Core: Cultural Exploration & Analysis (CCEA-UH)

How do ritual and play shape us? How do they constrain us? How do they free us? Much of modern society sees ritual as too rigid and play as too frivolous to matter. Yet the two are difficult to disentangle from each other and underlie performances of all kinds. Ultimately, both prove critical to effect personal and social transformation. Ritual and play entertain us, educate us, gather and synchronize us. They help us to navigate life’s milestones and to grapple with crisis. They push us towards the supernatural and the virtuosic and yet ground us in the fundamentally human. Drawing on theater, anthropology, sociology, and history among other disciplines, this course explores rituals of religion, healing, politics, law, and protest, as well as forms of virtual, deep, and dark play. Students engage with classic and contemporary texts, films, and live events, before they produce and/or document a rite or a game of their own.

What motivates human beings to form collections? How do we select, order, preserve and display information and objects? And, what intellectual processes are involved in these activities? What does the content of these collections say about those who created them? And what kind of narratives can be traced within the display of these collections? This course surveys the phenomenon of collecting, focusing on key moments in its history, from antiquity up to contemporary times. The first section of the class explores collections of "thought," that is, how knowledge has been stored, organized and retrieved - and some of the tools we have developed to do so - including mnemonic devices, writing, codices, libraries, information architecture, and digital technologies. The second section concerns physical objects and their collection, classification, organization, and display. Finally, the course turns to the work of modern and contemporary artists who incorporate concepts of assemblage and curation. In response to the readings and to the materials covered in class, students will conceive, create, describe and display a collection of their own making.

This course asks how objects from the past obtain meaning long after they were made, and how they have come to express the identity of communities, nations, and religions. We will consider fundamental questions of identity by assessing how objects become imbued with meaning. Who ascribes these objects meaning and why? How do we relate to objects designated to represent us? We will explore object biographies from a range of periods, regions and traditions. We will discuss objects representing contested national and global identities, such as the Cyrus Cylinder from Iraq and the Koh-i-noor diamond from India, as well as material that facilitates discussion of socially and culturally defined identities. In all of these examples politics plays a constant role. Through case studies of iconic objects from around the world, students will compare significance in the originating society with place and function today to better understand how, why, and by whom identity is constructed.

The making of abstract visual forms is a near-universal human activity across time and cultures. Some of the earliest known cave art, dating back approximately 40,000 years, is abstract. The use of abstract forms in ornament and for symbolic communication is found at different periods of history and in different locations across the globe. And abstraction has become prominent in modern art all over the world. This course takes a comparative approach to abstraction and asks why human beings in different places and at different times have drawn and carved similar shapes, lines, and patterns. What are the meanings of these forms? Why have some cultures with long traditions of representational painting turned to abstraction? How have religious, political, and social contexts shaped this turn? What has been the role of abstraction in Islamic and other non-Western traditions and how have these traditions influenced Western art? Although the course will range widely historically and culturally, it will take the Middle East as one of its key areas of interest and will include visits to galleries, private collections, and selected centers for traditional arts in the UAE.

This course focuses on questions of religious and cultural difference through the 1001 Nights, the corpus of tales that has served as a point of encounter between Middle Eastern literary traditions and the politics of Western culture, including ''Sinbad, ''Aladdin'' and ''Ali Baba''. Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, Muslim and 'pagan' realms co-exist uneasily in the original cycle of tales that often confront protagonists with such differences as a problem. Cultural difference piqued the interest of the Arab storytellers and European translators who brought the Nights to Europe and pioneered travelogues respectively of Europe and the Middle East. Their writings would serve as points of departure for seminal works on the engagement with cultural difference and its representation, Appiah's Cosmopolitanism and Said's Orientalism.

This course examines the ways in which artists, filmmakers, and/or writers have responded to the social complexity of urban life and the difficult task of finding points of connection within the diversity of the city. How is the order and the disorder of urban space represented in their work? What intellectual frameworks do they call upon to find meaning in unfamiliar settings? How do these assumptions shape what is seen and unseen within the city? And most importantly, what do these city texts reveal about the potential for building new forms of belonging and community within the urban environment?

There is no life without law. Nature has its laws. Religions have theirs, societies theirs, families theirs. Business has its rules and contracts. How do people understand the laws that are as much a part of life as the weather? Literature - the work of the imagination - guides our great journey towards understanding. Writers dramatize the relations among law, justice, and freedom. Writers also show the effect of law on the fates, fortunes, and feelings of people. The course explores the power of literature to show us what the law is, what it should not be, and what it might be.

