Global Arc

This course explores the reception of Greco-Roman themes and literature across different forms of visual and literary media from the early modern period to the present day. It begins by looking at the synesthetic relationship between art and literature in Ancient Greece and Rome before tracing its effects on both visual artists and writers from the Renaissance on, and especially those challenging the divisions between different forms of artistic expression.

A six-week course that will review the basics of Ancient Greek grammar and syntax while accelerating student familiarity with reading texts. Our focus will be on major authors writing in Athens in the 5th-4th century BCE, including Plato, Attic oratory, and Athenian drama, both tragedy and comedy. We will enhance our knowledge of these texts with selections from Homeric epic, lyric poetry, the New Testament and later prose authors living under the Roman Empire. Students can expect daily reading, translation and comprehension exercises, and short responses that reflect critically on the texts and genres read.

In this course we will read selected speeches of Lysias, Antiphon, and Demosthenes, focusing on how the orators frame family disputes and imagine family relations. In the process we will examine the orators' prose style and rhetorical technique and pay close attention the way they build their (often dubious) cases.

The chorus was a ubiquitous feature of ancient Greek life. The class will read highlights of classical choral lyric poetry in reverse chronological order, beginning with late fifth-century dramatic choruses (Bacchae, Frogs), then continuing to the epinicians of Pindar and Bacchylides, and concluding with a comparative study of Pindar's and Aeschylus' telling of the Orestes myth. While paying primary attention to the (often challenging) language of the surviving poems, the class will also investigate the role of the chorus within classical Greek culture more broadly. Students will complete a final project on a choral text of their choosing.

This course offers an introduction to Koine Greek, the 'common' Greek language that became predominant in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Our readings will span from Jewish and Christian literature, such as the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible), Ezekiel's Exagoge (the only extent Greek tragedy from the Hellenistic period), and the New Testament to the writings of Stoic authors, such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. We will pay attention to developments in the language (morphology, syntax, and lexicon) as well as engage with philosophical (ethical), literary, and historical questions raised by these texts.

To what degree has religion shaped the environmental justice movement? This course in environmental humanities and social sciences examines the impact of religious ideas, persons, practices, and institutions on the values and strategies of environmental, food, and climate justice activists. It also grapples with the significance of this impact for environmental thought and policy. Students engage with primary sources, media, scholarship, and community organizations to study cases in the US South, New Jersey, the tropics, and the planet as a whole, culminating in a collaborative project with a community partner.

This interdisciplinary seminar explores freshwater use, its present-day impacts, and possible future trajectories. We will examine various modes of seeing interconnections in freshwater resources through diagrams, maps, models, and photographs, and look at pressures through multiple conceptual frameworks such as water footprints and planetary boundaries. We also engage approaches for calculating, performing, and imagining alternative water futures. The course aims to provide students a supportive space to think and learn together about pathways for addressing grand water challenges.

This course examines the connections between climate change and longstanding processes of colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism. We will examine the history and evolution of the climate justice movement, including its connection with the environmental justice and civil rights movement in the United States and ongoing calls for climate reparations particularly among African-descended populations. We explore the ways wider scale systems of power and domination produce unjust environmental and climatic conditions and the disproportionate ways these systems impact BIPOC communities across the globe.

This course examines the diversity of life on earth across its different manifestations (biological, cultural, linguistic) and how that diversity is interrelated within a complex and adaptive social-ecological system. Through case studies, students will explore the complexity underlying conservation issues and learn to identify and critique policy and management interventions that aim to explicitly center the social-ecological contexts of biodiversity conservation. Topics include biological and cultural diversity patterns and threats, biocultural approaches to conservation, social-ecological systems theory, feedbacks, and telecouplings.

What does the environment look like? How do we visualize things like pollution, or interspecies relationships? This course examines the ways that images have been important in shaping our understanding of the environment. Each week, we will focus on meaningful themes that bridge the gap between art history and environmental studies. Exploring everything from nineteenth century landscape paintings to contemporary installation art, we will consider the way in which theories about art and environment have converged around topics such as the myth of untouched wilderness, colonial frontiers, or collectivity.