Past Seminars
This seminar will consider ways of using literature and visual art from the period to discuss two very different kinds of frontiers in the United States of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: the rapidly disappearing West and the even more rapidly rising city.
The Chicago Area Waterway System (CAWS) has been instrumental in transforming Chicago from a mudhole into a thriving commercial and cultural metropolis. The CAWS is a 130-mile network of natural and constructed rivers, canals, locks and other structures in Chicago and northwest Indiana.
How did Chicagoans interpret the rise of the city in the half-century after the Civil War through their five senses? What might the evidence of the sensory past teach us about their perspectives on the major issues of the day including public health, industrial pollution, the conflict between labor and capital, and political radicalism?
This seminar will explore several recent developments in the historical understanding of the Reformation era in the 16th century, and seek to answer the following questions:What were the cultural and theological differences between Catholics and Protestants, and among different kinds of Protestants?
In 1968, Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel “House Made of Dawn.” That moment is often understood as the start of the Native American Renaissance, a period characterized by unprecedented publication of literature by American Indian writers.
This seminar offers an opportunity to reconsider the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation. Was it a turning point in American history, or has its importance been exaggerated? How and why did slavery end in the United States? We’ll do our best to address these questions, drawing on primary sources and on recent writing by historians.
This seminar explores teaching methods and tools (e.g. images, sources, documentaries) for approaching Imperial Rome. We will approach the Roman Empire not just as a historical subject, but also as a teaching tool to analyze how modern concepts of the past are formed (e.g. the changing nature of sources and scholarship).
This seminar explores teaching methods and tools (e.g. images, sources, documentaries) for approaching Imperial Rome. We will approach the Roman Empire not just as a historical subject, but also as a teaching tool to analyze how modern concepts of the past are formed (e.g. the changing nature of sources and scholarship).
This seminar will analyze aspects of Shakespeare’s language that add depth to modern readers’ understanding of the Bard.
In this seminar, we will examine a crucial aspect of city life: the relationship between the built environment and the natural world. How does the man-made obliterate or exclude the natural? How do writers and artists depict this tension, which is especially prominent in Chicago, due to our relationship to Lake Michigan?
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, “The Scarlet Letter,” is one of the principal texts through which American students come to know the Puritans. Yet “The Scarlet Letter” was published in 1850, long after the last Puritan had died. What does this narrative of seventeenth-century sin, punishment, love, and redemption tell us about nineteenth-century New England culture?
While some scholars and critics disparage the rise of new media for communication like text messaging, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, others praise these media as exciting and worthwhile technologies for written communication. This seminar will take up this debate.
The 1960s and early 1970s witnessed an explosion in the environmental consciousness and activism of Americans, resulting in a spate of new laws, agencies, and organizations. This seminar will explore the most important recent scholarship about the origins and significance of environmentalism. Seminar participants will have a discussion-based format, interpreting and conversing about
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 student insights into the poetics and structures of both forms.
This seminar will explore how teachers can incorporate Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) History into their US History courses. We will consider a range of examples that suggest that LGBT people have a history and that their history has been central to the development of political, social and cultural change.
Rather than read Allen Ginsberg exclusively as a Beat Generation writer, this seminar will study Ginsberg as a poet immersed in the major avant-garde movements of the postwar United States.
This seminar will focus on different aspects of the ideology and politics of Indian nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and examine its relationship with identities based on religion, class, gender and caste. This seminar will also examine the role that Gandhi’s unconventional and often controversial politics, played in the Indian nationalist movement.
In May 2010, Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed into law House Bill 2281, which prohibits Arizona public schools from offering courses that promote resentment toward a race or class of people, promote overthrow of the U.S. government, or advocate ethnic solidarity. This seminar will examine four short stories by writers that appear on the list of books banned as a consequence of HB 2281.
While some scholars and critics disparage the rise of new media for communication like text messaging, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, others praise these media as exciting and worthwhile technologies for written communication. This seminar will take up this debate.
