The Cogut Institute for the Humanities supports collaborative research and curricular innovation across the humanities and in partnership with other divisions and schools of the university. The institute serves as an incubator for research-based, cross-departmental initiatives that reframe approaches to humanistic inquiry and address urgent topics, such as environmental crisis, political justice, and disability.
A robust lineup of courses and public events emerging from these initiatives creates a lively space of inquiry and dialogue that draws in faculty, students, alumni, and members of the larger Providence community. Each year, the institute’s fellowship program brings together researchers at all levels — faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate and undergraduate students — to explore work-in-progress in a dynamic workshop setting. The institute also administers the University’s Humanities Initiative, which provides for annual faculty programming funds and six faculty chairs that combine scholarly, teaching, and disciplinary distinction with collaborative projects within and beyond the humanities. Each semester, the institute’s faculty and fellows present unique courses for undergraduate and graduate credit.
The institute offers a Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities available to students pursuing doctorates in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. Collaboration is built into the teaching model as well as the requirements for students. Read more: https://humanities.brown.edu/programs/chi. As part of its Collaborative Humanities Initiative, the institute also fosters the development of undergraduate team-taught, collaboration-focused courses on a research theme, method, practice, or problem that has relevance across disciplines, divisions, or schools.
The Doctoral Certificate in Digital Humanities, a partnership between the Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship and the institute, provides a foundation for digital methods and skills for Ph.D. students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Read more: https://library.brown.edu/create/cds/digital-humanities-doctoral-certificate/
The institute is home to the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World, which administers an interdisciplinary undergraduate concentration. Read more: https://earlymodernworld.brown.edu/concentration-courses
More about the Cogut Institute: https://humanities.brown.edu
HMAN 0700A. Simulating Reality: The (Curious) History and Science of Immersive Experiences (ITAL 0701).
Interested students must register for ITAL 0701.
HMAN 0700B. Psychology and Philosophy of Happiness (PHIL 0650).
Interested students must register for PHIL 0650.
HMAN 0800A. The Humanities in Context: Victimization and Voice across the Disciplines.
This seminar investigates the silent language of victims. How can marginalized groups make their voices heard? The notion of subalternity has become crucial for transdisciplinary debates in the humanities. It describes not only a predicament of social, political, and economical oppression, but also one that imposes silence. How to break this silence? The risk is that of producing a representation that enters the dominant discourse while perpetuating the subaltern’s exclusion. Following the notion of subalternity from Antonio Gramsci to postcolonial studies and beyond, this seminar explores the conundrum of subaltern’s representation, its theoretical implications, and several strategies to address it.
HMAN 0800B. The Art of International Relations.
From the ritual handshakes of country leaders to iconic photographs of migrants and refugees, from the use of music in combat and torture to the mobilization of art to make a better world, aesthetics informs the way international actors present themselves, portray the world, perceive others, and conceive of peace, conflict, and war. At the intersection of the humanities and social sciences, this course explores cultural practices constitutive of the diplomatic stage, international society, transnational networks, globalization, and postcoloniality in the 20th and 21st centuries. These include theatre, literature, music, dance, images, film, television, and social media.
HMAN 0900B. Fake: A History of the Inauthentic.
What is a fake? Are “fake” and “authentic” absolute and antithetical categories? Who gets to decide what is authentic? Greek statues, Chinese bronzes, Maya glyphs—what gets faked and why? Have fakes always existed? Galileo’s moons, a centaur’s skeleton, Buddhas bearing swastikas—are all fakes the same? If not, how are they different? Why do people make fakes? Who wins? Who loses? This course revolves around the history of the inauthentic through a diachronic exploration of art objects and other forms of material culture. We will range widely in time and space, focusing primarily on the pre-modern.
HMAN 0900C. Heritage in the Metropolis: Remembering and Preserving the Urban Past (ARCH 0317).
Interested students must register for ARCH 0317.
HMAN 0900D. Introduction to Indigenous Politics with Pacific Islander Focus (POLS 0920B).
Interested students must register for POLS 0920B.
HMAN 0900E. Encounters: Latin America in Its Literature and Culture (HISP 0730).
Interested students must register for HISP 0730.
HMAN 0900F. The Politics of Gender in the Caribbean Novel (AFRI 0850).
Interested students must register for AFRI 0850.
HMAN 0900H. Queerness in Caribbean Literature (AFRI 0850).
Interested students must register for AFRI 0850.
HMAN 0900J. Diplomats, Drunkards, Anarchists: Competing Visions of the Future in Japan’s Global Past (EAST 0411).
Interested students must register for EAST 0411.
HMAN 1000A. The Cogut Institute for the Humanities Research Seminar.
This yearlong seminar involves reading and discussing in-progress research by the annual fellows of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, an interdisciplinary group of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates engaged in extended research on a major project or honors thesis. Students read a wide range of works-in-progress, prepare questions and participate in seminar discussions, intervene as first questioners for specific sessions assigned to them in advance, and present their own work twice during the year. Students are required to complete both semesters (HMAN 1000A in the fall and HMAN 1000B in the spring) to receive credit. Admission to the course requires that students have received the Cogut Institute Undergraduate Fellowship for the year in which they enroll. More information about the fellowship and application process may be found at https://humanities.brown.edu/apply/undergraduate-fellowship.
| Fall | HMAN1000A | S01 | 16724 | T | 11:00-1:00 | (A. Anderson) |
HMAN 1000B. The Cogut Institute for the Humanities Research Seminar.
This yearlong seminar involves reading and discussing in-progress research by the annual fellows of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, an interdisciplinary group of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates engaged in extended research on a major project or honors thesis. Students read a wide range of works-in-progress, prepare questions and participate in seminar discussions, intervene as first questioners for specific sessions assigned to them in advance, and present their own work twice during the year. Students are required to complete both semesters (HMAN 1000A in the fall and HMAN 1000B in the spring) to receive credit. Admission to the course requires that students have received the Cogut Institute Undergraduate Fellowship for the year in which they enroll. More information about the fellowship and application process may be found at https://humanities.brown.edu/apply/undergraduate-fellowship.
| Spr | HMAN1000B | S01 | 25393 | T | 11:00-1:00 | (A. Anderson) |
HMAN 1200. Making Choices: Ethics at the Frontier of Global Science (UNIV 1200).
Interested students must register for UNIV 1200.
HMAN 1301. The Sounds of Science: Nonfiction Audio Storytelling (STS 1700E)..
Interested students must register for STS 1700E.
HMAN 1305. Medical Humanities: Critical Perspectives on Illness, Healing, and Culture (ANTH 1305).
Interested students must register for ANTH 1305.
HMAN 1400A. Loss, Political Activism, and Public Feelings: Between Fact and Affect (HIST 1972I).
Interested students must register for HIST 1972I.
HMAN 1400F. The City in Strife: Mapping Segregations, Inequality, Insurrection (HIST 1954H or SOC 1954H)..
Interested students must register for HIST 1954H or SOC 1954H.
HMAN 1970A. Religion, Secularization, and the International.
For the past several decades (but especially since 2001), internationalists have been increasingly preoccupied by the perceived "return of religion." Religion is often proclaimed to pose the single greatest threat to a liberal legal/political order and, less often, to be the greatest hope for that order. We will explore genealogies of the three key terms at stake in this conundrum – "religion," "secularization," and "the international." We begin from the proposition that none of these terms refer to ahistorical essences, but have been subject to continual theoretical/practical contestation/reconfiguration. We focus on that contestation as it has emerged in "modernity." Enrollment limited to 20 juniors, seniors, and graduate students.
HMAN 1970B. The Question of the Animal.
This course is built around the question of the animal as a difficulty posed to representation and thought at a time when animals have largely disappeared from humans' living environment, but proliferate as strange protagonists, specters or figures of ambiguity in literature and philosophy. We will consider a range of texts and films that "cast" the animal critically, that is, as a body that strains or scrambles meaning (interruption, irony, illegibility, haunting) and forces us to reconsider the work of language and narrative (indeed, of the "human"). Authors include Kafka, Coetzee, Hofmannsthal, Kofman, Chevillard, Darrieussecq, Derrida, Agamben, de Fontenay, Herzog. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.
