What is a vulnerable image? The Latin vulnus points us in two directions: toward the relational vulnerability arising from the sight of wounds and the action of wounding; and toward the raw disclosure of the body's interior. This seminar, team-taught so as to bring the perspectives of the modern and the long premodern era into dialogue, attends to vulnerable images in both senses: we will consider not only works that picture vulnerable subjects, but images that, in their vibrant materiality or through their use and circulation, themselves become vulnerable. Across both domains we will examine what is arguably their shared capacity: to make viewers aware of their own vulnerability, and to provoke a range of responses, from the "tragic" emotions of pity and fear, to horror and disgust, compassion and care, pleasure and pain. Each week involves the critical juxtaposition of artworks and texts drawn from modern and contemporary culture with those from the long premodern past. Topics include pain as spectacle and perceptions of pain; care, attention, and maternal inclination; the vulnerability of gendered and racialized bodies; representations of torture, punishment, and war; laughter and grotesque humor; the subjects and objects of iconoclasm; material decompositions and forms of fragility. Readings run the gamut from Aristotle to Arendt, Freud to Butler, Warburg to Hartman, Sontag to Scarry.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Merback, Mitchell; Schopp, Caroline Lillian
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/13
• PosTag(s): n/a

This seminar introduces feminist film theory, queer film theory, and decolonial film strategies, analyzing and following their practical implementations in documentary, fiction films, and animation films. The films will be chosen from different global film traditions from East Asia to Latin America, Western Africa, Europe and North America. We will also invite several filmmakers into the classroom to discuss their practical strategies and how they are informed by specific theoretical approaches.

• Days/Times: F 2:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Wegenstein, Bernadette
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This graduate-level course will explore the material topographies of literature, both real and imagined, engaging the landscapes, geographies, and environments of literary works both as a vital dimension of the text and as contributions to 'cultural ecology'. We will explore how topography may be engaged not as mere background or setting for literary situations, but as a dynamic and vital dimension thereof, and how the human experiences evoked can be radically recontextualized and engaged through environmental attention to the text. We will read theoretical and philosophical works on geography and topography in literature along with environmental literary theory in approaching literary works by writers from the late 18th to the mid 20th centuries. Readings may include works by Goethe, Novalis, Heine, Thoreau, Schnitzler, Thomas Mann, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Brecht, Woolf, Borges, and other writers from the late 18th through 20th centuries. Discussions will invite phenomenological, de- or post-colonial, and ecological perspectives.

• Days/Times: T 3:30PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Gosetti, Jennifer Anna
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

A dive into the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Muriel Rukeyser, and Langston Hughes (among a few others), exploring American modernism’s aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations. How do these texts’ formal ambitions engage with philosophical thinking as well as social concerns and political theorizing? Writing assignments: two short presentation papers and either two 10-12 pages papers or one, multi-drafted, 20-25-page seminar paper.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Siraganian, Lisa
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This seminar aims at providing a survey of some fundamental concepts and problems that shape modern and contemporary debates in philosophy, literary studies, and the humanities at large. This term we will study different notions of existence, language, truth, power, otherness, race, gender, and reality. This course serves as the proseminar in methods and theory for graduate students in Comparative Thought and Literature but is open to students in all departments.

• Days/Times: Th 2:00PM - 4:30PM
• Instructor: Marrati, Paola
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 18/25
• PosTag(s): n/a

Composer Matthew Aucoin has recently called opera “the impossible art.” Its impossibility feels particularly acute today, as it is buffeted by competing media, genres, and attention. Yet since 2000, opera has never seemed as vibrant, with composers new and old continuing to engage with its "generative impossibilities,” using a variety of literary genres as their sources. This class considers central opera examples from the past twenty years, looking at compositions by such creators as Thomas Adès, Unsuk Chin, Missy Mazzoli, Terence Blanchard, and György Kurtág, among others. These composers and their performers and critics engage with a variety of literary genres including novels, short stories, memoirs, and plays, as well as different media, chief among them film. They address opera’s tangled history and its possible roles in our contemporary world, asking questions about race, class, ideology, the environment, politics, and identity. This class will do the same, asking what opera today is capable of doing that other genres (musical and otherwise) cannot. How can—and does--opera speak to the present moment? The class will spend time developing a theoretical and practical vocabulary for considering both literary texts and how best to listen to, watch, and analyze opera. No musical background is required.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Schmelz, Peter John
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation research and discussion of progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Marrati, Paola
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation research and discussion of progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Bennett, Jane
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation research and discussion of progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation research and discussion of progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation research and discussion of progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Siraganian, Lisa
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation research and discussion of progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hashimoto, Satoru
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Teaching Assistant graduate student

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Marrati, Paola
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Graduate Research

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Bennett, Jane
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

“Fascism” has returned to the political vocabulary of the times suddenly and without much intellectual preparation. This graduate seminar proposes to put on a firmer conceptual footing the possibility of understanding the present political and social crisis as the “return” of fascism as a political culture across the Euro-American world and beyond. We shall examine historical and contemporary developments in (and encounter texts from) a range of regions across the world: Western Europe, the United States, Russia, and India. We shall read works of literature, theory and philosophy, literary and linguistic analysis, and sociology by such figures as Sinclair Lewis, Bertolt Brecht, Filippo Marinetti, Julius Evola, Ezra Pound, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Georges Bataille, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Margaret Atwood, and Alexander Dugin, among others.

