2023 -2024 Curriculum

The first quarter of the Foundations sequence introduces students to the critical reading of literary works in historical context. The time span ranges roughly two thousand years, from the second millennium BCE, when the epic of Gilgamesh assumed written form, to Augustine's articulation of Christianity and the self shortly before the fall of Rome. Students will read epics, tragedies, philosophical works, natural history, lyric poetry, satire, autobiography and theology from Ancient Assyria, Greece, Rome, and China. 

Thematically, this course will focus on the historical, literary, artistic, and philosophical issues raised during The Long Nineteenth Century (1789-1914). Practically, it will concentrate on the skills and the information students will need to pursue MLA graduate work at Stanford: writing a critical, argumentative graduate paper; conducting library research; presenting a concise oral summary of work accomplished; actively participating in a seminar. Readings and assignments will include Austen, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Balzac, Douglass, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Lincoln, Darwin, Woolf, Hughes, as well as selected poetry and critical writings. The course will culminate in a research paper and a presentation of each students' findings.

This class will combine classic critical essays in the history of photography with close analyses of particular artists’ work. Readings from Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Deborah Willis,  Peggy Phelan, Hilton Als, and Fred Ritchin (among others) will guide our approach to fundamental issues in the conjunction of photography and performance. While our main emphasis will be on photographic portraiture and performances such as fashion shoots and selfies, we will also look at how photography performs in a diverse range of settings from criminal trials to sports events. As photography moves from high art to documentary evidence, to a node in an information network to a practice of everyday life, how does it help and hinder the political and philosophical belief in a singular self and a “once in a life-time event”? We will be discussing the photographs of: Matthew Brady, Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, Sherry Levine, Diane Arbus, Lorna Simpson, Cindy Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems, Andy Warhol, Emily Mann, Richard Avedon, Francesca Woodman, Ansel Adams, and Gordon Parks, among others.

The Indian Ocean has formed an enduring connection between three continents, countless small islands and has become the focus of increasing interest in this geographically vast and culturally diverse region. This course explores a range of issues, from the nature and dynamics of colonization and cultural development as a way of understanding the human experience in this part of the world, to topics such as food, disease, and heritage. The course studies the many ways in which research in the Indian Ocean has a direct impact on our ability to compare developments in the Atlantic and Pacific. Classes will initially take a longitudinal perspective, looking at the major changes over time to have impacted communities in the Indian Ocean. The course will then explore key topics: maritime endeavor, food, and labor, with particular emphasis on the colonial period and influence of Europeanization. Throughout the course, stress is placed on how archaeo-historic datasets can inform our understanding; however, the course will also be enriched through the inclusion of evidence and perspectives from anthropology and art.

Students who have an approved prospectus should enroll in MLA 398: Thesis-in-Progress. Students who are working on their theses are part of this class and meet regularly to provide peer critiques, motivation, and advice under the direction of the Associate Dean.

The second quarter of the Foundations sequence ranges from the medieval courtly romance to the flowering of 19^th-century Romanticism. In between, the course covers journeys historical, philosophical, and spiritual: across the medieval Islamic worlds of Ibn Battuta and Rumi, to the Americas at the dawn of European colonialism and transatlantic slavery, and through the Renaissance and Enlightenment of Dante, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Montaigne, Wollstonecraft, and Rousseau.

Imagine yourself in Rome. What do you see beyond the ruins of an ancient city? In the fourteenth century the city of over one million ancient Roman inhabitants had shrunk to a paltry population of less than twenty thousand. With the return of the papacy in the fifteenth century the rebuilding and revival of Rome began in earnest. By the late sixteenth century it was the center of global missions, an expanding state, and a nascent tourist industry. This course explores the history of the "Eternal City" from the late Middle Ages through the age of the Grand Tour. It examines the political, diplomatic, and religious history of the papacy, Roman society and cultural life, the everyday world of Roman citizens, the relationship between the city and the surrounding countryside, the material transformation of Rome as a city, and its meaning for foreigners.

How has our approach to cancer been affected by clinical observations, scientific discoveries, social norms, politics, and economic interests? Approximately one in three Americans will develop invasive cancer during their lifetime; one in five Americans will die as a result of this disease. We will explore how society has attempted to understand and manage this problem using clinical trials, population studies, public health interventions, and laboratory research. We will also discuss how race, politics, economics, and ethics have affected the outcomes of these efforts.

This course interrogates what people mean when they talk about security. Security justifies inconveniences like passwords that are nearly impossible to memorize, and metal detectors to enter sporting events, political talks, and airports. Security is said to be central to processes leading to war: the pursuit of security by one state may imperil the security of another, leading to a spiral of conflict that international relations scholars call “the security dilemma.” Sometimes we are asked to ignore impolite, nasty, or thoughtless behavior because someone suffers from the absence of security. Yet despite its importance and centrality in social and political life, security suffers from vagueness and imprecision. It can connote freedom from fear, or freedom from threat. Security’s modifiers are abundant and suggest a wealth of objects to be secured; a non-exhaustive list includes human, social, national, international, nuclear, cyber, food, economic, energy, and homeland.  In this course we will investigate how the meanings of security have shifted throughout history. We will ask why security becomes a societal preoccupation at different times in history. We will ask whether our current preoccupation with security will be permanent. 

