Global Arc

Sociology as a discipline was not institutionalized until the early 20th century, but sociological thinking predates the discipline by at least a century. In this course, we examine the development of social thought through the writings of sociology's founders as they developed the idea of the social and its relationship to the development of the individual and to economic and political transformation. While the course lingers on Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel, it also explores their intellectual contexts, their interlocutors and their legacies up through the middle of the 20th century.

This foundational class is designed to introduce students to both the ideation and investigation components of research, with milestones guiding students towards a complete thesis in the spring semester. Classes will consist of presentations on research tools (including data, library, and computing resources), crash-courses in common research methodologies, and introduction to LaTeX for typesetting their final theses. Throughout the semester, students will discuss and present their thesis progress in smaller group settings. Past student theses will also be studied as examples.

This course places issues of migration and legacies of imperialism and settler colonialism in conversation with Shakespeare and Shakespearean adaptations, appropriations, confrontations, and allusive riffs in the present day. By looking at both early modern and 21st-century texts and cultural products that engage with patterns of mobility and migration (and the securitized nation-state) from the U.S/Mexico borderlands to the Mediterranean, as well as the many afterlives of Shakespeare in the present, we will explore the possibilities and risks of an activist literature of migration that draws from early modern dramatic precedent.