Past Seminars
Chicago sits more than 600 miles from Gettysburg and more than 700 miles from Manassas and Atlanta, yet the city’s residents were intimately connected to the Civil War.
“History” was everywhere at the World’s Columbian Exposition, the gigantic world’s fair staged in Chicago in 1893.
This seminar aims to practice and discuss several means of encouraging students to engage with narrative cinema at the level of detail and intensity that they apply when close-reading works of literature, to include strategies for working /across/ film and literature as a way of
Today, American boredom appears to be a plague of epidemic proportions—one held responsible for almost every type of undesirable behavior running counter to what are considered acceptable social norms.
The topic of this seminar is the remarkable transformation of southern African Americans from slaves into voting citizens during Reconstruction.
Socrates found poets to be so dangerous he wished to exile them from his Republic. Who fears poets and literature today? Perhaps we should more than we are aware.
This seminar explores the crusades in their historical setting - the causes, motives, and impacts on relations between medieval Christians and Muslims - and as they shape discourse today.
This seminar explores the crusades in their historical setting - the causes, motives, and impacts on relations between medieval Christians and Muslims - and as they shape discourse today.
Religion and politics are two topics we’re told to avoid in discussions with polite company, but they’ve been central in the shaping of American culture.
Desde las imágenes de los chicos humildes corriendo a un tren en movimiento y pidiendo a sus pasajeros “diez centavos” en el documental de Fernando Birri Tire Dié (Argentina, 1961) hasta la historia de dos adolescentes de clase media en su aventura hedonista y sexualizada en
Few political issues inspired such intense debate among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans as what should serve as money, who should control its creation and circulation, and according to what rules.
Between Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy in 1494 and the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, European diplomacy underwent fundamental changes that still influence diplomatic theory and practice today.
From the working-class children running along a moving train and asking its passengers for a dime in Fernando Birri’s documentary Tire Dié (Throw me a Dime, Argentina, 1961) to the story of the two middle-class boys pursuing a hedonistic and sexualized “road trip” in Alfonso
In this seminar, participants will examine A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs.
This seminar will explore questions of gender and power in the poetry of canonical and lesser-known poets of the Beat Generation.
From Millennium Park to Northerly Island and the 1996 Democratic National Convention to the failed 2016 Olympic bid, Richard M. Daley’s shaping power on the city of Chicago, for good and/or ill, has been second only to that of his father, Richard J. Daley.
Few political issues inspired such intense debate among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans as what should serve as money, who should control its creation and circulation, and according to what rules.
This seminar will examine the relationship between the many intangible nuances of foreignness and the quite literal and material designation of foreignness, with the demarcations that designate who belongs in a place and who doesn’t, with the segregation of ethnicities, nationalities or “ra
The origins of the second world war in Europe appear deceptively simple. For some, the flaws of the Versailles Treaty led to a demoralized German nation and an unstable international system.
The origins of the second world war in Europe appear deceptively simple. For some, the flaws of the Versailles Treaty led to a demoralized German nation and an unstable international system.
Historians looking for an apt titling of the current era have often pointed to the last several decades as the age of conservatism.
Few writers were more influential to Renaissance poets than Ovid. Tudor schoolboys studied his poems from /The Metamorphoses/, rhetoricians used his poems as models of exemplary letter writing, and Renaissance dramatists and poets incorporated his stories into their greatest works.
Historians looking for an apt titling of the current era have often pointed to the last several decades as the age of conservatism.
Viewers of historical films often focus on questions of authenticity, asking whether a film has portrayed “accurately” what “really” happened during a historical event.
This seminar will provide strategies for using web-based resources when teaching students about Native American history and culture. The seminar will discuss the means of determining reliable and authoritative educational sites for their own teaching and for student research.
Surtout depuis la Révolution, la littérature française a souvent évolué de pair avec la ville capitale, toutes deux participant au nouvel urbanisme, aux tourmentes politiques, et aux triomphes artistiques qui marquent le 19e siècle en France.
This seminar will provide a critical interrogation of the dominant ideologies of so-called modernity and modernization in the post-colonial Arab world (and the Middle East more generally), with a specific focus on contemporary Islamism in the context of the recent Arab revolts.
This seminar will provide a critical interrogation of the dominant ideologies of so-called modernity and modernization in the post-colonial Arab world (and the Middle East more generally), with a specific focus on contemporary Islamism in the context of the recent Arab revolts.
