This course reads major works in European literature before 1800 (give or take) depicting the devil. It examines the history of the various social, cultural and political guises under which the devil appears, and the function that representing radical evil performs aesthetically. Among our readings may be selections from the Bible; Dante’s Inferno; Milton’s Paradise Lost; Goethe’s Faust; and many other major hellish works.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Thompson, Mark Christian
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

The course considers the transatlantic writing of three women in the early modern period, Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Behn, and Phillis Wheatley. We will consider issues of identity, spatiality, religion, commerce, enforced labor, sexuality, race, and gender, along with literary tradition, formal analysis and poetics. We will read a good deal of these early women writers. Foremost in our mind will be the question of how perceptions of space and time are mediated through the global experiences of early modernity.

• Days/Times: MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Achinstein, Sharon
• Room: Ames 218
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

This course investigates core questions of what constitutes political freedom, what limits on freedom (if any) should be imposed by authority, adn the relationship between freedom, responsibility, and political judgement. Spanning texts ancient, modern, and contemporary, we shall investigate how power inhabits and invigorates practices of freedom and consent. Among the questions we will consider: Can we always tell the difference between consent and coercion? Are morality and freedom incompatible? Is freedom from the past impossible? By wrestling with slavery (freedom's opposite) we will confront the terrifying possibility that slavery can be both embodied and psychic. If our minds can be held captive by power, can we ever be certain that we are truly free? The political stakes of these problems will be brought to light through a consideration of issues of religion, gender, sexuality, civil liberties, class and race.

• Days/Times: MW 1:30PM - 2:20PM, F 1:30PM - 2:20PM
• Instructor: Brendese, PJ Joseph
• Room: Gilman 50; Gilman 400
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/20
• PosTag(s): INST-PT, POLI-PT

This course investigates core questions of what constitutes political freedom, what limits on freedom (if any) should be imposed by authority, adn the relationship between freedom, responsibility, and political judgement. Spanning texts ancient, modern, and contemporary, we shall investigate how power inhabits and invigorates practices of freedom and consent. Among the questions we will consider: Can we always tell the difference between consent and coercion? Are morality and freedom incompatible? Is freedom from the past impossible? By wrestling with slavery (freedom's opposite) we will confront the terrifying possibility that slavery can be both embodied and psychic. If our minds can be held captive by power, can we ever be certain that we are truly free? The political stakes of these problems will be brought to light through a consideration of issues of religion, gender, sexuality, civil liberties, class and race.

• Days/Times: MW 1:30PM - 2:20PM, F 1:30PM - 2:20PM
• Instructor: Brendese, PJ Joseph
• Room: Gilman 50; Krieger 304
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 15/20
• PosTag(s): INST-PT, POLI-PT

This course investigates core questions of what constitutes political freedom, what limits on freedom (if any) should be imposed by authority, adn the relationship between freedom, responsibility, and political judgement. Spanning texts ancient, modern, and contemporary, we shall investigate how power inhabits and invigorates practices of freedom and consent. Among the questions we will consider: Can we always tell the difference between consent and coercion? Are morality and freedom incompatible? Is freedom from the past impossible? By wrestling with slavery (freedom's opposite) we will confront the terrifying possibility that slavery can be both embodied and psychic. If our minds can be held captive by power, can we ever be certain that we are truly free? The political stakes of these problems will be brought to light through a consideration of issues of religion, gender, sexuality, civil liberties, class and race.

• Days/Times: MW 1:30PM - 2:20PM, F 12:00PM - 12:50PM
• Instructor: Brendese, PJ Joseph
• Room: Gilman 50; Gilman 377
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 4/20
• PosTag(s): INST-PT, POLI-PT

This course investigates core questions of what constitutes political freedom, what limits on freedom (if any) should be imposed by authority, adn the relationship between freedom, responsibility, and political judgement. Spanning texts ancient, modern, and contemporary, we shall investigate how power inhabits and invigorates practices of freedom and consent. Among the questions we will consider: Can we always tell the difference between consent and coercion? Are morality and freedom incompatible? Is freedom from the past impossible? By wrestling with slavery (freedom's opposite) we will confront the terrifying possibility that slavery can be both embodied and psychic. If our minds can be held captive by power, can we ever be certain that we are truly free? The political stakes of these problems will be brought to light through a consideration of issues of religion, gender, sexuality, civil liberties, class and race.

• Days/Times: MW 1:30PM - 2:20PM, F 12:00PM - 12:50PM
• Instructor: Brendese, PJ Joseph
• Room: Gilman 50; Krieger 300
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 12/20
• PosTag(s): INST-PT, POLI-PT

How long has AI been part of our cultural imagination? This course critically engages instances of artificial intelligence in thought, literature, and film from the 17th century to the present. In conversation with the realities of machine learning, algorithms, generative AI, large language models, automation, and so on, we will investigate the nature of artificial intelligence vis-à-vis issues of labor, consciousness, collectivity, individualism, fantasy, and futurity. Students will consider philosophical texts alongside works of science fiction, literature, and film. Readings may include texts by Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Poe, Hofmannsthal, Marx, Foucault, Alan Turin, Charles Babbage, Philip K. Dick, and Ursula Le Guin. No technical knowledge or prior courses are required!

