Arts and Letters
Foundation Seminar
ARLET 801: Graduate Liberal Studies: What They Are, What They Do
Dean William B. Rogers et al.
Tuesday, 7–9:30 p.m.
3 credits. This entry seminar introduces D.Litt. students to the work of multiple disciplines in the Arts and Letters program. It produces initial familiarity with fields of humanistic inquiry from the program’s seven concentrations: historical studies; literary studies; global studies; studies in spirituality; Irish/Irish-American studies; fine arts and media studies; writing; and teaching in the two-year college. The seminar features a team of professors from several fields of study and practice taught in the CSGS, each of whom leads the seminar for two weeks. Through broad discussion and specific readings and assignments, classes preview what the individual disciplines “do” in our time. Students participate in weekly conversations and write six short papers. The goal is to ground and enable each student’s broad choices for D.Litt. work, from taking courses to conceiving the doctoral dissertation.
[Graded S/U. Required of all D.Litt. students entering the program in September 2011 and thereafter; open to interested M.Litt. students.]
SERIES 100
ARLET 107 The Medieval Mind
Topic: Women’s Experience of God in the Middle Ages
Prof. Gabriel Coless
Wednesday, 4–6:30 p.m.
3 credits. Through a study of outstanding women mystics of the Middle Ages, an attempt will be made to discover the unique charism of each person, as well as their common perception of the divine. Respecting the peculiar genre of mystical literature, students will have the opportunity to study the texts in their historical, cultural, and religious context. Included in this seminar will be some of the greats, such as Hildegard of Bingen, Gertrude of Helfta, Hadewijch, Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, and many others.
SERIES 200
ARLET 214-001
Topic: American Radicals: From the Progressives to the Tea Party
Prof. C. Brid Nicholson
Tuesday, 4–6:30 p.m.
3 credits. American history has been a constant struggle for political and cultural changes. The groups that have fought for change have mostly done so on the edges of the political process, choosing usually to influence, but sometimes they have interfered with the process. This course will seek to explore the motives, courses of action, successes, and failures of the variety of groups that have tried to change American society and its attitudes, from the post–Civil War era to the present day.
ARLET 234 001 Studies in Irish History and Literature
Topic: Understanding Ireland from Visual Images
Prof. Kinealy
Tues. 7-9:30 p.m.
Historians increasingly realize that visual culture can provide powerful and insightful windows into the past. Images and representations, in fact, can offer as much information to researchers as traditional written documentary sources. This course will use visual images – including Neolithic burial sites, illuminated gospels, early wood-cuttings, photographs, political cartoons, propaganda posters, video clips, and films – to learn more about Ireland’s past. From early religious iconography to political murals in Northern Ireland; from caricatures in Punch to famine memorials; from the Book of Kells to contemporary street art, each image tells us a story about Ireland’s rich culture and history.
ARLET 234 002 Studies in Irish History and Literature
Topic: The Future of Ireland in the 21st Century
Dean William Rogers
Mon. 7:00 – 9:30 pm
3 credits. “The Republic (of Ireland) has abandoned two major principles of the revolutionary Irish (de Valera) state: (a) a Catholic state, and: (b) protectionist, self-sufficient, nationalised-industry economics. It is now secular, and capitalist. Now is the time to abandon a third principle: (c) neutrality. It is time for the Republic to become a formal ally of Britain (and the US).” Mark Humphreys
This is one opinion about the future of Ireland, but it is certainly not the only one. Numerous voices can be found arguing that the future of Ireland must lay with the European Union, and more broadly, with the United Nations. Minister of Culture Sile De Valera soon after it was announced that EU funding would be equal to or less than Ireland’s investment in the noted the numerous positive effects of the EU for Ireland, but then proceeded to talk to about Ireland’s unique relationship with America, something no other European country shares. It echoed the remarks of Mary Harney, the Taniste, on July 21, 2000, when she famously stated that“we have strong social, economic and political ties with the EU. As Irish people our relationships with the United States and the European Union are complex. Geographically we are closer to Berlin than Boston. Spiritually we are probably a lot closer to Boston than Berlin.”
Another example of this attitude was a speech made in Boston by the Minister de Valera, who said she favoured a ‘more questioning attitude to the European Union….directives and regulations agreed in Brussels can often impinge on our identity, culture and traditions.’This was met with some surprise even in her own party, as it disagreed with official government policy. However, it did represent a growing viewpoint in Ireland, which the two ‘No’ votes in referenda on EU Treaty also indicated. This new Irish ‘Euroscepticism’ was greeted with surprise due to the traditionally enormous enthusiasm the EU enjoys in Ireland, in particular compared with Britain. So, will Ireland move closer to the United States, the country with which shares language, culture, and blood (1 in 3 Irish have relatives in the US), will it choose the EU, the confederation that has played such a key role in the development of Ireland over the past three decades, will it continue to straddle both worlds (as noted by De Valera, Harney, David McWilliams and other commentators), or will it find some new as yet undefined course?