There are enormous differences in living standards between rich and poor countries in the world today.
Cities represent spatial and temporal transformations of the physical environment. Their location and subsequent patterns of growth are dependent in part on the characteristics of the physical environment.
International organizations such as the United Nations exist at the intersection between domestic and international affairs, and between legal and political questions.
This seminar explores the darker side of the legacy of Peter I of Russia (ruled 1694-1725). Rather than imagine his reign as a period of greatness, the seminar will examine the social cost of Peter’s repeated failures as a ruler.
Poetry of the War in Viet Nam War provides a compelling case study of war literature in general, showcasing many of its major themes while refracting those themes through the formal demands of the lyric. Examining a diverse collection of poets—including Allen Ginsberg, W.D.
What is the state of American feminism today? Is it still countercultural? Was it ever?
Zora Neale Hurston famously stated that she is not “tragically colored” and does not belong to the “sobbing school of negrohood.” Richard Wright, in his review of /Their Eyes Were Watching God/, criticizes Hurston for continuing the tradition of minstrelsy
Although there is widespread agreement that American authorities knew of Hitler’s plan to annihilate Europe’s Jews by 1942, there is no consensus about the nature and effectiveness of America’s response to the Holocaust.
The current US financial crisis that began in 2008 has been depicted in the media as the first great financial crisis since the advent of the Great Depression in 1929.
In this perennially popular, short, and sensational (i.e., teachable!) book, we are confronted with one of literature’s most enduring and chilling tales of a hidden or repressed self. Just what is the relation of Stevenson’s hideous Mr. Hyde to the urbane Dr. Jekyll?
Much ink has been spilled on the need to make U.S. history more transnational. In this seminar, participants will read and discuss the historical literature that places the 19th century women’s movement in a global context.
This seminar aims to practice and discuss several means of encouraging students to engage with narrative cinema at the level of detail and intensity that they apply when close-reading works of literature, to include strategies for working /across/ film and literature as a way of developing studen
Ken Kesey’s /One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest/ was a seminal novel for the 1960s counterculture, as well as an important American inheritor of European ideas of Existentialism and the absurd.
From Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s victory alongside Fidel Castro in Cuba in 1959 to the military coup d’état against President Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, the Latin American “long sixties” were suffused by a feeling of imminence, of “change about to happen”.
Fashion is a powerful symbolic language for saying who we are, what we do, and what we value. Like all languages, fashion has a history, and therefore requires that we play by rules that we inherit as much as we invent. As a result, fashion exists at the intersection of tradition and
The Cold War was arguably the longest modern conflict between competing nations and ideologies. Much of the combat was communicated through media and related speculation about life on the other side. New definitions of masculinity and femininity emerged as gender became a particularly
The centrality of Chicago and the mobility of its inhabitants generated an aesthetic of openness and experiment that was particularly hospitable to the major writers and artists of the era. This seminar will focus primarily on poetry in Chicago by contextualizing it within larger cultural m
Students love, and arguably deserve, having their own lifetimes placed in historical context. And while some call such attempts to place the current moment in historical context mere journalism, scholars have already done quite sophisticatedwork on events such as the election of 2000, 9/11,
This seminar will examine the varieties of American intellectual responses to WWII in the 1940s and 50s. Seminar participants will explore how American commentators made sense of the war, justified American involvement, and likewise how the war set new terms for American self-understanding.
Students love, and arguably deserve, having their own lifetimes placed in historical context. And while some call such attempts to place the current moment in historical context mere journalism, scholars have already done quite sophisticatedwork on events such as the election of 2000, 9/11,
Religious reforms and civil conflicts produced excitement, division, chaos, and horror during the European Wars of Religion. In this seminar, participants will explore the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the experiences of the people who lived through them.
Incorporating the gorgeous and glossy films of Bollywood in the classroom can be a challenge.
Since the advent of the Four Modernizations under the aegis of Deng Xiaoping in late 1978, Chinese society, culture, economy-indeed, almost every aspect of life-has been transformed.
This seminar aims to practice and discuss several means of encouraging students to engage with narrative cinema at the level of detail and intensity that they apply when close-reading works of literature, to include strategies for working /across/ film and literature as a way of developing studen
In this seminar participants will use the life of the republic’s most celebrated president as a window to explore the transformations and continuities in American politics, cultures, economics, ideologies, and social life during the half- century ending in the cataclysmic Civil War.
