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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
Italian Studies, LAIS A historical journey to the Mediterranean world of the 16th and 17th centuries using the great scholarship of Fernand Braudel as a vehicle. The class first considers geography, demography, climate, and economies; next, the formation of social structures; and last, politics, religion, and culture. Open to any student seeking an introduction to this period or these places-Spain, Italy, and North Africa.
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4.00 Credits
Examining the built environment of cities is a powerful method for uncovering the social and cultural dynamics that shaped the past of urban populations. This course looks comparatively at five cities in the United States andWestern and Eastern Europe, considering a variety of physical structures and spaces from the preindustrial, industrial, and postindustrial eras. Students examine features of the urban landscape, including parks, tenements, cafés, skyscrapers, street corners, world's fairs, freeways, museums, courtyards, and even sewers. They "read" these sitesfor what they reveal about urban life across time, including such issues as economic changes, technological innovation, new forms of leisure, changing relationships to the environment, the development of working class culture, and the imposition of political hegemony. Cities to be studied include Paris, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Vilna.
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4.00 Credits
Medieval Studies An examination of the origins and evolution of Russian civilization from the founding of the first Eastern Slavic state through the 18th century, when Russia began to modernize by borrowing fromWestern culture. Among the topics considered are the ethnogeny of early Russians, the development of state and legal institutions, the relationship between kinship and politics, the role of religion in public and private spheres, economic organization, social institutions, family, gender relations, sexuality, popular culture, and the impact of the outside world (both Orient and Occident) upon Russian society. Sources include a variety of Russian cultural expressions (folktales, literature, art, film, music), original documents, and scholarly texts.
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4.00 Credits
German Studies, GIS, Human Rights This course examines the history ofGermany from its 1871 unification to the 2002 constitutional convention of the EuropeanUnion, paying particular attention toGermany's troubled relation with broader European society and identity. Using documents and films, the course explores Germany's pivotal place in the ideological divisions, political catastrophes, and theoretical, social, and scientific innovations of modern Europe. A guiding theme is the paradox that even as Germany is perhaps the most "modern" of European states, its definition?nd the identity of its citizens-has been haunted since its inception by its past. Topics include the impact of World War I, the political experiment of Weimar democracy, the role of "German" and "European" identity in Nazi propaganand expansion, the Holocaust, the student protests of 1968, and the creation of a new German and European identity after 1989, among others.
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4.00 Credits
French Studies An exploration of early practices of making bread, breaking bread, breadwinning, drinking wine, quaffing ale, and sipping coffee, tea, and chocolate. The class reads of medieval and early modern land cultivation (grape and grain); of eating and not eating in medieval women's religious culture; of new seasonings brought to French culture by returning merchants and explorers; from Rabelais on the gargantuan devouring of liberal education; of massacre and spiritual renewal in the Protestant and Catholic reformations with Montaigne's retort in his essay "OnCannibals"; and of a transfigurative, divine-right kingship under Louis XIV that made into gods men of royal lineage. The course concludes in the 18th century with the rise of the café as a space in which elites met and critiqued politics and culture, and with taverns and bread riots as sites in which the poor met and critiqued elites.
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4.00 Credits
In the fifth century B.C.E., Athens dramatically developed from a small, relatively unimportant city-state into a dominant power in the Aegean basin. Athenian political, artistic, literary, and intellectual traditions continue to reverberate through the world today. Democracy, tragedy and comedy, rhetoric, philosophy, and history itself, as well as the classical style of sculpture and architecture, stem from this remarkable culture. The course confronts some of the ambiguities and tensions (slavery, exclusion of women and noncitizens from political power) as well as the glories of Athenian art, literature, and history during this period. Students read selections from the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides; many of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the comedies of Aristophanes; and one or two dialogues of Plato.
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4.00 Credits
Africana Studies, French Studies The French nation gave birth to itself in 1789, but would be reborn as its colonial relations forced new ideas about the progress of its political identity. This course is a survey of French politics, society, and economy in the 19th and 20th centuries, from the French and Haitian Revolutions to the imperialist "civilizing mission" (especiallyin West Africa), and on to the fall of France in Indochina and its defeat in the Algerian War. Making France modern proved to involve far more than a republican legacy and industrialization. The rise of the French intellectual, the reformulation of gender roles, the politics of race, and revolution and resistance in overseas territories all contributed to give France the most strongly articulated modern identity in Europe.
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4.00 Credits
GIS, STS A survey of the history and historiography of technology in the late modern period. The course begins by considering how a separate domain of technology first came to be defined, in theory and practice, during the 18th century and goes on to address how institutional forces such as law, academia, business, and government came to define and influence technological change and scientific research during the industrial revolution. Studies focus on technology as a process embedded within research agendas, institutions, social expectations, economics, and specific use, and thus as part of a broader "sociotechnical system."Case studies ranging from the bicycle to the birth control pill help students generate "internal"accounts of the development of technology and science in conjunction with "external"accounts of the historical context of technologies. The course concludes with an assessment of recent approaches to the history of technology. Authors read include Hacking, Heidegger, Hughes, Landes, Latour, Lenoir, Luhmann,Mokyr, Spengler, andWise.
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4.00 Credits
American Studies This course examines how a disparate cast of people-from famous Americans such as Benjamin Franklin, Mary Rowlandson, and Frederick Douglass to long-forgotten figures such as Andrew Montour, Stephen Arnold, and Hannah Bernard-constructed personal identities in the messy world of early American history. Students explore the processes of personal identity formation, question the degree of flexibility people had in making their selves, and work to connect these individual actors to larger changes in racial, gendered, and national identities. Course work includes autobiographical writings, visual images, and some secondary historical essays.
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4.00 Credits
A monument of natural philosophy and scientific illustration, Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665) was the first laboratory manual in microscopy. A great experimentalist, Hooke intended the work to be a manifesto of experimental method and faith in progress. His Royal Society of London colleagues also hoped Hooke's observations would lend credence to atomism, a notorious ancient philosophy that was being rehabilitated in the 17th century. The work's descriptive and experimental language suggests objectivity, as does Hooke's recourse to geometric principles. Yet the treatise is also permeated with a theological agenda. Students read the Micrographia, examining its philosophical antecedents and experimental foundations, and investigate Hooke's life and work, as well as the links between science and society during the Scientific Revolution.
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