SERIES 300
ARLET 301 001 Contemporary Studies in the Humanities
Topic: Images of Suffering and Hope in International Film
Prof. Laura Winters
Tuesday, 4–6:30 p.m.
3 credits. This course will explore the representation of suffering and hope in classic and contemporary films from France, Great Britain, Canada, Japan, Korea, and Denmark, among other nations. Special attention will be paid to the understanding of hope in each of these cultures as well as to the relationship of form and content in the visual image, frame analysis, and auteurship.
ARLET 304 001 Studies in American Literature
Topic: Blood America: Reading Cormac McCarthy
Prof. Robert Ready
Wed. 7–9:30 p.m.
3 credits. In his summary survey of great books, The Western Canon, the critic Harold Bloom included Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The reclusive novelist came into even more prominence recently when the film version of No Country for Old Men won the Academy Award for best picture of 2008. McCarthy’s is a frightening humanism, a verbal artistry of heroic scale and risk, and a vision of historical American character having a dark beauty that both appalls and renews. He has created American characters that seem to come out hard from our collective memory, such as Judge Holden, Billy Parham, and most recently and simply, “the man” and “the boy.” This course will concentrate on six of McCarthy’s novels from Blood Meridian to The Road. It will ask questions about their representations of traditional male journeys; regeneration through violence; Southwest American nature, borders, and their peoples; narrative technique; roots in and contrasts with genre Westerns, Faulkner, and other American writers; immedicable evil; and intransigent courage and goodness.
ARLET 321 001 Studies in British Literature
Topic: Modern Literature and Culture
Prof. Cassandra Laity
Thurs. 7–9:30 p.m.
3 credits. This course will read modernist literature and aesthetics in the context of a broad spectrum of social, cultural, and historical “modernities” ranging from the impact of the early 20th-century urban/technological milieu, popular culture, and World War I, to new “sexologist” theories of gender/sexuality. Literary works will include the early manifestoes and artistic productions of futurism, vorticism, and imagism; World War I prose/poetry; and the “high modernist” poetry/prose of the 1920s and ’30s. We will read works by Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, Ezra Pound, H.D., E.M. Forster, Mina Loy, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. Secondary readings will include both theorists of cultural studies such as Walter Benjamin and contemporary critical essays by modernist scholars on the individual writers and “modernities” addressed.
ARLET 322 001 Studies in World Literature
Topic: The Novella Tradition in Spain and Latin America
Prof. Raúl Rosales
Thursday, 4–6:30 p.m.
3 credits. This course examines the origins, tradition, impact, and currency of the novella or short novel as an important subgenre of Spanish and Latin American literature. Beyond addressing the distinguishing characteristics of novellas (versus short stories and full-length novels), the course critically analyzes the elements of fiction of each novella considered. The readings present the Hispanic novella as a genre especially suitable for the artistic expression of certain social, cultural, and intellectual concerns within Spanish and Latin-American contexts, including recurring themes around race, gender, and sexuality. The course pays particular attention to: the reshaping of the Italian genre in the “exemplary” novellas of Spain; the use of the genre by authors of the Latin-American boom of the 1960s; and more recent articulations connected to postmodern and neorealist tendencies. This course will be taught entirely in English, with all readings available in translation.
Readings will be drawn from the following, among others: Miguel de Cervantes’ Exemplary Novels, María de Zayas’ Disenchantments of Love, Ana María Matute’s Celebration in the Northwest, Juan Rulfo’sPedro Páramo, Elena Poniatowska’s Dear Diego, Carlos Fuentes’ Aura, Gabriel García Márquez’s No One Writes to the Coronel / Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Reinaldo Arenas’ Mona, Mario Vargas Llosa’s Who Killed Palomino Molero?, Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star, Ana Lydia Vega’s Miss Florence’s Truth, and Mario Bellatín’s Beauty Salon.
ARLET 335 Studies in Genocide
Topic: The Graphic Novel and Representations of the Holocaust: Ethnic Violence and Genocide
Prof. Sloane Drayson-Knigge
Thursday, 7–9:30 p.m.
