The course explores how art worked in politics and religion from ca. 300-1200 CE in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Students encounter the arts of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Judaism and Islam, great courts and migratory societies; dynamics of word and image, multilingualism, intercultural connection, and local identity. We examine how art can represent and shape notions of sacred and secular power. We consider how the work of 'art' in this period is itself powerful and, sometimes, dangerous. Course format combines lecture on various cultural contexts with workshop discussion focused on specific media and materials, or individual examples.

An introduction to the history, methodologies, and theories of archaeology. The seminar discusses topics and problems drawn from a wide range of cultures and periods. Issues include trade and exchange; the origins of agriculture; cognitive archaeology (the study of the mind); biblical archaeology (the use of texts); artifacts in their cultural contexts; and the politics of the past. Emphasis on what constitutes archaeological evidence, how it may be used, and how archaeologists think.

The conquest of Asia from Anatolia to Afghanistan by Alexander the Great brought far-reaching changes in both the East and the West of the ancient world. Powerful new visual styles and techniques interacted with local ideas and visual cultures in complicated and unpredictable ways. The seminar aims to describe this vital period of ancient visual history and its complex, multi-stranded artistic cultures. It also aims to embody a method of investigating cultural history through material and visual evidence. The classes follow the material on the ground and its archaeological and historical contexts closely.

Siegecraft was an art more complex than painting, more powerful than sculpture, and more monumental than any building in the early modern world. This seminar confronts the discomfiting reality that the period long known as the Renaissance was defined as much, if not more, by brutal and collective warfare than it was by the rise of the individual. The class has no prerequisites and is open to all, including students of architecture, engineering, art, history, media, and literature. Seminar sessions will include hands-on study of original artworks in campus collections.

A seminar on the phenomenon of the Roman villa, its archaeology, history, decoration, and the social practices that arose from this aspect of aristocratic life.

This seminar focuses upon two aspects of mimesis, relational likeness and the participation in forms, that have shaped quite different ways of understanding the implications of artistic representation in Byzantium. As well as considering "naturalism" and "abstraction" in the visual arts of the Medieval period, the course examines rhetoric, theater, and liturgy as performative sites for an animated and ethical visual culture.

The Greek experience from Alexander the Great through Cleopatra. An exploration of the dramatic expansion of the Greek world into Egypt and the Near East brought about by the conquests and achievements of Alexander. Study of the profound political, social, and intellectual changes that stemmed from the interaction of new cultures, and the entrance of Rome into the Greek world. Readings include history, biography, and inscriptions.

What are the features of persuasive political speech? The reliance of democratic politics on memorable oratory stems from traditions dating back to ancient Greece and Rome which were revived in the modern era of parliamentary debates and stump speeches. This course will analyze the rhetorical structure of famous political speeches over time in a bid to better understand the potent mixture of aesthetics and ideology that characterizes political rhetoric, as well as the equally long tradition of regarding political rhetoric as insincere and unscrupulous. Students will try their hand at political speech-writing and oratory in class.

How did visual art and literature inform each other in the ancient world and how does viewing this interaction shape how we produce art today? This course is concerned with the adaptation of classical themes in contemporary culture at the interfaces between different media, including literature, visual art, film, music, and video games. We will begin by examining interactions between different artforms in an ancient context, and how such synaesthetic and intermedial spaces were used to explore how we construct and experience reality.

Who was Sappho? And what do we make of her today? In this course, students will consider in detail what remains of Sappho's work (including the latest discoveries, published in 2014), and also how her example informs later literatures, arts, identities, and sexualities. Students with no knowledge of ancient Greek and students who already know it well are equally welcome! One session per week will focus on reading and translating original texts with one group, while a parallel session will focus on translations and adaptations through time. One joint session per week will draw perspectives together.

This course will focus on the emergence of a 'common' (Koinê) Greek language adopted by an increasingly Hellenized eastern Mediterranean world of Jews, Pagans, Christians, Romans and Greeks. Readings include the Bible, Jewish Tragedy, Stoic philosophy, and hagiography, as well as introduction to papyri and manuscripts of post-classical texts.

