The Consortium includes Columbia University, Fordham University, New School University, New York University, Princeton University, Rutgers-New Brunswick, and Stony Brook.
This page will be updated as more information becomes available.

FALL 2015

Columbia University

Art History & Archaeology

NOTE:  Art History Lecture courses do not require an application, but seminars do. Applications can be submitted to the Art History department office (826 Schermerhorn Hall).  Application Deadline: Monday, August 3rd.
AHIS G4136 What’s the Matter? Reading Medieval and Early Modern Sources on Materiality and the Making of Artifacts. A. Shalem. T 6:10–8pm, 930 Schermerhorn (Seminar)
This graduate level seminar focuses on specific medieval and early modern sources, mainly translations of Arabic sources, on materials and the making of objects in the world of Islam. It will cover issues concerning the making and shaping of precious stones and precious materials into objects of art, the working with particular materials such as glass and rock crystals, and even the making of copies and fakes. In addition, other materials like metalwork, lacquer and ceramics will be also addressed. Students will be asked to read and discuss in each of the meetings a specific tractate, which usually focuses on one particular material. The text will be critically discussed with aiming at thinking beyond the text’s informative values and mainly trying to embed it within a wider context of the human knowledge of materials techniques in the pre- and early modern era.
AHIS W4144 Artistic Interactions: Europe and the “Orient” (711-1517). A. Shalem. TR 4:10-5:25, 612 Schermerhorn (Lecture)
With the Muslim expansion into the Mediterranean Basin, the capture of the Iberian Peninsula in 711, and, later on, the conquest of Sicily and South Italy by the very beginning of the 9th century, the Christian Latin West came into direct contacts with the new Muslim Empire. Moreover, diplomacy between the Carolingian and the Ottonian courts with potent Muslim powers in Baghdad and Cordoba, wars and conflicts in the age of Crusade, and extensive trade ventures between western Europe and the “Orient” in the High Middle Ages brought about a new aesthetic common language – a sort of artistic lingua franca – that strongly shaped the art of Christian Europe and that of the Muslim world, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. In this series of lectures the artistic interactions between Europe and the world of Islam will be chronologically discussed. In addition, contact zones, such as important trade centers, and particular frontier regions located on the verges of the Christian and Muslim worlds will be highlighted as the major interactive spaces for artistic exchanges and mobility of people and objects.
AHIS G8094 Mamallapuram & the Development of South Indian Style.  V. Dehejia.  T 2:10-4:00, 934 Schermerhorn Hall (Seminar)
This seminar seeks to arrive at a well-grounded “reading” of the enigmatic site of Mamallapuram, port of the Pallava dynasty, that holds the key to the origins of the South Indian style. It then examines the development and flowering of South Indian architecture and sculpture under the aegis of the Chola monarchs.
AHIS G8462 Italian Renaissance Painting.   M. Cole T 2:10-4, 832 Schermerhorn (Seminar)
The fall 2015 version of the seminar will focus on Andrea del Sarto. It will consider the artistic scene in Florence around 1500, when Sarto was learning his craft, then look at the major works he completed until his death in 1530. The course will consider the artist’s collaborations with several of the painters (Rosso Fiorentino, Jacopo da Pontormo) who later came to stand as icons of “Mannerism” and will examine the Sarto revival at the end of the century, when the painter’s works became touchstones for academic reformers. A number of the sessions will be held in the Frick Collection, where a major exhibition on Sarto opens in October; prospective participants should be prepared to meet there and at other collections in the city during class hours.
AHIS G8465 Finished/Unfinished.   D. Bodart R 2:10-4pm, 934 Schermerhorn (Seminar)
As Pliny the Elder famously asserted, “the last works of artists, their unfinished paintings, in fact, are held in greater admiration than their completed works… For in such works are seen the outline depicted, and the very thoughts of the artists expressed”. This seminar will investigate the artistic process in the early modern period in relation to these two extreme stages of completion and incompletion. It will focus particularly on the 16th century when, around figures of recognized artistic genius such as Michelangelo and Titian, there appeared for the first time the question of a possible intentional use of unfinished sketchiness as an expressive medium.
The course will devote particular attention to the critical reading of primary sources, examining original editions, later commented editions, and translations. The course will also be more generally based on a cross analysis of works, technical and scientific data, and historical and theoretical issues, in order to understand which elements would have determined a state of completion or incompletion of a work of art in the early modern period. Another fundamental issue will be to analyze the elaboration of a poetics of the unfinished in 16th century Italy and its later reception. Reading knowledge in Italian and/or Spanish is recommended, but not mandatory.

