This broadly interdisciplinary course is designed for Graduate and Undergraduate Fellows in the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) who hail from departments across Arts and Sciences as well as other schools at the university. The course is also open to others with permission of the instructors. Work in environmental humanities by necessity spans academic disciplines. By design, it can also address and engage publics beyond traditional academic settings. This seminar, with limited enrollment, explores best practices in public environmental humanities. Students receive close mentoring to develop and execute cross-disciplinary, public engagement projects on the environment.

In the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, France and the Italian States were bound together by linguistic, economic, political, and religious ties, and intellectual developments never flowed unilaterally from one country to the other. On the contrary, they were transnational phenomena, and French and Italian thinkers and writers conceived of themselves and their work both in relation to and in opposition to one another. This course will consider the most fundamental aspects of Franco-Italian cultural exchange in the medieval and early modern period, with an emphasis on humanism, philosophical and religious debates, political struggles, and the rise of vernacular languages in literary and learned discourse. Authors to be studied include Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola Castiglione, Bembo, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Du Bellay, Machiavelli, and Montaigne. In addition to learning the material covered in the course, students will gain expertise in producing professional presentations and research papers, and will also have the opportunity to consult original material from the Kislak Center. This course is open to undergraduates with permission of the instructors. It counts toward the undergraduate minor in Global Medieval Studies and the graduate certificate in Global and Medieval Renaissance Studies.

The course begins by considering the two key Italian predecessors to the Dantean opus: Durante’s sonnet sequence, Il Fiore (an Italian adaptation of the Roman de la Rose) and Brunetto Latini’s Il Tesoretto. We then turn to Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio to analyze how these new literary departures were utilized. We will simultaneously focus on the interrelated problems of authority, representation, history, politics, and language in Dante’s deeply innovative texts. The conclusion of the course examines two important texts of Boccaccio and Petrarch that take the newly canonical Dante as a key point of departure. On the one hand, Boccaccio’s La Teseida explicitly explores war as an epic matter in its Dantean context. On the other hand, Petrarch’s Latin Africa is an implicit correction of Dante’s Commedia, written in the Italian vernacular.<br />
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The greats all have something to say about translation. The Hebrew poet H. N. Bialik is attributed with saying that “he who reads the Bible in translation is like a man who kisses his bride through a veil.” That, however, is a mistranslation: What Bialik really wrote was, “Whoever knows Judaism through translation is like a person who kisses his mother through a handkerchief.&quot; (http://benyehuda.org/bialik/dvarim02.html), a saying that he probably translated and adapted from Russian or German. (https://networks.h-net.org/node/28655/discussions/116448/query-bialik-kissing-bride) Robert Frost wrote, “I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.” Walter Benjamin defines it: “Translation is a form. To comprehend it as a form, one must go back to the original, for the laws governing the translation lie within the original, contained in the issue of its translatability.” Lawrence Venuti rails against translation that domesticates, rather than foreignizes, thus betraying the foreign text through a contrived familiarity that makes the translator invisible. Emily Wilson wants her translation “to bring out the way I think the original text handles it. [The original text] allows you to see the perspective of the people who are being killed.” https://bookriot.com/2017/12/04/emily-wilson-translation-the-odyssey/ Is translation erotic? A form of filial love? Incestuous? A mode of communion, or idol worship? Is translation a magician’s vanishing trick? Is translation traitorous, transcendent? Maybe translation is impossible. But let’s try it anyways! In this graduate seminar, we will read key texts on the history and theory of translating literature, and we sample translations from across the centuries of the “classics,” such as the Bible and Homer. We will consider competing translations into English of significant modern literary works from a variety of languages, possibly including, but not limited to German, Yiddish, French, Hebrew, and Russian. These readings will serve to frame each student’s own semester-long translation of a literary work from a language of her or his choice. The seminar offers graduate students with their skills in various language an opportunity to take on a significant translation project within a circle of peers.

