This course examines body images and practices in diverse religious traditions around the world. Working with different methodological and theoretical perspectives, we will ask the following questions: What are bodies? How do body images perpetuate or challenge religious and social norms? What roles do bodies play in religious experience? We will generate answers to these questions by investigating a wide range of religious phenomena including healing rituals, relics, saints, fasting, asceticism, and modest dress.

This course will focus on portrayals of women in nineteenth- through mid-twentieth-century America, particularly in the context of nature and landscape. We will explore how women, often objectified in visual images of the period, appropriated established devices or developed new images and structures to represent womanhood in their own terms. Texts will include selected poetry, sketches, autobiographical essays or memoirs, short stories, novels, paintings, films, and photography.

This colloquium will explore the history of South Asia as seen from women's perspectives. We will read writings by women from the ancient period to the present. We will focus on the diversity of women's experiences in a range of social, cultural, and religious contexts. Themes include sexuality, religiosity, rights to education and employment, violence against women, modernity and citizenship--in short, those issues central to women's movements in modern South Asia.

What are the origins of violence? What counts as violence: outright bloodshed, or more subtle forms of coercion and domination as well? This course extends the definition of violence beyond conventional military engagements, and discusses 'Indian War' captivities, Native slavery, ritual torture, persecution of Quakers and witches, and the mass-scale deaths and dislocations caused by the transatlantic slave trade. The course concludes with the American Revolution and moral arguments for the just use of force, and an assessment of the complexities of waging peace.

Victor Hugo's celebrated novel, Les Misrables (1862), will set the themes for this lecture and discussion course on the history of France from 1789 to 1900. Topics will include revolts and revolutions; nationalism and nation building; urbanization and the social problems of poverty, disease, and crime; romanticism, socialism, and republicanism; the rise of the newspaper and print imagery. Particular attention will be given to the representation of history in literature, print images, and films. In addition to Hugo's Les Misrables, readings will include novels by Honor Balzac and Georges Sand.

How have Africans organized education? Who had access, and what did they learn? We explore the nineteenth and twentieth century transformation of African systems of education, including the significant involvement of African American educational reformers. A focus of the course will be developing the capacity to carry out historical research with written and oral sources. Our topics will include approaches to archival research, ethical research design, and strategies for participant-observation and interviewing.

The main objective of this course is to explore organismal structure and function via an examination of the basic physical principles that guide how living things are constructed and how organisms interact with their environment.