The following courses have been proposed by the IPRH Faculty Fellows for 2007-08, and will be offered after the fellowship year has been completed. Please contact the Fellows directly for more information about course scheduling.

Jonathan Ebel, Religious Studies
Religion, Violence, and America

Course description: This course is designed to introduce students to the study of religion, of violence, and of culture, through an examination of points in American history where the three have intersected. Using a wide range of primary and secondary texts, we will examine the worlds of perpetrators and victims of religiously motivated and/or religiously justified violence. We will seek to explain why people of faith acted as they did, how religion shaped their views of those against whom they struggled, and what, if anything, America’s violent religious past tells us about the present day.  This course is, at its core, about rupture. More specifically, it is about religious and cultural involvement in and responses to violent rupture. In discussions and in written work the student will be asked to engage in this underlying theme both in theoretical and philosophical terms and in relation to specific historical episodes and cultural artifacts. How have the custodians of American culture recalled and imagined the experience of personal and social rupture? What religious significance does American culture attribute to life in the midst of rupture? To what end?

Jed esty, English
"Make It New!": Modernism and the Fault Lines of the Twentieth Century

Course description: The most striking aspect of modernism is its sweeping claim to reinvent the basic coordinates of almost all the human arts and sciences, from physics (Einstein) and philosophy (Wittgenstein) to anthropology (Malinowski) and psychology (Freud), from architecture (Le Corbusier) and music (Schoenberg) to painting (Picasso) and sculpture (Gaudier-Brzeska). In all of these domains, radical innovators of the early twentieth century sought to break with the methods and canons of the nineteenth. This course will offer an extensive interdisciplinary introduction to the culture of modernism covering the period 1900 to 1945. Our inquiry will be guided by the over-arching question of whether and how modernism did, in fact, in the sloganeering words of Ezra Pound, “make it new!” What kind of rupture did various modernist projects produce as they tried to eradicate the past and reconstruct the future? What vision for the new (twentieth) century do they propose, especially when viewed in terms of convergences across nations, media, and disciplines?

Ellen Moodie, Anthropology
Democracy and Citizenship in Contemporary Latin America

Course description: Over the past quarter-century, most Latin American states have transformed from authoritarian, dictatorial regimes, or transitioned from the chaos of war, to be labeled “democracies.” Indeed, globally, democracy and human rights have become organizing principles of a new, still emergent post-Cold War international order. But by the early 1990s, the global-hegemonic meaning of “democracy” openly diverged from understandings shared by so many Latin Americans who had struggled against the authoritarian regimes from Argentina to Mexico. The social equality and community security that so many Latin Americans in the second half of the twentieth century had hoped for  - had lived for, had died for, in the guerilla forces or mass movements – has been openly redefined by remaining world powers (the U.S., the IMF, the WTO) in terms of a “personal freedom” merging with market freedom. In this seminar, we will move beyond the discussions of institutional aspects of post-Cold War democracies to study accounts of what it is like to actually live in one of these contemporary societies. Course readings and lectures will focus on how ordinary citizens and groups have made sense of the large-scale process of “redemocratization” and the neoliberal economic policies that have come to characterize dominant political forms today. How do ordinary citizens come to view themselves in relation to nation, to government, and to collective (race, class, ethnic, and gender as well as political) identities? What does citizenship mean today in Latin America?

Lisa Nakamura, Institute of Communications Research/Asian American Studies
Interfaces of Identity: Old Media, New Media

Course description: This course will trace the development of a new area of study: the application of cultural studies methods of media criticism to new media, in particular the Internet. We will work to locate a canon of cybercultural theory. We will examine the rigorous distinctions in methodology that make studying digital media different from studying analog media forms. We will pay special attention to digital gaming, music, and pornography as forms of computer mediated communication, virtual community, identity construction, and engines for new types of political economies. We will also examine the ongoing evolution of types of media convergence and expressions of cultural difference through television and film’s engagements with digital technology and culture.

Marc D. Perry, Anthropology and African American Studies
(Un)Makings of Race and Nation in Cuba

Course description: This course provides an overview of the historical centrality of race in the construction of Cuban society, culture, and national identity. Particular attention is paid to the notion (and limitations) of “non-racialism” – the devaluation of racial difference – which has been a defining principle in the national evolution of Cuba from independence to revolutionary socialism. This course is additionally concerned with an interrelated examination of Afrocuban social agency in the making and “unmaking” of modern Cuban history. Such historical groundings provide a basis from which to explore the shifting dynamics of race, class, and culture that are (re)shaped at the nexus of the local and trans-local in today’s increasingly neoliberalized, late-socialist Cuba.

Renee R. Trilling, English/Medieval Studies
Getting Medieval: From Beowulf to Monty Python

Course description: The purpose of this course is twofold: to introduce students to a range of medieval literature and to examine its legacy in the modern era. Since the nineteenth century literature tends to use a fetishized notion of “the medieval” as a foil for “the modern”, invoking it either as a Golden Age which critiques the problems of the present, or a pre-Enlightenment epoch of superstition and ignorance. In both cases, the question of “difference” is fundamental: however the modern defines the medieval, it is always and necessarily in opposition to modernity, and the implied rupture that defines that historical boundary encompasses all categories of human experience, from subjectivity and belief to aesthetics and ethics. Students will study both medieval literature itself and modern representations of the Middle Ages in an attempt to understand the complex means by which the present approaches the past. Students will discover how modern notions of empire, progress, belief, revolution, pacifism, and novelty inform modern attempts to represent – or appropriate – the medieval.