Featured Courses

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. 

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. 

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. 

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 engagement of the Victorian novel with the world of politics. Emphasis on how systems interact with individual agents to make stories and how methods such as realism, romance, and the courtship plot portray the mechanics of government. 

Biblical references in modernist literary works illustrate literature’s potential to transform ancient forms into driving forces of renewal. The course explores this dynamic in the work of major German-Jewish modernists such as Franz Kafka, Else Lasker-Schüler and Paul Celan.