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MLA Seminars
Following is a partial listing of previous MLA seminars.
The breadth of seminar offerings should give prospective applicants
a clearer idea of the opportunities available to MLA students. Please
note that the categories are for ease of reference; they do not constitute
“majors.”
The Plague: An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Graduate
Study
Linda Paulson, Lecturer in English; Associate Dean and Director
of the MLA program
Thematically, this course will focus on the historical, literary, artistic,
medical, and theological issues raised by the plague in history and
in our day. 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;
expectations of seminar participation. There will be frequent guest
lecturers. Readings will include selections from Homer, Thucydides,
Cyprian, Boccaccio, Defoe, Camus, Sontag, Artaud, and Kushner, as well
as selected sacred, scientific, and historical writings.
Critical Aesthetics: Thinking, Seeing, Feeling the
Beautiful
Ramón Saldívar, Hoagland Family Professor in the School
of Humanities and Sciences
This course is an introduction to the history of aesthetics, literary
criticism, and literary theory, emphasizing the major figures, texts,
and issues that have contributed to the development of the discipline
of criticism. We will examine the shifting importance of the work of
art, the artist, the audience, and the represented world in the history
of literary criticism from classical antiquity (Plato and Aristotle)
to the postmodern era of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
We will seek to understand the ways that critical discourse has affected
our understanding of literary and other representational works of art
and how artistic practices have determined our conceptions of what counts
as great works of art. And we will attempt to see the place of aesthetics,
criticism, and literary theory in the ideologies of the times. In addition
to faithful attendance at the seminar meetings, active participation
in the class discussion, and careful reading of the assigned texts,
the course requirements include (a) oral presentations on material related
to the work under discussion and (b) a ten- to fifteen-page term paper
that either deals synthetically with a major critical issue, examines
the practical application of a critical method or relates a contemporary
critical theory to the traditions we will examine in our readings.
Borrowing Your Neighbor’s Tools: Interdisciplinary
Methods for Graduate Research
Charles Junkerman, Associate Provost; Dean of Continuing Studies
Current research in the humanities and social sciences is ambitiously interdisciplinary.
Anthropologists borrow narrative theory from literary scholars, historians crib techniques
from ethnographers working in the field, and literary critics use psychoanalysis as a model
for understanding poems. In this seminar we will begin by identifying the methods that
define five disciplines and give them their unique abilities: history, philosophy, literary
studies, anthropology, and art history. And then we'll mix things up, and explore the appeal
of cross-disciplinary borrowings. By the end of the seminar, students will have a better
sense of which tools they want in their own tool kits as they tinker with the intellectual
contraptions they encounter in a graduate program in the liberal arts.
From Plato to Post-Modernism: A History of Literary
Criticism
Martin Evans, Professor of English
In this course on the Anglo-American critical tradition, we will trace how critics and theorists
from Plato and Aristotle to Stanley Fish and Elaine Showalter have defined the distinguishing
characteristics of the three principal humanistic disciplines— history, literature, and philosophy.
Individual sessions will cover texts and problems relating to such topics as intention, canonicity,
and the role of gender in literary experience. In addition to writing a term paper on a major critical
issue, students will be asked to prepare reports on a variety of external sources and to deliver
position papers on a series of key critical questions.
Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth
Carol Delaney, Associate Professor of Anthropology
This course will critically examine the story of Abraham at the foundation of
the three Abrahamic religions (Judiasm, Christianity, and Islam), namely the
story of God's command that he sacrifice his son that is found in Genisis 2 and
Sura 37 in the Qur'an. Is this just an ancient story, a myth? Or does it still
have powerful ramifications in contemporary social life? A basic text will be
the instructor's recent book, Abraham on Trial, that begins with a trial in
California where a man sacrificed his child according to what he felt was a
command from God. The book also includes chapters on archaeology and Freud as
well as commentary from the three religious traditions. Students will learn the
basics of biblical exegesis and scholarship as they explore numerous interpretations.
At the same time they will be given anthropological tools to question some of the
assumptions embedded in those interpretations. The aim is to consider the social
legacy bequeathed by a powerful story.