• Days/Times: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Todarello, Josh
• Room: Hodson 211
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM, CES-TI

This course offers an introductory survey of foundational authors of modern philosophy and moral and political thought whose ideas continue to influence contemporary problems and debates. The course is taught in lectures and seminar discussions. Authors studied include Plato, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Iris Murdoch, James Baldwin, Cora Diamond, Judith Butler, Kwame A. Appiah and others.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Marrati, Paola
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/25
• PosTag(s): INST-PT, CES-ELECT

When you are working for a company, how do you distinguish your ideas, actions, and responsibilities from the firms’—if that is even possible? What is corporate culture or a corporate person, and how is it similar or different from any other kind of culture or person? These and related questions inspired and fascinated writers from the nineteenth century through the present. By reading and thinking about short stories, novels, film, a television series, and a play, we will explore these issues and potential resolutions to them. The course especially considers how problems of action, agency, and responsibility become an intriguing challenge for writers of a variety of modern and contemporary fictions of the business world. Texts will include short stories by Herman Melville, Alice Munro, Ann Petry, and John Cheever; novels by Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Lydia Millet; films, plays, and television by Charlie Chaplin, David Mamet, and Dan Harmon (Community).

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Siraganian, Lisa
• Room: Gilman 288
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 8/19
• PosTag(s): CES-FT, CES-LC

his class explores the art, culture, and history of the Soviet and post-Soviet peripheries, meaning the non-Russian republics of the USSR, including, among others, the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan), and the diverse countries of Central Asia including Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan). We will focus on notable examples from different art forms, including literature (fiction and poetry), music (popular, traditional, and classical), film, and the visual arts, as we investigate questions about identity, power, cultural politics, and coloniality and decoloniality from the early twentieth century up to the present. Representative creators include Oksana Zabuzhko (The Museum of Abandoned Secrets), Dato Turashvili (Flight from the USSR), Chinghiz Aitmatov (The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years), Rashid Nugmanov (The Needle), Sergei Parajanov (The Color of Pomegranates), Kira Muratova (The Piano Tuner), Valentyn Sylvestrov, Viktor Tsoi, the Ganelin Trio, and Sainkho Namchylak. We will consider how different Soviet and post-Soviet thinkers from representative traditions wrestled with local definitions of “Sovietness” as well as with varied interpretations of the “post-Soviet.” The discourse of socialist realism and its bureaucratic and aesthetic negotiations will be a central topic, but so too will divergences from Moscow-centered artistic and philosophical demands

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Schmelz, Peter John
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 6/12
• PosTag(s): INST-GLOBAL

A survey of contemporary literature and film from the peripheries of the Chinese-speaking world, with a special focus on Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, the Americas, and Europe. We will not only examine literary and filmic works in the contexts of the multilayered histories and contested politics of these locations, but will also reexamine, in light of those works, critical concepts in literary and cultural studies including, but not limited to, form, ideology, hegemony, identity, history, agency, translation, and (post)colonialism. All readings are in English; all films subtitled in English.

• Days/Times: WF 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Hashimoto, Satoru
• Room: Bloomberg 168
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Catharsis isn’t solipsistic. Its power requires an eccentric stimulus, be it Antigone’s tragic fate or a cascade of sounds in a Baroque concerto. Occasionally, the experience of catharsis occurs in everyday life, where it is dimmed, while in art it is fulgurant. The course will analyze catharsis in response to selected literary, visual, and musical representation from Aristotle to the present. We will also consider ironic catharsis, anti-catharsis, and the catharsis of comedy. Selected readings: Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star; Lev Vygotsky, The Psychology of Art; Stanisław Lem, Tales of Pirx the Pilot; J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words; Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings; Aby Warburg on Pathosformeln. Theater, film, music, art: Jacques Tati, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday; Janusz Głowacki, Antigone in New York; Albrecht Dürer’s Death of Orpheus; Gustav Mahler, Second Symphony; Iwo Arabski, selected paintings.

• Days/Times: W 4:30PM - 7:00PM
• Instructor: Jerzak, Katarzyna Elzbieta
• Room: Gilman 217
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 1/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

A survey of Japanese and Japanese-language literatures produced in Japan and its (former)colonies during the “transwar” period, or the several years before and after the end of WWII. This periodization enables us to take into account the shifting boundaries, sovereignties, and identities amid the intensification of Japanese imperialism and in the aftermath of its eventual demise. We aim to pay particular attention to voices marginalized in this political watershed, such as those of Japanese-language writers from colonial Korea and Taiwan, intra-imperial migrants, and radical critics of Japan’s “postwar” regime. Underlying our investigation is the question of whether literature can be an agent of peace and justice when politics fails to deliver it. We will introduce secondary readings by Adorno, Arendt, Moi, Nancy, and Scarry, among others, to help us interrogate this question. All readings are in English.

