Fall and spring semesters.

Fall and spring semesters.

(Offered as HIST 438 [EU] and EUST 373.)  This course will explore the role of historical memory in the politics of twentieth-century Europe. It will examine how evolving memories of major historical events have been articulated and exploited in the political cultures of England, France, Germany, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union/Russia. Topics will include the politics of memory surrounding World Wars I and II, Vichy France, the Holocaust, Soviet Stalinism, and Eastern European communism.

(Offered as MUSI 422 and EUST 371.)  Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) and Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) are arguably the two greatest symphonic composers after Beethoven. In this course we will compare and contrast their highly charged music and explore the eras in which they worked--for Mahler, imperial Vienna on the eve of World War I, and for Shostakovich, revolutionary Russia under the tyrannical reign of Joseph Stalin. The class will attend Mahler and Shostakovich performances in New York and Boston.

(Offered as GERM 360, ARCH 360, EUST 360 and FAMS 316.) What is performance? What constitutes an event? How can we address a phenomenon that has disappeared the moment we apprehend it? How does memory operate in our critical perception of an event? How does a body make meaning? These are a few of the questions we will explore in this course, as we discuss critical, theoretical, and compositional approaches in a broad range of multidisciplinary performance phenomena emerging from European--primarily German--culture in the twentieth century.

(Offered as SPAN 340 and EUST 340.) The Spanish Civil War lasted only three years, from 1936 to 1939, yet the conflict cast a long shadow over Spain's twentieth-century history, culture and identity.  Indeed, the war's effects were felt worldwide, and it became the inspiration for works of art and literature as varied as Pablo Picasso's Guernica, Pablo Neruda's España en el corazón, Guillermo del Toro's El laberinto del fauno and Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.  This course will provide an

[EU^P] Medieval people moved: they traded and sent emissaries, they invaded and migrated, they went on crusade, jihad, and pilgrimage. This topical course will touch upon all of these movements as we pursue a larger question. Can patterns of exchange across the physical and cultural barriers of geography, language, religion, and governance reveal a more global medieval world than we usually envision?

(Offered as EUST 311, FREN 364, and RUSS 311.) Between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, poetry was revolutionized both in France and in Russia; nowhere else did the avant-garde proliferate more extravagantly. This class will focus on the key period in the emergence of literary modernity that began with Symbolism and culminated with Surrealism and Constructivism.With the advent of modernism, the poem became a “global phenomenon” that circulated among different languages and different cultures, part of a process of cross-fertilization.

(Offered as SPAN 364 and EUST 264.)  A patient, careful reading of Cervantes' masterpiece (published in 1605 and 1615), taking into consideration the biographical, historical, social, religious, and literary context from which it emerged during the Renaissance.  The discussion will center on the novel's structure, style, and durability as a classic and its impact on our understanding of ideas and emotions connected with the Enlightenment and its aftermath.  Authors discussed in connection to the material include Erasmus of Rotterdam, Montaigne, Emerson, Tobias Smoll

(Offered as HIST 235 [EU] and EUST 245). Joseph Stalin, the infamous Soviet dictator, created a particular type of society in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Stalinism became a phenomenon that influenced the development of the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, and North Korea. The course will begin with the exploration of Stalin’s own life, and then focus on what historical forces enabled the emergence of Stalinism.