This course examines a variety of cultural conceptions of money and wealth, and the ethical questions that money or wealth allows a writer to probe. Is the value of people measured by the value of their money, or are there other criteria for wealth? Is someone's wealth possible without someone else's poverty? How is human ambition rewarded or punished in the "pecuniary culture"? The course looks for answers to these and other questions in key works of literature, sociology, economics, and other fields, reading classical texts ranging from Aristophanes' Plutus, Ihara Saikaku's "A Dose of What the Doctor Never Orders", and William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, to Honoré de Balzac's Père Goriot, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby. Readings are supplemented by excerpts from works by Ibn Khaldun, Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Max Weber, and Alfred Hirshman.

This course understands gender as a social construct rather than as self-evident and immutable, and examines the ways in which constructions of gender shift across time and place. Some of the questions we will consider include the following: what does it mean to be "male" or "female," "masculine" or "feminine," and how do the meanings of such categories vary across historical periods and geographic locations? How do we understand gender in relation to other social differences such as race, class, sexuality, religion, nationality, and disability? How have ideologies of gender been central to colonial and nationalist projects from the nineteenth century to the present? How does gender shift in the context of diaspora, migration, and globalization? Students will approach these questions through a consideration of aesthetic practices and representational forms from many periods and cultures - literature, film, visual art - that suggest alternatives to a binary logic of gender and instead articulate different visions of gender justice.

The ethics of violence, its articulation and resistance, violence as a social problem and violence as social necessity: from the epic, to the novel, to contemporary poetry, literature has attempted to reckon with the question of violence. This includes violence in the form of divine retribution, as part of the rhetoric of patriarchy, and as necessary for anticolonial nationalism. Students will consider violence both as a theoretical problem as well an aesthetic one as they consider the work of philosophers and theorists while also considering how literary texts drawn from a diverse geographic and historical corpus have attempted to "write" violence as a problem of artistic representation. Some of the texts we may consider include Euripides' Medea, the epic Mahabharata, Dante's Inferno, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Sorel's Reflections on Violence, Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, Simone Weil's Essay on Force, Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, and the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Dennis Brutus.

This course asks what dis/Ability is and considers how this concept plays out within a variety of musical contexts. Our focus is not just on musicians with disabilities, but also on a wide spectrum of human musical capabilities. Some scholars argue that our relationship to music is necessarily embodied. In other words, we bring a unique set of physical, sensory, cognitive, and affective capabilities into any musical situation. In this way of thinking, the body, with all its unique characteristics is a central focus of our inquiry. Further into the semester, there will be a unit on Deaf musicians. Students will be exposed to a cultural view of music that remains largely unseen by the hearing world. Thereafter, through self-initiated final research projects, students will work to find their own ways of making meaning of people's varied musical capabilities.

This course explores ways of listening, and of being a listener, in human experience, with attention to the role of the ear in the constitution of subjects, communities, and societies of different times and places. Topics include debates about the listening subject in Western philosophy and media studies; the role of the "ethnographic ear" in cultural anthropology and ethnomusicology; theories and methods of "soundscape research" and "acoustemology"; and aurality as an aspect of culture, explored through case studies ranging from the development of sound reproduction technologies, to deaf culture, to the ethics of sounding and listening in religious practice. Course readings, drawn from a wide range of disciplines, include foundational texts in the emerging interdisciplinary field of "sound studies." In addition to engaging critically with a range of ideas and debates through discussion, presentations, and writing, students will try their ears at specialized modes of training and data collection developed by sound-oriented researchers and artists.

From mythological figures such as Coyote in North America, Hermes of Greek myth, and Eshu in West Africa, to modern icons of global pop culture like Charlie Chaplin, Bugs Bunny, and Bart Simpson, humans have long been fascinated with trickster characters who transgress boundaries, break rules, and unsettle fixed truths. Seemingly heedless of cultural norms, these characters in their many different guises point to the important role of play and disruption in the making of culture. In this course, students consider rogues, outlaws, and outsiders of various types from around the world and their portrayal in stories, novels, dramas, songs, and films. Building a repertoire of trickster characters, types, and tropes, students examine how these characters' dynamic roles relate to central problems of art, creativity, and life.

