Global Arc

Where does medicine begin in the West? In this course, we will go back to the earliest medical texts written in ancient Greece that try to give an account of disease as a natural phenomenon that happens inside the biological body. Our aim is not simply to reconstruct the theories of health and disease that these authors put forth. It is also to see the kinds of questions and problems that arise when healers take responsibility for the care and treatment of bodies.

What are the features of persuasive political speech? The reliance of democratic politics on memorable oratory stems from traditions dating back to ancient Greece and Rome which were revived in the modern era of parliamentary debates and stump speeches. This course will analyze the rhetorical structure of famous political speeches over time in a bid to better understand the potent mixture of aesthetics and ideology that characterizes political rhetoric, as well as the equally long tradition of regarding political rhetoric as insincere and unscrupulous. Students will try their hand at political speech-writing and oratory in class.

An introduction to the basic principles of a major system of civil law. The course will trace the beginnings of these legal principles in the society that produced them in the first half of the course, and will examine the afterlife of the Roman legal system - with an emphasis on colonial contexts - in the second half.

History courses usually cover the grand narratives based on the more traditional, literary evidence. Usually these courses leave no room for discussing how knowledge is created and the new and different methods for studying ancient history. This course instead looks at different questions to shed light on fruitful collaborations between scholars from different fields. Students will engage with STEM as they consider humanistic questions. Through different case studies and hands-on activities, students will learn about different scientific, technological, and mathematical methods and how knowledge of the past draws on multiple disciplines.

The astonishing preservation of Pompeii has captured popular imagination ever since it was rediscovered beginning in the 1700s. This course will uncover the urban fabric of the city. We will look at its layout, at public and private buildings and their decoration, and at the wider cultural, geographical and historical contexts. Using physical remains alongside texts in translation, we will explore aspects of the lives of the inhabitants, including entertainment, housing, religion, economy, slavery, political organization and expression, roles played by men and women inside and outside the family, and attitudes towards death.

Most often seen in opposition, Greco-Roman Classical culture and Christianity have a long history of reciprocal reliance. Neither would look as it does today without the other. Through readings and discussion of both Classical and Christian texts, as well as art and architecture, this course will inquire into the Classical roots of much Christian theology, ethics, cosmology, and values more broadly, while also considering the effect on Classics as a cultural cornerstone of societies beholden to these twin traditions.

Dramatists in the 20th and 21st centuries have repeatedly adapted classical literature to performance on the contemporary stage. In this course we'll ask after the particular uses, pleasures, and challenges of classical adaptation: why adapt ancient material in the first place? How have contemporary dramatists deviated from their sources, and how have they remained "true" to them? We'll consider these and other questions in a survey of a century of performance, ranging from early 20th-century modernism to Hadestown. All readings will be in translation. This course will include a trip to a stage production in New York in spring 2020.

Recent developments in the United States and throughout the world have exposed fault lines in how communities design and regulate forms of citizenship. But current debates over the assignment, withholding, or deprivation of citizen status have a long and violent history. In this course we will attempt to map a history of citizenship from the ancient Mediterranean world to the 21st century. Questions to be tackled include: who/what is a citizen? (How) are exclusion and marginalization wired into the historical legacies and present-day practices of citizenship?

This course compares ideologies and practices of monarchic rule across Greece and the Near East. We will investigate how monarchs established their rule, how they faced opposition, and which strategies they adopted to legitimize their power. We will ask what makes a monarch a "tyrant" rather than a "king" and why monarchy turned out to be disgraceful for the Greeks compared to their neighbors. We will read texts produced by royal courts as well as compositions which sketch the profile of the "ideal monarch". We will also look at monuments which monarchs erected during their reigns and investigate their historical and political significance.

The subject of this course will be medieval Greek Romantic fiction. We will read translations of the four surviving novels written in twelfth-century Constantinople in a bid to answer questions about the link between eroticism and the novel, truth and invention in the middle ages, who read fiction and why, and what role, if any, did the medieval or Byzantine Romances have in the story of the European novel. Above all, we will seek to recover some of the pleasure felt by the medieval readers and audiences of these novels.