HMAN 1970C. Modern Arab Thought: The Arab Renaissance.
This course introduces students to the 19th/early 20th century Arab thought - the "Nahda" (Arab Renaissance). Through primary and secondary English texts, we will explore questions raised by thinkers of this epoch pertaining to perceived civilizational crisis, and examine the diagnoses/proposals offered by them. The course underlines the changes and continuities in these concerns under the impact of dramatic socio-political events of the epoch. We will discuss the strengths/weaknesses of "Nahda" thought that continues to inform/preoccupy contemporary Arab debates on culture, democracy, gender and Islam. We will examine the significance of this legacy in today's Arab world. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.
HMAN 1970D. Places of Healing: Memory, Miracle, and Storytelling.
From antiquity to our day, therapeutic landscapes such as: minerai and thermal springs; shrines and churches built at sacred springs; volcanic ash mud baths; rocky landscapes emitting odorous gasses; and ponds filled with medicinal leeches, attract health pilgrims who search for healing. Storytelling transformed these into places of memory and pilgrimage. This seminar investigates places of bodily healing and miracle from a cultural studies perspective. The case studies will be drawn from the Mediterranean world and Western Asia (including Lourdes in France, Hlerapolis in Southeastern Turkey and the Agiasma churches of Byzantine Istanbul). Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.
HMAN 1970E. The Precarious University.
The intensification of student protest-occupy movements across the country particularly in California, and the proliferation the OWS movements across the world have rejuvenated social movements against cutbacks for the people and kickbacks for the wealthy. In this seminar, we will address the epistemic shifts and intellectual costs of these ongoing upheavals, particularly the fight against the U.S. university’s neoliberalization. We will imagine the kind of progressive university that is sustainable for the arts and humanities, and how the precarious work of artists and humanists are fundamental to 21st century global universities. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.
HMAN 1970F. Pain in Polish and Russian Twentieth-Century Literature.
Does pain and reflection on pain teach us something about ourselves, the world, our relation to it? This seminar approaches the question by examining the meaning of pain in Russian/Polish literature/literary theory of the 20th century. Our concern is with pain's resistance to language and representation. The works analyzed offer a variety of responses to problem of pain as it appears in theology, experimental medicine, discussions of materialism, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and above all, the giants of Russian literature, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, in whom these debates are dramatized; they also form the ground on which Russian and Polish literature meet. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.
HMAN 1970G. International Perspectives on NGOs, Public Health, and Health Care Inequalities.
Non-governmental and other non-state organizations play an expanding role in the provision of health care across much of the globe. Growth and internationalization of the non-governmental sector, contraction of post-socialist and advanced industrial welfare states, and sub-contracting of state-funded services have all contributed. The seminar focuses on this expansion, critically assessing texts on NGOs and health and drawing comprehensively from sources across disciplinary and interdisciplinary boundaries. We will address issues of human welfare, political citizenship and identity, replacement and displacement of states, new forms of health care inequalities, and the self-concepts, missions, and roles of non-profit sector workers around the globe. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.
HMAN 1970H. Specters of Comparison.
Comparison, which posits a likeness between the dissimilar, is always profoundly haunted by the question of its ground and judgment. This seminar will examine the comparative logic of capitalist modernity in the works of Marx, Weber, Adorno and Horkheimer, Foucault, Heidegger, and Benjamin. We will ask the following questions: How is equivalence established between nonequivalent objects? How are actual social relations quantified and measured, and is there an ethics to modern forms of comparability? How does language reflect and produce these operations? Or, to put it differently: What are the forms through which difference "haunts" us? We will pay special attention to figures of the double and the ghost in Hoffmann and Freud. Other topics to be covered include rationalization and the disenchantment of the world, the modern uncanny, "mediauras," colonial comparison, and the ethics of incommensurability.
HMAN 1970I. Imposing Orthodoxy: "Jews," "Pagans" and "Heretics" when Constantinian Christianity Won.
What happens when a particular 'orthodoxy' becomes able to impose itself on others? This course examines the imposition of post-Constantinian catholicism on Jews, Samaritans, other Christians (Arians, Miaphysites, etc.) and the remaining ancient Mediterranean populace (4th-7th centuries) to consider a larger cultural phenomenon. We'll draw on ancient authors and legal sources (in translation), archaeological data, and contemporary studies. Half the course entails communal exploration of the late antique Mediterranean. Student research presentations, including studies of comparable situations from other cultural and historical contexts, comprise the second half. Useful prior coursework includes: RELS 400, RELS 410, CLAS 600, CLAS 660, CLAS 1320. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.
HMAN 1970J. Miniature: An Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies.
Why do we take pleasure in small-scale objects? What is their history and what purposes do they serve? How do the technology and the aesthetics of the small contribute to human cognition? To find answers to these and other questions, the seminar explores the cultural, literary and cognitive significance of miniatures. We will explore productive relationships between three areas of research: imaginative texts produced during the eighteenth century, the period's prolific but insufficiently studied production of small-scale versions of everyday objects, and recent developments in cognitive theory about the role of size-perception in the developing brain. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.
HMAN 1970K. Law and Religion.
In an arguably "post-secular" age, conflicts over the relationship between religion and law have moved to the forefront of international debate. In our multicultural/globalized world, such conflicts often provoke contestation over the very possibility of universal definitions of either "religion" or "law," let alone their proper relationship. Our interdisciplinary inquiries on these questions will include concrete legal disputes in domestic/international courts; theoretical debates over the construction of "religion" in fields such as anthropology, religious studies, and philosophy; historiographical controversies about the relationship between "secularization" and sovereignty, particularly in light of the legacy of colonialism. Limited to juniors, seniors, and graduate students.
HMAN 1970L. Topics in the History of Aesthetics: Eighteenth Century.
Modern aesthetics emerged in the eighteenth century at the intersection of different disciplines, discourses, cultures, and European nations. Contributors to the new field came not only from academic philosophy but also from the arts, literature, history, theology, and other fields. Aesthetics was thus and remains primary among interdisciplinary disciplines. Readings for this course will be drawn from British, German, and French authors such as Shaftesbury, Du Bos, Addison, Hutcheson, Hume, Burke, Kames, Diderot, Mendelssohn, Lessing, Kant, Schiller, and Herder. Enrollment limited to 25 juniors and seniors.
HMAN 1970M. Living in End Times.
Doomsday predictions/apocalyptic themes have become commonplace. Between "End of History" theses/Mayan Calendar predictions/posthumanist theories/the Rapture, and environmental/financial collapse, it seems we are living in what many believe to be End Times. This course will examine some principal clusters of ideas around finality: posthumanism/singularity, environmental collapse, patriot survivalism, and post-politics. We will look at a number of cultural products: traditional fiction/non-fiction, blogs/podcasts/films. It will be less important to establish whether the Mayan calendar calculations are accurate than seeing the connections between those claims and the claims of survivalists/Rapture theorists. Taken together, what do all these claims say about this moment in history? Enrollment limited to 25.
HMAN 1970N. The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the Global Scene.
Dominant narratives of Israeli/Palestinian conflict obscure influential forces taking place outside the boundaries of Israel/Palestine, stories we believe are unique/historically peculiar. We will see how groups have been inspired by/have inspired both peoples' struggles for survival/self-determination. We examine case studies revealing connectivity/reciprocity: Zionism's inspiration for Garvey's-U.S.-back-to-Africa movement; adoption of Fanonian/Maoist/Guevarian thought in Middle East; Black Panther Party's support for Palestinians/their endorsement of an Israeli Black Panther Party in the 1970s; South Africa/Latin America's economic/military ties to Israel; Palestinian call for international Boycott Divestment Sanctions; and examine how struggles for self-determination negotiate between seeking territorially bounded independence/globally networked liberation, in the region/beyond. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.
HMAN 1970O. Autonomy and Globalization.
