Spring 2025

CLA 347 / NES 359 / HLS 377
The Roman East and the Silk Road
Supratik Baralay
In this class you will learn about Roman encounters with the histories and peoples of the Middle East. In the first weeks, you will think about the legacy of Alexander the Great and the Macedonians in the Middle East and Central Asia. Then you will examine the shape and the devastating effects of Roman imperialism in the Middle East, as described by the peoples who experienced it. In the third part of the course, you will consider the limits of Roman expansion that were imposed by Iran's Parthian horse-lords. Finally, you will analyze how the Roman, Parthian, and Han empires became entangled across the Silk Roads, before the system collapsed.

HUM 325 / EAS 325 / ENG 324 / COM 473
Nostalgia
Andrea Capra and Federico Marcon
Nostalgia is one of the most pervasive and multifaceted feelings of our time; an engine of artistic production, it informs the works of Homer and James Joyce. One can be nostalgic for childhood or for a time when one's country was different. Fashion and music are imbued with nostalgic feelings, as are countless videos on our feeds. This class studies nostalgia from an interdisciplinary and global perspective: leveraging literature, cinema, philosophy, history, and cultural studies, it will explore how nostalgia is formed, and its role in the arts and society.

HIS 453 / AFS 451 / NES 453 / AAS 453
History of Slavery in Africa and the Middle East
Lacy Feigh
History of Slavery in Africa and the Middle East focuses on the experiences of enslaved individuals and the powerful social, legal, and political regimes that attempted to define their subjection. Attention will be concentrated on the themes of race, gender, class, and diaspora to examine how these histories both differ from and are informed by histories of slavery globally. This course will analyze the relationship between abolitionist discourses and imperialism, underpinning the ongoing transition from slavery to freedom. Students will engage with literature to understand how historical production has distorted and silenced enslaved lives.

ANT 354 / HUM 373
Digital Anthropology: Methods for Exploring Virtual Worlds
Akil Fletcher
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, human experience has become heavily defined by our digital/virtual interactions. From Zoom calls and classes online to meeting up with friends in magical lands in video games, we have come to rely on digital technologies in ways rarely seen in the past. But how does one go about understanding our new digital condition? And how might one develop research around the many virtual worlds that have come to exist? This course is an anthropological exploration of the history of human interaction with the internet, social media, virtual worlds, and other forms of digital existence.

AAS 304 / HIS 305
Topics in African American Culture & Life - Body Politics: Black Health Activism in African America
Kelsey Henry
This course surveys histories of Black health activism and their legacies in the US. It addresses the pursuit of Black health and healing from the Atlantic slave trade through twenty-first century Black feminist manifestos on radical self-care. We will center the political labor and social movements of Black patients, doctors, scientists, and organizers - and their efforts to secure health equity for Black Americans - as fundamental to the arc of the long Civil Rights movement. Topics include: the Black Panthers' free clinics, Black eugenics, reproductive justice, "citizen" science, the anti-psychiatry movement, and HIV/AIDS activism.

COM 360 / ENG 362 / ANT 376
Ocean Outlaws: Pirates, Mutineers and the Invention of Freedom
Chloe Howe Haralambous
This course traces the social and literary history of maritime rebellion. From Pirates of the Caribbean to the specter of "Somali hijacking", Wikileaks, and the Orca uprising, seafaring (or web-surfing) agitators are back. Tracking the figure of the pirate in novels, ethnographies, films, comics, and counter-histories from the 16th century to the present, this course will approach piracy from three angles: "enemies of all mankind" and the making of international political orders; pirate predation and rebellion in the circuits of capital and Empire; mutiny, slave revolt and the new social orders that emerge out of pirate utopias.

HIS 319 / EAS 319
Japan in Korea, Korea in Japan
Sara Kang
The modern histories of Japan and Korea cannot be understood without close attention to the other. This seminar explores major events, starting with the fall of the Choson Dynasty, the Japanese colonial period, the creation of two Koreas, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and decolonization and social revolutions. Students will read primary texts, including memoirs, autobiographies, and novels, and engage with major works and debates on modern Japan and Korea. By adopting a comparative and transnational perspective, the course aims to reveal new ways and approaches to understanding the fraught histories of Japan in Korea, and Korea in Japan.

ANT 313 / HUM 303
Language, Disability, and Science
Timothy Loh
This upper-level seminar examines how ideas about language, disability, and science shape each other in contexts ranging from everyday life to expert medical practice. We look at how anthropologists and historians of science and technology have (or have not) considered disability and language in their research and, conversely, how scientific and technological innovations, like new media technologies, can change practices of communication and conceptions of disability.

ENG 328 / THR 324
Revenge Tragedy Beyond Hamlet
Bailey Sincox
"Revenge my foul and most unnatural murder!" A ghost compels his conflicted son, Hamlet, to address something rotten in the state of Denmark with these words in Shakespeare's great tragedy. Whether or not you have read Hamlet, or have seen it performed, you probably know the story. This course aims to recontextualize Hamlet in early modern English theater history. Through study of other "revenge tragedy" plays from this period, seminar participants will gain new perspective on Hamlet's embeddedness in a culture and an art form probing the ethics of seeking justice through violence.

REL 395 / SAS 395
Tantric Religion in South Asia
Guy St. Amant
This course introduces students to the Tantric traditions of premodern India through a close study of the idealized religious careers of Tantric initiates. It uses primary sources (in translation) to reconstruct the milestones, practices, and experiences that defined what it meant to be a member of a Hindu or Buddhist Tantric community. We will consider especially the broader religious context, Tantric initiation, and post-initiatory rituals involving yogic exercises, sexual practices, and violent sorcery. Students will also gain an understanding of the relationship between Hindu and Buddhist forms of Tantric scripture and practice.

HUM 234 / EAS 234 / COM 234
East Asian Humanities II: Traditions and Transformations
Ksenia Chizhova and Xiaoyu Xia
Second in the two-semester sequence on East Asian literary humanities, this course begins at the turn of the twentieth century and covers a range of themes in the history, literature, and culture of Japan, Korea, and China until the contemporary period. Looking into the narratives of modernity, colonialism, urban culture, and war and disaster, we will see East Asia as a space for encounters, contestations, cultural currents and countercurrents. No knowledge of East Asian languages or history is required and first-year students are welcome to take the course.