Humanities Signature Courses

Spring 2025 Signature Courses

Instructors: Benjamin Saltzman

If you have ever wondered why we say, "one mouse" and "two mice," but not "one house" and "two hice," this course will offer some answers. We will study the historical development of the English language, from its Proto-Indo-European roots through its earliest recorded forms (Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English) up to its current status as a world language. Now spoken by more than 1.5 billion people, English is a language that is constantly evolving, and students will gain basic linguistic skills necessary for analyzing the features of its evolution. We will study variations in the language (including variations in morphology, phonology, syntax, grammar, and vocabulary) and its development over time and across regions. We will also examine sociological, political, and literary phenomena that accompany and shape these changes in the language.

Instructors: Thomas Christensen

The history of the American musical in the 20th century is paradoxical. While the genre is often denigrated as staging lyrical utopias of romance and adventure allowing audiences to escape depressing quotidian realities, many musicals did seek to engage some of the most pressing social issues of their day. In this course, we will look-and listen-closely to four differing musicals from the 20th century, studying their creative origins, while also analyzing their complex social meanings revealed through the story, music, lyrics, staging, and dance. An Excursion to a professionally staged Musical later in the quarter is planned.

Instructor: Malynne Sternstein

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, Lolita: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate, to tap at three on the teeth." Popular as Nabokov's "all-American" novel is, it is rarely discussed beyond its psychosexual profile. This intensive text-centered and discussion-based course attempts to supersede the univocal obsession with the novel's pedophiliac plot as such by concerning itself above all with the novel's language: language as failure, as mania, and as conjuration.

Instructor: Orit Bashkin

The class explores the history of Iraq during the years 1917-2015. We will discuss the rise of the Iraqi nation state, Iraqi and Pan-Arab nationalism, and Iraqi authoritarianism. The class will focus on the unique histories of particular group in Iraqi society; religious groups (Shiis, Sunnis, Jews), ethnic groups (especially Kurds), classes (the urban poor, the educated middle classes, the landed and tribal elites), Iraqi women, and Iraqi tribesmen. Other classes will explore the ideologies that became prominent in the Iraqi public sphere, from communism to Islamic radicalism. We will likewise discuss how colonialism and imperialism shaped major trends in Iraqi history. The reading materials for the class are based on a combination of primary and secondary sources: we will read together Iraqi novels, memoirs and poems (in translation), as well as British and American diplomatic documents about Iraq.

Instructor: Jason Riggle

In this course we will examine the language of deception and humor from a variety of perspectives: historical, developmental, neurological, and cross-cultural and in a variety of contexts: fiction, advertising, politics, courtship, and everyday conversation. We will focus on the (linguistic) knowledge and skills that underlie the use of humor and deception and on what sorts of things they are used to communicate.

Instructor: Ada Palmer

Florence, Rome, and the Italian city-states in the age of plagues and cathedrals, Petrarch and Machiavelli, Medici and Borgia (1250-1600), with a focus on literature, philosophy, primary sources, the revival of antiquity, and the papacy's entanglement with pan-European politics. We will examine humanism, patronage, politics, corruption, assassination, feuds, art, music, magic, censorship, education, science, heresy, and the roots of the Reformation. Writing assignments focus on higher level writing skills, with a creative writing component linked to our in-class role-played reenactment of a Renaissance papal election (LARP). First-year students and non-History majors welcome.

Instructor: Carolina Lopez-Ruiz

Myth is essential to how humans make sense of the world: our foundational stories explain the nature of the world; they justify and explore social and sexual difference; they teach and test the limits of human agency. The course will survey contexts and uses of myth-making in the ancient Mediterranean world. We will also explore the many traditions of critique and anxiety about myth-making, among philosophers, literary critics and religious authorities.

Instructor: Mark Miller

From prophetic texts of the ancient world to more recent fascinations with zombie plagues, environmental disaster, nuclear winter, and other forms of systemic collapse, the genre of apocalypse has given extraordinarily fertile expression to religious, moral, political, and economic beliefs and anxieties. In this course we will explore what is both fearful and alluring about catastrophe on an unimaginable scale, as we read and view apocalyptic works across a wide historical range. Readings will include novels by Daniel DeFoe, Max Brooks, Octavia Butler, and N. K. Jemisin, as well as the Book of Revelation from the Christian New Testament, and excerpts from the medieval poem The Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland. The course will conclude with two 1968 US films, Planet of the Apes and Night of the Living Dead.

Instructor: Philip Bohlman

Each May since 1956 popular musicians and fans from Europe gather in a European metropolis to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), a competitive spectacle in which musicians from one nation compete against one another. Organized, funded, and broadcast by the European Broadcasting Union, the largest conglomerate of national radio and television networks in the world, the ESC is extensively participatory, creating its own communities of fans, musicians, musical producers, and ordinary citizens, who join together at all levels of society to interact with the politics and historical narratives of Europe. From the moment of heightened Cold War conflict at the birth of ESC to the refugee crisis and the rise of right-wing nationalism in the present, ESC has generated public discourse that not only reflects European and global politics, but provides a conduit for local and national citizenries to respond and shape such public discourse about gender and sexuality. The weekly work for the course draws students from across the College into the counterpoint of history and politics with aesthetics and popular culture. Each week will be divided into two parts, the first dedicated to reading and discussion of texts about European history and politics from World War II to the present, the second to interaction with music. Students will experience the ESC through close readings of individual songs and growing familiarity with individual nations with a participatory final project.

