Philosophy

People often talk about the problem of evil, but what do they mean? In its religious version, evil is the problem: If there is a good and all-powerful God, why does He allow evil? In its nonreligious version, the problem is: Why are humans evil? And can evil be overcome? We will track the problem of evil from the death camps to the notion of sin and of a cosmic struggle between good and evil. Students will be expected to bring a written question on the reading to each class and to write a paper analyzing a topic or reading; students may also be asked to do short, in-class presentations. Our focus in group conference will be on rhetoric. We will learn about the design of oratory in the ancient world. We will do this partly for practical reasons, to help us think about how to write anything designed to persuade and, partly, to help us think about the purposes and possible misuse of persuasion. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and group conferences. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

Western philosophy originated in Ancient Greece more than 2,500 years ago, addressing fundamental questions about being and time, about the human condition, and about ethics and politics, science and religion. Despite the universal nature of these questions, for most of these 2,500 years philosophy was practiced (at least publicly) mostly by men. It was not until the 20th century that this convention began to be significantly challenged, both practically (by the fact that more and more women entered the forefront of philosophical work) and theoretically (by questioning the historical contents of this male-dominant tradition). This yearlong course will be a survey of continental philosophy in the 20th and 21st centuries that, countering the aforementioned tradition, focuses exclusively on the work of women in philosophy. Among the authors we may read are Sarah Ahmed, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Karen Barad, Talia Bettcher, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Luce Irigaray, Melany Klein, Julia Kristeva, Audre Lorde, Maria Lugones, Simone Weil, Sylvia Wynter, and Virginia Woolf. Some of these philosophers are feminist or consider sexual difference as philosophically pertinent, and some are not. One way or another, surveying their thought will be our means for acquiring a comprehensive view of key developments in continental philosophy in the last and present centuries, including phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, structuralism and poststructuralism, feminism, Black feminism, decolonial, and queer theories. This is a reading- and writing-intensive course (readings will not normally exceed 30 pages per week, but philosophical texts can be extraordinarily demanding). Students will be evaluated based on weekly reading assignments, participation in group work and group discussions during class, and timely submission of three short papers each semester, as well as demonstrable investment in conference work throughout the year. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and group conferences that may include academic skill development such as time management and effective communication, as well as research, reading, writing, and editing. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

In this course, we shall begin by reading Schelling’s Bruno, which seeks redemption through a mystical “pantheism”—the teaching that the world is one with God. We shall then go on to read various texts from Nietzsche. Nietzsche rejects the mysticism of Schelling but still wants to save the world and seeks to do so through what one could call an atheist pantheism, which redirects the passion for transcendence to an embrace of life on Earth. Students will be expected to bring a written question on the reading to each class, to present short sections of the reading, and to write a paper analyzing a topic or section of the class reading.

What is being? What is time? What is justice? What is truth? What is the best way to live, and should we fear death? More than 2,500 years ago in Ancient Greece, a tradition of asking this sort of question developed under the name “philosophy,” which is Greek for “love of wisdom.” Veering away from the mythological and religious traditions dominant at the time, the first writers we now recognize as “philosophers” broke radically new ground for self-understanding and set the stage for modern scientific, political, and theological ideas. In this course, we will read the earliest surviving texts of this tradition by a group of authors who are now known collectively as the “Pre-Socratics.” These include Thales, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Ancient Atomists, to name a few. These texts are fragmentary, since the full works are lost. The ideas that we find in them are creative, inspiring, and often funny. Studying them is an opportunity to reflect on what “philosophy” means and an invitation to philosophize, perhaps becoming philosophers ourselves. This survey course on the origins of philosophy is designed both for beginners, for whom it would serve as an introduction, and for those more experienced in philosophy who wish to enrich their knowledge of its roots. We will accompany our readings of the first philosophers with commentaries by later thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, and with occasional reference to non-Greek or non-philosophical sources.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often regarded as a foundational figure in the development of the Western ideal of authenticity—the belief that a moral life entails uncompromising loyalty to one’s true self. Rousseau dedicated his life to the pursuit of a formula in which authenticity could serve as a path to happiness. And yet, time and again, he found himself entangled in paradoxes that were not merely philosophical but vividly reflected in his own life. His educational theory is a cornerstone of modern humanistic educational thought, yet he entrusted all five of his children to a public foundling hospital shortly after birth. He denounced popular entertainment but authored the best-selling novel of the 18th century. He professed deep Christian faith, while his books were burned as heretical. He argued that romantic love is an essential part of human existence while spending his final years in near-total solitude. This seminar welcomes anyone interested in modern philosophy, theories of the self, and the fragile threshold where bold ideas encounter human vulnerability. Rousseau was not only a thinker of inner conflict, he was also a political revolutionary whose writings have been interpreted as foundational to modern communism, liberal democracy, and even totalitarianism. His influence stretches across the ideological spectrum, making him a key figure for understanding both the promises and the perils of modernity.

Do you have any reason for caring about anyone else? Is it rational to do so? Is it nice to do so? Is it irresponsible not to do so? If we ask—“What is ethics?”—one of the most basic answers is that it seems predicated on, and concerned with, the distinction between oneself and others. This course will investigate this basic distinction. Questions of focus will include: How are we to understand the concept of otherness? Where does it originate? Does a sense of responsibility follow from a recognition of the other? While, at the most fundamental level, otherness may be understood as simply what is not me, it comes to be conceived in more determinate terms, such as nationality, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, sexuality, political affiliation, and various other categories. We will also examine encounters with nonhuman forms of otherness as they come to bear in nature, as well as in art. The course will begin by considering how the Enlightenment’s theory of individualism grants us a new perspective on what it means to be a self and then how this allows us to envision another’s perspective. To build our views as we proceed, we will draw insights from Hegelian ethics of recognition, feminist ethics of care, and Levinasian ethics of responsibility. Authors studied will include, among others, Hegel, Freud, Beauvoir, Sartre, Fanon, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Glissant, and Plumwood.

