Fall 2023 Courses

English 250 02: Representing non-human life

Instructor: Joanna Picciotto

We will explore techniques developed by poets, theologians, and scientists to represent other life forms. Areas of focus include encounters with new-world flora and fauna, the invention of the microscope and the discovery of the cell, and contemporary debates over plant reproduction and the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. Alongside questions related to medium and...

French 230B: French Absolutism, at Home and Abroad

Instructor: Nicholas Paige

This course will introduce students to the paradigmatic example of the early modern court society, Louis XIV’s “absolutist” court. Moving out from the foundational studies of Foucault, Elias, and Marin, we will explore a number of more recent efforts — coming from the disciplines of both literary studies and history — to parse the...

French 281: Literature and Scholarship Among the Writing Practices of Early Modern Europe (1500 to 1900)

Instructor: Déborah Blocker

This seminar is an introduction to the cultures of the written word in early modern Europe. It is designed to help graduate students from a variety of humanistic disciplines (literary studies, European languages and area studies, history, rhetoric, philosophy, theology, art history, musicology, theater, and performance studies, etc.) familiarize themselves with the various contexts...

History 280B: The Substance of Things Unseen: Matter and Spirit, 1650-1800

Instructor: Jonathan Sheehan

Between 1650 and 1800, matter, spirit, and their relationship, became subjects of unprecedented attention in Europe. Mechanism, the development of a science of forces, new forms of religious imagination, new spiritualisms, the rise of sensationalist psychology, the development of an aesthetics of the sublime, fascination with legal and political abstraction, new materialist ethics, the...

History of Art 290: rock, PAPER, scissors: early modern works on paper

Instructor: Todd Olson

Paper is a surface subject to inscription by direct manual intervention (pen, brush, pencil) or indirect technological processes (woodcut, engraving, etching). From fig tree bark to papyrus and from skin (parchment) to rag (emulsified cloth), paper supported or absorbed viscous pigments. Paper assumed the shape of codices, scrolls, broadsides, paperolles, and loose-leaf folios. Paper...

Music 220: Josquin des Prez and the Historical Record

Instructor: Emily Zazulia

Josquin des Prez (c. 1450–1521) was arguably the first internationally famous composer, thanks in part to his extensive travels as well as the explosion of music printing and a new international market for music. And yet this very fame, which lasted well into the sixteenth century, has caused the historical record to be weighted...

Slavic 242: Eighteenth-Century Russian Literature

Instructor: Lyubov Golburt

The course introduces students to key literary figures and genres of the Russian eighteenth century. Following a roughly chronological order and focusing on the writings of Prokopovich, Kantemir, Trediakovskii, Lomonosov, Sumarokov, Fonvizin, Catherine the Great, Derzhavin, Radishchev, and Karamzin, we will also consider key issues in Russian early modern culture: Europeanization, its innovations and...