Instructor: Na’ama Rokem

This course explores the history of comics through the lens of its Jewish creators and Jewish themes, and the history of Jewish culture and society through the lens of graphic storytelling. We learn to interpret this complex art form that combines words and hand-drawn images, translating temporal progression into a spatial form. Reading American, European, and Israeli narratives, our discussions will focus on autobiographical and journalistic accounts of uprooting, immigration, conflict, and loss. We will ask: how do Jewish graphic novelists use the conventions and the grammar of this medium? How do they grapple with the proximity between caricature and comics, and with the legacy of racist caricatures? And what is the relationship between graphic narrative and memory culture? A central concept or figure we will keep returning to is the face, which is a central element in the aesthetics of comics and graphic narrative, and a key to its meaning-making.

Instrutor: Sarah Taylor, Erin Walsh

In recent decades scholars of the pre-modern period have turned to the body as a site of renewed historical inquiry. Within the study of religion, this shift has reanimated discussions around asceticism as a particularly potent technē for self-fashioning. Nevertheless, scholars have struggled to theorize asceticism across religious traditions. This signature course, taught by two scholars working in disparate historical periods and religious traditions (early Christianity and medieval Indian religious literature), explores how gender theory has engaged ascetic practices for understanding the body and human potential. Students will engage asceticism as a series of techniques or forms of life that envision the sexed and gendered human body as the horizon of corporeal expression and personal imagination. Asceticism serves as a neat conceptual device, allowing us to toggle between the mind and body while tackling questions that fall within the liminal space between them, including debates around gender, sexuality, sovereignty, and biopower. Students along with the instructors will contend with the challenges and opportunities of transnational and transhistorical feminist and queer inquiry as we traverse across the boundaries of tradition, language, and culture. While drawing on rich historical and religious archives, we will anchor our discussions around the interplay of two principal authors: Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault.

Instructor: Tyler Williams

What is a 'sense'? How do we attune, coordinate, and interpret our senses and the information that we receive through them? How do we structure and shape the world around us for and through the senses? We will address these questions by diving into the multi-sensory worlds of South Asia-a region that includes the present states of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka-and learning how peoples of the region have theorized and employed the senses to understand and shape their aesthetic, social, and religious worlds. We will taste spices, smell fragrances, listen to music and street sounds, 'visit' temples, mosques, and museums, read literary, philosophical, and religious texts, and view works of visual and sculptural art in order to better understand which aspects of sensory experience are indeed 'universal' and which are conditioned by history and culture.

Instructor: Michael Bourdaghs

This course engages with the various techniques and practices associated with sound in Japanese culture, ranging from the 18th century through the contemporary era. The media covered will include literature, language reform movements, theater, cinema (both silent and sound), recorded music, radio broadcasting, manga, video games and anime. We will also read recent sound-oriented approaches to literary and cultural studies from scholars from both Japan and elsewhere. All readings will be in English.

Instructor: Melinh Lai

What is the relationship between physical processes in the brain and body and the processes of thought and consciousness that constitute our mental life? Philosophers and others have puzzled over this question for millennia. Many have concluded it to be intractable. In recent decades, the field of cognitive science--encompassing philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and other disciplines--has proposed a new form of answer. The driving idea is that the interaction of the mental and the physical may be understood via a third level of analysis: that of the computational. This course offers a critical introduction to the elements of this approach, and surveys some of the alternative models and theories that fall within it. Readings are drawn from a range of historical and contemporary sources in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science.

Instructor: Devon De Mayo, Jon Satrom

What makes a performance unforgettable? How do fleeting acts-onstage, online, or in the streets-spark curiosity, provoke debate, or ripple through memes and memories? In this course, we'll immerse ourselves in the bold, hybrid world of performance as a tool for upending expectations and crafting the unexpected. With hands-on projects, critical reflection, and collaborative exploration, we will investigate performance in its many forms, from physical spaces where people move, connect, and gather, to digital platforms where swipes, clicks, and streams define interaction. Together, we'll uncover how performers outwit algorithms, engineer surprise, and amplify their work in resourceful and unpredictable ways. Visiting artists from theater, media art, and tactical performance will join the course throughout the quarter, bringing unique practices and perspectives into the mix.

Instructor: Whitney Cox

The Mahābhārata is conventionally said to be fifteen times the length of the Bible, or eight times the combined texts of the Homeric epics and, as Wendy Doniger once quipped, "a hundred times more interesting". No other work of the Indic narrative imagination is as capacious; arguably no work of the imagination anywhere, ever. The most important monument of early Indian civilization, it is an amalgam of heroic poetry, visionary speculation, hairsplitting philosophical analysis, austere legal disputation, animal fables, and dirty jokes. In this course, we will read (in translation) the monumental Sanskrit epic, as well as some of its many mediations-whether in vernacular literary renditions, centuries of sculptural and pictorial representations, or contemporary film and comic adaptations- with an eye to how we might consider this work as both a fundamental text for the understanding of South Asia and a vital part of the global cultural commons. No knowledge of South Asia or of any Indian language is presumed; the course will be a combination of lectures, small group discussions, and collective efforts at understanding this inexhaustible work.

Instructor: Alice Goff, Sophie Salvo

Get Cultured in Nine Weeks: Historical Perspectives on Art and Education: What does it mean to 'get cultured'? Why-and how-do we do it? Does an education in the arts and letters make us more moral, more intelligent, more resistant to authority-or perhaps more submissive? These questions are at the center of debates about the place of cultural learning in the contemporary world, but our century was not the first to think critically about the social and political functions of this form of education. This course investigates how students, educators, writers, and artists conceptualized the aims and means of becoming cultured from the 1700s forward, focusing on European history and connecting it to the concerns of the present. We will pay particularly close attention to both formal and informal means of cultural education, and to the ways in which these practices have been understood to produce social structures of class, gender, and race. Readings will draw from the fields of history, literature, philosophy, sociology, and art history. At the end of the quarter, students will be asked to design their own fantasy syllabus for "getting cultured in nine weeks."