Global Arc

The seminar explores pluralism in Greece from minority governance in the Ottoman Empire to modern European multiculturalism. Through ethnographies, historical works, and films, the seminar considers how Greek governments and peoples have faced problems of cultural, linguistic, and religious difference within and outside the borders of the nation. It focuses on aspects of state government--health care, education, welfare--that clarify the boundaries of identity, community, and polity in Greece. It is based in Istanbul (week 1) and Xanthi (weeks 2-6); excursions may include Komotini, Alexandropoulis, Thessaloniki and the Rhodope Mountains.

Focusing on three Ghanaian cities--Accra, Cape Coast, and Kumasi--the seminar traces the development of these urban centers from the earliest times to the present and explores the cultural encounters that have given them distinct identities. Using theories from history and anthropology, literature and cultural studies, political economy and urban studies, the seminar explores central questions in the study of the urban experience. Based in Accra, students will immerse themselves in the life of the city, mapping its social and cultural geography, trying to understand the structures that define it.

This seminar will address two essential questions: How can the art of film advance the causes of science? How do communities use media to support their environmental activism? Based in Kenya, students will be trained in digital video production, screenwriting, and editing, and will produce a series of short and long documentaries. Filming will entail numerous trips into the field, interviewing, and recording. The seminar will help students begin to understand crucial international development issues, e.g., water, wildlife, and land use, and how to communicate memorably about them through video.

Nestled in the Caucasus, Azerbaijan offers an unparalleled perspective on the processes that birthed and continue to shape the modern world. Azerbaijan at the beginning of the twentieth century was a global pacesetter, the center of world oil production and then the first secular democratic republic in the Muslim world. After seven decades of Soviet Communism, Azerbaijan is again an independent state and global energy hub. We will study timeless debates on Islam and identity, empire and independence, autocracy and democracy, and energy and development.

This course will trace the ways in which Greek photographers, the modern Greek poets George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, Andreas Embirícos, and Yannis Ritsos, and the Canadian poet Anne Carson reflect on the relation between Greece and photography. Visiting Delphi, the site of the Oracle of Apollo, the god of the Sun, Mycenae, the mythical birthplace of Greek literature, and the island of Crete, where Greek history and geology encounter each other, we will be able to see the light and landscape that inspired these photographers and these extraordinary literary texts.

This course treats the language politics of Cyprus--a divided island since 1974, split by a UN buffer zone--as a way into broader discussions of borders, conflict, translation, and intercultural communication. We will read literary, historical, anthropological, sociological, and other materials dealing with the island's linguistic and social makeup, its present and its past. In addition, we will meet with individuals living and working on the island, including writers, artists, anthropologists, politicians, activists and translators engaged in multicommunal efforts to forge connections across Cyprus's many divides.

This course will introduce the study of language and the nature of translation and focus on specialized topics including the use of English as a lingua franca, the ideology of national languages, European Union language policy, the development and implementation of the Swiss model of a multilingual state, the history of the major international organizations since 1918 and their current language practices, the politics of language use, language issues in the spread of international law, translation in global cultural exchange, international languages, and the ethics of translation in humanitarian work and in conflict zones.

Namibia has a tempestuous history: slave raids, genocidal warfare, and overhunting marked much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Its history was affected by its local semi-arid environment and by slavers from the Atlantic, invaders from Germany and South Africa, and refugees from Angola. The colonial conquest of Namibia and its decolonization were deeply interwoven with two major global conflicts: World War I and the Cold War. The study of Namibia's past will serve to highlight the larger theme of development which is often defined as the domestication of non-Western "Nature" through Western science.

Before 1918, Austria-Hungary was a world power that spread from the Mediterranean to Ukraine, and Vienna was one of the world capitals of art, culture, and intellectual life. This seminar will explore the cultural history of psychoanalysis and its relation to Austrian history. It will feature weekly guest speakers who will lecture on topics as diverse as the history of communism in Vienna, the place of psychoanalysis in today's world, and the transformation of Austria from a world power into a small landlocked nation that often has thought of itself as a new Switzerland - a neutral country and a buffer between East and West.

Thessaloniki, the capital of northern Greece, is an ancient city at the center of some of the most dramatic events in European history, from the barbarian invasions of the post-Roman world to the dismantling of the Iron Curtain in 1989. This course will investigate both the reasons for Thessaloniki's centrality in European history and the events themselves through the prism of the city. Thessaloniki was torn apart, remade and reinvented several times over as different Balkan national movements, the Great Powers, communists and anti-communists and pro and anti-immigration forces fought to control the city and its destiny.