Courses

GEMS 72100: Introduction to Global Early Modern Studies: The Atlantic World, Mondays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 3 credits, Prof. Clare Carroll. Online.  Cross listed with MALS 74600, HIST 71000, and CL 80100. 

Transculturation in the Atlantic world will be the focus of our study of encounters between Europeans and Africans, peoples of the Caribbean, and the Americas in texts from Portuguese, Spanish, Nahuatl, French and English authors. Topics to be discussed include political versus economic interpretations of the encounter, slavery, and colonization; the geography of empire; visual narration in Meso-American codices; the intersection of gender, class and race in the creation of mestizo cultures; monsters and cannibals in maps and ethnographic writing; the construction of race before race (the pseudo-science of the 18th and 19th centuries). All texts can be read in the original language and in English. Readings will be available on Blackboard. 

Readings will be from: The Asia of João de Barros; Columbus, Diario; We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico; Hernán Cortés, The Second Letter; Las Casas, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies; Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of the Incas; Sor Juana Inés de a Cruz, Response to the Very Eminent Sor Filotea de la Cruz; Montaigne, ‘On Cannibals,’ ‘On Coaches,’ Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil; Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries; Shakespeare, The Tempest. Theoretical and contextual frameworks include Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint; Herman Bennett, African Kings and Black Slaves; Nicolás Wey Gόmez, The Tropics of Empire; Diana Magaloni Kerpel, The Colors of the New World: Artists, Materials, and the Creation of the Florentine Codex; Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire; Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human; Kim Hall, Things of Darkness, Nicholas Jones, Staging Habla de Negros.  There will be guest appearance by the authors of some of the works we will read including Herman Bennett, Amanda Wunder, Surekha Davies, among others. 

GEMS 83100: Montaigne and Intertextuality, Thursdays, 6:30pm-8:30pm, 2/3/4 credits, Prof. Erec R. Koch. In-Person. Cross listed with FREN 72000 and CL 80900. Taught in English.

Michel de Montaigne’s Essais invite the exploration of intertextuality through both textual performance and content. In those texts, Montaigne establishes the mutual imbrication of reading and writing; he makes copious use of citations of authors drawn from his library or inscribed in the beams of his tower; he adds continuously to the texts up to his death in 1592. Intertextuality defines the very genre that he created and shaped in that the essai is open-ended and invites citation and response. Intertextuality determines the literary heritage of the essai in the succession of essayists over the centuries. Every subsequent example of the genre has been overtly or covertly a reference Montaigne’s text: Pierre Charron, Jean-Pierre Camus, Blaise Pascal, and Pierre Nicole, to name only a few, graft Montaigne’s text into their own in responding to the Essais. In this course, we will use intertextual theory as a way to inform Montaigne’s Essais, but we will also examine the ways in which the Essais inform theories of intertextuality. Principal readings in intertextual theory will include: Gérard Genette on palimpsests, Antoine Compagnon on citation, Julia Kristeva on the semiotics of re-writing, Mikhail Bakhtin on dialogism, Harold Bloom on the “anxiety of influence,” Michael Riffaterre on intertextual signification, and Jacques Derrida on citation and textual grafts. Finally, we will examine new digital humanities methods of exploring intertextuality, particularly on the ARTFL website (TextPair and TopoLogic), and assess how those methods may re-shape our understanding of intertextuality. Readings will be in French; class discussion, in English.​ 

GEMS 83100: The Power of Words and The Words of Power. Mondays, 6:30pm-8:30pm, 3 credits, Prof. José Miguel Martínez Torrejón. Hybrid. Cross-listed with SPAN 87000. 

This course will focus on exploring the wide topic of the relations between literature and politics, using Early Modern texts from Spain, Portugal and their American colonies. Diverse themes will organize around four areas: a) satire and propaganda, information and desinformation; b) Polemics around the conquest of America; c) muslims and cristians, external and internal borders; d) patronage and authorship.  

Readings will include Alonso de Valdés, Cervantes (Numancia), Lope de Vega (Fuenteovejuna, Arauco domado, Los guanches de Tenerife, El Hamete de Toledo), Cristóbal Colón (Letters), Palacios Rubios (Requerimiento), Bartolomé de las Casas (Brevísima), Francisco de Vitoria (De indis), Corterreal, Aldana, Fernando de Herrera and Garcilaso Inca de la Vega (Florida). 

THE FOLLOWING COURSES WILL COUNT TOWARDS CERTIFICATE PROGRAM REQUIREMENTS:

CL 85500: Middle Eastern Explorers: Time, Space and Travel Literature, Thurs, 2:00pm-4:00pm, 3 credits. Anna Akasoy. Cross listed with MES 78500. 

CL 89000: On Passions, Emotions, Affects: in Theory, History, Texts. Tues, 4:15pm-6:15pm. 2,4 credits. Domna Stanton. Cross listed with FREN 87000. 

ENGL 82100: Queering the Renaissance, 2022. Mondays 11:45 AM - 1:45 PM. 2/3/4 Credits. Mario DiGangi. 

HIST 72110: Globalizing the Enlightenment, Thurs, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 3 credits.  Helena Rosenblatt. 

GEMS 83100: The Problem of Race in Early Modern Studies, Mondays, 6:30pm-8:30pm, 3 credits, Prof. Miles Grier. Cross listed with MALS 78500. 

In a provocative comparison of witchcraft to the conjuring of races, the historian Barbara Fields and sociologist Karen Fields argue that race is not a legal code or a scientific concept by a collective social process governing “what goes with what and whom (sumptuary codes), how different people must deal with each other (rituals of deference and dominance), where human kinship begins and ends (blood) and how [members of one racial community] look at themselves and each other.” The Fields sisters map an intersectional terrain of race-making that puts traditional historical periodization under pressure.  This course is designed to familiarize students with the trouble that race causes in the study of early modernity (roughly 1450-1820), including challenges to national history and to the very term "early modern period." Readings will come from multiple disciplines and theoretical approaches, helping us consider that fundamental question from the vantage point of Arabs, black Africans, Native Americans, Jews, as well as the French, Spanish, Irish, and English.   

GEMS 83100: Theatre in Society: Festive and Ritual Performance, Thursdays, 2:00pm-4:00pm, 3 credits, Professor Erika Lin.  Cross-listed with THEA 86000. 

This course will examine theories and practices of festive and ritual performance in a range of times and places and will explore their implications for theatre as both an aesthetic object and an efficacious performative enactment. Topics for discussion may include: religious ritual and popular devotion; dance, gesture, and movement; games and sports; roleplaying, especially in relation to race, gender, sexual identity, and class; icons and objects; magic, astrology, and witchcraft; birth and funeral rites; nonlinear temporalities; ritual space and place; holidays and calendar customs; animals and environment; food and drink; violence and combat; erotics and sexuality. Each class session will bring together disparate theatre and performance practices by centering on a particular theme. For instance, we might consider popular devotion in Carnival and Hindu processional drama; audience affect among seventeenth-century Caribbean black ritual healers and twentieth-century U.S. reinvented saint traditions; racial impersonation in relation to commedia’s legacy and Philadelphia mummers; performativity in Malaysian spirit possession and modern pagan witchcraft; and altars and other objects in feminist ritual acts. Culturally specific theatre and performance practices will be analyzed in relation to theoretical work by writers such as Joseph Roach, Diana Taylor, Max Harris, Claire Sponsler, Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, Mikhail Bakhtin, Catherine Bell, Kay Turner, Marina Warner, Johan Huizinga, Brian Sutton-Smith, Carlo Ginzburg, Peter Burke, and Ronald Hutton. Evaluation: active class participation, short weekly response papers, possible brief in-class presentation, research proposal with annotated bibliography, and a final paper. 

Students who are working towards the Certificate in Global Early Modern Studies must write the final paper on an early modern topic in order to have it count towards the Certificate. 

GEMS 83100: Representing Race, Wednesdays, 2:00pm-4:00pm, 3 credits, Professor Judy Sund. Cross-listed with ART 70010.

The course begins with a panhistoric survey of the way “black” people have been represented in the Western world, with emphasis on the ancient and Medieval origins of enduring tropes of blackness and consideration of the question whether “race” is a viable term in discussions of visual cultures that predate the invention of racial categories. This overview prefaces discussion of their re-presentations in modern art; of Black self-representation (including contemporary artists’ pushbacks against longstanding tropes); and of museological re-presentations in current exhibitions and installations.  The class will include visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where curators will discuss the intents and strategies that shaped the Afrofuturist period room (‘Before Yesterday We Could Fly”) and the Carpeaux exhibition (“Why Born a Slave!”). 

GEMS 72100: Introduction to Global Early Modern Studies, GC: Wednesdays, 6:30pm-8:30pm, 3 credits, Prof. Anna Akasoy. Cross listed with MALS 74600. 

The field of global early modern studies operates with the interdependence of two elements, one related to geography, the other to periodization. The period of early modernity gains its distinctive quality by virtue of a new quality of global connections. These connections in turn evoke an interconnected world where regions separated by religion, language and political rule are subject to the same or similar economic, political or cultural processes. A key challenge this field faces is the Eurocentrism potentially inherent in the notion of early modernity and in the legacies of imperialism and colonialism. Related challenges define the concept of the Global Renaissance. 

This course will provide an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of global early modern studies. The course will combine two components. Several faculty members of the certificate program in Global Early Modern Studies at the Graduate Center will discuss their research in visits to the course. Students will gain an impression how scholars of different disciplines who focus on different periods, geographical and cultural areas and source material approach the idea of a global early modernity. In a second component we will explore select examples of recent scholarship on Middle Eastern cultural and political history in larger regional, hemispheric or global contexts. These readings will offer insights into different modes of globalization, how global connections were established and how they became manifest. Examples range from similar aesthetic or literary tastes across cultural borders to pandemics. Topics in this component include Ottoman imperial ambitions in the Indian Ocean world, the relationship between the Renaissance and the Islamic world, diplomatic and cultural connections between early modern England and Morocco and different forms of networks (e.g., trade or the pilgrimage). The course does not require any previous familiarity with Middle Eastern history. 

