This seminar will examine contemporary affect theory and its relationship with Michel Foucault's theory of power. We will begin by mapping out Foucault's "analytics of power," from his early work on power knowledge to his late work on embodiment, desire, and the care of the self. We will then turn to affect theory, an approach which centralizes the non-rational, emotive force of power. No previous knowledge of theory is required.

This course approaches the Western history of race and racial classification (1600-1800) with a focus on visual and material culture, natural history, and science that connected Atlantic and Pacific worlds. Across the long eighteenth century, new knowledges about human diversity and species distinctions emerged alongside intensifications of global trade with Asia. The course will include case studies of chinoiserie textiles, portraits of consuming individuals, natural history prints and maps, Chinese export porcelain and furnishings, and "blackamoor" sculpture. Objects of visual and material culture will be studied alongside readings on regional and world histories that asserted universal freedoms as well as hierarchies of human, animal, and plant-kind. Keeping in mind that the idea of race continues to be a distributed phenomenon - across color, gender, class, religion, speech, culture - we will explore changing vocabularies of difference, particularly concerning skin color, across a range of texts and images. Knowledge often does not take written or literary form, and for this reason, we will study examples of visual and material culture as well as forms of technology that were critical to defining human varieties, to use the eighteenth-century term. Although we will be reading texts in English, some in translation, we will also account for European and non-European knowledge traditions - vernacular, indigenous - that informed scientific and imaginative writings about the globe. Topics may include cultural and species distinction, global circulations of commodities between the East and West Indies, the transatlantic slave trade, the casta system of racial classification in the Americas, religious and scientific explanations of blackness and whiteness, and visual representations of non-European people.

This course provides an in-depth introduction to Dante’s masterwork as a point of entry to the history of Western literature, philosophy, and science. The core of the course consists of an intensive study of Dante’s encyclopedic poem in relation to the culture and history of Medieval Europe. We examine the poem as both a product and an interpretation of the world it describes. We also observe how the Comedycasts its long shadow on modern culture: in Primo Levi’s description of the horror of Nazi concentration camps, or in Amiri Baraka’s fragmentary representation of America’s infernal racist system. We investigate the challenges that Dante’s text elicits when it migrates to visual and cinematic arts (from medieval illuminations to Robert Rauschenberg to David Fincher), continuously camouflaging and adapting to different media. And we critically reflect on how, after seven hundred years, the Comedy has not finished saying what it has to say. Major topics of this course include: representations of the otherworld; the soul’s relation to the divine; Dante’s concepts of governance and universal peace; mythology and theology in Dante’s Christian poetics; the role of the classics in the Middle Ages; intertextuality and imitation; genres and genders in Medieval literature; notions of authorship and authority during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the culture and materiality of manuscripts in the Middle Ages; and the reception of Dante’s work from the fourteenth century to the present.

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 "art") 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 "aesthetic"; what is "imitation" 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.

Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) is arguably Israel’s national poet. Looking at his 1948-2000 covertly autobiographical corpus, however, reveals a complex individual who struggled with his identity. “I Want to Die in my Bed", a young Yehuda Amichai's anti-war poem, propelled a literary and ideological rebellion in Israel. Amichai did not only express generational sensibilities but was torn between the orthodox Judaism in which he was raised and his secular way of life, European traditions and a nascent Zionist culture, his German mother tongue and the adopted Hebrew language. This course is an in-depth study of the life and work of a literary giant and simultaneously a lesson in the methodology of “archaeological reading.” The course covers Amichai’s poetry, short stories, plays, archived letters, and segments from his novel, and musical renditions of his poetry, as well as recent scholarship. Texts and discussions in Hebrew.

A course that traces how particular literary texts, very often medieval, are adopted to become foundational for national literatures. Key moments of emphasis will be the early nineteenth century, the 1930s, and (to some extent) the unfolding present. Research subtending this offering has been conducted over the last years, both in my editing of Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 (2 vols and 82 chapters, Oxford UP, 2016) and in preparation for "Medieval Studies in Troubled Times: the 1930s," to be offered as Presidential plenary at the Medieval Academy of America convention at Penn on 9 March 2019. I have also travelled and lectured extensively for Penn Alumni Travel over the last decade, crossing national boundaries and also pondering how complex literary issues might be framed for a broad (but exceptionally intelligent) audience. Issues arising in traversing Mediterranean space are explored in an article published (in Italian) in Studi migranti. Some texts immediately suggest themselves for analysis. The Song of Roland, for example, has long been fought over between France and Germany; each new war inspires new editions on both sides. The French colonial education system, highly centralized, long made the Chanson de Roland a key text, with the theme of Islamic attack on the European mainland especially timely, it was thought, during the Algerian war of independence. Germany also sees the Niebelungenlied as a key text, aligning it with the Rhine as an impeccably Germanic: but the Danube, especially as envisioned by Stefan Zweig, offers an alternative, hybridized, highly hyphenated cultural vision in running its Germanic-Judaic-Slavic-Roman course to the Black Sea. The course will not be devoted exclusively to western Europe. Delicate issues arise as nations determine what their national epic needs to be. Russia, for example, needs the text known as The Song of Igor to be genuine, since it is the only Russian epic to predate the Mongol invasion. The text was discovered in 1797 and then promptly lost in Moscow's great fire of 1812; suggestions that it might have been a fake have to be handled with care in Putin's Russia.