• Days/Times: F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Hashimoto, Satoru
• Room: Gilman 10
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 7/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

In contemporary discussions of climate change, it is an increasingly prevalent view that capitalism will lead to the destruction of civilization as we know it. The notion that capitalism is hostile to what makes human life worth living, however, is one that stretches back at least to the early eighteenth century. In this class, we will examine key moments in the history of this idea in works of literature, philosophy, and politics, from the birth of bourgeois tragedy in the 1720s, through topics such as gender, imperialism, and economic exploitation, to the prospects of our ecological future today. Authors to be studied will include: Lillo, Balzac, Marx and Engels, Ibsen, Brecht, Heidegger, Achebe, and current politics, philosophy, theology and film on climate change.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 10/15
• PosTag(s): CES-GI, CES-LC, CES-LSO, CES-RI, MSCH-HUM

It was more or less like this. They said: You know, Hela, you’re an anxious human being. She: I’m a human being? - Why, of course. You’re not a puppy. - She pondered. After a long pause, surprised: I’m a human being. I’m Hela. I’m a girl. I’m Polish. I’m mommy’s little daughter, I’m from Warsaw…. What a lot of things I am! (Janusz Korczak, Ghetto Diary) This course isn’t what you expect. It is not easy. It is not even fun. We will tackle painful topics: orphanhood, loneliness, jealousy, death. You will learn that “Snow White expresses, more perfectly than any other fairy-tale, the idea of melancholy.” (Theodor Adorno) We will also deal with parenthood, childhood, justice, and love. We will not watch any Disney films (but we shall analyze some memes). So who is a child? “Children are not people of tomorrow; they are people today,” wrote in 1919 Janusz Korczak, pediatrician, pedagogue, and children’s author who proposed the idea of inalienable Children’s Rights. We will read folk tales from different cultures, discuss authorial fairy tales (Oscar Wilde), fantasy books (Tove Jansson’s Moomintrolls) and science-fiction (Stanisław Lem’s Fables for Robots). We will also investigate the special connection between children and animals (Juan Rámon Jimenez, Margaret Wise Brown). Many iconic children’s literature characters, such as J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, “a Betwixt-and-Between” with a Thrush’s Nest for a home, St.-Exupéry’s Little Prince, and Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking, are outsiders. All along we will consider how children’s literature reflects and shapes ideas of selfhood, from archetypal to post-humanistic ones.

• Days/Times: MW 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Jerzak, Katarzyna Elzbieta
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/30
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

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 US 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: Canceled
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): CES-LC, CES-RI

From dancing skeletons and Mickey Mouse to nuclear-powered robots and Fritz the Cat, modernist visual culture is replete with iconic images of animated existence. This course surveys these diverse forms of "animatedness” emerging within the interconnected histories of special effects film and animated media, focusing on their entanglement with broader modernist practices, movements, and styles between the 1920s and the 1970s. Students will explore the shared origins of animation and special effects in the frame-by-frame manipulations of early trick film, the hopes and fears attached to machine aesthetics in German expressionism, French surrealism, and Soviet avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, and the ambivalent agency expressed by animated bodies in American and Japanese cartoons of the 1920s-40s. They will then assess the continuities and ruptures in the aesthetic and political commitments of interwar and postwar modernisms through case studies from North American, Central and Eastern European, and Japanese animation. By engaging with the diverse forms of “animatedness” and animated media presented in this course, students will develop critical theoretical, historical, and comparative frameworks for navigating the complex entanglements of organic life, emotional states, and machine technologies that increasingly define contemporary existence.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Taylor, Chris Ross
• Room: The Centre 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 10/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

There are almost 500 million Indigenous people in the world. They speak a variety of languages, produce knowledge in their mother tongues, and have deep connections to their lands and cultures. Indigenous people have been at the helm of a Global Indigeneity Movement that has mobilized both scholarship and activism in search of a better world. Despite their best efforts, the rich indigenous cultural production and their worldviews remain confined to very limited circles. Building on the notion of "indigenous ecologies," which spans a wide range of approaches and fields, this course will interrogate some of the salient questions related to literature, translation, extraction, environmentalism, and social justice from the perspective of Indigenous creators. The students will engage with materials produced by Indigenous thinkers, filmmakers, activists, and academic scholars to gain a deeper understanding of indigeneity across cultures and continents as well as the myriad critical ways in which its proponents approach knowledge production, climate change, and many other pressing questions.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: El Guabli, Brahim
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 7/12
• PosTag(s): ENVS-MAJOR, CDS-GI, MSCH-HUM