The following courses will count towards certificate program requirements

ART 85000: The Art of Dress in Early Modern Europe, GC, Tuesdays, 9:30am-11:30am, 3 credits, Professor Amanda Wunder. No auditors.  In person. Room 3421. 

This interdisciplinary seminar will examine the making and meaning of clothing in Western Europe, primarily in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using a wide variety of sources and methods. We will be looking closely at the various crafts that went into making clothes (weaving, embroidery, tailoring, lace- and trim-making) and the relationship between clothing and the arts (painting, literature, and theater). To the degree that it is possible, we will work with original objects in museum collections, including textile fragments and surviving garments, vestments and armor, printed works and painted portraits. Readings will include recent scholarship on global fashion and the relationship between fashion and nature in the early modern world. 

CL 87000: Recitar cantando: Opera Librettos from Origins to the Early Classical Period, GC, Thursdays, 6:30pm-8:30pm, 2 or 4 credits, Professor Paolo Fasoli.  In person.  Room 3306. 

Opera was born in Florence at the end of the 16th century as an attempt to revive Greek classical theater, or what at the time Greek drama was thought to have been. It was the product of a collaboration and a compromise between poets and composers. Poets would abandon the then prevailing style that called for the use of endless conceits for one that favored linear understandability, while composers renounced to the extensive use of polyphony and counterpoint, adopting a monodic style and resorting to recitatives and later, increasingly, to arias. In this course, we will study the literary aspect of this still flourishing endeavor, in a historical period that stretches from the invention of opera, to Gluck’s post-Baroque “reform.” Librettos will include some of those centered on opera’s mythical numen, Orpheus (set to music by Caccini, Peri, Monteverdi, Lully, Gluck), and others adapted from early modern narrative masterpieces such as Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata.  Librettos based on Ariosto’s poem will include texts written for composers like Lully (Roland), Vivaldi (Orlando furioso, Orlando finto pazzo), Handel (Ariodante, one of his three Ariostean operas), while those inspired by Tasso will be limited, for practical and historical reasons, to librettos used by Lully (Armide, a text later set to music by Gluck), Vivaldi (Armida al campo d’Egitto), and Jommelli (Armida abbandonata). We will also devote particular attention to librettos that, while ostensibly narrating ancient historical events (Monteverdi’s Incoronazione di Poppea, Haendel’s Agrippina) actually tackled contemporary political controversies. The relationship between opera production and the discourse on power at the time the works  were conceived will be an essential element of discussion. The course will feature guest speakers (musicologists, librettists, composers) and will address, among others, issues of gender, theory and practice of dramatic adaptation, and history of operatic performance.

ENGL 82100.  Early Modern Embodiment: Race, Gender, and Sexuality, Tuesdays 11:45AM – 1:45AM.  2/4 credits.  Professor Mario DiGangi.   

In this seminar we will explore race, gender, and sexuality as overlapping and intersecting modes of embodiment in the literature and culture of premodern England. While our focus will be sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, we will consider continuities and differences between medieval, early modern, and modern constructions of race/gender/sexuality. Drama will be at the center of our investigations, but we will also examine a variety of texts from multiple genres, including poetry, visual art, prose romance, court masque, and travel narrative, in an effort to understand the tropes and formal conventions through which racial, gender, and sexual differences were made to signify. Readings will include Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Sonnets; Jonson, The Masque of Blackness; Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum; Massinger, The Renegado; Fletcher, The Island Princess; Dekker, Lust’s Dominion; Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West; Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados; and Day, Rowley, and Wilkins, The Travels of the Three English Brothers. Through the work of scholars such as Abdulhamit Arvas, Dennis Britton, Kim Hall, Geraldine Heng, Carol Mejia LaPerle, Arthur Little, Ania Loomba, Joyce Green Macdonald, Jeffrey Masten, Jennifer Morgan, Carmen Nocentelli, Melissa Sanchez, Ian Smith, and Valerie Traub, we will also consider how different theoretical and historical approaches have produced varying accounts of race/gender/sex as objects of inquiry in the premodern and contemporary eras. 

FREN 87400/ SPAN 87000: Slavery, Gender, and Resistance on Hispaniola, Mondays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 2/4 credits. Professor Sophie Maríñez. 

This course examines the institution of slavery on Ayiti/Hispaniola, the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It also explores the various modes of resistance that led to its abolition and how various authors have addressed it in their literary works. We begin with theoretical texts on what constitutes slavery, its history, legacy and contemporary forms so as to situate our focus on Hispaniola within a transhistorical, global, human rights context. We then examine the work of historians and critics addressing resistance strategies that took place on both sides of the island and which culminated with the Haitian Revolution, an event of enormous impact on the modern world and on the rise of human rights. Lastly, we analyze neo-slave narratives, that is, recent representations of the experience of the enslaved. Special attention is given to the role of gender and women’s resistance to enslavement through a close reading of novels by Haitian Marie Vieux-Chauvet and Evelyne Trouillot and the poetry of Dominican-American author Ana-Maurine Lara, among others. Readings, papers, and discussions will be in English but students are welcome to read primary texts in either French or Spanish. 

HIST 76000: The African Diaspora, Tuesdays 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM, 3 credits, Professor Herman Bennett. In-person 

By employing the heuristic concept of diaspora—and specifically the African diaspora—this course focuses on the analytical work generated by studying cultures of movement.  As scholars, we might begin by asking whether diaspora complicates our understanding of disciplinary formations—including the normative assumptions that inform the study of society and culture.  How does diaspora, for instance, enhance our perspectives on imperial, colonial, national and post-colonial formations and the ways in which they have been historically represented?  In utilizing the prism of diaspora we confront the politics of representation through which scholars render meaning out of the past and present.  For this reason, diaspora like other categories of analysis engages the vexed terrain of representation whereby scholars frame the subject of their inquiries.           

Diaspora brings into relief many of the principle categories and themes informing the social and human sciences.  It de-naturalizes many of the foundational assumptions on which contemporary social theory rests.  For this reason, we will route our conversations and readings through some of the central concepts defining social theory (state, nation, society, sovereignty, difference, stratification, race, ethnicity, religion, and culture) so as to discern how diaspora might trouble existing forms of knowledge bequeathed to us by the Renaissance, Enlightenment and Modern Era.  

On a practical professional level, the course serves as a graduate-level introduction to diasporas in general but the African diaspora in particular.  Scholarship on this subject along with its development over time and in distinct settings (the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, England and Continental Europe) introduces us to the historical profession and professionalism.  For this reason, we will devote significant time focusing and discussing how various scholars have framed and approached their scholarly projects.  Since the African diaspora as a field of study constitutes a relatively novel endeavor, most of the readings draw on works from the last few decades.  While this conveys a sense of where the field is presently at it also serves to delineate how the African diaspora draws and builds on early forms of inquiry (polity formation and the history of empire, the history of slavery and freedom, the history of racial formation, the history of colonialism, the study of trans-nationalism, etc.)  Over the semester we will constantly need to ask what defines an inquiry, an approach or a perspective as diasporic in scope.  In doing so, we will necessarily focus on an earlier body of scholarship that was associated with different fields of inquiry (slavery, race relations, African Studies, Latin American & Caribbean history, the study of religion, English Cultural Studies, etc.). 

GEMS 82100: Topics in Material History: The Early Modern Atlantic World, GC: Mondays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 2/3/4 credits, Prof. Clare Carroll. Cross listed with MALS 74700 and CL 80900. 

Transculturation in the Atlantic world will be the focus of our study of encounters between Europeans and Africans, peoples of the Caribbean, and the Americas in texts from Portuguese, Spanish, Nahuatl, French and English authors. Topics to be discussed include political versus economic interpretations of the encounter, slavery, and colonization; the geography of empire; visual narration in Meso-American codices; the intersection of gender, class and race in the creation of mestizo cultures; monsters and cannibals in maps and ethnographic writing; the construction of race before race (the pseudo-science of the 18th and 19th centuries). With each text we will examine digitized versions of originals in order to study how their material properties condition their meaning. 

Readings will be from: The Asia of João de Barros; Gomes Eanes de Zurara, The Chronicle and Discovery of Guinea; Columbus, Diario; We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico; Hernán Cortés, The Second Letter; Las Casas, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies; Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of the Incas; Sor Juana Inés de a Cruz, Response to the Very Eminent Sor Filotea de la Cruz; Montaigne, ‘On Cannibals,’ ‘On Coaches,’ Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil; Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries; Shakespeare, The Tempest, and Antony and Cleopatra. Theoretical and contextual frameworks include: Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint; Herman Bennett, African Kings and Black Slaves; Nicolás Wey Gόmez, The Tropics of Empire; Diana Magaloni Kerpel, The Colors of the New World: Artists, Materials, and the Creation of the Florentine Codex; Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire; Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind; Alessandra Russo, The Untranslatable Image; Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human; Kim Hall, Things of Darkness. 

Links to early modern manuscripts, and printed books in digitized form will be available; excerpts from English translations, and secondary readings will be posted as pdfs on Blackboard. Students taking the course for 2 credits will give an oral report and a brief written account of it; those taking the course for 3 or 4 credits will also write a longer research paper. 

GEMS 83100: Early Modern Voice, GC: Tuesdays, 2:00pm-5:00pm, 3 credits, Prof. Emily Wilbourne.  Cross listed with MUS 86100.

Amanda Weidman has argued that in modernity, voice itself is a crucial site of knowledge: simultaneously "a set of sonic, material, and literary practices shaped by culturally and historically specific moments and a category involved in discourse about personal agency, communication and representation, and political power" (2014). In this class we will consider voice in literal, material, and metaphorical senses, particularly as it relates to subjectivity and representation. We will look closely at the shift in musical style and aesthetics that occurred in Europe (particularly in Italy) around 1600, and at gendered, raced, and otherwise marked voices (and subjectivity). Case studies will include the castrato, enslaved musicians, indigenous Americans, religious colonizers and converts. 

The following courses will count towards certificate program requirements: 

CL 80900: Moral Combat: Women, Gender, and War in Italian Renaissance Literature, Thursdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 2 or 4 credits, Prof. Gerry Milligan. 