Complex Societies: The Archaeological Origins
of Human Inequality
John Rick, Professor of Anthropology
This course explores theoretical models for and actual examples of the emergence
of political authority in prehistoric human societies. Did early political systems with
status and power differences emerge because of the value of the role leaders played, or
because of leaders’ intention to accumulate resources and privilege for themselves?
Examples from Mesoamerica and the Peruvian Andes will be used to illustrate this critical
transition from egalitarian societies to organizations built on inequality. This transition,
in turn, laid the foundation for state societies as we know them.
Gender Studies, Modernism, and Art History
Wanda Corn, Professor of Art
The Epic
Cheri Ross, Associate Director, Introduction to the Humanities Program
Family Fictions: Narrations of the Family
David Palumbo-Liu, Professor of Comparative Literature
Literary Modernism
Richard Terdiman, Professor of Literature and History of Consciousness,
UCSC; Stanford Humanities Center
Traditional Chinese Poetry and English Romantic
Poetry: Reading Landscapes
David Palumbo-Liu, Professor of Comparative Literature
How did poets from two very different traditions and ages come to feel that landscapes
offered them a particularly fitting set of images and symbols for the human condition?
How does nature give these poets a sense of themselves as human beings located both in
eternal time and in specific historical contexts? How did they pose the question, "What
is art?" and how do their various answers, given form in words, tell us something about
why that question and its answer were so important? This course will use these questions
(and others) to get a sense of both these specific traditions and how their comparison
yields an even deeper understanding of the way poets view themselves and their aesthetic,
social, cultural, and historical worlds in nature.
The Novelist as Public Intellectual: Mann, Rushdie,
& Roy
Russell A. Berman,Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities
Novels are works of imaginative literature that aspire to a comprehensive representation of a
fictional world. Some novelists also engage in public debates in order to intervene in the political
world. This seminar will explore the relationship between these two realms and modes of writing.
Is the life of the author as a public intellectual an extension of the mission of the novelist or
is it a betrayal of the demands of art? How does the political partisanship of the writer illuminate
or obscure the substance of the literary works? We will try to answer these questions by looking at
three authors, their public presence, and three major novels: Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus,
Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, and Arundathi Roy's The God of Small Things.
Beyond the Universal: Jews in the Twentieth Century
Steve Zipperstein, Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture
and History; Director, Program in Jewish Studies
Biography and Biographers in Fiction, Memoir,
and Elsewhere
Steve Zipperstein, Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture
and History; Director, Program in Jewish Studies
Creating the American Republic
Jack Rakove,William Robertson Coe Professor of History
Darwin and the Victorians
Timothy Lenoir, Professor of History; Co-chair, Program in History
and Philosophy of Science
Darwin, Marx, and Freud
Paul Robinson, Richard Lyman Professor of Humanities
European Thought in the Nineteenth Century
Paul Robinson, Richard Lyman Professor of Humanities
European Thought in the Twentieth Century
Paul Robinson, Richard Lyman Professor of Humanities
This seminar will examine important thinkers and writers of the 20th century. Each
meeting will focus on a single figure, usually on a single text, but the works will
be discussed in terms of their widest intellectual significance. Among the figures to
be treated are Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf,
George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault. Each student will be expected to
give one short oral presentation and write an analytic essay on a topic agreed upon with
the instructor.
Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
Van Harvey, George E. Burnell Professor of Religious Studies, Emeritus
Memory, Myth, and History in Ancient Egypt
J.S. Manning, Assistant Professor of Ancient History, Department
of Classics
The civilization of ancient Egypt, the first centralized state in world history,
is usually regarded as having had little impact on the ideas and institutions of
the “West.” Classical observers like Herodotus saw Egyptian civilization as static,
considered Egyptians to be without a coherent philosophy or historical consciousness,
and defined Egyptian wisdom as little more than magical spells and the folk sayings
of half-forgotten sages. This seminar will challenge this image of Egypt in the light
of Egypt’s own historical experience and written record. The remarkable richness of
material culture that has come down to us, in the form of inscriptions, prayers and
hymns, scientific texts, historical narratives, legal contracts, architecture, and
art, shows just how dynamic Egyptian thought was, and just how important it was for
the later development of the West. This course will examine the continuities and
changes of three thousand years of historical development and discover how ancient
historical sensibility and historical appropriation have shaped our views of this
most remarkable of ancient civilizations.
