2025 -2026 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

What might it mean to travel through eternity? This course will consider the question through the literary and visual lenses of allegorical pilgrimage, symbolic pilgrims, and schematic pilgriming. Perspectives on allegory, symbol, figura and diagram from Eric Auerbach, Samuel T. Coleridge, Stephen W. Hawking, David Bohm, and John M. Sullivan of The Optiverse. Supplementary material from the Bible, Dante, Chaucer, and a short video,Outside In: How to Turn a Sphere Inside Out. We will focus on the paintings, poems, and illuminated books of William Blake, from ballads andThe Gates of Paradise to A Vision of the Last Judgment,The Book of Thel, The Book of Urizen, and Jerusalem.

The underlying premise of this class is simple: Effective scholarship doesn’t have to suck the joy from the world. I usually teach it to incoming freshmen, but it’s a message even more relevant to older students and graduate students. College, we understand, is a serious place. It’s the time to leave childish things behind: favorite movies, games, cartoons, books, indeed the very idea of “favorites.” The task at college is to search for deeper meaning, to gain the tools that will allow an understanding of the way the world works, the better to affect, or even change, it. College and graduate school are sites of gravitas; weighty work is expected. But what of levitas ­– a lighter, more playful category? Writing in 1922 about the crassly commercial electric billboards of Times Square, the writer G. K. Chesterton realized that, “If a child saw these colored lights, he would dance with as much delight as at any other coloured toys; and it is the duty of every poet, and even of every critic, to dance in respectful imitation of the child.” What might it mean to do scholarly work that respects a child’s engagement with the world? To retain (or recover) the intensely pleasurable relation to particular objects or habits that we were allowed when younger? Does intellectually credible work depend upon a “critical distance” between the scholar and the object of study? Can we take something seriously without imposing a seriousness upon it that it may not possess (or want)? This seminar will explore such “unserious” media as amusement parks, comics, cartoons, musicals, and children’s books, and encounter modes of critical engagement that stress experience over meaning, and investment over critical distance.

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.

This MLA seminar provides an overview of protected area (PA) models for the conservation of nature - from national parks that exclude most human uses, to community-managed protected areas where sustainable human uses are encouraged - and their social and environmental impacts and implications. We use case study examples from the United States, East Africa, and Latin America to compare and contrast models across settings. Selected examples include classic National Parks in the U.S. (e.g., Yellowstone and Yosemite) and East Africa (Tarangire and Meru), multiuse PAs with human residents and their active resource use (Pt. Reyes National Seashore and Peru's Manu National Park), Indigenous and community conserved areas (ICCAs such as the Menominee Forest in Wisconsin and Kuna Yala in Panama), and community-based conservation of forests and wildlife in the U.S. and Tanzania. 

This course introduces the field of environmental history, which examines how humans have influenced and been affected by different environments over time. We will use various sources (written, visual, and on-site) to explore methods of studying environmental history, with a focus on water justice—that is, how access to water, its use and abuse, and the impacts of storms and droughts have historically reflected racial, gender, and class disparities from local to global levels.

Caravaggio was a murderer, Schiele a sex offender, and Picasso a self-declared art thief. Why do some artists seem to treat law and ethics as obstacles to be transcended—as if creativity itself demanded a leap from rebellion to outright transgression? This course explores the fraught relationship between art and morality, probing what can be represented, what ought to be censored, and why. Art, we often insist, should be free—freer even than society can tolerate—but in defending that freedom, do we also excuse the inexcusable? Is art a space of radical experimentation, or merely a smokescreen for privilege and impunity? Who gets to decide what counts as good or bad art? These are the questions this seminar will take up, guiding participants through debates in aesthetics, sociology, and moral philosophy.

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.

