Spring 2025

Luke Fidler

An introduction to the art and material culture of the European Middle Ages (ca. 400-1400), exploring topics of politics, religion and global interconnection.

Ann Marie Yasin

This course introduces students to key questions that structure ongoing debates about the preservation, reproduction, and ownership of the world’s cultural heritage: How and why do we collect and conserve the material culture of the past? How have objects participated in the exploits of colonialism, war, and global politics? Where do works of art belong, and who determines and adjudicates their value, classification, and public access? In addressing these and related questions and engaging with artifacts from antiquity to the present from a global perspective, students in the course will gain insight into the history of museums; the disciplines of anthropology, history, archaeology, and art history; and the ethics of repatriation, art restitution, and reproduction. The class is intended for students interested in the intersection of cultural studies and ethics.

Lucas Herchenroeder

Introduction to the culture of ancient Greece and its influence on contemporary ideas, institutions, values, and literary and artistic works of the imagination.

Daniel Richter

In the decades leading up the American Civil War, the voices of the abolitionist movement grew so loud that southern intellectuals, planters, politicians, and others responded with a series of arguments intended to justify the practice and the nature of the “peculiar institution” of African slavery. These arguments – from nature, from biblical and secular history, from law, from economics – continue to shape the ways in which we think about race, gender, and human diversity in the early twenty-first century. In the nineteenth century, those who fought over the issue of human property used the past to justify their present practices in very self-conscious ways. By contrast, in the early 21st century, we seem to be far less aware of the ways in which our racial politics are shaped by our own peculiar past. This course is an attempt to unearth the deep past of American racial discourse from the soil of history. The ante-bellum South will provide our center of gravity – a vantage-point from which we will look back to antiquity and forward to the present.

Frederic Clark

The history of the conflicts and compromises between advocates of antiquity and of modernity that continues to shape our own approaches to the past.

Afroditi Angelopoulou

This course delves into the politics of ancient Greek Drama, exploring how gender roles, identities, and power dynamics were depicted on the stage and on the page. Through close readings of several tragedies and comedies, we will investigate how these plays challenge, reinforce, or subvert contemporary assumptions regarding gender, power, and morality. Students will have the opportunity to critically analyze how gendered performances on the ancient stage reflect broader socio-political structures, past but also present. At the same time, we will consider the role of the ancient Athenian theater as a civic space, examining its potential to shape emotional dispositions and moral judgments, and ultimately to form group opinion and identity.

Christelle Fischer Bovet

This is an introduction to the history and cultures of the ancient empires of southwestern Asia, focusing on the period from the Assyrian and Persian Empires to the establishment of Islam (ca 900 BCE–ca 650 CE). What is an empire? Why have empires been so common in Eurasia in the last 4,000 years? How did they maintain themselves? How did they shape people’s lives and cultures and in turn were shaped by them? Did certain groups resist their incorporation into these larger entities, and if yes, why and how? Have empires brought peace and security or increased inequalities and facilitated exploitation? To engage with these large questions, students will examine case studies by learning how to use ancient primary sources critically. They will explore how theories affect the telling of ancient history and they will become acquainted with approaches in historical sociology. This training will also help students to be critical of modern appropriations of ancient history for political and other purposes. Major topics include the formation of early states, the Assyrian and Persian empire, Alexander and the Hellenistic empires, the Parthian and Sasanian Persian empires and their rivalries with Rome, as well as the empires of Afghanistan and the kingdom of Armenia. Attention will also be paid to other forms of political and social organizations that may oppose imperial formations, such as the Nabataean and Palmyrene trade networks and the Maccabean rebels in Judea.

Alexandre Roberts

This seminar explores the flourishing world of medieval science and scientists in the Byzantine and Islamic empires and its roots in ancient Greek science. Scholars read and wrote books on astronomy, medicine, alchemy, and other subjects in a variety of changing social and political contexts. What was the nature of the relationship between science and empire, between knowledge and power, in Byzantium and the medieval Islamic world? How did specialized knowledge and its bearers serve, subvert, and complicate imperial agendas? What was science understood to entail, and to what end?The course is designed for students interested in the history of science and/or Mediterranean and Middle Eastern empires. It introduces students to medieval Greek and Arabic science and its socio-political contexts, from roughly the 7th to the 12th century. Readings from primary sources (in translation) and modern scholarship will be analyzed and discussed with respect to several interrelated themes, including: narratives of the history of science, their modern and pre-modern political significance; science and translation; and knowledge in the service of empire.

Lynn Dodd

The interaction of archaeology and contemporary societies through political and moral claims; archaeologists’ role as stewards and interpreters of ancient cultures and their remains. Capstone course for the Archaeology major.

