Undergraduate

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 Freud's readers. We will pay particular attention to the way that Freud's theories of the mind translate into theories of the social world and of history. Taking its cue from the "beyond" of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the course will pay especial attention to the development of the death drive and explore its relationship to a constellation of psychoanalytic terms including but not limited to instincts and the drive, narcissism, melancholia, masochism, and religion/illusion. 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-especially conditions marked by political, ecological, economic, and public health crises?

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.

Interrogating the possibilities and limits of futurity amidst existential, territorial, ecological, and ideological states of crisis, Arabfuturism-like its sister project of Afrofuturism/s-speaks to how speculative cultures turn to sites of historical or present rupture to envision alternate, possible, or impossible worlds. It is a critical mode of reading assemblages of colonialism, capitalism, and biopolitics that theorizes other ways of being, knowing, and imagining. These counter-futures disrupt the logics of the past, present, and assumed future to envision entirely new archeologies of futurity. Beyond the toll of US-backed "forever wars," recent years have cast the MENA region into unprecedented turmoil. We have also witnessed the promise of revolutions sweeping the region following the 2010 Arab Spring. This seminar explores representations of apocalypse, dystopia, science fiction, speculative history, (non)futurity, and fantasy across works of literature, film, and art from the Middle East and North Africa. Fictional works will be paired with theoretical readings that frame imagination and futurity in relation to the extractive economies of war, colonialism, and capital. Foregrounding the political and ethical stakes of futurity as an existential, epistemic, and aesthetic project, we consider how speculative acts of world-building can not only chart possible paths forward but also reveal the critical potential of impossible acts of imagination.

Can you have sex with God? And, if so, what then does sex mean? What, as a matter of fact, might spiritual sex mean for the cultivation of virtues like celibacy or virginity? While early Christianity and the Christian Middle Ages are often characterized by a disciplined asceticism, erotic desire was just as central to cultivating mystical love for God. In fact, the significance of the language of love, passion, loss, nuptial bliss, jubilation, and the body has rendered the Christian mystical tradition a useful resource for contemporary-and especially psychoanalytic-theories of sex, gender, and sexuality. This course will look both to the past and the present in order to explore the workings of pre- and postmodern desire and to draw connections between Christian mysticism and theories and practices of sex. Working across historical periods, we will read exemplary pieces of Christian mystical literature, psychoanalytic theory, and contemporary literature that draws from the medieval past.

This course navigates the global refugee, exilic, expatriate and émigré crises and experiences as modes of displacement that permeate modern and contemporary literature. Using a comparative approach, this course offers a sustained and nuanced examination of the notion of displacement in most of its forms as represented by many canonical literary works produced by writers of various nations. This course compares the historical, socio-political, economic, cultural and national motives behind the experiences of displacement discussed throughout the course. The main topics covered in this course are: Loss, Alienation and Disorientation, Displacement and Gender Crossing, Displacement and Imperialistic Gestures, Displacement and Mobility, Displacement and Self-fashioning, Acts of Departure: Roots and Routes, Home-Abroad Dichotomy, Displacement, Memory and the Narrative/Poetic Imagination, Displacement and Individual/ National Identity, Abjection and Assimilation, Cross-Cultural Psychology and Dialogical Acculturation, The Crisis of Acceptance and Belonging, Biopolitics and Zoopolitics, The American Dream and Otherness.

Did Asian American literature exist before Asian America? How do we access the enslaved and indentured lives that archives have little to tell us about? Can we reimagine the unheard lives of Asian diasporas historically perceived as “diseased,” inscrutable, and undesirable? What kind of interracial violence and intimacies did they form with Afro-diasporic and indigenous peoples under Spanish and British colonial occupations? To answer these questions, this course turns to the pre-twentieth-century history of Asian diasporas in the Americas, principally in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru. We will closely examine archival sources (inventory records, legal documents, lyrics, spiritual biography, etc.) on two historical trends of forced migration—the early modern transpacific trade of chino slaves and the nineteenth century coolie trafficking of Chinese and Indian laborers—and reflect on the constitutive limits of the archives. In addition, we will read anti-racist, feminist, and queer reimaginations of the Asian-diasporic past by contemporary authors and artists such as David Dabydeen, Michelle Mohabeer and Patricia Powell, etc. These primary sources will be supplemented by theoretical readings on Black feminism, queer of color critique, and Afro-Asian solidarity.