This course explores the intellectual history of scientific racism, paying close attention to how its theories influence power and institutions today. Reading primary sources from the history of science, each class will trace the reverberations of scientific racism in media, education, politics, law, and global health. Our conversations will consistently analyze the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and age in the legacies of scientific racism. We will also examine the impact of scientific racism in public discourse about the Black Lives Matter Movement and collectively brainstorm for activism towards restorative justice.

Love is a deeply personal experience. Yet, powerful social, political, and economic forces determine who we love, when we love, and how we love. Looking at practices of romantic love, dating, sex, marriage, queer love, friendship, and familial love across different social and global contexts, this course explores how social and cultural factors shape our most intimate relationships. Drawing on ethnography, history, and journalism, we examine the intersections between love and technology, gender, race, the law, capitalism, colonialism, and religion. For the final project, students will use creative writing or multi-media to tell a love story.

What does "Justice" mean? What do efforts to achieve "Justice" tell us about injury, retribution, and peace? This class will explore how justice is defined and sought by looking at criminality, fights for indigenous and women's rights, post-conflict transitions, environmental catastrophe, debates about reparations, and intimate forms of repair. We will combine a global perspective with engaged local work to think about what struggles for justice look like in theory and on the ground. These debates will illuminate about how the past is apprehended, and how visions of possible utopias and dystopias are produced in the present.

This course draws on anthropology, history, critical theory, films and documentaries, fictive and journalistic writing to explore violence, its power and meaning. We will explore conquest and colonialism, genocidal violence, state violence and political resistance, everyday violence, gendered violence, racialization, torture, as well as witnessing and repair. Building across disciplines and working with heterodox theoretical frameworks (post-colonial/decolonial, non-Western, feminist, and indigenous approaches), this course invites us to understand violence in its multifaceted physical, symbolic, social, political and cultural manifestations.

Part of a series of seminars studying the parallel development of biological and architectural practices from the 18th c. to the present, this course focuses on recent ecological and environmental discourses through the writings of anthropologists, sociologists, material and environmental scientists, as well as architectural and literary critics. The seminar focuses on the effects of the diminishing distinction between the animate and the inanimate, the organic and the inorganic as well as the human and the non-human in the creation of living habitats and recreation of inequities within an environmentally challenged planet.

Who were the Vikings, at home or abroad? How did their raiding and settlement change the history of the British Isles and western Europe? This course will study the political, cultural, and economic impact that Norse expansion and raiding had on early medieval Europe. It will also look at the changes in Scandinavia that inspired and resulted from this expansion. Sources will include contemporary texts, sagas and epic poetry, material culture, and archaeological excavations.

An introduction to the classical myths in their cultural context and in their wider application to human concerns (such as creation, sex and gender, identity, transformation, and death). The course will offer a who's who of the ancient imaginative world, study the main ancient sources of well known stories, and introduce modern approaches to analyzing myths.

This course looks at Ancient Greco-Roman sport, spectacle entertainment and games; its origin in myth, its place in religious festivals, and the increasing institutional outlay on entertainment in the Roman empire. Areas of competition include: chariot, horse and foot-races, boxing, wrestling, dance, gladiatorial fights, beast-hunts, public executions and more. We will also consider leisure activities (swimming, hunting, board games), magic and curses, sport medicine and diet, and gambling. We close with the direct interaction of Christianity with Roman spectacle entertainment and the after-life of the games in this new world order.

A seminar on magic speech, defined as performative language that does not so much describe reality as change it. Our subjects will range from spells and enchantments to blessings, curses, prayers and oaths. We will focus on medieval literature, philosophy, and theology; at the same time, we will discuss some contemporary perspectives on magic and speech acts in literary theory, philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology. Attention will be paid to the Arabic, Scholastic, and vernacular traditions of medieval Europe.

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 European and American. We will read and discuss some theoretical works alongside the life writings themselves.

The Bible created and divided the world. This course explores that deep history by examining how the Bible itself was shaped: when, how, and by whom it was written; how it recorded and reworked history; how it responded to and changed politics and culture; how it gave birth to the way we read everything today. No experience with literature or the Bible is necessary. Short exercises will show how to read translations closely, and how to work with the original Hebrew and Greek versions.

Between the opening of the first purpose-built London public theater in 1576 and the beginning of the English Civil War in 1642, a host of playwrights -often in collaboration- wrote for different theatrical companies and spaces, for diverse audiences, and in distinct styles and genres. To understand this period requires immersion in its performance culture as well as exposure to a wide variety of plays. This course introduces students to the early modern theatrical world, from playing companies and playhouses to actors and rehearsals through works by Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, Webster, Cary, Beaumont, and Fletcher, among others.

