Core Seminars

This year’s seminars:

Every Humanities major must complete two core seminars - an Interpretations seminar that engages deeply with one particular work or author and a Modernities seminar that probes the question: what is modernity? 

The most recently-offered seminars are listed below. 

2022-2023

  • This seminar engages in the interpretation of a single great book, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. Some attention is given to its historical and literary context, with readings in Emerson, Hawthorne, Webster, and Douglass, Shakespeare and Montaigne, and Melville’s other writings.

    Spring 2023
    TTh 1pm-2:15pm
  • An undergraduate seminar on the life and work of one the greatest poets of all time, and founder of modernity, Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Readings include œuvre de jeunesse, his collection of poems in verse, Les fleurs du mal, his collection of poems in prose, Le spleen de Paris, and others.

    Spring 2023
    M 1:30pm-3:20pm
  • The seminar looks closely at the most influential poem of the 20th century, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” as a radical modernist experiment and as carrying on a kaleidoscopic dialogue with world literature, including the Buddha’s Fire Sermon, the Upanishads, the Holy Grail myth, and others.

    Spring 2023
    TTh 2:30-3:45pm
  • In this course we will reflect on the relation between Galileo’s anti-Aristotelian physics and Hobbes’ system by reading key text that situate Hobbes in early modern currents of thought in science, religion and politics and in contemporary debates about the origins of modernity.  

    Spring 2023
    T 3:30-5:20pm
  • Debates about the meaning of freedom from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Authors to be studied include Smith, Montesquieu, Constant, Tocqueville, Mill, Marx and Schmitt on questions of progress, representation, constitutionalism, democracy and individuality.

    Spring 2023
    Th 9:25am-11:15am
  • British historical narratives in the 19th century, the crucible of modern historical consciousness. How a period of industrialization and democratization grounded itself in imagined pasts— recent, distant, domestic, foreign—in historical novels and works by historians.

    Fall 2023
    Tuesdays and Thursdays 11:35am to 12:50pm
  • Culture wars are all the rage these days. But why do we say that works of art are political? What does that even mean? And, if it is true, what part do works of art play in the dynamics of social contest?  In concert with the special exhibition “Art, Protest, and the Archives” at the Beinecke, this seminar explores those questions by placing major works of literature in conversation with influential works of political and cultural theory.

    Fall 2023
    M 1:30-3:20p
  • Intensive study of the life and work of Simone Weil, one of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers. We read the iconic works that shaped Weil’s posthumous reputation as “the patron saint of all outsiders,” including the mystical aphorisms Gravity and Grace and the utopian program for a new Europe The Need for Roots

    Fall 2023
    Wednesdays 9:25am-11:15am
  • This course explores the world of William Blake’s poetry, with an emphasis on the longer prophetic poems, in conversation with his artistic output. We locate Blake in his historical moment, responding in his poetry and art to a variety of political, philosophical, and aesthetic movements in England and elsewhere. 

    Fall 2023
    Mondays 1:30pm-3:20pm
  • Transparency is the metaphor of our time. Whether in government or corporate governance, finance, technology, health, or the media–it is ubiquitous today, and there is hardly a current debate that does not call for more transparency. But what does this word actually stand for and what are the consequences for the life of individuals? 

    Fall 2023
    Wednesdays 9:25am-11:15am
  • A close reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s masterpiece, Emile. Though the book poses as a guide to education, it has much grander aspirations; it offers a whole vision of the human condition. Rousseau called it his “best and worthiest work” and said he believed it would spark a revolution in the way that human beings understand themselves. 

    Fall 2023
    Tuesdays 1:30pm-3:20pm