The Renaissance was a time of significant political and social unrest. These disorders are reflected in the writings of the period’s major authors, who often coded these struggles in gendered terms. The objectives of this course are to familiarize ourselves with these works, and in particular with the lively debate that questioned women’s ability to fight in wars, especially in the Italian sixteenth century; to sharpen our skills as readers of works that feature heroic female warriors and so-called “effeminate” male knights; and to explore and perhaps demystify the universal gendering of war. The course will consider Classical and Renaissance philosophical literature, epic poems penned by men and women, as well as short biographies of women in combat. Authors to be studied will include, Plato, Aristotle, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Ariosto, Tasso, Fonte, Shakespeare, and Marinella.  All texts are available in English translation. 

SPAN 82000: Maurofilia e islamofobia en la temprana modernidad española, 1492-1614, GC: Thursdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, Prof. William Childers.  

Exploraremos las tensiones culturales desatadas por la Conquista de Granada en 1492 y la imposición del cristianismo en la Península Ibérica a principios del siglo XVI. Empezaremos con el mudejarismo preexistente, manifestado en los romances fronterizos y en prácticas culturales como la zambra y aspectos artesanales: la seda, la yesería, la carpintería, la cerámica y la jardinería. Luego veremos la evolución de la representación de los musulmanes granadinos y sus descendientes a lo largo del siglo XVI, concentrándonos en el período clave entre la Guerra de las Alpujarras (1568-1571) y la expulsión de los moriscos de la Corona de Castilla (1610). Para este período, plantearemos la “cuestión morisca” con cierta complejidad. Leeremos textos de la boga maurófila en varios géneros: novela (El Abencerraje, Guerras civiles de Granada, Ozmín y Daraja); poesía (romances de Lope, Góngora y Lobo Lasso de la Vega); y teatro (El remedio en la desdicha). Yuxtapondremos con ellos documentos de archivo que reflejan el alcance popular del fenómeno, a la vez que los esfuerzos de la Monarquía y la Inquisición por mantener a la minoría vigilada y controlada. Nos asomaremos a ver algunos ejemplos de la resistencia de los propios moriscos: textos aljamiados, los llamados “libros plúmbeos”, y La historia verdadera del rey don Rodrigo de Miguel de Luna. Hablaremos del tema morisco en ambas partes del Quijote y en otros textos cervantinos, irónicamente contrastados con el discurso apologético en defensa de la expulsión (Aznar Cardona, La expulsión justificada, Gaspar de Aguilar, Expulsion de los moros de España y Jaime Bleda, Crónica de los moros de España). Finalmente haremos algunas calas en la historiografía posterior y la actualidad, viendo como la maurofilia resurge constantemente, pero sigue enfrentada hasta el día de hoy con una islamofobia que también es una dimensión permanente, al parecer, de la huella hispanoárabe en la Península. Nos orientaremos partiendo de conceptos teóricos de Bourdieu, Foucault, Pierre Nora, James C. Scott y Stuart Hall, pasados por el filtro de la teoría postcolonial (Said, Bhabha), del colonialismo interno (Aníbal Quijano), y de la “formación racial” (Omi y Winant). Aprovecharemos también los planteamientos de las generaciones de hispanistas que han estudiado estos temas desde distintos enfoques teóricos y empíricos. Este curso se impartirá en español. 

ART 83000, Charting New (and Old) Territory: Mapping in the Middle Ages GC: Weds. 4:15-6:15 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Jennifer Ball  

Maps were used by Medievals not only to document known places but also to lay claim to reli-gious and cultural histories. As the over ten-foot Armenian map known as the Tabula Choro-graphic Armenica, which covers all known sites connected to Armenia and its diaspora, attests, maps document how groups identified themselves and others, more than they charted topo-graphical features and borders.  Maps could be aspirational, as Matthew Paris' famous map of the Christian Holy Land, which he made without ever leaving his monastic cell in England. Me-dieval Christians drew their known world (mappa mundi) and included its unexplored edges, typ-ically labeled with phrases like “Here be dragons,” which seems inaccurate and amusing to mod-erns.  But the relationship between mapping and travel was complex, serving other uses, such as the reconstruction of memories or a virtual pilgrimage.   While this seminar will primarily study maps of the Medieval Mediterranean, we will utilize cartographic theoretical approaches across periods looking at works by James Ackerman, Christian Jacob, and Matthew Edney among many others. Some time will be devoted to using mapping software and web tools for one's own re-search. 

CLAS 82600 Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Ancient World, GC: Thurs. 4:15 PM – 6:15PM, 3 credits, Jennifer Roberts 

This interdisciplinary course will explore concepts of race and ethnicity in the ancient world in  readings in English in both primary and secondary sources, with emphasis on the Greek, Roman, and Hellenistic worlds. No knowledge of Latin or Greek is required, although students who can read either or both of those languages may periodically wish to meet with me for close analysis of a particular text. 

Greek and Latin literature is full of references to groups that the authors felt were “not like us.” The Greeks developed the term “barbarians” (people whose incomprehensible speech sounded like bar, bar, bar) for non-Greeks; their feelings about them were mixed, but for the most part they enjoyed articulating their own superiority. In addition, the individual Greek city-states were exclusive about their citizenship, not enfranchising immigrants or the children of immigrants, and a number of them had elaborate myths designed to explain the special characteristics they possessed that set them apart from, and above, others. Matters were more complicated in the later Greek world (the Hellenistic period of 323-30BCE) when the conquests of Alexander had spawned sprawling multi-ethnic empires, and the people we call “the Romans” were a very diverse group faced with a founding legend that painted them as the descendants of criminals and slaves.  The Roman elite was increasingly multi-ethnic as time went on; the emperors Trajan and Hadrian were both from Spain, and reign of the African emperor Septimius Severus—who spoke Latin with an accent--ushered in an era in which emperors came from all over the Mediterranean world. Despite this diversity, Roman authors enjoyed lobbing ethnic slurs at other “nationalities.” 

Profiting from our own diverse backgrounds and training, we will examine the very complex picture presented by ancient notions of race and ethnicity, and students will pursue projects that grow out of their particular backgrounds and interests. 

Readings will include: 

• Herodotus, The Histories (any translation) 

• Tacitus, Germania (any translation) 

• Rebecca Futo Kennedy, C. Sydnor Roy, and Max Goldman, Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World: An Anthology of Primary Sources in Translation (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2013 

• Denise McCoskey, Race in Antiquity and Its Legacy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012) 

CLAS 72100 Catullus, NYU: Mon. 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM, 3 credits, J. David Konstan 

Catullus: the first romantic poet in Western literature, as Yeats seems to have thought, or a learned master of Alexandrian refinement?  His brief corpus, which includes lyric poems (and a translation of Sappho), invectives, epigrams, wedding songs, a miniature epic, a proto-elegy, and a few poems that defy easy classification, survives by a slender manuscript tradition.  In this seminar, we will read the entire collection, along with a selection of scholarly interpretations, exploring the multiple facets of his literary persona.  Class time will be devoted to discussion and occasional reports, and a paper will be due at the end of the semester. 

the various influences in both directions.  We will analyze these issues in light of what are still some of the most intensely contested questions in classical scholarship, including the nature of Roman imperialism, the relationship between Rome and her colonies, the extent of aristocratic control over Roman military and political decision-making, and the reasons for the cultural shifts in the city.  We will draw on the widest possible set of evidence, primarily literary, but also archaeological, epigraphic, and numismatic. 

The class will meet for 1 hour each week. Regular attendance is required. The instructor will bring to class texts selected from the works of authors on and off the reading list, with an emphasis on prose. Students will be challenged to translate them on the spot in writing and discussion will follow of strategies for producing accurate and literal translations.

ENGL 81500.  Alternative Families in Early Modern England.  Mario DiGangi.  Tuesdays 2:00PM - 4:00PM.  2/4 credits. 
 
In contemporary parlance, an “alternative family” is one that departs from the “traditional nuclear family” of husband, wife, and biological children. While traditional families have no doubt existed, households both now and in the past are often messier than we imagine—my own childhood home comprised two parents, a (gay) biological child, a (gay) adopted child, an uncle from Italy, and a very old woman who rented the upstairs apartment). In this course, we will focus on the complex sexual, gender, racial, and class dynamics of the households depicted in early modern drama: households that contain servants, friends, apprentices, single parents, childless couples, cousins, single people, siblings, prostitutes, suitors, cuckolders, demonic familiars, and sodomites. Plays discussed might include Shakespeare, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice; Jonson, Volpone; Dekker and Webster, Westward Ho!; Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday; Rowley, Dekker, and Ford, The Witch of Edmonton; Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside; Middleton, The Family of Love; Dekker and Middleton, The Roaring Girl; Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness; Middleton, The Changeling; Brome, The English Moor. We will also look at the notorious trial of the Earl of Castlehaven and possibly at the alternative families imagined by religious sects such as the Family of Love, Ranters, and Fifth Monarchists. 
 
FREN 77400.  Women’s Stories in Premodern French. Sara McDougall. Tuesdays 4:15PM-6:15PM. 2/4 credits.  Taught in English. Cross-listed with Women’s and Gender Studies 
   
In the premodern era, French language and culture spread far and wide beyond the borders of "l'hexagone". This course will explore French stories told to, for, about, and by women between 1100 and 1700. These texts document the words and deeds of both real and imagined women, famous and infamous, and also women who history has forgotten. Our sources will include romances, poetry, plays, letters, trial records, medical and legal treatises, conduct literature, and illuminated manuscripts (the premodern version of the graphic novel). We will work from translations as well as the original, according to and accommodating the skillsets and interests of each student. Knowledge of French helpful but not in the least essential.

Hist. TBD - Literature Survey in Modern Latin America History, Herman Bennett.  
Mondays & Wednesdays at 2:00-3:30, 5 credits,  

Please email mweber@gc.cuny.edu for registration instructions. 