Russia Encounters Enlightenment: State and Society
in the 17th and 18th Centuries
Nancy Kollman, Professor of History; Director, Center for Russian
and East European Studies
Science, Technology, and Art: The Worlds of Leonardo
Paula Findlen, Professor of History and (by courtesy) French and
Italian
Women, Marriage, and Family in Early Modern Europe
Nancy Kollman,, Professor of History; Director, Center for Russian
and East European Studies
The course examines Russia's encounter with the European Enlightenment
in the late 17th and 18th centuries. We examine successive waves of
"Enlightenment" thought -- Latin Humanism from Ukraine, the German Aufklarung,
and the French Enlightenment. We look at the impact of these new ideas and practices
in various realms: political ideology and political culture, printing and public
discourse, women's status, concepts of nation, concepts of self, the rise of a critical
intelligentsia. We conclude by turning the tables, looking at how French Enlightenment
thought "envisioned" Russia. Each class will include a lecture providing general background
on relevant themes or events. Particular attention will be given in lectures and readings
to the contributions of Peter I (ruled 1689-1725) and Catherine II (ruled 1762-96).
The Ebonics Controversy
John Rickford, Professor of Linguistics
Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language
Tom Wasow, Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy
Why would we say, "Bonds FLEW to LA after the game" but "Bonds FLIED
out in the third inning"? Both are past tenses of the verb "fly," so
why are they inflected differently? Steven Pinker's book Words and
Rules: The Ingredients of Language argues that regular and irregular
verbal forms are manifestations of two fundamentally different modes
of human cognition. He claims that regular inflections (like "flied")
are examples of the human capacity for generalization and abstraction,
whereas irregular inflections (like "flew") exemplify simple association
in memory. He amasses an impressive array of evidence from linguistics,
psychology, and neuroscience to make the case that these are qualitatively
different forms of knowledge. This seminar will examine Pinker's arguments
in detail, and evaluate their soundness. Each student will be responsible
for reviewing the relevant primary literature on some of Pinker's claims
to see how well supported they really are.
Comparative Literary Criticism
Martin Evans, Professor of English
Literary Theory: The Contemporary Debates
Charles Junkerman, Associate Provost; Dean of Continuing Studies
The Making of Shakespeare’s England, 1560-1640
Paul Seaver, Christensen Professor of History
Mind and Matter in Medieval Japan
Tom Hare, Associate Professor of Japanese
The period between 1200 and 1600 call it, for the time being, the "middle ages"
produced many of Japan’s most enduring and impressive cultural monuments, whether
material objects, triumphs of insight or constructions of the imagination: Zen temples
and their gardens, monochrome ink painting, arts of living and samurai suicides, a
theater of ghosts, a perfect way to drink tea . . . . This course will immerse us in
Japan of the "middle ages" through its art, music, theater, poetry, and religion, and
will serve as an introduction to the heart of East Asian civilization.
The Modern African-American Freedom Struggle
Clayborne Carson, Professor of History; Director, Martin Luther
King, Jr. Papers Project
“All the Wizard Things”: The Life and
Work of William Butler Yeats
Charles Junkerman, Associate Provost; Dean of Continuing Studies
Yeats has been called the greatest poet of the English language in the 20th century.
For over five decades he wrote brilliantly: personal and political essays, plays, memoirs,
fairy tales, spiritualist speculations, and, of course, volumes of luminous poetry. In this
seminar we will follow Yeats' career from the "Celtic Twilight" of his youth, through the
"terrible beauty" of the Easter Rising and the "dragon-ridden" days of the Irish Civil War,
to the Nobel stage and the Senate chambers of the Irish Free State of the 1920s, where Yeats
had become a "smiling public man." We will get to know the people who shaped Yeats' life,
among them the beautiful rebel Maud Gonne, the aristocratic patron Augusta Gregory, that
"rooted man" John Millington Synge, and his skeptical artist father J.B. Yeats. We will spend
time with the Healy Collection of Yeats manuscripts at the Stanford Library, and will have a
session with Eavan Boland, one of Ireland's preeminent contemporary poets. Throughout the seminar,
we will try to appreciate how, beginning in "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart," Yeats created
"beautiful lofty things" that show no sign of wearing out.
