Autumn Courses | Winter-Spring Sequences
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2008-2009 (PDF, 2.26MB)
The yearlong freshman IHUM Requirement consists of three courses over three quarters: an autumn course, generally taught by faculty across different disciplines, and a winter-spring course sequence taught by faculty within the same department.
The autumn course brings together faculty from different disciplines to provide multiple perspectives on three to five primary course texts, which may be written documents, artistic works, or cultural artifacts. The courses build a fuondation in the study of thought, values, beliefs, creativity, and culture and promote the primary pedagogical objective of building students' skills of close analysis and interpretation.
The two-quarter, twenty-week IHUM course sequences promote depth of study, often in a single field. Rather than covering basic knowledge in preparation for advanced study in a given discipline, the IHUM sequences explore broad issues organized around a central theme.
Read the PDF of our printed course catalogue for 2008-2009.
Freedom, Equality, Difference
Faculty Team
"Freedom” and “equality” are commonly appealed to as the fundamental principles of Western liberal societies. Individuals are supposed to be treated as equals and have an equal right to freedom. Specifically, they are entitled to the freedom to carry on their everyday lives and pursue their ambitions without prejudice to race, ethnicity, religion or gender.
William Koski, School of Law
David Palumbo-Liu, Department of Comparative Literature
Rob Reich, Department of Political Science
Texts
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Nella Larsen, Passing
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Selected Supreme Court casesYet the principles of freedom and equality are often contested as soon as we move from the realm of abstract ideals to concrete social practices. People who agree in principle find themselves differing (sometimes violently) about what kinds of freedom and equality are important and essential to a just society. Which freedoms will a just society promote and which must be curtailed for the sake of justice? What particular equalities properly concern government (such as equality of opportunity or well-being)? How can the achievement of equality be reconciled with respect for freedom? What action should social and political institutions take to guarantee freedom and equality?
These questions embody some of our most pressing national and global issues today. This course explores these and related questions through interdisciplinary inquiry that includes political philosophy, literature, education, history and law. We will repeatedly move between the realm of abstract ideas and actual case histories, using one to shed light on the other.
Humans and Machines
Faculty Team
How is a living, thinking human being like, or not like, a machine? This might seem like a new question for the Information Age, yet it has been a preoccupation of our civilization for centuries. From the culmination of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century, philosophers, physiologists, engineers, authors, political actors and artists of every kind have taken humanity’s measure by comparing humans with machines. Our course follows this tradition.
Scott Bukatman, Department of Art History
Henry Lowood, History of Science and Technology Collections, University Libraries
Texts
Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine
Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Puppet Theater”
Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command
A. M. Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence
George Cukor, My Fair Lady (film)
Philip K. Dick, selected short stories
This course will also include a film series.
Together, we ask a number of questions about what it means to think of the human mind, body, and society as types of machines. How has the machine served as a metaphor for the cosmos and culture? How do we interact with machines, and how have machines influenced literature, performance, and the arts? What separates us from our machines, and are we really as separate as we think we are?
We explore the shifting boundary lines between the mechanical and the human by considering how humanity has created or imagined machines and our interconnections with them. What do the concepts of “machine,” “human,” “alive,” “intelligent” and "self-aware" mean in different times and places, including our own? We will consider how humans may be conceived and designed as well as manipulated as machines, and how our artificial creations may in turn reflect and reflect upon their human creators.
The philosophical, scientific and ethical questions regarding the relationship of humans to machines are not just the preoccupations of our current moment. These questions have generated long, rich traditions of responses. We must draw upon these if we are to confront our current concerns, not as isolated actors, but as members of an ever- evolving culture.
This autumn quarter course may be followed by any one of the Introduction to the Humanities winter–spring sequences. You will be asked to rank your preferences for these sequences during autumn quarter.