What does it mean to be a hero? Can one still be "heroic" in times marked by intense and jarring forms of violence? How does heroism travel across diverse places and beyond the frontline to intersect with mundane questions of survival as well as more severe issues of racial, class, and gender differences? And why do tales of heroism remain so persistently appealing to us today? In this course, we will examine the concept of the hero in world literature from ancient epic to postmodern fiction and film. We will investigate how the ideals of heroism, types of heroes/heroines and antiheroes, as well as modes of heroic action change through time, across literary genres and cultural traditions. Texts may include the Epic of Gilgamesh, Sophocles' Antigone, Sīrat 'Antar, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, graphic novels, selections from the Bible, the Qur'an, and the One Thousand and One Nights, and films such as Birdman, Lord of the Rings, and 300.

To what extent can "Shakespeare" serve as the focal point for a cultural heritage that belongs to the entire globe? This course offers a comparative, interdisciplinary approach to Shakespeare's plays, considering them both as exemplary of Western literature and also as world literature, influential in many cultures. Three sets of questions ground the course: 1) In what ways was Shakespeare a "global" author in his own day, adopting a "worldly" approach that transcends his English context? 2) How do the publication, performance, and critical histories of his plays transform "Shakespeare" into a global commodity? 3) What cultural legacy has Shakespeare's work left for a variety of global media forms, including plays, films, novels, operas, and works of visual art? The course begins with two plays, Othello and The Tempest, that have inspired adaptations in a variety of contexts and genres. It then pays close attention to the global spread of Shakespeare’s most famous play, Hamlet, from 1603 to the present. The course concludes with a creative project inspired by Shakespeare's lost play, Cardenio.

Tragic dramas from different cultures and periods have framed in memorable, though often contradictory, ways some basic questions about how human beings face suffering, violence, and death. Drawing on these broad traditions, students will explore the dramatic forms, social contexts, and rhetorical and political goals of tragedies in an attempt to understand how drama can turn catastrophe into art - and why. By what means does tragedy take horrific and often degrading experiences and transform them into artistic experiences that are (sometimes) intelligible, pleasurable, or beautiful? Should witnessing the misery of others ever be pleasurable or beautiful? Can we presume to make sense of another's suffering? How, more generally, can tragic drama help us come to terms with the violence and brutality of the human condition - or does it sometimes hinder this attempt?

What is memory? We tend to think it will be activated when the right moment comes, but our experiences may belie our thinking, such as when we forget a name just when we need it. A variety of disciplines and theories approach the phenomenon of memory: cognitive science, computer science, biology, psychology, sociology, media theory, theory of perception, philosophy, history, cultural history and art history, trauma theory, heritage studies. And we can observe a huge variety of attempts to preserve memories: monuments, memorials, museums, libraries, archives, rituals, writing, film, and even ephemeral forms such as blog posts or status updates (nothing gets lost in the Web!). The course allows students to sample these various approaches without being restricted to any one of them as they explore fundamental questions about the relationship between memory and human identity: Is memory everything we can remember, or everything we can forget? How can we know memories from dreams or fantasies? Do we remember things as they really were or as they never were? Is memory what we take for granted and thus an impediment to creative thinking, or is it the prerequisite of creative activity?

Is anything original? Before "remixes" had that name, they went by many others, including "tradition and the individual talent," parody, pastiche, burlesque, adaptation, dialogism, collage, detournement, refunctioning, intertextuality, intermediality, transtextuality, and the carnivalesque. Asking what happens when we make something new from something old, this course explores artistic and interpretative remix practices that are both very ancient and extremely contemporary. While "remix" is a recent term that evokes studio production and Internet culture, understanding its roots obliges us to go back to long-standing traditions in arts and culture generally. Although the course focuses to some extent on film adaptations of literary works, it should be of interest to students curious about music, film, and artistic adaptation in general, but also with our mass-mediated social environment that thrives on sampling, mash-ups, memes, and adaptation.

This course explores the craft of and the market for literary translation. Why do some translators aim for familiarity and others for estrangement? What is lost, and perhaps even gained, in a text's cultural relocation? What can be accessed in translation and what are the limits of translation? Translation, and translation projects such as NYUAD's Library of Arabic Literature, play a pivotal role in shaping intercultural exchange and globalizing literary markets and canons. The course familiarizes students with practices and theories of translation from different literary traditions. Case studies include comparative examples drawn from distinct genres such as the epic, forms of lyric poetry, drama, and modern prose fiction. Not available to students who have taken LITCW-UH 1140.