This course explores the Enlightenment concept of Zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, which emerged in Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries, spreading widely in Europe and resonating still today. With a focus on mainly French sources, the course will explore questions such as: What is the nature of this spirit (or ghost) that haunts an age? How does the popular understanding of the term differ from its original meaning? When does a particular Zeitgeist begin and end? How can literature (fiction, poetry, theater, non-fiction) and other cultural artifacts (journalistic writing, visual culture, objects) capture it?

What makes the diary such a popular form of self-expression? Are there collectively written diaries? Is the diary a media practice? What happens when diaries are "written" not only with text but also photographs, audio files and video? How can a standardized form foster intimate personal communication with one's own self? This seminar will explore the history and the varied practices of the diary, from famous historical examples such as Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf to current vernacular digital formats of auto-fiction such as lifelogging, weblogs and Instagram.

The media of literature, art, science and knowledge formation in general depend on a constant supply of so-called 'natural resources' such as fibers, metals, wax, vinyl and rare earths. This seminar combines discourse-analytical approaches from literary and media studies and the history of science with new methods of media ecology, critical infrastructure analysis and environmental studies to critically analyze these medial resource dependencies at different scales, both local and global, interrogating the normative, epistemic, aesthetic, geopolitical and economic frameworks that have co-constituted modern media.

Humanistic Studies 216-219 is an intensive yearlong exploration of the landmark achievements of the Western intellectual tradition. With a team of faculty drawn from across the humanities and social sciences, students examine pivotal texts, events, and artifacts of European civilization from antiquity forward. The course is enhanced by guest lectures from preeminent scholars. This double-credit course meets for six hours a week and fulfills distribution requirements in both LA and HA. Students must enroll in both 216 and 217.

In combination with HUM 216, this course explores the landmark achievements of European civilization from antiquity to the middle ages. Students must enroll in both 216 and 217, which constitute a double-credit course. The lecture component for HUM 217 is listed as TBA because all meetings are listed under HUM 216. There are no separate meeting times for HUM 217.

An introduction to the literature, art, religion and philosophy of China, Japan and Korea from antiquity to ca. 1600. Readings focus on primary texts in translation and are complemented by museum visits and supplementary materials on the course website. The course aims to allow students to explore the unique aspects of East Asian civilizations and the connections between them through an interactive web-based platform, in which assignments are integrated with the texts and media on the website. No prior knowledge of East Asia or experience working with digital media is required.

This course focuses on the Near East from antiquity to the early centuries of Islam, introducing the most important works of literature, politics, ethics, aesthetics, religion, and science from the region. We ask how, why, and to what ends the Near East sustained such a long period of high humanistic achievement, from Pharaonic Egypt to Islamic Iran, which in turn formed the basis of the high culture of the following millennium.

Bioethics was named in 1970. Its etymology, however, is from the ancient Greek. We will put ancient and modern conceptions of human flourishing in conversation by exploring how naturalizing medicine has historically shaped the nature of birth, death, and mind. What is at stake in invoking the Greeks when constructing the ethics of modern medicine? How can reading ancient Greek texts in context help us think critically and imaginatively about ethical challenges in medicine today? We will examine how the formation of a medical tradition around the physical body creates persistent practical and philosophical questions in the clinic and beyond.

This class analyzes how different cultures imagine monsters and how these representations changed over time to perform different social functions. As negative objectifications of fundamental social structures and conceptions, monsters help us understand the culture that engendered them and the ways in which a society constructs the Other, the deviant, the enemy, the minorities, and the repressed. This course has three goals: it familiarizes students with the semiotics of monsters worldwide; it teaches analytical techniques exportable to other topics and fields; it proposes interpretive strategies of reading culture comparatively.

The momentous encounter of Europeans and Indigenous peoples had shattering consequences for the worldview and identity of both groups. The encounters raised a host of existential questions that seemed to demonstrate the inadequacy of each culture's traditional religious models of the world. This course explores the effects of contact from early 17th-centruy encounters in Canada and North America into the residential schools of the 19th and 20th centuries. The course explores the effects of contact: contrasting prescriptive Christian ideals of conversion with the descriptive reality of mutual change and influence.

