Examines literature, art and architecture in its social and cultural context within a specified period of Roman history. The course may focus on either the late Republic, the ages of Augustus, Nero or the Trajan.
This course explores the evolving tradition of ancient Greek and Roman comic drama from later fifth-century BCE Athens to the early second-century Roman Republic, studying the works of the playwrights Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus and Terence, their influence on the development of the Western Canon, selected topics in Greek and Roman social and cultural history, and […]
This course surveys the literature and culture of the Roman Republic, 509 - 31 BCE. Beginning with the material and cultural record of pre-historical Rome in the 7th to 3rd centuries, this course examines the song and performance culture of Early Rome. The course then considers the fusion of Greek and Italian elements that laid […]
In this course we examine the relationships among two sets of discourses: philosophy, religion, and literature, on the one hand; faith, reason, and atheism, on the other hand. We do so in order to assess the thesis that the apparently disparate approaches taken by these discourses to conceiving the breadth and diversity of human expression […]
Analyzes two forms of media, the book and the photograph, and two moments in their histories, East and West. In the first instance, examines the separate Western and Eastern trajectories in the development of print. In the second, the ways the Western technology of photography was appropriated in the East. We read both canonical and […]
Explores the representation of terrorism and terror in a range of forms, disciplines and historical contexts, complicating the simplistic binary of good and evil characterizing terrorism that functions in dominant political and media discourse.
An examination of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews: the historical and philosophical background, the theological and psychological implications, the history and literature of the period.
This seminar examines the transformation of Yiddish from the vernacular of an ethno-religious community to a language of modern, secular mass culture and national politics in the 19th and 20th centuries in Eastern Europe.
A historical analysis of the formation of the ideas, literature and institutions of rabbinic Judaism as they took shape from the first to the seventh centuries.
This course examines contemporary manifestations of antisemitism and Islamophobia in Canada. To provide historical context it explores the antecedents of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim thought in the medieval and early modern periods. The course is interdisciplinary in nature drawing on both Humanities (primary texts, films, literature) as well as social science approaches. It begins by providing […]