The Tunisian revolution has been described as “a secular revolution. Not a secularist revolution, but secular in the sense that it was neither Islamist nor secularist.” This course will evaluate the promise and pitfalls of revolutionary politics and the potential for democratic pluralism in the twenty-first century Middle East and North Africa.
Pedro Almodóvar is the cultural symbol par excellence of the restoration of democracy in Spain after nearly 40 years of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Since Almodóvar’s emergence as a transgressive underground cineaste in the late 1970s and early 1980s he has gone on to establish himself as the country’s most important filmmaker and a major figure on the stage of world cinema.
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 student insights into the poetics and structures of both forms.
After the US entry into the first world war and the Bolshevik revolution-both in 1917-the two emerging superpowers set aside their mutual antagonisms to battler Hitler’s Third Reich in 1941. Their wartime collaboration turned into postwar rivalry which defined international relations for the next half century.
From wartime tensions over supply and the “second front” to postwar frictions over the peace and emerging (and conflicting) spheres of interest, domestic political, economic, social-cultural, as well as diplomatic and strategic factors will be examined.
This seminar provides an introduction to politics in contemporary Africa through the lens of four critical case studies, each one tracing a path from colonial realities to current challenges and opportunities. The cases examined will be Kenya, The Sudan, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe.
Students love, and arguably deserve, having their own lifetimes placed in historical context; events such as the financial crisis, Barack Obama, the Tea Party, current vaccination struggles, and public sector labor conflicts. In this seminar, participants will explore some of these contemporary issues, as well as try to figure out how these issues fit into an already over-burdened curriculum...
Participants will discuss a range of Shakespeare films that take a variety of approaches to transmuting the plays from page/stage to screen. We will break down the false high culture (literature)/popular – or even low – culture (film) dichotomy, exploring the intertextual relationship between the films and the plays that inspired them.
The protagonist of James Weldon Johnson’s iconic work of the Harlem Renaissance “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” declares at one point, “Between people in like stations of life there is very little difference over the world.” This statement exemplifies what David Levering Lewis identifies as the fundamental credo the Talented Tenth, “that the assimilated, cultured Afro-Saxon was e
This seminar will introduce participants to the discipline of historical archaeology, also known as the archaeology of the recent past. Historical archaeology is interdisciplinary in nature and combines traditional archaeological methods of excavation and survey with documentary analysis, oral history, and architectural studies. This disciplinary introduction will facilitate a prese
This seminar will explore the diversity of Latino experiences in the United States from 1492 to the present. he themes of our discussion will include: race mixing, notions of ethnicity and nationality, reactive identities, the 1960s and 1970 civil rights movements, and contemporary demography.
This seminar will focus on the role that the Fed plays in “normal times,” in setting monetary policy to obtain the dual congressionally mandated goals of price stability and maximum sustainable growth, as well as the Fed’s role as lender of last resort in times of financial crisis.
Though we frequently think of poets as icons of their national literary traditions —Walt Whitman, for example, is often read as the 19th-Century’s self-styled “voice of America”—few vocations have entailed more border-crossing, displacement, and exile than that of the poet. In this course, we will study three writers who make their art out of a “transnational” movement, rather than
In this seminar we will be discussing the place of material culture, ritual, and everyday life during the three revolutionary moments that ushered in the modern political era – the English, American, and French. In each case revolutionaries thought that while reasoned argument could make republican minds, democratic goods, habits, and rituals were needed to make republican hearts...
This seminar examines representations of the body in American popular culture and exploring the philosophical roots of contemporary notions of embodiment, to reveal the ways bodies matter to our beliefs about morality, power, and the self–even as we disavow its importance. In this seminar, we will also discuss strategies for teaching students to decode images and ideologies of the body...
This seminar will explore the structural biases of the mass media and the ways in which political realities are framed and constructed. Specifically, the seminar will revolve around a number of questions such as: What is the role of the media in American democracy? How do the media distort political reality? What are the sources of media power?
We might wonder how a book designed to critique racial, and racist, assumptions has come to be viewed as part of the problem.
Dans ce séminaire, il s’agit des contes de fées de Charles Perrault, écrivain du dix-septième siècle. Grand défenseur de la modernité dans la querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, ses contes de fées représentent une littérateur originale et “moderne.” On commence par discuter sa contribution au genre dans le contexte de la querelle.
