Graduate

This course analyzes a range of Palestinian life narratives produced by authors based in different places, both in Palestine and the diaspora, united in a common cause and a desire to speak out, thereby circulating their works as a form of Palestinian testimony. This course sees these writers conversing with each other, each attempting to represent their own personal experience but also responding to the broader context of ongoing Palestinian dispossession, making this integral to the snapshot of experience they want to narrate. This course shows that such texts, individually meaningful but also conversant with wider concerns and messages of solidarity and advocacy, are ideal components of contemporary Palestinian literature that position itself as future-orientated, and expresses a desire to combat the international community’s failure to acknowledge Palestinian rights for justice and self-determination. This course contends that contemporary Palestinian life writing goes beyond narrating the specifics of the conflict in order to reflect on central questions of dignity, justice, and solidarity at the time Palestine is still a place that is not fully recognized. All readings will be in English, although there will be an opportunity to read and discuss texts in the original language (Arabic).

Ideas of justice are not self-evident truths but constructed through a variety of practices. This course will explore how the language of human rights, which scholars have called the moral lingua franca of our time, is constructed and circulated through aesthetic representation (such as literature, painting, and film), the law, HRNGOs, and public intellectual debates in the 20th and 21st centuries. Throughout the course, we will ask: How are ideas of human rights produced, transformed, or troubled by aesthetic production? What kinds of aesthetic and political claims can we stake in the name of human rights? And what might alternative visions of justice look like? We will discover how literature and visual art help both constitute and reflect the social and political truths by which we live, as well as how these seemingly obvious truths produce a variety of normative assumptions about what constitutes justice. Works will include texts by Ernst Bloch, Richard Wright, Kwame Nkrumah, Rigoberta Menchú, Leon Golub, Jacobo Timerman, and Ai Weiwei. Texts can be read in the English translation or original.

This workshop will focus on literature as a tool to explore tragic and traumatic events in history, such as wars, genocides, and natural disasters, among others. Through different examples, we will review different poetic and narrative forms that delve into historical and personal memory, remembering, reflecting, and analyzing events that have marked the lives of individuals, communities, and nations. We will discuss how writing can be an effective way of coping with the painful burden of history, helping to heal the wounds of the past, as well as to reflect on the ways in which literature can serve as a way of preserving the memory of the victims of these tragic events, allowing their stories to be told, remembered and honored in order to bring us a little closer to reparation and justice.

Religions, like all cultural phenomena, are akin to organic beings: they change, grow and adapt, absorb and assimilate what they encounter, become transformed constantly in relation to challenges and opportunities – and sometimes react against them. This course will focus on one example of religious-cultural-philosophical adaptation and change through a study of the medieval translation of Arabic and Judeo-Arabic works into Hebrew during the 12th-15th centuries. We will focus on the translations themselves and translation technique, but principally on what was translated and why, when and where, by whom and for whom. All this with an added emphasis on the result: how did Judaism and Jewish culture change through translation – in all its forms – during the high middle ages.

The Fortunoff Archive at Yale, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Shoah Foundation, and Yad Vashem are just a few of the repositories of audiovisual Holocaust testimonies throughout the world. As these testimonies come to be all that remains of the generations of Holocaust survivors to tell their stories, how are researchers approaching them? In this class we will explore four distinct discourses and their approaches to testimony: Historical, Literary, Cinematic, and Photographic. Our final projects will be an analysis of a testimony from one of the above-named archives that incorporates all four perspectives. 

This interdisciplinary course will synthesize ethnographic and literary discourses to consider the ways in which the culture of the Jewish “shtetl,” the small towns and villages in eastern Europe where Jewish culture thrived for nearly a millennium, has been represented in the United States after the Holocaust, from the 1940s to the present day. We will read a wide variety of materials within the field of anthropology as well as Jewish literatures and cultures to tease out the concept of “salvage poetics” or a literary poetics that has been forged in popular attempts to bridge dramatically different historical moments, different geographic locations, and different cultures across the abyss of the Holocaust. 