In recent years, some Latin Americanists have questioned the hermeneutics defining the field of colonial Latin American History.  The colonial designation some feel posits a disjuncture (or beginning) when it could be argued that continuity characterized the historical narrative.  While students of ideas, political practice, and the cultural domain have been the strongest proponents of this intervention, scholars of indigenous cultures—especially the Nahua Studies groups—share similar sentiments despite differences in scope and method.  Consequently, scholars have been utilizing terms like ‘early’ and ‘early modern’ Latin America to distinguish their work from a colonial project and its association with the rupture that Spanish hegemony allegedly implied.  Concurrently, a self-conscious collection of scholars identified as the Latin American subaltern studies group have called into question the elitist hegemony shaping the structure and content of Latin American history.  Scholars of the Latin American subaltern along with those who take issue with the occidental reasoning informing how Latin America history is currently conceived are introducing new terminology (subaltern, postcolonial, Afro-Latin American) that allegedly re-frames the Latin American past and present.  In our semester’s work, we shall explore the meanings and implications, if any, that this and other discursive shifts have had on Latin American historiography.  Even as this seminar attends to shifts in meaning and context, we will engage the substance of the existing historiography. 

This second part of a year-long course is specifically designed as an introduction to Modern Latin American History.  It is designed to prepare History graduate students for the second major field exams in Latin American history.  Courses, despite their prominence in structuring graduate programs, merely introduce students to some of the overarching historiographic and conceptual themes defining a field.  To this end, a course identifies some areas of inquiry but in doing so obscures others.  Please read the full description here. Open only to PhD Program in History students.
 
SPAN 76200 – Theater and Fiestas in Colonial Spanish America: Religion, Politics, and History in Plays and Popular Celebrations, GC: Monday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Prof. Beatriz Peña 
 
Plays and accounts of public celebrations conform a rich corpus for the scholars of the history of ideologies and mentalities as well as for the history of artistic and literary forms. Colonial celebrations solemnized Corpus Christie; extoled the prestige and the magnificence of the city; memorialized canonizations; honored births, deaths, and weddings in the Spanish royal family; and saluted viceroys and other political figures. These events incorporated plays, rituals, parades, costumes, mythological figures, and indigenous dances, among other elements, that effectively radiated messages and projected the legitimacy and self-justification of the organizers, while also showing their aspirations and pretensions. Moreover, sometimes the authors of plays and the participants in fiesta’s sequences managed to voice resistance and criticisms against the entities in power. The study of surviving plays and accounts of fiestas, set and represented in the cities of Colonial Spanish America, such as Mexico, Lima, Quito, Potosí, and Santo Domingo, in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries (Llerena, Ocaña, Estrada Medinilla, Rodríguez Urbán de la Vega, sor Juana Inés, Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela) will allow us to delve deeper into both the imaginary worlds these events put forth and the historical, political, and religious ideas they meant to transmit. The course will also track how earlier celebrations mark the way for the fiesta barroca. The analysis of the encoded political and social imperatives of the primary texts will be supported by works from Maravall, Redondo, De la Flor, Mínguez, Rodríguez Moya, Dean, among others. The class will be taught in Spanish.
    
MUS 81502: Performance Practice: Baroque,Professor Gwendolyn Toth  

This course, intended for performance majors at the doctoral level, is designed to provide students with an in-depth understanding of what performance practice means and why we study it. Specific course content includes knowledge of the conventions of musical performance during the period 1550-1800, with emphasis on the changes from Renaissance to early baroque, early baroque to high baroque, and high baroque to early classical. Students will also gain acquaintance with the development of musical instruments, music printing, and musician status, as well as changing audiences, during the time frame.First-hand sources of principal pedagogical publications of the period will be used to the extent possible. Students should gain an understanding of performance practice principles (rhetoric, phrasing, ornamentation, improvisation, instrumentation) in different periods from 1550-1800; but equally, will examine applications of performance practice in today's modern concert world internationally through critical listening. Students should attain sufficient knowledge to run an early music ensemble/collegium or teach a beginning course on historical performance. The format of the course will include introductory lectures, extensive readings, occasional assigned practical written exercises, in-class listening and discussion, area -specific (keyboard, winds, strings, voice) papers comparing recorded modern performances, and a comprehensive final exam.

THEA 86000: Transatlantic Theatre and Performance: Golden Age Spain and Pre-Conquest/Colonial Latin America, Jean Graham-Jones, Wed, 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM 

This course focuses on theatre and performance produced in Spain and Latin America during, primarily, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rather than treating Latin America as a colonial extension of the Spanish-speaking metropolis, we will respond to the "transatlantic turn" in Latin American and Peninsular studies and examine the two regions through their nearly constant (albeit often conflicted) dialogue with each other. To do this we will discuss, apply, and critique the sociocultural, political, linguistic, literary, theatrical, and performance theories of coloniality. 

After a transatlantic introduction to the period, we will look at theatre / performance practices in place in both regions before the arrival of the Spanish to the Americas and then proceed to an examination of Spain’s “Golden Age” of theatre as well as colonial theatre and performance in Latin America. We will read autos sacramentales in addition to entremeses and comedias from both sides of the Atlantic; study accounts of Corpus Christi processions in Madrid and Cuzco in addition to reconstructions of pre-Hispanic performance-scripts in Meso-America and Canada; and seek out specific examples of cultural encounter, such as the translation of a Spanish evangelical drama into Nahuatl or a colonial loa intended for a madrileño audience. Among the authors whose texts we will study are Rojas, Lope de Rueda, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Calderón de la Barca, Cervantes, Ruiz de Alarcón, sor Marcela de San Félix, Ana Caro, and sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Special consideration will be given to the role of translation in our own study of theatre and performance. 

Evaluation will be based on engaged, prepared participation, the posting of multiple short responses, an in-class contextualization of an individual theorist, and a final research paper (15-20 pages). 

GEMS 72100 – Introduction to Global Early Modern Studies, GC: W, 4:15pm-6:15pm, Room TBA, 3 credits, Professor Anna Akasoy, Cross-listed with MALS 74600 and MALS 70500

This course focuses on two historical periods and phenomena which are considered key to the formation of the modern West: the Renaissance and the Reformation. The Renaissance has been considered the period in which Europe or the West more generally came into its own. Having recovered the classical Greek heritage from its Arab custodians after the ‘dark ages’, Europe, led by Italian humanists, prepared itself for Enlightenment, secularization and modernization. Complementing this, the Reformation is associated with the profound transformation of religious culture and the confining of religion to the private sphere, eventually allowing for the rise of the secular state. 

In this course, both Renaissance and Reformation will be analyzed critically as concepts considered unique to Western history and essential to modernity. To contrast these narratives, we will explore parallels primarily in Islamic history, especially against the backdrop of arguments that a ‘Renaissance’ or a ‘Reformation’ are ‘lacking’ in Islamic culture. Furthermore, we will consider both phenomena in larger geographical and diverse cultural settings and explore to what extent they developed in emerging global contexts. In particular we will be considering to what extent developments in western European intellectual and cultural history unfolded against the backdrop of a competition and exchanges with the Ottoman Empire and Morocco under the Saadi dynasty. 

Literature discussed in this class includes: 

Jack Goody, Renaissances. The One or the Many? 

Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century 

Joel Kraemer, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam 

Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought 

The Renaissance and the Ottoman World, edited by Anna Contadini and Claire Norton 

Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds 

María Antonia Garcés, Cervantes in Algiers. A Captive’s Tale 

Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration 

Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire. Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul 

Deborah Howard, Venice and the East. The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture 1100-1500 

Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds, edited by Linda McJannet and Bernadette Andrea 

Jerry Brotton, This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World 

Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies: Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750 

Nabil Matar, Europe through Arab Eyes, 1578-1727 

Stephen Cory, Reviving the Islamic Caliphate in Early Modern Morocco 

THESE COURSES WILL FULFILL ELECTIVE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE CERTIFICATE

 CL 80900: The Past Viewed through the Binocular of the Present: 20th and 21st Century Narrative Perspectives of Early Modern Italy, GC; Wednesdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 2/4 credits, Monica Calabritto. 

Many twentieth-century Italian authors have written novels, short stories, and theatrical plays inspired by and taking place in the past. This choice allows writers to explore bygone eras and, at the same time, to express implicitly their ideas and opinions on the period in which they live. The events narrated in the texts we will read during this seminar happen more or less over a century, between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century in Italy. These are accounts of well known historical figures, such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Vincenzo Gonzaga, and Isabella D’ Este, and fictional figures, like Antonia, accused of witchcraft, whose life develops in the accurately detailed historical context of late sixteenth-century Novara.
We will start our exploration of historical fiction by reading sections of Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, to which many of the authors whose texts are featured in the seminar allude. While exploring and interpreting in these texts the relationship that the present entertains with the past and with history, we will also investigate issues of gender and identity related to the events narrated in these works and to the authors’ lives, since Anna Banti and Maria Bellonci, who wrote three of the texts we will read, created compelling female protagonists. 

Some questions addressed in this course will be: Why write a literary work that takes place in a remote past? How accurately can a writer reproduce the past that she/he is recounting in her/his text? In which way does the author insert her/his presence, the atmosphere, and mode of the present in her/his text?​

CLAS 81900 Matter and Gender in Classical Antiquity 
Prof. Emanuela Bianchi, Wed. 4:55 PM-7:35 PM 
COLIT-GA 2502/CLASS-GA 2502 
19 University Place, 318 

In the face of the rising popularity of “new materialisms,” this class examines the emergence of the notion of “matter” in classical antiquity. In short, matter, from the Latin ‘materia’ (related to mater,mother) is transmitted from Aristotle’s Greek innovation hulê (literally, wood). We will undertake close readings of key ancient primary texts, including various Presocratics, Plato’s Timaeus, Aristotle’s Physics, Metaphysics, and Generation of Animals, and Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, tracing the discourses of materiality that arise in concert with tropes of sex and gender. The guiding question here is: what can matter’s genealogical ties to the feminine tell us about the materialization of bodies and genders? At the same time, we will attend to the topographies and texture of ancient thinking about nature and materiality more broadly. Alongside a narrative of “emergence” we will also consider hermeneutic questions – what are the ethico-political stakes of a “retrieval” of antiquity and how can we determine our relationship to these distant texts? And how does a consideration of ancient modes of thought help to enrich contemporary discourses of matter and gender? To help orient our study we will draw on contemporary thinkers including Irigaray, Kristeva, Loraux, Sallis, Cavarero, as well as critically engaging Bachofen’s 19^th century conception of Mutterrecht. Some background knowledge of psychoanalytic theory is advised, as is knowledge of Greek, however all readings will be in translation.

CLAS 82500 Greek & Roman Pastoral Poetry. NYU, Silver Center, Room 503. Tuesdays, 6:30pm-8:30pm. 3 credits, John Van Sickle. 
 
A seminar querying such critical metonyms as epic, bucolic & pastoral by deconstructing texts that dramatize relatedness, belatedness, reception, origin through metapoetic tropes stocking epic no more with heroes but with herders engaged with neither war nor animal husbandry but with love engendering originary craft thematized as country chore & song.

Brief look at bucolic memes in older epic as corralled by Sicilian Theocritus into idylls, which get rebranded into eclogue books at Rome: Virgil’s Book of Bucolics—ten eclogues—supplanting bucolic Sicily with pastoral Arcadia; then the book of Calpurnius—seven eclogues—‘Sicilian,’ anticipating books—bucolic, eclogue, pastoral—as tradition: flower of metapoetic tropes from Dante, Petrarch, Mantuan, Sannazaro, Spenser, Pope, Wortley-Montague, or Frost.

Texts may be studied in translations. Seminars, after introductory remarks, to develop by considering the texts. Intertextual relations further to be pursued in two short essays from bents peculiar to diverse readers: whether construing intertexts—Greek, Latin, Italian—philologically, rhetorically, theoretically of translation, or assaying translated texts from such standpoints as receptionistics, narratologism, cultural biastics, propagandism, courtiership, cognitive psychology & blending, metonymics, metaphorology: trahat sua quemque voluptas.

FREN 83000/CL 80100: The Nation and Its Others: France and Frenchness in The Age of Louis XIV, GC: Tuesdays, 4:15-6:15 p.m., (CL version of this course, 2/4 credits, FREN version of this course, 3 credits), Domna C. Stanton, T. 

This course will begin by questioning the view that the nation is born after l789. We will consider a set of criteria for nationhood and examine the efforts of Louis XIV and his ministers to transform France into a nation state with one monarch, one law and one faith; a centralized political and cultural structure; physical boundaries/borders, and a dominating linguistic idiom.

However, our principal focus will be the idea that a nation forges an inside by creating an outside, that is, by excluding a set of groups or people. To be sure, that enterprise is doomed to fail since the outside (the other) invariably mixes with or constitutes the necessary supplement to the inside, contrary to proclaimed ideology.  Moreover, in late 17^th-century France, even insiders, such as members of the  noblesse d’épée, felt marginalized in an absolutistic monarchy, and invoked the idea of the nation over and against tyrannical Louis XIV.

The seminar will be devoted to considering five different others: the others within – a religious other (Jews); the gendered other (women); a sexual other (the sodomite) in a nation of reputedly virile Franks. The two others outside we will study are the oriental/Ottoman Turk; and the African slave transported to the French Caribbean.
Readings will include work on the nation by Anderson, Foucault and Balibar; on the early modern nation by Hampton, Bell, Sahlins and Yardeni;  historical documents, such as Salic Law and the Black Code; and primary readings by Corneille, Molière, Louis XIV, Perrault, Picard, Racine, Saint Simon;  Prideaux, Baudier and Tavernier on the Ottomans; Dufour, du Tertre, and Labat on slaves; and relevant critical texts.

Over and beyond readings and class participation, work for the course will include a presentation in class on a primary text. Those taking the course for 4 credits will also produce a 25-page research paper on some aspect of early-modern nationhood and othering to be determined in consultation with the instructor. For those taking the course for 3 credits, the paper will be no longer than 10-13 pp. Those taking the course for two credits will prepare a written version of the presentation they do in class (5-7 pp.). All students will take the final exam.
For any questions, please contact Domna Stanton (dstanton112@yahoo.com)

HIST 71100: Printing Belief, GC:  Thursdays, 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM          
3 credits, Allison Kavey. 

The history of print is deeply intertwined with the history of belief in early modern Europe.  This course will look at primary and secondary literature to investigate the ways in which the print revolution contributed to the proliferation and regularization of religious practice, the popularization of emerging sects, and the emergence of competing systems for thinking about nature and natural change.  Cheap print, broadsides, pamphlets, books of secrets, and plays will provide the majority of our primary source material, but students are encouraged to bring their own interests and interesting sources to the course with them.

THEA 86000; Festive and Ritual Performance, GC: Tuesdays, 2:00PM-4:00PM, 3 credits. Erika Lin. 

This course will examine theories and practices of festive and ritual performance in a range of times and places and will explore their implications for theatre as both an aesthetic object and an efficacious performative enactment. Topics for discussion may include: religious ritual and popular devotion; dance, gesture, and movement; games and sports; roleplaying, especially in relation to race, gender, sexual identity, and class; icons and objects; magic, astrology, and witchcraft; birth and funeral rites; nonlinear temporalities; ritual space and place; holidays and calendar customs; animals and environment; food and drink; violence and combat; erotics and sexuality. Each class session will bring together disparate theatre and performance practices by centering on a particular theme. For instance, we might consider Mardi Gras and Carnival in relation to racial impersonation; movement and religious space in Christian and Hindu processional drama; audience participation and community formation in contemporary queer theatre; site-specific performance, ecocriticism, and the history of modern pagan witchcraft; poverty and charity in mumming and other holiday begging customs; mock combat, blood sports, and dramas of ritual sacrifice; and animal masks and puppetry in diverse dance traditions. Culturally specific theatre and performance practices will be analyzed in relation to theoretical work by writers such as Joseph Roach, Diana Taylor, Max Harris, Claire Sponsler, Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, Mikhail Bakhtin, Catherine Bell, Kay Turner, Marina Warner, Johan Huizinga, Brian Sutton-Smith, Carlo Ginzburg, Peter Burke, and Ronald Hutton. Evaluation: active class participation, short weekly response papers, possible brief in-class presentation, research proposal with annotated bibliography, and a final paper.

GEMS 82100: Reading Folklore in the Early Modern World, GC: Tuesdays, 4:15-6:15, Prof. Sarah A. Covington 
Folklore has traditionally been viewed as quaint and supplementary material illustrating “hidden” voices of “the people.” This seminar will question if not overturn virtually all of the previous statement, including the use of “folklore” as a term. Folklore, or more properly, vernacular expressions and practices, emerged wherever there existed a social group, of whatever status, which expressed its shared identity by calling on past traditions. It could also enter the most elite literature, move back and forth between oral culture and text, or be entirely invented as “fakelore.” This seminar will explore these enormously fertile vernacular worlds, including the often-overlooked discipline of folkloristics, which offers historians and literary scholars new insights and methodologies into reading pre-modern texts or interpreting often opaque stories from the deeper past. Extending across Europe and the Atlantic World (including colonial North America and the Americas more generally), from the late medieval period through the eighteenth century, we will study stories and the verbal arts (including jokes and ballads), material culture and landscape, rituals and performance; we will also learn to recognize the motifs and narrative structures of tales, their contribution to the formation of group identities, and their connection to larger political, economic, social and religious contexts across time.

In addition to extensive readings on this material and classic and current works of folkloristics, students will be expected to write a substantial research paper that ideally feeds into their own dissertation or thesis/capstone topics, providing possible new sources and perspectives on their work and fields of study.

The following courses will fulfill the elective course requirements for the Certificate

 
ENGL 82100. Feisal Mohamed. Death to Tyrants!. Thursdays 11:45AM-1:45PM. 2/4 credits.
“There can be slain no sacrifice to God,” Seneca’s Hercules declares, “more acceptable than an unjust and wicked king.” The statement epitomizes much classical thought on the subject. Aristotle in the Politics praises the killing of a tyrants, and emphasizes the right of citizens to seek a public life leading to the good. Cicero is more emphatic still. Tyrants show the exact opposite of the spirit of fraternity that should govern human interactions, and so, as he puts it in De officiis, “that pestilent and abominable race should be exterminated from human society.” The Reformation’s white-hot religious controversies, and humanist re-engagement of classical thought, lead the question of tyrannicide to bubble to the surface of early modern thought. Philipp Melanchthon quoted Seneca in expressing a hope that “some strong man” would kill King Henry VIII to avenge the death of Thomas Cromwell. John Milton quotes the passage in his vigorous defense of the execution of King Charles I, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Melanchthon and Milton thus help to forge a Protestant tradition of thought on tyrannicide that includes François Hotman, John Knox, and George Buchanan, a tradition finding 20th-century expression in the thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the pacifist Lutheran minister who conspired against Hitler. We must also recognize, however, that immediately after killing the tyrant Lycus, Seneca’s Hercules is visited by a madness that leads him to kill his wife and children. Noble and necessary as it might be, tyrannicide is also symptom and expression of a deep wrench in right order. So it is in especially in early modern tragedy, that genre obsessed with ills spanning human and cosmic realms, that we see tyrannicide explored in all of its complexity.

At bottom, early modern engagements of tyrannicide are also engagements of the foundations of political society, and meditations on the proper relationship between subject and sovereign. Here we find leitmotifs of early modern political thought that continue to be revolutionary in late modernity: sovereignty is delegated from the people, not transferred to the sovereign, and so can be revoked when the people so choose; citizenship must include the right of resistance, otherwise political life is a form of slavery. We will explore the engagement of these ideas across English and Continental, Protestant and Catholic thinkers, in literary and non-literary texts.
 
Students will be expected to deliver a conference-style presentation that will form the basis of a ten-page paper, and to develop that paper into a final research essay of 16 pages.
 