Virtually unknown outside of academic discourse until recently, the term cultural appropriation has become a commonplace in social and popular media, as activists and public intellectuals have highlighted what they see as problematic uses (or abuses) of cultural symbols, artifacts, or expressive modes connected to marginalized groups. But what exactly is cultural appropriation, and under what circumstances can it be said to constitute a form of exploitation or violence? This course approaches these questions both philosophically and empirically, asking, on the one hand: What is culture, and how can it be "owned" or "stolen"? and on the other: How have practices of adopting or using culture been implicated in processes of social subjugation or marginalization? Course readings are drawn from a range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, including cultural anthropology, art theory, music studies, and philosophy. By engaging with a rich corpus of ideas through in-class discussions, oral presentations, and written reflections, students will develop critical perspectives on cultural appropriation as well as the broader concepts of culture, race, and ethnicity.

This course examines a wide variety of literary texts on black-white couples, interracial families, and biracial identity, from classical antiquity to the present. Works studied include romances, novellas, plays, novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction, as well as some films and examples from the visual arts. Topics for discussion range from interracial genealogies to racial "passing," from representations of racial difference to alternative plot resolutions, and from religious and political to legal and scientific contexts for the changing understanding of "race." Focus is on the European and American traditions, and students are encouraged to supplement course discussions by introducing other literatures as appropriate.

As state apparatuses everywhere attempt to control their citizenry either directly (though force) or hegemonically (via consent of the governed), popular youth cultures become the ideological terrain on which battles for freedom of expression are fought. In the case of Muslim cultures, the contest is sometimes framed in terms of secular liberalism of thought and behavior, at others, in support of stricter religious orthodoxy even as the language and forms deployed are those of pop culture viz. "Islamic" fashion, music, comic books, film, theater, etc. This course will explore such tensions and the ethical challenges they pose in an increasingly global society through a variety of pop culture forms and subcultures from around the Muslim world. The challenge the course presents-one that requires students to synthesize materials from many disciplines-is to think through the ongoing battle for hearts and minds of Muslim youth around the world. This battle can be summed up through the competing ideologies of Islamism at one extreme and Islamophobia at the other. How do we steer a course between this contemporary Scylla and Charybdis? Herein lies the task.

Media depictions of the Middle East have transnational ramifications on political discourse and cultural identification around the globe. This seminar explores the cultural politics of such representations, beginning from the premise that representation itself is a contested site. Students will examine film, visual culture, and literature to ask how "the real" is mediated for various audiences. How can key dilemmas be best approached, such as the clash between theological taboos and notions of freedom of expression in recent controversies about Danish cartoons and Charlie Hebdo? Can readings of texts, films, and digital spaces see beyond familiar negative stereotypes or positive public images? The seminar will be organized around significant themes, concepts, and questions, including the exotic and the imperial imaginary; travel and the Holy Land; gender and national allegory; the representation of the "real"; religious taboo and visual representation; antiquity in contemporary popular culture; memoir and the post/colonial gaze; and dislocation and diaspora in the transnational reception of Middle Eastern cinema, art, and culture.

This course traces the theme of migration from the sixth century B.C.E. to the present and examines foundational, modern, and contemporary versions of migration experiences. Readings include scripture, epic and lyric poetry, epigrams and aphorisms, autobiography, reportage, documentary photography and film as well as fiction and examples of creative work in photography, film, and the visual arts. How has the process of migration been imagined and how have migrants and migration been represented in literature and visual arts, whether produced by migrants themselves or by others? What are the commonplaces (topoi) associated with migration, from fearing to yearning to be elsewhere and from nostalgia for the home (nostos) to making a home elsewhere? How has the emergence of migration literature (at times located between countries and languages) affected both national literary histories and notions of world literature? Works and even words (including the term "migration") have also migrated, and so the course will pay some attention to "wanderwords" and to translation as an intrinsic part of the cultural history of migration.

