Courses

Documentaries are proliferating with increasing intensity around the world. They circulate as market commodities, forms of entertainment, and vehicles for social change. In this class we will compare different national and regional contexts of contemporary documentary, including projects created within the media industries of China, Cambodia, Chechnya, Ukraine, Nigeria, and India. We will also examine the presence of “the global” within the United States, which involves exploring questions of immigration, border-crossing, and transnational co-production. Crucial to our course will be the close analysis of how documentaries actively address civil rights struggles, oppressive government regimes, cultural trends, environmental crises, and progressive social movements to create more inclusive, equitable communities. So, too, will we examine emerging technologies (AI, virtual and augmented reality), star-studded film festivals, and the reach and impact of mega studios such as Netflix and Wanda. Guest speakers (scholars, filmmakers, programmers) working in the field will enrich our class discussions. Site visits will offer the opportunity to engage with documentary through the cultural offerings of the city. This course fulfills the Global Core requirement.

Equivalent to FREN UN1101. Designed to help students understand, speak, read, and write French, and to recognize cultural features of French-speaking communities, now with the help of a newly digitized audio program. Students learn to provide information in French about their feelings, environment, families, and daily activities. Daily assignments, quizzes, laboratory work, and screening of video material.

Prerequisites: one term of college French or one year of secondary school French. $15.00= Language Resource Fee, $15.00 = Materials Fee , Equivalent to FREN UN1102. Continues the work of French S1101D and completes the study of elementary French. Students continue to develop communicative skills, narrating recent events (past, present, and future), describing daily life activities, and learning about cultural features of France and of the wider Francophone world. Following the communicative approach, students, with the help of the instructor, learn to solve problems using the language, to communicate their feelings and opinions, and to obtain information from others. Daily assignments, quizzes, laboratory work, and screening of video materials.

Prerequisites: no previous knowledge of German required, but some background is strongly recommended. This accelerated survey of German grammar, reading techniques, and dictionary skills is designed primarily for graduate students preparing for reading proficiency exams or wishing to do research in German-language literature. In addition to translation, the course focuses on strategies for extracting general and specific information from German texts (skimming and scanning) and judging their relevance for a specific research purpose. Reading texts take students' fields of study into consideration. Although this course does not satisfy any part of the foreign language requirement for degree candidates, successful completion of the translation on the final exam fulfills the German reading proficiency requirement in most graduate programs. Students are advised that this course is a full-time commitment. Students should expect to study 2 hours every day for every hour spent in the classroom and additional time on weekends. Students who would like to gain speaking and listening skills are advised to enroll in the Intensive Elementary German I and II, or another appropriate German course. The Department of Germanic Languages will assist in selecting the appropriate course. 

This course is designed as travellers guide to medieval Europe. Its purpose is to provide a window to a long-lost world that provided the foundation of modern institutions and that continues to inspire the modern collective artistic and literary imagination with its own particularities. This course will not be a conventional history course concentrating on the grand narratives in the economic, social and political domains but rather intend to explore the day-to-day lives of the inhabitants, and attempts to have a glimpse of their mindset, their emotional spectrum, their convictions, prejudices, fears and hopes. It will be at once a historical, sociological and anthropological study of one of the most inspiring ages of European civilization. Subjects to be covered will include the birth and childhood, domestic life, sex and marriage, craftsmen and artisans, agricultural work, food and diet, the religious devotion, sickness and its cures, death, after death (purgatory and the apparitions), travelling, merchants and trades, inside the nobles castle, the Christian cosmos, and medieval technology. The lectures will be accompanied by maps, images of illuminated manuscripts and of medieval objects. Students will be required to attend a weekly discussion section to discuss the medieval texts bearing on that weeks subject. The written course assignment will be a midterm, final and two short papers, one an analysis of a medieval text and a second an analysis of a modern text on the Middle Ages.

Examines the shaping of European cultural identity through encounters with non-European cultures from 1500 to the post-colonial era. Novels, paintings, and films will be among the sources used to examine such topics as exoticism in the Enlightenment, slavery and European capitalism, Orientalism in art, ethnographic writings on the primitive, and tourism.

Examines the shaping of European cultural identity through encounters with non-European cultures from 1500 to the post-colonial era. Novels, paintings, and films will be among the sources used to examine such topics as exoticism in the Enlightenment, slavery and European capitalism, Orientalism in art, ethnographic writings on the primitive, and tourism.

Capitalism shapes every aspect of our daily lives. Thinkers on both the left and the right of the political spectrum agree that capitalism structures our economic, social, and political relationships. Yet, there is little agreement as to the definition of capitalism and its normative implications. The definition and interpretation of capitalism differs across time and space, always evolving in response to challenges, crises, and contradictions. The aim of this course is to provide students with analytical tools to think critically and historically about the concept of capitalism. By studying how philosophers, economists, and political theorists have defined and described the concept of capitalism throughout its history (from the early seventeenth century to the present), students will be provided with a set of terminologies and analytical frameworks that enable them to interrogate the various dimensions of capitalism. The readings in the course are selected to illustrate the fact that capitalism has always been controversial. We will read texts authored by both proponents and critics of capitalism. We will explore how various canonical figures have thought about private property, markets, money, economic growth, injustice, inequality, alienation, and socialism.

This course charts the expansion of U.S. military power from a band of colonists to a globe-girdling colossus with over 2.1 million personnel, some 750 bases around the world, and an annual budget of approximately $754 billion — almost half of federal discretionary spending, and more than the next nine nations combined. It introduces students to the history of American military power; the economic, political, and technological rise of the military-industrial complex and national security state; the role of the armed services in international humanitarian work; and the changing role of the military in domestic and international politics. A three-point semester-long course, compressed into six weeks; visit bobneer.com for a complete syllabus.

This course examines the processes of colonization and decolonization that define the making of a modern, integrated world (c. 1500 to the present). We will study primary source materials.  We focus on the instruments of colonization—the treaty, the charter, the map, the ethnology—and the engines of decolonization—the manifesto, the resistance, the solidarity with the colonial, the demand for self rule. We are interested in the processes and contents of social and cultural contact and exchange, the development of knowledge, and how they shape relations of power; the place of colonialism in the development of western capitalism; and the elements of colonial power and resistance, including ideologies of liberal political philosophy, social Darwinism, and nationalism.  We will consider how ideas about race, civilization, religion, self and other, and freedom have evolved over time and shaped the making of the modern world.