Many of today's dissident movements adopt leaderless/self-managed practices presenting us with radically different notions of what it means to self-determine. We will situate these movements within historical struggles for autonomy. By "autonomy" we understand the quality or state of being self-governing/self-determining. By "self," we understand not the self-originating/self-determining/rational individual constructed by Enlightenment liberal humanism, but rather, a diversity of self-defined collectivities made up of social individuals. We will consider runaway slave societies (Western Hemisphere), Operaismo (Italy), Zapatistas (Mexico), Tahrir Square's protesters (Egypt), Occupy Movement (US), Shackdwellers (South Africa), refugee/migrant movements. Readings include Marx/ Cleaver/Linebaugh/Rediker/Negri/Tronti/Virno/Berardi/Holloway/others, and documents from movements we engage. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.
HMAN 1970P. Pragmatism, Religion, and Politics.
Pragmatism is a distinctive American school of thought that sees the goal of philosophy not as the apprehension of timeless truths but as a practical project of bettering individual lives and society as a whole. Pragmatists such as William James and John Dewey were devoted to deepening America's commitment to democracy. Both saw an important place for an unconventional sort of religion in democratic life. This course explores the pragmatist thought of James, Dewey, and others, looking especially at their views on religion and politics. We also will explore the influence of pragmatism on Barack Obama. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.
HMAN 1970Q. Working (on) Concepts in the Humanities.
Concepts are usually thought of as cognitive tools, constituents of thought used for categorization/inference/memory/learning/decision-making. We shall think about them as effects of a language game whose rules change across genres, media, and discursive regimes. Looking for these rules and analyzing them comparatively, we shall ask how concepts are formed/displayed/performed, when do we need them/can we do without them. We shall read philosophers (Plato, Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze), intellectual historians (Koselleck, Skinner), literary works (Kleist, Kafka, Musil), and look at some conceptual art. Advanced juniors, seniors and graduate students welcome. Enrollment limited to 20.
HMAN 1970R. Literature and the Arts in Today's Cuba.
Cuba today is home to writers, musicians and artists who engage with new media and a global audience against the backdrop of a socialist revolution. This seminar will explore esthetic and political dimensions of contemporary Cuban culture with authors who will speak to us directly through a video link with Casa de las Américas in Havana. Knowledge of Spanish required.
HMAN 1970S. Ethics and the Humanities.
This seminar will engage with ethical issues in a broad range of humanities disciplines. We will survey historical and thematic perspectives on ethics, and will consider the ethical implications of authorship and possession of texts and objects; translation as an ethical problem; data and open access; the perspective of the human subject; public humanities, public intellectuals and community-based research; and ethical issues in popular culture. Enrollment limited to 20. Not open to first year students or sophomores.
HMAN 1970T. Music, New Media, and Virtual Performance.
We'll investigate how new media technologies shape musical practices (and vice versa). Topics will include DJ cultures, digital music distribution and related intellectual property issues, digital gameplay, music videos, popular music reception, online music lessons, and virtual communities. We'll give equal attention to production, circulation, and reception practices, as well as to thier increasing convergence. Readings will include both contemporary and historical studies. The course will require critical engagement with a diverse range of media, genres, and cultural contexts, encouraging students to examine their own media production and consumption practices. Enrollment limited to 20. Not open to first year students or sophomores.
HMAN 1970V. Pragmatic Medical Humanities.
The question, "What is medical humanities?" has flummoxed the very experts who ardently argue for its importance to medical education and the professional and personal growth of health care providers. The interdisciplinary nature of medical humanities, engaging in conversations with persons who possess different expertise, knowledge and approaches, provides opportunities for insight unavailable elsewhere. Students will investigate alternative meanings, interpretations and purposes embedded in the term "medical humanities." They will develop their own personal relationship to this term/field of study, and its utility as a tool for understanding and responding to the profound experiences of clinical medicine, illness and health. Enrollment limited to 20. Not open to first year students or sophomores. This is a half-credit course.
HMAN 1970W. Medicine and Colonialism in the Atlantic World: A View from the South.
This seminar examines the role of disease, medicine, and health in the history of the Atlantic World. Our analysis will be centered on events that took place in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa, during the era of European colonial expansion (1490-1940). In these four and a half centuries, the West became the dominant force in global geopolitics and Western medicine emerged as the hegemonic form of healing worldwide. This seminar explores the complex relationship between these two historical developments. Enrollment limited to 20. Not open to first year students or sophomores.
HMAN 1970Y. Politics and Authority in Islamic Law and Society.
Few courses offer insight into the genesis of Islamic political theory in light of the social and historical circumstances of the medieval period. This seminar seeks to address major trends in political thought of classical Islam. In addition to reading secondary scholarship on social and political aspects of early Muslim society, we will also examine primary sources in translation (Prolegomenon, Book of Ordinances); literary genres, including official state epistles from the medieval period; and the work of Ibn Taymiyya. Finally we will address issues of authority, ethics and gender in contemporary analyses. Enrollment limited to 20. Not open to first year students or sophomores.
HMAN 1970Z. Knowledge Networks and Information Economies in the Early Modern Period.
This course is designed to introduce students to major topics in the developing historical literature on the relationships between intellectual and economic history, and their implications for European culture, mainly in the first two centuries after Columbus and Da Gama. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.
HMAN 1971B. Paris Archive: The Capital of the Nineteenth Century, 1848-1871.
We will take as our starting-point Walter Benjamin's notes for his unfinished masterwork "The Arcades Project." The Passagenwerke comprise a massive index of citations/observations on the nature/form of the city of Paris in every aspect of its cultural/political life in the 19th/20th centuries. We will read works from which he culled his aphorisms/investigate the present status of each of his assertions/citations, with historical/contemporary readings. We will discuss the nature of historical/archival interpretation and try to bring together artifacts – textual/visual/sensorial - that might constitute a "Museum" of 19th Century Paris. Taught by Prof. Anthony Vidler. Graduate students encouraged to register. Enrollment limited to 20.
HMAN 1971C. History, Theory and Practice of Storytelling Using Stereoscopic (“3D”) Motion Pictures.
This course will support/enhance Brown’s tradition in the Humanities by sharpening the focus on interdisciplinary/comparative work across cultural/linguistic boundaries. Can science/technology/medicine foster the presentation of innovative work in humanities by bringing 3D to New Media? Why do some cultural values dictate genres typically produced in 3D? What were the origins of 3D motion pictures/how might new technologies affect the distribution/visualization of 3D projects? How can 3D enrich relations between humanities and studio/performing arts? We provide Brown students with an opportunity to establish a foundation for analyzing/telling stories using stereoscopic tools, and receive basic technical experience using 3D small-format video equipment.
HMAN 1971E. Cross-Cultural Approaches to Death and Dying.
Despite the universality of death, human responses are incredibly varied. This course situates biological, medical, and psychological conceptions of death and dying in conversation with the religious and ethical perspectives that have also informed human responses to death and dying in cultural contexts. This course—team-taught by a psychologist, a scholar of religion, and two end-of-life care physicians—facilitates a more informed understanding of death-related cultural practices and a more skilled response to death-related decisions arising in the practice of medicine and in life. Limited to 20 students in Medical Humanities and graduate Humanities fields. Honors undergraduates and PLMEs may enroll with permission.
HMAN 1971K. Varieties of Secularism (RELS 1746).
Interested students must register for RELS 1746.
HMAN 1971R. The First Scientific Americans: Exploring Nature in Latin America, 1500-1800 (STS 1701C).
Interested students must register for STS 1701C.
HMAN 1971S. Introduction to iPhone/iPad Moviemaking Using 3-D and 360 VR Comparisons.
Mobile Devices are democratizing movie-making by lowering barriers to entry, enabling students to become full-fledged members of the film industry virtually overnight. This pioneering course provides the basic tools for students to create and distribute no- and low-budget live-action motion pictures with professional production values utilizing only their personal smartphones. Students will acquire the skills to plan, capture and edit short motion pictures through hands-on instruction and experimentation with low-cost accessories, including selfie-sticks, lens adapters, directional microphones and iPhone apps like Filmic Pro, Vizzywig and iMovie. Limited to junior, senior and graduate students.
HMAN 1971T. Law, Nationalism, and Colonialism.