Political theory consists of a discourse of thinking about the nature of political power; the conditions for its just and unjust use; the rights of individuals, minorities, and majorities; and the nature and bounds of political community. Rather than tackling pressing political problems one at a time, political theorists seek systematic solutions in overall visions of just societies or comprehensive diagnoses of the roots of oppression and domination in political orders. This course will focus on modern writers who shaped the terms and concepts that increasingly populate political imaginations the world over; that is, the conscious and unconscious ideas about rights, power, class, democracy, community, and the like that we use to make sense of our political lives. Thinkers to be considered will include: in fall, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant—the long social-contract tradition; in spring, Hegel, Marx, Mill, and Nietzsche—the long tradition in critical theory. By studying these thinkers, we will be better positioned to answer the following questions: What is the nature of political power? What is the content of social justice? Does democracy threaten basic individual rights? Is it more important to respect the individual or the community when the interests of the two conflict? Is a market economy required by, or incompatible with, democracy? What aspects of human potential and social worlds do different grand theories of political life illuminate and occlude? Finally, this course will also pose the issue of the worth and legitimacy of European modernity; that is, the historical process that produced capitalism, representative democracy, religious pluralism, the modern sciences, ethical individualism, secularism, fascism, communism, new forms of racism and sexism, and many “new social movements.” Which of the ideas that jostle for prominence within this tradition are worth defending? Which should be rejected? Or should we reject them all and instead embrace a new, postmodern political epoch? In answering these questions, we will be forced to test both the internal coherence and the continuing relevance of the political visions that shape modern politics.

While important trends in contemporary culture and politics seem to promise not only “the death of philosophy” but also the arrival of a “"post-truth epoch,” the oldest discipline itself seems not to have gotten the memo. Instead, the last 50 years witnessed a blossoming of original, important, exciting, and genuinely new work in systematic philosophy. Spanning different traditions (analytic and continental) and locations (Anglo-American, German, French, Italian, postcolonial, etc.), the reemergence of systematic philosophy revisits many of the most important questions that occupied the grand tradition for much of the last 2,500 years: What matters in life? What do we owe to each other? What do we mean by the truth? In what does human agency consist? Does human morality stem primarily from reason or emotion or from their combined operation? What is the nature of justice? Is it always wrong to lie? Can all aspects of human experience be accounted for in terms of biological processes, or do some escape reductive scientific explanation? At the same time, new issues of race, gender, identity, and, ultimately, the claim to universal knowledge and authority made on behalf of philosophy itself have been added to the range of traditional issues addressed by contemporary philosophers. This course is for any student interested in coming up to speed with important developments in recent philosophy and will focus on the big ideas from some of the most important recent thinkers. We will not only survey some of the most important and challenging works in contemporary philosophy but also put these thinkers in dialogue with each other, testing the insights they generate and also, by comparing them with one another, the blind spots they produce.

The magnum opus, Ethics, of great early modern Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1633-1672) will serve as the focus of this course. German philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi once wrote that “Spinoza is the only philosopher who had the courage to take philosophy seriously; if we want to be philosophers, we can only be Spinozists.” Even if Jacobi’s statement is exaggerated, it is certainly true that studying Spinoza will make us better philosophers. But Spinoza promises much more. He claims that those who follow the guide of his Ethics become freer, wiser, and, above all, happier. Ethics is a notoriously difficult and enigmatic text, written in the form of geometrical proofs, even concerning psychological, moral, and theological matters. Yet, many philosophers and poets considered it exceptionally beautiful. Among the questions the book tackles are: What determines our desires, and in what ways can we, or should we, control them? In what ways can we be free, and in what ways are our behaviors and desires predetermined? In what ways can we be unique, and in what ways are we an inherent part of a greater whole? As we will learn, Spinoza argued that God and Nature are synonyms and that, to achieve an eternal and blissful life, we do not need to die and go to heaven. We do not even need to change the world or ourselves. All we need is to understand the way things are.

What is education for? And what kind of human being does it aim to shape? This seminar will invite students to explore education not merely as a set of practices but, rather, as a reflection of our deepest convictions about human nature, freedom, and society. Through philosophical inquiry, students will develop critical, reflective, and ethically grounded perspectives on their role as educators. The seminar will be structured around four compelling visions of the human being, each giving rise to a distinct educational ideal and each delivering a pointed critique of dominant educational paradigms. Through readings in Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates, we will examine classical humanism and its belief in a universal human essence that education must actualize through the pursuit of virtue, fulfillment, and happiness. We will then turn to the Romantic-Naturalist tradition—Montaigne, Rousseau, and Fröbel—who emphasized the child’s innate goodness and warned against educational systems that suppress natural growth. The existentialist approach, represented by Nietzsche, Sartre, and Greene, shifts from self-realization to self-creation, challenging us to resist conformity. Finally, we will explore critical pedagogy through the works of Freire, Giroux, hooks, Arendt, and Adorno, who argue that education must address broader social injustices and guard against the political dangers of uncritical obedience. This seminar will offer students not only a rich encounter with the history of educational thought but also an invitation to take a stand—to reflect on who we are, who we aspire to become, and what kind of education might lead us there.

Presumably, you care about movies. Why do you care about movies? Because they entertain you? Because they are beautiful? Because they are informative? Because they make you feel things? The guiding thought of this course will be that we care about movies because they participate in the practice of philosophy—or at least they have that potential. Of course, this also presumes that we care about philosophy—a claim that will take some time to defend. To test that hypothesis—that films have the potential to participate in the practice of philosophy—we first need to consider what the practice of philosophy is. Then, we will need to say something about what film is. And then, we can examine whether film can do philosophy. In the first part of the course, we will analyze the medium of film in order to clarify the characteristics of film that would allow it to be philosophical. In the second part of the course, we will explore how those characteristics of film contribute to how we think philosophically about our lives. In particular, students will explore problems pertaining to subjectivity (What it is to be a human being?) and to ethics (How do I know the right thing to do?). Each week, we will watch a film—including Jeanne Dielman, Psycho, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Get Out, and Spring Breakers—and read a philosophical text—including Aristotle, Cavell, Merleau-Ponty, Parfit, and Adorno—with the aim of placing the two in conversation. 