3 credits. It’s no longer simply “Pow” and “Zoom”. The graphic novel has been undergoing a renaissance in America and abroad. This highly visual and convergent art form provides a useful tool for the cultural and social analysis of the historical events and experiences that they depict. The publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus I in 1986 was instrumental in bringing the graphic novel into scholarly discussion. In this course, we will begin with an examination of the theoretical framework of the medium and then move to the specific work of artists such as Miriam Katin and Joe Kubert, who have given particular attention to the representation of events and experiences of racial and ethnic violence. Among the additional texts to be explored are J.P. Stassen’s Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda, Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde, Art Spiegelman’s Maus I & II, and Tigran’s depiction of the Armenian genocide, Prior to the Auction of Souls.
ARLET 346 European Cultural History
Topic: Modern Italy Since 1815
Prof. Paolo Cucchi
Thursday, 4–6:30 p.m.
3 credits. The course provides an overview of Italian history, politics, and society, highlighting the forces that led the country to unification (1870) and the most salient events that have shaped the nation since. Topics to be discussed will include: the rise of fascism and neo-fascism; the two Italys and the Southern question; the Mafia, terrorism and white-collar crime; emigration, migration and immigration; the economic recovery and industrial change; and the rise and fall of Silvio Berlusconi. We will also examine other broad features of Italian life such as tradition and changes in the Italian family, the role of the Catholic Church and the secularization of Italian society, the system of education, and cultural modernization and mass media.
ARLET 349 001 Studies in Cultural History
Topic: The Evolution of the Empire
Prof. Jonathan Golden
Monday, 7–9:30 p.m.
3 credits. The course concerns the inception and development of empires and expansionist systems through history. The course begins with a review of theoretical work on the question of expansionism and globalization in order to develop models that can be used in the specific case studies. We then conduct a survey of expansive interaction systems though history, following key cultural systems around the world. Beginning with the early empires of Ancient Greece and Rome, we turn to the rise and spread of Christianity and Islam, the Mughals, the Ottoman Empire, and the Age of Colonialism. Ultimately, we will explore the set of new meanings that the term empire has taken on in the post-colonial world, with a special focus on expansionist systems of the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries
This survey takes a comparative approach, examining the similarities and differences between these expansionist systems. We also pay special attention to the perspectives of those being conquered and colonized.
ARLET 349 002 Studies in Cultural History
Topic: Fashioning the Self: 18th Century Life-Writing, Periodical Literature, and Portraiture
Prof. Eric Johnson-Debaufre
Wednesday, 4–6:30 p.m.
3 credits. The 18th century has often been regarded as a crucial period for the making of a distinctly modern identity. For Jurgen Habermas, this was the period that saw the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere and that produced the ideal of the informed citizen subject. This course seeks to supplement and qualify Habermas’s account through attention to three bodies of material that contributed to our modern sense of the individual: 18th-century life-writing, periodical literature, and portraiture. During the 18th century, developments in technology and literacy created new markets for various forms of life-writing by non-aristocrats. Many of these combined spiritual introspection with reflection on pressing social and moral questions, a conjunction that led to the formation of temperance movements and abolitionist societies and to a public sphere of morally guided, activist citizen-subjects. At the same time, an explosion of periodical literature enabled increasing numbers of women and non-aristocratic men a platform for public engagement on pressing issues of the day that contributed decisively to new ways of imagining the self. Likewise, portrait painting, once the preserve of aristocrats, expanded to include actors, writers, doctors, judges, courtesans, and former slaves among its subjects. In addition to broadening their understanding of the origins of the modern self, students will have the chance to do original research on the subject using the resources of the Methodist Archives.
SERIES 400
ARLET 416 001 Topics in Art History
Topic: From Modernism to … What?: Art of the 20th Century
Prof. Roberto Osti
Monday, 7–9:30 p.m.
3 credits. This course explores the art of the 20th century through a combination of class discussions and readings, museum visits, and a gallery tour of contemporary art in New York City. The course also involves the production of one or two artworks: Students will be asked to choose the artwork of one or two artists and reproduce it or create a new one in the style of the selected artist. The intent of this exercise is to promote a deeper analysis and understanding of the artist and his or her work. No previous experience in making art is required.
Topics include: modernism, art nouveau, and Haekel’s influence; the “isms” (Cubism, Futurism, Fauvism, Primitivism, etc.); Dada, Duchamp, and the ready-made; Bauhaus; Nazi art and the “degenerate art” (who is the degenerate?); the revival of classicism between two wars; from Benton hart to Pollock—how did that happen?; Postmodernism, Pop(ular), Op(tical), Et(cetera); 1980s and ’90s (Mapplethorpe, Serrano, Ophili, Currin, and more); and the 2000s, the end of art according to Danto, the end of art according to Kuspit, and recent trends.