Convention states religion and politics are the two things you do not discuss in polite company. But heading into this election year, they seem to be all that matters. In this seminar, we will bring some historical context to all of this punditry on religion and the American electorate by exploring the history of the Religious Right.
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 student insights into the poetics and structures of both forms.
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.
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. Although the city was less than 30 years old when the war began, Chicago provided troops, supplies, and relief to the Union Army that proved critical to the war effort.
“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 developing student insights into the poetics and structures of both forms.
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. Participants will discuss debates over voting rights, how freedmen voted, whom they voted for, and how southerners understood politics in this dynamic and controversial era.
Seminar led by Kate Masur, Northwestern University
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. Both totalitarian and democratic regimes have, it is argued, ways of regulating words, spreading myths, and mitigating dissent. This seminar will explore the links between literature and the world it describes.
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. In this seminar, participants will focus on the history of Protestant fundamentalism, accounting not only its origins but also its enduring infliuence in American life.
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 el film de Alfonso Cuadrón Y tu mamá también (México, 2001), la juventud ocupó frecuentemente el...
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 Cuadrón’s Y tu mamá también (And your Mum Too, Mexico, 2001), youth have been at the center of cin
In this seminar, participants will examine A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson as a text through which to explore questions about Puritan faith and culture, the experiences and status of women within that culture, and the history of Puritan conflict with Native American tribes.
This seminar will explore questions of gender and power in the poetry of canonical and lesser-known poets of the Beat Generation. Even though Beat writers thrived on the margins of the post-World War II United States, they often reproduced the same gender inequities of a dominant culture that they felt was stifling.
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 “races.” Through a reading of J. M.
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. Yet historians–themselves overwhelmingly left-of-center–have only recently come to grips with the massive transformation wrought by conservative politics and ideas.
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. But how did Renaissance writers understand the profound violence at the heart of Ovid’s erotic poems?
Historians looking for an apt titling of the current era have often pointed to the last several decades as the age of conservatism. Yet historians–themselves overwhelmingly left-of-center–have only recently come to grips with the massive transformation wrought by conservative politics and ideas.
Viewers of historical films often focus on questions of authenticity, asking whether a film has portrayed “accurately” what “really” happened during a historical event. Filmmakers certainly claim to present authentic history, spending lavishly to re-create the past by establishing the proper “look” of historical settings.
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. Per capita income in the richest 20 countries, comprising about one-quarter of the world’s population, is about five times the global average and over twenty times the level in the world’s poorest countries.
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? While commonly understood as a political and social movement against mainstream culture, feminism is also surprisingly consistent with elements of classical American political and social theory.
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 and pandering to a white audience and, as critics have characterized his position, for neglecting to address the key issue...
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. Yet, financial crises have occurred for centuries. The solutions taken, and more significantly, the solutions sanctioned by international financial institutions, are very different depending on where the crisis occurs.
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. Whether in terms of suffrage or temperance, this emerging work will help participants think about how to incorporate gender into lessons that focus on U.S.
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 student insights into the poetics and structures of both forms. Seminar participants will begin with
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. It is also a novel highly conscious of its place in an American tradition of frontier narrative that connects Cooper’s Leatherstocking saga with the modern Western.
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 modernity, and can be used to both defend and critique the status quo.
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 scrutinized means of measuring differences between East and West. On both sides of the wall,
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 movements here and further abroad. Seminar participants will read and discuss writings by Carl
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, Katrina, the financial crisis, and the Tea Party. In this seminar, participants will explore
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. By looking at developments in American political thought, moral philosophy, cultural cr
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, Katrina, the financial crisis, and the Tea Party. In this seminar, participants will explore
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. At the same time, however, the country’s Maoist and more distant Republican and Imperial pasts have continued to inform and shape reform.