Immanuel Kant revolutionized philosophy with his Copernican turn, which limits our knowledge of the world to our subjective experience of it. Kant elaborated this thought in the three volumes of philosophy that comprise his critical system. After investigating questions pertaining to knowledge in the first critique and problems of validating moral judgment in the second critique, Kant shifts in the third critique—our object of study—to elaborate on the forms of judgment that we employ in making sense of beauty in nature, works of art, and the meaning or purpose of life. The first part of the book focuses on aesthetic judgments; in it, Kant asks: What do we mean when we call something—for instance, a sunset or even a painting of a sunset—beautiful? The second part of the book investigates teleological judgments; in it, Kant asks: How do we judge something to be alive? Not only does this book establish many of the central questions of modern aesthetics—such as: How can aesthetic judgments be objective?—but it also addresses the antagonism between freedom and nature, the experience of the sublime, the emergence of artistic genius, the postulation of a sensus communis (common sense), and the relation between beauty and morality. Over the course of the semester, we will observe the vast influence of the Critique of Judgment on both art and the philosophy of art. We will complement our reading of Kant’s text by considering modern thinkers such as Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Jean-François Lyotard, Achille Mbembe, and Hannah Ginsborg. As well, Kant’s ideas will be appraised in consideration of the works of Beethoven, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Jo Baer, Marcel Duchamp, and James Turrell, among many others.

There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarity. —Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is one of the most important thinkers and writers of the 20th century. His many writings and innovative concepts, which continue to be discussed and debated today, are of pressing relevance for the contemporary moment, marked as it is by themes of technological and aesthetic transformations, political violence, and histories of exile and displacement. The purpose of this intensive seminar will be to delve into the textures of Benjamin’s life—from his childhood years in Berlin to his final days in France and Spain—while considering the diverse and intricate formations of Benjamin’s thought and writing. For this inquiry, we will be drawing from a number of biographical, historiographic, political, literary, and anthropological lines of analysis to gain an incisive sense of his groundbreaking writings on film and photography, literature and translation, concepts of history, and the politics of culture. Along the way, we will connect Benjamin’s thought to other significant writers and philosophers, including Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. We will focus on a number of key texts authored by Benjamin, including Berlin Childhood Around 1900, The Arcades Project, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” “The Task of the Translator,” “The Storyteller,” and “On the Concept of History.” In engaging with these and other challenging texts and giving thought to Benjamin’s life and death more generally, students will develop a richly informed understanding of the life and thought of this singularly compelling person while coming to terms with the haunted histories of the 20th and 21st centuries.

This yearlong seminar offers an introduction to histories of modern and contemporary art through two distinct themes: place and space. In fall, we will explore the place of the Hudson Valley through the category of Hudson River School landscape painting, asking how Euro-American artists portrayed ideologies of imperialism, settler-colonialism, and Western expansionism through the genre of landscape. We will also explore how Indigenous and Black artists have defined place, land, and embodiment as counter-histories to the dominant white, Western norm. Along the way, we will ask broader questions, such as: What can art tell us about humans’ relationships to land and environment? How does art shape our understanding of climate crisis and the Anthropocene or how humans have indelibly altered the earth? In spring, we will explore the category of sculpture in relationship to the body, light, and touch; the pedestal, the space of the museum, the monument, and the public sphere; commodities and everyday objects; and photography, video, and film. Our aim will be to explore how sculptures and installations shape how we perceive objects, sites, and spaces in the world. We will also research the Sarah Lawrence College archives to write about public sculptures, both past and present, on campus. This course will introduce students to the skills of close reading, visual analytical writing, and archival and library research. Assignments may include visual analysis essays, reading responses, peer reviews, and collaborative digital humanities projects. Conference projects will entail writing a long-form research paper or presenting your research in an alternate format, such as a podcast or online exhibition. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities that will include field trips to area museums, introductions to campus resources, and research sessions. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

Focusing on Europe and its intersections with the Americas, Africa, and the Caribbean, this course will explore how artists in the long 19th century responded to the economic, political, and social upheavals of modernity and imperialism. We will look to artists depicting plantation economies, sanitizing the slave trade, and abolitionists forging a new visual rhetoric to depict bodily freedom and personhood. We will consider how artists reveled in capitalist spectacle, leisure, and entertainment, including through the nascent medium of photography. We will also grapple with how realism and materialism became tools to voice politics amidst revolution and nationalism, social inequality, and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Readings and lectures will introduce the movements of neoclassicism, romanticism, realism, impressionism, aestheticism, and neo-impressionism— and dig deeper to take up questions of collective and individual; center and periphery; gender, race, class, and sexuality; and land, landscape, and industry. This lecture-seminar hybrid will also entail field trips to area museums.

This seminar in art theory and curatorial practice will explore ecological aesthetics in the era of anthropogenic climate change. The course’s guiding question will be: What forms might an aesthetic experience of nature take when it no longer privileges the human observer but, rather, cultivates an equality and reciprocity between all forms of life? Possible answers will be drawn from recent work in critical theory, Black studies, Indigenous studies, queer theory, continental philosophy, and science and technology studies. Case studies on the work of selected contemporary artists will complement the theoretical frameworks under consideration. The course’s topics will include: post-Enlightenment aesthetics of nature, biopower, vitalism, post- and antihumanisms, plant philosophies, bacteria and fungi studies, and deep time. The course will also incorporate a curatorial practicum that will allow students to participate in the production of an on-campus exhibition exploring ecological themes. In addition to exercises on exhibition writing, model making, and art installation, we will meet with artworld professionals working at museums in the New York area.

We are told, in one of the earliest accounts of the life and work of the Netherlandish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-1569), that his prints and paintings elicited laughter. From pictures of carnival celebrations and children’s games to peasant weddings and riotous hellscapes, the comic artist makes his viewers, both in the late 16th century and today, question whether any of it should be taken seriously. This course will explore the humor element in the work of Bruegel and many others in early modern Europe, examining the possible beginnings of a recognition of the artistic value of comedy and the contributions of these artists to the culture of laughter. Following art historians, as well as cultural historians who have theorized about the emergence of new comic techniques and the impulse to produce pictures in a “comic mode,” we will explore innovative creative practices and the social contexts of humor throughout Europe—from Bruegel in the Netherlands to Annibale Carracci in Italy to Albrecht Dürer in Germany to Jacques Callot in France and beyond. Topics of discussion will include early modern medical perspectives on laughter, shifting notions about humor in relation to civility and decorum, the functions of tragicomedy, the secularization of the image, and the dual roles of entertainment and didacticism in art. This course will involve visits to area museums to study paintings and prints in person.