The history of falconry is not a hunting story. It's a story of human imagination of self, society, and the natural world. Approaching falconry as a "social fact" and as an example of what specialists refer to as "intangible heritage," this course asks what human engagements with these birds of prey, across time and culture, reveal about relationships between humans and nature - relationships of ethics and respect, but also of desire and domination. How might a close examination of falconry help explain the emergence and transformation of social categories such as nobility and poverty, male and female, believer and pagan, citizen and foreigner? How might it require us to confront human fragility - our bodily, intellectual, and spiritual limits, our experiences of joy, love, youth, death, faith, science, and more? Engaging with texts, images, and films, students will ask how humans use non-human species to understand and define ourselves, our civilizations, and our aspirations across a range of ethnic, religious, historical, and geographical differences.

Do new media change the way we think and perceive the world around us? What does it mean to live in an era after film has reshaped our capacity for documentation and visual expression? In order to explore such fundamental questions, this course focuses on artistic developments during the Weimar period (1918-1933), when Berlin became a vibrant cultural center after World War I. As the emergence of German film provided new aesthetic principles of artistic production and reception, traditional art forms such as literature, theater, painting, photography, and music were reframed by a new "cinematic imagination." Engaging with the work of cultural theorists who first witnessed the impact of film, photography, radio, and gramophone, the course also explores recent interdisciplinary scholarship in media studies to understand how new technologies shape social and political concerns. A hands-on film project allows students to explore Abu Dhabi's urban cityscapes to create a remake of Walter Ruttman's 1927 film Berlin: Symphony of a City. How can this reflection on modernity and modernization in 1920s Berlin help us understand the cinematic imagination's mediation of urban spaces today?

"There is that great proverb," the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe once said, "that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter." Is history inevitably written by the winners? Who decides which stories are told and heard, or how they shape collective memory? Can artists effectively act as historians, with the agency to shape counter narratives? This course explores contemporary art that draws on documentary and archival material - the stuff of "history" - to create performance, films and installations that tell stories otherwise lost, forgotten, suppressed or displaced. Special attention is paid to how these stories may participate in the process of decolonization, shape understandings of postwar realities, and generate debates in the global art world and society at large. Through artist and curator talks, screenings and virtual exhibition visits, students engage with the work of artists from Japan, South Asia, and Southeast Asia who explore the mechanisms of postcolonial history at the intersection of fiction and nonfiction, poetry, and testimony. Texts include work by Spivak, Hobsbawm, Césaire, Butalia, Chakrabarty, and Prashad.

How do speculative genres speak to their own times, even as they imagine faraway futures? This course considers the metaphors and parables science fiction films create about present societies and the future of the human condition to explore such works negotiate the anxieties and fears of the present in imagined space and/or time. It focuses specifically on film - an art form that has had dramatic reach across global audiences, with technological advances allowing us to visualize increasingly complex alternative worlds. Drawing on films and television from the USA, Germany, India, Korea, the Middle East and elsewhere, many inspired by literature, the course allows students to consider what universal values these filmic narratives project and what solutions they offer to social, psychological, and environmental dilemmas. The course puts film in context with earlier forms of speculation about the future. Through the course, students will also consider what the science fiction of the future may look like by creating short narratives from which they will develop a podcast episode, short story or a treatment for a science fiction film or series.

How did the familiar, powerful, and problematic narratives of civilizations emerge that pit the "East" against the "West"? What are their consequences? Where and how have they been resisted? The course will analyze texts, events, images, and places that were influential in shaping these representations of the Orient/East, as well as key efforts, including Edward Said's, to outline the political consequences of such narratives. How was the Orient first encountered, written about, and even "produced" by European adventurers, travelers, and artists who "discovered" and "described" the people and places of the "East" in the 18th and 19th centuries? How did the travel writings, paintings, photographs, monuments, and museums that resulted both narrate the Other and simultaneously construct the "West" as well? Carefully considering Said's important theorization of Orientalism and a range of responses to it, the course will extend the applicability of these concepts to regions beyond the Middle East, especially South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia, and will also consider such topics as gender, ethnography, aesthetics, and the shaping of post-colonial identities.