Paris in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Marc Bertrand, Professor of French
Popular Culture in the Ancien Regime
Marc Bertrand, Professor of French
Theory of Poetry
Diane Middlebrook, Professor of English
Poetry and Poetics
Cheri Ross, Associate Director, Introduction to the Humanities Program
1852-1853: A Reading of Charles Dickens’
Bleak House
Linda Paulson, Lecturer in English; Associate Dean and Director
of the MLA Program
1855-1857: A Reading of Charles Dickens’
Little Dorrit
Linda Paulson, Lecturer in English; Associate Dean and Director
of the MLA Program
In December of 1855, the British public began to read Dickens’ Little Dorrit,
poring over it as it came out in serial publication. As always with Dickens,
the novel became one of the consuming, ongoing topics of the day. For a year
and a half, until June of 1857, Little Dorrit was part of the everyday lives
of people who lived in the richly complicated, supremely self-confident, and
painstakingly reported "high Victorian" times. The purpose of this seminar is
to investigate this novel and its contemporary context. Maintaining our focus
on Little Dorrit, and reading it number by number as Victorian readers did, we
will consider the time’s historical and political events, literary works, architectural
feats, art exhibitions, theatrical productions, scandals, technological innovations,
and scientific discoveries, as well as the large and small changes in everyday life.
1864-1865: A Reading of Charles Dickens’
Our Mutual Friend
Linda Paulson, Lecturer in English; Associate Dean and Director
of the MLA Program
The publication of a major Dickens novel was an event in the English-speaking world,
particularly so in Britain. From May 1864 until November 1865, the public pored over
his new novel, number by number, as it became, as always with Dickens, one of the
consuming popular topics of the day. For a year and a half, Our Mutual Friend
was part of the everyday lives of people who lived in a richly complicated time and who
were bombarded, as perhaps no population had ever been, with information about their world.
The purpose of this seminar is to investigate the context of this publication, as seen by the British
public, as reported by the British press, and as reflected in the published works of the day.
Maintaining our focus on Our Mutual Friend, and reading it number by number as Victorian
readers did, we will consider the time's historical and political events, literary works, diaries,
art exhibitions, theatrical productions, scandals of the day, technological innovations, scientific
discoveries, and large and small changes in everyday life.
Aeschylus’ Oresteia: Context, Language,
and Meaning
Marsh McCall, Professor of Classics
This seminar will concentrate on a close study of Aeschylus' immense
trilogic drama, the Oresteia. Issues of language, interpretation,
and the context of Athenian democracy will engage us constantly. We
will explore such themes as justice, gender struggle, fate vs. human
responsibility, and the nature of divine governance as they are articulated
on Aeschylus' stage. And we will try to get as close as possible to
an understanding of performance conditions in the fifth-century theater
of Dionysus. In addition, it is impossible to approach Aeschylus except
through Homer, and the seminar's first two weeks will consist of a rapid
but intense study of the Odyssey.
Caribbean English Poetry
John R. Rickford, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of
Linguistics
Angela F. Rickford, Associate Professor of Education, San Jose State
University
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
George Brown, Professor of English
Classical and Christian Elements in Milton’s
Poetry
Martin Evans, Professor of English
Conrad & Literary Impressionism
Thomas Moser, Professor Emeritus of English
Dante’s Inferno
John Freccero, Professor Emeritus of French and Italian
Empire and Terror: British and Irish Poetry in
the Twentieth Century
Eavan Boland, Professor of English; Director, Creative Writing Program
Euripides
Marsh McCall, Professor of Classics
Euripides is at the same time the most fascinating and the
most elusive of the fifth-century Athenian tragedians. A younger contemporary
of Sophocles, he was regularly bested in the dramatic contests by Sophocles
and others, but the Athenian audiences always wanted to see the next
set of Euripidean plays, even while rarely awarding them a first prize.
In this seminar, we will try to confront Euripides' amazing challenges
to practically every theatrical norm by studying five plays: Alcestis,
Medea, Hippolytus, Helen, and Bacchae.
Faulkner
Thomas Moser, Professor Emeritus of English
Henry James in England and America
George Dekker, Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities; Director of American
Studies
Italy in the Anglo-American Imagination
Martin Evans, Professor of English
Countries have a habit of becoming metaphors, and Italy is no exception. In
this course, we will explore some of the things Italy has stood for in the minds
of British and American writers from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.