Students who have an approved prospectus should enroll in MLA 398: Thesis-in-Progress. Students who are working on their theses are part of this class and meet regularly to provide peer critiques, motivation, and advice under the direction of the Associate Dean.

Foundations III explores how men and women attempted to locate themselves in the modern world through different rational, mental, humanistic, artistic, and conceptual ways. The course begins at the moment of the French Revolution and moves through to our contemporary global present. Along the way we will address capitalism and its critiques, liberalism, evolution and anthropology, world wars, the rise and fall of colonialism, struggles for equality, modernism, and the impact of modern science on the human condition.

Why is it that the aesthetic pleasures resulting from artistic representation so often depart from the “pure” ideal of beauty? Is tainted beauty more, or less, than beautiful? Is there any such thing as a “pure” aesthetic category, after all, or is all experience in relation to the arts hybrid? Pain may enhance pleasure in the case of the sublime, but where does disgust fit in? or does it? And what about ugliness? Campiness? Grotesqueness? The uncanny? This course is designed to put literary, psychoanalytic, sociological, architectural, post-structural, and queer theory as well as philosophical and art historical writings in conversation with poetry, narrative fiction, creative nonfiction, and film, in order to develop a critical skill set designed not only to address such questions but, more critically for an active mind, to posit new ones.

This MLA course introduces students to the history of law in imperial China through a close reading of primary sources in English translation and highlights of the best relevant scholarship. We begin with the Confucian and Legalist classics and the formation of law in early China. Then we explore how law served as a field of interaction between state and society during China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911). Specific topics include the formation and function of imperial legal codes; autocracy and political crime; evidence, review, and appeals; the regulation of gender and sexual relations; the functioning of local courts; property and contract; the informal sphere of community regulation outside the official judicial system; and law in cultural context, as seen in religious practices and popular fiction. There are no prerequisites for this class: prior knowledge of Chinese history and/or language are welcome but not expected or required.

Commercial companies, government agencies, NGOs, and academics routinely rely on surveys to guide their work. Poor quality surveys have been proliferating in recent years and creating the misleading impression that surveys are routinely inaccurate. But in fact, high quality surveys continue to precisely forecast election outcomes and measure many other phenomena more accurately and quickly and efficiently than lots of other approaches.But to achieve that accuracy, a researcher needs to know what scientists have learned over decades about how to draw truly representative samples from well-defined populations, how to hire and train interviewers to carry out their work objectively and effectively, how to write questions that are easy for respondents to interpret and answer and don't cause bias, how to properly analyze data with weights, and much more. During this course, students will review the evidence documenting accuracy and inaccuracy in survey measurements, guidelines for best practices in collecting survey data, and optimal approaches to analyzing and interpreting survey evidence. In addition, we'll look at in-depth stories of the findings and controversies surrounding surveys of opinions on global warming, surveys assessing the impact of massive chemical spills on the public, surveys assessing the frequency with which safety-endangering things happen during flights of commercial passenger aircraft, and more. This course will help students to be smarter users of survey data, will help to differentiate good surveys from unreliable ones, and will illuminate the roles that surveys play in society today.

Students who have an approved prospectus should enroll in MLA 398: Thesis-in-Progress. Students who are working on their theses are part of this class and meet regularly to provide peer critiques, motivation, and advice under the direction of the Associate Dean.

The third decade of the new millennium appears as a point of intersection of multiple crises of global scale, from climate change, to planetary migrations, to information technologies escaping human control, to unprecedented wealth inequalities. Yet, the feeling of anxiety that all of these and many other crises evoke is not new. Unlike the apocalyptic moods of the past, this new sense of anxiety was based on a realization that humanity has acquired the capacity to self-destruct, which was evidenced with the detonation of the atom bomb and the dawning of the nuclear age. One of the most effective artistic responses to this unprecedented human condition was the new form of theater that emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War: the theater of the absurd. This class will explore the unique artistic strategies that absurdist theater devised in response to a variety of overwhelming crises, with the ultimate goal of bringing its lessons into the present. This exploration is not limited to dramatic literature only. We will engage with philosophical texts from authors such as Albert Camus and Karl Jaspers, who provided theoretical grounds for the modern idea of the absurd, with critics such as Martin Esslin and Jan Kott, who recognized this new dramatic paradigm and elaborated on it, and with theater-makers such as Peter Brook, Roger Blin, and Pina Bausch, who responded to the unique performance potential of the absurd. Theater of the absurd contributed to the emergence of the first global form of experimental drama. The backbone of the class consists of dramatic works of canonical authors such Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Adrianne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, and Edward Albee, and others, not as well-known but no less deserving playwrights such as Tewfik al Hakim, Sławomir Mrożek, and Jose Trijana.