In this seminar, participants will explore several approaches to reading and responding to visually complex texts. Color, image, style, movement –these are all features of a sophisticated visual rhetoric.
The Cold War was arguably the longest modern conflict between competing nations and ideologies. Much of the combat was communicated through media and related speculation about life on the other side. New definitions of masculinity and femininity emerged as gender became a particularly
In this seminar, participants will explore several approaches to reading and responding to visually complex texts. Color, image, style, movement –these are all features of a sophisticated visual rhetoric.
Historians have documented the important cultural values that a wide variety of African peoples brought here as captives on slave ships. Yet, scholars have focused less on how blacks in America have imagined and encountered Africans in the postbellum period. Based on the wonderful new
Dans le roman Volkswagen Blues, de Jacques Poulin, un écrivain nommé Jack Waterman entreprend un voyage accompagné par une jeune Amérindienne, Pitsémine – à travers l’Amérique du Nord, d’est en ouest, à la recherche de son frère Théo, qu’il n’a pas vu depuis 15 ans. Leur parcours est littér
In August 2010, China surpassed Japan to take the number two spot(after the United States) as the world’s second largest economy. Will Japan be able to keep up with economic growth in China and India?
In this seminar, participants will eview the U.S. Census from its constitutional origins to its present day status as an essential tool of government social policy, and academic social science.
This seminar will provide an overview of the main events and historical actors of the 1910-1920 Mexican revolution, whose official centennial will be marked in 2010. Participants will discuss the causes behind the major rebellions and their political and social consequences.
Why did Congress and the President struggle to cooperate across party lines during the 110th Congress (2009-2011) and why is it unlikely that things will change in the 111th Congress (2011-2013)?
The 1919 peace conference and treaty with Germany were controversial with contemporaries, reviled in the thirties, and disdained by many historians since. One school of thought is that the end of the first world war (and the subsequent peace) led inexorably to the beginning of the second wo
Blanco es un poema y un artefacto que puede iniciar una discusión sobre cómo se influye la producción material del libro en los límites y posibilidades de la escritura del poeta. Publicado en 1967, Blanco se asocia tanto con el rollo como con los movimientos artísticos del Pop Art. Ex
This seminar will examine the varieties of American intellectual responses to WWII in the 1940s and 50s. Seminar participants will explore how American commentators made sense of the war, justified American involvement, and likewise how the war set new terms for American self-understanding.
The 1919 peace conference and treaty with Germany were controversial with contemporaries, reviled in the thirties, and disdained by many historians since. One school of thought is that the end of the first world war (and the subsequent peace) led inexorably to the beginning of the second wo
“Remember the Ladies,” Abigail Adams famously implored her husband, John, at the start of the American Revolution. “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands.
Since its rise in 1979, the Islamic Republican regime in Iran has tried by various methods, ranging from encouragement to intimidation to encourage women to resume their traditional role as homemakers.
Celebratory accounts of U.S. history have shied from the word “empire”, the one exception being the tendency to hold up the years around 1898 as an aberration in the longer sweep of events.
Celebratory accounts of U.S. history have shied from the word “empire”, the one exception being the tendency to hold up the years around 1898 as an aberration in the longer sweep of events.
The twentieth century saw the rise of a revolutionary global human rights culture in which the emergence of transnational norms, movements and institutions held out the promise of more fully realizing human dignity and welfare in a space that transcended the local and the national. Beginnin
Real or imagined, literal or metaphorical, monsters have exerted a dread fascination on the human mind for many centuries. They attract and repel us, intrigue and terrify us, and in the process reveal something deeply important about the darker recesses of our collective psyche.
In this seminar, seminar participants will examine the many ways in which Richard J.
In this seminar, seminar participants will examine the many ways in which Richard J.
The United States fought in World War I to make the world safe for democracy. After victory, African Americans carried on that mission at home. But the defenders of white supremacy did not make way for the rights and equalities of African Americans.
In the fifteen years before the publication of /Leaves of Grass/ (1855), Walt Whitman constructed three authoritative voices by which he engaged the upheavals endemic to the Industrial Revolution.
Spain during the Middle Ages (c. 500-1500) represented a crossroads of religious cultures. Some historians have described this as a /convivencia/ or period of harmonious coexistence.