SERIES 600
ARLET 601 Studies in Spirituality
Topic: Spirituality in the Age of St. Patrick
Prof. James Pain
Thursday, 7–9:30 p.m.
3 credits. The time of St. Patrick and the several centuries following his life were extremely fertile ones for Christian spirituality, which has had an impact even down to the present day. Inquiry into the character of Christian spirituality in Cornwall, England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales during the Early Middle Ages. Materials studied include those identified with St. Patrick, St. Columba, St. Hilda, St. Brigid, Caedmon, and Cynewulf.
SERIES 900
ARLET 905-001 Writing Practicum
Topic: Writing to Heal
Prof. Virginia Phelan
Tuesday, 4-6:30 p.m.
3 credits. If words can hurt, words can also heal. This course shows the non-professional writer how to use simple written forms (including journals, letters, and stories) to “diagnose,” “treat,” and “cure.” Class members learn to use these forms for their own explorations. Brief, relevant readings provide models by Paton, Cheever, and O’Connor, among others.
ARLET 905-002 Writing Practicum
Topic: Poetry Workshop
Prof. Robert Carnevale
Wednesday, 7 – 9:30 p.m.
3 credits. This workshop is for beginners and experienced poets alike. Most of class time is spent in workshop: an open and sensitive discussion of each other’s poems-in-progress. But some time is also given to stretching exercises for the imagination, to ear training in the English language, and to coming to grips with the curious logic of metaphor.
ARLET 905-003Writing Practicum
Topic: The Joy of Scholarly Writing: Beginning the Dissertation Process
Prof. Liana Piehler
Wednesday, 4:00-6:30 p.m.
3 credits. In this class, students will embark on their individual dissertation journeys. Specifically, students will choose and refine their dissertation topics and initiate research into that choice. We will review research skills and resources related to the various fields represented by the students/topics in the course. Early writing assignments will build towards composing a prospectus draft, and then an extended 20-page piece of scholarly writing related to their dissertation topics (shaped
by Caspersen School guidelines). Students will benefit from both sustained individual attention to their research and writing, along with group workshops. Work in this course will foster individualized, imaginative approaches to scholarly writing, as well as solid critical thinking and perspectives on research materials and methods.
[Students derive most value from the course if they enroll in their last or penultimate semester and are ready to begin the dissertation process. In order to enroll in The Joy of Scholarly Writing, students must have earned 24 or more credits.]Medical Humanities
MEDHM 101: Biomedical Ethics
Professor Lois Levy
Monday 7:00 – 9 :30
3 credits. An examination of central matters of moral concern in medicine and the life sciences, including some of the following: end of life care, euthanasia, requirements of consent, allocations of resources, disclosure of genetic information, and manipulation of genetic material in germ cells. The selected issues are considered in the contexts of moral justification and moral decision-making, with attention to fundamental matters of ethical theory.
MEDHM 102: Medical Narrative
Prof. Phyllis DeJesse
Tue. 4:00 – 6:30 p.m.
3 credits. This course investigates the scope of narrative approaches to medical knowledge (narratives of illness, narrative as ethical discourse, narrative as an essential part of clinical work). It introduces the student to varieties of medical narrative (anecdote, medical history, case presentation). The class also explores narrative and interpretive techniques that may enhance communication between patient and physician and within the medical community as a whole.
MEDHM 104-001: Literature of Addictions
Prof. Philip Scibilia
Tue: 7 – 9:30
3 credits. Alcohol and drugs appear often in literature and in many guises. Medical, sociological, cultural, and psychological discourses of addiction contest the definition, causes, and treatments. Each of these approaches formulates its questions and answers differently. A careful analysis of addiction as depicted in literature can provide valuable insights into the complicated predicament of the problem drinker and drug taker. This course traces the history of addictions and the use and abuse of alcohol and drugs, revealing their transformation from untested medicines to sources of idle pleasure. It provides a view of addiction from such diverse vantage points as the writings of Aristotle, Alcoholics Anonymous, Derrida, Baldwin, Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, Raymond Carver, Hardy, Doyle, Burroughs, Peele, Williams, O’Neil and London. Through this focus on addiction as literary event and the writing of interpretive essays, students enlarge their awareness of the language of addiction and its clinical implications. Prerequisite: MEDHM 102.
MEDHM 500: Humanism
Topic: Humanistic Psychology and Family Values
Prof. Jerome Travers
Mon. 7-9:30 p.m.