Journeys
Faculty Team
The journey is our most fundamental narrative, and no wonder; we are all, from the day of our births, embarked on a constant passage through space and time toward an end we can only think we know. Death itself is in dispute: Is it final, or only the beginning of another journey? The mysteries of destination infuse our lives, giving rise to our most basic questions of purpose and meaning and faith, our proper relation to others and the physical world.
Tobias Wolff, Department of English
Lee Yearley, Department of Religious Studies
Texts
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Flannery O’Connor, selected stories
Leo Tolstoy, selected stories
Writings of Chuang Tzu, with selected poems from the T’ang DynastyThe works we will examine in this course were written across a span of some 2,300 years, from very different cultural and historical situations and in very different forms and genres. But each of them presents some essential aspect of that journey we all share, and of the multiplicity of passages we make within that one great journey—moral, spiritual, and emotional passages that relentlessly challenge and transform us even as we advance toward what the poet Thomas Gray called our “inevitable hour.” The writers of these works are not in agreement as to where we are going or how we should get there, but all of them compel us, by the penetration of their vision and the power of their art, to make part of our own journey in their company.
This autumn quarter course may be followed by any one of the Introduction to the Humanities winter–spring sequences. You will be asked to rank your preferences for these sequences during autumn quarter.
Laws and Orders
Faculty Team
Russell Berman, Department of Comparative Literature
Helen Stacy, School of Law
Texts
Sophocles, Antigone
Francisco de Vitoria, On The American Indians
Immanuel Kant, Towards Perpetual Peace
The Judgment of the Military Tribunal of Nuremberg, 1946
Ayan Hirsi Ali, InfidelLaws are social rules that have the coercive backing of government. But which social groups in any society get to write the rulebook? What are the consequences for people who disagree with, and even disobey, those rules? How much opportunity is there for minority groups to re-interpret, or even re-write, the rules? How do different ways of writing and processes of interpretation contribute to the rule of law within societies?
In international relations, international laws purport to regulate relations among governments and between different societies, while claiming to draw upon universalist principles that apply to everyone, everywhere. Are such claims compatible with the specific characters of very different cultures? Can the lawfulness of general regulation leave room for particular or local customs? When does the rationality of laws collide with the peculiar orders of life?
This course examines the role of law both as a vehicle to establish order and as a tool with which customary order can be called into question. It explores how norms may (or may not) apply equally in different cultural traditions. Our medium is five key texts that represent watershed moments in the history of law as a force of regulation, order and normalization, but also as a source of emancipation: sometimes law imposes order, but the law can also demand that we resist orders. Our pedagogy, drawing on the fields of international law and comparative literature, is legal, literary and critical analysis to ask such questions as:
Are there universal values that all people share and which ought to form a single body of enforceable laws? How can such values be explained?
Who, or what, should articulate these values? Should it be governments, or individuals, or community groups, or international institutions?
When values conflict, what mechanisms and which institutions ought to mediate disputes?
How do different literary genres, rhetorical strategies, and cultural traditions refract the universality of law?
The claim of universal law, including universal human rights, seems to override distinctions among societies, cultures, languages, and forms: does law eliminate local custom and traditions?
Race and Reunion: American Memory and the Civil War
Faculty Team
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Department of English
Bryan Wolf, Department of Art History
Texts
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (film)
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Selected paintings, photographs and works of art by William Sydney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, Fitz Henry Lane, Frederic E. Church, Mathew Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan, Winslow Homer, Henry Tanner, Kara Walker, Robert Colescott, Willie Cole and othersWhat can we learn about ourselves from the stories we tell about slavery and Civil War? How do we understand the ways in which ideas of race have shaped Americans' sense of who we are as a nation? How does art imbue the past with meaning? How do literature, photography, painting, and film shape our sense of personal and national identity? These are some of the questions we will explore in "Race and Reunion: American Memory and The Civil War."
The peace treaty signed at Appomattox in 1865 ended the Civil War, and the Thirteenth Amendment, passed in 1865, ended slavery. But the battle over memory had just begun. What had it all meant? How should it be remembered? Battles over these questions have been re-fought ever since: in high art and popular culture, in literature, music, and film.
