Global Arc

This seminar situates cultural production in Ba`thist Syria (1970-present)--in terms of its conditions of creation, circulation and reception--within a broader framework, namely, the history of modern Syria. Through an exploration of historical debates in the scholarly literature on politics, aesthetics and culture, students will both contextualize and comment upon ongoing discussions surrounding contemporary Syria. The course engages with a wide range of media, from literature and drama to television and film. All readings are in English, although those with interests/abilities in French or Arabic will be encouraged to exercise them.

How do representations of men and women, past and present, intersect with popular memories of and attitudes towards gender and sexuality? Thinking through this question with reference to India, this course will entail a close reading of one Bollywood film (with English subtitles) each week alongside an engagement with scholarly studies of the histories of gender and sexuality and of film in South Asia. Students will learn to be critical and historically sensitive viewers of film. They will also reflect critically on the crafting and re-crafting of popular memory, placing remembered pasts in dialog with scholarly approaches.

Venice, from unpromising beginnings on a marshy lagoon, succeeded in becoming a major commercial and territorial power that by the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance sought to rival the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires and dominate much of the Mediterranean world. This seminar will look at the development of both the city itself and its empire - the stato da mar stretching from the Adriatic to the Aegean and Libyan Seas - against a backdrop of conflict and exchange between Christians, Muslims and Jews. We shall learn about political, social and economic history, but also about art, architecture and literature.

Who is a Hindu? Or, for that matter, who is a Muslim or an untouchable? Like today, these were vexed questions in pre-modern South Asia. This seminar will think through the history of social inequality and cultural difference in India from the earliest Muslim presence in South Asia until the region's conquest by the English East India Company in the eighteenth century. By juxtaposing modern-day scholarly writing on these subjects with primary-source material that circulated in a popular milieu, the seminar will encourage students to explore pre-modern responses to hierarchy, conflict, discrimination, and persecution.

This course will trace the history of Christianity in Africa from the first to twentieth centuries. We will focus on issues as diverse as the importance of Christians from Africa in the development of central Christian doctrines and institutions, the medieval Christian-Muslim encounter, the modern missionary movement, colonization and decolonization, the role of the church in freedom struggles, and more. We will ask the questions:how does studying the history of Christianity in Africa de-center Europe and the European experience in the history of Christianity? And:What would a global history of Christianity, pre-modern and modern, look like?

The course examines the fundamental changes after the end of the Roman empire in the writing of history. We will begin with Roman historians writing about barbarians, and continue to explore how in later centuries 'barbarian' and Christian men of the pen reinterpreted and continued these histories as cultural brokers, blending older Roman history with biblical narratives or stories and myths taken from their own imagined "primordial" pasts. In doing so we will observe that these histories not only reflect the fundamental changes from the late Roman empire to its medieval successor cultures, but also how they shaped these changes.

This course will explore the history of political propaganda in the context of mass politics, international rivalries, colonialism, and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. We will discuss the use (and abuse) of visual images and verbal messages, channels of delivering them to audiences, and their reactions. The topics for comparative and cross-cultural study of mass persuasion will include avant-garde art and propaganda, the cult of political leaders in totalitarian regimes, propaganda of hate and genocide, new media and terrorism, "weaponization" of information in international politics, and more.

Few political gestures are as ubiquitous or powerful as the appeal to our common "humanity." But a politics based on the human self (or, as it once was, "man") has often been accused of harboring limitations or prejudices that undercut its claim to be universal. More recently, the priority accorded to humans has been brought into question by studies into the cognitive and emotive capabilities of other animals, and developments in computing. In this course, we will examine the emergence of the human self as a master concept of politics, and we will also track the criticisms made by feminists, anti-colonial writers, and animal rights activists.

Catastrophe reveals the fragility of human society. This course examines a series of phenomena--plague, famine, war, revolution, economic depression etc.--in order to reach an understanding of humanity's imaginings of but also resilience to collective crises. We shall look in particular at how political forces such as empire have historically both generated and resisted global disasters. Material dealing with the especially fraught centuries at the transition between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period will be set alongside examples drawn from antiquity as well as our own contemporary era.

This course aims to explain the historical roles of fascism and antifascism in the making of our political world.