This course will be about how we perceive objects, sites, and spaces in the world. We will look closely at how modern and contemporary critics and artists have defined the medium of sculpture in relation to the body, light, and touch; the pedestal, the museum, the monument, and the public sphere; commodities and everyday objects; and photography, video, and film. We will begin with how theorists and writers described sculptural perception in the Enlightenment and beyond, consider the legacies of neoclassicism and the fraught status of sculpture in modernism, and conclude our story with large-scale installations in contemporary art. Along the way, we will explore sculptors remaking the category of sculpture by upsetting expectations for a stable object and blurring the boundaries between public monument and private encounter; using reproducible media to display their objects in the public realm; and making objects that incorporated commodities, functional things, bodies, raw matter, and detritus. The course will touch on discourses of neoclassicism, modernism, race and cultural memory, surrealism, minimalism, site-specificity, installation, feminism, and participatory art. Exploring a range of focused case studies—whenever possible through works in person—this course will ask what a 20th-century sculpture was and how it operated in the public realm. This lecture-seminar hybrid will also entail field trips to area museums.

This course will center on the close, detailed reading of a small number of foundational texts in classical Confucianism and Taoism. Our focus will be to explore how these texts might fit “virtue ethics,” which emphasizes moral character and the pursuit of a worthwhile life. Some attention will be paid to other forms of ethics, including those that stress either the adherence to duties and obligations or the social consequences of ethical action. The primary goal, however, will be to examine the ways in which classical Chinese philosophers regarded personal virtues and “good character” as both a prerequisite to and an explanation of appropriate action and its consequences. Among the more specific topics to be explored include: ideal traits of virtue, the links between moral values and different understandings of human nature, the psychological structures of virtue, practices leading to the cultivation of virtue, the roles of family and friendship in developing moral values, and what constitutes a good life. 

In recent years, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has made astonishing technical progress and has begun to assume an increasingly widespread and important role in society. AI systems can now (at least to some extent) drive cars; recognize human faces, speech, and gestures; diagnose diseases; control autonomous robots; converse fluently in English; instantly translate text from one language to another; beat world-champion human players at chess, Go, and other games; and perform many other amazing feats that just a few decades ago were only possible within the realm of science fiction. This progress has led to extravagant expectations, claims, hopes, and fears about the future of AI technology and its potential impact on society. In this course, we will attempt to peer beyond the hype and to come to grips with both the promise and the peril of AI. We will consider AI from many angles, including historical, philosophical, ethical, and public-policy perspectives. We will also examine many of the technical concepts and achievements of the field in detail, as well as its many failures and setbacks. Throughout the course, students will be asked to read texts, write responses, do follow-up research, and participate in classroom discussions. This is not a programming course, and no background in computer programming is expected or required.

This seminar, broadly speaking, will cover introductory microeconomics and macroeconomics from a wide range of theoretical perspectives, including neoclassical, post-Keynesian, Marxian, feminist, and institutional political economy perspectives. The course will enable students to understand the more “technical aspects” of economics (e.g., usage of supply/demand analysis within and outside neoclassical economics), as well as significant economic history and the history of economic thought. Theoretical issues will be applied to contemporary policy debates such as industrial policy, foreign trade, global warming, and inequality.

In this course, we will explore the power dynamics behind images and how they shape the way we see and experience the world. Drawing on John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, we will examine how visuals—whether in art, film, or everyday life—are never neutral but, rather, always tied to politics. We will dive into works like Harun Farocki’s An Image, Tony Cooke’s Disco Inferno, Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, Jean-Luc Godard’s radical cinema, and Brechtian approaches to audiovisual composition. Through these films and ideas, we will see how artists and filmmakers use images to challenge the status quo, resist dominant ideologies, and spark political change. With screenings and discussions, we will sharpen the ability to critically analyze the images that surround us and understand how they influence both political consciousness and personal identity. This course is a thought-provoking investigation into how images can manipulate, provoke, invent, and sometimes resist the political forces at play in our world.

This video-production seminar will explore, in depth, the rich world of film/video making as artistic expression. Students will complete a series of assignments and short films through lecture, discussion, and screenings of media, including artist interviews, work, readings, and visits. The course will explore moving-image forms and styles that blur the boundaries of narrative, poetic, and abstract filmmaking. There is, by definition, no formula for this kind of work; rather, this course will introduce the language and techniques of film production alongside strategies for the use of film and audio design as creative expression. In this fast-paced course, we will direct concerns to an exploration of the relationship to the aesthetics, politics, and language of filmmaking in its broadest context. We will work on concept development, visual planning, and production pathways. Frequent discussions about student-produced work and about the work of professional artists will broaden the understanding and appreciation of experimental film and will expand creative boundaries. In this context, we will analyze the pioneering work of many experimental film/video artists, including Tacita Dean, Doug Aitken, Pipilotti Rist, Martha Colburn, Bill Fontana, Nigel Ayers, and Young-Hae Chang, among others.

Where does the food we eat come from? Why do some people have enough food to eat and others do not? Are there too many people for the world to feed? Who controls the world’s food? Will global food prices continue their recent rapid rise; and, if so, what will be the consequences? What are the environmental impacts of our food-production systems? How do answers to these questions differ by place or the person asking the question? How have they changed over time? This course will explore the following fundamental issue: the relationship between development and the environment, focusing in particular on agriculture and the production and consumption of food. The questions above often hinge on the contentious debate concerning population, natural resources, and the environment. We will begin by critically assessing the fundamental ideological positions and philosophical paradigms of “modernization,” as well as critical counterpoints that lie at the heart of this debate. Within this context of competing sets of philosophical assumptions concerning the population-resource debate, we will investigate the concept of poverty and the making of the “Third World,” access to food, hunger, grain production and food aid, agricultural productivity (e.g., the Green and Gene revolutions), biofuels, the role of transnational corporations (TNCs), the international division of labor, migration, globalization and global commodity chains, and the different strategies adopted by nation states to develop natural resources and agricultural production. Through a historical investigation of environmental change and the biogeography of plant domestication and dispersal, we will look at the creation of indigenous, subsistence, peasant, plantation, collective, and commercial forms of agriculture. We will analyze the physical environment and ecology that help shape, but rarely determine, the organization of resource use and agriculture; rather, through the dialectical rise of various political-economic systems—such as feudalism, slavery, mercantilism, colonialism, capitalism, and socialism—we will study how humans have transformed the world’s environments. The course will follow with studies of specific issues: technological change in food production; commercialization and industrialization of agriculture and the decline of the family farm; food and public health, culture, and family; land grabbing and food security; the role of markets and transnational corporations in transforming the environment; and the global environmental changes stemming from modern agriculture, dams, deforestation, grassland destruction, desertification, biodiversity loss, and the interrelationship with climate change. Case studies of particular regions and issues will be drawn from Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the United States. The final part of the course will examine the restructuring of the global economy and its relation to emergent international laws and institutions regulating trade, the environment, agriculture, resource extraction treaties, the changing role of the state, and competing conceptualizations of territoriality and control. We will end with discussions of emergent local, regional, and transnational coalitions for food self-reliance and food sovereignty, alternative and community-supported agriculture, community-based resource-management systems, sustainable development, and grassroots movements for social and environmental justice. Films, multimedia materials, and potential distinguished guest lectures will be interspersed throughout the course. Attendance will be required for one farm/factory field trip. Regular postings of short essays will be required, as well as follow-up commentaries with classmates. There will be occasional in-class essays and a final quiz at the end of the semester. Group conferences will focus on in-depth analysis of certain course topics and will include debates, a film, workshopping, and small-group discussions. Students will prepare a poster project over the semester on a related topic presented at the end of the course in the final group conference.