What texts and contexts constitute American Jewish experience? In this class, we will consider the birth of a unique Jewish ethnicity in America, with a deep dive into the literature, the theology, and the politics of American Judaism from the turn of the 20th century to the post-October 7th moment we now inhabit. Beginning with reflections on the protestantization of American Judaism, special attention will be paid to the intersection of ethnic and religious experience in contemporary American Jewish life. With a foray into the boom in American Jewish Passover Haggadahs, we will explore the unique shape of the seemingly oxymoronic American Jewish religious secularism. We will consider Jews, Civil Rights, neo-Hassidism, and the counterculture and read ethnographies of American Jewish immigrant communities and aging urban synagogues. Debates on the silence of the American Jewish community after the Holocaust will be set against the backdrop of the quest to reconstruct East European Jewish life during that same period. Finally, we will explore the powerful growth of Diasporism in American Jewish culture today.

This course focuses on expressions of mourning and explores how in response to catastrophic experiences and histories of colonialism, writers and filmmakers narrate loss and trauma. We will investigate how these authors renegotiate their identities, how they fashion national and political imaginaries, and how they envision alternative futures in their diverse bodies of work. Engaging with an array of literary and cinematic depictions, our aim will be to examine and compare the rich landscape of voices that animate African, Native American, and Palestinian experiences and representations. Together, we will analyze source materials related to the themes of violence, memory, gender, race, and trauma. Through our weekly assignments and discussions, we will seek to determine the tropes and aesthetic tools that ignite modes of storytelling, and to answer: how do writers and artists employ aesthetic form to portray catastrophes? How might expressions of grief also be mobilized for resistance and struggle?

Our class will be organized into three modules, touching upon African, Native American, and Palestinian prose, poetry, and film alongside theoretical works in memory and trauma studies. By the end of the quarter, students will be able to develop their own complex evaluations of these narratives—and recognize how comparisons through artistic expression can be a powerful tool for amplifying a multiplicity of stories about mourning and defiance.

The 19th century enslaved scholar Omar Ibn Said opens his autobiography with the words: “I cannot write my life.” This seminar takes this starting point –the thick of chattel slavery, mercantile capitalism, and colonial violence – to investigate literary productions by racialized others dispersed in and by the so-called era of modernity. We will complicate what constitutes the modernity and how Islam, perhaps more than any other tradition, has been configured as its inverse. In doing so, we will read works ranging from poetry, novels, short stories, comics, and memoirs as they relate to encounters and engagements particularly with Islam as a religious tradition, colonialism, industrialization, and nationalism, even as global understandings of tradition, genre, and form are being contested and rapidly changing. In addition to these primary sources, we will theoretically situate these works within larger discussions of racecraft, oral transmission and culture, “folk” vs. “high” literature, Orientalism, politics, gender, sexuality, and identity. We will look at this is articulated in diasporic literary forms written within – and sometimes for - the imperial core. Through in-class discussions, readings, and a final paper, students will strengthen their global literacy, demonstrate knowledge of global historical trends, analyze the shifting and even contradictory interpretations of the role of religion in racial formations, all while identifying, critiquing, and assessing these key course themes within our primary source material.

This course offers a close reading of Giambattista Vico’s seminal work, New Science (1744), which aimed to challenge prevailing notions regarding the fundamental principles of humanity. Often dubbed the “last Renaissance man” or a representative of the “Counter-Enlightenment,” Vico rejected the detached rationalism of his time as he set out to recover the attitude and emotions relevant to the humanities in contrast to the natural sciences. His inquiry revolves around the connection between the factum or what is “made” – anything resulting from human skills (literature, art, law, institutions, etc.) – and the verum or God-begotten truth. What kind of epistemology and interpretive methodologies arise when we turn to Vico, Descartes’s scourge? In our own dissatisfaction with rational empiricism, Vico’s alternative unfolds as an epic exploration through time, guiding us to witness primitive humans uttering their first word, partake in Noah’s ark journey, and retrace the origins of writing and the foundation of civilizations.