Columbia University
Art History
AHIS G8221 Art and Diplomacy: Gifts and Gift-Giving from Late Antiquity to the Early Renaissance
H. Klein
M 2:10-4pm, 930 Schermerhorn
Silk textiles, luxury objects made from precious metals, stones, or ivory, and even Christian relics and reliquaries feature prominently in surviving lists of goods exchanged between foreign courts and rulers as part of the diplomatic process. Precious books, carved gems, and objects of fine metalwork are likewise attested as gifts exchanged between members of aristocratic families as well as potentates and ecclesiastical communities to serve as tokens of allegiance or familial bonds, pious votives, or exquisite offerings that aimed to secure a person or a family’s earthly memory and heavenly afterlife. Building on a rich body of art historical, anthropological, and sociological literature, this graduate seminar explores the culture of gifts and gift-giving and its intersection with familial and dynastic politics from late antiquity to the early modern period. A number of canonical texts and prominent artifacts will help to illuminate the role and function of artistic products in a complex system of value and valuation that defined and structured the interaction between individuals and groups in a shared ‘culture of objects’ that stretched from the Eastern Mediterranean to the fringes of Western Europe. Please note that the number of participants in this seminar is restricted to 10 to facilitate a more immediate approach to the study of objects and allow for a number of site visits to museum collections in New York City.
AHIS G8525 Laughter and Renaissance Images
D. Bodart
R 2:10-4pm, 832 Schermerhorn
Laughter escapes all sorts of uniform classification, as literary studies have taught us, and during the Renaissance one used to laugh with images in many different ways. The seminar will focus not only on the representation of laughter, but also on the modalities of laughter used in images in 15th-16th century Europe. A special attention will be devoted to the comical language of images, with its witticisms, inversions, and parodic inventions: the distinctive structures and a specific vocabulary for pictorial syntax will be investigated in relation with the language of comic theatre, burlesque literature, carnival culture and farce. Examining the various forms of laughter produced by images, whether they concern ‘vulgar laughter’ or ‘erudite laughter’ or contaminations of the two, the seminar intends to develop a preliminary taxonomy of laughter in Renaissance visual art. Students are required to read at least one of the following foreign languages: French Italian, Spanish or German.
English and Comparative Literature
ENGL G6129 Writing Lives in Early Modern England 4 Stewart, Alan W 9:00A-12:00P
ENGL G6199 Early Modern Literature: Writing London 4 Howard, Jean M 2:10P-4:00P
CLEN W4721 Magic, Carnival, Sacrament, Theatre 3 Peters, Julie TR 10:10A-11:25A
Fordham University
English
ENGL 5985
Introduction to Early Modern Studies
An introduction to the major debates, conversations, and approaches in early modern studies, with a focus on what it means to define and contribute to a field, how canons are formed, and what constitutes evidence for a literary-critical argument. Students will be exposed to, and gain practice in, a variety of methodological strategies and techniques: close reading and rhetorical analysis, archival research, theoretical and interdisciplinary work, and textual editing, among others.
British 2 McEleney, C.
New York University
Anthropology
ANTH-GA 3392
English
ENGL-GA.2271
Workshop in Medieval & Renaissance Studies
W 11:00 – 12:15 PM
Same as MEDI-GA 2000
Momma
ENGL-GA 2333
Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama
T 3:30 – 5:30 PM
Archer
ENGL-GA 3323
TPCS: Renaissance Literature
R 1:00-3:00 PM
Fleming and Halpern
French
FREN-GA 2290
The Emotions in Medieval French Literature
R 3:30 – 6:00 PM
Vitz
Fine Arts (IFA)
FINH-GA 2513 3
From Dehli to the Deccan: Arts of Mobility in South Asia
T 3:00 – 5:00 PM
Students must have permission from the instructor before registering for this course.
Flood and Khera
FINH-GA 3017 3
The Qur’an as Object, the Qur’an as Text
F 10:00 – 12:00 PM
Students must have permission from the instructor before registering for this course.
Soucek
FINH-GA 2532 3
Velázquez
R 3:00 – 5:00 PM
Reading knowledge of Spanish is helpful but not obligatory
Students must have permission from the instructor before registering for this course.
