"Love is mad, love is obsessive, love can be a painful or tragic, or on the contrary an experience to be treasured forever. That's what books have taught us, by giving poetic souls a chance to imagine and develop romantic ideas -- on paper. These books have in turn inspired films, or in earlier days, great operas. This course is offered to those of you who might miss the experience of getting lost in a book or story! As a historian of ideas and a specialist of narrative with a keen interest in bodies, minds and feelings, and in gender, I will explore with you in this seminar a few favorite love stories. Each is chosen because it helps us uncover a universe of romantic feelings, often in conflict with social conventions (as is Romeo and Juliet for example). Our course will also involve the study of a film (Jane Campion's Bright Star) and possibly of the opera, La Traviata -- as well as a class trip to the movies to see, if available, a recent presentation of our theme. Among the readings for this class: The Legend of Tristan and Isolde, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther; a selection of contemporary short stories.

• Days/Times: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Ender, Evelyne
• Room: Shriver Hall 001
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

A famous, very experienced clinician used the phrase "The Soul of Care," signaling that medicine is not merely about fixing bodies. He wants to remind us that scientific knowledge involves mastery as well as empathy. "Narrative medicine" as this domain is called, assumes that the close study of stories can play a decisive role in preparing doctors for the challenging humanistic aspects of their profession. We focus in this First-Year Seminar on stories connected to medical cases, stories that can take us beyond medical questions to deeper issues connected to the human condition. Our seminar will be centered on discussions, often prepared in teams, based on your attentive close reading and research. The aim is to exercise your observational skills and imagination. What is at stake, medically and humanly speaking, is our capacity to uncover problems, dilemmas, ethical questions woven into texts that take us into the worlds of doctors and patients. Readings will involve a combination of modern and contemporary short stories, some of them more obviously fictional than others, some of them geographically or culturally more remote. Part of our study will also involve one longer text, namely When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi, and a small "anthology" of documents of a preparatory kind. We'll have at least one guest speaker, and also see a film together.

• Days/Times: MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Ender, Evelyne
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/12
• 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 GIS basics, and those among you with previous experience in these technologies will be welcome to contribute ideas and share skills (no previous experience is required). Over the course of the semester students will pursue their own group projects, developed in class discussions and visits to various mapping technology hubs around Hopkins, such as Geospatial Data and GIS technologies at Milton S. Eisenhower Library, brain mapping technologies at Biomedical Engineering, and approaches to mapping the heavens at the Space Telescope Science Institute. We will also ground ourselves in the Humanities by reading The Odyssey of Homer (trans. James Lattimore, any edition) and testing out various mapping techniques on the intersecting adventures of Odysseus, his son Telemachus, and his wife Penelope. A series of short close reading assignments on selected passages from The Odyssey will help to refine analytical and writing skills, and a final group or personal project report on a topic of your choice will address the (very) general subject of “How maps enhance, change, clarify or complicate ideas.

• Days/Times: M 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Patton, Elizabeth
• Room: Gilman 134
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

Climate change poses an existential threat to human civilization. Yet the attention and concern it receives in ordinary life and culture is nowhere near what science tells us is required. What are the causes of this mismatch between crisis and response? What accounts for our collective inability to imagine and grasp this new reality, and how can it be overcome? In pursuit of these questions, we will pair literary works and films with texts from politics, philosophy, literary theory, and religion, that frame climate change as a fundamental challenge to our ways of making sense of the human condition.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/12
• PosTag(s): CES-LE

Dystopia (from the Latin) means “bad place.” Classic literary dystopias such as We, 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451 depict societies gone wrong, bad places in which socioeconomic ideas promise harmony but produce nightmarish, even apocalyptic outcomes. A common theme of dystopian fiction is the conflict between collective need and individual desire. In this course we will pursue this theme, and others, as we read works of fiction alongside influential works of socio-economic thought. One of our aims will be to tease out the buried dreams and latent possibilities in the historical realities and literary imaginings of dystopic worlds. Readings include selections from popular fiction and contemporary media as well as texts by authors such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Hayek, Rosa Luxemburg, W.E.B. Du Bois, Franz Kafka, Juli Zeh, Olivia Wenzel, Elias Canetti, Brigitte Riemann, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Herta Müller, and Philip K. Dick.

• Days/Times: TTh 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Todarello, Josh
• Room: Gilman 77
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/14
• PosTag(s): MLL-GERM

For the past fifty years, scholars and cinephiles have been drawn to psychoanalysis as a tool for understanding the unconscious effects films have on their viewers. However, over the past twenty years, since the dawn of television’s Second Golden Age, there has been significantly less psychoanalytic engagement with television as a medium. Marxist theorists and critics, on the other hand, have long been interested in television. But until relatively recently, this was usually to bemoan it as an ideological product of the “culture industry.” This course draws on central texts of media studies, as well as key texts in psychoanalytic and Marxist theory, to ask some of the following questions: What is formally unique about the television episode? Are series works of art or commodities, or both? What is Prestige TV, and is it over? What role have streaming services played in the evolution of the medium? What is binge watching, and why do we both love and hate to do it? We will watch episodes of many of the most lauded serial dramas of the past few decades, such as The Sopranos, Twin Peaks, Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Succession, as well as critically acclaimed comedies like The Simpsons, Seinfeld, The Office (UK), and Peep Show. We will read theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Laura Mulvey, Jason Mittell, Mark Fisher, and Todd McGowan.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Meyer, Marshall
• Room: Shaffer 202
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/12
• 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: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room: Gilman 10
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/12
• PosTag(s): CES-CC, CES-ELECT

