Graduate

Fundamental questions about the human condition are as old as time. First attested in ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts conventionally labeled ‘wisdom literature’ dating from the third to the first millennia BCE, we can still relate to ancient musings about life, death, power, justice, and the relation between mortals and the divine. While they are often rooted in folk traditions, these contemplations find expression in diverse modes of literary expression, ranging from proverbs and instructions to fables and philosophical dialogues—all of which provide readers with some guidance on how to grapple with the challenges and uncertainty of the human experience. However, given the heterogeneity of the corpus, ‘wisdom literature’ is one of the most contested generic labels.

This interdisciplinary graduate seminar approaches wisdom texts from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia from a comparative perspective. We will explore how ‘wisdom literature’ traditions developed in these two interconnected regions, how the texts relate to their respective social and political contexts, in what material contexts they were written and read, and how they compare with ancient Greek and Hebrew, as well as later Arabic and Persian texts. In contrast with text-reading classes in Egyptology, Assyriology, and Sumerology, the seminar will focus on broader methodological and interpretive questions about this body of literature.

This course examines well-being and illness from transnational, decolonial and intersectional perspectives. Together, we will explore the various ways in which fiction and film can help challenge and expand our notions of what it means to be sick or healthy in complex circumstances. Some guiding threads: To what extent is illness an intensely personal experience, and to what extent does it draw in those around us - family members, friends, partners, medical practitioners, legal counsel? What renewed valences do concepts of autonomy, care and responsibility take when overshadowed by the spectre of disease? How might we ethically and productively relate the medical humanities to broader entangled concerns such as migration (both legal and clandestine), gender, class, race, community, queerness and neocolonialism? Beyond the justified responses of fear and anger, what are other ways to relate to death and mortality - ways that are infused with creativity and resilience? How does human "health" relate to planetary and interspecies well-being?

While journalists and historians work to uncover facts and present accurate accounts, the public imagination is captured by compelling stories, regardless of their accuracy. Where the first course in this sequence, Media and Power, focused on how media impact the spread of information, here we will consider how stories attract audiences and shape understanding, and thus inform the political arena and shape history. As in Media and Power, we will examine recent and current Russian and American events. Each week we will focus on a set of critical opposing narratives that are motivating political orientation and action, asking how they inflected by political and ethical perspectives, how they capture attention, how they are being used to legitimate authority, and how they are incorporated into larger frameworks of historical and political interpretation.

Class members will participate in creating the list of topics for discussion, which will include at least one topic that emerges during the quarter so that we can observe as the story takes shape in real time. The list of possible topics will include: 1) Trump vs. campus protesters. What happened at the encampments at UChicago and elsewhere? We were right here—so what do we know? What stories were told at the time, and what stories are being told now? 2) The Ukraine War: How has Russia used the story of the Great Patriotic War (WW2) to explain its actions in Ukraine? How have terms like genocide and war crime been used throughout the conflict? 3) 1619 vs 1620: How is the master narrative of American history being revised, and how is the counterattack on this effort being justified? 4) Public Economics: What are the current stories of the national economy, and how are they affecting policy and public behavior (consumer confidence, etc.)?

Arabic poetry has been a major force in Middle Eastern societies since the seventh century when it became the elite culture of the Arabo-Islamic empire until today. This course focuses on poetry from the "Golden Age of Islam" during the Abbasid period and especially on three famous poets: Abu Nuwas (d. 814), al-Mutanabbi (d. 965), and al-Maʿarri (d. 1057). While the emphasis will be on close reading of their poems (in Arabic), we will also discuss broader questions: How does this poetry reflect the world of the vast and quickly evolving world of the Islamic empire? How does it relate to its societies, political structures, and religious institutions?

A sprawling, digressive epic like The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace may come first to mind when you think of the classic Russian novel. But Russian authors of the nineteenth century also produced short novels distinguished by their intellectual intensity and tight formal structure. An outlet for political speech under censorship or a passionate cry for recognition of the “spiteful man,” the Russian novella lay bare the injustices of late Russian imperial society. It also performed acute psychological analysis of the lovesick and brokenhearted. We will read novellas by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, as well as the unjustly neglected Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, who was one of the most popular authors of the 1870s in Russia. In seminar-style discussion, we will examine critical approaches to the novella form, the historical and cultural context of the period with a comparative look at European literature, and the “accursed questions” at the heart of the works themselves. All readings are assigned in translation with an option (pending enrollment) to participate in a Russian-language section through Languages across the Curriculum (LxC). This course fulfills the GATEWAY requirement for REES majors matriculating in AY 2025-26.

