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Mystics––historically portrayed as passionate, dangerous, romantic, heretical, satanic––are a thorn in the side of organized religion. From the very beginnings of recorded human time, the presence and practice of mystics has been controversial. Sufi mystic al-Hallaj’s pronouncement that he was “the Truth” was received as blasphemy by the orthodoxy. His execution followed shortly after. Christian mystics of the 4th and 5th centuries were relegated to practicing outside the peripheries of the Roman Empire, in relative secrecy.

This course will explore the construction and experience of gender and sexuality in the Middle East through a performative lens. Drawing on research in ethnomusicology, queer and gender studies, anthropology and Middle Eastern history, the course will examine performance (music, dance, theater, poetry and more) as a process of representation, assertion, and sometimes transgression of sexuality and gender identities. This course will delve into the ways that performance, gender, and sexuality relate to ethnicity, nationalism, modernity, colonialism, and religion.

In this course, we will be uncovering, re-positioning, and affirming historical legacies and traditions that stand the risk of being lost forever, and explore how to use them to fight discrimination, racism and hate today.

Against a background of what is often described as a worldwide democratic recession or regression, this advanced seminar surveys current theoretical debates, empirical analyses, and policy conversations on the emergence, survival, challenges, breakdowns, and prospects of global democratization.

Historical Dress: The Park-McCullough Project Fall ‘25

Working in collaboration with the local Park-McCullough Historic Governor’s Mansion, students will create a new archive of the historic dress collection.

Today it is clear that the environment matters. In activism and scholarship and public policy, the environment has become a potent (if sometimes obligatory) point of reference. Less attention, however, has focused on the emergence of the environment itself as a converging field of action for advocacy, science, and statecraft. In this seminar, we will reflect not only on what we know of the environment but also on how we came to know the environment.

“I, at least, am not a Marxist”&�Բ�����;Karl Marx

Students with little or no Spanish will learn the language through an immersion in Latin American painting. While there will be some discussion of standard tactics such as stylistic nuances and artists’ biographies, it is expected that we will rapidly develop sufficient linguistic ability to focus on movements, ranging from the republican art of nation-building in the 19th century to modernism, magical realism, and the postmodern, thus treating the works as ideologemes, representations of political and social import.

In lieu of more conventional advanced Spanish classes, paralleling a series of often disparate tutorials, with tutees working in relative isolation, the proposal is to allow students free reign over an idea for a final, term-long project, while concurrently offering them an educated, exoteric audience to assist in fleshing out their work. Faculty will provide key secondary and tertiary reading, common to all, some with immediate relevance to the projects in question, some deemed necessary for any culminating work, but the primary content of these sessions will be student-driven.

Low-intermediate level. More details to be announced soon. 

High-intermediate level. More details to come soon.