In recognition of the visit to Penn’s campus by the Teatro delle Albe, the celebrated, experimental theater company from Ravenna, we will consider the evolution of Italian drama and Italian theaters. We will also have the opportunity to meet the members of the group and share in the communality of the experience. Coming out of the isolation of a pandemic, we will put emphasis on the venues in which the works were initially presented. How do performance spaces influence dramatic works? What is the connection between dramatic and civic performance? We will consider works by Plautus, Machiavelli, Aretino, the Intronati, Bibbiena, Goldoni, Pirandello, De Filippo and Dario Fo. We will look at the phenomenon of opera, and we will trace the origins of the commedia dell’arte and follow its evolution into our current culture. When possible, we will invite local artists to share in the discussion of the relationship between theater and performance spaces. All works will be read in translation and the course will be conducted in English.

This is a wide-ranging introduction to the “other” major cinema in English: the films of England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The British film industry has been thriving in the 21st century, but it remains the underdog in a global media environment dominated by Hollywood. We will consider some of the ways British filmmakers have positioned themselves in the space of world cinema and television as close rivals or radical alternatives to the American model. Our approach will be to study two films a week, mixing films from the 21st century with films from earlier moments in British cinema history from the 1930s through the 1990s. Our aim will be to discern some of the enduring cinematic modes and transatlantic strategies that contribute to the national “signature” of British film. Our screenings will run the gamut from the big-budget James Bond and Harry Potter franchis to mid-sized transnational productions such as Pride & Prejudice and Slumdog Millionaire, to more independent or artisanal work by such directors as Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Sally Potter, Michael Winterbottom, Lynne Ramsay, and Andrea Arnold. A number of films we will study were made for British television, and we will devote some attention to the important and changing relationship between TV and cinema in contemporary screen culture.

Written work for the class will include four mid-term exams (no final), two 1-page research findings about the business side of the film industry, a 3-page formal analysis essay, and a research paper with various options, including a creative-writing option. Viewing every film at least once is required, but reading is relatively light. There are no prerequisites and no expectation that you have any expertise in British cinema or culture. If you enjoy watching films and learning about how they were made and in what ways they succeeded or failed with audiences, you should be able to do well in this class.

We may know what it is like to fall in love, but how do movies tell us what it is like? Through an exciting tour of American and World cinema, we will analyze the moods and swings, successes and failures of love in romantic comedy, one of the most popular but generally overlooked and taken for granted genres. We will turn a spotlight on it by examining what elements and iconography constitute the “romcom” genre, what specific qualities inform its sub-groupings such as screwball, sex comedy or radical romantic comedy, how they are related to their historical, cultural and ideological contexts, and what we can learn about their audiences. Watching classic as well contemporary examples of the genre, from City Lights (1931), It Happened One Night (1934) and Roman Holiday (1953), to Harold and Maude (1971), Annie Hall (1977), How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days (2003) and Her (2013), we will problematize this overly-familiar cinema to make it new and strange again, and open it up to creative analysis.
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Audre Lorde famously stated, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”In She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, the poet Marlene NourbeSe Philip observed, “I want to write about the beauty of kinky hair and flat noses—maybe I should be writing about the language that kinked the hair and flattened noses…” NourbeSe Philip might have added that she also should be writing about the language that engendered woman. Taking these statements as a point of departure for the seminar, we will examine the ways a selection of authors and filmmakers engage language for social change. Included on the syllabus will be works by Harriet Jacobs, Ida B Wells, Lucy Parsons, June Jordan, Sarah Moldoror, Léonora Miano, Marilene Felinto, Maaza Mengiste, Akwaeke Emezi, and Elizabeth Acevedo. The course will feature class visits by several contemporary writers. In consultation with the instructor, students will complete a semester-long project.