Special Courses

This course will explore some of the purposes that have been ascribed to college, including development of personal character, participation in a community, conversation on intellectual matters, and preparation for citizenship.

From Gilgamesh to Persepolis is an introduction to Near Eastern civilization through its rich and diverse literary achievements. Our main approach will be close reading: to investigate deeply small parts of a text to illuminate the whole. 

This course focuses on Dante’s Divine Comedy, a masterpiece of world literature. After looking at the Vita Nuova (New Life) as the starting point of Dante’s poetic trajectory, we will read the Comedy in its entirety and in light of what it claims to be – a journey to God. 

Following general reflections on the term Modernism and its variations in different linguistic and national contexts as well as its relation to Realism, to the Avant Garde and to Postmodernism, this course explores some of the major works of German Modernism. 

This seminar is co-taught with Sheila Heti. It discusses shifts in how the unchosen is conceived and how it is valued, across a range of contemporary fields and historical models. The goal to explore whether and how a contemporary concept of fate may come into focus.

Arabic-Islamic civilization has produced numerous works that would make it onto almost anyone’s list of wondrous books. In this course, we will read a selection of (or from) those books and study the literary and intellectual cultures that produced them.

The course is a semester-long study of the quintessential big Russian novel, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, about Napoleon’s failed 1812 war against Russia. 

In this seminar, we undertake a careful examination of Thucydides’ so-called History of the Peloponnesian War in its entirety.

This course studies accounts of pandemics, from Thucydides in Athens up to our ongoing Coronavirus outbreaks. We trace the histories of understanding that accompanied pandemics: religious, scientific, philosophical, ethical, literary. 

The French Revolution of 1789 and its legacies, as viewed through the late-eighteenth-century debates about democracy, equality, representative government that shaped an enduring agenda for historical and political thought.

The truth can set you free, but of course it can also get you into trouble. We begin with the revolt of the Hebrews and the Socratic questioning of democracy, and end with various contemporary cases of censorship within and between regimes. 

In this course, we explore theatre as a site of adaptation, as intermedial constellation. We investigate the relationship between dramatic literature and its performance and performability, between textual outlines and their realization(s): between scripts and stages. 

The course demonstrates the ways in which Modernist movements in Moscow and Paris were intimately connected and mutually influenced through decades of artistic exchange and competition.

A course on key moments in the history of jazz in America until 1960 with special focus on the role of jazz within broader streams of American cultural life; improvisation; jazz as popular music and as art music; the racial politics of jazz; and its artistic achievements. 

The course looks closely at the intersection of literature, philosophy and natural science through the lens of the thought experiment. Throughout we try to be attuned to overlap between the humanities and the sciences.