Freud is approached as a systematic thinker dedicated to discovering the basic principles of human mental life. For Freud those basic principles concern what impels human thought and behavior. What moves us to think and act? What is it to think and act? Emphasis is placed on the close study and critical analysis of texts, with particular attention to the underlying structure of the arguments.

Academic life is largely configured along disciplinary lines. What are "disciplines," and what does it mean to think, write, teach, and work within these socio-cognitive structures? Are there alternatives? This course, drawing on faculty associated with the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM), takes up these questions, in an effort to clarify the historical evolution and current configuration of intellectual activity within universities. Normative questions detain us. The future is a persistent preoccupation. Collaborative work and generic experiment are encouraged.

While the structures of animal and vegetal organisms have been used as sources of metaphor/analogy with human design and architecture, this course investigates the tectonic capacities of non-human specimens beyond a merely metaphoric usage. Animals and plants also make things, yet they may make things differently than humans, evoking alternative possibilities. The course assesses debates from evolutionary biology, morphology, aesthetics, architecture, color theory, philosophy, contemporary art practice, and film. Topics include milieu, tectonics, aesthetics, form, surface (camouflage and mimicry), agency, analogy, and fabrication.

Course will examine the political development, principles and practice of Abraham Lincoln, and especially grass-roots politics in the 19th century Republic, the international context of liberal democracy in the 19th century, the war powers of the presidency, the contest of Whig and Democratic political ideas, the relation of the executive branch to the legislative and judicial branches, diplomacy, and the presidential cabinet.

This class will wrestle with an enormous evil that deeply implicates Christianity, both theoretically and practically - from its scriptures and creeds to its ecclesiology and history. We will examine how Christians, male and female, both contributed to and resisted the Nazi genocide that came to be known as the Holocaust, as well as the theological and moral dimensions of anti-Semitism more generally. The approach is inter-disciplinary and pluralistic, with readings including historical, sociological, and ethical analyses by Jews, Christians, and non-religious authors. Specific issues addressed include the nature of sin, especially hatred.

How are ideas of belonging to the body politic defined in Spain, Latin America, and in Spanish-speaking communities in the United States? Who is "Latin American," "Latinx," "Boricua," "Chino," "Moor," "Indian," etc.? Who constructs these terms and why? Who do they include/exclude? Why do we need these identity markers in the first place? Our course will engage these questions by surveying and analyzing literary, historical, and visual productions from the time of the foundation of the Spanish empire to the present time in the Spanish-speaking world.

Woolf once said, "It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly." We address and complicate the notion that women need a room of their own in order to write and create by examining the ways in which Latin American women and queer writers, artists, and filmmakers interrupt, deconstruct, reshape, and at times shake the patriarchal house of writing and the dominant gaze of film and art by performing gender in unexpected and ingenious fashions, feminizing and expanding the sites of symbolic production.

Translation is at the heart of the humanities, and it arises in every discipline in the social sciences and beyond, but it is not easy to say what it is. This course looks at the role of translation in the past and in the world of today, in fields as varied as anthropology, the media, law, international relations and the circulation and study of literature. It aims to help students grasp the basic intellectual and philosophical problems raised by the transfer of meanings from one language to another (including in machine translation) and to acquaint them with the functions, structures and effects of translation in intercultural communication.

Translation is at the core of our encounters with East Asia. From translations of the literary classics to contemporary novels and poetry, from the formation of modern East Asian cultural discourses to national identities to East-West travels of works in theater and film, the seminar poses fundamental questions to our encounters with East Asian cultural artifacts, reflecting on the classical principles of translation and problematizing what the "translation" of "original works" even means anymore in our globalized world. Open to students with or without knowledge of an East Asian language.

This seminar introduces urban studies research methods through a study of New York in conversation with other cities. Focused on communities and landmarks represented in historical accounts, literary works, art and film, we will travel through cityscapes as cultural and mythological spaces - from the past to the present day. We will examine how standards of evidence shape what is knowable about cities and urban life, what "counts" as knowledge in urban studies, and how these different disciplinary perspectives construct and limit knowledge about cities as a result.

This seminar introduces the study of gentrification, with a focus on mapping projects using GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software. Readings, films, and site visits will situate the topic, as the course examines how racial landscapes of gentrification, culture and politics have been influenced by and helped drive urban change. Tutorials in ArcGIS will allow students to convert observations of urban life into fresh data and work with existing datasets. Learn to read maps critically, undertake multifaceted spatial analysis, and master new cartographic practices associated with emerging scholarship in the Digital and Urban Humanities.