English & Comparative Literature

ENGL W4015 Vernacular Paleography.   3 credits. Baswell, Christopher MW 12:10pm-2pm
(Lecture). This class is designed to introduce graduate students (and some advanced undergraduates) to the paleography of English vernacular manuscripts written during the period ca. 700 -1500, with brief excursions into Latin and into French as it was written on the Continent. Students interested in a broader introduction to Latin and the national hands of the Continent should also consider taking Dr. Dutschke’s Latin Paleography course, which is planned to be offered in alternate years to Prof. Baswell’s. The purpose of the course is fourfold: (1) to teach students how to make informed judgments with regard to the place and date of origin, (2) to provide instruction and practice in the accurate reading and transcription of medieval scripts, (3) to learn and use the basic vocabulary of the description of scripts, and (4) to examine the manuscript book as a product of the changing society that produced it and, thus, as a primary source for the study of that society and its culture. In order to localize manuscripts in time and place it is necessary to examine aspects of the written page besides the script, such as the material on which it is written, its layout and ruling, the decoration and illustration of the text, the provenance, and binding. It is also necessary to examine the process of manuscript production itself, whether institutional, commercial, or personal. The history of book production and of decoration and illumination are thus considered part of the study of paleography, as is the history of patronage and that of libraries; the German term Handschriftenkunde well describes the subject. Manuscripts are among the most numerous and most reliable surviving witnesses to medieval social and intellectual change, and they will be examined as such.
ENGL W4130 British Literature to 1500.  3 credits. Crane, Susan. TR 04:10P-05:25P
(Lecture). A survey of early British writing in its cultural contexts. The course begins with Anglo-Saxon poetry, traces the changes brought to Britain by the Norman Conquest, focuses on the literature of aristocratic courts in the later Middle Ages, and ends as Caxton sets up London’s first printing press. We will read Anglo-Saxon works in translation and most Middle English works in their original language. The syllabus will include Beowulf, the Lais of Marie de France, The Book of Beasts, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Malory’s Morte D’Arthur.
ENGL G6028 Medieval Animals.  4 credits. Crane, Susan. T 10:10A-12:00P
(Seminar). This seminar offers an introduction to basic readings in the field called critical animal studies or human-animal studies, with primary texts from medieval Britain and France, and secondary texts by familiar theorists including Derrida, Foucault, Agamben, Nussbaum, and Haraway together with field-specific founders including Ursula Heise, Vinciane Despret, and Cary Wolfe. Medieval literature offers a rich archive of thought about nonhuman animals, ranging from the high philosophy of Augustine’s commentary on Genesis and Aquinas’s rediscovery of Aristotle, to the many animal miracles in the Life of Saint Cuthbert, the totemic use of animals in heraldry and family genealogies, and the instructions in treatises on how to hunt boar and deer. Many questions still current in animal studies today engaged medieval writers as well. Do humans have ethical responsibilities to animals? What kinds of consciousness do different species have? How did domestication come about? What kinds of working relationships are possible across species lines? What rhetorical resources (metaphoric? anthropomorphic? affective?) come forward when animals are represented, and what are the limitations of rhetoric for translating animal encounters into language?
ENGL G6113 Court vs. Country: Literature and Politics in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England.   4 credits.  Crawford, Julie. W 04:10P-06:00P
(Seminar). In his An Harborow for faithfull and trewe subjects(1559), the Elizabethan Bishop John Aylmer writes that “the regiment of England is not a mere monarchie, as some for lacke of consideration think, nor a mere oligarchie, nor democracie, but a rule mixte of all these…thimage whereof, and not the image but the thinge in deede, is to be sene in the parliament house, wherein you shall find these three estates.” This course takes this statement at its word, looking at the balance of power in Elizabethan and early Stuart culture between the monarchy, the nobility, and the commons, as reflected and created in literary texts. We will examine political philosophy from Aristotle to Cicero to Machiavelli and Lispius, as well as in the words of Elizabeth I and James I themselves; continental and British contexts from France and the Low Countries to Scotland and the great estates of England; continental and British controversies from Catholic and Calvinist resistance theory to continental absolutism and the divine right of kings; texts ranging from Sidney’s letter to Elizabeth to country house entertainments and poems, cheaply printed texts, manuscript miscellanies, and Shakespeare’s King Lear; and critical paradigms ranging from Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City(1975) and J.G. A Pocock’s The Ancient Constitution(1987) to Victoria Kahn’s “The Romance of Contract” (1997).