Our focus in this class will not be on the military history of the war, or the political and economic forces that helped precipitate it. Instead, we will examine the place of slavery and the war in American cultural memory--how both have been represented in literature, the visual arts and music. We will weave our story around several recurring themes: competing ideas of race and nationhood; different perspectives on freedom and citizenship; changing notions of individual and collective identity. Central to all of our discussions and readings will be the idea that the stories we tell about the past shape our understanding of the present and of the future, and that each generation's lived experience indelibly shapes its understanding of the past.
This is a course in critical thinking and interpretation. Our goal is to develop students' abilities to read texts, images and cultural artifacts closely; to attend to the historical debates embedded in texts and objects; to think critically about different methods of interpreting cultural objects; and to translate their insights in sustained intellectual discussion and lucid analytical prose. Our assumption in this course is that history is not available to us as a set of events -- fixed, past, and unchanging -- but rather that history is known through each generation's interpretations of those events. We encounter the past through the stories we tell about it in the present, stories that reflect the values, needs and anxieties of the world that produces them.
Technological Visions of Utopia
Faculty Team
Eric Roberts, Department of Computer Science
Rob Robinson, Department of German Studies
Texts
Thomas More, Utopia
George Orwell, 1984
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Neal Stephenson, Snow CrashThroughout history, philosophers have speculated about the nature of the “good society” and how to achieve it. Although earlier writers had offered their own views, Sir Thomas More gave a name to this ideal society that has now become part of common language: utopia. In the almost 500 years since More’s Utopia appeared, changes in society — including enormous advances in science and technology — have opened up new possibilities for the utopian society that More and his predecessors could not have envisioned. At the same time, science and technology also entail risks that suggest more dystopian scenarios—in their most extreme form, threats to humanity’s very survival. This course looks at several works that consider how literary visions of society have evolved with the progress of science and technology. The readings begin with More and continue forward to the much more technologically determined visions of the late 20th century. The course also considers one cinematic treatment of technology and utopia, Fritz Lang's film classic Metropolis.
Truth and Morality: One, Many or None?
Faculty Team
Chris Bobonich, Department of Philosophy
Nadeem Hussain, Department of Philosophy
Texts
Plato, Republic
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Russ Shafer-Landau, Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant FundamentalistThere are those who think that without a belief in “absolute” truth or a belief in one morality, or one set of values, societies would decay and crumble. Some see this decay as already eating away at many contemporary societies and take it as their task to fight this decline. Others think that cultural diversity and the inevitable presence of bias and self-interest make the idea of a single truth or a single, correct morality simply implausible. Furthermore, some believe, the view that there is a single truth or a single morality is what leads to many forms of intolerance; there would be more peace, tolerance, and understanding both within societies and between societies if people would just give up the old-fashioned, unsophisticated view that there is one truth for all humans or one set of values for all humans.
In this course we will investigate whether there is indeed one truth or many; whether truth is in some way relative to particular groups of people in particular places and times—cultures, societies, or traditions. Or whether, as some philosophers have argued, humans are not capable of knowing any truth whatsoever. We will concern ourselves with both purported descriptive truths—the kinds of things physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, economics, and so on claim to reveal to us—and specifically normative or evaluative truths—the purported truths of morality, of values, of rationality. Could there be some sense in which the world of physics, in which everything happens according to the laws of physics, is true for physicists and others who believe in physics, but not true for someone who believes that God is continuously directing how the Universe proceeds? How could there be two truths here? Isn’t the physicist either right about how the Universe works or wrong? After all, those who believe in physics and those who do not cannot literally be living in two Universes, can they? (Imagine the consequences for international trade!) Doesn’t this mean that those who accept one religion—or a secular world view—have to think of those who disagree with them as simply mistaken?
