Global Arc

This course explores the variety and richness of Jewish social, political, and community life in Poland in the context of the calamity that befell Polish Jews in World War II. The seminar includes multi-day study trips to Warsaw, small towns known as Jewish Galicia, and the Auschwitz concentration camp. It coincides with the Kazimierz-based International Festival of Jewish Culture, and festival offerings will be incorporated into the curriculum. Classes are supplemented by lectures and workshops with Polish scholars, artists, and journalists. The seminar includes a community service component and daily Polish language instruction.

This interdisciplinary seminar explores various representations of Rio de Janeiro - from literature to photography, from painting to music - while examining perspectives from urbanism and the social sciences. Focusing on intersections between modernization projects and cultural production, we will ask: how has Brazil's former capital been a laboratory for architectural and city planning movements? How was it crucial to the formation of a national identity? Topics include the city's history, racial relations, the impact of technology in the urban experience, and contemporary challenges related to preparations for the 2016 Olympics.

This course introduces students to the issues facing post-tsunami Japan. The debates currently facing Japan not only involve the difficult and delicate balancing of needs in the disaster-ravaged regions but also address the kind of country that will emerge from the catastrophe. Do Japanese observers envision a progressive country leading the world in alternative energy and green technology? A more proudly nationalistic country unified by the tragedy and committed to recovery? What do these different projections mean? The course also explores the postwar narrative of Japan's rise from defeat to become the world's second-largest economy.

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.

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.