To do so, we'll be looking at the way in which poets and novelists, from Thomas
Nashe and William Shakespeare, to D.H. Lawrence and Robert Hellinga, have represented
Italian character and culture in their writings.
Law, Freedom, and Fiction in the Great Russian
Novel: Anna Karenina v. The Brothers Karamazov
Monika Greenleaf, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Comparative
Literature
While the emancipation of American slaves was carried out only after a bloody Civil War,
the Tsarist state freed its vast population of Russian serfs by means of an edict and
accompanying "Great Legal Reform" (1862-64). With the partial introduction of western
concepts of law and individual freedom as well as the liberalization of the press in
Russia, the ensuing two decades witnessed unprecedented social ferment and creative
flowering, above all of the great Russian realist novel. The course will examine Tolstoy’s
and Dostoevsky’s last masterpieces Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov
as powerful fictions that synthesized and transcended contemporary debates on adultery,
women’s and children’s rights, patriarchy, and the spiritual coherence of the modern family;
and that dramatically situated criminal acts between modern law and more ancient structures
of justice and redemption.
Origins of the Novel
Ian Watt, Professor Emeritus of English
Romanticism and Modernism in Poetry
Albert Gelpi,William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature
Barbara Gelpi, Professor of English
Shakespeare: Major Genres
Ron Rebholz, Professor of English
Shakespeare Through Performance I, II, III, IV,
V, and VI
Larry Friedlander, Professor (Teaching) of English
Shakespeare's works were written for the theater, and their style, structure, and
power are only fully revealed in performance. In this workshop-style class, students
will gain an intimate understanding of the process of theater by producing a short
version of two plays. Our goal will be to understand better how a unified interpretation
and theatrical style emerges from the collaborative efforts of an entire production team.
Students do not need to have a background in acting but must be willing to participate
fully in all areas of production. Students will write a paper which applies their experience
of production to a more conventional reading of a play.
Sophocles
Marsh McCall, Professor of Classics
This seminar will focus on four plays of Sophocles: Ajax, Antigone, Oedipus
the King, and Philoctetes. Our effort will be to understand Sophocles
as much as possible in his fifth-century Athenian context. Thus, we will attend
closely to matters of staging, audience expectations, and language. The great
themes of god and man and of heroic choice and responsibility will also engage
us, and we will become acquainted with some of the major trends and debates in
current Sophoclean criticism.
Virginia Woolf ’s Foremothers: The Development
of a British Women’s Novel
Linda Paulson, Lecturer in English; Associate Dean and Director
of the MLA
Program
Over the last 200 years, female novelists have produced many of the most
important and innovative novels in British literature. Experiments in form,
style, psychology, and subject characterize their investigations into the rich
complexities of character and situation. Beginning with Virginia Woolf's essay
A Room of One's Own, the seminar will study the literary foremothers that she
cites: Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot.
The course will conclude with Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway, in an
effort to evaluate Woolf's own claim of the growing prominence of a new literature
by women, and to determine her place in the lineage of this new tradition.
Music in the Eighteenth Century
Stephen Hinton, Associate Professor of Music
Bioethics: The Approach of the Year 2000
Ernlé Young, Clinical Professor of Medicine (Ethics); Co-director,
Stanford Center for
Biomedical Ethics
Biomedical Ethics: Cases, Issues, and Perspectives
Ernlé Young, Clinical Professor of Medicine (Ethics); Co-director,
Stanford Center for
Biomedical Ethics
Ethical Quandaries and Controversies in Select
Medical Specialties
Ernlé Young, Clinical Professor of Medicine (Ethics); Co-director,
Stanford Center for
Biomedical Ethics
Evolution and Philosophical Thought in the Late
19th and 20th Centuries
Denis Phillips, Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Philosophy;
Acting Dean,
Department of Education
The Impact of Evolutionary Thought on Philosophy,
Psychology, and Social Theory
Denis Phillips, Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Philosophy;
Acting Dean,
Department of Education
It would be difficult to overestimate the impact of Darwin’s work on Western
thought in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; philosophy, theology,
political thought, and psychology were influenced by it in deep ways, and the
controversies that it spawned in these fields have continued down to the present.
