language and religion, and linguistic ideologies. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. McIntosh or Mr. Parmentier

CLAS 100a Survey of Greek History: Bronze Age to 323 BCE
[ hum ]
Surveys the political and social development of the Greek city-states from Bronze Age origins to the death of Alexander. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Walker

CLAS 115b Topics in Greek and Roman History
[ hum wi ]
Topics vary from year to year and the course may be repeated for credit with permission of the instructor. Topics include the Age of Alexander the Great, the Age of Pericles, the Greekness of Alexander, and Imperialism in Antiquity. See the Schedule of Classes for the current topic. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Walker

CLAS 120a Age of Caesar
[ hum wi ]
The life and times of Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 BCE) viewed through primary texts in a variety of genres: from Caesar himself to contemporaries Cicero and Catullus and biographers Plutarch and Suetonius. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Walker

CLAS 133a The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Greece
[ ca hum ]
Surveys the main forms and styles of Greek art and architecture from the Bronze Age through the Hellenistic period in mainland Greece and on the islands of the Aegean. Archaeological remains and ancient literary evidence help explore the relationships between culture, the visual arts, and society. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Koh

CLAS 134b The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Rome
[ ca hum ]
Surveys the art and architecture of the ancient Romans from the eighth century BCE to the end of the empire in Sicily, mainland Italy (with focus on Rome, Ostia, Pompeii, and Herculaneum), and in the Roman provinces. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Koloski-Ostrow

CLAS 145b Topics in Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology
[ ca hum ]
Topics vary from year to year and the course may be repeated for credit. Topics include daily life in ancient Rome; ancient technology and art; and Athens and the golden age of Greece. See Schedule of Classes for the current topic and description. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Koloski-Ostrow or Mr. Koh

CLAS 150b Pompeii: Life in the Shadow of Vesuvius
[ ca hum ]
Examines Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried by Vesuvius in 79 CE, using the ancient cities' art, architecture, and wall writings to understand the social, political, economic, and religious realities of Roman life on the Bay of Naples, especially in the first century CE. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Koloski-Ostrow

CLAS 187a Art, Archaeology, and Society in the Holy Land
[ hum ]
Surveys the archaeological and social history of the southern Levant from the emergence of complex societies in the Chalcolithic to the hegenomy of the Romans, emphasizing developments after the Early Bronze Age such as the rise and fall of the Iron Age biblical states. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Koh

COML 109b The Art of Living: Imagination and the Just Life
[ hum wi ]
Formerly offered as FYS 68b.
Can one live well without living justly? Live justly without living well? What does justice ask of us? From Plato to Zhuangzi to Nabokov's Lolita, we examine the subjective preconditions for living justly; knowledge, imagination, love, empathy, freedom and responsibility. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Powelstock

COML 121b Tragedy and the Tragic
[ hum ]
Explores the genre of tragedy and the concept of the tragic in Western literature. Readings from Aristotle, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, Büchner, Nietzsche, Nelly Sachs, Celan and others. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Dowden

FA 30a History of Art I: From Antiquity to the Middle Ages
[ ca ]
Open to all students; first-year students and sophomores are encouraged to enroll. May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 17a in prior years.
A survey of major styles in architecture, sculpture, and painting from prehistoric times to the Gothic cathedral. Usually offered every year.
Mr. McClendon

FA 30b History of Art II: From the Renaissance to the Modern Age
[ ca ]
Open to all students; first-year students and sophomores are encouraged to enroll. May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 18b in prior years.
A study of the major styles in architecture, painting, and sculpture of the West from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Unglaub

FA 42b The Age of Cathedrals
[ ca ]
Architecture, sculpture, and painting (including stained glass) in Western Europe from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, with particular attention to the great churches of medieval France. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. McClendon

FA 45b Art of the Early Renaissance in Italy
[ ca ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 51a in prior years.
Examines major painters, sculptors, and architects in Florence, Rome, and Venice from Giotto to Bellini (1290-1500). Important themes include the revival of Antiquity, the visual arts and the culture of Humanism, the Rise of the Medici, art and the ideal of the Republic, the development of art theory and criticism, Naturalism and the Sacred image, and the relation of artists and patrons during times of crisis (black death, Pazzi Conspiracy, and Savonarola). Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Unglaub

FA 46b High and Late Renaissance in Italy
[ ca ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 58b in prior years.
Examines the major works of art produced in Italy in the sixteenth century. It focuses on the principal centers of Florence, Rome, and Venice. The foremost artists of the age, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian, receive in-depth coverage. The course also considers the social institutions, ecclesiastical, courtly and civic, that furnished the patronage opportunities and promoted the ideas that occasioned, even demanded, new artistic forms of grace and harmony, energy and torsion. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Unglaub

FA 47b Renaissance Art in Northern Europe
[ ca ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 54b in prior years.
A survey of the art of the Netherlands, Germany, and France in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Cultural developments such as the invention of printing, the Protestant Reformation, and the practices of alchemy and witchcraft will be considered through the work of major artists. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. Unglaub

FA 57a Paris/New York: Revolutions of Modernism
[ ca ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 70a in prior years.
A chronological survey of painting and sculpture from the French Revolution
to the emergence of Pop Art and Minimalism. Principal periods: Manet and the
impressionists, Picasso and Cubism, Matisse, expressionism, Dada and Surrealism, abstract expressionism and Pop avant-garde in America. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Scott

FA 58a Modern Sculpture As Public Art
[ ca ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 172a in prior years.
Focuses on multiple definitions of three-dimensional art in the public realm, from statue to structure. This course charts the development of sculpture for nineteenth-century practice, (Rodin) to abstraction (Brancusi, Calder), and considers the conceptual and installation art projects of contemporary times (Oldenburg, Maya Lin, Shimon Attie, Sarah Sze). Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Scott

FA 59a Modern Art and Modern Culture
[ ca ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 71a in prior years.
A thematic study of modernism in twentieth-century painting and sculpture, emphasizing three trends: primitivism, spiritualism, and the redefinition of reality. Individual artists and art movements will be examined in the context of literature, politics, and aesthetic theory. Artists include Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, and Duchamp. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Kalb

FA 61a History of Photography
[ ca ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 76b in prior years.
The history of photography from its invention in 1839 to the present, with an emphasis on developments in America. Photography is studied as a documentary and an artistic medium. Topics include Alfred Stieglitz and the photo-secession, Depression-era documentary, Robert Frank and street photography, and postmodern photography. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Kalb