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 student insights into the poetics and structures of both forms. Seminar participants will begin with
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 scrutinized means of measuring differences between East and West. On both sides of the wall,
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 book by James Campbell, /Middle Passages/, and a variety of other secondary as well as primary sour
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 littéraire aussi bien que réel, car les traces laissées par Théo sont en grande partie textuelles. I
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 world war. The peacemakers have been viewed as naive idealists or cynical realists, either too f
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. Exploraremos los límenes y las libertades del libro, fuentes, colores y papel en la poesía.
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. By looking at developments in American political thought, moral philosophy, cultural cr
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 world war. The peacemakers have been viewed as naive idealists or cynical realists, either too f
“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. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.” Her appeal raises the question, what did the national founding mean for women?
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. Yet during last year’s presidential elections women played an active role in demanding greater political and civil freedoms.
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. Beginning at the turn of the century, and accelerating after 1945, rights talk exploded as states and people
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. Through these public personas, found mostly in his journalism, Whitman offered remedies for American artisans who had lost their economic autonomy and status.
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? Do these future cities also feature increased congestion, burdensome commutes, suffocating pollution, and sharpened segregation?
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 newspapers which transcend the limitations of the deadline-driven prose daily papers require.
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. Suburbs are no longer the exclusively white enclaves that they were during the early post World-War II period, when developments such as Levittown established their racially homogeneous image for a generation.
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 selections from Hume’s short work, /An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals/, and will scruti
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. Thoroughly understanding a graphic narrative means developing literacies that make sense of both visual and textual elements on a page.
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 this seminar, participants will examine the principles of business cycles and financial crises. An overview of several hundred years of past financial crises in the U.S.
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 Soviet model. By the late 1970s, the Soviet model began to break apart, only to collapse in th
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. Participants will discuss school segregation and desegration, intermarriage and fears about racial purity, as well as the complex interplay of race, gender, and class politics.
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’/Heptaméron/. Dans ce séminaire nous étudierons un choix de nouvelles, pour voir ce que ces petit
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. The panic of 1819 for example, helped bring about the first popular party system.
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 represent some key themes that one encounters in Native American literature. Such themes include the challenges
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 incentives have the potential for solving the problems.
The teaching and practice of international relations, security, and development have long been dominated by Western–especially U.S.–theoretical paradigms. The field of international relations has long privileged ‘neorealist’ and ‘neoliberal’ perspectives in its explanation of the world. Threats to U.S.
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 well as tales. In this seminar, participants will read some of the greatest hits (and meet some
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 medium in turn affect or reflect the city? Can a film or television show-produced by a relati
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 medium in turn affect or reflect the city? Can a film or television show-produced by a relati
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 intoxication, and antinomian dissent from socio-religious orthodoxies have exerted a tremendous influen
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 particular, wide-spread concern about complex financial instruments and “fictitious capital” engaged the Victori
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 space and identity. What place do we call home?
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 industrial conflict and competing strategies hatched by the labor movement itself. Select readings and
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 seminar will touch upon several authors representative of these trends, both in England and the U.S
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. writers of short fiction of the time, including Dorothy Parker, Ring Lardner, and Ernest Hemingway.
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 doing in revising the one version into the other (if that is what he did). One of the assumptions of the semi
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. The roots of rock, the rhythms, lyrics, genres and sound technology, can all be used to teach students about US postwar history.
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, radicals during the Progressive Era, Joe McCarthy, the New Right, and contemporary activists rangin
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. Thoroughly understanding a graphic narrative means developing literacies that make sense of both visual and textual elements on a page.
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? What are some common challenges for translators presenting new Latin American poets in English – and/or bilingually – in the United States?
This seminar will explore the diversity of Latino experiences in the United States from 1492 to the present. We will examine numerous themes, including early narratives of conquest and exploration, the nature of regional differences, and the identities that stem from locale, race mixture and racial purity in the ideologies of settler elites.
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 Soviet model. By the late 1970s, the Soviet model began to break apart, only to collapse in th
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 newspapers which transcend the limitations of the deadline-driven prose daily papers require.
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. We will examine numerous themes, including early narratives of conquest and exploration, the nature of regional differences, and the identities that stem from locale, race mixture and racial purity in the ideologies of settler elites.
