by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Most of the people in the world know something about the American West. Usually popular ideas about it come from the work of novelists, artists, performers, filmmakers and TV producers, who created a mythical time and place where self-reliant pioneers overcame...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
This course will explore the culture, counterculture, and art of the long decade of the 1960s. Our focus will center on youthful artists in the United States, beginning with Abstract Expressionism and ending with Performance art and what critic Lucy Lippard called the...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
“No person ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he/she is not the same person.” If this is the human condition according to Heraclitus, what remains permanent in the midst of change? This course will explore the twin themes of...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Why is it that much classical music written after 1910 remains difficult for audiences? The answer lies partially in the splintering of compositional languages throughout the 20th century, languages that can leave listeners unnecessarily flummoxed and dissatisfied. In...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
This course will examine the sites that were most critical to the development of ancient Egyptian civilization and have yielded its most spectacular discoveries. Archaeological sites such as the Pyramids and Great Sphinx of Giza, the Valley of the Kings & King...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
In the 1800s the newly created United States of America was seized by what was labeled “Manifest Destiny”–a deep-seated drive to expand from coast to coast. This drive encountered several obstacles, ranging from the challenges presented by geography and travel...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Virginia Woolf famously said that Middlemarch is “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” It is also frequently said to be the best nineteenth-century novel written in English and the most perfect example of classic British realism. Its capacious...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
What’s really in the Bible? As opposed to what we’ve been told by well-meaning but often not well-informed parents, clergy, and others? This course provides an innovative look at many instructive and amusing aspects of this most consequential book in...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
This seminar begins by putting Dubliners and Portrait of an Artist into their social and literary contexts. We will then spend two meetings on each work. Though in different genres—the short story and the education novel—they are companion pieces in significant ways....
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
This course addresses the twentieth-century genocide that was the Holocaust, the attempted annihilation of European Jews and other designated racial and political opponents led by the Third Reich in Germany. We will review the horrific events of the Holocaust and...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Faust is alive and well. His emanations appear in literature, art, music, film, and cyberspace. Not only Adam and Eve but also Faust ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So he has excited the human imagination for centuries. But who was this...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Join anthropologist and classical archaeologist David Soren for an overview of ancient Rome. Moving from the Early Iron Age to the so-called fall of the Roman Empire, the course will also look at the mysterious people known as the Etruscans. It will delve into...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Art has often been plundered or stolen during times of war, occupation, or even peace. This course explores the historical, political, and legal framework of specific moments when art has been taken. The class focuses on how art has been used for propagandistic...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
How can we best know the past, and how much can we really know of it? This interdisciplinary course will seek answers to these questions in relation to mid-Victorian England. We will read primary material published around 1859, providing a “snapshot” of a particularly...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
U.S. intervention in underdeveloped countries raises many basic issues of international relations and foreign policy. The main purpose of this class is to provide students with an ability to examine such issues critically and in a historical context. Among the general...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
This five-week course examines concepts that have become increasingly relevant to contemporary artists working in a variety of media over the past 50 years. It concentrates on more recent art, understood against the backdrop of modern art movements. In this class we...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
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...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Superman, Wonder Woman, Spiderman, Batman, Captain America, Green Lantern, Iron Man, Black Widow–the list of America’s superheroes is long. Comic books, TV, and cinema have long built up the appeal of superheroes, and they remain popular. Embodiments of cultural...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
The human brain, guiding our every thought and action, is as complex as anything we know. Its almost unimaginable complexity arises from minute interconnections between tens of billions of nerve cells. If we could map every connection among the cells, we still would...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
What was the relationship of ancient Greek culture to early Christianity? This seminar will open with two topics of significance in the early development of Christianity: the image (or icon) and the Jesus story itself. The course will also include lectures on the...