FA 62a Art since 1945
[ ca ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 74a in prior years.
Survey of developments in painting and sculpture since World War II. Consideration of major trends of the period, including abstract expressionism, pop art, minimalism, color field painting, and realism. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Kalb

FA 69b Inventing Tradition: Women as Artists, Women as Art
[ ca ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 61b in prior years.
Provides an art-historical overview and a feminist critique of gender and representation followed by select case studies of the art and life of women artists. Examples include non-Western art. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Ankori

FA 79a Modernism Elsewhere
[ ca nw ]
Explores major architectural developments from the late 19th to the 21st century outside the West. While focused on the territories between the India Subcontinent and North Africa, it examines Western colonial politics of center-periphery in creating architectural forms, discourses, and practices in the postcolonial world. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Grigor

FA 80a Modern Architecture
[ ca ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 122a in prior years.
Explores major architectural developments from the 19th and to the 21st century. While tracing European and American movements, links are made to the architectural implications of Western ambitions worldwide and the role architecture played in the politics of colonialism. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Grigor

FA 86b Museum Studies
[ ca ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 85b in prior years.
An experiential learning seminar focused on the art object in the context of the museum; the history of museums (architecture, educational mission, curatorial presentation); museum ethics and provenance studies; new theories of museums and their expanded role in the community. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Scott

FA 143a The Art of Medieval England
[ ca ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 43a in prior years.
A survey of art and architecture from the end of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. Particular concern for the synthesis of native and foreign cultures and their artistic styles, resulting from the barbarian invasions, the Norman conquest, and political rivalry with France. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. McClendon

FA 145a St. Peter's and the Vatican
[ ca ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 45a in prior years.
The history, growth, and development of Christendom's most famous shrine, with particular concern for the relationship between the design and decoration of the Renaissance/baroque church and palace complex and their early Christian and medieval predecessors. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. McClendon

FA 149a The Age of Rubens and Rembrandt
[ ca wi ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 63a in prior years.
Explores the major figures of seventeenth-century painting in the Netherlands and Flanders: Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. During this time, the ideal of Renaissance painter/courtier gives way to the birth of the modern artist in an open market, revolutionizing the subjects, themes, and styles of painting. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Unglaub

FA 155a Impressionism: Avant-Garde Rebellion in Context
[ ca wi ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 171a in prior years.
Focuses on the major artists from the period 1863 - 1886, from the time of Manet and the Salon des Refusés through the eight group exhibitions of Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, Pissarro, Morisot, and Cassatt and company. The antithesis of impressionism, its academic rivals, the backdrop of the sociopolitical context, the Second Empire, and the Third Republic will be provided, as well as the roots of the movement's dissolution. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Scott

FA 156b Postimpressionism and Symbolism, 1880-1910
[ ca wi ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 174b in prior years.
The course curriculum covers postimpressionist artists Seurat, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, and more broadly, symbolist trends, expressionism, and art nouveau at the end of the nineteenth century. These trends are followed through chronologically to the early twentieth century in the art of Matisse and the fauves, and in German expressionism. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Scott

FA 158b Picasso and Matisse
[ ca ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 173b in prior years.
Examines the major contributions of all periods of Picasso's career, with special focus on the development of Cubism, counterbalanced with the color expression of Matisse and the Fauves. The larger circle of artists, poets, and patrons associated with both these masters--from Juan Gris, Fernand Leger, and especially Georges Braque, to Gertrude Stein and Guillaume Apollinaire--forms the core subject matter. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Scott

FA 180a Contemporary Architecture
[ ca ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 121a in prior years.
A study of stylistic and technological developments in post-World War II architecture. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Grigor

FA 191b Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Art
[ ca wi ]
Open to Fine Arts majors and minors, Italian Studies minors, and Medieval and Renaissance minors only. Topics may vary from year to year; the course may be repeated for credit as topics change.
Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Unglaub

FA 192a Studies in Modern and Contemporary Art
[ ca ]
Topics may vary from year to year; the course may be repeated for credit.
Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Ankori, Mr. Kalb, or Ms. Scott

FA 193a Studies in Modern and Contemporary Architecture
[ ca ]
Topics may vary from year to year; the course may be repeated for credit with permission of the instructor.
Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Grigor

FA 199a Methods and Approaches in the History of Art
[ ca wi ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 197b in prior years.
Explores various ways of analyzing works of art and provides an overview of the historical development of the discipline. Designed specifically for junior and senior art history majors. Usually offered every year.
Mr. McClendon

FILM 100a Introduction to the Moving Image
[ hum ]
An interdisciplinary course surveying the history of moving image media from 1895 to the present, from the earliest silent cinema to the age of the 500-channel cable television. Open to all undergraduates as an elective, it is the introductory course for the major and minor in film, television and interactive media. Usually offered every year.
Staff

FYS 25a The Artist Behind their Work
[ ca ]
No previous painting or drawing experience required.
Appreciates through understanding the artists lives and experiences behind his/her work. Each student gains deeper appreciation for their chosen artist’s painting process, style and artistic content through the execution/replication of a chosen artist’s work.
Mr. Moody (Theater Arts)

FYS 32b Crime and Punishment in History
[ ss ]
This seminar aims to help first-year students sharpen their skills in critical reading, thinking, writing, and oral expression — vital tools of a liberal arts education and a rich intellectual life. Our common substantive project will be to develop an informed historical perspective on crime and punishment. Immersing ourselves in an eclectic mix of texts and genres — criminal codes, pardon tales, trial records, political essays, memoirs, true-crime journalism, history books, urban sociology, novels, and films — we will examine how Western Europeans and Americans of different eras have defined, represented, and punished crime.
Mr. Willrich (History)

FYS 53a Between Conflict and Cooperation: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain
[ hum ]
An examination of social and intellectual interaction among the three religious communities of medieval Spain, focusing on literature, philosophy, and religion (including mysticism). Will study how the interaction of the three faiths helped produce a unique culture.
Mr. Decter (Near Eastern and Judaic Studies)

GECS 187b Seeking Justice: Jews and Germans
[ hum ]
Since WWII the relationship between Jews and Germans has been defined by the Holocaust. How could a modern civilized nation like Germany perpetrate the Nazi crimes? What led to the Nazi regime and how have Jews and Germans tried to overcome a history of injustice since 1945? We will investigate the past two hundred years of this relationship by looking at some of the most influential texts and films that address the question of seeking justice. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. von Mering

HIST 103a Roman History to 455 CE
[ hum ss ]
Survey of Roman history from the early republic through the decline of the empire. Covers the political history of the Roman state and the major social, economic, and religious changes of the period. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Kapelle