The Humanism fluid context which was based especially on scientific knowledge and cultivation of classics places emphasis humanistic values. What does it mean ” to just be yourself” or become more human or become fully actuated? How does one become a Healer and a Friend? Over seven percent of doctor visits have no physical cause. Emphasis will placed on the mind body connection and William James physical mindedness.
MEDHM 510: Spirituality in Medicine
Topic: Instances of Grace in Healing
Prof. James Pain
Weds. 7 – 9:30 p.m
3 credits.This course investigates the complex role of grace in health. Medical school teaches mainly about diseases and their treatments, with the implication that the patient is the storehouse of diseases. Thus, the patient as a person, affected by and capable also of influencing his or her disease, is often ignored, or worse. And the doctor is viewed as a disease detective, a storehouse of facts and techniques, a computer to be programmed to be a ‘provider’ of cost effective treatment. The class will explore the healing experiences outside the domain of reductionist medicine. Skeptics often dismiss grace’s potential influence on healing. Students will trace the link between grace, medicine and science from ancient times to its relatively modern disconnect to recent developments indicating a strong influence of grace in healing.
MEDHM 301: Encountering Death and Dying in Literature
Prof. Margaret Micchelli
Weds. 7:00 – 9:30 p.m.
An awareness of mortality and death is central to understanding the human experience. Although death is universal and inevitable, it evokes a range of responses that resonate differently within each individual and across societies. This course will examine personal and social dimensions of death and dying through fiction, poetry and memoirs, from the imaginative projection of the experience of dying to autobiographical depictions of loss and grief. The meaning of death from an individual’s perspective, as well as death in the context of the medical system, will be examined.
MEDHM 410: The Pharmaceutical Industry
Prof. Paul DeJesse
Weds. 4-6:30
3 credits. This seminar will examine the growth of the Pharmaceutical Industry from its early beginnings to its present role as a multi-national, multi-billion-dollar industry. The course will introduce students to the drug discovery and development process from inception to market. Selected readings and discussions will analyze the following: inequalities that emerge from and are reinforced by market-driven medicine, the responsibilities of drug developers to health care and general wellness on a global scale and the controversial role pharmaceutical marketing and promotion play in enabling the flow of information that is quite difficult to convey to patients and doctors.
MEDHM 603 Studies in Art and Medicine (same as ARLET 416*002)
Topic: The Art of Medicine
Professor: Phyllis DeJesse
Tuesdays 7:00 – 9:30 pm
3 credits. The Art of Medicine will explore the representations of humanity, illness, and the practice of medicine through the mediums of art – specifically paintings and sculptures. Backgrounds and the artistic endeavors of Rembrandt, Thomas Eakins*, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, and Andrew Wyeth (as well as others) will be investigated and discussed. Also, sculptures of the great masters Alberto Giacometti and Auguste Rodin will be examined. Field trips (private tours) to museums – The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA), The Philadelphia Museum of Art* (PMA), and The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) will afford participants the opportunity to see the masters’ works and augment class readings/discussions.
Additionally, the common goals of medicine and art as well as the similar skills of both physicians and artists will be reviewed. Also, the course will examine observational and interpretive techniques that may be honed by the inclusion of art and the humanities in medical education and consequently, foster communication to enhance the patient/physician relationship. Clearly, the use of these techniques are crucial to nurses, allied healthcare professionals, and patient advocates as well. A background or formal training in art is not required.
MEDH 818: Medical Humanities and Health Reform
Prof Richard Marfuggi
Thurs. 7-9:30
3 credits. The Medical Humanities movement must now play out in the context of National Health Care Reform, the goals of which are universal coverage and cost containment. Until now, the two trends have largely progressed in parallel, with mutual acknowledgment of the other’s merits. But now, when it is most important for them to coalesce, they are poised to collide. This course will discuss and debate how National Health Care Reform should be supported by Medical humanities. Some of the issues the course will address are; Is Health care Reform mandated by Medical Humanities principles? — no more than providing the exact same level of housing to all is mandated by humanist principles. Why should Medical Humanities support some sort of system that ensures everyone receives at least a decent minimum of health care, just as everyone has a right to basic housing and a basic education.
MEDHM 852: Topics in Disability
Topic: Disability: Personal Narrative and Empowerment
Prof. Frank Wyman
Thurs. 4 – 6:30
3 credits. This engages in a critical examination of important narratives-both in written form and on film-about and by persons with disabilities. These narratives reflect the lived experiences of persons with a variety of impairments, corresponding to the many ways in which disability is embodied: physical, sensory, cognitive and emotional. While medicine is often a significant part of these narratives, the lived experience of disabled persons is not medical alone. Disabled persons learn to navigate a world that is often hostile or ill designed for them, face disabling attitudes, and yet have the same emotional, spiritual and sexual needs as other persons
MEDHM 900b Clinical Practicum St.Barnabas Hospital
MEDHM 905: Writing Practicum
Topic: The Joy of Scholarly Writing: Beginning the Dissertation Process
Prof. Liana Piehler
Wednesday, 4-6:30 p.m.