Until five decades ago, many Tamazghan (Maghrebi) and Middle Eastern cities and villages teemed with Jewish populations. However, the long historical process that was started in France with creation of the Alliance Israélite Universelle’s schools (1830s) and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 in the midst of decolonization in Tamazgha and the Middle East led to the departure of tens of thousands of Amazigh and Arab Jews from their homelands. This emigration took these Jews to France, Israel, Canada, the United States, and different Latin American countries, leaving their Muslim co-citizens behind. After a long silence, the last thirty years have noticed the emergence of a very rich body of literary and cinematographic works that revisit the history of Jewish-Muslim relations before Jewish emigration. Reading against both nostalgia and conflict, which have deeply marked the study of Jewish-Muslim relations, this course will examine these works from the perspective of loss and trauma. Understanding how the remembrance of Jews by Muslims is mired in unresolved trauma and loss will help critically examine the process that took Jews away from their homelands as well as the currently state of Jewish memory in societies that they once called home. Students enrolled in the course will read a variety of materials, both primary and secondary sources, and watch several films that will help them gain a better understanding of stakes of the ways Muslims remember Jews.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: El Guabli, Brahim
• Room: Smokler Center Library
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

The ordinary, the common, the everyday: why does literary realism consider the experiences of the average individual to be worthy of serious contemplation? In this course, we will closely read a set of novels by Flaubert, Mann, Dickens, Zola, Tolstoy, and Woolf from the period in which the development of realism reaches its climax. These novels transform the conventions for the representation of lives of lower and middle class subjects, revealing such lives as capable of prompting reflection upon deep and serious questions of human existence.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Undergraduate student having directed work with a specific faculty.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Jerzak, Katarzyna Elzbieta
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 2/3
• PosTag(s): n/a

The Honors Seminar is a mandatory component of the Honors Program in Humanities, which offers qualified undergraduates the possibility of pursuing an independent research project in their Junior and Senior years in any humanistic discipline or combination of disciplines: intellectual history, comparative literature, philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis, religion, film, etc., as well as points of intersection between the arts and the sciences. Sophomores who plan to study abroad in their Junior year should also consider applying to the Program. In the 2024-2025 academic year, the Seminar will focus on a close reading of Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello and associated texts, which will serve as a point of departure for discussion on the relation between different intellectual disciplines and the idea of the humanities.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 9/10
• 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: Krieger 304
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 1/12
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

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 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Backer, Samuel Ehrlich; Messner, Craig A
• Room: Maryland 114
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/10
• PosTag(s): COGS-COMPCG, MSCH-HUM

Famously, Karl Marx had little to say about gender, sexuality, or race. Yet, scholars have developed Marxist theory to account for how a capitalist political economy generates racial divisions, gender inequalities, and queer and trans subcultures. This course will introduce students to feminist, queer, trans, and Black Marxist theory. Key concepts will include: social reproduction, racial capitalism, and sexual hegemony. Students will consider how Marxist theorists envision the place of race, gender, family, and sexuality in a utopian post-capitalist future.

• Days/Times: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Amin, Kadji
• Room: Bloomberg 276
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 0/12
• PosTag(s): CES-GI, CES-LC

This studio art course will introduce students to the basic techniques and applications of fine art photography using digital technology. Emphasis will be placed on DSLR camera functions, image manipulation with Adobe Creative Cloud, and digital inkjet printing. Throughout the semester, students will engage in classroom critiques and discussions to aid their dialogue on art and their understanding of photographic imagery. In this course, creative exploration will be fostered through the visual language of photography. DSLR film cameras are available on semester loan. Attendance in first class is mandatory.

• Days/Times: W 10:00AM - 1:00PM
• Instructor: Caro, Christiana
• Room: The Centre 318
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 1/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

This studio art course will introduce students to the basic techniques and applications of fine art photography using digital technology. Emphasis will be placed on DSLR camera functions, image manipulation with Adobe Creative Cloud, and digital inkjet printing. Throughout the semester, students will engage in classroom critiques and discussions to aid their dialogue on art and their understanding of photographic imagery. In this course, creative exploration will be fostered through the visual language of photography. DSLR film cameras are available on semester loan. Attendance in first class is mandatory.

• Days/Times: F 10:00AM - 1:00PM
• Instructor: berger, phyllis Arbesman
• Room: The Centre 318
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 0/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

This studio art course will introduce students to the basic techniques and applications of fine art photography using digital technology. Emphasis will be placed on DSLR camera functions, image manipulation with Adobe Creative Cloud, and digital inkjet printing. Throughout the semester, students will engage in classroom critiques and discussions to aid their dialogue on art and their understanding of photographic imagery. In this course, creative exploration will be fostered through the visual language of photography. DSLR film cameras are available on semester loan. Attendance in first class is mandatory.

