This seminar will explore the ways in which literary and visual representations of sexual difference and gender roles disrupt the cultural imagination of everyday life in North Africa and its Diasporas. Special attention will be given to representations of Arab women and queer subjectivities as sites of resistance against dominant masculinity. We will analyze the ways in which representations of gender have allowed for a redeployment of power, a reconfiguration of politics of resistance, and the redrawing of longstanding images of Islam in France. Finally, we will question how creations that straddle competing cultural traditions, memories and material conditions can queer citizenship. Course taught in English.

How do we visualize the future? Visuality, futurity, and practices of visualizing the future (or futures) are, to me, an inherently political undertaking. Images, visual practices, and visuality make possible particular ways of seeing, thinking, and imagining our worlds. Describing the political nature of images, Roland Bleiker writes, “they delineate what we, as collectives, see and what we don’t and thus, by extension, how politics is perceived, sensed, framed, articulated, carried out, and legitimized” (2018, 4). The stakes of visuality are high. Whether or how an individual, a community, an issue, or an event is depicted can have powerful effects on how histories are narrated, how precarity might be attended to, or how categories of knowledge are reproduced or disrupted. The future is also a concept with significant political stakes. The future is not a given or determined system of relations. Our perspectives on history, hegemonic structures and institutions, and narratives of the possible all shape the multiple futures that might be brought into being or foreclosed. The work of rethinking and reimagining possible worlds requires a host of practices, which include the work of seeing, of image-making, and other visual methods. To visualize the future is political work. This course will explore the political work of images, visual practices, and futurities. Texts will be drawn from canonical and emergent works in visual studies and media theory, as well as Indigenous studies, Black studies, multispecies studies, and political ecology. Assignments will include reflective essays, field visits to museums and art galleries in the Philadelphia area, and a final extended essay.<br />

This seminar has a bold aim: it seeks to understand better what has happened in our world since the era of decolonization, by considering the term “politics” in its very broadest and most dramatic connotations, as the dream of social change (and its failure). Another way of describing its subject matter is to say that it is about revolution and counterrevolution since the Bandung Conference. Together we will investigate the way in which major historical events, including the struggle for Algerian independence, the military coup in Indonesia, the Cuban Revolution, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in Congo, the Vietnam War, Latin American dictatorships, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid in South Africa, 9/11, and the Iraq War and its aftermath, have been represented in some of the most innovative and moving films of our time. Attention will therefore be paid to a variety of genres, including cinema verité, documentary, the thriller, the biopic, animation, the global conspiracy film, hyperlink cinema, science fiction and dystopia. Films will include: The Battle of Algiers, The Year of Living Dangerously, Memories of Underdevelopment, Lumumba and Lumumba: La Mort du Prophète, The Fog of War, The Lives of Others, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Even the Rain, The Constant Gardener, Syriana, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Waltz with Bashir, Caché, Children of Men, and The Possibility of Hope. An archive of secondary readings will be provided on Canvas. Writing requirements: a mid-term and a final paper of around 8-10 pages each.

This course introduces undergraduates and graduate students to one specific Book of the Hebrew Bible. &quot;The Bible in Translation&quot; involves an in-depth reading of a biblical source against the background of contemporary scholarship. Depending on the book under discussion, this may also involve a contextual reading with other biblical books and the textual sources of the ancient Near East. No prerequisites are required.

What does it mean to be Israeli? The literature written by Israelis in the last seven decades reflects a continuous struggle with identity. Following the establishment of the State in 1948 with its spirit of patriotism, Yehuda Amichai's 1955 poem &quot;I want to die in my bed&quot; was a manifesto for individualism. However, the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict and the wide-ranging character of Israeli society has returned writers to the social and political arenas. This course focuses both on how contemporary writers have metabolized the concept of national identity and examines its early literary iterations. Readings include poems by Natan Alterman, Yehuda Amichai, and Meir Wieseltier; fiction by Sayed Kashua, Amos Oz, and A.B. Yehoshua.<br />
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This course is for students interested in taking a literature course in Hebrew and are proficient in it. Texts, discussions, and papers are in Hebrew. There will be three 2-page written assignments over the course of the semester. Grading is based primarily on students’ literary understanding.<br />

In this course we will read the Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, focusing on a series of interrelated problems raised by the poem: authority, fiction, history, politics and language. Particular attention will be given to how the Commedia presents itself as Dante's autobiography, and to how the autobiographical narrative serves as a unifying thread for this supremely rich literary text. Supplementary readings will include Virgil's Aeneid and selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses. All readings and written work will be in English. Italian or Italian Studies credit will require reading Italian texts in the original language and writing about their themes in Italian. This course may be taken for graduate credit, but additional work and meetings with the instructor will be required. When crosslisted with ENGL 323, this is a Benjamin Franklin Seminar.

Humor in ethnic societies has two dimensions: internal and external. The inside humor of an ethnic group is accessible to its members; it draws upon their respective social structures, historical and social experiences, languages, cultural symbols, and social and economic circumstances and aspirations. The external humor of an ethnic group targets members of other ethnic groups, and draws upon their stereotypes, and attributed characteristics by other ethnic groups. The external ethnic humor flourishes in immigrant and ethnically heterogenic societies. In both cases jokes and humor are an integral part of social interaction, and in their performance relate to the social, economic, and political dynamics of traditional and modern societies.

In the first decade of the new millennium, the so called “Second Generation”, children of Holocaust survivors reached maturity. Only in their 40s and 50s they finally began confronting and reconstructing their parents’ experiences, as well as their own nightmarish childhoods. These include striking narratives Our Holocaust by Amir Gutfreund and Corner People by Esty G. Hayim as well as films like Walk on Water. The third generation is also returning to the forbidden story with prize winning films like The apartment. The quintessential Holocaust narrative The Diary of Anne Frank appeared in 1947, one year prior to the establishment of the Jewish State. Nevertheless, Israeli culture &quot;waited&quot; until the public trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 to hesitantly face the momentous catastrophe. The Zionist wish to forge a &quot;New Jew&quot; motivated this suppression, at least in part. Aharon Appelfeld’s stories were the first Holocaust-related works to enter the modernist literary scene in the 1960s, followed by the cryptic verse of Dan Pagis, a fellow child survivor. It was not until 1988 that this practice of concealing the past was broken, when two Israeli-born pop singers, children of survivors, released the watershed documentary Because of That War. This course will follow and analyze the transformation of Israeli literature and cinema from instruments of suppression into a means of processing this national trauma. While Israeli works constitute much of the course's material, European and American film and fiction play comparative roles.<br />
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The course explores an aspect of 20th-century poetry intensively; specific course topics will vary from year to year.

From the 1922 silent film &quot;Hungry Hearts&quot; through the first &quot;talkie,&quot; &quot;The JazzSinger,&quot; produced in 1927, and beyond &quot;Schindler's List,&quot; Jewish characters have confronted the problems of their Jewishness on the silver screen for a general American audience. Alongside this Hollywood tradition of Jewish film, Yiddish film blossomed from independent producers between 1911 and 1939, and interpreted literary masterpieces, from Shakespeare's &quot;King Lear&quot; to Sholom Aleichem's &quot;Teyve the Dairyman,&quot; primarily for an immigrant, urban Jewish audience. In this course, we will study a number of films and their literary sources (in fiction and drama), focusing on English language and Yiddish films within the framework of three dilemmas of interpretation: a) the different ways we &quot;read&quot; literature and film, b) the various ways that the media of fiction, drama, and film &quot;translate&quot; Jewish culture, and c) how these translations of Jewish culture affect and are affected by their implied audience. All readings and lectures in English.