This seminar will begin by examining competing paradigms and approaches to understanding “development” and the “Third World.” The course will set the stage by answering the question: What did the world look like 500 years ago? The purpose of this part of the course is to acquaint us with and to analyze the historical origins and evolution of a world political-economy of which the Third World is an intrinsic component. We will thus study the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the rise of merchant and finance capital, and the colonization of the world by European powers. We will analyze case studies of colonial “development” to understand the evolving meaning of this term. These case studies will help assess the varied legacies of colonialism apparent in the emergence of new nations through the fitful and uneven process of decolonization that followed. The next part of the course will look at the United Nations and the role that some of its associated institutions have played in the post-World War II global political-economy, one marked by persistent and intensifying socioeconomic inequalities, as well as frequent outbreaks of political violence across the globe. By examining the development of institutions that have emerged and evolved since 1945, the course will attempt to unravel the paradoxes of development in different eras. We will deconstruct the measures of development through a thematic exploration of population, resource use, poverty, access to food, the environment, agricultural productivity, and different development strategies adopted by Third World nation states. We will then examine globalization and its relation to emergent international institutions and their policies; for example, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization. The course will then turn to contemporary development debates and controversies; for example, the widespread land grabbing (by sovereign wealth funds, China, hedge funds, etc.), rising nationalism and anti-state populism, the contested role of international aid, and the climate-change crisis. Throughout the course, investigations of international institutions, transnational corporations, the role of the state, and civil society will provide the backdrop for the final focus of the class—the emergence of regional coalitions for self-reliance, environmental and social justice, and sustainable development. Our analysis of development in practice will draw upon case studies primarily from Africa but also from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the United States. Conference work will be closely integrated with the themes of the course, with a two-stage substantive research project. Project presentations will incorporate a range of formats, from traditional papers to multimedia visual productions.

This course will provide an intensive introduction to Ancient Greek grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, with the aim of reading the language as soon as possible. By fall mid-semester, students will be reading authentic excerpts of Ancient Greek poetry and prose. Students will also read and discuss English translations of selected works of Plato, Aristophanes, Thucydides, and Pseudo-Xenophon. In spring, while continuing to refine their knowledge of Greek grammar and their reading skills, students will read extended selections of Plato’s Apology in the original Greek. Biweekly individual conferences with the instructor, in addition to class sessions, will be required.

The term “realism” enjoyed an unprecedented vogue in 19th-century Europe. All manner of doctrines and ideologies prided themselves on their “realistic” understanding of the human predicament and the structure of the universe while disdaining rival doctrines as captive to illusions and prejudices. Students in this course will read and discuss texts illustrating influential forms of 19th-century European realism in philosophy, ethics, and politics. They will also consider realism in literature and painting. We will try to identify what exactly realism meant to each of these philosophical and artistic tendencies and to discover why 19th-century Europeans found the concept of realism so irresistible. Since the schools of thought to be investigated often conceived “reality” in diametrically opposed ways, the course will provide an introduction to a number of the most significant intellectual debates of the 19th century. Thinkers to be discussed include Malthus, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Weber, and Freud; creative artists studied will include Turgenev, Strindberg, Courbet, Manet, and Degas. 

In the 16th century, Europe entered upon a religious crisis that was to permanently alter the character of Western Christianity. Between 1520 and 1580, the religious unity of Catholic Christendom was destroyed, as believers throughout Central and Northern Europe severed their ties with the papacy to form new “Protestant” communities. But the impact of the religious crisis was by no means confined to the emergence of the churches of the Reformation. Luther’s revolt against the Roman church ushered in an era of soaring religious creativity and savage religious conflict that lasted for nearly two centuries and revolutionized thought, art, music...and politics. The modern state is ultimately a product of the Reformation crisis, as is the system of international law that still governs the relations among sovereign states. Students in this course will examine multiple aspects of the religious, intellectual, and political history of Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. Readings will focus attention on the diversity of religious thinking and religious experience in this era. Besides tracing the rise of the Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican churches and the complex history of the “Radical Reformation,” we will consider forms of belief independent of any church and new varieties of skepticism and doubt. We will also devote considerable attention to the reform movements that transformed Roman Catholicism during those two centuries and the upsurge of missionary energy and mystical spirituality that accompanied them. We will investigate the effects of the Reformation crisis on politics and the state and on the social order that Europe inherited from the Middle Ages. As part of this investigation, we will examine the most important political struggles waged in the name of religion between 1524 and 1689: the Peasants’ Revolt and Thirty Years’ War in Germany, the Dutch revolt against Spain, the French Wars of Religion, and the English Revolution. Texts will include works by Luther, Calvin, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Ávila, Queen Marguerite of Navarre, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Pascal. 

This course will examine aspects of European culture in the last two decades of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century. This was the era of the Decadent and Symbolist movements; of Secessionist art and architecture; of the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and William James; and of early psychoanalysis. Though in the eyes of some Europeans, looking back at the period nostalgically across the smoking battlefields of World War I, these decades were la belle époque—the “beautiful time” of peace and security—others remembered them as “the gay apocalypse,” a hectic burst of cultural experiment against a background of political paralysis which together heralded the end of the old Europe. While the primary focus of this course will be on creative figures active in Vienna and other parts of the Habsburg monarchy, we will also consider writers, artists, and thinkers from Russia, Scandinavia, Germany, France, and the English-speaking world. These figures will include August Strindberg, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan Zweig, Andrei Bely, Gustav Klimt, and Edvard Munch. We will also look at the Nietzsche cult, “life-philosophy,” and Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.

In this course, students will develop their comprehension of Latin grammar, vocabulary, word inflection patterns, and syntax by close reading of selected works of Catullus and Cicero in fall and Ovid and Livy in spring. The ancient Roman Republic lasted 450 years before imploding into a military dictatorship. The democratic republic in the United States, modeled on the ancient Roman Republic, has lasted just 237 years and now confronts forces threatening to replace it with dictatorship or some form of authoritarian populism. Examining works of poetry and prose, both accompanying and following the advent of autocracy in ancient Rome, we will consider the value and limits of literature for exposing, challenging, or affirming hierarchical and tyrannical ideals, institutions, and norms.

Where and how did democratic ideals emerge? Throughout the history of the world, hierarchies of power and privilege have predominated. Democracy is not the norm. Democracy is the bizarre exception. But 3,000 years ago, ancient Greek epic poetry began to undermine the moral validity of political hierarchies and tyrannical abuses of power. From the eighth through the fifth centuries BCE, ancient Greek literature cultivated ideals of humanity, equality, and justice vital to sustaining humane, egalitarian values, norms, and institutions. Over centuries, ancient Greeks came to understand—as by now we must—that not only individuals but also groups, both large and small, can wield power tyrannically by using violence and intimidation to subjugate others and silence dissenting opinions. Reading selected works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Euripides, Plato, and others, we will investigate how and why the Greeks developed democratic ideals, why they themselves failed to attain them, and how we might do better. This course is reading- and writing-intensive. We will also encounter ideas that are uncomfortable and troubling in various predictable and unpredictable ways. The course is designed for anyone who welcomes open-minded critical inquiry and is eager to read and calmly discuss texts that are challenging, both intellectually and emotionally. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

This lecture will focus on the interpretation and appreciation of the most influential lyric poetry written in English in the tumultuous decades between the French Revolution and the Reform Act of 1832. Over the course of two generations, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats invented a new kind of autobiographical poem that largely internalized the myths they had inherited from literary and religious traditions. The poet’s inward, subjective experience became the inescapable subject of the poem—a legacy that continues to this day. We will explore ways in which the English Romantic poets responded to the political impasse of their historical moment and created poems out of their arguments with themselves, as well as their arguments with one another. The preeminent goal will be to understand each poet’s unique contributions to the language.

This course will read Romanticism as a precursor to our own era of postmodernism. The starting point will be the French Deconstructionist reading of Friedrich Schlegel and his short-lived journal, Athenaeum (1798-1800). As Maurice Blanchot argues, among the many contradictions “out of which romanticism unfolds—contradictions that contribute to making literature no longer a response but a question,” perhaps most significant is that “romantic art, which concentrates creative truth in the freedom of the subject, also formulates the ambition of a total book, a sort of perpetually growing Bible that will not represent but, rather, replace the real.” We will take Blanchot’s insight as our guide in reading an otherwise disparate collection of texts ranging across Romantic time and space. From Germany, besides Schlegel’s aphorisms, we will read Hoffmann’s The Sandman (1816) and The Golden Pot (1814); from Great Britain, Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818), Byron’s Don Juan (1819), and Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); from Poland, Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1814); from Russia, Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter (1836) and Eugene Onegin (1833), Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1841), and Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842); and from the United States, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Along the way, we will periodically depart from the 19th century to emphasize the ways that Romanticism underpins what we take to be our own postmodernist thought. As a response to Don Juan, we will read Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia. Together with Frankenstein, we will read Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 novel, Frankissstein: A Love Story; and will end on a ship-faring note, as we juxtapose Moby Dick with Maggie Nelson’s gender- and genre-bending The Argonauts (2015).

Julian of Norwich is the earliest known woman to author a text in English. In 1373, at the age of “thirty and a half,” Julian fell severely ill. On the brink of death, she experienced a series of visions, which she recorded as her “short text” or Shewings. Sometime after her recovery, she chose a life of solitude as an anchorite; and for the next 40 years, Julian contemplated and elaborated on her visionary experiences. The result is her “long text,” A Revelation of Divine Love, which has been called “the most important work of Christian reflection in the English language.’ The journey of this course will begin with Julian’s Shewings and end with her Revelation—her writings serving as a lens to various traditions of medieval mysticism. Along the way, we will encounter the “intellectual” and “erotic” threads of mysticism woven throughout Jewish, Christian, and Islamic spirituality—from the philosophy of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Solomon ibn Gabirol (Avicebron), and Augustine of Hippo to the poetry of Ibn Arabi, Dante, and Jewish mystics. Next, we will examine how monks and mendicants such as Richard of St. Victor, William of St. Thierry, and Bonaventure understood the intersection of human and divine love, how the knowledge of self leads to the knowledge of God. We will then pause at the fraught waystation of mysticism and heresy to examine how Meister Eckhart’s and Marguerite Porete’s teachings of the soul’s total union with God were met with institutional hostility and violence. Finally, we will land once again in medieval England. After surveying Julian’s English contemporaries, we will embark on a sustained close reading of her Revelation of Divine Love—now with preparation to see how she understood the purpose of her visionary experiences: “Who showed it thee? Love. What showed he thee? Love. Wherfore showed he it thee? For love.”

The performance of a play is a complex cultural event that involves far more than the literary text upon which it is grounded. First, there is the theatre itself—a building of a certain shape and utility within a certain neighborhood of a certain city. On stage, we have actors and their training, gesture, staging, music, dance, and costumes alongside scenery and lighting. Offstage, we have the audience, its makeup, and its reactions; the people who run the theatre and the reasons why they do it; and finally the social milieu in which the theatre exists. In this course, we will study these elements as a system of signs that convey meaning (semiotics)—a world of meaning whose lifespan is a few hours but whose significances are ageless. The plays of Shakespeare will be our texts. Reconstructing the performances of those plays in the England of Elizabeth I and James I will be our starting place. Seeing how those plays have been approached and re-envisioned over the centuries will be our journey. Tracing their elusive meanings, from within Shakespeare’s Wooden O to their adaptation in contemporary film, will be our work. 