Between the myths of shipwrecked sailors and the history of camel caravans transporting frankincense, myrrh, and gold to the archaeological expeditions at the crossroads of the Empty Quarter, "Arabia Felix" - a name given to the southern Arabian Peninsula by Classical historians, meaning "Happy" and "Fortunate" - has captivated the minds of ancient and modern-day explorers. But what is Arabia Felix? Why, after this imagined place has enlightened and eluded so many according to its myths, is it still identified today as the land of happiness, the land of builders? Where is the source of Arabia's happiness at the intersection of its myth and history? In this seminar, we will explore the idea of Arabia Felix inside Abu Dhabi's Island of Happiness, where oil has developed a prosperous cultural-heritage, religiously tolerant, ecotourism landscape. By learning to read accounts of travelers, archaeologists, expatriates, politicians, clergy and poets, the aim is to produce interdisciplinary essays on Arabia today.

The Arabian Peninsula is remembered throughout the ages on account of its smell. Characteristically laden with types of oudh, frankincense, myrrh, musk, jasmine, agarwood and bakhur, Arabian perfumes are branded traditionally as scents with robust odors and medicinal properties to beautify, purify, and fumigate the body from malodors and infection. In this course, we will ask the following questions: What do our noses really know and love? How are our emotions intertwined with scents and memories personally and noetically? How are innovative local and global technologies changing our olfactory perceptions by blending traditional elements with modern ones? When and where are the lines blurred between medicine and perfumery and for what purposes? Using Abu Dhabi and the entire UAE as a heritage landscape of scent, we will look for the origins of the perfumery tradition in the Arabian Peninsula, and investigate how the industry has changed globally in time.

How can music provide a framework for understanding conflict, as well as protest and peace movements, across a wide range of historical and cultural contexts from the twentieth century to the present? This seminar examines the role that diverse musical traditions and practices play in shaping the complex sociological rituals of war. Whether hearing John Lennon's song "Give Peace a Chance" as the anthem of the peace and protest movement against the Vietnam War during the 1960s or engaging with music as a basis for cultural and heritage preservation in post-conflict contexts, this seminar draws on scholarship from musicology, ethnomusicology, sound studies, and sociology, among other fields, to explore music as a contested practice during times of conflict.

By default, you are a consumer of immersive experiences if you’re been to a 3D or IMAX movie; if you’re tried a virtual reality headset; if you’ve listened to surround sound music; if you’ve explored an interactive website or visual album; or if you’re attended Burning Man or Disneyland. One of the main drivers of culture and technology, immersion is the process by which one or more senses become saturated, as environmental objects surround, envelope, or come in closer proximity to us. In the 21 st century, immersion has become a multi-billion global business. But it is not new. Theorists and artists have long been concerned with theorizing sensory aspects of media spectacle. Why have human beings long been driven to push the boundaries of reality and spectacle? In this class, students will explore the history and culture of immersive and investigate how emergent technology has impacted immersion. We especially look at immersion in popular culture—from Satie to Björk; to ambient music and panoramic sound; to theme parks and escape rooms; to the rise of holograms and the metaverse.

What is the relationship between citizenship and culture? When and how do they overlap? How do the rituals by which our identities are conferred and regulated relate to either or both of these concepts? Are we simply born into citizenship? Into culture? When and how do these categories evolve? To what extent can works of art be said to "belong" to a country or culture or to contribute to the work of shaping national or cultural identities? Emergent literatures from what we might call nation-spaces are often subjected to simple deeds of ownership, albeit not without contestation. Indeed, the same texts, examined more carefully, may negate such casual attributions. What happens when memory exerts its brooding influence, upsetting the categorical claims of citizen that derive from the cultural field? This seminar draws on diverse genres of literature from a range of times and places - from ancient Greece to the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary Turkey, from eighteenth-century England to the unfinished business of the Biafra war of secession – to ask if there are any inherent and permanent values to be placed on household expressions such as Nation, Culture, and other like terms.

What stories do you know and how do you know them? How have you lived with these stories over the span of your life? What stories will you tell in the future? In this course, "Once Upon a Time," we will consider storytelling as a complex human phenomenon by focusing on the rich heritage of folk and fairy tales that have been recorded around the globe. Students will be introduced to a wide range of methodological approaches drawn from diverse fields evolutionary biology, cognitive science, psychology, literary approaches, and media studies.

Faith and Finance How do ideas about the future affect our attitudes towards risk-taking? How is a central religious value and practice of faith historically related to financial notions of debt, credit, and money? This course examines the ways in which a new idea of the future in Renaissance Italy, as undetermined and distinct from providence, gave shape to a speculative financial and commercial culture. These have shaped, in their turn, modern financial institutions, including the global market. which has in their turn generated contemporary financial institutions including the global market, and political economy. We will examine the role of Renaissance bankers and merchants as patrons of the arts, as well as artists, philosophers, and theologians in shaping and evaluating commercial and political cultures of speculation and risk. Topics and texts include: the notion of Fortuna in Machiavelli's milestone book The Prince, the first public debt fund; charity funds; merchants conducting transnational trade.

