This course surveys the literary and cultural milestones in late 19th-century to 21st-century China. We will explore a wide range of works from mainland China and the Sinophone world, including critically acclaimed films and theatrical productions. The course highlights the capacity of literature as a form of historical engagement and a vehicle for ethical reasoning as modern Chinese intellectuals braved a violent and perplexing age. Furthermore, it unpacks the multivalence of Chinese literary modernity as well as that of the very term “China.” All readings are in English.

A survey of the literary and intellectual traditions of premodern China, the course guides students to appreciate a broad array of textual records and literary genres from antiquity to late Imperial China. We will read monumental works such as Shang dynasty oracle-bone inscriptions, the Analects, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Tang and Song poetry, the folk opera Mulian Rescues his Mother, and the celebrated vernacular novel The Story of the Stone.

Preparation of a thesis or completion of a studio project which may be submitted to the Department for consideration for Honors.

Open to seniors with consent of the Department. Fall semester. The Department.

How to handle overenrollment: null

Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: Not applicable

Independent reading course.  A full course.

Fall and spring semesters. The Department.

How to handle overenrollment: null

Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: Not applicable.

Walter Benjamin, writing in the 1930s, famously said that when it comes to a photograph, there is no original. While predominant thinking about the copy hinges on the example of photography, how can we understand this idea as part of a longer history of replication that includes a much more expansive range of media, including ceramics, printmaking, and bronze-casting? Why replicate the object or image? How does replication relate to mass production and the market, and how does it challenge an idea of the work of art as a unique creation?

(Offered as ARHA 348 and FAMS 348) The aim of the course is both analytic and creative. We will be looking at a variety of approaches and issues related to portraiture in an attempt to develop both common and contested definitions that can be applied to our own filmmaking practice. Each student will complete in-class exercises and individual video projects that seek to reveal the nature of people, places and objects through sound and image.

Limited to 12 students. Fall 2024: Professor Levine.

A studio course that will emphasize compositional development by working from memory, imagination, literature and abstractions derived from nature and other works of visual art. The Students will be encouraged to explore a wide variety of media including, but not limited to, drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture and collage. Students will be required to create an independent body of work over the course of the semester which explores their individual direction in pictorial construction. 

An investigation of ideas into the development of visual imagery focusing on series of works utilizing drawing and printmaking. Contemporary and historical references of artists' series of works will be studied in conjunction with students' individual projects, culminating in a final project consisting of a cohesive, visual body of work. Experimentation of conceptual and technical boundaries will be encouraged and explored. Discussion and critiques will be held regularly in both group and individual formats.

(Offered as ARHA 267 and ASLC 267) The book has played (and continues to play) a central role in the Islamic world. As a technology, it gives physical form to the Qur’an, an orally proclaimed text, allowing Islam’s scripture to be read, touched, held, and easily transported. It is a carrier of divine blessing, but also of wisdom, authority, tradition, and affiliation. The earliest Islamic books were either very fragile, being made of papyrus, or expensive, being made of animal skin (parchment).

(Offered as ARHA 257, ARCH 257, and BLST 253) Creole dwellings were first erected by enslaved builders working under Diego Colón (the son of Christopher Columbus) on the island of Hispaniola. By the end of the first wave of European expansion in the early nineteenth century, the creole style existed across imperial domains in the Caribbean, North and South America, Africa, the Indian Ocean, and even Asia.