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 within which even the most seemingly banal substances can be enmeshed.
Just about every year, one rogue scholar or another offers a new, or newly recycled, theory about who “really” wrote Shakespeare’s plays. This seminar opts to circumvent the authorship debates altogether by asking not “Who wrote Shakespeare?” but “Why do we care who wrote Shakespeare?” What are the consequences of abandoning the authorship question altogether?
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 embajador y como poeta, tendremos la oportunidad de evaluar y apreciar las contribuciones locales y g
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 half of the seminar will concentrate on the historical context of the region, the second half will tur
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 social values, however, most historians and casual observers assume that the entertainment and popul
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 information—have led scholars to question much of what we thought we knew. We will examine wh
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, home to a million people. Chicago writers have worked to define this unprecedented place ever sin
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 complex mediations allow for a rich variety of interpretations. We shall try to determine both t
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 focus on the intersections between democratic revolution and revolutionary poetics in Whitman’s writ
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. First, participants will take an “intellectual tour” of the new Creation Museum in Kentucky, as a launching pad for discussing the latest debates between evolutionists and creationists.
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. so-called World or Global Cities, offshore banking enters, and Export-Oriented Zones).
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 can and cannot be done at the beginning of a new presidential administration. What are the pr
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, and artists did not want to lag behind. While some wished to stand in the vanguard of revolu
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 Shelley, previous to 1970s always one of the “big six” Romantic (read male) poets, is perhaps himself
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 important stories to tell, about such diverse matters as Henry VIII’s divorce, the beginnings of the Prote
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 Empire, which ruled vast stretches of the Indian subcontinent for over three centuries (1526-1857).&n...
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 Empire, which ruled vast stretches of the Indian subcontinent for over three centuries (1526-1857).&n...
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. We will be interested in exploring the innovative methodologies or theoretical approaches used by scholars to ask and answer new questions.
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. Often overlooked, however, are its many allusions to historical events involving pre-English peoples still living in their continental Germanic homelands.
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 territorial expansion across the Appalachians into the interior of the continent—quickly became enshrin
This seminar will introduce participants to recent interpretations of the modern U.S. women’s movement that have questioned the periodization of “Second Wave” feminism as starting in the mid-1960s and suggested that women of color and working-class women played an important role in shaping feminist activism in the postwar era.
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 seminar will explore why and how the unthinkable occurred and what implications it holds for subsequent g
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. In this seminar, participants will look at a variety of sources, including excerpts from the king’s memoirs and from anti-Louis XIV treatises by Leibniz and Jurieu, in order to examine how monarchical power was viewed during the seventeenth century.
Few would disagree that individuals are endowed with inherent human rights—but what are those rights? And howare they established, acted upon, and guaranteed? This seminar investigates the conception and history of human rights, assesses current debates in the field, and explores what literary texts have to teach us about human rights.
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 new class conflicts, the entrenchment and expansion of slavery, and the decimation and forced reloca
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 Shakespeare employs in these extraordinary poems.
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 stems from St.
Louis XIV, the Sun King, is often referred to as an absolutist monarch, in spite of the term’s anachronism. In this seminar, participants will look at a variety of sources, including excerpts from the king’s memoirs and from anti-Louis XIV treatises by Leibniz and Jurieu, in order to examine how monarchical power was viewed during the seventeenth century.
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 for it the question of the nature of the psychological basis of the claims of citizenship.
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 the character of the theory. Participants will discuss how Darwin’s original conception, despite its
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. Thoroughly understanding a graphic narrative means developing literacies that make sense of both visual and textual elements on a page.
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 new class conflicts, the entrenchment and expansion of slavery, and the decimation and forced reloca
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 traditions, delay of its economical and technological development and heartbreaking tragedy for literally
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. Thoroughly understanding a graphic narrative means developing literacies that make sense of both visual and textual elements on a page.
As was predictable following Senate confirmation of the two Bush appointees, the United States Supreme Court moved in an increasingly conservative direction. The Court’s decision making is largely attributable to the fact that Justice Anthony Kennedy has joined forces more often than not with the four conservative justices: John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas.