The Young Friedrich Nietzsche: Images, Memories, Stories, Texts

The Young Friedrich Nietzsche: Images, Memories, Stories, Texts

The youthful interests of Friedrich Nietzsche permeate his later work, for which the critical-creative writer is most widely known. We will first consider his early experiences, memories, illustrations, piano compositions, poetry, and prose, including his first major...
Four Great Directors: Pathways to Hollywood

Four Great Directors: Pathways to Hollywood

Join University of Arizona Regents Professor David Soren for a survey of the life and work of four great directors. First up is Fritz Lang whose collaboration with wife Thea Von Harbou led to the recently fully rediscovered science fiction epic Metropolis. Next the...
There Is Nothing Like a Dame! The Great Women of Broadway

There Is Nothing Like a Dame! The Great Women of Broadway

There Is Nothing Like a Dame! celebrates the women of Broadway who wrote the scripts, composed the songs, penned the lyrics, designed, directed, choreographed, and starred in classics of the American musical theater. The seminar introduces the women of the Golden Age...
Anatolia: Cradle of Civilizations

Anatolia: Cradle of Civilizations

In this cultural excursion we will explore literary and artistic highlights of the diverse cultures that have flourished in the concise landmass of ancient Anatolia (modern Turkey) —Paleolithic and Neolithic habitation, Hittites, Amazons, Assyrians, Hebrew Biblical,...
What to Listen for in Classical Music since 1950

What to Listen for in Classical Music since 1950

In four sessions we will look at works of art music from each of the decades of the latter half of the twentieth century. Our focus will be on the act and art of listening, and how to know what to listen for. We will explore the qualities of the music itself and...
Elementary My Dear…The Modern International Detective Tale

Elementary My Dear…The Modern International Detective Tale

The detective tale, born of the work of Edgar Alan Poe and altered by Dashiell Hammett, evolved over time in the hands of international masters such as Jorge Luis Borges, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Andrea Camilleri, and Donna Leon. Our examination helps identify the...
Tribal Governments: Where They Fit

Tribal Governments: Where They Fit

The role of tribal governments within the United States is not well understood, largely because most schools do not teach it. This course is designed to fill that gap. Each class will explore a different aspect of how tribal governments fit within the federal system....
Seeds of Globalization: The Making of the Modern World

Seeds of Globalization: The Making of the Modern World

How did our globalized economy and international culture come to be? The “Rise of the West” idea has long suggested something innately superior about “Western civilization.” But there are better grounded ways than appeals to cultural or racial superiority to explain...
Postmodern Art and Its Discontents

Postmodern Art and Its Discontents

This course examines the issues, artists, and theories surrounding the rise of Postmodernism in the visual arts from 1970 into the twenty-first century. We will explore the emergence of pluralism in the visual arts against a backdrop of the rise of the global economy....
The String Quartets of Beethoven

The String Quartets of Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven was one of the great masters of the Classical and Romantic eras in music, and no genre summarizes his achievement better than the string quartet. This course will examine 16 works spread evenly throughout his early, middle, and late styles. The...
Germany’s Roaring Twenties

Germany’s Roaring Twenties

Berlin, capital of the Weimar Republic between the two World Wars, was one of the most exciting cities in Europe–the place of the most radical experimentation in the visual and performing arts, in mass entertainment and theater, in literature and architecture....
The Latin American Short Story

The Latin American Short Story

The short story has held a prominent place in Latin American literature for at least 200 years, but it is only within the past few decades that it has become widely known in translation. The course will use the short story as a vehicle to introduce some of Latin...
Dante’s Inferno

Dante’s Inferno

  Dante’s 700-year-old masterpiece the Divine Comedy still attracts great attention. For centuries readers have been drawn to his vivid description of the afterlife. This course will explore the first portion of the Divine Comedy, Inferno, in its entirety. The...
Twentieth Century Art Movements

Twentieth Century Art Movements

This course examines the fundamental issues and theories surrounding the art production and reception of Modern Art in Europe and America through the twentieth century. Framed by discussions of Post-Impressionist painting of the 1880s and the Post-Modern pluralist art...
Dance and the Human Image

Dance and the Human Image

The Dance—as Homer named it—is always an expression of the ideas, traditions, and values of the society that creates it, whether spiritual, recreational, or artistic in form. The body in motion is both the mode of expression and the meaning of the Dance. In this...
Jane Austen, Novelist

Jane Austen, Novelist

One of the most popular and beloved novelists in the English language, Jane Austen wrote novels that have beguiled and challenged readers for two centuries. For some, Austen is our beloved Aunt Jane, chatting with us about tea parties, excursions in pony phaetons, and...
Classic Tragicomedies of European Theatre

Classic Tragicomedies of European Theatre

The tragicomedy genre, so prevalent in our day, has actually been evolving for many centuries. While one can take a primarily aesthetic approach to any genre–what makes comedy comedy?–here we will include a fuller consideration of history, stressing the...
Mysterious Moments from the History of Astronomy

Mysterious Moments from the History of Astronomy

This seminar will examine mysterious moments, ancient and modern, which have come to the fore in humanity’s quest to understand our place in the cosmos. We begin in prehistory, where from the oldest humans we have evidence of sophisticated astronomy. How much did the...