Similar questions arise about morality and values. Should we think that slavery was fine once upon a time because that is how things were done then? But then what stops a group of people from separating themselves from the rest of us and declaring that they are founding a new community in which, once again, slavery is just fine? But if there are universal moral truths, then how do we know them? Physics has particle detectors, the biologist has microscopes, the economist has detailed surveys of income levels and productivity, but what instrument do we have to detect moral truths? A person’s right to health care, if any rights actually exist, isn’t like the person’s height or weight. How do we “measure” someone’s rights? Or should we conclude that believing in morality and values is like believing in witches or unicorns, a mistake we should finally get over? But if there is no right or wrong, if nothing is really more valuable or important than anything else, then how can we decide what to do with, and in, our lives? Indeed if there is no value, meaning or point to anything, then life itself seems completely worthless.
World Archaeology and Global Heritage
Anthropology/Archaeology
Faculty
Winter quarter:
Ian Hodder, Departments of Anthropology and Archaeology
Spring quarter:
Barbara Voss, Departments of Anthropology and Archaeology
Sites
Kennewick, WA - Kennewick
Turkey - Catalhoyuk
Egypt - the Valley of the Kings and Tutunkhamun
Peru - Macchu Picchu
San Francisco Bay Area - Stanford, Colony Ross, Mission Dolores, Ng Shing Gung, Angel Island
Ayodhya, India - Ram Janmabaami temple and Babri Mosque
Israel - al-Haram al-Sharif and Temple Mount
New York, NY - African Burial Ground
Capetown, South Africa - District 6In a world marked by rapid globalization and forward-looking technology, heritage presents a particular paradox. Increasingly, heritage sites are flashpoints in cultural and religious conflicts around the globe. Simultaneously heritage is viewed as a unifying force in nation-building and in forging international alliances. Clearly, “history” matters but how do certain histories come to matter in particular ways, and to whom? How is research on the past shaped through present-day concerns about identity, community, nation, alongside transnational flows of people, money, and goods?
The main topics of our course are the impact of the past on the present, and the impact of the present on the past. Thus we will be looking both at how the past plays a role in contemporary society, and at contemporary archaeological research, management and conservation. Through close study of important archaeological sites, we will critically analyze landscapes, architecture, and objects as well as related literary works, religious texts, films, political essays, and scientific articles. We will examine topics as diverse as debates about the peopling of the New World to present-day religious conflicts over heritage sites. Far from being a neutral scholarly exercise, archaeology is embedded in the heated debates about heritage and present-day conflicts.
Rebellious Daughters and Filial Sons of the Chinese Family: Present and Past
Asian Languages
Faculty
Winter Quarter:
Ban Wang, Asian Languages
Spring Quarter:
Yiqun Zhou, Asian Languages
Selected Texts
Ang Lee. Eat, Drink, Man, Woman (film)
Xi Xi, “A Woman like Me”
Xu Dishan, “The Merchants Wife”
Huo Jianqi, Postman in the Mountain (film)
Ding Ling, “When I was in Xia Village”
Mao Dun, “Spring Silkworm”
Xiao Hong, “Hands”
Ji Junxiang, The Orphan of Zhao
Guan Hanqing. The Injustice Done to Doue
Cao Xueqin, The Dream of the Red Chamber
Shen Fu, Six Records of a Floating Life
Susan Mann and Yu-yin Cheng eds., Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese HistoryLeaving home to live in the dorm may be a form of freedom, but this experience also raises the question of disconnection and reconnection with the family. This course will help students think about the family in its enduring role in shaping us as members of a community and citizens of society. Taking the Chinese family as a specific case, we will inquire into the ways the family has been revolted against, broken up, critiqued, and transformed through social and political changes. We will look at the stern authority of the father, nourishing care of the mother, the supportive or antagonistic relations of siblings, and the extension of these relations in kinship community and society. We will consider how the notions of love, emotion, and gender play into the formation of the family and how the family connects with interpersonal and social relations.