This seminar examines the interface between landscape, religion, and the material culture of healing in the premodern world. We will be especially concerned with Roman and post-Roman interactions with places and waters (caves, springs) understood to have numinous and therapeutic properties. Our inquiry will be both comparative and diachronic in scope. Taking the recently discovered Etrusco-Roman shrine at the thermal springs of San Casciano dei Bagni in Tuscany and the early modern transformation of the site under the Medicis as a central touchpoint, we will consider ancient sites, materials, and bodily practices in light of early modern and modern appropriations and adaptations. Our investigation of primary material sources associated with the ritual, therapeutic, and social activities at those sites—including monumental architecture, hydraulic interventions, objects, and material texts (altars; votive oKerings of sculptural body parts, portraits, statues of divinities; medical instruments; curse tablets; drinking vessels; etc.)—will draw on anthropological, indigenous studies, and ecocritical approaches to landscape, bodies, and medicine.

Susan Lape

Tragic poetry, comic poetry, Hellenistic poetry.

What kind of empire was the Roman one between the 2^nd c BCE and the Augustan times? This seminar will answer in three ways : first by looking at the historiography of this question and at the methodological and theoretical evolutions during the last 50 years ; then by analyzing the theoretical debates on empires among Roman and Greek authors; then by studying the government of the Roman empire through non-literary sources (epigraphy, iconography, coins, papyri).

David Bialock

Examines the uses of myth, folklore, and fantasy in Japanese culture across a range of genres and media from the premodern period to contemporary times.

Sonya Lee

Introduction to the history and material culture of the Silk Road with emphasis on the arts of Dunhuang and Kucha.

Bettine Birge

Individual research and seminar reports on selected phases of Chinese traditional civilization.

Claudia Moatti

Citizenship is a key notion in our contemporary political experience, but it also has a history that helps us to understand it better. In this course, we’ll take a detour into antiquity, analyzing both the civic practices of the Greeks and Romans, the rights and duties of the citizens, as well as the theoretical debates on the definition of the citizen, the city, the people, on slavery or on women’s incapacities, etc… Then we’ll study the influence this ancient experience had in other times (notably in the 18th century and during the two great Revolutions). In the third part of the class, we will explain how the ancient conception of citizenship came to be criticized and even rejected from the 19th century, and what major changes it underwent up to the beginning of the 20th century. In the final part, we’ll discuss together on the current problems raised by the spectacular transformations of our global societies and their influences on the practice of citizenship.

Maya Maskarinec

This course introduces the history of the ancient Mediterranean world: the Near East, Egypt, Greece and Rome. We will examine aspects of the societies and cultures of these civilizations and their impact on the modern world. Special attention will be given to the circulation of people, products and ideas, the changes that this brought about, and their legacy. Other themes addressed include state formation and concepts of power, cultural and religious identities, individuals and communities, freedom and slavery, literary and artistic production, and how ancient peoples imagined the cosmos and their place in it.

Maya Maskarinec

How did a small Italian settlement by the Tiber River rise to become the capital of a vast Mediterranean Empire? How did this same city reinvent itself as the spiritual capital of Western Christendom? How were these dramatic changes registered, recorded, remembered, forgotten or erased in the urban fabric? This course ‘reads’ the multilayered city of Rome from its origins through the Middle Ages: Part I: From Village to Empire; Part II: A Christian Capital; Part III: Continuity and Change in the Middle Ages. Each meeting focuses on select sites or monuments in the city, each paired with a primary text, to consider larger economic, social, cultural, religious, and political changes taking place in Rome and the impact that they had on the urban landscape. Throughout, we will delve into the methodological challenges faced by scholars in understanding these changes. Students will be encouraged to think creatively about the intersections of history and legend and the participation of monuments in their wider urban setting.

Jason Glenn

In 972 Maiolus, abbot of the great monastery of Cluny, was returning to the Frankish lands from Rome, where he had an audience with the pope. As he and his retinue traversed the Great Saint Bernard Pass, in the Alps, he was captured by Saracen pirates. These Arab Muslims ransomed him back to the monastery which was forced to sell some of its prized possessions to raise the 1000 pounds of silver demanded by his captors. A few years earlier, a German Roman emperor named Otto sent an Italian bishop, Liudprand of Cremona, on an embassy to the court of the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople; among other things, Liudprand was to request the hand of the Byzantine ruler’s daughter for Otto’s son. He was humiliated by and offended at the reception and customs of the Greeks he encountered in imperial capitol. The emperor mistrusted him and viewed him as a dangerous heretic. Although the marriage was successfully arranged and did indeed take place, before the bishop had returned from the “rapacious, avaricious, and vainglorious” city, the two emperors were again at war. Half a century later, a queen of the Franks stood before a church in Orléans. She was trying to prevent a crowd of common folk from entering the church and killing the reputed heretics inside, a group of highly educated canons that included her former confessor. The heresy of these men, said to have been brought to Gaul by a woman from Italy, had been discovered and revealed by a Norman cleric who had gone under cover, infiltrated their group, and brought their practices to the attention of the king. On the king’s orders, these men were burned at the stake.