HIST 110a The Civilization of the Early Middle Ages
[ ss ]
Survey of medieval history from the fall of Rome to the year 1000. Topics include the barbarian invasions, the Byzantine Empire, the Dark Ages, the Carolingian Empire, feudalism, manorialism, and the Vikings. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Kapelle

HIST 110b The Civilization of the High and Late Middle Ages
[ ss ]
Survey of European history from 1000 to 1450. Topics include the Crusades, the birth of towns, the creation of kingdoms, the papacy, the peasantry, the universities, the Black Death, and the Hundred Years' War. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Kapelle

HIST 112b The Crusades and the Expansion of Medieval Europe
[ ss ]
Survey of the relationships between medieval Europe and neighboring cultures, beginning with the decline of Byzantium. Topics include a detailed look at the Crusades, the Spanish reconquista, the Crusader kingdoms, economic growth, and the foundations of imperialism. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kapelle

HIST 113a English Medieval History
[ ss ]
Survey of English history from the Anglo-Saxon invasions to the fifteenth century. Topics include the heroic age, the Viking invasions, and development of the English kingdom from the Norman conquest through the Hundred Years' War. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kapelle

HIST 120a Britain in the Later Middle Ages
[ ss ]
Exploration of the critical changes in government and society in the British Isles from the late fourteenth to the sixteenth century. Topics include the Black Death, the lordship of Ireland, the Hundred Years' War, the Scottish War of Independence, economic change, the Tudors, and the Reformation. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kapelle

HIST 121a Breaking the Rules: Deviance and Nonconformity in Premodern Europe
[ ss wi ]
Explores the ways in which "deviant" behavior was defined and punished by some, but also justified and even celebrated by others in premodern Europe. Topics include vagrancy, popular uprisings, witchcraft, religious heresy, and the status of women. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sreenivasan

HIST 123a The Renaissance
[ ss ]
Culture, society, and economy in the Italian city-state (with particular attention to Florence) from feudalism to the rise of the modern state. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Kapelle

HIST 126a Early Modern Europe (1500-1700)
[ qr ss ]
Survey of politics, ideas, and society in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Focuses on the changing relationship between the emerging modern state and its subjects. Topics include the development of ideologies of resistance and conformity, regional loyalties and the problems of empire, changing technologies of war and repression, and the social foundations of order and disorder. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Sreenivasan

HIST 131a Hitler's Europe in Film
[ ss wi ]
Takes a critical look as how Hitler's Europe has been represented and misrepresented since its time by documentary and entertainment films of different countries beginning with Germany itself. Movies, individual reports, discussions, and a littler reading. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Kelikian

HIST 133b Rights and Revolutions: History of Natural Rights
[ ss wi ]
An examination of the doctrine of national rights, its significance in the contemporary world, its historical development, and its role in revolutionary politics. The English and French Declarations of 1689, 1776, and 1789 will be compared and contrasted. Usually offered every second or third year.
Mr. Hulliung

HIST 137b World War I
[ ss wi ]
Examines the opening global conflict of the twentieth century. Topics include the destruction of the old European order, the origins of total war, the cultural and social crisis it provoked, and the long-term consequences for Europe and the world. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Jankowski

HIST 139b Fascism East and West
[ ss ]
Traces the origins of authoritarianism in Europe, Asia, and Latin America during the twentieth century. It first looks at Germany and Italy. Additionally, it examines right-wing regimes in Japan, China, and Indonesia and their non-western political traditions. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Pieragastini

HIST 140a A History of Fashion in Europe
[ ss wi ]
Looks at costume, trade in garments, and clothing consumption in Europe from 1600 to 1950. Topics include sumptuous fashion, class and gender distinctions in wardrobe, and the rise of department stores. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Kelikian

HIST 145a War in European History
[ ss ]
Introduces students to the changing nature of war and warfare in European history since the Middle Ages. Explores the reciprocal influence of armies and societies and the ways in which wars reflect the cultures of the polities waging them. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Jankowski

HOID 100a Introduction to Critical Theory
[ hum ]
How should we understand the cultural contradictions of modern society? This course will explore the evolution of Critical Theory as developed by the early Frankfurt School, with a specific focus on the works of Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. Special one-time offering, fall 2014.
Mr. Gamsby

LING 120b Syntactic Theory
[ ss ]
Prerequisite: LING 100a is recommended but not required. Four class hours per week.
An introduction to the process of syntactic analysis, to generative syntactic theory, and to many major syntactic phenomena of English and other languages, including the clausal architecture, the lexicon, and various types of syntactic movement. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Goldberg

LING 125b Linguistic Typology
[ ss ]
Prerequisite: LING 100a or permission of the instructor.
Focuses on linguistic typology, in which the languages of the world are classified in terms of their common grammatical features rather than by genetic relationships. Includes study of language universals: traits and implicational relationships which hold in (nearly) every language. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Goldberg

LING 130a Formal Semantics: Truth, Meaning, and Language
[ hum qr ss ]
Prerequisite: LING 100a or permission of the instructor. LING 120b recommended.
Explores the semantic structure of language in terms of the current linguistic theory of model-theoretic semantics. Topics include the nature of word meanings, categorization, compositionality, and plurals and mass terms. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Malamud

LING 140a Architecture of Conversation: Discourse and Pragmatics
[ oc ss ]
Prerequisite: LING 100a or permission of the instructor.
Assuming a theory of sentence-level linguistic competence, what phenomena are still to be accounted for in the explication of language knowledge? The class explores topics in language use in context, including anaphora, deixis, implicature, speech acts, information packaging, and pragmatics of dialogue. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Malamud

LING 190b Topics in Linguistics
[ ss ]
See the schedule of classes for topic and prerequisite(s). Maybe repeated for credit with permission of the instructor.
Advanced topics in linguistics, varying by year. Usually offered every year.
Staff

LING 197a Language Acquisition and Development
[ oc ss ]
Prerequisite: LING 100a or permission of the instructor.
The central problem of language acquisition is to explain what makes this formidable task possible. Theories of language acquisition are studied, and conclusions are based on recent research in the development of syntax, semantics, and phonology. The overall goal is to arrive at a coherent picture of the language learning process. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Malamud

MUS 1a Exploring Western Music
[ ca ]
Does not meet requirements for the major or minor in music.
A general introduction to the materials and forms of music, and a study of western musical literature. Training in analytical listening, based on selected listening assignments. Open to non-majors who are assumed to have little or no previous knowledge of music. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Coluzzi

