This course introduces the student to the art of the Byzantine Empire from ca. 800 to ca. 1200. Byzantine art has often been opposed to the traditions of western naturalism, and as such has been an undervalued or little-known adjunct to the story of medieval art. In order to develop a more sophisticated understanding of our visual evidence, this course will stress the function of this art within the broader setting of this society. Art theory, the notions of empire and holiness, the burdens of the past and the realities of contemporary praxis will be brought to bear upon our various analyses of material from all media.

This course examines the representation of the Cosmos and of Creation narratives in the arts of Late Antiquity. While its focus will be the illumination of manuscripts of the Book of Genesis, attention will also be paid to competing Late Antique cosmologies, particularly the revival of interest in Plato's Timaeus. In addition to considering the implications of the varied manners in which the Genesis narrative is visualized, the course will investigate how the Jewish-Christian definition of a created cosmos conditioned understanding of one's being in the world and the ethical life.

Before the suppression of non-Christians in Spain and Portugal after 1492, three vibrant medieval cultures inhabited the peninsula: Muslims based in Al-Andalus, Christians based in the northern Spanish kingdoms, and Sephardic Jews throughout both realms. Their coexistence transformed their visual culture in ways that resonated well beyond Iberian borders, from Atlantic colonialism to modern identity politics. This course asks how the contacts, conflicts and compromises provoked by "living with" each other shaped artistic traditions and cultural identity in a land both enriched and destabilized by its own diversity.

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 course is designed to introduce the culture and history of Japan, and to examine how one understands and interprets the past. In addition to considering how a culture, a society, and a state develop, we will try to reconstruct the tenor of life in "ancient" and "medieval" Japan and chart how patterns of Japanese civilization shifted through time.

It's no accident that authors from William Shakespeare to Zadie Smith have taken inspiration from the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer's collection of tragedies, romances, satires, fantasies, and farces engages with problems that remain urgent today vexed dynamics of gender and power, freedom, servitude, antisemitism, Islamophobia, grief, trauma, piety and hypocrisy. Our task in this class will be to read this multiform masterpiece from beginning to end, learning its original Middle English as we go. The goal: to understand the Tales both in their late-medieval context and as living literature, still capable of teaching today's writers a few tricks.

We'll study select Old English works preserved in several media and genres. Our focus is on texts muted in dominant histories of this period: metrical charms, runic inscriptions on whalebone and metal, riddles, spells that curse and heal, and travelogues. These constructions are embedded in polysemous discourses that network through the broad range of cultural discourses available in the Old English Period and link the built environment to the natural one. We will actively fabricate 21st-century approaches to the many-branched worlds of Old English, deciphering the processes these early medieval texts write and performing their songs.

Ruled from Constantinople (ancient Byzantium and present-day Istanbul), the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire survived the collapse of the Western Roman Empire by over a millennium. This state on the crossroads of Europe and Asia was Roman in law, civil administration, and military tradition, but predominantly Greek in language, and Eastern Christian in religion. The course explores one of the greatest civilisations the world has known, tracing the experiences of its majority and minority groups through the dramatic centuries of the Islamic conquests, Iconoclasm, and the Crusades, until its final fall to the Ottoman Turks.

The course will focus on the formation of the Christian West from Ireland to the Eastern Mediterranean until ca. 1000 CE. We will start with the insignificance of the Fall of Rome in 476 CE, to move on to much more fundamental changes in the Ancient and medieval world: the Christian revolution in the 4th century, the barbarian successor states in the fifth, their transformation into Christian kingdoms, or the emergence of new nations and states whose names are still on the map today and which all came to be held together by a shared culture defined by the Rise of Western Christendom in the first Millennium.

A survey of the history of music in Europe between about 600 and 1400. The course is structured in five big subject areas: (1) plainchant: from St Gregory the Great to St Hildegard of Bingen, (2) the earliest polyphony, from the 8th to 12th centuries; (3) the tradition of the troubadours and trouvères, from the 11th to 14th centuries; (4) the Ars Antiqua: polyphony in the 13th century; (5) the Ars nova, polyphony in the fourteenth century. As much as possible, materials for discussion in class consist almost wholly on primary sources (in reproduction), modern recording, and musical scores.

This class explores medieval Islamic history from the bottom up -- through everyday documents from Egypt used by men and women at all levels of society: state decrees, personal letters, business letters, contracts, court records, wills, and accounts. Even the smallest details of these everyday writings tell us big things about the world in which they were written. Each week examines a different topic in medieval Egyptian social history. We'll cover politics, religion among Muslims, Christians, and Jews, social class, trade, family relationships, sex, taxes, and death, among other subjects.

The course offers a hands-on introduction to such basic genres of medieval scholarship as biography, history, tradition, and Koranic exegesis, taught through the intensive reading of texts, mostly in Arabic. The syllabus varies according to the interests of the students and the instructor.

This course traces the emergence of the traditions we now call Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: their first communities, texts, images, and values. Students will learn to examine their histories critically, identify patterns across traditions, uncover the way these traditions shaped one another, trace the developments of beliefs and practices from their earlier forms, and analyze the social and political factors that informed these developments.