This is a course that explores the relationship between ideas, the body and the way that fashion can be understood to mediate between the two. Through a range of disciplines and media this course considers the body as an aspect of not only medical and scientific exploration, but crucially as a vital element of culture and society. Bodies affect the ways in which the social world and power relations are organized, and they even arguably condition the way that we understand reality itself. Our physical form is constantly shaped according to both philosophies and fashions. Body ideals and broader ideals often interrelate strongly through bodily practices and with what we wear. There are meanings and fashions in all bodily forms (skinny, buxom, muscular, ideas of 'whiteness') and body practices (dieting, hair management, cleansing rituals, plastic surgery and genital cutting). Different cultural forms (literary, visual, material etc) will provide the focus of our discussions as they all engage with the different ways that we make meaning out of our bodies. Students will be invited to investigate in their written work set texts from class in addition to primary material of their own choice.

French films and French culture, examined by situating the films in their social, historical, and philosophical context. Topics include the relationship between the Avant-garde artistic movements of the early 20th century (futurism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism) and the cinematographic Avant-garde (Buñuel, L'Herbier, Cocteau), the echoes of classical French theatre (Marivaux, Beaumarchais, Musset) in the cinema of Renoir, the troubled period of the German Occupation and the work of filmmakers who deliberately chose to stay in France to continue their calling (Clouzot, Carné), and the influence of the existentialist circles of Saint Germain des Prés (Sartre, Camus) on the Nouvelle Vague.

The course will tackle questions of sexuality in the Middle East from a historical perspective. Applying methodologies of queer theory, it will discuss the complex history of sexuality in the Middle East, and sketch the genealogy of Western attitudes towards both Arab and Jewish sexuality. Relying on theorists and historians like Michel Foucault, Robert Aldrich, Khaled El-Rouayheb, Samar Habib, and Joseph Massad, we will explore the essential role that the queer issue plays in the contemporary politics of the region.

Is Israel a multilingual or a monolingual country? This is a question with which many educators, linguists, politicians and laypeople have been struggling. In this course we will explore several issues of language use and practice in Israel, language ideology and language policy. We will start by learning the orthographies (spelling systems) of Hebrew and Arabic and practice them through the methodology of Linguistic Landscape. We will tour Tel Aviv-Jaffa and other places and study public signs and their use in Hebrew and Arabic as well as in other languages. We will look at signs, advertisements, instructions, buildings, streets, billboards, etc. This exercise will teach us much about the public space, who controls it and what cultural and political messages it sends us.

How does noise affect the way we perceive the world? How do writers translate their acoustic environments through their work? This course explores the vexed and vexing concept of noise in literature and culture. Students will consider the creative value of noise in literature across time and space through depictions of bustling cityscapes, the din of warfare, clattering factories, and grinding machinery. What types of sonic cues are gendered, racialized, or class-coded? Students will place literary representations of noise in their broader cultural and historical contexts, as they put close readings in dialogue with larger phenomena. Theoretical and critical readings will complement literary texts, music, and sound art, allowing students to blend literary analysis with the interdisciplinary field of sound studies. In addition to reading, hearing, and discussing how authors translate sound into text, students will explore their own acoustic surroundings through "soundwalks" and write about them in creative "sonic translation" projects to better understand the creative potential of noise in literature.

In 2022, 54,400 photos were taken per second, 196 million per hour, 4.7 billion per day. We are surrounded by surveillance cameras, viral images, selfies, social media, gaming culture, Google Earth, news outlets, advertising and reproductions. Is the image a new social currency for the articulation of our identities? How does machine viewing change our view and experience of the world, when we can travel the globe, view the interior of our bodies, and watch the bombardment of cities on various electronic devices? How do we mediate reality as we click, swipe, scroll, delete and like, and how is this imagery experienced in different global contexts? What do these pictures want from us? This course addresses such critical questions from a global perspective drawing on a range of examples from popular culture, media, news, art and photographic practices and visual cultures across the globe. Students will have the opportunity to author a visual essay and develop visual literacy skills.