MUS 45a Beethoven
[ ca ]
Open to music majors and non-majors.
A study of the most influential musician in the history of Western civilization. Although attention is given to his place in society, emphasis falls on an examination of representative works drawn from the symphonies, concertos, chamber music, and solo piano works. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Keiler

MUS 51b The Symphony
[ ca ]
Open to music majors and non-majors.
Examines a major genre of Western classical music: the symphony. By analyzing representative masterpieces, students acquire an understanding of the development of musical style in the classic, romantic, and modern periods. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Chafe

MUS 52a The World of Opera: Music and Drama
[ ca ]
Open to music majors and non-majors.
Surveys the history of opera from its emergence around 1600 to the present day. In addition to tracing musical changes, the social, cultural, and intellectual trends that influenced (and were shaped by) these changes are also considered. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

NEJS 110b Readings in the Hebrew Bible
[ hum ]
Prerequisites: NEJS 10a or 40-level HBRW course or permission of the instructor. May be repeated for credit.
A close reading of selected biblical texts. Topics may vary from year to year. Recent topics have included readings in the prophets. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Abusch, Mr. Brettler or Mr. Wright

NEJS 111a The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
[ hum wi ]
Open to all students.
A survey of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). Biblical books will be examined from various perspectives and compared to other ancient Near Eastern compositions. No knowledge of Hebrew is presumed. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Brettler

NEJS 112a The Book of Genesis
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: HBRW 122a or b, NEJS 10a, or permission of the instructor.
An in-depth study of the Hebrew text of Genesis, with particular attention to the meaning, documentary sources, and Near Eastern background of the accounts of creation and origins of human civilization in chapters one to eleven, and of the patriarchal narratives, especially those about Abraham. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Abusch

NEJS 114b Ritual and Cult in the Bible
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: HBRW 122a or b, NEJS 10a, or permission of the instructor.
A study of ritual and cultic texts of the Bible in Hebrew and their rites and phenomena with historical-critical, Near Eastern-environmental, social-scientific, and literary analysis. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Wright

NEJS 115b Gender and the Bible
[ hum ]
Open to all students.
The Hebrew Bible, a complex work, reflects a wide range of attitudes toward gender. This course examines these attitudes as they are reflected in issues such as the legal status of women, women in myths, leadership, prostitution, masculinity, and the gender of ancient Israel's deity. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Brettler

NEJS 116a Ancient Near Eastern Religion and Mythology
[ hum nw ]
Open to all students.
An introduction to the religion, mythology, and thought of the ancient Near East. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Abusch

NEJS 121b Biblical Poetry: Love and Death
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: NEJS 10a or a strong knowledge of biblical Hebrew.
A close reading of biblical poetic texts, with a consideration of what makes these texts poetic. Texts will be chosen primarily from Song of Songs, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Job. Topics will vary from year to year and the course may be repeated for credit. Refer to Schedule of Classes for current topic. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Brettler

NEJS 122b Biblical Narrative Texts: The Historical Tradition
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: NEJS 10a or a strong knowledge of biblical Hebrew.
A close reading of a variety of biblical "historical" texts from Deuteronomy, Judges, Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles. The basic tools for biblical research and the literary study of the Bible will be explored. The newer methods of analyzing biblical "historical" texts will be discussed. Topics vary from year to year and this course may be repeated for credit. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Brettler

NEJS 128a Introduction to Christianity
[ hum ]
Open to all students.
An introduction to Christian beliefs, liturgy, and history. Surveys the largest world religion: from Ethiopian to Korean Christianity, from black theology to the Christian right. Analyzes Christian debates about God, Christ, and human beings. Studies differences among Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Brooten

NEJS 130a The New Testament: A Historical Introduction
[ hum ]
Open to all students.
A study of the main parts of the New Testament, with emphasis on the contents of the books and the historical development of early Christianity. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Brooten

NEJS 133a Art, Artifacts, and History: The Material Culture of Modern Jews
[ hum ]
An interpretive, bibliographic, and hands-on study of the material (nontextual) culture of American and European Jews since 1600 taught in a comparative cultural context. Analyzes how objects, architecture, visual images, bodies, museums, and memorials can help us understand and interpret social, cultural, and religious history. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Smith

NEJS 134b Yiddish Culture in the Modern World
[ hum ]
An examination of the rise of modern Yiddish secular culture in Eastern Europe and North America with a particular focus on the literature it produced. Music, criticism, journalism, drama, film, and painting are also studied. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Kellman

NEJS 135a The Modern Jewish Experience
[ hum ]
Themes include Enlightenment, Hasidism, emancipation, Jewish identity in the modern world (acculturation and assimilation), development of dominant nationalism in Judaism, Zionism, European Jewry between the world wars, Holocaust, the creation of the State of Israel, and contemporary Jewish life in America, Israel, and Europe. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Freeze or Mr. Sheppard

NEJS 137a The Destruction of European Jewry
[ hum ]
Open to all students.
Why did the Jews become the subject of genocidal hatred? A systematic examination of the anti-Jewish genocide planned and executed by Nazi Germany and the Jewish and general responses to it. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Polonsky

NEJS 137b A History of the Jews in Warsaw, Lodz, Vilna, and Odessa
[ hum ss ]
Examines the history of the four largest Jewish communities in the Russian Empire from the earliest settlement through the Holocaust to the present, comparing internal organization, different political and cultural allegiances, and relations with the majority population. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Freeze

NEJS 140a Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages
[ hum ss wi ]
Surveys Jewish political, social and intellectual history in the domains of Islam and Christianity from the rise of Islam (622) to the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (1492) and Portugal (1497). Topics include the legal status of Jews, Jewish communal organization, persecution and response, inter-religious polemics, conversion, the origins of anti-Judaism, and trends in Jewish law, philosophy, literature, and mysticism. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Decter

NEJS 140b Early Modern Jewish History
[ hum ]
Examines Jewish history and culture in early modern Europe: mass conversions on the Iberian peninsula, migrations, reconversions back to Judaism, the printing revolution, the Reformation and Counter Reformation, ghettos, gender, family, everyday life, material culture, communal structure, rabbinical culture, mysticism, magic, science, messianic movements, Hasidism, mercantilism, and early modern challenges to Judaism.
Mr. Sheppard