Palestine has been on everyone's lips for the last two and a half years - and the idea that people "don't understand" or "should know" about Palestine is part of our political and cultural debates in North America. But what have Palestinians been saying in words, music, and film - and what backgrounds do we need to engage them? This course offers an opportunity to read Palestinian literary culture and engage Palestinian music and politics across time. We start with the rap album Shabjdeed released in the West Bank in February 2024 and work through a canon of literary and artistic expression, developing a conversation about Palestinian culture, politics, internationalization, and history that will help us to think about the current moment. Key figures for the course will include Mahmoud Darwish, Emile Habibi, Sayed Kashua, Samira Azzam, Ghassan Kanafani, Anton Shammas, and Adania Shibli.

Seminar course exploring the social, ethical, artistic and policy implications of artificial intelligence systems. AI “literacy” is not just about learning the technical aspects of AI; AI is both a tool and a topic of inquiry. Our class considers both. Engages emerging best practices and leading scholarship on AI and education, decolonial AI, indigenous AI, disability activism AI, feminist AI and the future of work for creative industries across STEM, social sciences and the humanities. We will have several special guest speakers, experts from across many sectors. This is AI for the Thinking Person.

For over two millennia, Jews and Judaism have been the object of sustained fears and fantasies, which have in turn underpinned repeated outbreaks of violence and persecution. In general, such fears and fantasies stem not from encounters with actual Jews, but rather from anxieties prompted by the spectral, shapeshifting, fictive figures of “the Jew” and “Judaism”—that is, the images of Jews and Judaism as constructed by outside observers. But why did such myths and stereotypes emerge at all? How did these become so widely accepted? What made them so persuasive and so powerful? Did they inspire violence, or merely legitimize it? This seminar will explore key moments in the development of antisemitism from ancient Egypt to the Enlightenment, including the Christianization of the Roman Empire, the emergence of an association between Jews and moneylending, the appearance of the blood libel, and early manifestations of racial hostility.

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.

This course asks how nations, regions, communities and institutions preserve their records: how are materials collected, catalogued, conserved, curated, and made known? How are we to interpret these texts within broad contexts of production and reception? Whose voices and memories are included, and whose excluded? The course will introduce students to the critical skills and methodological frameworks required for working in archives and manuscript repositories. Participants will be introduced to the reading and analysis of primary sources, and will be guided in the transcription, editing, evaluation, and publication of primary materials, which will vary in form, language, place and era of production. In sum, participants will acquire the basic tools and methods of Archival Studies, with a particular focus on positionalities and representation.

Thursday, June 25, 6:00-9:00pm
Thursday, July 2, 6:00-9:00pm
Thursday, July 9, 6:00-9:00pm
Thursday, July 16, 6:00-9:00pm
Thursday, July 30, 6:00-9:00pm
Saturday, August 1, 10:00am-5:00pm
Thursday, August 6, 6:00-9:00pm

Students will step into the hidden world of the Cultural Cold War in this immersive, archive-driven course that uncovers how the CIA shaped global culture through art, literature, music, and intellectual networks. Students will work directly with extraordinary primary sources from the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, guided by expert Hoover curator Jean Cannon, who will introduce students to newly accessible materials on covert cultural operations. Students will also engage firsthand with leading historian of the CIA, Hugh Wilford, whose groundbreaking work has defined the field, as well as experience the Cold War’s artistic battles through a special behind-the-scenes visit to the Cantor Arts Center. Combining cutting-edge scholarship, hands-on archival research, and encounters with world-class experts, this course offers a uniquely Stanford experience at the intersection of history, politics, and the arts.

Monday, June 22, 5:30-8:30pm
Monday, June 29, 5:30-8:30pm
Monday, July 6, 5:30-8:30pm
Monday, July 13, 5:30-8:30pm
Monday, August 3, 5:30-8:30pm (This week may be scheduled slightly differently, with the Monday session shorter than 3 hours, and an additional meeting night added to include a trip to the Cantor Arts Center. We will confirm the schedule as soon as the details are finalized. We are keeping in mind that some students may enroll in both summer courses.)
Monday, August 10, 5:30-8:30pm
Saturday, August 15, 9am-4pm

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.