This seminar explores the internationalism of the past century in terms of its relationship to separatist nationalism, anti-colonialism, and religious radicalism. It takes as its point of departure the dramatic political, cultural, and intellectual transformations that followed in the wake of World War I. A guiding hypothesis of the seminar is that internationalism cannot be understood apart from its complex relationship to "identity" broadly conceived – identity of local/transnational groups as well as the identity of internationalists themselves. Readings will be drawn from law/cultural studies/politics/postcolonial theory. Enrollment limited to 20.
HMAN 1971U. Kabbalah: An Introduction to Jewish Mysticism.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, new ways of approaching Judaism sprung up in France and Spain that would come to be known as “kabbalah.” New approaches included aspirations for mystical illumination, elaborate mythological narratives, and human history. Kabbalists radically and self-consciously departed from conventional understandings of Judaism, particularly those of medieval Aristotelian philosophers like Maimonides. They claimed to find their mythological, mystical worldviews in traditional texts, from the Bible through rabbinic writings. This course introduces students to kabbalah’s founding period, focuses on primary texts in translation, especially the Zohar, the magnum opus of classical kabbalah. No prior background necessary.
HMAN 1971W. Decolonizing African Education: Student Activism and Social Change, 1960-present (EDUC 1035).
Interested students must register for EDUC 1035.
HMAN 1971X. The Southern Question and the Colonial Mediterranean (ITAL 1400P).
Interested students must register for ITAL 1400P.
HMAN 1971Y. Visions of Liberation: African Decolonization Now? (COLT 1610R).
Interested students must register for COLT 1610R.
HMAN 1971Z. Cannibalism, Inversion, and Hybridity: Creative Disobedience in the Americas (HIAA 1870).
Interested students must register for HIAA 1870.
HMAN 1972A. Landscape and Japanese Cinema (MCM 1504X).
Interested students must register for MCM 1504X.
HMAN 1972B. Environmentalism and the Politics of Nature (ANTH 1556).
Interested students must register for ANTH 1556.
HMAN 1972C. Picturing Paradise: Art and Science in the Americas.
The study of nature has developed together with the representation of flora and fauna in Europe and the Americas. After the encounter, visual thinking remained an integral part of how knowledge was negotiated between different communities on both sides of the Atlantic—as several scientific expeditions involving artists confirm. This course, which includes field trips to museums and collections, examines connections between knowing and making, ranging from the tradition of pre-Columbian writer-painters to contemporary Latin American artist collectives. We will investigate the entangled histories of art and science as seen through the artistic productions inspired by the exuberant American land.
HMAN 1972G. Eternal Returns: Poetry and Politics in Modernity.
The title of this course alludes to Friedrich Nietzsche’s “eternal return of the same,” which he famously called “the highest formula of affirmation,” and which later philosophers and thinkers, such as Pierre Klossowski and Martin Heidegger, would repeatedly return to. Yet Nietzsche’s discovery is not new, for it inflects, too, the thinking of the professional revolutionary, Louis-Auguste Blanqui, the returns of commodity production in high capitalism, and the poetic figurations of the big city found in nineteenth-century writers such as Charles Baudelaire. In this course, we will examine the problem of returns—temporal, political, economic, and poetic—in modernity.
HMAN 1972I. Me, Myself, and I: Exploring Senses of Self from a Multidisciplinary Perspective.
Human beings have long puzzled over how precisely to conceptualize and understand what it is we are. Questions about the nature of the self have informed the speculations of philosophy, the soteriologies of religion, the trajectories of self-cultivation in contemplative traditions, and the therapeutics of psychology. Recently, cognitive science and phenomenology have attempted to correlate abstract concepts about the self with lived experience, emphasizing how various senses of self give rise to our self-concepts. Through this course, students will engage with conceptions of self that we often take for granted by studying senses of self from multidisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives.
HMAN 1972J. Urban History of Latin America (HIST 1979L).
Interested students must register for HIST 1979L.
HMAN 1972K. Anthropology of Climate Change (ANTH 1112).
Interested students must register for ANTH 1112.
HMAN 1972M. Environmental Political Thought (POLS 1185).
Interested students must register for POLS 1185.
HMAN 1972Q. The Nature of Conquest: Scientific Literatures of the Americas (HISP 1330X).
Interested students must register for HISP 1330X.
HMAN 1972R. Transnational Hispaniola: Haiti and the Dominican Republic (AFRI 1050W).
Interested students must register for AFRI 1050W.
HMAN 1972S. Comparative Education: International Trends and Local Perspectives (EDUC 1030).
Interested students must register for EDUC 1030.
HMAN 1972T. Apartheid in Post-Apartheid South African Literature (COLT 1814L).
Interested students must register for COLT 1814L.
HMAN 1972U. Feminist Thoughts for a Heated Climate (POLS 1180).
Interested students must register for POLS 1180.
HMAN 1972Y. Indigenous Peoples and American Law.
The European colonial empires and their successor states in the Americas all developed bodies of law concerned with the indigenous peoples who preceded them. In the United States, this body of law is generally still known as “American Indian Law” or, more recently, “Federal Indian Law.” It emerged out of colonial-era juristic thinking and was adapted and transformed after the U.S. gained independence from Britain. This seminar will study both the history and structure of this body of law. It will also seek to uncover the ways the technical legal materials embody deep-rooted cultural presuppositions about indigenous peoples.
HMAN 1973A. Race, Sexuality, and Mental Disability History (AFRI 1060Z).
Interested students must register for AFRI 1060Z.
HMAN 1973B. Feminist Theory for a Heated Planet (POLS 1824N).
Interested students must register for POLS 1824N.
HMAN 1973C. East Asian Cinemas in a Global Frame (MCM 1203U).
Interested students must register for MCM 1203U.
HMAN 1973D. Sports and Culture in Latin America (HISP 1371B).
Interested students must register for HISP 1371B.
HMAN 1973E. The Age of Constantine: The Roman Empire in Transition (CLAS 1120V).
Interested students must register for CLAS 1120V.
HMAN 1973F. Ruined History: Visual and Material Culture in South Asia (HIST 1979D).
Interested students must register for HIST 1979D.
HMAN 1973G. Writing Animals in the Iberian Atlantic (HISP 1331A).
Interested students must register for HISP 1331A.
HMAN 1973H. Water is Life/New Currents in the Study of Land, Water and Indigeneity (ETHN 1750H).
Interested students must register for ETHN 1750H.
HMAN 1973N. Islam in America: A Global History.
This course explores the history of Muslims in America — and American discourses about Islam — from 1492 to the present. We follow five historical contexts bridging Spain and Portugal, West Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and North America, including: (1) Iberian-Ottoman rivalry from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and European colonization of the Americas; (2) transatlantic slave trade and the roots of African-American Islam; (3) the U.S. Founders’ ideas about Muslims and religious freedom, plus diplomatic engagement with Morocco, the Ottoman Empire, and Persia; (4) large-scale immigration of Asian Muslims following the 1965 Civil Rights Act; and (5) racialization of Muslim Americans — and oft-misidentified minorities including Arab, Iranian, Sikh, Jewish, Black, and Latinx Americans — before and after 9/11 and U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
| Spr | HMAN1973N | S01 | 25801 | M | 3:00-5:30(13) | (F. Ahmed) |
HMAN 1973T. The Politics of Chinese Cinema (MCM 1204D).
Interested students must register for MCM 1204D.
HMAN 1973U. Art for an Undivided Earth: Transnational Approaches to Indigenous Activism and Art (ENGL 1711J).
Interested students must register for ENGL 1711J.
HMAN 1973W. Indigenous Politics in Hawai'i: Resurgence and Decolonization (POLS 1820I).
Interested students must register for POLS 1820I.
HMAN 1973Y. Rhythm and Silence: A Creative Writing Workshop (HISP 1700B).
Interested students must register for HISP 1700B.
HMAN 1974B. Southeast Asia’s Entangled Pasts: Excavated, Curated, and Contested (ARCH 1494).
Interested students must register for ARCH 1494.
HMAN 1974C. Dawnland Voices: Exploring Native New England (AMST 1902S).
Interested students must register for AMST 1902S.