What if the roots of English literature were not wholly English? How were the origins of Italian literature pollinated with Arabic philosophy? This course will explore these questions and more through two foundational texts—Dante’s Divine Comedy and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Often read in isolation, we will instead study these works together—in historical, intellectual, and comparative context—charting how the high tide of Italian literary culture reached the shores of medieval England, how Dante’s vernacular epic of the afterlife helped shape Chaucer’s vernacular epic of earthly life. In fall, we will focus on Dante, treating his formation as a poet and thinker as a window into the formation of Italian literature itself. We will explore his engagement with the Occitan, Sicilian, and Tuscan lyric traditions; his reading of Aristotle through Arabic and Latin commentators; and his response to the burgeoning—and fraught—political and intellectual climate of medieval Florence. Having immersed ourselves in the life, times, and mind of Dante, we will then turn to the Comedy itself, reading all three canticles—the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—with special attention to Dante’s evolving understanding of love and desire. In spring, we will turn to Chaucer and his role in inaugurating vernacular English literature through a rich, self-conscious dialogue with Dante and the other “corone,” or crowns, of Italian literature—Boccaccio and Petrarch. Chaucer’s travels to Genoa and Florence in 1373 and Milan in 1378 were formative for him as a person and poet. At a time when hardly anyone in England had heard of Dante, Boccaccio, or Petrarch, Chaucer read them in the original and responded to them by creating new literary forms. In doing so, Chaucer fashioned a future English literary audience; in a real sense, he wrote for us. We will read Chaucer’s House of Fame (a direct response to the Comedy) and Canterbury Tales, pairing each tale with its Italian analogues and influences. Throughout the year, we will practice comparative reading and source study, mapping how ideas and literary forms travel across, cultures, languages, and borders. In the process, we will encounter the profoundly interconnected intellectual world of Dante’s and Chaucer’s Middle Ages.

While Dostoevsky is often praised for the universality of his themes, in his own day he was a working journalist deeply engaged with the issues facing his own contemporary Russia. This course will seek to contextualize a few of Dostoevsky’s major works by reading them as they were originally written: as part of an ongoing and often heated debate with his contemporaries. We will begin with the distinction between the 1840s and the 1860s that Dostoevsky made famous first in Notes from Underground (1864), then moving on to read Crime and Punishment (1866) and Demons (1872) in the context of the intense debates that drove the latter decade. Our particular focus will be Russian nihilism, above all as it was defined by Turgenev and Chernyshevsky, and also the “woman question,” especially as developed in the works of two women writers, Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya and Sofiia Kovalevskaya. We will finish with Nabokov’s extravagant send-up of Chernyshevsky and Russian nihilism in The Gift (1938).

What is in a feeling, and what does it do? This course will explore how medieval writers understood the emotions—what they called the passions—as forces that move the soul, affect the mind, transform the body, and raise pressing questions about free will and moral responsibility. Because the passions operate at the threshold of the soul and body, virtually every domain of medieval thought had something to say about them—from poetry and medicine to philosophy and contemplative devotion. For instance, physicians like Peter of Spain diagnosed lovesickness and melancholia as genuine medical conditions. Philosophers like Aquinas compiled catalogues of the passions—from joy and sorrow to fear and courage to despair and hope—and offered phenomenological descriptions of how the passions arise through both embodied sensation and ensouled experience. Occitan troubadours like Arnaut Daniel and Italian lyric poets like Cavalcanti and Dante could write of love as the bondage of mind and will or the source of ethical nobility and spiritual freedom. (Dante did both.) Mystics like Walter Hilton and Julian of Norwich explored how emotional awareness could be refined into subtler modes of spiritual attention and how, at the same time, the inmost experience of divine love could be expressed as ecstatic, passionate feeling. In addition to the themes and writers above, this course will examine how the passions open onto questions of habitus and disposition—how repeated action shapes how we feel and how the way we repeatedly feel shapes our action. We will also consider how emotion is at the center of vice and virtue—how the quality of our feeling determines the quality of our inner life and our life with others. With the help of contemporary scholarship, we will approach the medieval passions with historical and phenomenological methods of analysis. Through these lenses, we will see how the passions in the Middle Ages serve as a unique site for comparative intellectual history, spanning disciplines and bridging ancient, medieval, and modern traditions. At the same time, studying the medieval passions offers something more personal: the chance to recover forms of feeling and attention from the past that might expand the borders of our own in the present.

This course will explore the topic of time from a wide variety of viewpoints—from the physical, to the metaphysical, to the practical. We will seek the answers to questions such as: What is time? How do we perceive time? Why does time appear to flow only in one direction? Is time travel possible? How is time relative? We will explore the perception of time across cultures and eras, break down the role of time in fundamental physics, and discuss popular science books and articles, along with science-inspired works of fiction, to make sense of this fascinating topic. Time stops for no one, but let us take some time to appreciate its uniqueness.

What makes linguistic communication possible? Do other primates “talk”? How do we understand messages from one another despite uncertainty and noise? In this course, we will consider central questions about language: Are we the only ones who have it? When did we learn it? How does artificial intelligence mimic it? This course will start with an introduction to comparative research with other species (nonhuman primates, whales, and insects), allowing students to consider many possible forms of communication. Next, we will look at humans. What can studies with babies and children tell us about the nature of our communication system? Finally, we will explore how large language models, such as ChatGPT, produce text that might look and feel like human writing. What have these models learned, and how should we study them? Students should come prepared to engage with the topic of communication from multiple perspectives, including empirical/scientific and critical. Through weekly small-group conferences, students will develop projects that relate the course to their collective interests, such as learning and communicating in Toki Pona (a philosophical artistic-constructed language), researching the limits of artificial intelligence language models, observing and analyzing children’s communication, or designing a behavioral intervention study that implements and evaluates different communication practices.

What does it mean to live a flourishing life? This is one of the most fundamental questions of human existence. This course will explore this fundamental question through an engagement with the universal human experiences of care, aging, and death. Together, we will dive into the centrality of caregiving to the human experience and identify and explore normative claims around care, aging, and death. Specifically, we will explore issues of avoidance, dependence, and interdependence, as we collectively think about the role of care in our lives across the lifespan—but especially leading up to the final stages of life. In dominant US culture, notions of individualism prevail—often leading to the conceptualization of caregiving as a burden. But who decided that the care of other humans is a burden? Or that an unburdened life is one most worth living? Who is to say that we would prefer or be better off to be “unburdened” from the most important relationships in our lives? Collectively, we will consider more life-affirming, meaningful, and pluralistic ideas about care, as well as consider who is most served by current mainstream normative claims. Finally, the course will look at the ways these ideas are being resisted. Guest speakers will help explore how individuals have replied to questions concerning how one lives life well.