Preliminary list of readings: Seneca, Hercules furens; George Buchanan, Jephtha; John Ponet, A Short Treatise of Politike Power; François Hotman, Francogallia (selections); Brutus, Vindiciae, contra tyrannos; Christopher Marlowe, The Massacre at Paris; Juan de Mariana, De rege; William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, Hamlet, and Macbeth; John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Paradise Lost, and Samson Agonistes.
 
ENGL 82100. Mario DiGangi. Early Modern Embodiment: Race, Gender, and Sexuality. Wednesdays 11:45AM-1:45PM. 2/4 credits
In this seminar we will explore race, gender, and sexuality as overlapping and intersecting modes of embodiment in the literature and culture of premodern England. While our focus will be sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, we will consider continuities and differences between medieval and early modern European discourses of race/gender/sexuality. Drama will be at the center of our investigations, but we will also examine a variety of texts from multiple genres, including love poetry, visual art, prose romance, court masque, and travel narrative, in an effort to understand the tropes and formal conventions through which racial, gender, and sexual differences were made to signify. Readings will cluster around five major topics: 1) Race/Gender/Sex and the Color of Beauty; 2) Race/Gender/Sex and Courtly Culture; 3) Race/Gender/Sex and Travel; 4) Race/Gender/Sex and Religion; 5) Race/Gender/Sex and the Global Circulation of English Honor. Readings will include Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Sonnets; Jonson, The Masque of Blackness; Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum; Massinger, The Renegado; Fletcher, The Island Princess; Dekker, Lust’s Dominion; Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West; and Day, Rowley, and Wilkins, The Travels of the Three English Brothers. Through the work of scholars such as Abdulhamit Arvas, Dennis Britton, Kim Hall, Geraldine Heng, Carol Mejia LaPerle, Arthur Little, Ania Loomba, Joyce Green Macdonald, Jeffrey Masten, Jennifer Morgan, Carmen Nocentelli, Melissa Sanchez, Ian Smith, and Valerie Traub, we will also consider how different theoretical and historical approaches have produced varying accounts of race/gender/sex as objects of inquiry in the premodern and contemporary eras.​

GEMS 72100 - Introduction to Renaissance Studies: The Problem of Race in Early Modern Studies, GC: T, 4:15pm-6:15pm. Room TBA, 3 credits, Professor Miles Grier, Crosslisted with MALS 78500.

In a 2016 issue of the Journal of the Early Republic , historian of slavery Jennifer Morgan asserted that a chronological period demarcated by the founding of the United States could never account for the history of enslaved women "whose presence in the nation-state is predicated on producing them as absent." To study the social and cultural work of race--in its necessary involvement with the production and regulation of sexuality, labor, property, and performance--would seem necessarily to put conventional means of historical periodization under pressure. How have those who study the early modern period addressed this problem? This course is designed to give us a firmer grasp on early modernity by asking for what past subjects a term such as early modern might be a meaningful epoch. Readings will come from multiple disciplines and theoretical approaches, helping us consider that fundamental question from the vantage point of Arabs, black Africans, Native Americans, as well as the French, Spanish, and English. 

Likely readings will include: 

Bennett, Herman L. African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 

Derrida, Jacques. “But, beyond... (Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon).” Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry13, no. 1 (Autumn 1986): 155–70. 

Fields, Karen E., and Barbara J. Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. New York: Verso, 2012. 

Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. 

Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press, 2018. 

Holt, Thomas C. The Problem of Race in the Twenty-First Century. New Ed. Harvard University Press, 2002. 

Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797. Routledge, 1992. 

Jones, Nicholas R. Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain. 1 edition. University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2019. 

Korda, Natasha. Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 

Loomba, Ania. “Early Modern or Early Colonial?” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies14, no. 1 (2014): 143–148. 

Matar, Nabil I. Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.  

Pietz, William. “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 13 (April 1, 1987): 23–45. 

Porter, Carolyn. “History and Literature: ‘After the New Historicism.’” New Literary History21, no. 2 (January 1, 1990): 253–72. https://doi.org/10.2307/469250. 

Rappaport, Joanne, and Tom Cummins. Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.  

Shoemaker, Nancy. A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 

Smith, Cassander L. Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. 

Smith, Ian. Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 

Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics17, no. 2 (July 1, 1987): 65–81.

Students will be expected to produce a weekly response, to lead one class discussion, and to produce a seminar paper or its equivalent. 

The following courses will count towards certificate program requirements

 
ART 72000 - Topics in Ancient Art and Architecture: Art, Materials, and Mobility in the Ancient Mediterranean, GC: R, 11:45am-1:45pm, 3 credits, Prof. Rachel Kousser
 
CLAS 70100 - Greek Rhetoric and Stylistics, GC: W, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 3 credits, Prof. David Petrain
 
CLAS 71200 - Aeschylus: Poetry, Democracy and War, R, 6:30pm-8:30pm, 3 credits, Prof. Peter Meineck, NYU, Silver Center, Room 503A
 
CLAS 71400 - Homer’s Odyssey, GC: W, 6:30pm-8:30pm, 3 credits, Prof. David Schur.
 
CLAS 72100 - Lucan's Bellum Civile, T, 6:30pm-8:30pm, 3 credits, Matthew McGowan, NYU, Silver Center, Room 503A

CLAS 73200 - Sovereignty in Roman Law, T, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 3 credits, Prof. Michael Peachin and Prof. Andrew Monson,  NYU, Silver Center, Room 503A

CLAS 81100 - Aristotle’s Rhetoric, R: 4:15pm-6:15pm, 3 credits, Prof. Laura Viidebaum, NYU, Silver Center, Room 503A

CLAS 71800 - Thucydides, Politics, Philosophy, GC: M, 6:30pm-8:30pm, 3 credits, Prof. Jennifer Roberts

CL 80100 - Cervantes's Don Quixote, GC: R, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 2/4 credits, Prof. Lía Schwartz. 

CL 88400-Machiavelli and the Problem of Evil, GC: T, 6:30pm-8:30pm, 2,4 credits, Prof. Paul Oppenheimer.

CL 89100 - History of Literary Theory & Criticism I, GC: W, 4:15-6:15pm, 4 credits, Prof. Paola Ureni.
 
ENGL 80700 - Books of Marvels and Travels: The Middle Ages and Beyond. T, 4:15pm - 6:15pm, 2/4 Credits.  Prof. Steven F. Kruger.
 
ENGL 81100 - Actors, Bodies, and Performance in Early Modern England. R, 2:00PM - 4:00PM. 2/4 Credits. Prof. Tanya Pollard.

FREN 70500 - Writing the Self: From Augustine to Selfies. T, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 2/4 credits. Prof. Domna Stanton. 

HIST 75000 - The Age of Empires, 1492-1750. R, 2:00pm-4:00pm, 3 credits.  Prof. David Waldstreicher.
 
THEA 80300 - Seminar in Theatre Theory & Criticism: Theorizing the Oceanic from Antony and Cleopatra to John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea.  W, 2:00pm-4:00pm, 3 credits, Prof. Maurya Wickstrom.

RSCP 83100 - An instance of the Fingerpost: Early Modern Evidence in Comparative Perspective, GC: T, 4:15pm-6:15pm. Room TBA, 3/4 credits, Professor Monica Calabritto, Crosslisted with CL 89000.

**Students needing the 2 or 4 credit option should register under CL 89000**

Many scholars from fields as varied as history of science and medicine, philosophy, legal history and history have reflected on the notion of evidence and its affiliated terms—proof, sign, fact. They have investigated these terms in light of the tectonic changes that occurred in the early modern period vis-à-vis the approach that men of science, jurists, and historians took towards the concept of experience. 

Early modern evidence was at the center of a web of connections among multiple disciplines, including literature, at a moment in which a new method of experimentation and truth finding was taking shape in Europe. Francis Bacon used the expression “instance of the fingerpost” in the Novum Organum (book 2, "Aphorisms", Section XXXVI), to illustrate evidence that would direct, as a signpost, to the truth. In order to explore how the concepts of experience, evidence and proof changed in radical ways between the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century, we will read sections from Bacon’s Novum Organum, Montaigne’s Essays, Vesalius’ The Fabric of the Human Body, and Galileo’s Assayer_ and Sidereal Messenger. We will also read excerpts from early modern legal treatises defining the terms of evidence and proof, and the way these new definitions of old terms were transposed in historical and literary narratives.

The following courses will fulfill the elective course requirements for the Certificate

 
FRENCH 73000 – Orientalisms in Early Modern France, GC: T, 2:00pm - 4:00pm, Room TBA, 2/3/4 credits, Professor Domna C. Stanton

This course will focus on Orientalisms in France's relations with the Ottoman  empire. Beginning with 16th-century orientalists such as Postel (long before Said's Orientalism begins to track these figures), we will examine theories of Orientalisms as well as a number of discourses, including cartographic representations, travel narratives and letters; commercial relations (and the European desire for oriental luxury items); pilgrimages; conversion narratives from Christian to Muslim to Christian; and phantasms of oriental harems and baths, and the gendering of the Orient itself as feminine and effeminate, despite the coincident stereotype of Turks as militaristic, violent, and cruel. We will consider closely theatrical works produced in France (Paris and the port city of Rouen) in the period 1600-1680 (e.g. Manfray,  La rhodienne (1621), Scudéry,  L'amant libéral (1638), Desfontaines, Perside (1644), when openness and "tolerance" of alterity seem to decline during the reign of Louis XIV (e.g. Molière, Le bourgeois gentilhomme; Racine, Bajazet), just when the Ottoman threat to Europe is temporarily ended by the European victory at Vienna in (1683).  We will analyze the nature of the perceived threat of and desire for Oriental despotism during the long reign of Louis XIV.

The course will be conducted in English. A reading knowledge of early-modern French is important. In addition to close readings of primary as well as historical and theoretical texts, work for the course will include an in-class presentation of one primary reading and a final exam. After consultation with the instructor, those taking the course for four credits will submit a 25-page research paper; those taking it for three credits, will produce a 10-13-page research paper. Those who wish to take the course for two credits will write up their class presentation (5-7-pages) and take the final exam.

The research papers can deal with sites other than France, including states bordering the Mediterranean, England or Northern  Europe.

The syllabus for the course will be posted on line by January 15, 2019. Readings for the course will appear on Blackboard before the first class.

