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Many of Shakespeare’s most powerful, intelligent, and subversive characters are female. How were such vividly complex roles constructed in a culture that legally defined women as property, on the grounds of their intellectual and moral inferiority? Given the early modern imperatives of feminine silence, chastity, and obedience, how is it that women impel Shakespeare’s plots, orchestrate conflicts, and—in many instances—impose “resolutions”? This five-week course considers representations of women in three of Shakespeare...
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About 2600 years ago, an "Intellectual Revolution" shifted Greek thinking from mythic world descriptions to observational ones. The first group of thinkers in this new era lived in eastern Greece and started new directions in math and sciences. The next group, notably including Pythagoras, moved from eastern to western Greece and into theological inquiries. Pythagoras's philosophy meshed mathematical, moral, and theological ideas and influenced Plato and the development of Western philosophy for 1000 years. Here, we...
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It is for good reason that China is often called a land of poetry. As the longest continuous form of creative writing in the country, poetry has been a defining feature in the life of China’s elite, from their participation in the civil service exams to their performance of rituals on official and leisure occasions. The ideas for poetry and its genre formation, however, have been a subject of constant debate throughout history, the most radical of which took place at the turn of the nineteenth century, when Chinese men...
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In this course, the class will examine how the image of the Roman emperor was and is constructed. We will be investigating questions of source material reliability, genre, and the use and power of rhetoric in history. Through an examination of Rome’s rulers, from Julius Caesar to Emperor Domitian, using the ancient written source material (in translation), we will discover the ways in which we, no less than the ancients, forged images of the emperors.
Hybrid Course Format
- All classes will be delivered in-person and online via live video...
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The course investigates the ecology of war in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century to determine its impact on post-war perception, avant-garde art and architecture, and conceptions of place and memory. The primary focus will be on World War I, with secondary coverage of the U.S. Civil War. Readings and class meetings will deal with a range of topics, including the philosophy and culture of war, landscape modification, technologies of war, combat experience, the psychological costs of war, war and...
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Why is French the most-commonly taught language in the United States after Spanish? Why are Americans so interested in things French? This course suggests that answers may be found in the long and fascinating saga of the French in North America, the topic of this seminar. The names of rivers (Poudre, Platte), cities (Saint-Louis, Baton Rouge, Louisville, Lafayette), and people (Bonneville, Crapo, Ducey, Duval, Québedeaux), several thousands of them, all evoke the French heritage of the United States. Most of the stories...
In Session
NEW! HSP Deep Dive Seminar
Humans use language not just to communicate information but also to indicate identity, that is, the “self versus other” or “us versus them” distinction. Judges 12:6 describes how the pronunciation of the Hebrew word shibboleth was used by the Gileadites to identify their enemy, the Ephraimites, at the river Jordan. Putin claims that Ukrainian is not a separate language; therefore, Ukraine is Russian territory. In the 19th century, language was part of the nation-building process whereby a ‘people’ or ‘...
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Moderate Democrats blame progressives for their divisions, and Republicans use them to depict Democrats as socialists. We will look beyond these partisan divisions to consider how our times parallel those of the Progressive Era. One has to go back a century to find the same levels of economic inequality and mass immigration. The historical precedent for our global pandemic is the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918, which killed an estimated fifty million people worldwide—twice the number of Covid victims and a far higher...