Few people dispute the enormous impact that the Ancient Greeks have had on Western culture—and even on the modern world, in general. This seminar will introduce the interested student to this culture, mainly through reading salient primary texts in English translation. Our interest will range broadly. Along with some background reading, we will discuss mythology (Hesiod), epic hymns and poetry (Homer), history (Herodotus), politics, religion, and philosophy. By the end of the course, students should have a basic understanding of the cultural contribution of the Ancient Greeks, as well as a basic timeline of their history through the Hellenistic age. 

This course will provide a historical overview of how key philosophical thinkers have thought about religious themes within the philosophical tradition broadly known as Continental philosophy, beginning with Spinoza and ending with contemporary postmodern thinkers. We will engage with key questions of the modern period emerging from the challenge to traditional religious forms and belief systems, such as: What is the nature and existence of God? Can we understand God through rational thought? How do we make sense of evil? How is God reconcilable with a belief in human freedom? How do we make sense of religious pluralism and the existence of multiple belief systems? Does God actively work within human history? What is left of morality if we do not maintain a traditional belief in God? We will think about such questions comparatively and historically, discussing key thinkers and ideas from philosophical movements such as German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism, feminism, psychoanalytic theory, and poststructuralism and deconstruction. By the end of the course, students will have a broad understanding of the historical development of the field of Continental philosophy of religions, which should support further work in philosophy for interested students. Though primarily focused on Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish thinkers, as well as atheist and agnostic thinkers from these cultural backgrounds, there will be opportunities for students to explore the field of philosophy of religions within a Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Eastern Orthodox Christian, or other religious framework, if so interested.

Perhaps no one has not heard the name of a seemingly obscure carpenter’s son executed by the Romans around 33 CE. Why? The religion that we call Christianity shaped the Western world for at least 1,500 years. This course will study the origins of that tradition. As we study those origins, we will explore Judaism in the strange and fertile Second Temple period (515 BCE–70 CE). We will encounter the learned societies of holy men like the Pharisees and the Qumran sectarians, as well as the freedom fighters/terrorists called the Zealots. Our main source will be the New Testament of the Christian Bible, though our sources will be supplemented by other primary materials. Excerpts from the Dead Sea Scrolls and rabbinic literature, as well as other Hellenistic texts from that period, will provide the cultural backdrop in which Christianity has its roots. We will learn about the spread of the new movement of “Christians,” as they were called by their detractors in Antioch, from its roots in the Holy Land into the greater Greco-Roman world. How did that movement, which began among the Jews of the Eastern Mediterranean, come to be wholly associated with Gentiles by the end of the second century? Who became Christian? Why were they hated so much by the greater Greco-Roman society? What did they believe? How did they behave? What are the origins of Christian antisemitism? What kind of social world, with its senses of hierarchy and gender relations, did these people envision for themselves?

The Fourth Gospel and the epistles associated with its authors, 1-3 John, have been particularly significant for the development of Christian thought. In this course, we will study the Gospel of John closely, engaging in the hermeneutical arts with an eye to the development of Christian theology, as well as uncovering the history and growth of the early Christian community responsible for its unique prose and views regarding Jesus of Nazareth and the role of Christian discipleship. We will immerse ourselves in the Hellenistic world, especially as it relates to Mediterranean Judaism. In doing so, we will examine the roots of Christian antisemitism and the development of Gnosticism and Christian docetism.

How does the setting up of a textile factory in Malaysia connect with life in the United States? Or of ship building in Bangladesh? What was the relationship of mothers to children in 17th-century, upper-class French households? What do we expect of the same relationships today? In the United States? In other societies? Across rural and urban areas? How do contemporary notions of leisure and luxury resemble, or do they, notions of peoples in other times and places regarding wealth and poverty? What is the relation between the local and the global, the individual and society, the self and “other”? How is the self constructed? How do we connect biography and history, fiction and fact, objectivity and subjectivity, the social and the personal? These are some of the questions that sociology and sociologists attempt to think through. In this seminar, we will ask how sociologists, and social thinkers in general, analyze and simultaneously create reality. What questions do we/they ask? How does one explore these questions and arrive at subsequent findings and conclusions? Through a perusal of comparative and historical materials, we will look afresh at things that we take for granted; for example, the family, poverty, identity, travel and tourism, progress, science, and subjectivity. The objective of the seminar will be to enable students to critically read sociological texts and become practitioners in “doing” sociology (something we are always already involved in, albeit often unself-consciously). This last endeavor is both designed to train students in how to undertake research and intended as a key tool in interrogating the relationship of the researcher and the researched, the field studied, and the (sociological) text. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

Stories are immensely complex mechanisms. When talking about how they work, we often confine our discussion to their most straightforward elements: the relationship between conflict and suspense, for example, or between verisimilitude and believability. But stories also derive a substantial proportion of their meaning and force from elements not so easily pinned down: from the potency of their images, from their surprising and suggestive juxtapositions, or from other qualities more easily apprehended by the unconscious than by the conscious mind. During the first half of the semester, students will read and discuss dreamlike narratives with the goal of understanding how the patently impossible can be made to feel as if it is actually happening, what sort of truths are rendered through unreality, and how authors can open themselves to the promptings of the unconscious and become alert to the complex interactions of images and narrative gestures. As part of the process, students will write two- to three-page imitations of the works discussed in class. The second half of the semester will be devoted to workshopping students’ own stories.  

This course is for students who want to break free from the conventions of the traditional essay and memoir and discover a broader range of narrative and stylistic possibilities available to nonfiction writers. During the first half of the semester, students will read and discuss examples of formally innovative nonfiction that will serve as the inspiration for brief assignments. Completed assignments will also be read aloud and discussed each week. During the second half of the semester, students will workshop longer pieces, which they will have written in consultation with the instructor as a part of their conference work. Required texts will include: The Next American Essay, edited by John D’Agata, and Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra; all other readings will be accessible in a photocopied handout.