History

HIST W 1061 / Grad Section: 6999. Intro to the Early Middle Ages, 250-1050. Maskarinec. TR 4:10-5:25. Lecture.
This course surveys the history of the Mediterranean world and northern Europe from the Late Roman Empire to the eleventh century. We will begin (Part 1) by considering the interconnected Roman world of Late Antiquity, focusing on the changes brought about by Christianity. The second half (Part 2) will trace the emergence of new religious and political communities around the Mediterranean and in Northern Europe. Special attention will be given to the circulation of people, products and ideas across Europe and the Mediterranean and the changes that this brought about.  This course emphasizes the diverse but fragmentary textual and material evidence that survives from the period and the problems of interpreting this evidence. Students will begin acquiring the skills of a historian and learn why and how other historians have studied the period. No previous background in medieval history is required. [Note: this description is for the 1000-level version; the graduate version will likely have additional requirements].
HIST W 4076. Devotional Objects in Medieval and Early Modern Christianity. Caroline Bynum. W 2:10-4.   4 points. Permission of instructor required.
This course will consider the history of religious objects from ca. 1200 to ca. 1600 mostly in northern Europe, examining both what kind of religious “charge” they carried and what sorts of ambivalence and/or rejection they met with in the period of the Protestant Reformation.  Although we will spend approximately a third of the course time studying examples of what we would today call “art”—that is panel paintings, miniatures, and statues—we will also consider other sorts of things (for example, relics of the saints, the Eucharist, and religious clothing) that expressed the sacred through their materiality and will place all objects in the context of written sources that demonstrate or oppose their use.
HIST W 4983.   Science and Empire from Baghdad to Byzantium. Seminar. A. Roberts. T 2:10-4.  4 points.
This seminar explores the flourishing world of medieval science and scientists in the Byzantine and Islamic empires. Scholars read and wrote books on astronomy, medicine, alchemy, and other subjects in a variety of changing social and political contexts. What was the nature of the relationship between science and empire, between knowledge and power, in Byzantium and the medieval Islamic world? How did specialized knowledge and its bearers serve, subvert, and complicate imperial agendas? What was science understood to entail, and to what end? The course is designed for students interested in the history of science, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern empires, and/or the pre-modern world. It introduces students to medieval Greek and Arabic science and political contexts, from roughly the 7th to the 12th century. Readings from primary sources (in translation) and modern scholarship will be analyzed and discussed with respect to several interrelated themes, including: knowledge in the service of empire; communities of knowledge-producers (Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and other); narratives of the history of science and their political significance; and taxonomies of the sciences.
History G6999 section 010. MEDIEVAL INTELLECTUAL LIFE 1050-1400.   4 points. Joel Kaye. MW 2:40pm–3:55pm. GRADUATE LECTURE. Instructor permission required.
HIST G 8906 Craft and Science: Making Objects in the Early Modern World.   Pamela  Smith  M 10:10-­2, Chandler 260.  (Course will be offered Spring 2016 as well)
This course will study the materials, techniques, settings, and meanings of skilled craft and artistic practices in the early modern period (1350-1750), in order to reflect upon a series of issues, including craft knowledge and artisanal epistemology; the intersections between craft and science; and questions of historical methodology and evidence in the reconstruction of historical experience. The course will be run as a “Laboratory Seminar,” with discussions of primary and secondary materials, as well as text-based research and hands-on work in a laboratory. This course is one component of the Making and Knowing Project of the Center for Science and Society. This course contributes to the collective production of a transcription, English translation, and critical edition of a late sixteenth-century manuscript in French, Ms. Fr. 640. In 2014-15, the course concentrated on mold-making and metalworking. In 2015-16, it will focus on color-making, including pigments, varnishes, cold enamels, dyes, imitation gems, and other color processes. Students are encouraged to take this course for both semesters (or more), but will receive full credit only once. Different laboratory work and readings will be carried out each semester.

Italian

G4030  TASSO.  3 points.  Jo Ann Cavallo. M 2:10pm-4:00pm
W4091 DANTE’S DIVINA COMMEDIA 1.  4 points.  Teodolinda Barolini. TR 4:10pm-6:00pm.