This course explores oral traditions and oral literary genres (in English translation) of the Slavic and East European world, both past and present, including traditions that draw from the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish East European communities. Topics include traditional rituals (life-cycle and seasonal) and folklore associated with them, sung and spoken oral traditional narrative: poetry (epic and ballad) and prose (folktale and legend), and contemporary forms of traditional and popular culture. Discussion and analysis will focus on the role and meaning of Slavic and East European oral traditions as forms of expressive culture.

This course aims at reading and analysis of some of the most iconic texts of the Middle Ages including the Mediterranean. In addition to providing a fascinating group of texts for us to discuss, `Rethinking Medieval Cultures' will reveal the many dynamic perspectives at issue during this foundational period of Western civilization. Issues of power - political, religious, amorous and supernatural - attitudes toward sex and gender, slavery, class and dreams are some of the topics voiced in our readings.

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.

This course will survey the "Dark Ages" from the end of the Roman Empire to the end of the first millennium (ca. 400-1000 AD), often seen as a time of cultural and political decline, recently even labelled as the "end of civilization". The complex political and social landscape of the Roman Empire, however, had more to offer than just to end. This course will outline how early medieval people(s) in the successor states of the Roman Empire used its resources to form new communities and will suggest to understand the "Dark Ages" as a time of lively social and cultural experimentation, that created the social and political frameworks of Europe.

Catastrophe reveals the fragility of human society. This course examines a series of phenomena--plague, famine, war, revolution, economic depression etc.--in order to reach an understanding of humanity's imaginings of but also resilience to collective crises. We shall look in particular at how political forces such as empire have historically both generated and resisted global disasters. Material dealing with the especially fraught centuries at the transition between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period will be set alongside examples drawn from antiquity as well as our own contemporary era.

This course introduces and engages with historiographical questions central to our understanding of the Byzantine Empire from its inauguration in the fourth century to its fall in the fifteenth century. Sample sources - available in original and translation - are examined and analyzed using a variety of current methodological approaches. We consider aspects of political, economic, social, and cultural and intellectual history. The main areas of focus in a specific year will depend on the interests of the group. The aim is to provide students with concrete tools that will inform and strengthen their own research and teaching.

Course intended for students with little or no previous knowledge of modern Greek. Intensive focus on the fundamentals of grammar and syntax, with parallel emphasis on reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Through sustained practice and a wide range of materials and activities, students are provided with skills and vocabulary necessary in order to understand and produce written texts and communicate effectively at an elementary level. With integrated references to various aspects of everyday life and experience, the course also serves as an introduction to modern Greek society and culture.

This course aims at developing students' communicative and intercultural competence in Modern Greek, while acquainting them with the accomplishments and challenges of Modern Greek society.

This course, designed as a seminar, will trace the ways in which humans have dug into the ground in order to find the material remains of the past and then interpreted what they found. We will look at efforts of many kinds: discoveries made by chance as well as those made by deliberate searches; discoveries inspired by dreams and visions as well as those motivated by formal surveys; discoveries of the relics of saints, Christian and other, as well as the remains of ancient civilizations. We will examine our subjects' ideas and their practices, and set both into context.

We shall study Aristotle's contributions in logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, and ethics, with emphasis on the ongoing philosophical interest of some of his central insights. We shall compare some of Aristotle's views with those of some of his successors, Hellenistic and beyond.

We will read through Physics Book VIII in an attempt to understand its central argument for the existence of the unmoved mover of the heavens.

This course explores how political theorizing by Greek authors (classical and post-classical) drew on the figure of the lawgiver to animate questions about law and founding. It considers Plato and Aristotle on lawgivers against the backdrop of Herodotus and Greek oratory; moves on to later Greek biographers and historians such as Plutarch, and to the post-classical portraits of Moses as framed in Greek texts by Philo and Josephus; and asks how these approaches came to shape later interventions in the history of political thought. Students may write on reception of the figures studied as well as on the Greek sources themselves.

Who was Jesus of Nazareth? What do we know and how do we know it? This course takes up these questions and surveys the diverse history of interpretation of the life and teachings of Jesus and how this history shaped and continues to shape contemporary views of and debates about politics, race and ethnicity, sexuality and gender, and civil rights. Throughout the course, we will consider both historical material such as early gospels, letters, and Jewish and Roman sources as well as modern contexts of interpretation in theology, film, art, and music. This course is designed and open to all regardless of (or no) religious background.