This class is about how philosophy tried to be a science, and rejected most of its history as metaphysical nonsense. It's about how and why this failed, and returned to metaphysics. There were three phases: Logical Positivism, which argued that most of the history of philosophy was meaningless babble, and should be replaced by a much more scientific approach to the issues. Quine, who replaced the positivists with a pragmatic view of the subject. And Kripke/Lewis who returned Metaphysics to the center of concern using possible worlds. This last approach brings us to the present day.

This course explores the role of lies and practical jokes in Italian literary culture and the way the concept of humor has changed over time. We will investigate the intimate connection between power, religion, and laughter by reading some of the funniest and politically charged works. Our authors (Machiavelli, Goldoni, Pirandello, De Filippo, Fo) will take us through the streets of Renaissance Florence, eighteenth-century Venetian canals, as well as the improvised "factory theaters" of the 1970s.

Thinking of Italy as both a European and a Mediterranean country constitutes a unique challenge to our ways of reading the contemporary world. By exploring classic and lesser known Italian works intersecting the national, the regional, and the global, we will question present-day truths related to history, geography, and religion, providing an introduction to the critical methods employed in Italian, European and Middle Eastern Studies.

This course is particularly designed to create a new path for students who are taking (or have taken) Italian 101 and wish to have the necessary preparation to take Intermediate Italian (Italian 201) the following fall semester. They will be provided with the skills necessary to: understand, speak, and write Italian at the advanced beginner level, learn about contemporary Italian society, and develop the competence, interest and enthusiasm for the language that will inspire them to proceed to more advanced levels.

Throughout the modern period the way people engaged with mountains reflected the currents of political and cultural thought. This course engages the history of human-mountain relations to think transnationally about major historiographical themes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: modernity, nature, empire, class, nationalism, science, leisure, environmentalism, gender, climate change, and ideology.

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the social, cultural, and political history of both Western and Eastern Europe since 1945. By exploring the permeability of the "Iron Curtain," the course encourages students to critically assess conceptions of division and unity in European history. We will explore ways in which borders were both reinforced and transcended.

The Balkans, Winston Churchill famously said, "produce more history than they can consume." This course offers an introduction to the complex histories of this little-known yet diverse and fascinating part of Europe that has been subject to many myths. Starting in the eighteenth century, we will focus on the emergence of modern Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania and end our journey in the late twentieth century.

One-third of South Asia's population, or approximately 500 million people, currently live and work in cities. This course explores the history of urban life in the subcontinent from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. Cities have long been sites of economic opportunity, but also of profound inequality. They offer a unique spatial perspective on large-scale transformations such as industrialization and globalization. The course addresses the ongoing challenges of mass urbanization, especially the negotiation of ethnic, class, gender, and religious differences.

Caligula was a god (or so he thought); Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Commodus dressed as a gladiator and fought man and beast in the arena. The history of the Roman empire is replete with scandalous stories about eccentric and even insane emperors whose reigns raise questions about the nature of the emperor's power and his role in administering the empire.

This course examines the lives of women in imperial China (221 BCE-1911). How did Confucian didactic texts define women and their place in the family? Seen as the core of the family in a patrilineal, patrilocal, and patriarchical society, men prescribed women's roles in family life. How did women understand and respond to the social expectations imposed on them? What changed over the long history of imperial China? Students consider writings by and about women alongside the evidence of material culture.