Global Arc

Nature shapes how many of us think about the world. It's a balanced ecological system; the opposite of culture; a way of explaining how living things work; and a way of regulating how living things, especially people, should live. We will look at how ideas about natures, Nature, and "living naturally" take shape in texts from ancient Greece and Rome. We'll consider the Greek and Roman texts in relationship to other ways of imagining human and non-human life and the world in the Mediterranean and other cultures. We'll think, too, about how these ancient ideas bear on how we think about nature today-and how we might think differently.

In this course students will engage with modern social science research on cultural globalization as well as with the texts and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, broadly construed (Greece, Rome, Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, etc.). Students will explore how intercultural contact in the ancient Mediterranean set the stage for local globalization processes and served as the origin for modern globalization. Moreover, students will gain the tools to compare and contrast how people in the ancient and modern worlds reacted to intensive globalization and define their identities against it.

Our focus is the city of Constantinople. Designated 'New Rome' to rule the Christian East at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, the capital of the Byzantine empire was considered the greatest metropolis of the middle ages. We will study the city through primary texts in translation and examine its surviving monuments and urban landscape. To encourage individual engagement with the city, each student will assume a typical persona drawn from the readings, from whose perspective she or he will observe the city as part of a broader assignment.

Where does medicine begin in the West? In this course, we will go back to the earliest medical texts written in ancient Greece that try to give an account of disease as a natural phenomenon that happens inside the biological body. Our aim is not simply to reconstruct the theories of health and disease that these authors put forth. It is also to see the kinds of questions and problems that arise when healers take responsibility for the care and treatment of bodies.

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.

An introduction to the basic principles of a major system of civil law. The course will trace the beginnings of these legal principles in the society that produced them in the first half of the course, and will examine the afterlife of the Roman legal system - with an emphasis on colonial contexts - in the second half.

This course will consider Greek tragedy, its ancient context, and modern responses by focusing on the three canonical Greek tragedians: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. We will also incorporate comparative readings from the history of drama and philosophy. Dramatic authors include Aristophanes, Seneca, Racine, Wole Soyinka, Sarah Kane, Anne Carson; philosophical authors include Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche. The course will conclude by considering recent activist uses of Greek tragedy, such as The Medea Project and Antigone in Ferguson.

This course will approach select classics of Greek political thought (Plato's Statesman and Republic, Aristotle's Politics) through a scrutiny of Greek social and political institutions. Students will be introduced to basic principles such as the distinction between free and unfree, the social and political status of male and female, and the distribution of political power and access to political participation in the Greek polis, in order to be in a position to observe how the ideas of Greek political thinkers map onto this reality.

Why did sex become so prominent in the moral imagination of early Christianity? How did the fate of the soul become so dependent on the sexual discipline of Christians? We will read a wide variety of late antique and early medieval texts which explore, prescribe, and aestheticize physical love and relate its consequences for sin and salvation in later Roman society. The course will emphasize literary as well as social history.

History courses usually cover the grand narratives based on the more traditional, literary evidence. Usually these courses leave no room for discussing how knowledge is created and the new and different methods for studying ancient history. This course instead looks at different questions to shed light on fruitful collaborations between scholars from different fields. Students will engage with STEM as they consider humanistic questions. Through different case studies and hands-on activities, students will learn about different scientific, technological, and mathematical methods and how knowledge of the past draws on multiple disciplines.