Course Highlights

Forms of Humanism: Renaissance to Enlightenment

Between the years 1400 and 1800 – what we now call the Renaissance and the Enlightenment – the arts re-focused themselves on the human and the mundane as new ideas about the individual and his role in society were debated. Works by Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Mozart, and many other touchstones of Western civilization appeared during this period. “Forms of Humanism: Renaissance to Enlightenment,” a course offered by Drew’s humanities program, delves into the period and asks students to think deeply about how it shaped our modern world. The course is taught every other fall, and was most recently taught in fall 2008 by Louis Hamilton, an assistant professor of religious studies, and James Hala, an English professor and director of the humanities program. Hamilton says the team-teaching approach is an essential component of the course and others in the program. “We try to convey to the students that all intellectual endeavor is a dialogue, not a monologue,” Hamilton says. “We also try to demonstrate that every text can be approached from multiple vantage points.” Having two professors present ideas from different perspectives and challenge each other helps students understand the intellectual process and brings energy to the course, he adds. Frank Sedita, a junior majoring in Italian and sociology, had never taken a team-taught course before he took “Forms of Humanism” last fall. “We got to see the professors bounce ideas off each other and understand how everything is interrelated,” Sedita says. He also enjoyed the course’s wide range of readings and activities, such as attending a production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Manhattan and a chamber music concert on the Drew campus. “It was a very comprehensive course,” Sedita notes. “The reading featured so many works from all over Europe and the United States. We saw where the ideas of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment originated and how they shaped the American Revolution and our Constitution.”

Africa in New York and Paris

Junior Erin Newell thinks every student at Drew should be required to take at least one humanities course. “The humanities program is the flagship of a liberal arts education,” Newell says. “You really do ‘get the whole picture,’ ” as the program’s motto goes. And one Drew humanities course Newell, an English major, would recommend is “Africa in Harlem and Paris,” which she took in spring 2009. The course was taught by James Hala, an English professor and director of the humanities program, and Philip Peek, a professor of anthropology. The course explored the period during the 1920s and ’30s when both New York’s Harlem and Paris experienced a blossoming of African-American artists and intellectuals. “By the 1920s, Reconstruction and World War I were over and large numbers of African-Americans had attended college,” says Peek, a cultural anthropologist. “In addition, philanthropists were helping to support black artists of the period.” Society became fascinated by the music, visual arts, drama, dance, and literature of African-Americans. Works by W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larsen electrified readers, and jazz found its voice as a true American art form. “For the first time, African-American artists were addressing each other and white audiences,” Peek adds. Concurrently, however, the Ku Klux Klan was growing in power and many artists and thinkers fled to Paris, which was the focus of the second part of the course. In addition to reading texts by such authors as DuBois and Jean Toomer, the class traveled to New York to visit sites that figure prominently in the Harlem Renaissance. Newell says the course fit in well with her concentration in post-colonial literature. “You see a lot of oppression and people discovering their own voices in post-colonial literature,” she says. “During the Harlem Renaissance, black Americans are writing for the first time about their lives and are able to choose the way they want to express themselves.”

European Middle Ages

Junior Alicia Rapp was pleasantly surprised by the intensity of the “European Middle Ages” course she took in spring 2008. “It was so much more in depth than I thought it would be,” the English major recalls. “It was like four or five courses in one. There was a lot of reading and a lot of ideas to absorb, but at the end, I felt really proud of myself and had a better understanding of the Middle Ages.” That’s exactly the response Professor Karen Pechilis hopes for from students in the course. Pechilis is the former director of the humanities program and a religious studies professor who co-taught the course last spring with James Hala, current humanities program director. The goal of the course is to illuminate the Middle Ages – which roughly span the years 400 to 1400 – through the study of interrelated themes, including religion, politics, literature, and everyday life. “There was a lot happening in the Middle Ages,” Pechilis says. Contrary to the popular image of those centuries as a grim, backwards era, “It was not a dark age,” she adds. “There was literature, art, philosophy, music. It was a transformative period.” As in other humanities courses, “The European Middle Ages” incorporates non-classroom activities to illustrate what students are reading about in texts. For example, the class traveled to Manhattan to tour St. John the Divine Cathedral and The Cloisters. “I had been to the Cloisters before,” says Rapp, “but when I saw the unicorn tapestries this time, I noticed more detail and had a better understanding of what was going on in that time period.” Students are also encouraged to attend or participate in MedFest, an annual spring festival that celebrates Medieval life. Rapp is a member of the student group that produces the event, That Medieval Thing. At last spring’s MedFest, she played a beggar. “I was apparently a very knowledgeable beggar!” she says with a laugh. “I could talk about things that happened during the Middle Ages like the Plague and Richard’s Crusades.”