This seminar will focus on a few key writings and events which encapsulate the key
issues: we will explore the bases of social Darwinism and its impact on American
political thought, the Scopes trial and the legal and theological issues raised
therein, the way in which the classical pragmatists James and Dewey developed
evolutionary ideas, and we will also try to make sense of one or two of the
contemporary disputes among philosophers of biology.
Philosophic Views of Friendship
P.J. Ivanhoe, Associate Professor of Religious Studies
Pragmatism
Denis Phillips, Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Philosophy;
Acting Dean,
Department of Education
Theories of Beauty
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Albert Guérard Professor of Literature;
Professor of French
and Italian
Comparative Politics and Policies: The United
States and Europe
Gerald Dorfman, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institute; Political Science
Department
The 2000 election year in the United States offers a vivid illustration of the
important changes in politics and policy-making that have been occurring in our
country and throughout other democracies in western Europe. After a generation of
relatively sharp political differences between parties and their policies under
leaders such as Reagan, Thatcher, and Kohl, there is now a growing convergence
between government and their oppositions so that real political and policy
differences are slight. This course will explore the reasons for this political
shift, its impact on electoral competition as well for public policy in Britain,
France, Germany, Italy, and the United States. We will examine the current presidential
election in the United States, Clinton’s victories in 1992 and 1996, and recent
elections in Britain and Germany; tracing the policy consequences of those elections
for the political systems in each country.
Democracy in Europe
Gerald Dorfman, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institute; Political Science
Department
Diversity and Unity in the American Republic
Luis Ricardo Fraga, Associate Professor of Political Science
In this course we will examine the historical debate about diversity and unity in the American Republic.
How did the Founding Fathers envision national identity and the American character in the eighteenth
century? How did this debate evolve as American grew in population and geography throughout the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries? How relevant are these earlier debates to national discourse on the challenge
that increasing racial and ethnic diversity present to the current United States? Readings will be
drawn from history, literature, and the social sciences to examine these issues.
Politics of Race and Ethnicity in the U.S.
Luis Ricardo Fraga, Associate Professor of Political Science
The social construction of racial distinctions is a founding principle of American government. Although
less frequently examined by historians and social scientists than principles of justice, equality, and
popular participation, race-based distinctions have been equally long-lasting in their impact on American
political development. This seminar will examine the importance of such distinctions in the evolution of
the American polity. What role have such distinctions had in the history of American political development
and what role do they play in American politics? What role should such distinctions have in future
considerations of public policy regarding representation, affirmative action, and education?
Race, Wealth, and Power in South Africa
David Abernethy, Professor of Political Science
This course traces the history of race relations in South Africa, with special attention to the formation of
the apartheid regime, the long and eventually successful struggle to terminate apartheid’s politically
discriminatory features, and current debates over whether and how to attack its legacy of race-based
economic discrimination. We examine the big picture of this complex society through works of history and
political economy, and the small pictures of individuals’ lives through autobiographies, biographies, novels,
and short films. Along the way we identify similarities and differences between South Africa and the United States.
Tony Blair’s Not-So-New Politics in Britain
Gerald Dorfman, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institute; Political Science
Department
Worlds of Childhood: Culture and Biology in Early
Development
Ann Fernald, Professor of Psychology
“Clash of the Gods”: Jews, “Pagans,”
and Christians in the Late Roman World
Robert C. Gregg, Teresa Hihn Moore Professor of Religious Studiesbr>
A philosopher accuses the Jews of annually sacrificing a fattened Greek to their God. A
Christian "apologist" ridicules the morals of the Greek and Roman Gods, branding them "demons."
A Roman emperor attempts to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem-against Christian opposition.
The powerful relics of a Christian martyr silence Apollo's oracles, and a mysterious fire destroys
the god's temple. "Pagan" intellectuals blame the fall of the Empire on the weakness of the Christian
God. A Jewish community is forcibly converted by a bishop and his flock. Such "headline" events, and
their portrayals by participants (not one of them "disinterested"), are the primary data in this course.
We will be addressing the following issues: What role did communal religious loyalties play in the
significant cultural changes of the 1st through 6th centuries, CE? What was the character and extent of
"Christianization" in the Roman world? Does any single definition of religion "fit" Judaism, Greco-Roman
polytheism, and Christianity? How significantly do these three systems of belief and their institutions
themselves change over the first six centuries of the common era?
