Global Arc

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.

This seminar explores Chilean visual culture since the coup, focusing on the responses to censorship and repression by visual artists, filmmakers, performers, and collectives as they developed new ideas around liberty, human rights, and political minorities, as well as free expression, memory, and peripheral cultures. These artists placed their bodies and works into the public sphere, reclaiming new spaces and radically transforming Chilean life. Our analysis will also consider the complex negotiations of the transition, the composition of the contemporary Chilean art scene, and the implementation of neoliberalism.

This seminar is going to be mostly athenocentric. It will explore the history, geography, and intellectual legacy of Athens, the most remarkable and influential urban center of the ancient (and not so ancient) world. In antiquity, Athens was the first body politic to make a bid for hegemonic power. This seminar will explore the back and forth between the voices of the dominating ideology and the loud and not so loud, often subversive and invariably critical voices of social and political discontent.

The course will revisit the Vietnam War from both American and Vietnamese perspectives. The focus will be long term, taking a look back at the French colonial period prior to American intervention on the one hand, and , on the other, at the evolution of the Vietnamese political economy since the end of the war. The core focus of the course will be the war period itself, especially U.S. motives and strategy, the role of the Soviet Union and of China and Vietnam's own understanding of what the war was all about.

This seminar will offer an introduction to some of the most prominent features of Chinese society -- work organizations, the education system, the urban/rural divide, migration, social inequality, marriage and family, ethnicity and religion, with an emphasis on understanding social phenomena in China within its historical, cultural, political and economic context. It will also allow students to begin to study other social changes in China and their long-term impact on the people living there, as well as people living in other developed and developing countries.

The course will explore the vibrant scene of French theater today both in Paris and at the international Avignon Theater Festival through reading, performance and observation and investigates France's cultural exception in the 21st century, its achievements and challenges. Students will explore how French theater's long and rich traditions and history translate to contemporary stages, both in class and through meetings and discussions with cultural policy makers, actors, directors and producers. Theatergoing will be central to the seminar, and students will immerse themselves in plays at many venues.

Based at the Hanifl Centre in Mussoorie this course introduces students to the ecologically and culturally diverse region of the Himalayas known as Garhwal in the Indian state of Uttarakhand. In the past, Himalayan people used to practice transhumance and nomadism and nowadays, because of increasing out-migration, fewer and fewer of them live out their lives where they are born. The central questions of the seminar will be, how do the people of Garwal identify and experience "locality," "territory" and "community"? What does it mean to be "at home" in this part of the Indian Himalayas?

Since President Obama reestablished diplomatic ties with Cuba after almost six decades of cold war between the two countries, Havana has been abuzz with the energy that comes with all political transitions. Art and culture are thriving. We will explore how writers, artists and filmmakers react to the changes in many aspects of Cuban society: the economy, race relations, sexual minorities, freedom of speech, political models, the legacy of communism, among others.The seminar, based in Havana, includes one weekend trip to Trinidad, one of the most important ports in Cuban history.

This seminar will examine xenophobia and xenophilia in Germany. Identification through irrational fear of the foreign is currently on the rise in many parts of the world, manifested in anti-immigrant, religiously motivated national exclusionary movements, discrimination, political party competition, racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, internal purging, and massacres. This course examines their psychology and social meanings, focusing on both the modification of projections and the changing nature of its objects. It will introduce students to ethnographic methods by participating in cultural encounters and observations outside the classroom.