Please address any questions to Domna Stanton at dstanton112@yahoo.com

Courses of interest

Phil 77600: Classics in the Philosophy of Art, GC: T, 11:45am-1:45pm., Rm TBA, 4 credits, Prof.  Nickolas Pappas and Prof. Noel Carroll

This course comprises close readings of classics in the history of the philosophy of art in the Western tradition, beginning with Plato and extending to the early twentieth century.  Some figures to be explored include Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and others.  There are no prerequisites for the course. The course requirement is a final paper.

RSCP 72100 - Introduction to Renaissance Studies:  Comparative Lyric Poetry, GC: T, 2:00-4:00pm., Rm 4422, 3/4 credits, Prof. Steve Monte, Cross listed with CL 80900 and ENG 71000

This course will explore the explosion of poetic productivity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as efforts to justify an essential social and cultural activity. In his Apology for Poetry, Philip Sidney says that the poet “lifted up with the vigor of his own invention” can make a world “better than nature bringeth forth.” Edmund Spenser creates an idealized alternative world in The Faerie Queene and John Milton aspires in Paradise Lost to achieve “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” in Paradise Lost and to comprehend God’s “eternal providence.” Readings include the poetry of Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, William Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, John Donne, and George Herbert, and special attention will be paid to the poetry and poetics of Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton. To highlight issues of translation, nationality, and intertextual appropriation, some consideration will be given to Italian and French poets such as Petrarch, Pierre Ronsard, Joachim Du Bellay, and Louise Labé—including Du Bellay’s La Défense et illustration de la language française. While no knowledge of Italian or French is required, students who work in those languages are welcome in the seminar. 
 
Other topics considered will include: 1) A comparison of early modern theories and defenses of poetry – Sidney’s Apology, Puttenham’s Art of English Poetry, Daniel’s Musophilus -- with contemporary critical and theoretical works by John Hollander, Mark Edmundson, Marjorie Perloff, Rita Felski, and others 2) Ambivalent attitudes throughout the Renaissance and Reformation towards imagination and fantasy. 3) The establishment of the poet as an exalted cultural authority and the emergence of the author as a brand and cultural agent.

COURSES THAT WILL FULFILL ELECTIVE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE CERTIFICATE

HIST 72500 - Fashion and Experience in Early Modern Europe, GC: Mondays, 2:00PM-4:00PM., Rm TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Amanda Wunder [63371]

This seminar will examine the art and history of fashion in early modern Europe from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Precious few secular garments made before the eighteenth century survive, so we will be trying out a variety of sources and methods to gain a sense of the “period eye” to see and understand what clothing meant from various perspectives in the early modern period.  Seeking to understand the processes behind change and innovation in fashion, we will be looking at developments in textiles and clothing as they took place within broader historical contexts (global, political, economic, religious, and social). Students will acquire a firm grounding in the historiography of the field, which has been especially rich and dynamic in recent years. In class sessions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other collections we will learn from original objects such as: textiles, vestments, and accessories; printed costume books and tailoring manuals; portraiture; arms and armor. Other classes will include practical experience working with a variety of primary sources and methods, including historic reconstruction. 
This interdisciplinary course is not restricted to students in Art History and History; students from other departments and programs are very welcome. Please email Prof. Wunder (Amanda.Wunder@lehman.cuny.edu) if you need permission to enroll. Auditors will be accepted by permission of instructor only if space allows.
* Important note: About half of the class sessions will meet away from the Graduate Center at museums in Manhattan (mostly the Metropolitan Museum of Art); please allow for travel time in your schedule. Also note that the Registrar has scheduled one class on a Thursday (Sept. 6).
Requirements:
Active participation and regular contributions to classroom discussions and museum visits; oral presentation on at least one week’s readings. Written assignments: Short paper based on a primary source or museum object due mid-semester; final research paper and brief oral presentation at the end of the term.
Preliminary Reading:
These and other course materials will be available on DropBox; email Prof. Wunder for the link after enrolling in the course.
Timothy McCall, “Materials for Renaissance Fashion,” Renaissance Quarterly 70, no. 4 (2017): 1449-64. 
Sarah-Grace Heller, “The Birth of Fashion,” chapter 2 in Fashion in Medieval France (2007); reprinted in The Fashion History Reader, ed. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (2010).
 
ART 70010 - Exoticisms, GC: Thursdays, 2:00pm-4:00pm, Rm TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Judy Sund (jsund@gc.cuny.edu) [63372]

This course surveys the processes by which non-European peoples and production have been reimagined and repurposed in a variety of modern Western media (from painting and architecture to advertising, performance and body modification) – in the service of projects ranging from the propagandistic and commercial to the escapist and erotic. Although exoticist practices are age-old, this course focuses on those that burgeoned in the Age of Discovery and flourished in tandem with 18th- and 19th-century colonialism and imperialism, and surging tourism. Theories of the exotic – as outlined by Victor Segalen, James Clifford, Tzvetan Todorov, Roger Célestin, Deborah Root, Peter Mason, et al. – and considerations of parallel developments in literature inform discussions of chinoiserie and japonisme; Orientalism; portrayals of the Noble Savage; and Western constructions of race and its hierarchies.
 
CL 80900 - Clues, Evidence and Conjectural Paradigm: A Comparative Investigation of Early Modern Narratives, GC: Wednesdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 2-4 credits, Prof. Monica Calabritto
 
CL 80900 - The Art of Fiction in Cervantes. From the Exemplary Novels to Quijote, GC: Thursdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 2-4 credits, Prof. Lia Schwartz

ENGL 78100 – Renaissance Sex, GC: Tuesdays, 11:45am-1:45pm, 2/4 credits, Prof. Mario DiGangi and Prof. William Fisher [64633]

This seminar will explore the repertoire of scholarly methods that have been used for understanding sex and sexuality in early modern literature, with an eye to current debates and future directions in the field. We will consider how different theoretical and historical approaches have produced varying accounts of sex as an object of inquiry; we will engage various reading strategies for elucidating sexual meaning in literary and non-literary texts; and we will reflect critically on questions of evidence, language, genre, theatricality, and periodization.
The following kinds of questions will guide our discussions: What are the consequences of emphasizing historical alterity or historical continuity in the study of sex? Are concepts such as sexual identity, subjectivity, or community useful in analyzing early modern modes of eroticism? How was sex itself depicted? Which acts feature regularly in texts from the period, and which appear to have been unknown? How were sex acts and erotic discourses structured by social categories such as race, gender and class? How were phenomena like consent and sexual violence conceptualized? How might the field ultimately move beyond familiar sexual paradigms and taxonomies (i.e., homoeroticism/heteroeroticism) and access alternative forms of erotic knowledge, practice, and relationality in early modern culture? How do particular textual and performative elements (i.e., puns, soliloquies, gestures, costumes, voices, metatheatrical moments, offstage actions) convey or confound sexual meaning?
 
Readings:
In addressing these questions, we will be examining a wide range of primary materials, from plays and poetry to court cases and pornography. First, we will be reading a number of canonical literary texts such as Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Othello, Marlowe’s Edward II, Barnfield’s The Affectionate Shepherd, Donne’s “Sappho to Philaenis” and the poems of Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn. In addition, we will be exploring “pornographic” texts like Rochester’s Sodom, The School of Venus, Nashe’s Choise of Valentinesand other poems featuring dildos like Seignor Dildo’s Adventures in Britain. Finally, we will study an array of non-literary texts including medical treatises (such as John Henry Meibom’s The Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs and Giles Jacob’s Treatise of Hermaphrodites) and court cases (such as the infamous Castlehaven trial).
 

ENGL 78100 – Renaissance Sex, GC: Tuesdays, 11:45am-1:45pm, 2/4 credits, Prof. Mario DiGangi and Prof. William Fisher [64633]

This seminar will explore the repertoire of scholarly methods that have been used for understanding sex and sexuality in early modern literature, with an eye to current debates and future directions in the field. We will consider how different theoretical and historical approaches have produced varying accounts of sex as an object of inquiry; we will engage various reading strategies for elucidating sexual meaning in literary and non-literary texts; and we will reflect critically on questions of evidence, language, genre, theatricality, and periodization.
The following kinds of questions will guide our discussions: What are the consequences of emphasizing historical alterity or historical continuity in the study of sex? Are concepts such as sexual identity, subjectivity, or community useful in analyzing early modern modes of eroticism? How was sex itself depicted? Which acts feature regularly in texts from the period, and which appear to have been unknown? How were sex acts and erotic discourses structured by social categories such as race, gender and class? How were phenomena like consent and sexual violence conceptualized? How might the field ultimately move beyond familiar sexual paradigms and taxonomies (i.e., homoeroticism/heteroeroticism) and access alternative forms of erotic knowledge, practice, and relationality in early modern culture? How do particular textual and performative elements (i.e., puns, soliloquies, gestures, costumes, voices, metatheatrical moments, offstage actions) convey or confound sexual meaning?
 
Readings:
In addressing these questions, we will be examining a wide range of primary materials, from plays and poetry to court cases and pornography. First, we will be reading a number of canonical literary texts such as Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Othello, Marlowe’s Edward II, Barnfield’s The Affectionate Shepherd, Donne’s “Sappho to Philaenis” and the poems of Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn. In addition, we will be exploring “pornographic” texts like Rochester’s Sodom, The School of Venus, Nashe’s Choise of Valentinesand other poems featuring dildos like Seignor Dildo’s Adventures in Britain. Finally, we will study an array of non-literary texts including medical treatises (such as John Henry Meibom’s The Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs and Giles Jacob’s Treatise of Hermaphrodites) and court cases (such as the infamous Castlehaven trial).


