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.

This course will use Modern Greek literature as a case study for formation of nationalizing literary canons. We will explore the historical roots of the Greek nation-state, the homogenization of its linguistic landscape, and the consolidation of a genealogically based, ethnic majoritarian understanding of citizenship and belonging, focusing specifically on the role literature and literary culture play in these processes. Who counts as a Greek writer? Who is excluded? How do writers and works enter the world literary sphere in nationally and ethnically coded ways? Knowledge of Greek is useful but not essential for the course.

An interdisciplinary exploration of the meanings and uses of the palace and gardens of Versailles, from their creation as center of absolute monarchy under Louis XIV to their present status as an iconic site of French and European cultural heritage. The course aims in particular to study Versailles as a microcosm embodying a certain view of the world, and to highlight the roles that foreigners (artists, queens, diplomats, tourists) have played throughout its history. Readings will consist of a mix of primary sources and critical essays and will be complemented by various visual materials, ranging from original prints to websites and films.

This course will focus on a major intellectual controversy of the 17th and 18th centuries known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. Through close readings of seminal texts we will address issues pertaining to the historical significance of the Quarrel, its sociopolitical implications, and the role it played in the cultural and scientific evolution of early modern Europe. We will approach the Quarrel as a critical moment in the prehistory of modernity that resulted in a redefinition of concepts such as mimesis and originality, tradition and innovation, decline and progress.

This course examines how politics and culture play out in that most refined of art forms: opera. The course will introduce students to the history of European opera, focusing on 19th century composers in France, Germany, and Italy. We will closely examine three operas: one French (Bizet's Carmen), one Italian (Verdi's Aida) and one German (Wagner's Die Meistersinger). Following Edward Said's work, we will examine how politics and culture play out in these works: European colonialism in Aida; the question of antisemitism in Wagner; stereotypes of Spain in Carmen. Includes excursions to the Metropolitan Opera.

In the interface of environmental and film studies, this multidisciplinary course investigates the phenomenology of home in relation to the environment as well as the civilizational (both cultural and technological) paradigms of colonizing versus nomadic homemaking through examples from masterpieces of cinema and our own short research film exercises.

The course will focus on postcolonial writing from the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, which have come increasingly to be viewed as sites where issues of global import are conspicuously articulated. Against the historical background of slavery and colonialism, questions to be discussed will feature some that loom especially large: the genesis of a distinct multiethnic and multilingual community; the phenomena of migration and diaspora; ongoing tensions between former colonies now incorporated, as peripheral departments, by the "center," that is, France and the European Union; and not least, the matter of geography and the environment.

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.

As fascism was rising in Europe in the 1930s, French writers, artists, and intellectuals expressed their opposition to this threat both in action, coalescing around militant groups with overt political positions, and in their work. This antifascist cultural mobilization was sustained throughout the decade and siphoned into different kinds of resistance action and creation during WWII. This highly interdisciplinary course explores works of literature, art, cinema, and photography that fought fascism with words and images before and during the war in France. Works will be situated within their historical context and framed by theory.

This course will investigate the development of Francophone Postcolonial Cinema from the 1950s 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.

Who wrote about politics in the eighteenth century? Why? And for whom? This course will examine the genres and techniques Enlightenment writers invented to talk about politics in spite of official and unofficial censorship. Coined by Montesquieu, the phrase "political writer" can apply to a wide range of writers whose motivations, purposes, and publishing strategies varied in response to different urges and new audiences. The course is based on the study of primary texts, but also historical documents, such as indictments of writers.

Informed by recent German media theory on 'cultural techniques'--from the operation of doors to embodied acts of writing and image-making-- this seminar will explore the relations between performance and media, from interactions between performance practices and modern/new media to implications of performance for theorizing media in general. Topics will include shared concerns in media studies and performance studies (such as embodiment, (im)mediacy, practice, and the archive), relations/tensions between performance and text, movement and inscription, and thinking media through the lens of practice as well as practice as the basis of theory.

Italy, homeland of poets, saints, navigators, and... weirdos. In this class, we turn stereotypes that depict Italy as the land of beauty and classicism inside out, and focus instead on how distinctively weird much of Italy's modern artistic production is. Is the Italian polymath Giacomo Leopardi the unsung grandfather of weird fiction? Did Giorgio De Chirico and Italo Calvino influence Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation? Leveraging theorizations on the topic as well as transmedial and transnational perspectives, we study what it means for something to be weird, why weird art fascinates us, and if we should all try to be weirder.

This course examines over a millennium of music, art, literature, and culture in Venice, using as its lens the theatricality of the city's unique topography, environment, and geographic position. Moving between modern and medieval, the stage and the street, we consider the special relationship this implausible city has always staged between human creativity and ecological fragility. Topics include public opera, civic ritual, postwar avant-gardism, tourism, the city in fiction and film, and the Venice Biennale.

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.