This course is offered online in asynchronous format.

How has our image of Italy arrived to us? Where does the story begin and who has recounted, rewritten, and rearranged it over the centuries? In this course, we will study Italy's rich and complex past and present. We will carefully read literary and historical texts and thoughtfully watch films in order to attain an understanding of Italy that is as varied and multifacted as the country itself. Group work, discussions and readings will allow us to examine the problems and trends in the political, cultural and social history from ancient Rome to today. We will focus on: the Roman Empire, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Unification, Turn of the Century, Fascist era, World War II, post-war and contemporary Italy. Fulfills Cross Cultural Analysis and Arts and Letters.
INSTRUCTOR: CARLA LOCATELLI

This course is intended for those with no prior background in folklore or knowledge of various cultures. Texts range in age from the first century to the twentieth, and geographically from the Middle East to Europe to the United States. Each collection displays various techniques of collecting folk materials and making them concrete. Each in its own way also raises different issues of genre, legitimacy, canon formation, cultural values and context.
INSTRUCTOR: DAVID AZZOLINA

How do we conceptualize “the world?” In this course, whose alternate title might be “Literature at the End(s) of the World” (or even, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It—and I Feel Various Feelings”), we will approach the idea of “world literature” through the lens of social, political and ecospheric collapse, interrogating along the way the various claims to universality a text can make. "World literature" here refers not merely to the usual definition of "books written in places other than the US and Europe," but to any form of cultural production that explores and pushes at the limits of a particular world, that steps between and beyond worlds, or that heralds the coming of new worlds, waiting to be born. Some of our guiding questions will include: what is a world? Can a text create, depict, or contain a world? How many worlds are there? And most importantly, what happens when a world—or our world—is threatened with extinction? To explore these topics, we will read, view, and discuss selected canonical texts in the tradition of “World Literature” as well as more recent work from writers and creators outside of Europe and the Anglosphere, spanning the generic categories of poetry, fiction, and film. In approaching these texts, we will try to push beyond both a view of “world” as predicted on us vs. them distinctions as well as one in which local difference has been homogenized or erased by the rise of global capitalism. We will also attempt to defamiliarize—or, perhaps, decolonize—our generic categories by looking at texts which are often placed outside the rarified categories of “literature.” Potential authors/filmmakers may include: Arthur Rimbaud, Jorge Luis Borges, Amos Tutuola, Clarice Lispector, Leslie Marmon Silko, Roberto Bolaño, Fernanda Melchor, Bong Joon-Ho, Abbas Kiarostami and others. Theoretical readings will supplement our discussion of the primary texts, and may include work from Theodor Adorno, Fredric Jameson, David Damrosch, Emily Apter, and others. Assignments will include weekly preparation, occasional discussion board posts, an in-class presentation, a mid-semester creative assignment, and a final paper (6-8 pp).
INSTRUCTOR: MICHAEL SHEA

The destruction of the world's forests through wild fires, deforestation, and global heating threatens planetary bio-diversity and may even, as a 2020 shows, trigger civilizational collapse. Can the humanities help us think differently about the forest? At the same time that forests of the world are in crisis, the "rights of nature" movement is making progress in forcing courts to acknowledge the legal "personhood" of forests and other ecosystems. The stories that humans have told and continue to tell about forests are a source for the imaginative and cultural content of that claim. At a time when humans seem unable to curb the destructive practices that place themselves, biodiversity, and forests at risk, the humanities give us access to a record of the complex inter-relationship between forests and humanity. Forest Worlds serves as an introduction to the environmental humanities. The environmental humanities offer a perspective on the climate emergency and the human dimension of climate change that are typically not part of the study of climate science or climate policy. Students receive instruction in the methods of the humanities - cultural analysis and interpretation of literature and film - in relation to texts that illuminate patterns of human behavior, thought, and affect with regard to living in and with nature. Fulfills Arts and Letters sector.
INSTRUCTOR: SIMON RICHTER

In this class we will study international modernism by focusing on the emergence of a concept of the "new," a term that is also often understood as the "new fashion." What is the “fashion of the new,” how is the concept linked with the material production of “fashion” itself? After having studied the political functions of fashion as an agent of control and distinction from the Middles Ages to the end of the 18th century, we will study the rise of modernism, whose specificity consists in being accompanied by a complex network of discourses on fashion elaborated by poets like Baudelaire and Mallarmé or by philosophers like Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin. Not sticking to a pure chronological pattern, we will move back and forth in time so as to analyze today’s changing scene, with a view to identity the multiple emergences of the "new" in the context of the fashion industry. In our cultural mapping of fashion, we will discuss Baudelaire and Mallarmé, read Aragon's Surrealist novel Paris Peasant. We will watch and discuss a number of films and documentaries that foreground fashion. The collection Fashion Theory: A Reader will serve as a theoretical guide and a compendium.
INSTRUCTOR: JEAN-MICHEL RABATE

