Italian 215 - Political Science 211 | Power and the Art of Writing: from Machiavelli to Hobbes
Kinch Hoekstra and Diego Pirillo
Bancroft Library 371 | Thursday 2-4pm
The seminar considers how thinkers communicated their ideas in the context of the new forms of power, domination, and surveillance that emerged during the Renaissance and early modern period. How did rulers, states, and churches regulate intellectual life? How did dissidents and minorities criticize power? How did they circumvent censorship and avoid persecution? How did intellectuals manage to speak truth to power, or to tailor their ideas to the needs of their patrons, helping to construct social hierarchy and cultural hegemony? We will read a selection of authors and genres, including works by Machiavelli, Erasmus, Elizabeth I, Sarra Copia Sulam, Paolo Sarpi, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes. The close reading of primary sources will be complemented by attention to the technologies through which ideas circulated and the barriers they encountered (print/manuscript/censorship). To facilitate access to rare books and archival material, the entire seminar will be held at the Bancroft Library. During the last month of classes, the seminar will host Filippo De Vivo (https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-filippo-de-vivo), Chair of Italian Culture at Berkeley in Spring 2026, who will share his work on power and communication, considering forms of propaganda and control, and also the arts of communicative resistance by subaltern groups.
HISTART 290 | Across the Monsoon Seas: Global Art Histories of Early Modern South and Southeast Asia
Sugata Ray
Monday, 2:00pm-5:00pm | 308B Doe Library
In the early modern world, mobility was a defining condition. The monsoon system facilitated not only the circulation of ships but also the movement of languages, religious practices, technologies, and cultural forms across the Indian Ocean and into continental interiors. Porcelains from Jingdezhen appeared—modified and recontextualized—in the bazaars of Malacca; Coromandel textiles clothed diverse populations in Batavia; and cloves and nutmeg, once localized commodities, provoked global conflicts that redrew imperial boundaries. In their circulation, objects acted as agents in remaking the world. This seminar takes such objects as points of entry into the transcultural dynamics of South and Southeast Asia in the early modern period. Each week, one object—a carved ivory crucifix, a fragment of chintz dyed with indigo and madder, a pearl harvested from the Gulf of Mannar, or a nutmeg seed once prized above gold—will anchor our inquiry. We will trace their trajectories through the Bay of Bengal’s commercial centers, the markets of Makassar and Manila, the Dutch warehouses of Batavia, and the Jesuit missions of Ayutthaya. These case studies will frame broader questions: How did technologies of making contribute to the production of aesthetic value? In what ways did commodities generate political rivalries or intimate entanglements? How might objects be understood as participants in history rather than as passive remnants of it? Drawing on postcolonial theory and global art history, the seminar foregrounds the instability of the categories through which such objects have traditionally been studied. Our aim is not to impose order but to analyze the unruly capacities of artworks to disrupt aesthetic systems, to seduce and unsettle, and to reveal the entangled processes of cultural exchange.
French 201 | History of the French Language
Mairi-Louise McLaughlin
Tuesday 2-5pm | 4226 Dwinelle
This course covers the history of the French language from its Latin roots through to contemporary usage. Both internal and external history will be considered so that students acquire a firm grounding in the linguistic evolution of the language, coupled with an understanding of its development in relation to a range of social and cultural phenomena. The course will be structured around our analysis of the wide range of texts from different genres presented by Ayres-Bennett (1996) and which date from 842 CE to the present day. We will use the relatively new historical sociolinguistic approach to try to capture what Anthony Lodge (2009) has called “une image multidimensionnelle de la langue du passé”.
Requirements: Reading ability in French required. No training in linguistics required.
Text book: Ayres-Bennett, Wendy (1996/2005) A History of the French Language through Texts, London-New York: Routledge.
English 246D | Ascetic Imagination: Seventeenth Century
David Marno
Monday, 3:30 - 6:30 pm | 301 Wheeler
Seventeenth-century English literature is haunted by the afterlife of the monastery. Dissolved in the Reformation and remembered largely through polemic, the monastery was recast as a space of unnatural enclosure—an image of idleness, corruption, or confinement that shaped Protestant cultural memory. Yet writers continued to reimagine this figure of the cloister, sometimes reproducing its pathology, sometimes exploring how monastic habits of discipline, devotion, and community might be reinvented. This course examines how literary forms—lyric, sermon, drama, and epic—engage the legacy of monasticism, treating enclosure not only as a site of claustrophobia but also as a resource for imagining freedom. Readings include Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus, Donne’s and Herbert’s devotional works, Milton’s Paradise Regained, Herrick’s Hesperides, and Marvell’s lyrics, alongside key scholarship on poetics, devotion, and cultural memory.
Philosophy 290-5 | A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics
Professors Kristin Primus and John Carriero
Time: Tuesdays 4-6pm
Location: Philosophy Hall 234 (Dennes Room)
Satisfies REMS elective requirement? Yes.
A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics. Even attention will be paid to all five parts of the work, and special attention will be to the relationship between the metaphysical and ethical dimensions of the work. We will carefully make our way through the entire treatise, studying Spinoza’s account of God and the ways in which Spinoza’s arguments take us in the direction of naturalism (Part 1), his treatments of the human mind (Part 2) and our affective nature (Part 3), Spinoza’s arguments concerning the ways in which the affects either advance or hinder our wellbeing (Part 4), and what he says about the conditions for peace of mind and human blessedness (Part 5). Topics to be taken up along the way include Spinoza’s denial of free will and what follows from it, his account of the relation between mind and body, his theory of desire as striving (conatus), his alleged hedonism or psychological egoism and its fit with his views about benevolence and social harmony, and Spinoza’s apparent identification of theoretical and practical reason.
Music 220 | Song Culture in the Fifteenth Century
Emily Zazulia
Monday 2:30 - 5:30 pm | Hargrove 210, Music Library Seminar Room
This seminar examines song culture in the fifteenth century as a site where the boundaries between musical genres, media, and social hierarchies become unstable. We will study a wide range of repertory—from songs in the international high-art traditions to so-called “rustic” songs and works by elite composers writing in popular registers—not to establish a hierarchy of value, but to understand how songs circulated, were recomposed and recontextualized across musical forms, and appear cited or embedded in literary texts, theatrical works, and visual media. Methodological concerns will include: how to work simultaneously with musical, literary, visual, and material evidence; how to attend to textual transmission and reuse as evidence of cultural reception; and how to recognize our own categorical habits when we encounter sources that resist them. We will engage with both primary sources and recent scholarship that models critical approaches to song culture, genre, and register.