HMAN 1974D. Avicenna (PHIL 1002).
Interested students must register for PHIL 1002.
HMAN 1974E. Political Theology for the Anthropocene.
The Seminar develops a discourse in political theology for gaining insight into the catastrophes of the modern world and those associated with the Anthropocene. The political imagination embedded in a cluster of texts from the Hebrew Bible and the political theology they imply will enrich discussions in political theory about sovereignty, government, law, and violence. The seminar gives special attention to the way the modern state and other modern and contemporary institutions have come to substitute for God as authors of large scale, globalized, and planetary catastrophes. Our theoretical companions include Buber, Assman, Agamben, Arendt, Foucault, Boltanski, and Žižek.
HMAN 1974F. Anthropology in/of the Museum (ANTH 1901).
Interested students must register for ANTH 1901.
HMAN 1974G. Authority, Identity, and Visual Culture in Colonial Latin America (HIAA 1631).
Interested students must register for HIAA 1631.
HMAN 1974I. Contested Histories of Colonial Indochina:Encounters,Soc. Transformations,Legacies of Emp-HIST 1978D.
Interested students must register for HIST 1978D.
HMAN 1974K. Governing Culture: Music and the Arts in Political Life.
The social function and governmental regulation of aesthetic life play a key role in the constitution of political regimes. This course examines debates on the arts as instruments of power, distinction, resistance, contestation, and revolution, from the early modern period to the present. The government of music, sound, noise, and silence will offer a point of comparison among absolutist monarchies, modern republics, totalitarian regimes, liberal democracies, and colonial empires. In addition to music, the course draws from political sources, theoretical works, literature, and the visual arts.
HMAN 1974L. The Coming Apocalypse: Between the Earth and the World.
A cascading catastrophe threatens to turn the earth uninhabitable and bring our world to its end. How to think, in this context, the relation between our world, the world, and the earth? Are they known, experienced, shared with others, or being destroyed in the same way? How have their differences and convergence been affected by globalization, and affected our understanding of the “Anthropocene"? Following the news on ongoing and future climate catastrophes, the seminar addresses these and related questions through critical readings of theoretical and philosophical texts, including works by Arendt, Latour, Haraway, Povinelli, Yussof, Moore, and Mbembe.
| Spr | HMAN1974L | S01 | 25406 | Th | 4:00-6:30(17) | (A. Ophir) |
HMAN 1974M. Solidarities: Sharing Freedom, Inventing Futures.
Solidarity between people—even between species—has never been more needed. But our culture is saturated by personality politics and ubiquitous narcissism. How can we think and organize ourselves out of this impasse? Is it shared interests or shared identities that unite us? What does freedom mean in an interconnected age? These are some of the questions that any attempt to think through the question of solidarity in the twenty-first century must encounter. Writers to consider include Marx, Arendt, Foucault, Simondon, Negri, Stuart Hall, Maurizio Lazzarato, Donna Haraway, Couze Venn, and Ruth Ozeki, among others.
HMAN 1974N. Narrating the Borderlands: Literature, Legality, and Solidarity (HISP 1371F).
Interested students must register for HISP 1371F.
HMAN 1974O. Print and Power in Modern Southeast Asia (HIST 1962E).
Interested students must register for HIST 1962E.
HMAN 1974P. Theo-Politics: Political Readings of the Hebrew Bible.
The seminar presents the Hebrew Bible as a primary source for political theory. It offers readings of some highly charged theo-political episodes through which some key political concepts are explicated and problematized. Special attention is given to systemic violence, states of exception, the politics of plagues, and resistance. The readings are guided by (mostly) contemporary thinkers who contributed to the study of these concepts in non-biblical contexts. Reconstructing God’s multiple political personae and several types of biblical theocracies, the seminar questions the gap separating our putatively modern, secular political imagination from that of the political cultures documented in the Bible.
HMAN 1974R. Humans, Animals, and Machines.
This course examines the invocation of animals and machines to illuminate the meanings and limits of the human in modern American thought and culture. Our objects of analysis will range from medical experiments to popular films, primatology to video games, and Crispr babies to science fiction. Readings will consider the roles of animals and machines in the history of categories of race, gender, and bodily difference. Throughout we will examine the political, cultural, and epistemological stakes of the shifting boundaries of the natural and the unnatural, as well as the human and non-human.
HMAN 1974X. Contested Histories of Colonial Indochina: Culture, Power, Change (HIST 1978D).
Interested students must register for HIST 1978D.
HMAN 1975A. Disability and Culture in the Past and Present (ANTH 1760).
Interested students must register for ANTH 1760.
HMAN 1975B. Authority, Identity, and Visual Culture in Colonial America (HIAA 1631).
Interested students must register HIAA 1631.
HMAN 1975C. From Pancho Villa to Netflix: An Introduction to Mexican Cinema (HISP 1371I).
Interested students must register for HISP 1371I.
HMAN 1975E. Philosophy of the Environment: Environmental Utopias (PHIL 1785).
Interested students must register for PHIL 1785.
HMAN 1975G. Planning the Family: Gender, Reproduction, and the Politics of Choice..
This course explores 20th-century efforts to address population growth and family planning in a variety of global contexts, ranging from macro-level initiatives to individual practices. For some women, state leaders, and international experts, contraception meant sexual liberation, increased autonomy, and the reduction of economic hardship. But for others, the same biomedical technologies were associated with colonial control and efforts to reduce “undesirable” people. How is it possible for contraception to hold such expansive and contradictory meanings? In order to assess this central question, students will engage with critical theories of gender, race, class, nationalism, and decolonization.
HMAN 1975H. Orientalism and the Question of Palestine: Theory, History, Literature (MES 1244).
Interested students must register for MES 1244.
HMAN 1975I. History, Nation, Popular Culture and Caribbean Politics (AFRI 1600).
Interested students must register for AFRI 1600.
HMAN 1975J. Love Hurts: Romance, Media, Masochism (MCM 1506X).
Interested students must register for MCM 1506X.
HMAN 1975K. Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Hispanophone Caribbean Literature (HISP 1331M).
Interested students must register for HISP 1331M.
HMAN 1975L. What We Talk about When We Talk About Horror (MCM 1205A).
Interested students must register for MCM 1205A.
HMAN 1975M. Philosophy of the Environment (PHIL 1785).
Interested students must register for PHIL 1785.
HMAN 1975N. Mourning and Experimental Form (HISP 1331O).
Interested students must register for HISP 1331O.
HMAN 1975Q. Cripping Technoscience (STS 1700).
Interested students must register for STS 1700.
HMAN 1975R. Religion from Below.
There has always been a tension between "religion," as it is practiced by ordinary people and communities, and the prescriptions of those who see themselves, or who have more official roles, as religious "elite." What, though, does it mean to speak of this “lived” or “popular” religion? Primarily through the close readings of case studies, this course will explore how scholars approach and theorize actual lived religious practice, and whether through such a cross-disciplinary and transhistorical approach we might be able to think more broadly about the ways in which people approach religion, and the reasons they do so.
HMAN 1975S. Figures of the Sovereign: Concepts and Stories from the Life of Power.
The sovereign is a person, institution, or a people where sovereignty – often understood as “the supreme authority in a given territory” – resides. How does the sovereign display its marks and perform or exercise its supreme authority? How is it questioned or undermined? These are matters of political imagination and public contestations no less than of legal definitions and conceptual distinctions. This is also where the problematization of the very idea of sovereignty may begin. We will study these questions by following the sovereign’s language, time, impunity, and unruly subjects. Our stories, images, and concepts will be drawn from a variety of sources: early modern (Machiavelli, Hobbes), modern (Schmitt) and contemporary political theory (Honig, Butler, Sawyer); modern literary fictions (Melville, Kafka); journalistic essays on autocrats, abroad and at home (Snyder, Gessen); and anthropological accounts of “stateless societies” (Clastres, Graeber).
HMAN 1975T. Bodies at Work: Disability and Capitalism (STS 1700R).
Interested students must register for STS 1700R.
HMAN 1975U. The Jewelers of the Oumma – Inhabiting the Jewish Muslim World.