NEJS 141a Russian Jews in the Twentieth Century
[ hum ]
Examines Russian Jewish history from 1917 to the present. Focuses on the tsarist legacy, Russian Revolution, the creation of a new socialist society, development of Yiddish culture, the "Great Turn" under Stalin, Holocaust, post war Judaism, anti-Semitism, emigration, and current events. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sheppard

NEJS 142a Modern History of East European Jewry
[ hum ]
A comprehensive survey of the history (economic, sociopolitical, and religious) of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe from the middle of the eighteenth century until World War II, with emphasis placed on the Jews of Poland and Russia. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Freeze

NEJS 142b Secular Jews: Lives and Choices from 1750 to the Present
[ hum ]
A survey of the lives of Jews who since 1750 have seen their identity in new ways, either as individuals without religious faith but still identified as Jews or as adherents of ideologies which provided alternative definitions of Jewish identity. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Polonsky

NEJS 148b Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Jews and Christians: Sources and Interpretations
[ hum ]
Introduction to the classical Jewish and Christian sources on same-sex love and on gender ambiguity and to a variety of current interpretations of them, to the evidence for same-sex love and gender fluidity among Jews and Christians through the centuries, and to current religious and public policy debates about same-sex love and gender identity and expression. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Brooten

NEJS 149a The Jews of Muslim and Christian Spain
[ hum ]
A survey of Jewish political, intellectual, and social history in the Islamic and Christian spheres from the beginnings of Jewish life in Spain until the expulsion in 1492. Students develop skills in reading historical, literary, and philosophical texts. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Decter

NEJS 154a World Without God: Theories of Secularization
[ hum ]
What is secularization? What does it mean to describe the modern world as wholly secular or independent of any prior religious foundations of beliefs? Is modern political identical intelligible apart from religion? Or does politics remain a translation of religious concepts and is all politics therefore a mode of political theology? This advanced undergraduate course surveys various debates concerning the historical process and philosophical-political significance of secularization, most especially the secularization of political norms. Concentrates on the history of European thought from the 17th century to the 20th century, with special reference to the encounter between Judaism and Christianity and modes of modern rationalist criticism. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Sheppard

NEJS 158b Yiddish Literature in the Modern Jewish Revolution
[ hum wi ]
Students with reading knowledge of Yiddish may elect to read the original texts.
Introduces students to Yiddish fiction, poetry, and drama created in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Eastern Europe and the Americas. Readings include a sampling of works by classic Yiddish writers, but focus primarily on fiction, poetry, and drama by writers of succeeding generations. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Kellman

NEJS 159a Modern Jewish Philosophy
[ hum ]
Surveys the contours of modern Jewish philosophy by engaging some of its most important themes and voices. Competing Jewish inflections of and responses to rationalism, romanticism, idealism, existentialism, and nihilism. This provides the conceptual road signs of the course as we traverse the winding byways of Jewish philosophy from Baruch Spinoza to Emanuel Levinas. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sheppard

NEJS 159b The Yiddish Classics: Fiction and Drama
[ hum wi ]
Reading and analysis of the major works of fiction and drama by the best Yiddish writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taught in English using texts in translation. Weekly additional section for students with advanced reading knowledge of Yiddish who elect to read some texts in the original. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Kellman

NEJS 167a Twentieth-Century Jewish Immigration to the United States
[ hum ss ]
Open to all students.
A historical survey of twentieth-century Jewish immigration to the United States, including East European, Sephardic, Cuban, Persian, Mizrahi, and Soviet Jewish immigrations. Regular readings will be supplemented by primary sources, immigrant fiction, and film. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sarna

NEJS 175a Jews and Gender in Eastern Europe: Tradition and Transformation
[ hum ]
Examines gender roles in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eastern European Jewish culture, with a focus on transformation in gender relations, education, and religious practices. Readings are drawn from Yiddish and Hebrew prose, poetry, and memoir literature, with secondary sources in cultural history. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Kellman

NEJS 177a The Holocaust in Israeli and Jewish Literature
[ hum ]
A broad survey of Holocaust writings in Modern Jewish literature. Examines the psychological, social, moral, and aesthetic challenges involved in representing the Holocaust in Israeli, American, and European context through literary texts, theoretical research, works of art, and film. Taught in English. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Szobel

NEJS 181a Jews on Screen: "Cohen's Fire Sale" to the Coen Brothers
[ hum ]
Open to all students.
Survey course focusing on moving images of Jews and Jewish life in fiction and factual films. Includes early Russian and American silents, home movies of European Jews, Yiddish feature films, Israeli cinema, independent films, and Hollywood classics. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Rivo

NEJS 181b Film and the Holocaust
[ hum ]
Open to all students.
Examines the medium of film, propaganda, documentary, and narrative fiction relevant to the history of the Holocaust. The use of film to shape, justify, document, interpret, and imagine the Holocaust. Beginning with the films produced by the Third Reich, the course includes films produced immediately after the events, as well as contemporary feature films. The focus will be how the film medium, as a medium, works to (re)present meaning(s). Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Rivo

NEJS 186a Introduction to the Qur'an
[ hum nw ]
Traces the history of the Qur'an as text, its exegesis, and its role in inter-religious polemics, law, theology, and politics. Examines the role of the Qur'an in Islamic teachings and its global impact. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Lumbard

PHIL 1a Introduction to Philosophy
[ hum ]
Enrollment varies according to instructor. Refer to the Schedule of Classes each semester for information regarding applicability to the writing-intensive requirement.
A general course presenting the problems of philosophy, especially in the areas of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and social and political philosophy. Texts include works of selected philosophers of various historical periods from antiquity to the present. Usually offered every semester.
Staff

PHIL 17a Introduction to Ethics
[ hum ]
Explores the basic concepts and theories of ethical philosophy. What makes a life good? What are our moral obligations to other people? Applications of ethical philosophy to various concrete questions will be considered. Usually offered every semester.
Ms. Smiley or Ms. Moran

PHIL 24a Philosophy of Religion
[ hum ]
An introduction to the major philosophical problems of religion. Discusses traditional arguments for and against the existence of God, the nature of faith and mystical experiences, the relation of religion to morality, and puzzles about the concept of God. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Hirsch

PHIL 37a Philosophy of Language
[ hum ]
Theories of meaning, reference, and methodological issues in account of language and translation. Readings from contemporary sources. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Berger or Mr. Yourgrau

PHIL 78a Existentialism
[ hum ]
A study of French existentialist philosophy and its reception, with special attention to the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Marusic

PHIL 107b Kant's Moral Theory
[ hum ]
An examination of the main philosophical issues addressed in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason from the perspective of their relation to works specifically belonging to his ethical theory: the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Metaphysics of Morals. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Moran