3 credits. In this class, students will embark on their individual dissertation journeys. Specifically, students will choose and refine their dissertation topics and initiate research into that choice. We will review research skills and resources related to the various fields represented by the students/topics in the course. Early writing assignments will build towards composing a prospectus draft, and then an extended 20-page piece of scholarly writing related to their dissertation topics (shaped by Caspersen School guidelines). Students will benefit from both sustained individual attention to their research and writing, along with group workshops. Work in this course will foster individualized, imaginative approaches to scholarly writing, as well as solid critical thinking and perspectives on research materials and methods.
Students derive most value from the course if they enroll in their last or penultimate semester and are ready to begin the dissertation process. In order to enroll in The Joy of Scholarly Writing, students must have earned 24 or more credits.
History and Culture
HC 818 001: Topics in American History
Topic: America since 1945
Prof. James Carter
Tues. 1:15-3:45p.m.
The purpose of this course is to provide students access to the historical issues, themes, and historical literature on U.S. history since World War II. The course will proceed roughly chronologically from Cold War America, through the Sixties and Vietnam, Civil Rights Movement, the Age of Nixon, the rise of the “new right,” the Age of Reagan, the end of the Cold War, and Globalization and the Culture Wars of the 1990s. We will examine these changes in the field and explore the various methodological approaches through a series of intensive readings and have opportunities to explore them in extended discussions and in various writing exercises.
HC 818 002: American Political Thought
Prof. Kenneth Alexo
Tues. 7-9:30p.m.
This course investigates the various – and, at times, competing – definitions of equality advanced by key American political thinkers, including statesmen, novelists, and commentators. Is there a dominant conception of equality within the American political tradition, or have different conceptions prevailed at different times? In what key respects does equality matter from the perspective of American political practices and institutions? Can equality subsist apart from freedom? Does political equality rest or depend upon a deeper natural or social equality? Is equality natural or merely conventional? If human beings are, in fact, by nature equal, is democracy the only legitimate regime? Is there a necessary tie between equality and citizenship? Does the state have an obligation to maintain equality among citizens and, if so, what kind of equality? What types of inequality, if any, are justifiable within a polity founded upon, or committed to, the value of equality? We will explore these and similar questions through careful readings of writings by such thinkers as Thomas Paine, Jefferson, Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Henry Adams, John Dewey, and Ralph Ellison.
HC 820 001: Studies in American Literature:
Topic: Blood America: Reading Cormac McCarthy
Dean Robert Ready
Wed. 7:00-9:30 p.m.
In his summary survey of great books, The Western Canon, the critic Harold Bloom included Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The reclusive novelist came into even more prominence recently when the film version of No Country for Old Men won the Academy Award for best picture of 2008. McCarthy’s is a frightening humanism, a verbal artistry of heroic scale and risk, and a vision of historical American character having a dark beauty that both appalls and renews. He has created American characters that seem to come out hard from our collective memory, such as Judge Holden, Billy Parham, and most recently and simply, “the man” and “the boy.” This course will concentrate on six of McCarthy’s novels from Blood Meridian to The Road. It will ask questions about their representations of traditional male journeys; regeneration through violence; Southwest American nature, borders, and their peoples; narrative technique; roots in and contrasts with genre Westerns, Faulkner, and other American writers; immedicable evil; and intransigent courage and goodness. [Ex]
HC 833 001: Modern British and Imperial History
Prof. Jonathan Rose
Mon. 4:00-6:30 p.m.
The world as we know it today was shaped very largely by Great Britain and its Empire. This course surveys the political, social, economic history of modern Britain and its relationship to the larger world. It will cover the rise and fall of British power, industrial society and its discontents, popular culture, “Victorianism”, urbanization, social reform, politics, religion, sexuality, imperialism, the First and Second World Wars, the Beatles in the “Swinging Sixties,” and the changing historical profession.
HC 836 001: Understanding Ireland from Visual Images and Representations
Prof. Christine Kinealy
Tues. 7-9:30p.m.