• Days/Times: F 2:00PM - 5:00PM
• Instructor: berger, phyllis Arbesman
• Room: The Centre 318
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 0/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

In this First-Year Seminar, we will ask why maps and mapping technologies have become useful – some would say central – to the pursuit of new knowledge. Do they clarify, simplify, amplify, organize, reveal unexpected connections, point the way forward, or severely complicate our thoughts and send us back to the drawing board? We will learn/review some ArcGIS mapping basics. Those of you with previous experience in mapping technologies will be welcome to contribute ideas and share skills (no previous experience is required), and we will visit various mapping hubs around Hopkins, such the history of world maps as well as Geospatial Data mapping at Milton S. Eisenhower and Peabody Libraries, brain mapping technologies behind current research in the department of Biomedical Engineering (BME), and genetic engineering at the Translational Tissue Engineering Center (TTEC). Across the semester we will also ground ourselves in the Humanities by reading The Odyssey of Homer (trans. James Lattimore, any edition). Each student will create an ArcGIS map website to locate and illustrate an assigned Odyssey episode. In this way, we will test out various mapping techniques on the intersecting adventures of “great hearted” Odysseus, “circumspect” Penelope and their son, “thoughtful” Telemachus. A series of short close reading assignments on selected passages from The Odyssey will help to refine analytical and writing skills, and at the end of the semester students will present to the group the completed GIS map of the adventures of these characters across the Mediterranean.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Patton, Elizabeth
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

Emphasis on ancient Greek ritual, music, religion, and society; and on cultural institutions such as symposia (drinking parties) and festivals.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Yatromanolakis, Dimitrios
• Room: Gilman 108
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 19/25
• PosTag(s): n/a

In the Republic, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato posed three questions: what is justice? How would a just person live? How would a just society be governed? These three questions form the basic subject matter of of political theory. In this course we will survey the history of political theory, reading a series of political theorists who took up Plato’s questions in a wide range of contexts, from Renaissance Italy and early modern England to late colonial India and the Jim Crow US South. Throughout, we’ll consider whether there are better and worse answers to these questions, or simply different answers that appear better or worse depending on the perspective from which one considers them. We’ll look closely at how the circumstances in which political theorists lived influenced their thinking, and how those circumstances should influence our own evaluation of their thinking. And we’ll ask whether Plato’s questions were the right questions to ask in his time, whether they are still relevant in ours, and whether there are other questions that political theorists would do better to spend their time considering.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Simon, Josh David
• Room: Gilman 50; Gilman 75
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/20
• PosTag(s): INST-PT, CES-ELECT, POLI-PT

Fake facts, conspiracy theories, outright lies: have we entered a new era of “post-truth”? Some claim that deception has always been a part of political processes, that objectivity is an illusion, that every “fact” is made, formed, fashioned, constructed (“fact” comes from the same Latin root as “fiction”). Others insist that without a distinction between truth and lie, all politics is a farce, and look to fact-checking and evidence for guidance. Who is right? And what assumptions are at the basis of this perhaps overly-simple binarism? In order to get a grasp on these questions, we will explore the theme and the concept of lying in literature, philosophy, and current media, with an emphasis on political language. We will read literary texts by Heinrich von Kleist, Herman Melville, Thomas Mann, the much-discussed GDR novel “Jacob the Liar,” political philosophy by Plato, Machiavelli, Kant, Nietzsche (“On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”), Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Nina Schick’s 2020 exposé “Deep Fakes: The Coming Infocalypse.” We will apply what we learn from these readings to fake news and social media in order to develop new skills of dealing with manipulative language. Taught in English (with the option of a section in German).

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Frey, Christiane
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 2/14
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM, INST-GLOBAL

(German language section of this course.) Fake facts, conspiracy theories, outright lies: have we entered a new era of “post-truth”? Some claim that deception has always been a part of political processes, that objectivity is an illusion, that every “fact” is made, formed, fashioned, constructed (“fact” comes from the same Latin root as “fiction”). Others insist that without a distinction between truth and lie, all politics is a farce, and look to fact-checking and evidence for guidance. Who is right? And what assumptions are at the basis of this perhaps overly-simple binarism? In order to get a grasp on these questions, we will explore the theme and the concept of lying in literature, philosophy, and current media, with an emphasis on political language. We will read literary texts by Heinrich von Kleist, Herman Melville, Thomas Mann, the much-discussed GDR novel “Jacob the Liar,” political philosophy by Plato, Machiavelli, Kant, Nietzsche (“On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”), Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Nina Schick’s 2020 exposé “Deep Fakes: The Coming Infocalypse.” We will apply what we learn from these readings to fake news and social media in order to develop new skills of dealing with manipulative language.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Frey, Christiane
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 0/3
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM, INST-GLOBAL