Spain during the Middle Ages (c. 500-1500) represented a crossroads of religious cultures. Some historians have described this as /convivencia/ or period of harmonious coexistence.
The United States fought in World War I to make the world safe for democracy. After victory, African Americans carried on that mission at home. But the defenders of white supremacy did not make way for the rights and equalities of African Americans.
/Hamlet/’s impact has led one famous critic to credit its protagonist with “the invention of the human,” his psychological depths and existential struggles a model that decisively impacts all subsequent literary creation.
/Hamlet/’s impact has led one famous critic to credit its protagonist with “the invention of the human,” his psychological depths and existential struggles a model that decisively impacts all subsequent literary creation.
A metropolitan area’s defining characteristic is that its structure is always changing. Do the cities of the future feature speedy mass transportation, expanded mixed-use neighborhoods, and vibrant downtowns?
The United States is commonly described as a nation of immigrants or as a melting pot of racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. In celebrating American pluralism, we rarely think about its origins or its contested history.
Students new to the /Odyssey/ sometimes find disappointing the relative absence of the kind of psychological realism we find in novels, and leave the poem with a secure sense of Odysseus’s wanderings but a suspicion that the Homeric notion of character doesn’t extend much past its famous epithets
The image of Chicago has been created through many genres and media: poetry, fiction, drama, film. But what all of these representations of the city have in common is a source, Chicago journalism. Beyond this, however, many Chicago journalists have themselves written work for Chicago
Buddhism is alternately described as a religion, a philosophy, and a culture. All of which are accurate descriptions. But tremendous confusion exists in the West about the beliefs and the logic of Buddhism.
One of the most striking indicators of our new multiracial age is the growing racial and ethnic diversity of American suburbs.
This seminar is an intense examination of some of the events that led to the first world war and its subsequent interpretation by historians.
The Scottish philosopher, essayist and historian, David Hume, was among the first great thinkers of the Enlightenment, and among the first to develop a thoroughly secular account of morality – an account that continues to be a live option. In this seminar participants will read select
Throughout U.S. history, a persistent question has vexed commentators on American culture: do we have a vital, distinct intellectual life?
One of the key challenges in teaching graphic narratives is convincing readers that a text that looks every bit like a simple comic requires more than minimal analysis and critical reading.
The United States fought in World War I to make the world safe for democracy. After victory, African Americans carried on that mission at home. But the defenders of white supremacy did not make way for the rights and equalities of African Americans.
Why do recessions and financial crises occur? How can individuals and governments limit damage and reduce suffering while promoting recovery?
In the summer of 1944, the Red Army entered Eastern Europe in its westward push towards Berlin. The Soviets liberated these territories from the Nazi occupation, but did not leave them. Instead, with the help of local communists, they implemented the communist system patterned on the
This seminar focuses on the role of law in creating and maintaining legal segregation in the American South from the late 19th century through the 20th century.
Although originating in Britain, the gothic has taken root in American literature with fiction that explores the dark and hidden sides of human culture, creating worlds teeming with the buried, the undead, the supernatural, the forbidden, the demonic, and the grotesque.
After the Second World War, the American labor movement worked to ensure that America’s working class benefited from the United States’ new global preeminence.
Although originating in Britain, the gothic has taken root in American literature with fiction that explores the dark and hidden sides of human culture, creating worlds teeming with the buried, the undead, the supernatural, the forbidden, the demonic, and the grotesque.
Marguerite de Navarre était la soeur du roi François Ier aussi bien que reine du royaume de Navarre. Très croyante, elle a encouragé la réforme à l’intérieur de l’église catholique en France. Elle a écrit de la poésie spirituelle aussi bien qu’un recueil de 73 nouvelles intitulé l’/He
Between 1819 and 2008, the United States has experienced six major panics - periods when stock market crashes coincided with bank failures. This seminar will examine historical explanations for these panics as well as their political, social, and cultural legacies.
This seminar is meant to provide participants with an overview of Native American literature through a series of short readings and the discussion of the Native American film, “Smoke Signals.” The readings have been chosen for their accessibility and for the fact that they repre
This seminar will provide an economic theoretical framework for understanding that environmental problems are often economic problems with economic solutions. Participants will focus on the role that economic incentives play in creating environmental problems and how alterations in those in
The teaching and practice of international relations, security, and development have long been dominated by Western–especially U.S.–theoretical paradigms.