PHIL 108a Philosophy and Gender
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: PHIL 1a or PHIL 17a.
Explores the place of gender in the works of particular Western philosophers (e.g., Kant, Hume, and Rousseau) and uses the tools of contemporary analytic philosophy to address questions about gender equality, sexual objectification, and the nature of masculinity. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smiley

PHIL 109b Ethics and Emotions
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: One course in philosophy.
An examination of the historical and contemporary theories concerning the role that emotions and feeling ought to have in moral judgment and decision-making. Explores contemporary philosophical theories about the relationship between emotion and judgment. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Moran

PHIL 110a The Meaning of Life or "How Should One Live?"
[ hum wi ]
Much recent philosophy in the English-speaking world has focused on the nature of things and our knowledge and reasoning about such things. But most human mental activity is not theoretical, but practical; less concerned with how the world is than with what is to be done. In the earliest moments of Western philosophy, Socrates distinguished himself by asking, "How should one live?" Increasingly, however, that question and its variants have taken a back seat in philosophy, abandoned to the best-seller lists and to publications produced by recent graduates of assertiveness training workshops. We reclaim these questions and take them up again from within the discipline of philosophy itself. Questions asked include: "How should I live?" "What are the good things in life?" "Does life have meaning?" Readings include Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, Murdoch, Dennett, Dawkins, Hacking, Nozick, and Nagel. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Teuber

PHIL 111a What Is Justice?
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: One course in philosophy or political theory or permission of the instructor.
What is justice and what does justice require? The course examines theories of justice, both classical and contemporary. Topics include liberty and equality, "who gets what and how much," welfare- and resource-based principles of justice, justice as a virtue, liberalism, multiculturalism, and globalization. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Smiley

PHIL 113b Aesthetics: Painting, Photography, and Film
[ ca hum wi ]
Explores representation in painting, photography, and film by studying painters Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Vermeer, as well as later works by Manet, Degas, Cézanne, and Picasso; photographers Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Alfred Stieglitz, and Diane Arbus; and filmmakers Renoir and Hitchcock. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Teuber

PHIL 114b Topics in Ethical Theory
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: PHIL 1a, or PHIL 17a, or PHIL 23b.
Is morality something we have reasons to obey regardless of our interests and desires, or do the reasons grow out of our interests and desires? Is the moral life always a personally satisfying life? Is morality a social invention or is it more deeply rooted in the nature of things? This course will address such questions. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Moran or Ms. Smiley

PHIL 119a Human Rights
[ hum wi ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took PHIL 19a in prior years.
Examines international human rights policies and the moral and political issues to which they give rise. Includes civilians' wartime rights, the role of human rights in foreign policy, and the responsibility of individuals and states to alleviate world hunger and famine. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Teuber

PHIL 120a Utilitarianism
[ hum wi ]
Explores historical and contemporary versions of utilitarianism. Examines arguments for and against them, as well as looking at the implications of utilitarianism for our own lives. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Hewitt

PHIL 122a History of Ethics
[ hum ]
Explores several major ethical traditions in the history of modern philosophy/ Examines the natural law theories of Hobbes and Grotius; moral sense theory; Kantianism; utilitarianism; and Nietzsche's response to these traditional moral theories. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Moran

PHIL 129a Philosophical Problems
[ hum ]
Open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students.
For students already introduced to philosophy who are interested in examining an array of fundamental philosophical problems in the three main areas of philosophy--epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics and politics--at a more advanced level. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Greenberg

PHIL 131a Philosophy of Mind
[ hum ]
May not be repeated for credit by students who took PHIL 39b in previous years.
Covers the central issue in the philosophy of mind: the mind-body problem. This is the ongoing attempt to understand the relation between our minds -- our thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and so on -- and our bodies. Is the mind just a complex configuration of (neural) matter, or is there something about it that's irreducibly different from every physical thing? Topics include intentionality, consciousness, functionalism, reductionism, and the philosophical implications of recent work in neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Samet

PHIL 133a Consciousness, Brain, and Self
[ hum wi ]
Prerequisite: One course in philosophy, psychology, or neuroscience, or permission of the instructor.
Consciousness--sensing, feeling, thinking--is our life. But it's hard to understand how mere "meat puppets" like us could be conscious. Are scientists closing in on a solution? And if they are, what does that say about who we are and how we ought to live? Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Samet

PHIL 134b Philosophy of Perception
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: PHIL 1a or PHIL 66b or one course numbered PHIL 35a through PHIL 38b.
What do we perceive? Do we perceive objects in the world or do we infer on the basis of sensory data that there are such objects? And how do our answers to these questions depend on or shape our metaphysics? Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Samet

PHIL 135a Theory of Knowledge
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: PHIL 1a or PHIL 66b or one course numbered PHIL 35a through PHIL 38b.
An investigation into the nature, sources, and extent of human knowledge, with emphasis on the problem of justifying our beliefs about the existence and character of the external world. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Greenberg, Mr. Hirsch, or Mr. Marusic

PHIL 136a Personal Identity
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: PHIL 1a or PHIL 66b or one course numbered PHIL 35a through PHIL 38b.
An examination of some major issues involved in the question of personal identity. What am I? What are the conditions of self-identity? How does the identity of the self relate to the identity of a physical object? Is identity an illusion? Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Hirsch or Mr. Greenberg

PHIL 137a Nature or Nurture? The Innateness Controversy
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: One course in philosophy or permission of the instructor.
The question: How much of what we are--what we believe and know, what we think and feel, and how we act--is due to our environment and training and how much is a function of our inherent nature? This interdisciplinary course covers: the main answers in the history of philosophy (from Plato through Logical Positivism); the contemporary philosophical debate on this question; and current scientific research in linguistics, psychology, ethology, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary biology. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Samet

PHIL 140a Logic and Language
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: PHIL 1a, PHIL 6a, or PHIL 106b, or permission of the instructor.
Covers basic problems and puzzles regarding reference and identity-topics that dominate issues in philosophy of language today. Topics include puzzles about belief, necessity, substitutivity of identity statements, and formal semantics for parts of language that includes modal and intensional notions. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Berger or Mr. Yourgrau