This seminar uses these three events as points of departure for an exploration of the cultural landscape of Europe in the tenth century, conceived broadly as extending from the 880s through the 1030s. This period, perhaps the darkest of the so-called “Dark Ages”, represents a time of dynamic change in the social, economic, religious, intellectual, and political complexion of the lands stretching from England to North Africa and from Iberia to Byzantium. Students will work together with the instructor in an effort to make sense of these events and, perhaps more importantly, to develop from primary sources a picture of the larger contexts in which those events (and the larger cultural changes we detect) took place. This seminar therefore offers students an opportunity to do history rather than merely to study it.

Joan Piggott

The highways of medieval Japan were travelled by itinerant minstrels who chanted, to the accompaniment of their biwa music, the exploits of fighting men during the civil war of the late twelfth century. These bards shaped the earliest parts of the Heike corpus, likely based on an early written text in Chinese characters. In the mid-fourteenth century, the Heike monogatari , Tales of the Heike as we know it today, was compiled by the master bard Kakuichi. In this seminar we will read the Tale and study the world in which it took form. We will consider its main themes, its historicity, how it depicts the medieval world in which it was produced, and why it has been beloved by listeners and readers since medieval times. We will debate its categorization as history or literature and some strategies proposed by historians like Jacques Le Goff in France and Fumihiko Gomi in Japan who advocate attention to “works of the imagination” like the Heike for the study of history.

Richard Ibarra

The Spanish Inquisition is often invoked as the early modern paragon of fanaticism, violence, bureaucratization, surveillance, and institutional persecution. This course will provide an introduction to the legal and institutional history of the Inquisition across the Iberian world, from Spain and Portugal on the peninsula itself, to the tribunals established in the Americas and the Indian Ocean. Students will consider the legal procedures and institutional frameworks involved in its creation and operation, as well as major myths, theories, and interpretations of the impact of the Inquisition on Iberian societies from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Along the way, we will also explore critiques of the “inquisitorial” mindset from the period and consider the tensions between legislation and social practice. In addition, students will become familiar with the primary sources produced by the Inquisition, both in translation as well as through images of original manuscript trials, in order to consider the extent to which these documents can serve as evidence about everyday experiences, culture, and beliefs. The final product of the course will be a research paper, produced in stages throughout the semester, that will answer the question: what can we expect to learn from the Inquisition and the documents it produced that can advance our understanding of law, society, and culture in the early modern Iberian world?

Jason Glenn

This seminar focused on Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages will begin with a single piece of parchment, a ninth or tenth century royal precept that will serve as the point of departure for a sustained reflection on how to use charters (both royal and non) that have been so foundational to the study of early medieval political culture, ecclesiastical institutions, social structure and dynamics, the economy, etc. In the first several weeks, we shall transcribe it—we’ll also work on paleography during the term—translate it, study it as a physical (visual) object, explore its intertextual relationship with previous charters, and consider the various ways it may offer insight into aspects of the world in which and for which it was issued. To do so, we shall also consult other materials of different genres (cartularies, polyptics, histories, hagiography, theological texts, customaries, necrologies, etc.) produced in the monastic community for which the king issued it. At the same time, during these first weeks, seminar participants will read scholarship that exploits such diplomatic materials in various and often innovative ways. Thereafter, each participant (in consultation with the instructor) will identify a diploma (or diplomas, cartulary, charter(s), etc.) that would be a point of entry into a series of questions or problems they wish explore in the period and location of their choice. We shall then rotate week to week from student to student, as they assign the rest of us primary source readings that build out contexts for the interpretation and understanding of their chosen diploma(s) and their own interest in it. We shall therefore be working collaboratively on several projects, but each participant will be responsible to lead our exploration of the materials that bear on their chosen materials. To that end, they will themselves read scholarship that bears on those materials they assign.

Lisa Bitel

Examination of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in their origins and their development in relation to Western civilization.

Arjun Nair

History, thought, institutions, and religious practices of Islam.

David Albertson

How human appetites for sex, food, community or immortality are articulated as mystical desires in different religions, either within institutional structures or working against them.