ENGL 82100 – Land, Liberty, and Slavery from Hobbes to Defoe, GC: Wednesdays, 2:00pm-4:00pm, 2/4 credits, Prof. Feisal Mohamed [64642]

This course will consider together several phenomena often considered separately: the conversion of arable land to pasture, which imposed unprecedented hardships on tenant farmers in early modern England; the central place of property in seventeenth-century English formulations of political liberty; and the rising prevalence, and increasing racialization, of forced labor in the period. Taken together, these radically refigure the relationship between power, space, and subjectivity.
We will read the seminal works of political theory produced in England’s tumultuous seventeenth century, those of Hobbes, Harrington, Filmer, and Locke. These will be connected to larger debates in European political thought on dominium, a right of possession, and imperium, the power to command. We will also explore how transformations of labor and property necessarily exert influence in literature, not only at the level of content but also at that of genre and mode. Along the way, we will essay a detailed accounting of England’s efforts to expand its mercantilist activity to the West and East, goaded by rivalry with other European powers, especially Spain and the Netherlands. In exploring these questions, we will look at material arising from both sides of the Atlantic, as well as work in slavery studies and space studies. Assignments will be a seminar presentation and paper, to be developed into a research paper of 15 double-spaced pages.

Preliminary list of literary texts:

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Anne Bradstreet, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America
Andrew Marvell, selected poems
James Harrington, Oceana
Sir William Davenant, The Siege of Rhodes
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
Robert Filmer, Patriarcha
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
 
FREN 87200 – Entre Rire et Châtiment: La Formation de la Satire moderne à la Renaissance, GC: Thursdays, 6:30pm-8:30pm, 2/4 credits, Prof. Bernd Renner [63526]

La satire est une des formes d’expression littéraire les plus complexes. Elle se place à la fois dans un contexte strictement littéraire (p. ex. parodie de genres tels l’épopée où de conventions telles l’amour courtois) et dans un cadre politique, religieux ou social. Son objectif principal est d’habitude de nature morale : elle vise à guérir les maux de la société à travers une multitude d’approches critiques et esthétiques. La Renaissance offre un champ d’étude particulièrement fertile pour la satire. De nombreuses traditions satiriques différentes se mélangent à cette époque pour aboutir au concept moderne de la forme : le modèle classique de la satire en vers (Lucilius, Horace, Perse, Juvénal), L’épigramme (Martial), la variante ménippéenne (Lucien de Samosate), le drame satyrique grec et la variante populaire en vernaculaire (farce et sottie). Quasiment tous les auteurs, canoniques ou non, souscrivent à cette écriture militante riche et complexe qui combine de manière exemplaire un éventail représentatif d’aspects littéraires et extralittéraires. L’étude de la satire renaissante nous permettra donc de mieux comprendre l’évolution de la littérature française (et européenne) en vernaculaire dont les débuts étaient dominés par les soucis de l’imitatio et de l’anoblissement des lettres nationales.
 
Liste préliminaire des textes étudiés :
 La Farce de Maître Pathelin.
--François Rabelais, Pantagruel. Paris : Seuil, 1996.
--Clément Marot, « L’Enfer ».
--Bonaventure Des Périers, Le Cymbalum mundi.
--Barthélemy Aneau, Lyon marchant. Satire françoyse.
--Le Paradoxe contre les Lettres.
--Joachim Du Bellay, Les Regrets ; Divers Jeux rustiques.
--Pierre de Ronsard, Discours des Misères de ce Temps.
--Agrippa d’Aubigné, Les Tragiques.
--La Satyre Menippee.
 
 
HIST 76900- Latin American and Caribbean Slave Societies in Comparative Perspective with Slavery in the United States, GC: Thursdays, 4:15-6:15 p.m, 3 credits, Prof. Laird Bergad
 
This course will examine some of the main themes found in the vast historiography on Latin American and Caribbean slavery in comparative perspective with slave systems in the United States.  Comparative patterns of race relations will also be considered. Readings have been selected from some, not all, of the principal scholars who have worked on the theme of slavery; and they are reflective of topics that have been the subject of recent research and debate. The most exhaustive bibliographical guide to works on slavery is Joseph C. Miller, Slavery and Slaving in World History:  A Bibliography, 1900 - 1991 (Millwood, New York:  Kraus International Publications, 1993). This has been updated as Slavery and Slaving in World History: A Bibliography - Vol 2, 1992-96 (Armonk NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999). More importantly a searchable web site has been developed by Miller and other collaborators at the following internet address: http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/bib/index.php Also see Seymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. A Historical Guide to World Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
 
There are many synthetic surveys on slavery and the slave trade to Latin America and the Caribbean that you may use for general reference. It is recommended that you read, or become familiar with, Herbert S. Klein and Ben Vinson III, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean  (second edition) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Klein’s survey of the slave trade, Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade  (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Robin Blackburn’s book is also recommended: The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation, and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011), as well as Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
 
An expansive survey which transcends slavery, and which focuses only upon the 19th and 20th centuries is George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
 
Latin American and Caribbean slavery is best understood in comparative perspective, which is one of the objectives of this course.  The literature on U.S. slavery is enormous.  There are several survey histories that I recommend which summarize much research. These are: Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone:  The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America(Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 2003); Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003); Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York:  W.W. Norton, 1989); and David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
 
HIST 76000- Colonial Latin America, GC: Wednesdays, 6:30-8:30pm, 3 credits, Prof. Herman Bennett
 
In recent years, some Latin Americanists have questioned the hermeneutics defining the field of colonial Latin American History.  The colonial designation some feel posits a disjuncture (or beginning) when it could be argued that continuity characterized the historical narrative.  While students of ideas, political practice, and the cultural domain have been the strongest proponents of this intervention, scholars of indigenous cultures—especially the Nahua Studies groups—share similar sentiments despite differences in scope and method.  Consequently, scholars have been utilizing terms like ‘early’ and ‘early modern’ Latin America to distinguish their work from a colonial project and its association with the rupture that Spanish hegemony allegedly implied.  Concurrently, a self-conscious collection of scholars identified as the Latin American subaltern studies group have called into question the elitist hegemony shaping the structure and content of Latin American history.  Scholars of the Latin American subaltern along with those who take issue with the occidental reasoning informing how Latin America history is currently conceived are introducing new terminology (subaltern, postcolonial, Afro-Latin American) that allegedly re-frames the Latin American past and present.  In our semester’s work, we shall explore the meanings and implications, if any, that this and other discursive shifts have had on Latin American historiography.  Even as this seminar attends to shifts in meaning and context, we will engage the substance of the existing historiography.
 
This course is specifically designed as an introduction to the early modern/colonial field and is designed to prepare History graduate students for the major field exam in Latin American history.  Courses, despite their prominence in structuring graduate programs, merely introduce students to some of the overarching historiographic and conceptual themes defining a field.  To this end, a course identifies some areas of inquiry but in doing so obscures others.  At the core of this seminar are three thematic foci:
 
Firstly) Utilizing the concepts of movement, power, and difference one focus is to examine the formation of a Renaissance Atlantic in the period of 1400 to 1600 in which Iberian History and early Latin America played a central yet still overlooked role.  Framed as a question, I am asking: in what ways does recent scholarship on medieval and early modern Iberia call for a reconsideration of colonial Latin America history?  Ostensibly a historiographical question, it has epistemic implications.  In view that recent scholarship on the Iberian past has been transformative, what implications might this have on our thinking, approach, and writing of early Latin American history?  Successive turns, most notably the imperial and Atlantic ones, complicate matters by underscoring how nineteenth-century nationalist fabrications conjured up a mythic Iberia with profound consequences for the foundational representations of colonial Latin America history.
 
Secondly) through the prism of political economy this course will also bring into relief the genealogy of economy and government in early modern Iberia and the early modern Atlantic. In the wake of successive intellectual turns (the linguistic, feminist, cultural, the post-colonial, and archival turn), our engagement with the cultural domain has become finely honed but at the expense of our understanding of the social.  This dynamic, in many respects, reflects the working of related but distinct renderings of the political.  Arguably, for cultural historians narrating the political entails discursive formations and an awareness of how political rationalities are grafted on to cultural codes and grammars.  While we now understand how the political related to the social draws on similar discursive formations, it also embodies a materiality—signified in the relationship of the political to the economy as in ‘political economy’—that configures it as distinct.   To this end, the course will introduce students to a range of authors and texts which will develop our analytical skills as they relate to the realm of political economy.  To be clear, this aspect of the course is not intended to mean the study of economics or political science for historians.  While abstractions of the “economy” or “politics” figure prominently in the semester’s work, the course focuses on the contextualized meanings that these terms and related concepts implied for various authors and historical actors through time and space.  At the same time, it should be understood that this course does not offer a formalized discussion of ‘political economy’ framed through a historiography self-consciously stylized as such.  Instead by bringing a distinct selection of authors and texts into conversation seminar participants will hopefully refine their acumen for thinking and writing about the temporal and spatial specificity of early modern ‘political economy.’
 
Thirdly) this course seeks to situate the study of the African diaspora in the early modern period.  Accomplishing this task is no simple feat since the study of the black experiences in the New World and the African diaspora in general emerged as subjects of scholarly inquiry burdened by the weight of European colonial expansion and racial dominance.  In our efforts to route the study of the African diaspora through another scholarly abstraction—the early modern period—we will highlight the modern genealogies of many of our analytical concepts.  The intent here is not simply to offer a relentless critique but to foster ever more awareness for historical specificity.  By employing the heuristic concept of diaspora—and specifically the African diaspora—another thematic focus resides in the analytical work generated by studying cultures of movement.  As scholars, we might begin by asking whether diaspora complicates our understanding of disciplinary formations—including the normative assumptions that inform the study of society and culture.  How does diaspora, for instance, enhance our perspectives on imperial and colonial formations and the ways in which they have been historically represented?  In utilizing the prism of diaspora we confront the politics of representation through which scholars render meaning out of the past and present.  For this reason, diaspora like other categories of analysis engages the vexed terrain of representation whereby scholars frame the subject of their inquiries.
 
In reading and thinking about syllabi, you need to think about courses stated objectives, the instructor’s intent in relationship to those objectives, and the work a particular syllabus performs in relationship to previous and present intellectual formations.   Though designed for students in the Latin American field, the thematic and theoretical concerns informing the assigned readings and the course itself make this seminar accessible and of interest to early modern Europeanists, colonial Americanists, students of race, anthropology and cultural formations along with those interested in the current state of early modern cultural theories.