• Days/Times: W 1:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Mufti, Aamir
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

In this seminar we will explore psychoanalytic theory as a method for interpreting art, literature, media, and political discourse. Our approach will be structured around an interlinking set of elements: historical stages in the development of Lacan’s theory; dimensions of experience as defined by the theory, specifically the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real; and moments of analytic interpretation, namely, the identification of the symptom, the staging of a fundamental fantasy in transference, and traversing the fantasy through subjective destitution. Readings will include texts from Lacan's seminars and writings as well as commentaries by the Slovenian philosophers Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič, the Haitian analyst Willy Apollon, the Argentine analyst Juan-David Nasio, and others. The seminar is being offered across several programs and will be taught in English, although students who can are encouraged to do readings in the original language. Attendance and participation are mandatory, but a term paper is not required.

• Days/Times: Th 3:30PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Egginton, William
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): MLL-SPAN

Humanists possess a reservoir of scholarly abilities that prime them for contributing to debates well beyond the academy. This semester-long workshop will introduce graduate students to the basics of writing for such broad audience. Each session will be organized around particular topics in public humanities writing, including the pitching, writing, editing, and publishing processes of newspapers, magazines, and online outlets. We will also consider the forms of writing that most allow scholars to draw from their academic training and research: reviews, personal essays, op-eds, interviews, and profiles. Throughout the course we will see how the interdisciplinarity, comparativism, and multilingualism of fields from across the humanities can be helpful for reaching wide audiences. Beyond the nuts and bolts of getting started in so-called “public” writing, this course aspires to teach graduate students how to combine quality writing with academic knowledge, scholarly analysis with a general intellectual readership—and, ultimately, make academic knowledge a public good. Taught in English.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 3:30PM
• Instructor: Seguin, Becquer D
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

At a time when racial, economic, social, cultural, religious, and political divides seem more irreconcilable then ever, the very fabric of democracy shows its vulnerability in the United States as well as at the global scale. This seminar aims to study how different thinkers, in different historical periods, addressed the challenges, betrayals, and fragile hope of the American Dream and how their voices resonate with contemporary authors and problems inside and outside the United States.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Marrati, Paola
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

A comparative study of the philosophy, rhetoric, and naturalism of Marcus Tullius Cicero (Rome, 106–43 BCE) and Gilles Deleuze ( 1925–1995). Texts include Cicero’s On Fate and On Divination and Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. The seminar will explore themes pertaining to the environmental humanities and eco-criticism, semiotics, materialisms, stoicism, and the practice of cross- and trans-historical comparison and invention.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Bennett, Jane; Butler, Shane
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course will consist of a close reading of the eleven texts collected in Heidegger’s 1954 volume “Vorträge und Aufsätze,” including such seminal pieces as “The Question Concerning Technology,” “What is Called Thinking?,” “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” “… poetically man dwells…,” and “Aletheia.” Discussions in English; reading knowledge of German required.

• Days/Times: F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Graduate student having directed work with a specific faculty.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Marrati, Paola
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Graduate student having directed work with a specific faculty.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Forster, Eckart
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Graduate student having directed work with a specific faculty.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Graduate student having directed work with a specific faculty.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hashimoto, Satoru
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation research and discussion of progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Marrati, Paola
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation research and discussion of progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Bennett, Jane
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation research and discussion of progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation research and discussion of progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation research and discussion of progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Siraganian, Lisa
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation research and discussion of progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hashimoto, Satoru
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course introduces basic computational techniques in the context of empirical humanistic scholarship. Topics covered include the command-line, basic Python programming, and experimental design. While illustrative examples are drawn from humanistic domains, the primary focus is on methods: those with specific domains in mind should be aware that such applied research is welcome and exciting, but will largely be their responsibility beyond the confines of the course. Students will come away with tangible understanding of how to cast simple humanistic questions as empirical hypotheses, ground and test these hypotheses computationally, and justify the choices made while doing so. No previous programming experience is required.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Lippincott, Tom; Sirin Ryan, Hale
• Room: Gilman 50
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 19/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course introduces substantial machine learning methods of particular relevance to humanistic scholarship. Areas covered include standard models for classification, regression, and topic modeling, before turning to the array of open-source pretrained deep neural models, and the common mechanisms for employing them. Students are expected to have a level of programming experience equivalent to that gained from AS.360.304, Gateway Computing, AS.250.205, or Harvard’s CS50 for Python. Students will come away with an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different machine learning models, the ability to discuss them in relation to human intelligence and to make informed decisions of when and how to employ them, and an array of related technical knowledge.

• Days/Times: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Backer, Samuel Ehrlich; Messner, Craig A
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Graduate Research

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Bennett, Jane
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a