Women were important and active players in the literary field in Medieval and early Modern Europe. Many women throughout the continent and on the British Isles engaged in the book culture, as readers, owners, commissioners, copyists, illuminators, and authors. This course intends to study the role women had in the intellectual and literary culture of their time. Starting from a number of key publications on gender, agency and female literacy and authorship in the medieval and early modern period, we will examine what texts women wrote, to which genres they had access, and what the (literary) agency of female writers was. We will explore the options women had to express their experiences, ideas, opinions and feelings and their interaction with male supervisors (in case of religious women) or male colleagues. What impressions do we get of their intellectual and literary skills? How did women writers publish their works and for whom did they write? We will also study the networks and literary circles in which women participated. Sometimes these networks were local; sometimes literature for and by women circulated through all Euopre. In our travel through time and space between c. 1300 and 1700, we will explore several literary genres and meet famous and less famous women such as Hadewijch of Brabant, Marguerite Porete, Theresa van Avila, Christine de Pizan, Anna Bijns, Mary Sidney, Anna Maria van Schurman, and Margaret Cavendish, and their contemporaries. A strong emphasis in this course will lie on the women's texts and the manuscripts in which these have been preserved, in order to shed light on the role of women in the handwritten book culture. In this way we will explore how women, religious and secular, came to the fore in medieval and early modern literary culture. In order to get an impression of the material aspects of the books women produced, read and/or owned, we will visit some of the importnat manuscript collections in Philadelphia.

This is a course on the history of literary theory, a survey of major debates about literature, poetics, and ideas about what literary texts should do, from ancient Greece to examples of modern European thought. The first half of the course will focus on early periods: Greek and Roman antiquity, especially Plato and Aristotle; the medieval period (including St. Augustine, Dante, and Boccaccio), and the early modern period (such as Philip Sidney and Giambattista Vico). In the second half of the course we will turn to modern concerns by looking at the literary (or &quot;art&quot;) theories of some major philosophers and theorists: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Walter Benjamin. We end the course in the mid-twentieth century. The purpose driving this course is to consider closely how this tradition generated questions that are still with us, such as: what is the act of interpretation; what is the &quot;aesthetic&quot;; what is &quot;imitation&quot; or mimesis; and how are we to know an author's intention. During the semester there will be four short writing assignments in the form of analytical essays (3 pages each). Students may use these small essays to build into a long piece of writing on a single text or group of texts at the end of the term. Most of our readings will come from a published anthology of literary criticism and theory; a few readings will be on Canvas.

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.

How do sex and gender become sites of cultural production, identity-formation, and contentious politics? This seminar engages these questions in the context of the &quot;Middle East&quot; as a constructed geopolitical space for imperial politics and political intervention. The class is divided into three units. In the first unit, we engage feminist and queer theories to discuss the shifting meanings of &quot;sex&quot; and &quot;gender&quot; in transnational and postcolonial contexts. In the second unit we explore the contextual and shifting notions of &quot;private&quot; and &quot;public&quot; as they have been elaborated in political theory, feminist theory, and media studies. We also consider how different media technologies enable and constrain the performance and expression of gender and sexual identities. In the last unit, we examine the material and symbolic construction of sex and gender in the shadow of Orientalism, the War on Terror, Multiculturalism, and the recent Arab uprisings. In this unit, we consider how geopolitics are refracted in public controversies around issues like gay rights, female genital mutilation, the veil, and honor killing.

This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important film theory debates, and allow us to explore how writers and filmmakers from different countries and historical periods have attempted to make sense of the changing phenomenon known as &quot;cinema,&quot; to think cinematically. Topics under consideration may include: spectatorship, authorship, the apparatus, sound, editing, realism, race, gender and sexuality, stardom, the culture industry, the nation and decolonization, what counts as film theory and what counts as cinema, and the challenges of considering film theory in a global context, including the challenge of working across languages. There will be a weekly film screening for this course. No knowledge of film theory is presumed. Course requirements: attendance at lecture and participation in lecture and section discussions; canvas postings; 1 in-class mid-term; 1 final project.

This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important film theory debates, and allow us to explore how writers and filmmakers from different countries and historical periods have attempted to make sense of the changing phenomenon known as &quot;cinema,&quot; to think cinematically. Topics under consideration may include: spectatorship, authorship, the apparatus, sound, editing, realism, race, gender and sexuality, stardom, the culture industry, the nation and decolonization, what counts as film theory and what counts as cinema, and the challenges of considering film theory in a global context, including the challenge of working across languages. There will be a weekly film screening for this course. No knowledge of film theory is presumed. Course requirements: attendance at lecture and participation in lecture and section discussions; canvas postings; 1 in-class mid-term; 1 final project.