Fall 2024 Courses

So-called ‘mystical’ forms of thought and experience have played a major role in the history of modern philosophy and literature from Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Schopenhauer to Lukàcs, Heidegger, Bataille, Benjamin, Derrida, and Fred Moten; and from Novalis to Musil, Kafka, Celan, Bachmann, Klossowski, and Cage (to name just a few). In this seminar we will read and discuss key texts written by some significant medieval figures in this tradition. We will focus on forms and styles of writing; problems of negative and affirmative theology; and configurations of speculative, affective, and sensual moments. During a second phase of the seminar we will turn our attention to baroque mysticism (Angelus Silesius and Jacob Böhme). Based on the class discussion and on individual student interests, we will then explore the ways how these texts have been read by 19th and 20th century authors and how they allow us to think about the formation and transformation of modern concepts of the sacred, subjectivity, affect, critique, and agency. Depending on student interests, we will decide on a final version of the syllabus at the first meeting of class. All texts will be available in original languages and in English translation.

Sidney wrote that the poet’s task was to “grow in effect into another nature.” No poet in English has fulfilled that charge more luxuriantly than Edmund Spenser. We will read widely in Spenser’s oeuvre and milieu, but most of our attention will be devoted to exploring the strange landscapes and structures of The Faerie Queene. As the semester progresses we will address the poem’s books and worlds from the multiple perspectives they invite, from the psychological to the ecological.

The interactions between religion and the state in early modern Europe (c.1450-1750) have shaped modern legal-political regimes of state power and religious toleration, and have also shaped modern understandings of “religion” as a category in human society. This course therefore has two interconnected goals. As a History class, it will teach graduate students about early modern Europe and the ways Christian states and empires managed the problems generated by religious diversity, and by the competing authority of churches, in the centuries of the Reformation, colonial violence, religious wars, and the Enlightenment. As a required course for the Designated Emphasis in the Study of Religion, it will teach graduate students about the evolution of modern, scholarly interpretations of religion, the state, and secularity.

This seminar is intended to introduce graduate students to a range of critical perspectives, theoretical issues, and methodologies that constitute the practice of art history. The seminar is not intended to be a comprehensive survey of the history of the discipline. The selected topics and readings are in no way entirely inclusive of contemporary practitioners and their respective fields. Once we have set aside the disclaimers and apologies, the seminar can pursue an archaeology of the discipline with an eye to the useful and the latent. While good art historical work generously draws on the theory and methodology of other disciplines, the seminar will attempt to understand the discipline’s particular (if not peculiar) history, accretions, inheritances and possibilities. Stress will be placed on close reading of illustrated texts, which entails attention to the visual evidence as well as the rhetorical strategies of the writers.The structure of the course will be shaped by some of the following keywords or issues: sign (persistence, (dis)continuity, misrecognition and afterlife or revival), change (structure and transformation), object, materiality, reception, context, agency (biography and authorship).