PHIL 144a Philosophical Problems of Space and Time
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: PHIL 1a or PHIL 66b or one course numbered PHIL 35a through PHIL 38b.
An examination of philosophical problems concerning the concepts of space and time as these arise in contemporary physics, modern logic and metaphysics, as well as in everyday life. Specific topics usually include philosophical aspects of Einstein's theory of relativity, the possibility of "time travel," the distinction between space and time, and McTaggart's famous distinction between the "A-series" and the "B-series" of time. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Berger, Mr. Hirsch, or Mr. Yourgrau

PHIL 145b Topics in the Philosophy of Language
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: PHIL 1a or PHIL 66b or one course numbered PHIL 35a through PHIL 38b.
Topics may vary from year to year and course may be repeated for credit. Topics include the relationship between the language we speak and our view of reality, reference, the sense in which language may structure reality, and formal semantics. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Berger, Mr. Hirsch, or Mr. Yourgrau

PHIL 146a Idea of God
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: PHIL 1a or PHIL 66b or one course numbered PHIL 35a through PHIL 38b.
Engages in a philosophical investigation, not of religion as an institution but of the very idea of God. Studies the distinction between human being and divine being and addresses the issue of the relation of God's essence to his existence. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Yourgrau

PHIL 149a Leibniz, Hume, and Kant on Necessity
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: PHIL 1a or a course in the history of modern philosophy or analytic philosophy.
An investigation into the views of three historical philosophers -- Leibniz, Hume, and Kant -- on the concept of necessity, with limited reference to contemporary treatment of the concept by W. V. Quine and early David Kaplan. Related concept of a priori and analyticity are also discussed. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. Greenberg

PHIL 150b Topics in Epistemology and Metaphysics
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: PHIL 1a or PHIL 66b, or one courses numbered PHIL 35a through PHIL 38b.
Topics vary each year; course may be repeated for credit. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Berger, Mr. Hirsch, or Mr. Marusic

PHIL 161a Plato
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: PHIL 1a or permission of the instructor.
An introduction to Plato's thought through an intensive reading of several major dialogues. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Yourgrau

PHIL 162b Aristotle
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: PHIL 1a or permission of the instructor.
An introduction to Aristotle's philosophy through an intensive reading of selected texts. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Yourgrau

PHIL 166a David Hume
[ hum ]
An in-depth examination on the philosophical ideas of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, covering his views in metaphysics and epistemology, his philosophy of mind, his moral and political philosophy, and his philosophy of religion. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Marusic

PHIL 167a Hegel: Self-Consciousness and Freedom in the Phenomenology of Spirit
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: PHIL 1a or equivalent.
Offers a close reading of Hegal and pays special attention to his analyses of the changing patterns of understand and self-understanding and the way in which he opens up these transformations for the reader to experience. In his modern paradigm, the Subject and the Object of thought necessarily affect one another's potential, essence, and fate. And through a rational comprehension of role of Spirit (Geist) in thought and the world, we can see how they become inextricably bound together. Indeed, for Hegel, the dialectic between subject and object provides the very ground for the self-aware and free subject to participate in modern life. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Sheppard

PHIL 168a Kant
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: PHIL 1a or permission of the instructor.
An attempt to understand and evaluate the main ideas of the Critique of Pure Reason, the subjectivity of space and time, the nature of consciousness, and the objectivity of the concepts of substance and causality. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Greenberg

PHIL 177b Simone Weil
[ hum ]
Studies the French philosopher Simone Weil, revolutionary and mystic. Is divine perfection reconcilable with human suffering? Weil shook the foundations of Christianity and Judaism attempting to answer this question and this course will rejoin her quest. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Yourgrau

PHIL 182a Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations
[ hum ]
An intensive study of Ludwig Wittgenstein's seminal work, Philosophical Investigations. This course should be of interest to philosophy and literature students who want to learn about this great philosopher's influential views on the nature of language and interpretation. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Flesch and Mr. Hirsch

POL 129a East European Politics
[ ss ]
Politics and society in the post-Communist states of Eastern Europe, drawing general lessons about the relationships among social modernization, nationalism, and democratic transition. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. Burg

POL 151a Seminar: Cultural Pluralism and Democratic Governance
[ ss wi ]
Prerequisites: Sophomore or junior class standing and at least two prior politics courses.
How liberal democracies respond to the social and political challenges of linguistic, cultural, religious, racial, and gender differences. Examines legal, political, and normative issues arising out of these differences, and the implications of various responses for the stability of a liberal democratic state. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Burg

POL 153a The New Europe: European Economic and Political Integration
[ ss ]
The institutions and policymaking processes of the European Union (EU). Western European political and economic integration since 1945 and the resurgence of European integration since the mid-1980s. Social policy issues, policy harmonization and economic integration, European citizenship, and the reorientation of national politics in response to community expansion. The future of European unity and national cultures. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

POL 154a Seminar: Citizenship
[ ss wi ]
Liberal theory presumes the progress of history to be, in the words of John Stuart Mill, a gradual "doing away with privilege." Examines the frontiers of social and political justice through readings drawn from literature, political science, and history. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Klausen

POL 154aj Seminar: Citizenship
[ ss ]
Liberal theory presumes the progress of history to be, in the words of John Stuart Mill, a gradual "doing away with privilege." Examines the frontiers of social and political justice through readings drawn from literature, political science, and history. Offered as part of JBS program.
Mr. Kryder

POL 156b European Culture & Politics
[ ss wi ]
The comparative politics of Western Europe. Focuses on the development of political parties and social movements in Britain, France, and Germany--particularly since 1945--to determine how they affect policies and the citizenry's participation in modern democracies. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Klausen

POL 182a Liberal Political Thought
[ ss ]
An exploration of the history of liberal thought as well as contemporary critics and defenders of liberalism, focusing primarily on American and European authors. Authors may include Locke, Smith, Montesquieu, Mill, Tocqueville, Dewey, Rawls, Hayek, Shklar, MacIntyre, Oakeshott, Sandel, Walzer, and Okin. Usually offered every fourth year.
Staff

POL 186b Classical Political Thought
[ hum ss ]
Major ancient political philosophers and the meaning and implications of their work for contemporary political issues. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Yack

POL 187b Conservative Political Thought
[ ss ]
Focuses on American and European thinkers, with an emphasis on critics of equality and unlimited commercial and civil liberty. Readings include political philosophy and literature. Authors may include Burke, Oakeshott, Calhoun, Conrad, Hayek, Macintyre, and Strauss. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Yack

POL 189a Marx, Nietzsche, and Twentieth-Century Radicalism
[ ss ]
Comparison of two powerful and influential critiques of modern politics and society. Explanation of Marx's work, both for its own insights and as a model for radical theorists; and of Nietzsche's work as an alternative conception of radical social criticism. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Yack