Nation and nationalism were dominant concerns in global scholarship from the 80's to 90's. But they have receded from academic conversations in the 2000s as 'post-national' thinking became dominant. However, the world over there has been a resurgence of nationalist movements. In light of these changing global dynamics, we interrogate how the nation is 'narrated'. Nations are ontological fictions but are also 'real' in a very significant sense - people literally die and kill for them. In this course we explore the duality of the nation through the notion of narration. Narratives 'construct' nations (or imagine them into being) and nations are also 'represented' in narratives because they are seen as 'real' objects. We will explore the literary, aesthetic and political implications of the ways in which nation and narration are intertwined in a range of texts spanning diverse cultures, historical periods, genres and styles. In doing so we will ask how has nation and nationalism been theorized? What are the relationships between decolonization, nationalism and postcolonialism? How do minorities and migration shape nations? We will conclude with reflections on thinking 'beyond' the nation.

The question of the ‘Other’ is one of the most intractable social, philosophical and political questions of contemporary existence. The ‘Other’ can take multiple forms: ethnic, racial, sexual, national, class and the list is potentially endless. We encounter otherness on a daily basis and given the highly mobile world we inhabit Otherness also often becomes a source of conflict. This course asks a set of interrelated questions about how we encounter otherness from a specifically postcolonial lens – particularly in terms of how otherness is represented. Some of the questions it raises are: What was the nature of Otherness in the colonial encounter and what are its postcolonial implications? What are the politics of attempting to comprehend the Other? Is the Other constructed or is it real? Why has Otherness been important for a sense of self, particularly in colonial discourses? But also how does such notions of Otherness continue to shape identities in the postcolonial world and the Global South? How are academic disciplines and epistemologies implicated in producing the Other? The course takes as it point of departure anglophone writing from different historical and geographical contexts to critically explore how writers using English as their primary medium of expression have grappled with representing 'otherness'. We will read texts such as Leonard Woolf's Village in the Jungle set in colonial Sri Lanka, George Orwell's Burmese Days set in colonial Burma (or what is now Myanmar) and Paul Theroux's Kowloon Tong set in Hong Kong to respond to a set of questions that arise when Otherness is produced under contexts of extreme inequality, such as colonialism.

What ties do our bodies have with the world around us and with each other? Who gets to define the human and the non-human? What place does the human-like have in our world of experience? Stories of Our Bodies is a course where students explore the intricate relationship between the world and the human body, the human-like body, and the non-human body. We investigate the connections between sensory, cognitive, and emotional experiences of the world around us. The course is structured around key themes exploring the body and will cover a wide range of media such as fiction, poetry, film, music, and video games, alongside scholarly articles on the body. Classroom discussions will delve into questions about our conceptions about our bodies, our embodiment, our situated knowledge, and the powers that surround and influence our bodies and our perceptions of other people’s bodies.

Eco-art and ecomedia offer ways to conceptualize ecosystems that are biological, cultural, economic, epistemological, political, social, and, above all, more-than-human. They also foreground potential damage that human activity, including art making and viewing, inflicts on the planet. This class examines how film and video, interactive media, multimedia installation, and visual arts can address issues, such as carbon and pollution trading, earth democracy, digital energy consumption, environmental in/justice, e-waste and waste, extractivism, GMOs and IP, greenwashing and sustainability, habitat degradation, indigenous, local, and traditional knowledge, industrial farming, labor informalization, petroculture, plastics, public health, resource privatization, rewilding, risk assessment, species extinction. The course challenges conventional partitioning of thinking into discrete academic disciplines that normalize anthropocentrism, capitalism, and colonialism to amplify and accelerate overlapping existential crises that affect future generations.

This course interrogates the nature of the photographic image. It does so by exploring the relationship of the still and moving image in cinema. Through detailed engagements with a variety of films in which photography plays a central role, the course develops critical assessments of the social and cultural uses of the photographic image: What is the relationship between image and truth and image and memory? How has the photographic image shaped our understanding of family and self? How have communities been represented and represented themselves? What are the ethics of documentary photography? How do class and gender inflect the histories of the image? These and other questions will be approached through a rigorous engagement with aesthetic experience, so that the nature of film and the photograph will also remain at the forefront of our discussions. In addition to producing scholarly written work, students will be required to produce a film of 2 to 4 minutes in length using only still images.