This course treats the supernatural and the paranormal as phenomena warranting serious exploration in their entanglement with race, gender, the psyche, and the body. Texts and audio-visual materials will introduce us to ghosts, fairytales, monsters, witches, spirit possession, and many forms of enchantment. Through a series of case studies, we will investigate how several key concepts work together to create our sense of reality: nature, science, religion, magic, reason, modernity. Ultimately, the course will push students to interrogate their assumptions about what is natural, normal, rational, and real.

Direct and regular contact between China and Europe in the early modern period brought new artistic forms and expressions to China and reconfigured the entire picture of Chinese art. Even though China appeared to have been the recipient of European art, it did not play a passive role; in fact, Chinese agents, including emperors, artists, literati, and merchants, appropriated European artistic resources according to their own agendas. This seminar will tackle the multiple dimensions of how European art worked at the Chinese imperial court and in local societies from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century.

This seminar focuses on the Netherlands in the late sixteenth early seventeenth centuries, when new scientific discoveries and geographical expansion challenged established worldviews. We examine how Netherlandish artists used elemental imagery to draw attention to the hidden forces of nature, the beginning and end of the world, the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, and the transformative powers of their own craft. How did they imagine and represent the elements and other ultimate particles of the material world at a time when the intersections of life and art were being redefined?

Fairy tales are among the first stories we encounter, often before we can read. They present themselves as timeless--"Once upon a time..." - yet are essentially modern. They are often presented as children's literature, yet are filled with sex and violence. They have been interpreted as archetypal patterns of the subconscious mind or of deep cultural origins, yet perform the work of shaping contemporary culture. They circulate in myriad oral variations, and are written down in new ones by the most sophisticated literary authors. In this course we will explore the fantasy, enchantment, labor, and violence wrought by fairy tales.

The foreigner, the pervert, the outcast: the imaginary of literary decadence is fixated on figures at the margins of the social order, who are valorized and exalted. This course investigates the aesthetics of abjection in late 19th., early 20th c. (English, French, German) literary and visual culture as it develops in response to European empire. Core themes include: "late" or "decadent" antiquities; decadence and orientalism; Jewish decadence; and how these interact with the catalog of haunting female figures that populate these imaginaries. Class trips include visits to both the Neue Galerie in NYC and Firestone's Special Collections.

In early modern Europe, mythology provided the stimulus for a host of performances in theaters, palaces, and different media involving song, stone, gardens, and even water. This course will consider the performance of mythology in early modern Europe. What are the gendered implications of the myths in which women turn into plants, trees, flowers, and animals, and how were they presented in media? How is the trope of the abandoned transformed into song and painting? We'll explore the interactions between artists, poets, and musicians and the ways in which opera - a brand new medium in the early 17th century -brought the ancient world to life.

In this course we will see how texts have been written, made into books and read in the West, from ancient Greece to modern America. We will read primary sources and modern case studies and make a number of visits to the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections in Firestone, where we can examine manuscripts and early books. Through the semester we will track the ways in which the experience of reading has changed - and remained the same - over the centuries.

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.

This transdisciplinary course investigates `home' as a central concept in both environmental studies (settler-colonial vs nomad) and arthouse cinema (anthropocentric vs environmental perspective). With the help of examples from masterpieces of cinema and our own short research film exercises, we will experiment with a possible compromise between the civilizational paradigms of settler colonialism vs nomadic homelessness.

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 offers an introduction to film studies as well as a space for discussing the issues of race, multiculturalism and otherness in the French context. Students will learn to watch films critically, honing their linguistic and rhetorical skills through workshops and brief assignments. While we will survey prominent works, directors, actors, genres, and aesthetic movements in French cinema, the course will also strive to decenter the "canon" by showcasing thought-provoking and esthetically groundbreaking movies made in the last two decades by filmmakers themselves of very diverse backgrounds.

How have French writers sought to portray the experience of illness, medicine, and the modern hospital in recent years? What role, if any, does literature adopt, as its own form of knowledge and healing, in trying to care for sick bodies and diagnose the failings of the medical system itself? How might literature and medicine enrich each other? Short works by key modern writers on topics ranging from mental health, autism, and eating disorders to organ transplants, AIDS, abortion, and disability. Brief background readings in the medical humanities. Class is writing-intensive and discussion-centered to improve French language skills.

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 explores the basic ideas, works, and principles of Surrealism as it developed in France and around the world from the early 1920s into the present. A very wide array of material will cover diverse literary genres and media to show how the Surrealists wanted to revolutionize both art and life in its political and ethical dimensions, as well as the movement's ongoing impact. The course is highly interactive, built around two digital creative and critical projects, which will constitute the students' assignments throughout the semester.

How do films structure values and desires? What is propaganda? Is there a politics of narration? These and other deeply contemporary questions of media history and theory will be explored through an interdisciplinary interrogation of key works of expressionist, documentary, proletarian, avant-garde, queer, horror, and paranoid-thriller cinema (both silent and sound) produced in Germany during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). Films and texts will be subjected to close readings, situated in their socio-political, media-historical and cultural context, and examined in light of the reigning debates in film criticism and aesthetics.

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 the rediscovery of ancient texts, 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 culture.

What kind of public architecture is appropriate for a democracy? Should public spaces and buildings reflect democratic values - such as transparency and accessibility - or is the crucial requirement for democratic architecture that the process of arriving at decisions about the built environment is as participatory as possible? Is gentrification somehow un-democratic? The course will introduce students to different theories of democracy, to different approaches to architecture, and to many examples of architecture and urban planning from around the world, via images and films.

This seminar will examine 20th-century Eastern European history through literary works from a number of countries in the region, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to present-day Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Belarus, and the Balkans. Readings will generally consist of one novel per week, but we will also look at a number of other genres, including the short story, poetry, drama, the journal, and reportage. While discussing the historical and political dimensions of this period, we will consider the limits of what literature can depict, and a range of possible ethical and aesthetic responses to authoritarianism.

We start with Tolstoy's artistic stimuli and narrative strategies, exploring the author's provocative visions of war, gender, sex, art, social institutions, death, and religion. The emphasis is placed here on the role of the 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.

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.

The European Union (EU) has its own legal system. So does the Council of Europe (COE), another international organization, famous for the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). And so do each of the states that are members of the EU and COE. How do these multiple legal systems coordinate and sometimes clash? In Legal Europe, we will learn EU law, ECHR law and national law from multiple European states to explore how they work together (or not) to handle the toughest issues of our time, including democratic backsliding, violations of human rights, international security, economic policy, mass migration and nationalism.