What do we know of the world inhabited by the heroes of Homer’s epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey? Do the poems describe a largely imaginary realm created by their author, or do they reflect a particular period of ancient Greek history—and if so, which one? This course explores the society, economy, and culture of Iron Age Greece with special emphasis on the Geometric and early Archaic periods, emphasizing what scholars have learned through archaeological discoveries along with study of the poems themselves. Topics include the excavations at Troy, Athens, and other sites; contacts with Egypt and the Near East and colonization in the Mediterranean world; trade, exchange, and the technology of travel; literacy and oral tradition; political communities and warfare; religion, burial practices, and the art of ritual and commemoration.
Ancient Rome is visible in Chicago—walk the city and learn to “read” the streets, buildings, and monuments that showcase Chicago’s engagement with the classical past! You’ll gain digital mapping and video editing skills as you collaborate on a virtual walking tour mapping Chicago’s ongoing dialogue with antiquity. With a combination of experiential learning and rigorous research methodologies, you’ll explore architecture, history, visual arts, and urban topography in this quintessential modern American city.
How did Lyndon B. Johnson, a product of the Jim Crow South, become the standard bearer of presidential liberalism? In this study of the man and his times, students will thus trace the arc of Lyndon Johnson’s political career through the lens of American race relations. This course takes as its starting point Johnson’s modest Texas origins and continues in a study of his political labors, after he assumed the presidency, which resulted in the passage of historic civil rights legislation and produced the Great Society program that was designed to address the problem of poverty. In the final weeks of the semester, we will consider Johnson’s fall, in the wake of Vietnam, and consider his political legacy and his relevance to the contemporary electoral cycle.
This seminar explores the role of race and Indigeneity in histories of the American Midwest. Despite popular narratives of the Midwest as purely a heartland of white homogeneity and normativity, racialized communities of color have long shaped politics, culture, and society in the region. This course emphasizes the fluid nature of ideas about race, and their interplay with the construction of place in a settler colonial society. The course materials cover a wide range of topics that are crucial for understanding both Midwestern and U.S. history writ large. From the multi-ethnic world of the fur trade, to contemporary housing inequalities, this course highlights the making of a U.S. region, and confronts mythologies of the Midwest in the American imagination.
HUM 370-5-20 Race/Gender/Sex and Science: Making Identities and Differences
How do scientific claims and technological developments help transform cultural understandings of race, gender, and sexuality? Conversely, how do cultural beliefs about race, gender, and sexuality influence scientific knowledge and medical practice? This class will take up a series of controversies from the recent past and present to explore the dynamic interplay between expert findings, social identities, and political arguments. NOTE: This course was previously offered as HUM 395.
This seminar will give undergraduates the opportunity to reflect critically, thoughtfully, and together with peers, on the question: why go to college? There are many expectations that parents and society place on the college experience. Now that we are in college, how shall we think about it? Is it an experience or is it an education? Is it a ticket to a job or is it the pursuit of knowledge? What do professors do? How is contemporary culture reflected in the university? We address various facets of college life, such as diversity and justice; sex and sexism; the “party pathway”; technology; the value of the humanities; the role that wealth plays in admissions; and we relate our present experience to the history of the university.
HUM 370-5-22 Integrity and the Politics of Corruption
If seasoned politicians in a fragile democracy are implicated in wide-scale corruption, but the country faces an acute economic crisis requiring experience at the helm, what should be done about the corrupt, and who should decide? What compromises, if any, are morally appropriate when dealing with dictators who threaten to unleash violence unless they are guaranteed amnesty by the democratic forces trying to replace them? We’ll delve into such fraught problems of corruption and abuse of political power, examining in detail two ideas related to “the people:” the sovereign people as the owner of public property (often stolen by corrupt politicians) and the people as an agent with its own moral integrity (one that might bear on policy dilemmas surrounding the proper response to corruption). Students will acquire familiarity with prominent philosophical treatments of integrity, property, and public policy.
Crime fiction is where questions of law, justice, and community are investigated, but only rarely resolved. This course will explore this problem in a transnational context, to expose the fundamental issues of power and difference that have underlain the classic detective novel, and then work our way through texts produced in colonial and postcolonial settings in the Middle East and North Africa. Surveying over 150 years of detection, we will use these texts to understand the relationship between criminal investigation and literary interpretation, between history and the present, and between literary style and political authority.
This seminar examines shifts and transformations in embodied cultural practices across the Middle East and North Africa, with particular attention to music, dance, theater, and popular culture. Spanning the late nineteenth century to the Arab Spring, students will better understand a cultural history of the region, its role in shaping global modernity, and the politics of gender, sexuality, and ethnoreligious difference. In addition to class discussion and written assignments, students will be asked to develop a creative project to be designed in consultation with the instructor.
HUM 397 Exhibiting Antiquity: The Culture and Politics of Display
How do institutions such as museums—and websites and archaeological sites developed as tourist destinations—shape and construct our notions of the past? How are these institutions enmeshed with broader cultural and political agendas regarding cultural identity and otherness, the formation of artistic canons, and even the concept of ancient art? This course explores modern strategies of collecting, classification, and display of material culture from ancient Egypt, the Middle East, Greece, and Rome, both in Europe and the U.S. and in their present-day homelands. By analyzing programs of collecting and display, it seeks to understand both the development of modern scholarship in ancient art and the intersection of institutional and scholarly programs. Topics will include the historical development of modern displays devoted to ancient civilizations in museums, notions of authenticity and identity, issues of cultural heritage and patrimony, temporary and “blockbuster” shows, virtual exhibitions and museums, and the archaeological site as a locus of display.