The Chinese family is a mix of old and new. The traditional family relations are abandoned, preserved, and re-invented in the modern world. In the winter quarter we will address the modern image of family in 20th century China and the Chinese diaspora in the US. We will consider modernization, colonialism, revolution, dislocation, war, and immigration in disrupting traditional home and family and will read about the poignant attempts to re-build family relations. In the spring quarter we will look backward and delve into the layers of millennial tradition sedimented from the ancient times up to the end of the 19th century. These layers may resurface or submerge in the present, and an awareness of them will deepen our understanding of the modern family. This back-to-the-future view crystallizes in this tension: the modern image of the individual as the sole shaper of self, estranged from the family, is matched by an equally strong pull to restore and preserve inherited family morality and communal relations.
We will further explore these questions: Can self-realization be achieved without ties to family and community? Is the life of independent individuals more meaningful than the one wedded to a network of community and shared values? What is the gender role of men and women in the changing faces of the family? What kinds of stories and links are constructed to bridge the gap between the individual and community? We will use texts of imaginative creation and expression—short stories, novels, films and dramas – to explore the intricacy and possibilities in the tension between individual and community.
Ancient Empires
Classics
Faculty
Winter Quarter:
Ian Morris, Department of Classics
Spring Quarter:
Walter Scheidel, Department of Classics
Selected Authors and Texts
Assyrian and Persian inscriptions
The Hebrew Bible
The New Testament
Histories of Herodotus, Xenophon, Polybius, Josephus, and Tacitus
Letters of Cicero and PlinyWhy are wealth and power so unevenly distributed around the world today, with so much in the hands of Europeans and their descendants in other countries? In this course sequence you will investigate one of the decisive places and periods in the world’s history: the Mediterranean basin between about 800 BCE and 600 CE. Great empires—Assyria, Persia, Macedonia, and Rome—were carved out in bloody wars and permanently changed the course of human development. We will ask why these empires arose when and where they did, how they worked, and what their legacy is. We will balance their economic, religious, and artistic achievements against their record of genocide, enslavement, and brutal warfare. We will ask what these empires meant, not only for the people who created and ruled them but also for those who lived within their power or struggled to resist them. What drove some people to conquer, others to submit, and others still to fight back? How do we set the turbulent details of their histories against the deeper currents of economic and environmental changes across a thousand years?
In this course you will examine the rich evidence surviving from ancient literature and archaeology, tracing the roles of religion, property, and freedom across these centuries and what they meant for the shape of the world today.
Inventing Classics: Greek and Roman Literature in its Mediterranean Context
Classics
Faculty
Winter quarter:
Marsh McCall, Department of Classics
Spring quarter:
Christian Kaesser, Department of Classics
Selected Texts
Gilgamesh
Genesis
Homer, Odyssey
Sophocles, Antigone
Euripides, Medea
Plato, Apology and Crito
Vergil, Aeneid
Aristophanes, Lysistrata
Sappho
Speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero
Plautus, Menaechmi
Horace, Odes
Apuleius, The Golden AssAre you concerned with fundamental questions about the human condition? Do you ask yourself whether your life is controlled more by your own free choices or by your genetic code? Do you wonder whether the universe is just or unjust? Do you worry whether a superpower can function without hubristic arrogance? If these sorts of issues seem central to your intellectual and personal explorations, this IHUM sequence will reveal to you that the ancient Mediterranean world was equally consumed with identical questions about the nature of human society and human existence. We will undertake our explorations by reading a wide and deep selection of important and influential literary texts from Greece and Rome, amplified by a smaller selection of texts from other cultures in the Mediterranean and the Near East. The sequence will be organized by literary genre, and will investigate the very origins of such genres. In the winter term, creation texts, epic, tragedy, and philosophy will be studied, ranging in date from c.2000 BC to the first century AD. In the spring term, lyric, comedy, rhetoric, and prose fiction will be studied, with the texts ranging from c.1000 BC to the second century AD. Some of the themes that will recur throughout the sequence are, as our opening questions suggest: power and gender, gods and humans, the justice of the cosmos, fate and human responsibility.