This seminar will explore revolutionary erotics as both a modality and site of revolutionary thought and action. We will engage erotics and desire expansively as strategies for sensuous and affective agitation and political resistance, probing topics such spirituality and erotics, as well as erotics and its publics and politics. We will think about how erotics and desire have been central to revolutionary art and politics from anti-imperial and anti-fascist struggles to anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and queer worldbuilding, from revolutionary love to terrorist drag, and from the US to Yugoslavia and Iran. The seminar asks, how has the erotic excited revolutionary action-- challenging at once the taboo and commodity fetish—and how can erotics can help us reimagine agitation today?

The Berlin-based seminar will include studio visits with renown contemporary artists, a guided visit of the Gropiusbau’s current show: Vaginal Davis: Fabelhaftes Punk, a performance by CHEAP collective, and a series of events and performances surrounding art week. Studio visits will include meetings with Berlin-based artists such as AA Bronson– co-founder of General Idea, Sophie Jung, Piotr Nathan, and Hito Steyerl.

While in Berlin students will also have time to explore their own research-based art project in consultation with the instructors, relevant archives, and museums. They will have an opportunity to present their work during the final class review and critique.

For various reasons, short stories have been among the most popular genres in literature. They have also been among the most translated. In this class we will read short stories from all over the world, and from various time periods. From early fables from collections like the Sanskrit Pañcatantra and Arabian Nights we will discuss how translation played a role in the transmission of these tales across linguistic traditions. Entering the modern period, we will discuss how short stories confront questions of Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, Gender, Sexuality, Religion, the Climate Crisis etc. We will be guided in our inquiry by classic theorists of the genre like Edgar Allen Poe, Henry James and Vladimir Popp. Authors to be read include well known figures like Lev Tolstoy, María de Zayas, Anton Chekhov and Rabindranath Tagore, as well as lesser known figures such as Manto, Stefan Grabiński, Ambai, Masti Venkatesha Iyengar, Premchand, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Chaso. All readings in English.

This course explores the representation of animality in Jewish literature and visual art. We will explore questions of animal ethics and ecological entanglement across a range of secular and religious genres, from folklore and poetry to Hasidic tales and rabbinic narrative. Writers will include Kafka, Sholem Aleichem, Celan; artists will include Soutine, Chagall, Sarah Shor, and more. No prerequisites. Open to undergrad and grad students.

This course examines the long history of queer love poetry, from the ancient world to postmodernism. Its readings are particularly interested in how modernists claimed literary lineages of queer poetics, queered social practices and communal literary spaces, and reinvented verse forms to reflect queer eros. We will study works from Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish, Greek, and several other languages. No prerequisites. Open to undergrad and grad students.  

This course explores the multifarious entanglements between shamanism—as a religious phenomenon, as an anthropological imaginary, and as a mode of existence—and global modernity. How did shamanism as a concept emerge in the age of colonial expansion and ethnological racialization, how did it affect modernity's understanding of human history, and how do shamanic (dis)articulations of historicity, personhood, sexuality, trauma, translation, and the "nature/culture divide" intervene in modernity's politics? In contemplating these questions, we will consider a variety of "shamanic" artworks ranging from shamanic liturgies to travelogues, music recordings, film, performance art, contemporary literature, and beyond. We will attend both to the spiritual worlds of the "original" shamans of Northeast Asia (through texts from the Evenki, Khakas, Manchu, Tuvan, and other Siberian languages) and to a much broader corpora of (Anglophone, Chinese, German, Greco-Roman, Indigeneous American, Japanese, Tibetan, etc.) works that can be generatively thought of as shamanic in some way. In doing so, we will reflect on the limitations and powers possessed by the figure of the shaman in various broader contexts, both in the history of ideas and in the contemporary world.