Undergraduate

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.

The Hollywood film studios were established in the same years that the Hittite language was deciphered, and so began two genre-building projects that have barely interacted.  What do the ancient annals of the king’s military exploits have in common with Westerns like Stagecoach and The Searchers?  Can we read the story of a murdered Hittite prince—who would have been the future pharaoh of Egypt—as a film noir, like The Maltese Falcon?  Is a mythological text about a missing deity a better example of Hollywood film style than the musical Singin’ in the Rain?  In the first course in the history of the world to compare Late Bronze Age Hittite texts and classic Hollywood genre films, we will endeavor to understand what makes a genre recognizable across time, culture, and medium.  Topics we will explore include storytelling through text and image, reception, literary and film style, adaptations, and what makes a “classic”.  We will dive into Hittite texts in translation, watch Hollywood films, and consult literary and film theory.

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.  

Romanticism is often represented, both popularly and in grand intellectual histories, as a movement of retrieval or re-enchantment. In such narratives, some cosmic or spiritual unity has been lost, hidden, or fractured by the rationality of the Enlightenment, and Romanticism is seen as one of western Europe’s first attempts to grapple with the consequences of this loss. In this course we will closely read the poetry and prose of six key German and English Romantic writers, with a focus on how they variously characterize the philosophical and spiritual significance of their work. Alongside these writers we will look at several influential accounts of the place they hold within religious, philosophical, and literary history, and ask how the primary texts support or resist these framings. Is poetry, as the above narrative would have it, a way of picking up the broken pieces of religion? What sorts of ‘pasts’ do Romantic writers take up, and how do such pasts figure into the present? Is re-enchantment a necessary step, or is disenchantment a myth from the start? Is the imagination a means of countering the pernicious effects of scientific rationalism, or ‘reason in her most exalted mood’ We will read works by Novalis, Schlegel, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, and Keats to ask how each figure articulates a spiritual charge for poetry, and what poetry’s spiritual task means for the relationships between literature, religion, and philosophy. 

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.

This course offers an introduction to psychoanalytic theory by surveying significant writings by Freud and by Freud's readers. We will explore Freud's various models of the psyche, his interventions into the theory of sexuality, and his writings on religion by tracking the development of key concepts like transference, the Oedipus complex, narcissism, melancholia, the unconscious, and the death drive, among others. How have these concepts evolved over the course of their deployment in 20th- and 21st-century critical and political projects like feminism and queer theory? How have major developments in psychoanalysis read Freud anew? And in what ways do these psychoanalytic projects respond to their historical conditions? Readers of Freud whom we will encounter may include Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Butler, Spillers, Edelman, Dean, and Musser.

These two philosopher-teachers, Mengzi (Mencius) in 4th century BCE China and Epictetus in the 2nd century CE Greco-Roman world, both foregrounded an embodied ethics, and both were concerned with questions of living in harmony with nature, achieving freedom from external constraints, and dealing with the disruptive turbulence of passionate emotions. This course is a literary and philosophical comparative study of Mengzi’s writings alongside the Handbook and Discourses of Epictetus. Course readings are all in English, and no knowledge of classical Chinese or Greek language or philosophy is needed, but separate meetings can be scheduled for students interested in reading either of these texts in the original language.