Courses

This seminar will focus on the role of religion in 21st-century right-wing movements in Europe and the Americas. For each case study, we will spend one week learning the basic history and contours of the case and one week reading and discussing material that analyzes and attempts to explain the case. Categories and explanatory models covered in these more analytical weeks will include religious nationalism, secularism and laicism… Continue Reading – Religion & 21st-Century Right Wing Movements

Unruly Bodies of Global Cinema offers a close examination of the cinematic discourses surrounding those bodies that are considered abnormal, queer, weird, and monstrous throughout diverse global contexts with specific attention to those works of global cinema.

In this multilateral search for the intersection of theories of "weird" with the spaces of the other, we will search for the queer, the weird, the outsider, the… Continue Reading – Unruly Bodies in Literature and Media

This course is an introduction to select aspects of the social, cultural, intellectual and political history of the Papacy from the early modern period to the present. Put briefly, the seminar aims to analyze the human (as opposed to theological or strictly ecclesiastical) element in the Papacy. As such, the course through a case-study approach generally addresses trends in the social background of Popes over the past five… Continue Reading – The Popes and the City of Rome, 1500-Present

“A landmark report from the United Nations’ [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, its Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 oC, dated October 8, 2018,] paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought,” Coral Davenport writes, in the December 7, 2018 edition of The New York Times, according to which “avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a… Continue Reading – The Climate Crisis in Philosophy and Popular Culture - Sp 25

Prereq: FSH placement, SPA 204, or permission of the instructor

This seminar is open to students with a high proficiency in Spanish that wish to deepen their conversational and writing skills in the language. Readings of both canonical and non-canonical texts will be provided in class. The course is open to students that love Spanish literature but may not have the opportunity to delve in the language… Continue Reading – Don Quijote: una crónica de absurdos, lectores y el placer de leer

Science communication is an integral part of scientists’ everyday lives.  From writing papers and proposals, to giving talks, creating lectures, or composing tweets, it is imperative for scientists to learn how to effectively communicate to a wide range of audiences in order to be successful.  Science communication has become a field within the scientific community in recent years and it generally refers to the public… Continue Reading – Talk Science to Me

GRAPHIC MEMOIR—WHAT’S ON ALISON BECHDEL’S MIND

The seminar will examine the works of Alison Bechdel—her comic strips and her three graphic memoirs. The seminar will begin by learning how to read graphic materials, the better to appreciate and analyze Bechdel’s work. The facet of Bechdel’s graphic memoirs that we will focus on will be the literary, psychoanalyOc and spiritual works that she engages on her life… Continue Reading – Graphic Memoir —What's on Alison Bechdel's Mind

The particular power of the word, and by extension literature, in forming and transforming people’s worldview has been widely used by governments focused on ideology to describe to those whom they control the kinds of social and political character they desire for their society. This course explores, through primary and occasional secondary texts, the literature created during three periods of social… Continue Reading – Literature Under Tyranny

In this course, we will read, think, and talk about health, science, and medicine, and we will explore what happens when we face the messiness of language, history, economics, and politics. Throughout the course, we will examine fiction, nonfiction, narrative, and metaphor. The course has four sections. We begin by reading and writing about pandemics and metaphors, juxtaposing the film Contagion and the more literary play and… Continue Reading – Introduction to Health, Medicine, and Literature

This course explores contemporary artistic responses to the long and complicated history of the U.S.-Mexico border. We will consider various meanings of the word frontera or border. What is a border geographically speaking? What does it mean in political and legal terms? How do we conceive of the border in cultural, literary, linguistic, political, judicial, and personal ways? What is it like to live on the border or on the… Continue Reading – Art and Politics in the Borderlands

One of the ways to think about what philosophers do is to imagine them tending to concepts we use routinely in thinking to ourselves and speaking with one another, but which remain controversial even after more “scientific” folks have had their say. There have been many such concepts in the history of philosophy, among them the concept of “person.”

Thinking about “persons” is, by the conventional standards of the history of… Continue Reading – The Problem of Evil in Philosophy and Popular Culture

“Imagining Queer Communities” investigates the evolution of the idea of a queer community historically, as it developed in art, literature, music, medicine, media, and politics. What makes a queer community? Is there such a thing as a unified community? Or does the term register a utopian desire for a collectivity not yet achieved? Can a queer community span generations, continents, and identities? What forms of sociality does it… Continue Reading – Imagining Queer Communities

Ever since Eve caused “the fall of mankind,” female curiosity has been seen as dangerous. Why does this Christian interpretation of Genesis still inhabit our cultural imagination? What does it say about our needs and anxieties? In this seminar, I intend to show that men constructed female curiosity as an act of immodesty to mask a gesture of insubordination. Eve is the mediating figure that makes it possible to link the curious… Continue Reading – From Eve to the Femme Fatale: Women who dared to know too much

The practice of slavery has risen and faded a number of times, and even exists in some regions today. Its most extensive practice took place during the colonial era, in the Age of Mercantile Capitalism in  the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, between 1450 and 1860,  and  its legacy is continues down to the present day.  Colonial era slavery involved the translocation and control of millions of people and its… Continue Reading – Historical Archaeology of Slavery

From the native Americans, to colonists, to the immigrant communities of yesterday and today, the United States has never spoken just one language. This course offers an exploration of this dynamic tapestry, tracing the history and ever-evolving demographics of languages spoken across the nation. Though addressing topics such as language policy, bilingual education, language contact and revitalization, language attitudes, and… Continue Reading – The Multilingual United States

This seminar addresses several aspects of sex and gender as interpreted in United States Constitutional law.

We begin the course with an introductory unit on the concept of the Constitutional right to privacy as established by the United States Supreme Court. Then we examine how that right has been interpreted to apply to intimacy and sexual activity.

We then begin our second unit on the history of sodomy laws in the… Continue Reading – Sex, Gender, and the U.S. Constitution

New York’s Lower East Side may be the most studied and storied neighborhood in America. Since its emergence as the city’s most densely populated immigrant neighborhood in the mid-19thcentury, the Lower East Side has been the subject of extensive scrutiny by journalists, reformers, photographers, urban planners, as well as creative engagements by writers, visual artists, and filmmakers. Over the past century-and-a-half the Lower… Continue Reading – The Lower East Side, Then and Now

“Magic, Religion, and Science” is a survey of the anthropological, archaeological, historical, and literary evidence for organized systems of knowledge, such as those traditionally circumscribed under the rubrics of “magic,” “religion,” and “science,” which reflect how humans perceive the world and their place within it.

The fact that all three of these categories are factitious (that is, made up) is evident from the… Continue Reading – Magic, Religion, and Science

"Metamorphoses: Body as Rupture and Disruption” examines the queer way real and imagined bodies (human, animal, alien, cyborg) disrupt our traditional categories of thought, often irrupting in violent and troubling ways. These traditional categories (male/female, human/animal, normal/abnormal) were culturally constructed precisely to contain, manage, and control the fundamental unruliness of the human embodied experience. We will… Continue Reading – Metamorphoses: Body as Rupture and Disruption

The search for other intelligent life in the universe and the question of how humans would manage first contact with such life poses many scholarly questions. These include: Does such life exist or is it likely to exist? Is contact possible? Why have we not had such contact? If we encounter such life, how should we respond and what might we expect? How could we possibly even begin to understand alien intelligence? These questions… Continue Reading – Xenoanthropology