Arts and Ideas
Drama
Faculty
Winter and Spring Quarters:
Janice Ross and Alice Rayner, Department of Drama
Selected Authors
Plato
Sidney
Shakespeare
Shklovsky
Kleist
Langer
Berger
Benjamin
GoodmanArts and Ideas will explore a broad sampling of cultural practices – primarily dance and theater - that use the human body as an art medium. From the critical perspectives of dance history and drama theory, we will examine both established and emerging works. The focus will be on developing perceptual and interpretive skills for understanding how the performing arts have functioned historically and critically as key indexes to and challenging templates of cultural understanding. How can we come to read the body as an art medium? What kinds of knowledge can a highly disciplined moving body reveal? What does it mean to re-present life through performance historically?
From romantic ballet and realist drama to current Broadway musicals, transnational Asian and African performance forms and the experimental dance and theatre of the 21st century, we will use art as central texts for understanding the world. From the highly athletic slam action dance of Elizabeth Streb to contemporary stagings of T.S. Elliot’s Wasteland, the scope will be global. The class includes extensive viewing of performances in digital media and live venues as well as exhibitions at the Cantor Art Center. The syllabus will take advantage of leading artists visiting Stanford and the Bay Area during the winter and spring quarters. Play readings will range from Ibsen and Chekhov to Beckett and Wole Soyinka, while dance examples will be drawn from Giselle and Vaslav Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring and John Cage to Bill T. Jones, Twyla Tharp and Pina Bausch among others.
A Life of Contemplation or Action? Debates in Western Literature
and Philosophy
English
Faculty
Winter quarter:
Jennifer Summit, Department of English
Spring quarter:
Blakey Vermeule, Department of English
Selected Authors and Texts
Selections from Plato, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Francis Bacon, Margaret Cavendish
The Bible
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Thomas More, Utopia
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Selected poems by William Wordsworth
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”
Selections from Thoreau, Walden
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Clint Eastwood, Selected films
John Ford, Selected films
Selections from Hannah Arendt’s The Human ConditionWhich is preferable: a life of thought or a life of action? Are the two necessarily in conflict, or is it possible to reconcile them? This course focuses on literary treatments of the ongoing debate over "the active life" versus "the contemplative life" as it is carried out in from the classical to the modern eras. While the debate itself is perennial, it takes on different forms and implications as it moves across changing literary, historical and philosophical contexts. The winter quarter will consider the debate as it is defined by classical authors, early Christian thinkers, and medieval mystical and literary texts, and is redefined in the Renaissance by humanist and posthumanist treatments of it. The spring quarter will consider the role of contemplation in an increasingly market-driven and secular world.
Epic Journeys, Modern Quests
French and Italian
Faculty
Winter Quarter:
Robert Harrison, Department of French and Italian
Spring Quarter:
Robert Harrison and Jean-Marie Apostolides, Department of French and Italian
Selected Authors and Texts
Homer, Odyssey
Dante, Inferno
Boccaccio, selections from the Decameron
Baudelaire, selected poems
Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist
Kafka, The TrialThrough the metaphor of the journey, epic poems externalize the human quest for identity and self-definition: as the epic hero crosses the physical world and descends into the underworld, to visit the dead and seek counsel from them, he gradually comes closer to himself. We will examine the different goals of such journeys and the evolution of the epic hero as he struggles to reach his destination, with particular attention to how exile and alienation, the encounter with ancestors, the female voice, and divine guidance define the trajectories traced by the various epics in question.
As the course develops, we will examine the diminished importance of the dead and the increased emphasis on the power of the living in various literary genres. We will pay particular attention to how concepts of humanity and society are defined by the sense of rupture with the past, including a heightened importance given to innovation, the present, the living, and the everyday that contrasts with the formative power of the afterlife, tradition, and the dead.