Historians increasingly realize that visual culture can provide powerful and insightful windows into the past. Images and representations, in fact, can offer as much information to researchers as traditional written documentary sources. This course will use visual images – including Neolithic burial sites, illuminated gospels, early wood-cuttings, photographs, political cartoons, propaganda posters, video clips, and films – to learn more about Ireland’s past. From early religious iconography to political murals in Northern Ireland; from caricatures in Punch to famine memorials; from the Book of Kells to contemporary street art, each image tells us a story about Ireland’s rich culture and history.
HC 852 001: Abolition and Anti-Slavery in Europe
Prof. Christine Kinealy
Tuesday 4:00-6:30
In 1833, the British House of Commons voted to end slavery in the British Empire. The legislation was the result of decades of campaigning by anti-slavery groups in Britain and Ireland. After this date, they increasingly focused their attention on ending slavery in America. One result of this cooperation was that, in 1845, the escaped slave Frederick Douglass visited the British Isles. He described his journey as “transformative”, and pronounced Irish abolitionists to be ‘the most ardent’ he had ever encountered.
This course will look at the eighteenth-century origins of British and Irish anti-slavery. The contribution of key individuals, including Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, Mary Anne McCracken, Richard Madden, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Daniel O’Connell, will be examined. Other areas to be explored include: social constructs of race, divisions within the movement, the pivotal role played by women, the transatlantic dimension of abolition, and literary representations of slaves and slave-owners. As far as possible, students will be encouraged to use primary sources, including slave narratives.
HC 855 001: Twentieth Century European Intellectual and Cultural History
Prof. Edward Baring
Friday 1:15-3:45
This course explores the rich intellectual life of the twentieth century, tracing how key thinkers responded to the political, social, and philosophical challenges of European modernity. The class examines the fraught re-working of the Enlightenment heritage; the promise and perils of politics as a means of redemption; the search for ethical commitment and moral order in the absence of absolutes; the critique of power as it operates in knowledge, institutions, and technology; and different visions of liberation. Individual units are devoted to psychoanalysis, western Marxism, existentialism, feminism, structuralism, and post-structuralism; featured thinkers include Freud, Heidegger, Schmitt, Adorno, Horkheimer, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Foucault, Derrida, and Habermas among others.
HC 855 002: Modern Italy Since 1815
Prof. Paolo Cucchi
Thursday 4:00-6:30
This course provides an overview of Italian history, politics, and society, highlighting the forces that led the country to unification (1870) and the most salient events that have shaped the nation since. Topics to be discussed will include: the rise of fascism and neo-fascism; the two Italys and the Southern question; the Mafia, terrorism and white-collar crime; emigration, migration and immigration; the economic recovery and industrial change; and the rise and fall of Silvio Berlusconi. We will also examine other broad features of Italian life such as tradition and changes in the Italian family, the role of the Catholic Church and the secularization of Italian society, the system of education, and cultural modernization and mass media. [Ex]
HC 876*001: Topics in Global History
Topic: Classical Sociological Theory
Prof. Jonathan Reader
Mon. 1:15-3:45p.m.
This course examines the development of classical sociological theory in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, including the works of such theorists as Addams, Dubois, Durkheim, Marx, Simmel and Weber. It has the following three objectives: 1) an examination of the logical and ideological components of classical theories and their methodologies; 2) an assessment of how social and intellectual forces influenced the development of these theories; and 3) an exploration of how classical sociological theory has contributed to the development of contemporary sociological theory.
HC 876*002: Topics in Global History
Topic: Just War Theory
Prof. Darrell Cole
Wed. 4-6:30p.m.
The course offers a historical overview of the contemporary study of moral and religious issues in warfare. The course will cover but not be limited to the following: the philosophical and religious origins of moral thinking on war, morality and international law, moral problems in World War II and Vietnam, conscientious objection to war, the morality of war crimes trials, possessing and using nuclear weapons, Islamic views on war, ethical issues in the use of terrorism and in combating terrorism, moral problems in the Gulf Wars, and ethical issues in espionage, covert operations, and the use of torture.
HC 876*003: Topics in Global History
Topic: Lexicography across Cultures: The Socio-Political Influence of Dictionaries (Cross-listed as ARLET 322*002)
Prof. Donna Farina
Thurs. 4-6:30p.m.
This course will consider the history of lexicography, important concepts of the field, and the relevance of lexicography as an area of study today. The significance of the dictionary as a book with special social and even political authority will be examined. While the course will focus on dictionaries of English, it will compare the lexicographic traditions of other languages and cultures. Topics include: slang, taboo words, censorship of dictionaries, public perceptions of dictionaries and dictionary work, the role of dictionaries in education, the impact of the Internet on lexicography, corpus acquisition, and the use of the Internet and corpora in dictionary compilation and in the study of language. Students taking the course will have the opportunity to practice essential lexicographic tasks such as word sense disambiguation, defining, production of illustrative examples, and the creation of dictionary entries.
