Autumn

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?

Ever find yourself getting emotional over a painting or a song? Or staring at a piece of art and thinking, "What on earth am I looking at?" What does art do to us? Is there a "right" way to experience it? Why do we feel the need to talk about artworks we have seen? In college classes and beyond, we spend a great deal of time engaging with and responding to literary texts and artworks. This course offers a chance to step back and reflect on the nature of those encounters-how and why we respond the way we do, why those responses might matter, and how we go about sharing them with others. While we will occasionally turn to aesthetic philosophy, our main focus will be on developing our own concepts and categories for understanding these encounters-the very event of experiencing art, how those experiences linger, and how they shape our social interactions. Readings will include fiction where characters are profoundly transformed by their encounters with art, essays on paintings and museums, poems drawn from music, travelogues that chronicle sustained exposure to art, ekphrastic dialogues between visual arts and poetry, and creative literary translations. Authors may include Ben Lerner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alice Oswald, Anne Carson, Rachel Cusk, Ciaran Carson, Natasha Trethewey, and Mary Jo Salter.

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.

How does one begin something new? What accounts for our ability to do things that have not not been done before or to create something new? And how can we draw on this fundamental human capacity in moments of crisis? This seminar turns to the Hebrew Bible to think through these timely questions. We will read the book of Genesis in different English translations, think of its reception through the millennia that have passed since it was created, and reflect on its relevance to our current moment of crisis. Featuring museum visits and visiting artists and poets, this seminar will explore human creativity and invites students to mobilize their own capacity to make new beginnings.

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.

Picture a tête-à-tête between Seyh Galip (1757-1799), a mystic poet and leader of a Sufi order in Istanbul, and Mary Robinson (1757-1800), otherwise known as “the English Sappho,” a prolific Romantic poet and actress renowned for Shakespearean roles. We'll dive into their narrative poems on love: Galip’s masnavi Love and Beauty breathes new life into rhyming couplets, and Robinson’s “Sappho and Phaeon” contributes to the revival of the sonnet sequence, with both poets writing at historical crossroads. As the Ottoman Empire undertakes structural modernization efforts amidst decline, England expands its colonial outreach while contending with the legacies of the American and French Revolutions. We will analyze how these poets navigate the delicate balance between tradition and innovation, with a fundamental inquiry into their use of ornamentation and excess. Coleridge’s quip, “she overloads everything,” nods to Robinson’s affiliation with the “Della Cruscans,” while Galip’s opulent works reflect the so-called “Indian style.” What draws poets, or anyone, to such ornate expressive techniques? We'll ponder these questions, exploring their intersections with gendered, cultural, and political realms. In doing so, we might just stumble upon intriguing theories to explain the eventual rise of symbolist movements in modern art.