The Making of the Modern World: Europe and Latin America
History
Faculty
Winter Quarter:
David Como, Department of History
Spring Quarter:
Zephyr Frank, Department of History
Selected Authors and Texts
Machiavelli, The Prince
Luther, Christian Liberty
Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
Da Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands
Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz
Guevara, Selected writingsHow did the modern world come to be? Through exploring the emergence of modernity from 1300 to the present, this course sequence attempts to address this overarching question. Starting with demographic and religious transformations in Europe, the course tracks the development of ideologies, social formations, and political institutions as they eventually crossed the Atlantic and were modified in the Americas, ending with the twentieth-century shocks of social revolution and authoritarianism throughout Latin America. Students build an understanding of the modern world and engage with the creative/destructive tensions inherent in this long transformation.
Readings include classics of imaginative literature as well as pivotal works of political thought or historical criticism. In addition, we will engage with theorists who have themselves confronted and analyzed the problem of the origins of capitalist modernity, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx and Max Weber. Records of ordinary life, such as parish registers, wills and diaries, will illustrate deep changes in social and economic existence. Through the study of materials drawn from literature, philosophy, economic and social theory as well as primary source documents and visual media, we will try to understand the seismic shifts that have remade the conditions of material existence for modern humans.
Mass Violence from Crusades to Genocides
History
World History of ScienceFaculty
Winter Quarter:
Philippe Buc, Department of History
Spring Quarter:
Amir Weiner, Department of History
Selected Texts
Josephus, Jewish Wars
Luther, Against the Marauding Hordes of Peasants
Robespierre, “Speech for the execution of the king”
Hitler, Mein Kampf
Stalin and Trotsky, Selected writingsThis course explores the evolution, varieties, causes and logic of mass violence in pre-modern and modern history, and the way mass violence shaped historical trends. What accounts for the persistence of mass violence in history? Do religions, ethnicity, and modernity ferment or restrain mass violence? Is there a common pattern of mass violence throughout the centuries? These questions and others will be pursued through examination of violence under its legal aspects, such as just war theory and the Genocide Convention; its socio-political functions of discipline and integration; state-mob-individual dynamics; and its ethical and religious meaning. Its persistence will be traced through several dimensions: religion, social and political institutions, nationalism, revolutionary ideologies and social engineering projects, economics and technology. Finally, the course explores the manner in which mass violence can be confronted through retribution, restitution and international bodies of justice.
The geographic focus of the course is Europe, with comparative forays into societies which the Europeans encountered, such as the Aztec empire, the Islamic world, and Africa. It begins with the siege and conquest of Jerusalem by the Romans and proceeds to the Christian crusades; follows on to intra-Christian violence during the Wars of Religion and the German Peasants' War (1524-1525). It then covers warfare in the American New World; the French Revolution with its Terror and the birth of mass citizen warfare; the emergence of genocide as a modern, international, and legal issue; colonial genocides in Africa in late 19th century; the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire; Nazi and other racial genocides; communist-induced mass violence in the Soviet Union and Asia; ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia; and the recent genocides in Rwanda and Sudan.
History
Faculty
Winter and Spring Quarters:
Robert Proctor, Department of History
Selected Authors and Texts
Franz Kafka, Report to an Academy
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel
Galileo, Starry Messenger
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Selections from Stephen Jay Gould and Rachel CarsonWhat are the oldest scientific discoveries of humans? Knowledge of the stars? Of medicinal plants? Of our mortality? How have people in different parts of the world throughout history come to know the natural world, and what does this tell us about the history of science more generally?