Using Daniel Albright’s Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (2000) and Panaesthetics: On the Unity and Diversity of the Arts (2014) as guides, this class investigates the idea of collaboration and communication across and between the arts from the late nineteenth century to the present. Albright’s book includes the famous dictum: “The great Modernist collaborations all survive as fragments.” This class examines and, as possible, reassembles and reassesses these fragments. Among other artistic collaborations, topics will include dialogues between Eric Satie, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Cocteau; Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein; and John Cage and Merce Cunningham; as well as Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk—“Total work of art”—and its implications for artistic interrelationships from his time to now, including its impact on Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, among many others.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Schmelz, Peter John
• Room: Gilman 400
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 18/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

Scientific consensus tells us human induced climate change is a fact and that continuing with business as usual constitutes an existential threat to our social order, perhaps even to our species. And yet, these pronouncements have had little impact on our politics or everyday behavior. This suggests that understanding climate change does not depend on scientific data alone but on the perspectives that we have on such data, the meaning and significance our culture and personal values ascribe to it. In this course we will study a range of such perspectives, from ethics and politics to forms of belief and literary imagination, in order to examine both why we have failed to act and what adequate action might require. This class counts toward the requirement of concept-based courses for the minor in Comparative Thought and Literature.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Undergraduate student having directed work with a specific faculty.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Jerzak, Katarzyna Elzbieta
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

A course that examines how women's bodies are depicted in horror literature and film, asking: how are issues of race, class, national identity, and belonging illuminated through the genre and its ongoing fascination with gender and sexuality? Why do we return to women's bodies to illuminate our fears? Why do we represent women's bodies through the horror genre? Focusing on speculative fiction and film, we will investigate how women's bodies speak to issues of power and spectatorship through affects such as disgust, terror, titillation, and pleasure.

• Days/Times: M 3:40PM - 6:10PM
• Instructor: Gil'Adí, Maia
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 0/8
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

In this First-Year Seminar, we explore the long history of humans thinking about what it means to be human. In myth, religion, science, art, literature, and philosophy, humans have never stopped posing the question of how we fit in, or fail to fit in, to the natural world; what our relation is to the cosmos, to gods, to animals, and even to other beings we may not yet have encountered. In our own quest we will read fascinating stories, poems, and philosophical texts; visit museums to view and discuss provocative works of art; and delve into the ramifications of our thinking they impact our relations with machines, with non-human animals, and with each other.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Egginton, William
• Room: Gilman 134
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 0/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

In the Republic, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato posed three questions: what is justice? How would a just person live? How would a just society be governed? These three questions form the basic subject matter of of political theory. In this course we will survey the history of political theory, reading a series of political theorists who took up Plato’s questions in a wide range of contexts, from Renaissance Italy and early modern England to late colonial India and the Jim Crow US South. Throughout, we’ll consider whether there are better and worse answers to these questions, or simply different answers that appear better or worse depending on the perspective from which one considers them. We’ll look closely at how the circumstances in which political theorists lived influenced their thinking, and how those circumstances should influence our own evaluation of their thinking. And we’ll ask whether Plato’s questions were the right questions to ask in his time, whether they are still relevant in ours, and whether there are other questions that political theorists would do better to spend their time considering.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 1:30PM - 2:20PM
• Instructor: Simon, Josh David
• Room: Gilman 50; Hodson 216
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 10/20
• PosTag(s): INST-PT, CES-ELECT, POLI-PT

In the Republic, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato posed three questions: what is justice? How would a just person live? How would a just society be governed? These three questions form the basic subject matter of of political theory. In this course we will survey the history of political theory, reading a series of political theorists who took up Plato’s questions in a wide range of contexts, from Renaissance Italy and early modern England to late colonial India and the Jim Crow US South. Throughout, we’ll consider whether there are better and worse answers to these questions, or simply different answers that appear better or worse depending on the perspective from which one considers them. We’ll look closely at how the circumstances in which political theorists lived influenced their thinking, and how those circumstances should influence our own evaluation of their thinking. And we’ll ask whether Plato’s questions were the right questions to ask in his time, whether they are still relevant in ours, and whether there are other questions that political theorists would do better to spend their time considering.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 1:30PM - 2:20PM
• Instructor: Simon, Josh David
• Room: Gilman 50; Maryland 217
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 12/20
• PosTag(s): INST-PT, CES-ELECT, POLI-PT