POL 194a Politics and the Novel
[ ss ]
Selected works of fiction as sources of political ideas and pictures of political and social life. How modern fiction helps us understand social change, societies in transition and decay, revolution, law, bureaucracy, and ethnicity. Authors such as Kafka, Conrad, Borges, Dostoevsky, Ford Madox Ford, Babel, Greene, Malraux, and Carpenter. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Levin

POL 195b Shakespeare and the Politics of Leadership
[ ss ]
Shakespeare as sources for understanding selected work of the role of leaders and followers, elites and masses, class and ethnicity, social change, the relations between disparate social orders, and societies ins transition. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Levin

PSYC 195a History of Psychology
[ ss ]
Structuralism, Gestalt theory, William James (consciousness), functionalism, behaviorism, learning theories, psychoanalysis, Piaget, cognitive theories, and so on. Recommended for students taking the psychology GRE. Usually offered every semester.
Staff

SOC 115a Masculinities
[ ss ]
Men's experiences of masculinity have only recently emerged as complex and problematic. This course inquires into concepts, literature, and phenomenology of many framings of masculinity. The analytic schemes are historical, sociological, and social-psychological. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Fellman

SOC 117b Sociology of Science, Technology, and Medicine
[ oc ss ]
From the moment we are born, to when we die, our lives are shaped by science, technology, and medicine. This course draws on both historical and contemporary case studies to examine how science and medicine enter into our ideas about who we are as individuals and members of social groups (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity), understandings of health and illness, and ideals regarding what constitutes a good life, and a good death. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Shostak

SOC 127a Religion, Ethnicity, and Nationalism
[ nw ss ]
Examines three sources of identity that are influential in global affairs: religion, ethnicity and nationalism. Considers theories of the relationship among these identities, especially "secularization theory," then reviews historical examples such as Poland, Iran, India, and Pakistan. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Rosenberger

SOC 129a Sociology of Religion
[ ss wi ]
An introduction to the sociological study of religion. Investigates what religion is, how it is influential in contemporary American life, and how the boundaries of public and private religion are constructed and contested. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Cadge

SOC 136b Historical and Comparative Sociology
[ ss ]
Explores the relationship between sociology and history through examples of scholarship from both disciplines. Using historical studies, the course pays close attention to each author's research strategy. Examines basic research questions, theoretical underpinnings and assumptions, and uses of evidence. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Rosenberger or Ms. Hansen

SOC 138a Sociology of Gender, Race, and Class
[ ss ]
Examines gender as an individual and institutional factor that organizes societies. Uses a variety of media to analyze how gender and race (re)create forms of domination and subordination in labor markets, family structures, realms of cultural presentation (e.g., media), and social movements. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

SOC 141a Marx and Freud
[ ss ]
Examines Marxian and Freudian analyses of human nature, human potential, social stability, conflict, consciousness, social class, and change. Includes attempts to combine the two approaches. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Fellman

SOC 146a Mass Communication Theory
[ ss ]
An examination of key theories in mass communication, including mass culture, hegemony, the production of culture, and public sphere. Themes discussed include the nature of media effects, the role of the audience, and the extent of diversity in the mass media. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Miller

SOC 148b The Sociology of Information: Politics, Power, and Property
[ ss ]
Examines the claim that information is a key political and economic resource in contemporary society. Considers who has access to information, and how it is used for economic gain, interpersonal advantage, and social control. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Miller

SOC 150b Culture of Consumption
[ ss ]
Examines the historical development and social significance of a culture of consumption. Considers the role of marketing in contemporary society and the expression of consumer culture in various realms of everyday life, including leisure, the family, and education. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Miller

SOC 152a Urban Life and Culture
[ ss ]
An analysis of the social and cultural dimensions of life in urban environments. Examines how various processes, including immigration, deindustrialization, and suburbanization, affect neighborhoods, public spaces, work, shopping, and leisure in the city. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Miller

SOC 155b Protest, Politics, and Change: Social Movements
[ ss ]
Utilizes case studies of actual movements to examine a variety of approaches to contentious politics. Covers collective behavior, resource mobilization, rational choice, and newer interactive models. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Cunningham

SOC 162a Intellectuals and Revolutionary Politics
[ ss ]
Examines the role of intellectuals in modern politics, especially their relationship to nationalism and revolutionary movements. In reading across a range of political revolutions (e.g. in Central Europe, colonial Africa and Iran), students will have the chance to compare the relative significance of appeals to solidarity based on class, religion, ethnicity, and national identity. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Rosenberger

SOC 164a Existential Sociology
[ ss ]
Introduces existential themes in relation to the discipline of sociology and social psychology and evaluates selected theories on human nature, identity and interaction, individual freedom and social ethics, and the existential theory of agency and action. Mead, Sartre, Goffman, Kierkegaard, De Beauvoir, Elizabeth Beck, Taylor, and others will be considered. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Hayim

SOC 189a Sociology of Body and Health
[ ss ]
Explores theoretical considerations of the body as a cultural phenomenon intersecting with health, healing, illness, disease, and medicine. Focuses on how gender, race, class, religion, and other dimensions of social organization shape individual experiences and opportunities for agency and resistance. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Shostak

THA 102b Shakespeare: On Stage and Screen
[ ca ]
Shakespeare wrote his plays to be seen and heard, not read. This course approaches Shakespeare as a man of the theater who thought visually as well as verbally. Explores Shakespeare's scripts in their original theatrical context, subsequent production history, and migration to film. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Holmberg

THA 115b The Avant-Gardes in Performance
[ ca hum ]
Explores the avant-garde movements including symbolism, decadence, futurism, constructivism, Dada, surrealism, expressionism, existentialism, pop art and happenings, performance art, minimalism, and postmodernism as alternative forms of expression that challenge mainstream art. Attention is paid to the interactions among theater, painting, dance, music, and film. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Holmberg

WMGS 5a Women, Genders, and Sexualities
[ ss ]
This interdisciplinary course introduces central concepts and topics in the field of women's, gender, and sexuality studies. Explores the position of women in diverse settings and the impact of gender as a social, cultural, and intellectual category in the United States and around the globe. Asks how gendered institutions, behaviors, and representations have been configured in the past and function in the present, and also examines the ways in which gender and sexuality intersect with many other vectors of identity and circumstance in forming human affairs. Usually offered every fall and spring.
Ms. Fox, Ms. Freeze, Ms. Lanser, or Ms. Singh