Deserts have always mesmerized and fascinated people from different cultures and backgrounds. These arid lands, which are principally known for the scarcity of water resources, excessive heat, and dusty winds, have attracted romantics, dreamers, mystics, spies, ethnographers, explorers, and fearless adventurers as well as social outcasts and brigands. Students in the course will engage with different literary works that are emplotted in different deserts. Drawing on the tension between Saharanism, which we simply define as a universalizing imaginary of deserts, and ecological care (ecocare), whereby is meant the intimate relationship between people and place, the course will allow students to engage in multifaceted analyses of the representations of the desert in scholarship, literature, and cinema. In addition to subverting all sorts of romantic, colonialist, and adventurist approaches to deserts, the students will emerge from the course understanding that desertic spaces are home to myriad forms of mobility, solidarity, and connectivity. Literature depicts people as they go about their quotidian life, producing artifacts, exchanging material and immaterial goods, and forming relationships, thus debunking Saharanism myths of emptiness, death, and danger that have overtaken the image of deserts in popular imagination. Accordingly, by excluding the false assumption of the desert’s death, the course will allow students to think about the environmental and humanistic ethics of nuclear experiments, policing, and extraction that unfold in deserts across the globe.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: El Guabli, Brahim
• Room: BLC 4040
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course examines the revolutions produced by four of the most innovative and influential figures in modern drama: Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett. We will look in detail at specific plays and literary programs in order to trace the transformation drama underwent during this period and to probe the claims and ambitions of modern art.

• Days/Times: F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

What do films and philosophy have in common? Do films express, with their own means, philosophical problems that are relevant to our experience of ourselves and the world we live in? This term we will study such issues with a particular focus on questions of justice, truth, revenge, forgiveness, hope, hate, and fear.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Marrati, Paola
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/25
• PosTag(s): n/a

In this course, we will survey the major works of three of the greatest, most relentless innovators of the twentieth century – Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce – who explored and exploded narrative techniques for depicting what Woolf called the “luminous halo” of life.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

Great Books and Conversations” engages students across all disciplines in critical reading of and writing on foundational texts of the Western tradition (and beyond), from Homer’s The Odyssey to Dante’s Inferno, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, Virginia Wolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and others. The course encompasses lectures by JHU professors and guest speakers, group discussions, and an introduction to the library’s exceptional collection of rare books. Guided by a team of Humanities professors from different departments, students will learn how to read closely, analyze, and converse on great literature. This course fulfills three foundational abilities: (1) Writing and Communication; (3) Culture and Aesthetics; and (5) Ethics and Foundations.

• Days/Times: Th 10:30AM - 11:45AM, T 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Bedran, Marina; Patton, Elizabeth
• Room: Croft Hall G02
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

Great Books and Conversations” engages students across all disciplines in critical reading of and writing on foundational texts of the Western tradition (and beyond), from Homer’s The Odyssey to Dante’s Inferno, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, Virginia Wolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and others. The course encompasses lectures by JHU professors and guest speakers, group discussions, and an introduction to the library’s exceptional collection of rare books. Guided by a team of Humanities professors from different departments, students will learn how to read closely, analyze, and converse on great literature. This course fulfills three foundational abilities: (1) Writing and Communication; (3) Culture and Aesthetics; and (5) Ethics and Foundations.

• Days/Times: Th 10:30AM - 11:45AM, T 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Bedran, Marina; Patton, Elizabeth
• Room: Croft Hall G02
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

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: Gilman 277
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/15
• 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
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 19/20
• PosTag(s): INST-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
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 18/20
• PosTag(s): INST-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
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/20
• PosTag(s): INST-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
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 19/20
• PosTag(s): INST-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:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

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: Open
• Seats Available: 15/25
• 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 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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: Open
• Seats Available: 7/12
• 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: Smokler Center 301
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/15
• 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 El?bieta
• Room: Gilman 217
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/15
• 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: Bloomberg 172
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/12
• 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: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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 El?bieta
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/25
• 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 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:
• Instructor: Marrati, Paola
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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: Open
• Seats Available: 8/12
• PosTag(s): ENVS-MAJOR

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: Open
• Seats Available: 11/12
• 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: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• 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: Open
• Seats Available: 8/12
• 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 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Backer, Samuel Ehrlich; Messner, Craig A
• Room: Maryland 114
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/10
• PosTag(s): COGS-COMPCG

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: Greenhouse 113
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/12
• 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: W 10:00AM - 1:00PM
• Instructor: Caro, Christiana
• Room: The Centre 318
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 7/10
• 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 A
• Room: The Centre 318
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 4/10
• 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 A
• Room: The Centre 318
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 7/10
• PosTag(s): n/a