HC 886*001: Environmental History
Prof. Luis Campos
Wed. 7-9:30p.m.
As a study of the ways in which humans have understood, interacted with, and both shaped and been shaped by their physical environments, environmental history is central to the study of history. This course engages historically and critically with the history of “the environment” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Themes to be explored include ideas of wilderness and landscape; romanticism and environmental management; biological imperialism, the Columbian exchange, and European ecological invasion; the history of ecology, biogeography, and conservation biology; the rise of the American conservation and preservation movements; resource exploitation and shifting visions of nature; imperialism, colonialism, and the rise of “human ecology”; the green revolution and the population bomb; the development of environmental movements, deep ecology and environmental justice; biodiversity and biopiracy; and mutant, agrotechnological, and synthetic ecologies. Readings will be drawn from both classic and contemporary sources.
HC 887*001 Topics in Art History
Topic: The Historical Imaginary in Modern Art
Prof. Rhodes
Fri. 4-6:30 p.m.
In this course we will examine how modern and contemporary visual artists (c. 1750 to the present) have represented, interpreted, and been inspired by historical events, figures, and documents. We will begin with discussion of the grandiose history paintings of the romantic period produced by such artists as Benjamin West, Eugene Delacroix, and Theodore Gericault, looking closely at their theoretical and ideological underpinnings. Next, we will consider how modernist artists who moved away from historicist styles in favor of more abstract visual languages such as Pablo Picasso processed historical events in their work. Finally, we will study contemporary artists who critically interpret history through techniques such as installation art, performative re-enactment, archival and museum interventions, and appropriation of earlier art. Throughout the course we will ask questions about the changing roles of the visual arts in the recording and analysis of history and how visual artists who work with historical materials and subjects shape our understanding of history in ways that differ from the accounts of historians and art historians.
HC 806 001 Writing as a Public Intellectual
Prof. Damon DiMarco
Mondays, January 30, February 13, February 27, March 26, April 9, and Friday April 20
Time: 4:00-6:30
A distinguishing component of H & C is public engagement. This writing workshop introduces advanced Ph.D. students to the practice of writing for the larger public, that is, for intellectually and culturally engaged readers of non-academic print and online media. The goal of the workshop is for each student to learn how to modulate the discursive practices of academic writing into the substantial but accessible writing of a genuinely public intellectual.
HC 895 001 Topics in Memory Studies: History and Memory in the Modern World
Prof. Evans
Wed. 1:15-3:45p.m.
The modern world has seen a resurgence of memory– especially the collective memory of historical events that is often at variance with mainstream historical accounts. Memory has become an important research subject for neuroscientists studying Alzeheimer’s and related mental disorders. Memory is the defining element of digital technology. Repressed memory has been invoked by victims of childhood and sexual abuse. Collective memories of traumatic group experiences like the Holocaust have been instrumental in validating personal experiences, in achieving justice and reparations, and in pursuing political ends. Throughout the modern world, popular memories influence political contests and help justify ideological claims. This seminar examines the history of memory, the scientific and philosophical understanding of memory, its relationship to modern historical studies, and the multiple manifestations of collective memory in the modern world. Readings include Nora, Todorov, Yates, Yerushalmi, Augustine, Boym, and more.
HC 896 001: Topics in Modernism: Modern Literature and Culture
Prof. Cassandra Laity
Thursday 7:00-9:30
This course will read modernist literature and aesthetics in the context of a broad spectrum of artistic, social, cultural, and historical “modernities” ranging from the impact of the early 20th-century modern art, the urban/technological milieu, popular culture, and World War I, to new “sexologist” theories of gender/sexuality. Literary works will include the early manifestoes and artistic productions of futurism, vorticism, and imagism; World War I prose/poetry; and the “high modernist” poetry/prose of the 1920s and ‘30s. We will read works by Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, Ezra Pound, H.D., E. M. Forster, Mina Loy, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. Secondary readings will include both theorists of cultural studies such as Walter Benjamin and contemporary critical essays by modernist scholars on the individual writers and “modernities” addressed. [Ex]
HC 990: Research Tutorial
All Ph.D. and M.A. students must take a Research Tutorial, normally in their final semester of course work, where each student will produce an original and publishable scholarly paper. The tutorial introduces students to archival research, the apparatus of scholarship, and the art of presenting papers at conferences and publishing them. Students in this tutorial work mainly independently but under faculty supervision.