Global Arc

This course will offer an intensive introduction to the history of the making, distribution and reading of books in the West, from ancient Greece to modern America. By examining a series of case studies, we will see how writers, producers, and readers of books have interacted, and how the conditions of production and consumption have changed over time.

When the sum of our pains surpasses that of our pleasures, non-existence becomes preferable to existence. This argument became ubiquitous in Enlightenment philosophical debates. Many used it to discuss the rationality of suicide, God's creation, religious faith, as well as the metaphysical grounds of human existence and the idea of progress. Some criticized the quantitative premises of the argument and questioned the idea that pain could change the positive value of human existence into a negative one. We will examine those debates in philosophical and literary texts and discuss their later and contemporary echoes in ethics.

Following Italian unification Massimo d'Azaglio remarked, "Italy has been made; now it remains to make Italians." This course examines the art and architectural movements of the roughly 100 years between the1848 uprising and the beginning of the World War II, a critical period for defining italianità. Topics include the paintings of the Macchiaioli, reactions to the 1848 uprisings and the Italian Independendence Wars, the politics of 19th Century architectural restoration in Italy, the re-urbanization of Italy's new capital Rome, Fascist architecture and urbanism, and the architecture of Italy's African colonies.

This course is designed to introduce students to Central European literature, culture and history. We will focus on texts from Poland, ex-Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and the impact of Jewish culture on the region as a whole. The course will begin with the interwar period (1918-1939) and the immediate postwar part of the course is dominated by fictional and nonfictional accounts of World War II, the Holocaust and Communism. We will discuss literature as an opposition tool, the writer in exile, and the post-communist accounting for the past.

This course examines how politics and culture play out in that most refined of art forms: opera. The course will introduce students to the history of European opera, focusing on 19th century composers in France, Germany, and Italy. We will closely examine three operas: one French (Bizet's Carmen), one Italian (Verdi's Aida) and one German (Wagner's Die Meistersinger). Following Edward Said's work, we will examine how politics and culture play out in these works: European colonialism in Aida; the question of antisemitism in Wagner; stereotypes of Spain in Carmen. Includes excursions to the Metropolitan Opera.

Weber taught that scientific rationality had disenchanted the world. It dispelled myths and made the natural and social worlds transparent and prosaic. Religious and supernatural accounts of the universe lost credibility. An old magical picture of reality made way for a new one: gods and spirits fled, leaving material processes behind them. This course looks at the historical process that Weber described as one of disenchantment. We will watch gods and demons being expelled from the heights of western culture - and reappearing there in new forms. By the end we may wonder if they ever left - and if we were ever modern.

The course examines the "classic versus barbarian" dialectics as the characteristic dynamics between Hollywood and European Art Cinema using Erich Auerbach's comparative method. Students will not only learn about important milestones of European Cinema, but also become familiar with the method of historicism/perspectivism/comparativism as developed by Vico, Nietzsche and Auerbach.

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 fin-de-siècle to the present. Works by artists, architects, theater designers, and film makers who address the human figure in space will be supplemented by readings on architectural theory, intellectual and cultural history, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and aesthetics. Course will address issues of bodily empathy, the relation between bodily perception and space, as well as the animation and mechanization of bodies and things inside modern enclosures.

Where does nature end? Where does culture begin? In this seminar, we will walk the contested borderlands claimed by both, exploring key works of literature, art, and film from the Middle Ages to the present that challenge, represent, perform, condition, and subvert our notions of morality and human conduct. Is nature cruel or edifying? Should human values be informed by botany? How can an earthquake become an act of natural justice? Is the environment a field of scientific study or a human-made reality? Studying these cases of European culture will force us to address ethical issues and moral judgments of lasting fundamental relevance.

This course examines the experience of the Jewish musician in Europe from the 17th-century through World War II. We will explore how Jewish music; which had so long isolated Jews from mainstream Christian society; would ultimately provide a path to inclusion; how anti-Semitism shaped the careers of Jewish musicians; and how notions about Jewish music fostered anti-Semitism. Topics include: Jewish musicians in early modern Italy; Sephardic Jews in 18th-century Amsterdam; Mendelssohn and the "sincere conversion"; Victorian London and her Jews; operetta, opera, and symphony in fin-de-siècle Vienna; music during and after the Holocaust.