As readers travel along the road to Canterbury with Chaucer’s pilgrims, they not only hear a collection of stories- both pious and irreverent-but they also meet a community of characters whose diversity spans the spectrum of medieval society, who compete with one other, trading insults as w
Chicagoans and their city have played integral roles in the evolution of motion picture technology and the history of film. As producers, distributors, writers, actors, audiences, and as backdrop and setting, the city and its residents shaped the development of the medium. But did the
This seminar will suggest a paradigm for thinking about democratic development in post-Communist Europe.
Chicagoans and their city have played integral roles in the evolution of motion picture technology and the history of film. As producers, distributors, writers, actors, audiences, and as backdrop and setting, the city and its residents shaped the development of the medium. But did the
This seminar will introduce participants to some of the historical background and key concepts that have informed Indo-Persian Sufism (tasawwuf) since medieval times. Described succinctly by one modern scholar as the “mystical dimensions of Islam,” Sufi idioms of gnostic love, spiritual int
In the midst of the “shocked disbelief” exclaimed by Alan Greenspan at the global financial turmoil of 2008-09, it is easily overlooked that crisis has been an expected and regular feature of life in western capitalism at least since the Victorian period. During that period, in
This seminar will offer participants a new perspective on North America as a place of constant migrations and shifting homelands. First, the issue of non-sedentary cultures will be explored, using the concept of diaspora as a tool to understand the effects of our modern environments on spac
Tim O’Brien’s /The Things They Carried/ is rapidly becoming a fixture in the American literary canon, and a standard text in American high school curricula. This seminar will discuss O’Brien’s work from formal, historical, and thematic perspectives.
In this seminar, particpants will explore the variety of backgrounds and experiences of the American workers during the heyday of the industrial revolution. Participants will begin with the racial, ethnic, and gender particularity of the workforce by region, then examine sources of industri
Freedom and slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil were intertwined. Between the abolition of the African slave trade in 1850 and the abolition of slavery in 1888, Brazil had dimensions of both a slave society and a post-emancipation society.
Throughout U.S. history, a persistent question has vexed commentators on American culture: do we have a vital, distinct intellectual life?
Buddhism is alternately described as a religion, a philosophy, and a culture. All of which are accurate descriptions. But tremendous confusion exists in the West about the beliefs and the logic of Buddhism.
Although science fiction has been a popular genre for decades, and fantasy derives from a tradition as old as literature, the past two decades have seen a dramatic blurring of the boundaries between genres, between genre and literary fiction, even between adult and young adult fiction. This
In this seminar, participants will study the short fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald in and around the time of The Great Gatsby, considering his reputation as a writer of popular and serious fiction with comparative reference to other prominent U.S.
In this seminar, participants will look at the two different existing texts of /King Lear/ (the Quarto and the Folio), trying to see what makes each of them unique. The idea will not be to decide which one of them is “better,” but rather to see what Shakespeare may have been doi
Even in today’s hip hop/alternative music scene, rock ‘n’ roll speaks to students. Exploring recent American cultural history through a look at rock music is therefore as much fun as it is useful.
Celebratory accounts of U.S.
A neglected but vital element of American political history has been populism. This seminar will explore how populism has influenced the course of our past, from the 18th century to the present. Participants will look at the Anti-Federalists, nineteenth-century social movements, radic
Tim O’Brien’s /The Things They Carried/ is rapidly becoming a fixture in the American literary canon, and a standard text in American high school curricula. This seminar will discuss O’Brien’s work from formal, historical, and thematic perspectives.
One of the key challenges in teaching graphic narratives is convincing readers that a text that looks every bit like a simple comic requires more than minimal analysis and critical reading.
Everyone has heard of Pablo Neruda – not just fans of the original Spanish poems, but also readers who first encounter his work in English. How have certain writers come to be familiar names to diverse audiences, in different languages?
This seminar will explore the diversity of Latino experiences in the United States from 1492 to the present.
In the summer of 1944, the Red Army entered Eastern Europe in its westward push towards Berlin. The Soviets liberated these territories from the Nazi occupation, but did not leave them. Instead, with the help of local communists, they implemented the communist system patterned on the
The image of Chicago has been created through many genres and media: poetry, fiction, drama, film. But what all of these representations of the city have in common is a source, Chicago journalism. Beyond this, however, many Chicago journalists have themselves written work for Chicago
In recent years the study of European colonialism has become a central component of the way one understands and explains the modern world, its globalized economic markets and ethnically diverse citizenry.
