Livy and Sallust, the best known historians of the Roman Republic, viewed history writing as a moral enterprise, presenting events from the past as exemplary tales to inform and enlighten the lives of their readers. Their narratives thus are highly rhetorical, combining myth, memory, and history to reconstruct the past. Close reading of selections from Livy's Ab Urbe Condita and/or Sallust's monographs--the Bellum Catilinae and Bellum Jugurthinum--will lead to discussions about how Romans viewed their past and how they wrote about it.

Livy and Sallust, the best known historians of the Roman Republic, viewed history writing as a moral enterprise, presenting events from the past as exemplary tales to inform and enlighten the lives of their readers. Their narratives thus are highly rhetorical, combining myth, memory, and history to reconstruct the past. Close reading of selections from Livy's Ab Urbe Condita and/or Sallust's monographs--the Bellum Catilinae and Bellum Jugurthinum--will lead to discussions about how Romans viewed their past and how they wrote about it.

This course introduces the ancient Greek language and epic meter through the study of the Iliad. The grammar of the Iliad, originally an oral poem, is relatively uncomplicated, so that by the middle of the first semester students will begin to read the poem in Greek. By the end of the year they will have read a portion of Iliad, Book I.

May include further readings in Homer, Herodotus, pastoral poetry, the dialogues of Plato, the Greek novel, or other authors, topics, or genres.

Studies in Greek lyric and tragedy, pastoral poetry, the dialogues of Plato, the Greek novel, the use of myth in literature, or other authors, topics, or genres.

The Greeks, beginning with Homer, saw the world from an essentially tragic perspective. The searing question of why human societies and the human psyche repeatedly break down in tragic ruin and loss, particularly in the conflicts of war and in the betrayal of personal bonds of love and friendship, fascinated them as it still does us. The most consistent themes that emerged from such examination are the tragedy of self-knowledge and illusion, the tragedy of desire, the tragedy of crime and guilt, and tragedy as a protest against social injustice.

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.

This course surveys the major geographic regions of the world in terms of environmental features and resource distributions, economic mainstays, population characteristics, cultural processes, social relationships, and patterns of urbanization and industrial growth. In addition to these topical foci, we use various sub-fields of geography to animate different regions. This approach provides a sense of depth while we also pursue a breadth of knowledge about the world.

Systemically studies political phenomena and their geographic expression, at a variety of spatial scales -- national, regional, and international. Major themes include nation-state formation, boundary, territory, and ethnic issues, regional blocs and spheres of influence, and conflicts over access to and use of resources.

This course introduces the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and other geospatial technologies in the social sciences and the humanities. The student will learn to collect, process, and analyze quantitative data within the spatial (geographic) context where they occur. Course content may include research topics from current faculty.