This seminar examines the literary, historical, and visual matter of the archive in order to generate new methods of creating, deconstructing, and reading across archival formations in comparative race and ethnic studies. In alignment with recent feminist and queer of color critiques and theorizations of the archive, we will ask: how do we encounter, assemble, and disassemble archival matter? What haunts the archives that we work within, and who do we become in the process of doing archival research? Our readings will foreground the imperial archive as an epistemological and material formation, but we will also attend to the uses and value of personal and familial archives. In so doing, we will consider what it means to intimately engage with archival matter such as dust, ephemera, and decay. Our objective is to develop ways of what Antoinette Burton calls “dwelling in the archive” – practices of research and reading that counter Derrida’s “archive fever.” Readings draw from Asian American and Black Studies, and may include Hazel Carby, Imperial Intimacies; Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents; Lily Cho, Mass Capture; Tiya Miles, All That She Carried; Martha Hodes, My Hijacking; Sarita See, The Filipino Primitive; and Nicole Fleetwood, Marking Time.

Submatriculated M.A. students interested in this course should request permission from the instructor and should submit a permit request via Path@Penn.

There is hardly an author who has been as controversial as Niccolò Machiavelli. The influence of this Italian political thinker on the theoretical imaginary of subsequent thinkers and writers has been huge. Yet, there have been strong disagreements on how to interpret Machiavelli’s ideas and questions still abound on the political meaning of his thought. Is there a core message of Machiavellian politics? Is he a political philosopher or a theorist or a ‘scientist’ of politics? Can we call him a realist? Or is he rather a republican or a plebeian actor and thinker, as recent scholars have pointed out? If so, what kind of republicanism or plebeian ideas can be found in his context and in his works? What has been the impact of his ideas in 20th century political thought? The goal of this course is two-fold. Each class will comment and discuss passages from The Prince and the Discourses or important modern and contemporary texts based on Machiavelli’s ideas. On the one hand, the course aims to directly analyze some key passage of the two main texts of Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses. The aim of this investigation is to stress the complexity of Machiavelli’s thought in its own context, which substantially challenges any attempt to reduce him to simple labels. Machiavelli’s texts will also be approached through a close and thorough reading as well as a comparison with the ideas of its own sources (especially Polybius, Dante, Petrarca, Plutarch, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero etc.). On the other hand, the course aims to analyze the influence of Machiavelli thought on some 20th century thinkers (The students will also read texts from Antonio Gramsci, Claude Lefort, Isaiah Berlin, Leo Strauss, Louis Althusser, next to the most recent scholarly historical literature in Machiavelli studies). This will allow the students to become familiar not only with Machiavelli’s texts but also with several thinker who have drawn on this author from completely different perspectives to shape their own political thought.

By necessity, work in environmental humanities spans academic disciplines. By design, it can also address and engage publics beyond traditional academic settings. This seminar explores best practices in public environmental humanities. Students receive close mentoring and build collaborative community to develop and execute cross-disciplinary, public engagement projects on the environment. This spring, this broadly interdisciplinary course is designed in conjunction with the ongoing environmental humanities project, An Ecotopian Toolkit for the Anthropocene. In the framework of our seminar, students will have opportunities to work with tne project’s curators and educators as well as Toolmakers on project-based assignments that also engage wider publics around issues of climate and environmental justice. This lab-style seminar is suitable for advanced undergraduates (with permission) and fulfills the “Capstone” requirement for the Minor in Environmental Humanities. It is also open to graduate students in departments across Arts and Sciences as well as other schools at the university.

In this course, we will be guided by the principle that translation is a practice that requires both carefulness and care, by the belief that it is an art form unto its own, and by the understanding that it is a practice steeped in ideological and political power. We will study several trends, theories and philosophical approaches in the field, and we will also attend to more technical concerns, such as copyright, machine translation, etc. We will compare different translations of same works (such as the ones of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks) to think through the complex relationship between author, translator and their publishing contexts. We will welcome
several accomplished translators who will share their process and explain the importance of building a translation community. Students will also work on their own translations (into English), which we will workshop together. This course is open to graduate students and to advanced undergraduate students, with permission from the instructor.

In this course, we will be guided by the principle that translation is a practice that requires both carefulness and care, by the belief that it is an art form unto its own, and by the understanding that it is a practice steeped in ideological and political power. We will study several trends, theories and philosophical approaches in the field, and we will also attend to more technical concerns, such as copyright, machine translation, etc. We will compare different translations of same works (such as the ones of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks) to think through the complex relationship between author, translator and their publishing contexts. We will welcome several accomplished translators who will share their process and explain the importance of building a translation community. Students will also work on their own translations (into English), which we will workshop together.

This course explores contemporary Black thought through a set of literary, visual, and theoretical texts. One of the signal shifts in contemporary Black arts and letters, and Black studies, is a turn towards interiority. This shift has enabled a capacious accounting of Black being, foregrounding everyday interior and intramural experiences that cannot be summed by ideological critiques of white power nor by nationalist discourses of Black resistance. Our theoretical repertoire will include concepts like love, quiet, fabulation, and gaze to explore Black interiority in relation to political movements, aesthetic experimentation, gender and sexual identity, and African continental and diasporic practices. The course will draw on a range of genres (including films, photo portraits, personal essays, and criticism) and also take a comparative approach (including works from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States).