The independence of Algeria in 1962 marked the end of a centuries-old intertwined Jewish and Muslim world in North Africa and the Middle East. This end, however, is made into a non-event in the annals of history. We will study the colonial projects that produced this termination as a non-event, and will ask questions about the role of different imperial technologies such as art, museum, and archive in normalizing it. The Maghreb will be our point of departure, but students are invited to explore other imperial geographies and ask how practices of art-making such as jewelry, pottery, embroidery and others – not works of art destined to be displayed in museums –can resuscitate imaginaries of shared worlds?
HMAN 1975V. Latin Radicals: Polemics by Spaniards and native authors in early colonial Mexico.
The seminar, rooted in an ongoing research project on Cristóbal Cabrera, the first poet in the Americas, has a broader compass, incorporating texts by Cabrera’s influential contemporaries and associates which contain inflammatory criticism of the conduct of the Spaniards in the Indies. The classes will also introduce writings by indigenous Mexican rulers who took advantage of their humanist education to write Latin, challenging aspects of the colonial status quo and advancing the interests of their local communities.
HMAN 1975X. Blackness and Puerto Rican Literature (HISP 1331R).
Interested students must register for HISP 1331R.
HMAN 1975Y. Narratives of Disability in Greek and Latin Literature (CLAS 1070).
Interested students must register for CLAS 1070.
HMAN 1976A. Disability and Sexuality: Politics of Desire and Desirability (STS1700A)..
Interested students must register for STS 1700A.
HMAN 1976B. Encountering Monsters in Comparative Literature (COLT 1815U).
Interested students must register for COLT 1815U.
HMAN 1976C. Native American Architecture (HIAA 1625).
Interested students must register for HIAA 1625.
HMAN 1976I. The World We Share: An Encounter Between a Continental Philosopher and Five Africana Thinkers.
What is “this world” we inhabit and share with others? Who are “we” in the name of whom “the world” is questioned and its apocalyptic end announced? Who are “they” — friends, neighbors, strangers, enemies, animate and inanimate beings — with whom the world is shared? To explore these questions, the course stages an encounter between French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, who wrote at the radical edge of continental philosophy and critical theory, and Black radical thinkers Ta-Nehisi Coates, Achille Mbembe, Toni Morrison, Christina Sharpe, and Olúfémi Táíwò, whose works reflect upon concrete and inherited experiences of colonization, slavery, and forced modernization. Through class discussions and assignments, participants will practice close readings of relatively short, selected texts drawn from the reading materials. There are no prerequisites; some experience in continental philosophy, postcolonial theory, and African American studies is recommended.
HMAN 1976J. Pacific Indigeneities: From Māori Mythology to James Cameron’s Avatar (EAST 1702)..
Interested students must register for EAS 1702.
HMAN 1976K. Anarchisms in Asia and Beyond (EAST 1704)..
Interested students must register for EAST 1704.
HMAN 1976M. Borders, Belonging, and Memory in the Black Mediterranean (ITAL 1001).
Interested students must register for ITAL 1001.
HMAN 1976O. Reception of Latin in Americas (CLAS 1179)..
Interested students must register for CLAS 1179.
HMAN 1976Q. Settler-Colonial Placemaking: From Vikings to the Homestead Act (HIAA 1626).
Interested students must register for HIAA 1626.
HMAN 1976R. Pacific Indigeneities: From Māori Mythology to James Cameron’s Avatar (EAST 1702)..
Interested students must register for EAST 1702.
HMAN 1976S. The Latin American Diaspora in the US (HISP 0750B)..
Interested students must register for HISP 0750B.
HMAN 1976T. Ethnography, Oral History, and Storytelling: Theories and Methods of Narrating Italy (ITAL 1002)..
Interested students must register for ITAL 1002.
HMAN 1976U. The Politics of Symbolic Worth: Groups, Identities, and Status in American Politics.
What leads politics to become meaningful, engaging, and contentious for members of the public? In this course, we will examine how American politics is shaped by struggles between social groups over the meanings and status of group identities. First, we will examine theoretical perspectives suggesting political behavior can be seen as symbolic action to affirm—and sometimes legally enforce—one’s own morality, social status, lifestyle practices, and vision of the proper social world. Then, we will apply this framework to understanding two areas of American politics: the politics of white racial resentment, and stalled political action to address climate change. This course will provide conceptual tools for understanding what’s at stake in public debates for many Americans, and how elite-public interactions over the meanings and status of group identities has shaped American politics in the 20th and 21st centuries.
| Fall | HMAN1976U | S01 | 16872 | Th | 10:00-12:30 | (R. Wetts) |
HMAN 1977A. Islam in America – A Global History.
This course explores the history of Muslims in America — and American discourses about Islam — from 1492 to the present. We follow five historical contexts bridging Spain and Portugal, West Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and North America, including: (1) Iberian-Ottoman rivalry from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and European colonization of the Americas; (2) transatlantic slave trade and the roots of African-American Islam; (3) the U.S. Founders’ ideas about Muslims and religious freedom, plus diplomatic engagement with Morocco, the Ottoman Empire, and Persia; (4) large-scale immigration of Asian Muslims following the 1965 Civil Rights Act; and (5) racialization of Muslim Americans — and oft-misidentified minorities including Arab, Iranian, Sikh, Jewish, Black, and Latinx Americans — before and after 9/11 and U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
HMAN 1977B. Foreign Policy Worlds: Diplomatic Designs and International Governing.
Foreign policy unfolds through carefully crafted encounters and exchanges in both domestic and diplomatic arenas. In public and closed spaces, actors leverage narratives, venues, dress, gestures, images, and soundscapes to sustain relations with others, pursue security goals, and affect the world they live in. At the intersection of the humanities and social sciences, this course foregrounds practices and designs that are constitutive of the international stage and world politics. They encompass everyday interactions as well as protocol-driven scenes, mediatized moments, and spectacular occasions. The course draws case studies from a range of historical and global contexts, from the early modern era to the present, to shed light on key forms of international society and worldmaking, from the diplomatic list to the negotiation table to the group portrait.
| Fall | HMAN1977B | S01 | 17518 | TTh | 2:30-3:50(12) | (D. Mahiet) |
HMAN 1990. Independent Study.
HMAN 2300. Introduction to Digital Humanities.
Digital humanities uses digital methodologies and formats to answer humanities research questions, produce and share knowledge, and teach. It encompasses critical studies of digital environments, innovative modes of researching and advancing arguments (including methodologies for constituting archives, analyzing texts and images, and visualizing data), new forms of scholarly and general publications, and digital pedagogy. The digital changes the way we research, understand, and share information in the humanities. This course will introduce students to a range of methodologies and critical lenses. Students will learn to collect resources formatted for machine-actionable research, analyze qualitative and quantitative datasets, and visualize and present their findings. They will consider the ethics of digital work and publication. Each student will plan a digital humanities project. This course is open to all graduate students and fulfills a requirement for the doctoral certificate in digital humanities.
| Spr | HMAN2300 | S01 | 25309 | W | 3:00-5:30(10) | (T. Nummedal) |
HMAN 2301. Digital Humanities Capstone Seminar.
Participants in the Digital Humanities Capstone Seminar will learn how to design and build their own digital humanities project and/or participate as a key member on an already established digital humanities project with a faculty leader through hands-on, step by step instruction. Students will grapple with key methodologies and theoretical frameworks (including critical, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx digital humanities) and consider how to situate their own work within these ideas. Seminar participants will participate in the Digital Humanities Salon, where they will also present their project. Where desired and advisable, the capstone project may build toward dissertation work. Admission in the course is conditional on enrollment in the doctoral certificate in digital humanities, and partial or full completion of the digital tools and methods requirement.
| Fall | HMAN2301 | S01 | 16735 | T | 1:00-3:00 | (A. Champagne) |
| Fall | HMAN2301 | L01 | 16736 | T | 12:00-12:50 | (A. Champagne) |
HMAN 2400I. Environmental Humanities.