The purpose of this course is to trace the broad sweep of global science, from the prehistoric roots of the oldest known technologies through the events of the Scientific Revolution and recent triumphs in the physical and life sciences. The first quarter concentrates on prehistory and cosmology. We begin with theories of human origins and the oldest known tools and symbols, especially those found in Africa. We then turn to achievements of the Maya, Aztecs, and native North Americans and explore such topics as calendrical astronomy, paleobotany, metallurgy, and mathematical nomenclature. Science and medicine in the ancient Greek and Egyptian worlds will be followed by a look at the remarkable sciences of early China, Africa, and India. Our study of science in medieval Europe, the Islamic world and the Renaissance lays the groundwork for understanding the challenges to existing paradigms raised by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton.
In the second quarter, we begin with an exploration of how voyages of discovery transformed scientific knowledge, as Europeans tried to understand and exploit new kinds of animals, plants, and minerals in the New World, Africa and Asia. We will examine early theories of fossils and the 19th century discovery of “deep time.” Debates over extinction vs. evolution culminate in Lyell's geology and Darwin's theory of evolution. Twentieth century topics emphasize the intersections of science and ethical questions, leading to the challenges for the 21st century posed by global climate change, the ubiquity of information, and threats to biodiversity.
Our focus throughout will be global, recognizing that history is always profoundly and unavoidably selective. The overarching theme will be to explore how science transforms—and is transformed by—human engagements with technology, religion, art, politics, and moral values.
Humanistic Perspectives on Science
Philosophy
Faculty
Winter Quarter:
Michael Friedman, Department of Philosophy
Spring Quarter:
Helen Longino, Department of Philosophy
Selected Authors
Plato
Aristotle
Descartes
Leibniz
Hume
Kant
Galileo
Newton
Brecht
Shelley
Gandhi
AstellIt is often thought that there is an unbridgeable gulf between what C.P. Snow famously called the "two cultures": between the sciences and the humanities respectively. On the contrary, however, there has always been a vital and necessary relationship between the two. Whereas the sciences themselves aim at the reality they aim to describe (whether physical, biological, or social), a humanistic perspective views science itself as an essential part of human culture and explores the many relationships between scientific activity and religion, philosophy, theology, politics, and the arts. We explore these relationships, from a philosophical point of view, across a large part of the development of Western science from ancient Greece and the medieval period, through the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and then up to recent times. In winter quarter, we focus on space, time, infinity and divinity -- concepts that define a fundamental framework for approaching reality. In spring quarter, we consider the fate of knowledge in modern life within the context of science, philosophy, and society. We will study a variety of philosophical genres, scientific writings, works of literature, and texts by social and political thinkers.
Performing Religion
Religious Studies
Faculty
Winter Quarter:
Shahzad Bashir and Linda Hess, Department of Religious Studies
Spring Quarter:
Charlotte Fonrobert and Carl Bielefeldt, Department of Religious Studies
Selected Texts
Hebrew Bible
Qur’an
Mahabharata
Films and texts on religious rituals and experiences"All religions are essentially the same."
"Faith can't be subject to analysis."
"Religion is a private matter and should have nothing to do with politics."
"Those who use religion to justify violence are perverting the true meaning of religion."
Are these statements true or false? What would we need to know to discuss such matters with depth and intelligence? Negotiating myth and history, devotion and power, sacred commitment and political manipulation, personal transformation and social solidarity, religious traditions permeate our private lives and shape our public discourses. This is so despite what has been advertised as the ascendancy of the secular and the decline of faith. But most of us are unschooled as to how to "read" religion.
This course explores the meanings of religion and various ways of understanding religion. While it gives extended views of four major religious traditions, it is not a general survey of those traditions. Our views of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism provide particular and diverse materials to grapple with. Through these cases, we will demonstrate themes and methods in the study of religion.Students will learn to recognize major themes in the study of religion--for example, narratives of origin; myth; ritual; god/s; sacred texts; gender; politics; ethics; law; mysticism. Students will also learn to analyze religious texts -- mostly written ones, but in some cases oral, visual, and performative texts -- and to observe historical processes. While religious traditions may be inclined to describe themselves as eternal, they are, like all human institutions, continually changing.