Submatriculated M.A. students interested in this course should request permission from the instructor and should also submit a permit request via Path@Penn

In this seminar we will consider the ways of knowing, the epistemologies, that were particular to vernacular cultures in medieval Europe, c.1100-1500. From the late twelfth century, knowledge that had hitherto been transmitted in scholarly languages and formats (Latin, for example, and in some contexts Arabic and Hebrew), began to be translated and reformatted for vernacular language speakers. This major shift in the transmission of knowledge responded to - and helped to create - a broader audience for subjects ranging from natural science, law, medicine, and astronomy to ethics, political theory, world history, and religious instruction. It also gave rise to vernacular cultures of knowledge or ways of knowing and transmitting knowledge within particular regions and languages.

Together we will explore the following questions: how did vernacular cultures redefine what constitutes knowledge and what was worth knowing? Did medieval writers acknowledge a division between general and elite (“high-brow”) knowledge (questions that we still ask today)? And to what extent did they recognize a difference between “literary” and “learned” productions? How did vernacular writers develop their languages to bear the burden of learning? For example, what new genres of knowledge did they create, what styles did they invent in order to accommodate new readerships, and what formal choices (e.g. prose, verse, dialogue, exposition) did they make for transmitting and thematizing knowledge? In what ways was a broadening of audiences for learning accompanied by sensory appeals (visual, aural, imaginative)? Finally, how did the material vehicles of learning target vernacular audiences, from manuscript mis-en-page, diagrams, and illustrations to copying, compilation, and circulation?

These are questions that bear on many theoretical issues, including form, poetics, hermeneutics, textual reception, visuality, the senses, readership, gender, class, encyclopedism, and translation.

We welcome students from a variety of language interests and competences. While some of the basics of our reading will be medieval English texts, each week we will also put these side by side with texts from other language traditions (including, for example, French, Italian, German, Catalan and Castilian, Hebrew and Yiddish, Arabic and Persian, and other languages that the students in the seminar wish to see considered).

We will be meeting in Special Collections in Van Pelt Library in order to have manuscripts at our weekly seminar meetings. We will also invite guest lecturers to speak to us about various language fields.

Knowledge of one or more medieval languages is helpful but not necessary: all the readings will be available in translation. Submatriculated M.A. students interested in this course should request permission from the instructor and should submit a permit request via Path@Penn.

The tumultuous political and economic history of modern China has been mirrored in and shaped by equally fundamental revolutions in language and poetic expression. In this course, we will take Chinese poetry as a crucible in which we can observe the interacting forces of literary history and social change. From diplomats who saw poetry as a medium for cultural translation between China and the world, to revolutionaries who enlisted poetry in the project of social transformation, we will examine the lives and works of some of China’s most prominent poets and ask, what can we learn about modern China from reading their poetry? In asking this question, we will also reckon with the strengths and limitations of using poetry as an historical source. In addition to poems, the course will include fiction, essays, photographs, and films by both Chinese and non-Chinese artists that place our poets in a broader context. We will pay close attention to how these poets represent China’s place in the world, as well as the role of language in social change. Topics of discussion include: national identity, revolution, translation, gender, the body, ethnicity, and technology.
Familiarity with Chinese or related cultural context is beneficial, but not required.
This course introduces students to Chinese poetry in English translation. Students will leave the course with an in-depth understanding of the main figures, themes, and techniques of Chinese poetry, and will be introduced to some of the major developments in the history of China. Through a focus on primary texts, students will develop the vocabulary and analytical skills to appreciate and analyze poetry in translation and will gain confidence as writers thinking about literary texts.

This course is an introduction to and exploration of modern East Asian literatures and cultures through close readings and discussion of selected literary works from the early 20th century to the start of the 21st century. Focusing on China, Japan, and Korea, we will explore the shared and interconnected experiences of modernity in East Asia as well as broaden our perspective by considering the location of East Asian cultural production within a global modernity. Major issues we will encounter include: nation-building and the modern novel; cultural translation; media and technology; representations of gender, race, and class; history and memory; colonialism; war; body and sexuality; globalization. No knowledge of the original language is required.

This course explores the literal and literary landscapes of 19th-century Paris and Philadelphia, paying particular attention to the ways in which the built environment is shaped by and shapes shifting ideologies in the modern age. Although today the luxury and excesses of the "City of Light" may seem worlds apart from the Quaker simplicity of the "City of Brotherly Love," Paris and Philadelphia saw themselves as partners and mutual referents during the 1800s in many areas, from urban planning to politics, prisons to paleontology. This interdisciplinary seminar will include readings from the realms of literature, historical geography, architectural history, and cultural studies as well as site visits to Philadelphia landmarks, with a view to uncovering overlaps and resonances among different ways of reading the City. We will facilitate in-depth research by students on topics relating to both French and American architectural history, literature, and cultural thought.