We live in a time of immense global change and ecological rupture that poses a foundational challenge for modern society. How are we to respond to environmental crises that take place on a geological scale without papering over complex issues of social inequality, racial difference, and powerful gender norms? How might we promote the flourishing of sustainable communities that include both human and non-human, present and future beings? This collaborative seminar will address deep philosophical questions like these by exploring a range of work in environmental humanities. The readings reflect a diversity of disciplinary commitments and methodological approaches ranging from History, Anthropology, and Philosophy to Indigenous Studies and Science Studies.
HMAN 2400Q. War and the Politics of Cultural Memory (ENGL 2901D).
Interested students must register for ENGL 2901D.
HMAN 2400T. Imagining Cities: Early Modern Urban Perspectives.
Every city is a palimpsest in space and time. Architectural treatises, legal charters, novels, poems, paintings, maps, and the archeological record all provide points of entry to real and imagined urban centers. This collaborative humanities seminar considers early modern cities as varied as Rome, Seville, Peking, Mexico City, and the City of God, but seminar participants will propose their own cities of interest. This multidisciplinary archive forms a basis for collaborations in recovering and reconstructing built environments from different perspectives in text, image, and digital media, working with original materials in special collections wherever possible.
HMAN 2400Z. Instruments and Instrumentalities.
What is an instrument? Today, in a variety of fields, the definitions of instrument and instrumentality are transforming. While retaining its older connotations of delegation, means to ends, and tool-use, the "instrument" now also implies bigger, messier complexes of technologies, bodies, and rationalities. In this seminar, we will think transversally across categories and contexts to consider the form and meaning of musical instruments, technical instruments, and ideas of instrumentality. Readings will draw from music, media studies, science and technology studies, sound studies, cultural studies, and related fields. This is a distributed seminar, collaboratively taught between Brown and McGill Universities.
HMAN 2401T. Critique of Political Theology: Ancient Texts and Contemporary Questions.
The seminar examines political theology through critical readings of ancient canonical texts considered as foundational in the traditions of Western philosophy, Judaism, and Christianity. Texts from Anaximander, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristotle, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Renaissance musings of Etienne de La Boetie will be read alongside 20th-century thinkers—Carl Schmitt, Pierre Clastres, Cornelius Castoriadis, Hans Blumenberg, Michel Foucault, Regina Schwartz, Jan Assmann, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig. Can readings of ancient canons be both non-anachronistic and critical? Must critique be secular? Or Gnostic? Can the political be separated from the theological? What can formations of ancient theo-political imagination teach us about the limits of ours? The seminar is taught in parallel with Professor Stathis Gourgouris and his class at Columbia university. Collaborative work will take place among students at Brown and across the two campuses.
HMAN 2401X. Archive Theory: Imagining Absence Otherwise.
What does it mean to work through archival silences? What archival methods are necessary to mine the gaps? Facilitated by two cultural studies scholars, one located in American Studies and the other in Hispanic studies, this collaborative humanities seminar tackles the archive as an institution, a practice, and a methodology through the tools of queer studies, critical race theory, gender theory, media studies, and postcolonial studies. We will study archive theory through methodological discussions and hands-on practice with Brown’s special collections at John Hay Library. We will engage the work of key scholars in the field of archival studies, such as Saidiya Hartman, Anjali Arondekar, Marisa J. Fuentes, and Zeb Tortorici. Assignments will consist of short and long essays, responses to archival materials, group presentations, and the organization of a one-day public symposium.
| Fall | HMAN2401X | S01 | 16943 | M | 12:00-2:30 | (K. Murphy) |
HMAN 2401Y. Faces: From Masks to Deepfake.
What is a face? Faces are generally considered unique to the being they belong to — usually a human being, since animals tend to be denied access to faciality. Indeed, face, understood as singularity, is for Emmanuel Levinas what grounds the ethical relation to the other. But faces, as deepfakes have shown, are also utterly replicable: they can be grafted, mimicked, appropriated, forged. Our collaborative humanities seminar will delve into the representations of faces (portraits, self-portraits, selfies, close-ups), the classification of faces (Johann Kaspar Lavater’s physiognomy, the iconography of hysteria, Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Man), the staging of faces (pornography), the racial politics of faces (Blackface, facial recognition, Frantz Fanon’s notion of mask), and the philosophy of “faceity” (Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben).
| Fall | HMAN2401Y | S01 | 16938 | T | 1:00-3:30 | (P. Szendy) |
HMAN 2401Z. Articulations of Voice.
There is silence over the voice when Aristotle’s Peri hermeneias (On Interpretation) places emphasis upon “those things in the voice that are symbols of the affections in the soul.” What “voice” signifies here is unclear: used to speak of “speech,” “discourse,” and “language,” it remains irreducible to articulation. This irreducibility is especially pronounced in the monstrosity of Typhon’s hundred heads and the threat his many “voices” poses to the Olympian order in Hesiod’s Theogony. This seminar examines the polyvalent and volatile functions of the “voice.” What role does the “voice” play in poetic and philosophical articulations of the subject of language? How does the “invocatory drive” (Jacques Lacan) register in texts ranging from the Memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber through modern lyric poetry? What structures are implicit in that which is called “voice,” and to what slippages is voicing exposed?
HMAN 2402A. Decolonial Futurities: Submerged Perspectives from and within the Americas (POBS 2400)..
Interested students from register for POBS 2400.
| Fall | HMAN2402A | S01 | 18491 | Arranged | 'To Be Arranged' |
HMAN 2402B. Empire: Global Perspectives.
Empires — ancient, early modern, and contemporary — have profoundly shaped the distribution of wealth and power in the modern world. However, imperial formations are strikingly diverse, and many of the entities that scholars now call “empires” were not understood as such during their own times. This collaborative humanities graduate seminar explores that diversity and examines how empires rise, fall, and perdure. While taking a global, comparative perspective, we also attend to local processes, analyzing how landscapes, objects, and people were bound up with imperial trajectories in such contexts as the ancient Mediterranean, Persia, China, the Andes, the Early Modern Atlantic, and the contemporary world. We afford particular attention to local peoples’ relationships with empires, environmental history, political economy, historiography, and imperial art and material culture.
| Spr | HMAN2402B | S01 | 26389 | F | 9:00-11:30 | (C. Rice) |
HMAN 2402C. Reading the Large Language Models: Artificial Intelligence, Language, and Literary Art.
Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have produced systems that can appear human-level in their ability to generate text and images. This technology opens questions concerning the relationships between the art and philosophy of language and computation as cultural infrastructure. This seminar will explore how technology and humans interact via language, and what it means for humans and for AI to read and to write. The format of this collaborative humanities seminar will emphasize in-class discussion. Readings will comprise a mix of literature, including digital literature, theory, and philosophy of language. Participants will not be required to have a background in computer science or technology, but will experience tutorials on key technical concepts in order to enable them to think critically about cutting-edge developments in AI beyond a superficial level.
| Spr | HMAN2402C | S01 | 25654 | Th | 1:00-3:30 | (J. Cayley) |
HMAN 2500. Project Development Workshop.
In this capstone course, students completing the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities pursue individual or collaborative projects, such as a dissertation chapter, an article on method/theory, or a stand-alone essay related to the larger field. The workshop provides a collaborative and supportive space in which students from different disciplines can share their work and receive and give feedback that will broaden and sharpen the framing of their projects. At the end of the semester, participants present in a Collaborative Public Workshop. Admission to the seminar requires a formal application process and the completion of two HMAN 2400 seminars.
| Spr | HMAN2500 | S01 | 25394 | W | 3:00-5:30(10) | (A. Anderson) |
HMAN 2900Y. The State and the Circulation of Meaning (ANTH 2325).
Interested students must register for ANTH 2325.
HMAN 2970C. Concepts of Space and Time in Media Discourses.
No description available. Enrollment limited to 20 graduate students.
HMAN 2970D. Biological Issues in Cultural Theory.
Contemporary culture is increasingly preoccupied by biological themes and issues—genomes, brain images, biotechnology, the natural environment, etc.—and, not unrelatedly, by a wave of new biological determinisms: "gay genes," "God genes," mental "hardwiring," etc. At the same time, ongoing work in fields such as developmental biology, ethology, neuroscience and science studies increasingly challenges classic dualisms of nature/culture and mind/body along with traditional assumptions about the nature of biological entities and the operations of scientific knowledge. The seminar will focus on a selection of these issues and developments especially relevant to the interests of humanities scholars and students of culture and cultural theory. Enrollment limited to 20 graduate students.
