Taking cues from Linda Nochlin's classic feminist essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?," this course is a global "studio visit" with artists from Constance Afiong Ekong to Howardena Pindell. We explore the intersections of nationalism, race, identity, gender, politics, cross-cultural influences, local and colonial histories, and artistic passion which all contribute to giving these artists space in the male-dominated, Eurocentric art world.

Indian popular cinema, known commonly as Bollywood, is usually understood to have weak storylines, interrupted by overblown spectacles and distracting dance numbers. The course explores the narrative structure of Bollywood as what scholar Lalitha Gopalan calls a "constellation of interruptions". We will learn to see Bollywood historically, as a cultural form that brings India's visual and performative traditions into a unique cinematic configuration.

During the Middle Ages, the Iberian Peninsula was unique in its diversity: social and political, ethnic and religious, linguistic and cultural. This lecture course examines the art and architecture of Spain and Portugal from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages from the perspective of the interconnections between its various communities. We will explore instances of coexistence and acculturation, periods of persecution and violence, and where these relations found visual expression.

This seminar will focus on the works of four painters, and we will choose from among the following: Bonnard, Cezanne, Gauguin, Pissarro, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, and van Gogh. We will study their works in relation to the feverish debates about painting in the 1880s and 1890s that the previous generation's Impressionism brought about. As we will discover, the four artists were hardly a unified group, took distinct paths away from Impressionism, and pursued projects that had limited allegiance to its main tenets or, indeed, to the ideas and practices of each other.

This course emphasizes understanding, speaking, and writing in a contemporary context. It also promotes creativity with presentations and original group projects. It includes Web activities, films, short stories, and frequent conversation sessions with language assistants.

This course emphasizes understanding, speaking, and writing in a contemporary context. It also promotes creativity with presentations and original group projects. It includes Web activities, films, short stories, and frequent conversation sessions with language assistants.

Offers practice of colloquial and idiomatic speech patterns in Italian to emphasize correct pronunciation and intonation. Includes oral presentations as well as frequent compositions, from short reports to full-length essays. Uses newspapers, magazines, and literary texts to discuss issues and lifestyles concerning Italian society.

Its long history as the locus of collisions among cultures -- Greek, Roman, Arab, Norman, Spanish, and (northern) Italian -- has earned Sicily a special place in Mediterranean studies. One product of these clashes is that for millennia Sicilians have confronted questions of identity. More recently, because of immigration waves from North Africa, Sicily is once again at the center of the Mediterranean cultural debate. This course will cover almost three thousand years of Sicilian life, as we explore the role of material culture and literature in shaping Sicilian identities.

Travel literature has always been a precious source for the study of culture, politics, arts, and last but not least, people. From Tacitus to Marco Polo, from Stendhal to Camilo Jose Cela, we will read and discuss authors who traveled for political, personal, and recreational reasons. We will also pay special attention to tales of emigration and immigration in the third millennium.

How does the brain enable otherwise ordinary people to display extraordinary abilities? This course will challenge our understanding of ourselves and each other by using a collection of stories, peer-reviewed research, and podcasts to compare popular media's portrayal of these individuals against science's current understanding of the brain.