This course will offer an overview of historical and anthropological writing on the Mediterranean from the birth of the field through the pages of Fernard Braudel’s celebrated book in the 1940s to the present day. It will trace the shifts in the ways we understand the Mediterranean by examining the sea as a malleable geographical space, which changes over time. It will explore topics such as the macro- and micro-histories of the Sea; the ‘history in’ and the ‘history of’ the Mediterranean; ‘anti-Meditterraneanism’; the revolutionary Mediterraneans; the colonial Mediterranean; the Grand Tour; the migrants in the Mediterranean; Italy in the Mediterranean, and others. Looking at the sea can tell us a lot about human life on land and can change our perspective on how we view this and other parts of the world.

Instructor: Caroline Weber

This course examines the myth of Oedipus in a range of dramatic and theoretical writings, exploring how the paradigm of incest and parricide has shaped Western thought from classical tragedy to gender studies. Authors studied: Sophocles, Seneca, Corneille, Dryden, Voltaire, Hölderlin, Hegel, Wagner, Nietzsche, Freud, Klein, Deleuze, Guattari, and Butler.

Instructor: Valentina Izmirlieva

In 1955, an American writer of Russian descent published in Paris a thin book that forever shaped English language, American culture, and the international literary scene.  That book, of course, was Vladimir Nabokov’sLolita. We will speak of exile, memory and nostalgia, of hybrid cultural identities and cosmopolitan elites, of language, translation and multilingualism.  All readings will be in English.

This is a course on the literatures, laws, and languages of human rights. We consider problems in human rights storytelling by examining the figures of speech that the law constructs to protect people’s rights and by exploring the capacities and limits of specific narrative genres to represent and promote human rights. Topics and texts include: legal personhood, forensic anthropology, and testimony in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost; synecdoche and other figures of genocide in Hotel Rwanda; empathy, indifference, and humanitarianism in Henri Dunant’s A Memory of Solferino and Janette Turner Hospitals’ “Dear Amnesty”; epistolary limits of forgiveness in Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother; torture and the drama of truth commissions in Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden; recreating and consuming trauma in The Act of Killing; the graphic nature of coming of age in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis; child soldiers and formations of (ir)responsibility in Ishmael Beah’s Long Way Gone; the end and ends of narrative in Mohamedou Slahi’s Guantanamo Diary.

Time: W 12:10pm-2:00pm

Location: 610 Lewisohn Hall

Narrative medicine – its practice and scholarship – is necessarily concerned with issues of trauma, body, memory, voice, and intersubjectivity. However, to grapple with these issues, we must locate them in their social, cultural, political, and historical contexts. Narrative understanding helps unpack the complex power relations between North and South, state and worker, disabled body and able-body, bread-earner and child-bearer, as well as self and the Other (or, even, selves and others). If disease, violence, terror, war, poverty and oppression manifest themselves narratively, then resistance, justice, healing, activism, and collectivity can equally be products of a narrative based approach to ourselves and the world.

Day & Time: W 2:00pm-5:45pm

Approvals Required: None

This course will read some major texts of Pan-Africanism and Postcolonialism; and examine their intersectionality. CPLS students will be expected to read the texts in the original language where possible. In conversation with the Postcolonialism section, the Pan-Africanism section will consider the shifting debates in various geographical (Harlem, Paris, London and the African Atlantic enclaves (Cape Coast, Accra, Lagos, Saint Louis, Dakar), historical (from ide of African Renaissance in the late 18th century, the Haitian Revolution to the early 20th century, War World 1, the interwar period, the invasion of Ethiopia and World War 2, the Civil rights (The Americas)  and nationalist (Africa) movements…), intellectual (the debates and controversies around African cultures, modernit(ies) and universalisms) and artistic (modernism and African aesthetic languages) situations.

This seminar reads key theoretical texts from the late nineteenth century to the present that address the city and urbanization as objects of critical, philosophical reflection. An important contribution to such thought was made by a variety of German thinkers concerned with the modern metropolis. The seminar begins there and follows the problem forward, to the present, with a particular focus on the interactions of capital and culture, and to the social relations of urbanization, technological development, decolonization, and financialization, including the role of architecture and urbanism therein. The aim is not a philosophical metalanguage but rather, the elaboration of a critical, theoretical discourse. Special attention will be paid to the constitutive role of buildings, space, and infrastructures within this discourse.