HMAN 2970E. Pain, Medicine and Society.
We take on the big question of pain as an interdisciplinary enterprise, drawing on the rich and varied faculty of Brown University and Alpert Medical School. We will examine acute/chronic/physical/psychic pain, the nature of suffering, and why some might find value/solace in pain and suffering. We will examine representations of pain in literature, art and music; look at the shifting conceptions of pain and suffering across cultural/ethnic/religious communities, and the actual/perceived barriers to effective treatment of pain. Most importantly, we will foster sensitivity and impart tools that will improve our understanding and treatment of individuals suffering from pain. Enrollment limited to 20 students in Medical Humanities and graduate Humanities fields. Honors undergraduates and PLMEs may enroll with instructor permission.
HMAN 2970G. Space and Capital.
This course examines various ways Western/non-Western societies have conceptualized space, with a specific focus on the tension between capitalist/common space. We adopt the map as a lens into this question, focusing on the cadastral survey's rise in the Modern era and on its role in parceling space into strictly bounded, individual property. Throughout the semester, we undergo an enquiry into the map's uncritical reception in the contemporary era, understanding this development as linked to the Scientific Revolution; the role of linear perspective; the Age of Discovery's world-as-picture; as well as to the processes of primitive accumulation, colonialism, and the nation-state. Enrollment limited to 20.
HMAN 2970L. History and Theory of Catastrophes.
This seminar proposes a philosophical history of catastrophes (large-scale disasters) and uses it as a vantage point for questioning contemporary critiques of modernity/secularization. Starting from Biblical narratives of God-made disasters, we will follow God's role in the way north-western societies interpret/cope with catastrophes. Reading/viewing documentation of catastrophes from Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year to Cooper's/Block's/Spike Lee's reports on Hurricane Katrina, we will examine the emergence of the state as a major actor responsible for preparing for catastrophes/mitigating their effects, but often also for their generation, and discuss the globalization of catastrophes and with catastrophes as special sites of globalization. Enrollment limited to 20.
HMAN 2970M. Race, Space, and Struggle.
This seminar will examine the stark realities of spatial racialization: ghettos, slave plantations, prisons, refugee camps, and border walls, situating the creation of these spaces as violent responses to broader social/economic crises. At the same time, this course will highlight the the always already existing practices of resistance by exploring how inhabitants these spaces responded to their marginalization. Because these spaces are also lived, our understanding of anti-racist struggle will encompass a broad array of everyday practices, the appropriation of space, artistic expressions of resistance, and everyday forms of cooperation/creativity, alongside more traditional forms of organized interventions. (Course prerequisites: none) Enrollment limited to 20.
HMAN 2970R. Political Foucault.
Michel Foucault was one of greatest political thinkers of the 20th century. He was not always recognized as such, but his work has shaped the field within which critical political theory is pursued today. The seminar will follow Foucault’s thinking on power and its subjects, the state, sovereignty, government, and the political, as these concepts were developed, articulated, and experimented with during one decade of intensive research and revisions -- the nineteen seventies. Our main primary texts will be the three series of lectures Foucault delivered at the Collège de France between 1975 and 1979.
HMAN 2970T. And What About the Human? Black/Anti-Colonial Thought, Human Freedom and Emancipation?.
This course will examine the figure of the human posed in radical anti-colonial thought as a distinctive mode of thinking. Reviewing some major 20th century thinkers, Foucault, Derrida, Arendt alongside Fanon, Ceasire and Wynter, the course will also examine the complex relationships between the figure of the human, freedom and emancipation. Graduate or undergraduate senior students only. Enrollment limited to 20.
HMAN 2970U. Antiquity and Innovation in the Hispanic Renaissance (HISP 2160N).
Interested students must register for HISP 2160N.
HMAN 2970X. Political Concepts: The Balibar Edition.
The seminar is dedicated to the political philosophy/theory of Étienne Balibar, a contemporary post-Marxist and post-structuralist French philosopher. The seminar will focus on the conceptual dimension of Balibar’s work through a study a small cluster of concepts with which he has been especially engaged: ideology, city, citizen and citizenship, equa-liberty, violence, politics and the political. By explicating the meaning of these concepts in Balibar’s work and their role as theoretical-political interventions, we will open the question of the political and experiment with the intellectual and creative power of conceptual analysis and its possible contribution to political theory.
HMAN 2970Y. Race and Nation in the Spanish Caribbean (AFRI 2502).
Interested students must register for AFRI 2502.
HMAN 2970Z. Logos, tekhnē, philosophia.
Today, Western thinking forms the technoscientific apparatus of societies of hyper-control, built on the foundation of ubiquitous and reticular computing. This amounts to what Martin Heidegger called Gestell, which imposes itself as the digitalized merging of science and technology. We find ourselves confronted forcefully (as what the Greeks called ubris) with the question of the status of technics with respect to knowledge in all its forms. It has become crucial to understand how and why from its birth, with Plato, philosophy has made technics unthinkable thereby establishing the unthought that then comes to constitute the threat of the Anthropocene.
HMAN 2971C. Decolonial Methodology: Pedagogy for a New Era of Dissent and Resistance.
The seminar will focus on the ways to develop and nurture a decolonial methodology that is intersectional, anti-racist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. The aim is to produce a space of trust that allows debating hard questions and challenging our own assumptions, and encouraging collective thinking and cooperative learning.
HMAN 2971E. Kinds of Others.
Multiple "Others," from the ancient barbaria to the contemporary and queer, from the abnormal to the colonial subject, from the Jew to the black have been widely studied in the humanities and social sciences. The seminar addresses this proliferation of others and explores the role of the Other in the economy of the self, the religious community, or the nation. We will experiment with different principles for classifying this variety of kinds of others and modes of othering. The typological approach will guide a double survey: of philosophical conceptions of otherness, and of modes of constructing kinds of others.
HMAN 2971F. Critique of Political Theology: Ancient Texts, Contemporary Readings.
The seminar examines political theology through critical readings of ancient canonical texts considered foundational in the traditions of Western philosophy, Judaism, and Christianity. Texts from Anaximander, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristotle, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Renaissance musings of Etienne de La Boetie will be read alongside 20th-century thinkers — Carl Schmitt, Pierre Clastres, Cornelius Castoriadis, Hans Blumenberg, Michel Foucault, Regina Schwartz, Jan Assmann, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig. Can readings of ancient canons be both non-anachronistic and critical? Must critique be secular? Or Gnostic? Can the political be separated from the theological? What can formations of ancient theo-political imagination teach us about the limits of ours?
| Fall | HMAN2971F | S01 | 17685 | Th | 4:00-6:30(04) | (A. Ophir) |
HMAN 2971G. The Coming Apocalypse: Between the Earth and the World.
A cascading catastrophe threatens to turn the earth uninhabitable and bring our world to its end. How to think, in this context, the relation between our world, the world, and the earth? Are they known, experienced, shared with others, or being destroyed in the same way? How have their difference and convergence been affected by globalization, and affect our understanding of “the Anthropocene”? Following environmental news, the seminar addresses these and related questions through literary, theoretical, and philosophical texts, including works by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida, Nancy, Latour, Haraway, Povinelli, Coates, and Mbembe. Open to juniors and seniors with instructor permission.
HMAN 2971H. Solidarities: Sharing Freedom, Inventing Futures.
Solidarity between people—even between species—has never been more needed. But our culture is saturated by personality politics and ubiquitous narcissism. How can we think and organize ourselves out of this impasse? Is it shared interests or shared identities that unite us? What does freedom mean in an interconnected age? These are some of the questions that any attempt to think through the question of solidarity in the twenty-first century must encounter. Writers to consider include Marx, Arendt, Foucault, Simondon, Negri, Stuart Hall, Maurizio Lazzarato, Donna Haraway, Couze Venn, and Ruth Ozeki, among others. Open to juniors and seniors with instructor permission.