In the Republic, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato posed three questions: what is justice? How would a just person live? How would a just society be governed? These three questions form the basic subject matter of of political theory. In this course we will survey the history of political theory, reading a series of political theorists who took up Plato’s questions in a wide range of contexts, from Renaissance Italy and early modern England to late colonial India and the Jim Crow US South. Throughout, we’ll consider whether there are better and worse answers to these questions, or simply different answers that appear better or worse depending on the perspective from which one considers them. We’ll look closely at how the circumstances in which political theorists lived influenced their thinking, and how those circumstances should influence our own evaluation of their thinking. And we’ll ask whether Plato’s questions were the right questions to ask in his time, whether they are still relevant in ours, and whether there are other questions that political theorists would do better to spend their time considering.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Simon, Josh David
• Room: Gilman 50; Gilman 377
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/20
• PosTag(s): INST-PT, CES-ELECT, POLI-PT

In Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall (2023), a woman is tried for murdering her husband. In the myth of Antigone, a young woman is torn between the obligation to obey the law and the necessity to resist. Which way will she embrace? In Yorgos Lanthimos' The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a heart surgeon must sacrifice a member of his family to compensate for mishandling an operation as he was drunk. Is it just to demand a life for a life? Fiction constitutes an inexhaustible source of alternative worlds and experiences that theoretical reasoning fails to address. That is, fictions often present us with dilemmas for which there are no clear answers. And yet, we are asked to choose. In this class, we will explore and analyze a variety of extreme situations. What is so tantalizing about fictional dilemmas? Do they teach us something that can last? Together, we will experiment with a variety of critical reading practices that bring us to grapple with our own position as readers, judges, interpreters, and ethical agents who are forced to make impossible choices for which we are nevertheless accountable.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Morin, Barthelemy
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 10/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

A course that examines how women's bodies are depicted in horror literature and film, asking: how are issues of race, class, national identity, and belonging illuminated through the genre and its ongoing fascination with gender and sexuality? Why do we return to women's bodies to illuminate our fears? Why do we represent women's bodies through the horror genre? Focusing on speculative fiction and film, we will investigate how women's bodies speak to issues of power and spectatorship through affects such as disgust, terror, titillation, and pleasure.

• Days/Times: M 3:40PM - 6:10PM
• Instructor: Gil'Adí, Maia
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 2/10
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

Modern China’s foremost writer and intellectual Lu Xun (1881–1936) wrote to think, to innovate, to fight, and, ultimately, to transform. What and how did he write as he confronted a radically changing world in early-twentieth-century China, and what can we learn from his works, as we once again face an uncertain world? This course introduces students to fundamental methods of textual analysis by exploring the contemporary significance of Lu Xun’s writings—short stories, poems, “miscellaneous essays”—through three distinct approaches: literary, comparative, and philosophical. Our investigation will revolve around questions such as: How did he expand what written language was capable of doing? How did he engage with world literature (from Europe, Russia, and beyond), and how have his works been read and adapted by writers in East Asia? How can his works be understood in a broader context of the global spread of Enlightenment thought and the discontents it caused? This course is open to any student interested in Lu Xun’s works and their transnational significance, and satisfies the “text-based” course requirement for the minor in Comparative Thought and Literature. All readings are in English.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Hashimoto, Satoru
• Room: Smokler Center Library
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

How has the Holocaust been represented in literature and film? Are there special challenges posed by genocide to the traditions of visual and literary representation? Where does the Holocaust fit in to the array of concerns that the visual arts and literature express? And where do art and literature fit in to the commemoration of communal tragedy and the working through of individual trauma entailed by thinking about and representing the Holocaust? These questions will guide our consideration of a range of texts — nonfiction, novels, poetry — in Yiddish, German, English, French and other languages (including works by Primo Levi and Isaac Bashevis Singer), as well as films from French documentaries to Hollywood blockbusters (including films by Alain Resnais, Claude Lanzmann, and Steven Spielberg). All readings in English.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Spinner, Samuel Jacob
• Room: Gilman 400
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/15
• PosTag(s): INST-GLOBAL

Virginia Woolf famously called the lives of women “infinitely obscure” seeing as their everyday, domestic existence had long passed unnoticed, undervalued, and unrecorded. The personal essay, a form which inherently values the ordinariness and even triviality of subjective experience, has helped counteract the burdensome “accumulation of unrecorded life,” to use Woolf’s phrase, and fill in the gaps of women’s collective history. In this course we will read a diverse range of personal essays by Sei Shōnagon, Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, Anne Carson, Audre Lorde, Naomi Shihab Nye, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion, and more, tracing a tradition of women’s essayism. We will attend to the essay’s unique and flexible modalities for portraying subjectivity, exploring universal themes, and experimenting with form. This is a writing intensive course that will incorporate critical and essayistic modes of writing that will teach us first-hand about experimentation with voice, temporality, rhetorical argument, narrative, and the representation of consciousness on the page.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Theodoropoulos, Eleni Eleni
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 8/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