This course covers eight centuries of Russias cultural, political, and social history, from its origins through the eighteenth century, a period which laid the foundation for the Russian Empire. Each week-long unit is organized around a set of texts (literary text, historical document, image, film) which examine prominent historical and legendary figures as they represent chapters in Russias history. Historical figures under examination include, among others, the Baptizer of Rus, Prince Vladimir; the nation-builder, Prince Alexander Nevsky; the first Russian Tsar, Ivan the Terrible; the first Emperor and Westernizer, Peter the Great; the renowned icon painter Andrei Rublev; the epic hero Ilya Muromets; and the founder of Muscovite monasticism, St. Sergius of Radonezh. Three modern-day nation-states Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus share and dispute the cultural heritage of Old Rus, and their political relationships even today revolve around interpretations of the past. This constructed past has a continuing influence in modern Russia and is keenly referenced, sometimes manipulatively, in contemporary social and political discourse. (Recently, for example, President Putin has justified the annexation of Crimea to Russia by referring to it as the holy site of Prince Vladimirs baptism, from which Russian Christianity ostensibly originates.) The study of pre-modern cultural and political history explains many aspects of modern Russian society, as well as certain political aspirations of its leaders.
INSTRUCTOR: JULIA VERKHOLANTSEV

This course explores literature that resists normative categories of gender and sexuality. By focusing on figures writing from the margins, we will explore how radical approaches to narrative form and subject-matter invite us to think in new ways about desire and identity. We will read texts that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, hybridizing the genres of poetry, drama, and autobiography to produce new forms of expression, such as the graphic novel, auto-fiction, and prose poetry. From Viriginia Woolf's gender-bending epic, Orlando, to Tony Kushner's Angels in America, this course traces how non-normative desire is produced and policed by social and literary contexts - and how those contexts can be re-imagined and transformed.
INSTRUCTORS: INDIA HALSTEAD, HANNAH LECLAIR

How does literature both connect cultures across time and space and speak about what is specific to each culture? In this course we will read several types of narratives written in different periods and in different parts of the world, ranging from ancient Greek and Sanskrit drama to modern African, Latin American and South Asian fiction and graphic novels. We will discuss the different techniques of storytelling, and what attitudes to love and war, sexuality and power, tradition and rebellion are inscribed in these stories. In this way, we will consider how literature reveals historical connections and conversations across cultures, as well as asks large philosophical questions shared across cultures.

Texts will likely include Sophicles, Antigone; Kalidasa Shakuntala; William Shakespeare Othello; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold; Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis; Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy; Tayib Salih, Season of Migration to the North and Shyam Selvadurai Funny Boy .

We will meet synchronously for one session a week. The asynchronous sessions will consist of either a lecture posted in advance (which you will respond to with a short canvas post which will be used as the basis of class discussion in the next session) or group work. The synchronous sessions will consist of in-class discussions. You will be required to keep your cameras on. You will develop three of your posts into short papers (2-3 pages). There will be a final exam at the end of the semester. Regular attendance and consistent class participation will count for 30% of your grade; the three short papers for 30% and the final exam for 40%.
INSTRUCTOR: ANIA LOOMBA

This course is offered online with synchronous and asynchronous components.

Focusing on movies made after 1945, this course allows students to learn and to sharpen methods, terminologies, and tools needed for the critical analysis of film. Beginning with the cinematic revolution signaled by the Italian Neo-Realism (of Rossellini and De Sica), we will follow the evolution of postwar cinema through the French New Wave (of Godard, Resnais, and Varda), American movies of the 1950s and 1960s (including the New Hollywood cinema of Coppola and Scorsese), and the various other new wave movements of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (such as the New German Cinema). We will then selectively examine some of the most important films of the last three decades, including those of U.S. independent film movement and movies from Iran, China, and elsewhere in an expanding global cinema culture. There will be precise attention paid to formal and stylistic techniques in editing, mise-en-scene, and sound, as well as to the narrative, non-narrative, and generic organizations of film. At the same time, those formal features will be closely linked to historical and cultural distinctions and changes, ranging from the Paramount Decision of 1948 to the digital convergences that are defining screen culture today. There are no perquisites. Requirements will include readings in film history and film analysis, an analytical essay, a research paper, weekly Canvas postings, and active participation in class discussion. Fulfills Cross Cultural Analysis and Arts and Letters.
INSTRUCTOR: FILLIPO TRENTIN

This course is offered online with synchronous and asynchronous components.

Focusing on movies made after 1945, this course allows students to learn and to sharpen methods, terminologies, and tools needed for the critical analysis of film. Beginning with the cinematic revolution signaled by the Italian Neo-Realism (of Rossellini and De Sica), we will follow the evolution of postwar cinema through the French New Wave (of Godard, Resnais, and Varda), American movies of the 1950s and 1960s (including the New Hollywood cinema of Coppola and Scorsese), and the various other new wave movements of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (such as the New German Cinema). We will then selectively examine some of the most important films of the last three decades, including those of U.S. independent film movement and movies from Iran, China, and elsewhere in an expanding global cinema culture. There will be precise attention paid to formal and stylistic techniques in editing, mise-en-scene, and sound, as well as to the narrative, non-narrative, and generic organizations of film. At the same time, those formal features will be closely linked to historical and cultural distinctions and changes, ranging from the Paramount Decision of 1948 to the digital convergences that are defining screen culture today. There are no perquisites. Requirements will include readings in film history and film analysis, an analytical essay, a research paper, weekly Canvas postings, and active participation in class discussion. Fulfills Cross Cultural Analysis and Arts and Letters.
INSTRUCTOR: JULIA ALEKSEYEVA