This seminar will explore the diversity of Latino experiences in the United States from 1492 to the present.
The story of sugar’s transformation from luxury product to uibiquitous commodity in the modern Western diet offers a rich vantage on transatlantic and world history. It also prods students and scholars to deeper consideration of the myriad social, cultural, and economic processes with
Just about every year, one rogue scholar or another offers a new, or newly recycled, theory about who “really” wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
The International Olympic Committee awarded the 1936 Olympic Games to Germany in May 1931, nearly two years before Hitler became Chancellor.
Este seminario se trata de la poesía tardía de Neruda, especialmente los poemas menos conocidos y circulados en los estudios canónicos de Neruda. A través de una investigación de los discursos políticos y estéticos—tan nacionales como internacionales—en los cuales Neruda está situado como e
The Middle East has been a central focus of American foreign policy since the end of World War II. This seminar will examine the strategic significance of the region, its internal dynamics, and the basic outlines of American foreign policy over the past few decades. While the first ha
During the economic and social catastrophe of the Great Depression of the 1930s, most Americans changed their views of the government’s role in their lives as they supported New Deal measures to mitigate and reform the worst aspects of the crisis. Despite this change in political and
This seminar will focus on a phenomenon which bound together four continents, touched millions of lives, and ultimately created pathways of globalization. The trans-Atlantic slave trade has been studied intensively for decades, but new perspectives—and perhaps more important, new sources of
Chicago grew from a frontier outpost to a world metropolis in a mere 60 years. Between its 1833 incorporation and the 1893 Columbian Exposition, Chicago was transformed from a village of a few hundred on the edge of wilderness to home of the railroad, the skyscraper, the modern factory, hom
A number of prominent and conflicting interpretations of Charlotte Bronte’s/ Jane Eyre/ have emerged over the past few decades. Originally viewed as a love story, later as a feminist manifesto, and more recently as both a colonialist and anti-colonialist allegory, the novel’s co
Challenging the widespread depiction of Martin Luther King as winning equal rights for African Americans is the story of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. These black and white students risked their lives to organize black southerners and help them win their own rights.
Viewed as everything from an extension of frontier ideology to the expression of counter culture, the road narrative genre has been an enduring and popular American cultural form.
“The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots,” Walt Whitman wrote in the Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, a revolutionary volume of poems that radically transformed the form and content of poetry in the United States and elsewhere. This seminar will
This seminar focuses on the legacy of Darwinism and the conflicts between science and religion in contemporary American culture. It will be divided roughly into two halves.
In this seminar, participants will explore the ways the geographic discipline studies the organizational components of cities (i.e. neighborhoods, business districts, and public spaces), the spatial structure of cities in a comparative sense, and systems of cities in a global context (i.e.
Partisan conflict over taxes, spending, and budget deficits are increasingly major concerns as the federal debt reaches new levels every year. Informed citizens ought to understand the ideologies that shape partisan conflict over taxes and spending. It is also worth understanding what
In the decade after the October Revolution of 1917, in the invigorating and alarming atmosphere of scientific, technological, and political revolutions, Russian artists and writers sought to glimpse and creatively embody the promise that the future might hold. The world was rapidly changing
The United States is commonly described as a nation of immigrants or as a melting pot of racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. In celebrating American pluralism, we rarely think about its origins or its contested history.
Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley were both famous and infamous in their own time for their writing as well as for the lives they lived. Today, thanks to feminist criticism in the 1970s, Mary Shelley’s novel, /Frankenstein,/ is a canonical text for any English major. Percy S
Hans Holbein’s 1533 painting, The Ambassadors, is famed for the anamorphic skull that appears in the center foreground. This strangely distorted death’s head is so striking, we tend to forget to look closely at the many other material objects in the painting. Yet they also have import
Contrary to the image regularly purveyed in contemporary media and popular culture, the Islamicate world has, over the centuries, produced some of the most eclectic, innovative, heterogeneous, and multicultural polities the world has yet seen. One such polity would certainly be the Mughal E
Contrary to the image regularly purveyed in contemporary media and popular culture, the Islamicate world has, over the centuries, produced some of the most eclectic, innovative, heterogeneous, and multicultural polities the world has yet seen. One such polity would certainly be the Mughal E
In this seminar, participants will read three pieces that either take new approaches to Civil War history, or reflect critically on the ways that historians are addressing the period.