Contested Truths: Classical, Early Christian,
and Medieval Case Studies in Orthodoxy and Intolerance
Robert C. Gregg, Teresa Hihn Moore Professor of Religious Studies
Maud Gleason, Acting Assistant Professor of Classics
Dante and Aquinas
Lee Yearley, Professor of Religious Studies
Hindu Mythology in Literature, Film, and the Arts
Mark Mancall, Professor of History
Love and Death in the Middle Ages
Hester Gelber, Associate Professor of Religious Studies
The Medieval World View
Hester Gelber, Associate Professor of Religious Studies
Mystics and Mysticism in the Middle Ages
Hester Gelber, Associate Professor of Religious Studies
The term "mysticism" is an early 17th-century invention, and modern academic
investigation began in earnest only in the late 19th century. During the quarter
we will explore the utility of this term in dealing with texts. Controversy attaches
to claims for its cross-cultural usefulness: Does it identify experience of the same
kind or of the same object? How do we resolve the varying assessments of theology,
philosophy, and psychology? How does gender figure in? Is mysticism best analyzed as
varying forms of religious practice or as particular genres of religious text. The
course will focus on Medieval and Renaissance mystics and texts as the laboratory for
exploring accounts of mystical experience, and we will read extensively in the works of
Hadewijch and John of the Cross.
Nietzsche on Culture and Religion
Van Harvey, George Edwin Burnell Professor of Religious Studies,
Emeritus
Neglected for decades, Friedrich Nietzsche has proved to be one of the most
influential modern European thinkers. His attempt to unmask the motives
underlying Western philosophy, morality, and religion have influenced a host
of modern novelists, playwrights, psychologists, and philosophers. In this
seminar, we will read and discuss some of his best known works and concentrate
on his claim to be a "physician of culture," especially as this becomes manifested
in his critique of morality and religion.
Religious Ritual
Arnold Eisen, Professor and Chair of Religious Studies
Environmental Ethics
Robert McGinn, Professor (Teaching) of Industrial Engineering and
Humanities and Sciences
For better and worse, human environments underwent major transformations in the twentieth
century. This seminar will critically analyze a range of ethical issues raised by these changes.
Issues studied will be drawn from both predominantly natural and predominantly human-made
environments, and involve policy conflicts over wilderness preservation, endangered species,
the treatment of animals, global warming, the proliferation of large buildings, traffic limitation,
signage, the soundscape, and the character of public space. Emphasis will be on sharpening and
applying critical-analytical skills to unpack the ethical dimensions of the issue conflicts
studied. Each student will make a short in-class presentation and write a critical-analytical
paper on a case study of personal interest.
Ethics, Science, and Technology: Issues and Controversies
Robert McGinn, Professor (Teaching) of Industrial Engineering and
Humanities and Sciences
Innovations in contemporary science and technology, and attempts to implement them in Western
society raise profound ethical issues that defy easy resolution. In this class we will analyze
key scholarly essays, investigative reports, and policy documents on a number of ethical
controversies spawned by recent or emerging technical advances and practices. We will be
looking at issues of privacy, intellectual property, and equity of access in relation to
information technology and biotechnology; issues of individual liberty and public interest in
relation to recent and emerging advances in human reproduction, genetic engineering, and biomedical
research and practice; issues of moral responsibility, loyalty, and integrity in the work of scientists
and engineers; and issues of traditional individual rights, such as property, mobility, and freedom of
inquiry; and artistic expression in construction, transport, and other technologies that transform human
environments.
The Human Genome
Robert Siegel, Acting Associate Professor (Teaching), Microbiology
and Immunology
The Science of Emerging Diseases
Robert Siegel, Acting Associate Professor (Teaching), Microbiology
and Immunology
The Science of Stuff
John Bravman, Bing Centennial Professor of Engineering, Senior Associate
Dean for Student Services
Aging: From Biology to Social Policy
Clifford Barnett, Professor of Anthropology
Education and Citizenship: Cross-National Perspectives
Francisco Ramirez, Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology
Environmental Policy Design and Implementation
Leonard Ortolano, UPS Foundation Professor of Civil Engineering
Gender and Family in Welfare Policy
Carol Delaney, Associate Professor of Anthropology
last updated: November 9, 2004
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