Things are the staple of our lives, but they are also objects of our studies and products of our activities. We depend on things, but things also depend us. In this course, we will explore convoluted networks of relations that bring together humans, non-humans and things. Looking at things and thinking about things differently, we will try to understand why they are so irresistible to have, to use, to make, to keep, and to exchange. During the course, we will approach things as signs (semiotics), as material entities (new materialisms), as objects of affection (new materialisms), and as key agents of influence (actor-network theory).

Seminar will explore the myth of the artist in Europe and North America from the Renaissance to the present. Topics will include ideas of the artist as a privileged social being, notions of artistic temperament and "genius," the gendering of the artist, modern myths of bohemianism and madness, the importance of race and cultural identity, and the postmodern artist's engagement with mass media. Analysis of self-portraiture, artists' statements and writings, and artists in film. Case studies include Leonardo, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Artemisia Gentileschi, Dürer, Manet, Van Gogh, Kahlo, Warhol, and Kara Walker.

Exploring literary texts and films that foreground the benefits, but also the ordeals of transnational migration and the traffic in peoples, goods, and ideas throughout the Mediterranean region, with particular stress on contemporary works and issues. Particular attention will be paid to women's experience of the Mediterranean as a realm of adventure as well as the subjection imposed by patriarchal customs, war, and colonization.

Poetry can be seen as a mode of reflection on history and, very often, as an act of resistance to it. This course will examine works written in Europe, Latin America and the US during the 20th and 21st centuries in different languages and historical contexts. We will explore their oppositional and also their liberatory effects: their ability to evoke their times, to disrupt our usual understandings while offering new political, artistic and ethical perspectives. The course will pay special attention to the work of René Char and Paul Celan, as ideal points of focus for questions of language and resistance.

This seminar will explore the perennial fascination with forms of narrative that purport to tell true stories about actual individual lives: biography and autobiography, memoir, diary, hagiography, and more. What is at stake, what can be gained by writers and readers from life writing in its various genres? Readings will be primarily though not exclusively European. We will read and discuss some theoretical works alongside the life writings themselves.

An interdisciplinary investigation of the status of the human body in the modern reinvention of space within the overlapping frames of art, architecture, and the performing arts from the 1890s to the present. Works by artists, architects, theater designers, and filmmakers will be supplemented by readings on architectural theory, intellectual and cultural history, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and aesthetics.

Filmmaking is a mural art. Due to the contemporary ubiquity of screens, our physical environment is increasingly eclipsed in the human experience. Yet vernacular filmmaking does not simply replace our physical nature, rather lets it emerge just as terroir wines reveal the natural environmental factors of winemaking without industrial tempering. Less industrial, more poetic film production can teach us a more respectful relation to our environment. Together with guest professors and filmmakers, we will study the interface of environmental and film studies through examples from masterpieces of cinema and our own short research film exercises.

This course focuses on major issues raised by but also extending beyond Holocaust survivor testimony, including genres of witnessing, the communication of trauma, the ethical implications of artistic representation, conflicts between history and memory, the fate of individuality in collective upheaval, the condition of survival itself, and the crucial role played by reception in enabling and transmitting survivors' speech.

The flamboyant second generation of British Romantics: Keats, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Byron, Hemans, Jewsbury. Careful attention to texts--ranging from novels, to odes, to romances, and modern epics--in historical and cultural contexts, with primary focus on literary imagination.

This course interrogates the ways we read now and in the future, along the cultural, social, and cognitive ramifications of our habits of reading. The course is divided into three sections, past, present, and future of reading, investigated through questions such as: Why do we read? How do we read? What does reading do to/for the individual and the community? We approach reading not as a neutral process, but as a basic cognitive function and a life skill that is determined by many factors (material, cultural, social, and psychological), which can have considerable repercussions on the individual and the society at large.