As is now well known from films, graphic novels, and the like, Beowulf, our most important Old English poem, treats a super-hero’s fights against three monsters.
At the conclusion of the War for Independence the United States emerged as a separate political entity, but the process of forging a distinct national identity continued well beyond the Revolutionary era. History –the events of the war, the activities of the founders, and the process of ter
This seminar will introduce participants to recent interpretations of the modern U.S.
Students new to the /Odyssey/ sometimes find disappointing the relative absence of the kind of psychological realism we find in novels, and leave the poem with a secure sense of Odysseus’s wanderings but a suspicion that the Homeric notion of character doesn’t extend much past its famous epithets
While witchcraft has always been illegal, exactly what constituted magic (as opposed to science or religion or healing) was a grey area through much of the middle ages.
Twentieth-Century U.S. historiography hinges on the year 1945. Everything after V-J Day is lumped together as “postwar,” while everything before it is, too often, treated merely as a prelude to the “American Century” it inaugurated.
Few areas of historical study have made such striking advances in the past two decades as the study of the Nazi regime’s attempt to eradicate the European Jews. Yet the subject remains unfathomable to many people, and its causes and course almost literally incredible. This semin
Twentieth-Century U.S. historiography hinges on the year 1945. Everything after V-J Day is lumped together as “postwar,” while everything before it is, too often, treated merely as a prelude to the “American Century” it inaugurated.
We’ve heard much about Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and the University of Chicago sociologists who broke new ground during the Progressive era with fresh approaches to social urban problems.
Louis XIV, the Sun King, is often referred to as an absolutist monarch, in spite of the term’s anachronism.
Few would disagree that individuals are endowed with inherent human rights—but what are those rights? And howare they established, acted upon, and guaranteed?
The Jacksonian era (1815-1848) is commonly associated with the widening of political participation, the expansion of economic opportunity, and the explosion of reform movements to improve American society. At the same time, this era witnessed the early industrial revolution and the rise of
This seminar will examine the rhetorical and psychological complexities of some of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Participants will examine how Shakespeare uses the form to get his effects (or struggles with the form to do so), while also getting some sense of the range of styles that Shakesp
In this seminar, participants will discuss the Federal Reserve Bank’s role in shaping monetary policies and how those policies have influenced the United States’ current economic problems.
In this seminar, participants will examine ways in which Benjamin Franklin crafted an identity through the recollecting and writing of his life and founded the concept of the self-made man. Participants will also discuss how, in Franklin’s text, the genre of spiritual autobiography, which s
Louis XIV, the Sun King, is often referred to as an absolutist monarch, in spite of the term’s anachronism.
Christianity in medieval Europe was characterized by an ambivalent attitude toward women: the image of Eve as the source of original sin was juxtaposed with the central role of the Virgin Mary in the salvation of mankind.
The United States is not a nation like many other nations; it is not the product of a commonly occupied territory over many centuries, and after the waves of immigration in the nineteenth century, it became a polyglot “unity” of many different ethnic “unities.” This raises
Most of us are well aware of the role that the Anti-Federalists played in the debate over the US Constitution. And though they failed to prevent the ratification of the Consitution, their ideas were never completely expunged from American politics.
Darwin’s /Origin of Species/ is one of the most important books in science and still provides the foundation for contemporary biology. Seminar participants will examine parts of chapters 3 and 4 of the “Origin” and the last chapter. These will furnish a good idea of
One of the key challenges in teaching graphic narratives is convincing readers that a text that looks every bit like a simple comic requires more than minimal analysis and critical reading.
The Jacksonian era (1815-1848) is commonly associated with the widening of political participation, the expansion of economic opportunity, and the explosion of reform movements to improve American society. At the same time, this era witnessed the early industrial revolution and the rise of
The Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), an event that embodied Maoism and its utopian vision, was unique in world history in the depth and scale of pure destruction. It resulted in the destruction of much of China’s cultural heritage and tradit
One of the key challenges in teaching graphic narratives is convincing readers that a text that looks every bit like a simple comic requires more than minimal analysis and critical reading.
As was predictable following Senate confirmation of the two Bush appointees, the United States Supreme Court moved in an increasingly conservative direction.