2024 -2025 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.

Cartography is one of the main devices through which humans have attempted to capture and understand complex social, economic and political phenomena. Map-making in Latin America was one of the most important processes of discovery and appropriation during the colonial period, as the Spanish and Portuguese (as well as the Dutch, French and English if we include the Caribbean islands) used mapping for practical uses related initially to navigation, and as a means of control and extraction of resources from their empires. Indigenous map making was used by the original peoples of the Americas as a form of resistance and a device for adaptation. This course uses mapping in colonial and early independent Latin America as a lens through which students may learn about the process of colonization, state building, and the legacies on those processes on poverty and underdevelopment today.

This course asks how communities and institutions preserve their records: how are materials collected, categorized, described, preserved, displayed, and made accessible? How do we learn to interpret these documents and their place within broader cultural contexts? Whose voices and memories are included and excluded? The course will introduce students to the critical skills and methodological framework required for working in archives and manuscript repositories. Students will be taught how to read and analyse archival sources, and will be trained in the transcription, editing, evaluation, and publication of primary textual materials. Our textual materials will be generically varied and chronologically and linguistically diverse. Students will acquire the basic tools, and methods of Archival Studies, with a particular focus on representation.

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.

Between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries the republic of Venice created a powerful empire that controlled much of the Mediterranean. Situated on the shifting boundary between East and West, the Venetians established a thriving merchant republic that allowed many social groups, religions, and ethnicities to coexist within its borders. This seminar explores some of the essential features of Venetian society, as a microcosm of early modern European society. We will examine the relationship between center and periphery, order and disorder, orthodoxy and heresy as well as the role of politics, art, and culture in Venice. The seminar will conclude with a discussion of the decline of Venice as a political and economic power and its reinvention as a tourist site and living museum for the modern era.

The central theme of this course is that islands can be used as model systems that help us to understand many aspects of how the world works. We will explore this theme through an analysis of the Polynesian islands in particular – their origin and geology, how life arrived and diversified there, how ecosystems develop on young lava as well as cope with ancient infertile soils, how climate, soils, and ecosystems interact, the conservation challenges inherent to island organisms, how interactions with land shaped the development of island societies in the era before globalization, and how islands can be thought of as living laboratories for building more sustainable human societies. While my focus and much of my experience is in Hawaii, I will draw upon information from other island systems and societies as well.

Drawing on recent research from Asia, Europe, and the Americas, this course will probe the significance of cartographic enterprise across the early modern world. Readings analyze the political, economic, and epistemological imperatives that drove the proliferation of charts and plans in this period and consider what kinds of work such artifacts performed for their patrons, makers, and viewers. The contributions of indigenous knowledge to imperial maps will be considered, as will the career of the map in commerce, diplomacy, conquest, and rule. Time will also be devoted to canvassing historical map reproductions, online and in print.

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.

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. 

Humans are turning the planet inside out, digging vast quantities of materials out of the ground and spreading them across land, water, and air. The mass of everything ever made now exceeds that of all living things. Waste accounts for mounting proportions of this anthropogenic mass. In our epoch, waste has become the main event. But what does it mean to designate things, places, or people as waste? How does the meaning of waste changed, and how does it reflect value systems? In exploring such questions, this course takes you on a historical world tour that ranges from human excrement to greenhouse gases, and from southern Africa to the Norwegian Arctic. Get ready for a shitty experience!

This course has three goals: to read in detail some texts from the Greek and Latin prose fiction or ‘romance’ genre; to gain insight into the ancient Mediterranean world(s) that produced them; and to think critically about the literary critical approaches by which we might read such texts. Our reading combines two of the ‘famous five’ Greek novels, namely Chariton’s Callirhoe and Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, with the two main Latin novels, Petronius’ Satyrica and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (a.k.a. Golden Ass). We’ll end with Lucian’s True History (a.k.a. True Story), antiquity’s own critique of storytelling techniques; and the Alexander Romance, a fanciful but widely read prose account of Alexander the Great’s expedition, which challenges many assumptions we might have about the nature of prose texts and how to read them. These six primary readings will be supplemented by others that support the second and third goals of our class.

John Muir (1838-1914) was a prophetic defender of wild nature, and an internationally celebrated champion of environmental preservation. Known as “The Father of the National Parks” and the Founding President of the Sierra Club, he was a powerful political and cultural force; he was also a mesmerizing story-teller, speaker, and writer. In this seminar we will focus on Muir’s most exuberant and rhapsodic writing, all about the place he loved most in the world, California’s Sierra Nevada mountains -- what he called “The Range of Light.” We’ll start with two autobiographical texts that explain how the Scottish immigrant Muir became “John of the Mountains.” We’ll spread our view to bring in contemporaries and near-contemporaries whom he admired – Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, Robert Burns, and John Ruskin – and we’ll look at the painters and photographers who were drawn to the Sierras with him: Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill, William Keith, Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge. Finally, we’ll spend time with some of the writers and artists who were profoundly influenced by Muir’s work -- Everett Ruess, Ansel Adams, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Tom Kilion, and Kim Stanley Robinson – and we’ll read the prize-winning biography by Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir.

Almost two decades after it happened, it becomes clear that the 2008 global financial crisis had a pivotal role in shaping the contemporary world. Today, the crash of 2008 occupies a unique position of a global event with significant local ramifications that has been documented in various media and disciplines, while being still fresh in the memory of those of us who experienced it. In this interdisciplinary class, we will explore the ways in which the momentous events of 2008 have been recorded and interpreted in various disciplines and media: history, social sciences, memoirs of some of key protagonists, and the arts (theater, film, visual arts). This class will help students develop the skills of doing comparative research on materials drawn from different disciplines.