Latin American and Iberian Cultures

Spanish G6533 THE BOOK & THE DISCIPLINES: Histories of the Book. 4 points. Jesus Rodriguez-Velasco. R 1:10pm-3:55pm.
This seminar is an inquiry into the close relations among the history of the book, the history of reading and the discussion about the disciplines. This is not to say that there is a chain of causality among these three disparate elements. Rather, they are part of an entwined series of discussions surrounding material, intellectual, and cognitive questions that set in motion changes in the technologies of the book, in the practices of reading, and in the ways disciplines are devised within and without the academic world. Books transmit content –but not only. Furthermore, they have always been epistemological devices –that is, artifacts that suggest ways to know things (skills, disciplines, etc.). They have always constituted material concepts with which to respond to complex questions about cognition, study, dissemination of knowledge, interaction, dialogue, debate, indexing, order, search and research –at local and global levels, among many different graphic and alphabetic traditions. Book is a very large denomination that includes many different techniques ranging from unique handwritten objects to manually, mechanically, or digitally reproduced ones.The history of the book encompasses the study of the radical variety of researches devised to achieve material ways to produce and disseminate knowledge that are not only verbal, but also multimedia: the history of the book is, as well, the history of the combination and interplay, on the same portable and archivable object, of text, images, music, pieces of machinery (vovelles), or even the sacred, the talismanic, and the totemic.
Span G6509 4 points. Visions from Afar, Visions from Nearby: Opening of the World and Close-Seeing. Alessandra Russo. Time/Location TBA
Between the 15th and the 17th centuries the expansion projects –and in particular the Iberian ones – stimulated an unprecedented fertile tension between the distant and the close, in geographical, historical and visual terms. Each session of this graduate seminar will be devoted to specific episodes – how to conceive the city of Tenochtitlan from Nuremberg? how to make a Jesuit mapamundi in Beijing? how to illustrate local plants and fruits in Mexico (Francisco Hernandez) or Goa (García da Orta)? how to transform into copper plates the pages of the chronicles describing remote places for an European public (De Bry’s enterprise)? We will also study a number of textual and visual documents explicitly conceived to cross the ocean (Diego Muñoz Camargo from Tlaxcala, Guaman Poma de Ayala from Lucanas, both authors’ textual and visual works aimed to reach Spain and to be potentially printed), or Bernardino de Sahagún’s encyclopedic project. From the construction of “global mythographies” in Las Casas, or Pignoria to the display of farness and the reconceptualization of Antiquity in XVIth century Lisbon, and Goa or in the Wunderkammern of Bologna, Naples, or Prague, we will investigate how between the 15th and 17th centuries, new ways of making both remoteness and proximity visible were used and invented, tools that range from new challenges of ekphrasis to precise optical techniques of capturing.

Music

G8101 Seminar Historical Musicology Middle Ages: The Troubadours and the Value of Song. 3points. Susan Boynton. M 9:30-11:30
Please note: You must contact Susan Boynton directly (slb184@columbia.edu) if you wish to take this course.
This seminar will introduce students to the songs of the troubadours and bring them up to date with current thinking on the conjunction of words and music in their compositions. It will be held so as to coincide with that offered by Professor Sarah Kay, Department of French, New York University, and will be open to students interested in medieval music as well as those more interested in poetry. The course will have four principal thematic components: formal analysis (poetic and musical), historical conspectus (an overview of how troubadours situate their songs at different points in the twelfth century), the study of a particular troubadour (the songs of Guiraut Riquier), and songs in context (examples of narrative works in which songs are embedded). In addition, students will learn to read medieval Occitan, to understand the musical notation used in the medieval troubadour manuscripts, and to become familiar with at least some of those manuscripts. A visit will be organized to see the only troubadour songbook in North America, chansonnier N, which is in the Morgan Library. Early enrollment is advised as overall numbers will be limited to 16.

Religion

W4171 CANON LAW & MEDIEVAL CHRISTIANITY. Points: 4   F 10:10am-12:00pm. Robert E Somerville
 

Fordham University

English

ENGL 5345 – THEATRICAL ENTERPRISE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND  T 4:00 – 6:30 Mary Bly
This course will offer a survey of English theatrical enterprise from the 1590s to the 1640s. The playing companies will serve as an organizing principle for study of dramatists including Shakespeare, Jonson and Marlowe.
CRN 28400

New York University