In the Republic, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato posed three questions: what is justice? How would a just person live? How would a just society be governed? These three questions form the basic subject matter of of political theory. In this course we will survey the history of political theory, reading a series of political theorists who took up Plato’s questions in a wide range of contexts, from Renaissance Italy and early modern England to late colonial India and the Jim Crow US South. Throughout, we’ll consider whether there are better and worse answers to these questions, or simply different answers that appear better or worse depending on the perspective from which one considers them. We’ll look closely at how the circumstances in which political theorists lived influenced their thinking, and how those circumstances should influence our own evaluation of their thinking. And we’ll ask whether Plato’s questions were the right questions to ask in his time, whether they are still relevant in ours, and whether there are other questions that political theorists would do better to spend their time considering.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Simon, Josh David
• Room: Gilman 50; Hodson 216
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 1/20
• PosTag(s): INST-PT, CES-ELECT, POLI-PT

William Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen are the two most frequently performed playwrights in history, and both have been credited with reinventing drama: Shakespeare for the Elizabethan stage and Ibsen for the modern. In this course we will pair plays by each author – those that stand in an explicit relation of influence as well as those that share a significant set of concerns – in order to investigate how each takes up and transform key problems in Updated description: the literary, political, and philosophical tradition for their own historical moment. Plays to be studied by Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, Coriolanus, The Tempest; by Ibsen: Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck, An Enemy of the People, The Master Builder. As part of the course, we will try to organize at least one excursion to a Shakespeare or Ibsen performance in the Baltimore-D.C. area. This class counts towards the requirement of text-based courses for the minor in comparative thought and literature.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 11/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

Literary and philosophical imaginations of moral community in the post-WWII period. Texts include: Coetzee, Disgrace; McEwan, Atonement; Achebe,Things Fall Apart; Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World; Roy, The God of Small Things; Lessing, The Grass is Singing; Mistry, A Fine Balance; Morrison, Beloved; and essays by Levi, Strawson, Adorno, Murdoch, and Beauvoir on the deep uncertainty over moral community after the crisis of World War II. Close attention to novelistic style and narrative will inform our study of the philosophical questions that animate these works. What does it mean to acknowledge another person’s humanity? Who are the members of a moral community? Why do we hold one another responsible for our actions? How do fundamental moral emotions such as contempt, humiliation, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, and regret reveal the limits of a moral community?

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 8/12
• PosTag(s): CES-CC, CES-ELECT

Knowing who or what counts as a person seems straightforward, until we consider the many kinds of creatures, objects, and artificial beings that have been granted—or demanded or denied—that status. This course explores recent debates on being a person in culture, law, and philosophy. Questions examined will include: Should trees have standing? Can corporations have religious beliefs? Could a robot sign a contract? Materials examined will be wide-ranging, including essays, philosophy, novels, science fiction, television, film. No special background is required.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Siraganian, Lisa
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 2/19
• PosTag(s): CES-LSO, CES-ELECT, MSCH-HUM

Although fundamentally grounded in human existence, Illness, pain, and suffering are also cultural experiences that have been depicted in literature and film. The way different cultures relate to and convey pain is embedded in the cosmogonic ideas each society holds about suffering and its outcomes. Reading through different literary texts from different parts of the world and drawing on movies that portray varied experiences of illness, this course aims to help students think about illness and its ramifications in a more transcultural way in order to understand how illness functions across different geographic, climatic, political, and social conditions. The students will also gain a better understanding of the causes of pain, its symptoms, and the different manners in which the authors and filmmakers whose works we will study mediate it to their readers and viewers. From basic traditional potions to hyper-modern medical technologies, illness also mobilizes different types of science across cultures and social classes. By the end of the course, students will develop an ethics of reading for illness not a as monolithic condition but rather as an experience that has unique cultural codes and mechanisms that need to be known to better understand it and probably treat it.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: El Guabli, Brahim
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 2/14
• PosTag(s): CDS-GI, MSCH-HUM

How is the so-called “AI Revolution” altering the landscape of work? This course takes up this question through the lens of underemployment, migratory labor, and diasporic communities. We will read a variety of key works on migration and imagined communities, precarity and alienation, labor, automation, and empire—as well as texts produced in the margins of globalization. In conversation with these texts, we will investigate the dynamics of diasporic communities, migration, and solidarity vis-a-vis the future of work in a global society increasingly automated by AI models such as DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and Qwen 2.5, and the entities that own them. Through a variety of writing assignments and presentations, students engage issues such as race, class, gender, the border, citizenship, and community as they exist for diasporic and migratory workers. This course explores themes relevant to students of Critical Diaspora Studies, as well as the history of science and technology, political science and political economy, international studies, literature, film, and sociology. Readings may include works by Ruha Benjamin, Audre Lorde, Harry Braverman, Benedict Anderson, David Harvey, Edward Said, Mary L. Gray, Octavia Butler, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

• Days/Times: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Todarello, Josh
• Room: Gilman 186
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 2/15
• PosTag(s): CES-BM, CES-LC, CES-RI, CES-TI, CDS-MB, CDS-SSMC