Instructor: Y. Shevchuk

The course will discuss how film making has been used as a vehicle of power and control in the Soviet Union and in post-Soviet space since 1991. A body of selected films by Soviet and post-Soviet directors that exemplify the function of film making as a tool of appropriation of the colonized, their cultural and political subordination by the Soviet center will be examined in terms of post-colonial theories. The course will also focus on the often over looked work of Ukrainian, Georgian, Belarusian, Armenian, etc. national film schools and how they participated in the communist project of fostering a as well as resisted it by generating, in hidden and, since 1991, overt and increasingly assertive.

Instructor: M. Jannus

(Seminar). Reading selections from Lacan’s Seminar XIV: The Logic of Phantasy 1966-7; Seminar XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972-3; Seminar XXIV The unknown that knows the unconscious/or blunder takes wings at playing love/death game 1976-7 together with selected novels, short stories, and poems. Emphasis on Lacan’s elaboration of the phantasy, the four discourses, jouissance, the formulas of sexuation, and his redefinition of our notions of the imagination, the body, language, and the function of the arts. Consideration of the relevance of his thought to literature, aesthetics, and culture.

Instructor: M. Cohen

(Lecture). A survey of touchstone nineteenth-century European novels, this class will explore the relationship of the realist novel to urban experience and rural identity. If most novels are, in Raymond Williams’s phrase “knowable communities,” how do fictions of the city and fictions of the country represent youth and experience, time and space, work and leisure, men and women, landscape and portraiture, privacy and public life, national culture and cosmopolitanism? Readings include Balzac’s Le Pere Goriot, Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Austen’s Persuasion, Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Eliot’s Middlemarch, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Requirements: two writing assignments and two-in-class written exams; thorough and attentive reading and participation are also mandatory.

Instructor: A. Hartnett

Third-wave feminism has introduced a dynamism to the study of gender and sexuality in archaeology that situates gender as a relational category intersecting with aspects of identity such as race, ethnicity, status and class. In this seminar, we explore gender, sexuality, social organization and identity in earlier societies that were filled with a diversity of peoples. We examine geographically and historically diverse cases that range from prehistoric Europe to twentieth-century San Francisco through archaeological investigations rooted in space, material culture, and daily practice.

Instructor: B. Robbins and O. Pamuk

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). The phrase “the art of the novel,” a reminder that the ascension of the genre to the status of “high art” rather than merely popular entertainment is still relatively recent, comes from Henry James, himself both a novelist and an influential critic of the novel. The premise of this co-taught seminar is that it is intellectually productive to bring together the perspectives of the novelist and the critic, looking both at their differences and at their common questions and concerns. In addition to fiction and criticism by Orhan Pamuk, students will read novels by Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy.

In recent decades scholars have focused their attention on a precise aspect of the Iberian expansion between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries: the vast circulation of overseas objects as “goods,” with the consequent enrichment of the European collections, the birth of the Wonder Cabinets etc. Beyond these physical movements of new items, from Peru, Brazil, India, New Spain, Sierra Leone, or the Philippines, however, another parallel and equally significant process took place: the production and circulation of texts documenting, describing and analyzing the diversity of these creations, the qualitative exceptionality of their creators´ abilities, their mythologies, their material specificities, and their possible aesthetic, theological, or political links as well as their key role in the Iberian domination process itself. These two movements between texts and images are intimately intertwined: as more items were being produced overseas, more texts were being devoted to their existence and production; then as more texts were being written,published, and read, more objects were being desired, commissioned, invented, and shipped. The seminar will explore the variety of these sources -variety of genres (chronicles, histories, inventories, grammars, dictionaries, legal or inquisitorial processes), variety of authorships (conquistadors, missionaries, ambassadors, travelers, visitadores, cronistas, naturalists, historians, collectors, artists) etc.- in order to examine the relationship between textual and visual production in Early Modernity. The study of this unexpected “literature of art” will be continuously accompanied with the discussion of the actual artifacts commented in the sources. We will also consider if there are local specificities in the production of such texts: for instance, is the impressive amount of sources exclusively related to the “American” (New Spain, Brazil, Perú…) artistic processes understandable within a broader Iberian perspective or is there something specific in the observation and examination of the “American” aesthetics?

Instructor: L. Sharp

(Enrollment limit to 40; not open to 1st year; non-anthro majors require permission of the instructor) Introduction to medical anthropology, exploring health, affliction, and healing cross-culturally. Draws from theory and methods to address critiques of biomedical, epidemiological, and other models of disease; the roles of healers in different societies; the inseparable nature of religion and healing; and different conceptions of the body and how this affects cultural conceptions of health.

Enrollment limit is 20. Instructor’s permission is required. The first part of the course focuses on the history of the creation of the atomic bomb and the aftermath of its use during World War II. We look at the socialization of the scientists involved in the birth of the bomb; at the devastation it wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and at the physical and psychological injuries that afflicted its survivors, especially the immediate and long-term effects of radiation poisoning and trauma. The course then considers the Cold War period, examining civil defense campaigns, the cultural features of weapons laboratories, and the devastating physical and environmental contamination suffered by communities–disproportionately composed of indigenous populations-where such weapons repeatedly have been tested. The second part of the course explores the transformative cultural and psychological consequences of living with the bomb. Readings consider the evidence of spontaneous psychic adaptations to life in the nuclear age. They also examine governments’ deliberate attempts to shape citizens’ cognitive and emotional lives. How do states produce political subjects who comply with military imperatives? What role does the continual manufacture of foreign threats and enemies play in this process? While acknowledging the powerful forces that seek to control public perceptions of nuclear arms by minimizing their destructive potential, the course concludes by considering organized resistances to increasing nuclear proliferation and to militarism.

Instructor: M. Van de Mieroop

A comparative study of the histories of Egypt, the Near East, Anatolia, and the Aegean World in the period from c. 1500-1100 BC, when several of the states provide a rich set of textual and archaeological data.