This course will investigate the development of Francophone Postcolonial Cinema from the 1950's to the present. Emphasis will be placed on the development and flourishing of this cinema in the 1950s and 60s in the period of Decolonization. Focus will be on films by directors such as Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Ousmane Sembene, Assia Djébar and Djibril Diop Mambety. The course will investigate both the specific cinematic languages developed by these various directors, as well as the political and historical context of Decolonization, in which these films developed critical, militant interventions against French and global colonialism and racism.

Why is it that we know something but don't act accordingly? This question becomes urgent in the face of issues that require immediate action, like global-warming, meat-production, exploitative working conditions, sexual violence, racism. "Death is a master from Germany," the poet Paul Celan wrote - given the long denial of the death-camps, we could also say: "Denial is a master from Germany." This class traces a series of catastrophic (quasi-)events in German history and discusses global analogues. We will also turn our attention to conspiracy-theories, i.e. large-scale communities of denial that affirm alternative realities.

This seminar explores the significance of works of art, and of practices of writing about art, for three great writers of the early 20th century: poet Rainer Maria Rilke, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin. Readings include: lyric poetry, experimental prose, psychoanalytic theory, cultural analysis, and aesthetic theory. Topics include: the situation of the work of art in modernity; art and the unconscious; the work of art and the historical transmission of culture in modern Europe. Course taught in English. Readings also available in German for those who wish to work with texts in the original language.

This course explores how new developments in science, medicine, and technology shaped European cultures during three crucial centuries, from 1400-1700. During this period, knowledge of nature was transformed by a host of factors, from the rediscovery of ancient texts to the invention of new technologies and encounters with new lands and peoples. Political upheaval, religious Reformation, and the expansion of global commerce and colonization also affected how science was carried out, and by whom. From medicine and mechanics to alchemy and magic, this course examines the interplay between natural knowledge and human society.

160,000 persons were deported from France to camps in Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War. A rough half were Jews; a rough half were résistants. How was the experience of deportation remembered in literature and film? How do the two kinds of experience, Jewish and résistant, compare and contrast?

The French Enlightenment was one of the most intensely creative and significant episodes in the history of Western thought. This course will provide an introduction to its major works. Each class meeting will consist of a two-hour discussion, followed by a 45-minute background lecture on the subsequent week's readings.

Short stories and music will serve as vehicles for a deeper understanding of the major political and social shifts that have affected the landscape of the Contemporary Portuguese-speaking world. We will hear an array of voices and delve into a diversity of narratives as we explore the interconnected historical, social, political, and cultural aspects of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal and Timor-Leste.

We start with Tolstoy's artistic stimuli and narrative strategies, explore the author's provocative visions of war, gender, sex, art, social institutions, death, and religion. The emphasis is placed here on the role of a written word in Tolstoy's search for truth and power. The main part is a close reading of his masterwork The War and Peace (1863-68) - a quintessence of both his artistic method and philosophical insights. Each student will be assigned to keep a "hero's diary" and speak on behalf of one or two major heroes of the epic (including the Spirit of History). The roles will be distributed in accordance with the will of fate.

Since 2018 the feminist movement has massively and transnationally re-emerged. Particularly in the Spanish-speaking world, the enormous momentum of its struggle has generated profound political, social, and cultural transformations. In this course we will study the so-called 4th Feminist Wave from a varied number of media (literature, film, social media, archives, etc.) created by artists, intellectuals, and activists from the Spanish-speaking world. The aim of the course is to promote a rigorous knowledge of the recent history of feminism in The Americas and Europe and to encourage reflection on the relevance of its claims and achievements

The ways in which individuals and societies define space and place is very revealing. The investigation of space and place-how cultures turn material, racial, and/or metaphysical settings into human landscapes defining home, neighborhood, and nation-is a deeply important optic that dramatizes social, racial, political, and religious factors. At the same time, it can be used to track the changes of these realities over time. Because of its unique mix of Jews, Christians, and Moors, medieval Iberia offers near laboratory conditions for the study of space and place in their racial, ethnic, literary, religious, and political identities.