Brown
FINH-GA 3034 3
Revisiting the Carracci Academy
R 12:30 – 2:30 PM
Students will be expected to read Italian, German, and French
Hood
FINH-GA 3028 3
Dreams and Visions in Medieval Art
T 10:00 – 12:00 PM
Maxwell
FINH-GA 2528
Truth/Fiction: Current Research in Medieval Art
R 12:30 – 2:30 PM
Maxwell
FINH-GA 3026 3
Visualizing World and Cosmos in Late Antiquity
W 3:00 – 5:00 PM
Students must have permission from the instructor before registering for this course.
Thomas
FINH-GA 3043 001
Architectural Theory and Practice in the Italian Renaissance
W 5:30 – 7:30 PM
Students must have the permission of the instructor before registering for this course.
Trachtenberg
FINH-GA 3025
Seminar: Byzantine Art, 9th to 15th Centuries
TBA
TBA
FINH-GA 3029
Seminar: The Sculp Imagination in Italian Renaissance Art
M 3:00-5:00 PM
TBA
FINH-GA 2543 002
TPCS: Advanced Study/Medieval/Renaissance Architecture
R 3:00-5:00 PM
Trachtenberg
Hebrew and Judaic Studies
HBRJD-GA 1235 [3 points]
Biblical Interpretations: The Song of Songs
T 11:00-1:45 PM
Kozodoy
History
HIST-GA 31151
Proseminar in Medieval and Renaissance Studies
T 2:00 – 4:45 PM
Same as MEDI-GA 1100
Bedos-Rezak
Italian
ITAL-GA 2312
Paradiso
T 3:30 – 6:10 PM
Class conducted in Italian.
Ardizzone
Medieval & Renaissance Center
MEDI-GA 1100
Proseminar in Medieval and Renaissance Studies
T 2:00 – 4:45 PM
Same as HIST-GA 3115
Bedos-Rezak
MEDI-GA 2000 1
Workshop in Medieval & Renaissance Studies
W 11:00 – 12:15 PM
Same as ENGL-GA.2271
Momma
MEDI-GA 2100-001 2
Studies in Late Latin and Early Vernaculars: Medieval Latin
T 7:00 – 9:00 PM
Gnoza
Spanish
SPAN-GA 9966
Literary Encounters: Jews, Christians & Muslims
T 9:30 – 10:50 PM
Course takes place in Madrid
Princeton University
English
ENG 523
Renaissance Drama – Literature and Intellectual Culture: The Other Shakespeare
Bradin T. Cormack
This class has the double goal of addressing the status of early modern imaginary literature in relation to intellectual culture (including university and professional training) and of exploring, as test cases for that question, a range of plays at the margin of Shakespeare’s canon that together challenge our expectations for a “Shakespeare” text.
Sample reading list:
Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece
Shakespeare, Love’s Labor’s Lost
Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida
Shakespeare, Timon of Athens
Shakespeare, Pericles
Shakespeare, Hamlet
See instructor for complete list
6:00 pm – 8:50 pm T
German
GER 511
Barbara N. Nagel
The concept of the “Baroque” emerges as the belated reaction to a change that took place with regard to the idea of the Renaissance. The seminar will thus start with the questions of defining epoch and style. As the Baroque is one of the first transcultural phenomena, we will add to our readings of German Baroque those of Shakespeare and Caldéron. This broadly “cultural” character also means that the Baroque cannot be restricted to a narrowly textual phenomenon; the Baroque, rather, is multimedia in character. Hence, we will complement our readings of literature and philosophy with excursions into the fine arts and musical performance.Sample reading list:
Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock
Andreas Gryphius, Dramen
Walter Benjamin, Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadologie
Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus
Jacques Lacan, “Baroque”Reading/Writing assignments:
50-100 pages per week; Final paper, 12-15 pages, one presentationCourse taught in German.1:30 pm – 4:20 pm M
Rutgers University-New Brunswick
English
Renaissance and Reformation from Erasmus to Milton
Course No: 350:537
Monday – 1:10 p.m.
MU 207
Thomas Fulton
Few events in history had as profound an effect on English literature as the Protestant Reformation. Its proponents advocated the wide dissemination of the most read of vernacular texts, the Bible, and with this wildly popular text came a set of radical instructions, overturning those of the Catholic middle ages, on how the text should be interpreted. With new ways of reading came new modes of writing – writing that attended closely to the directives of the great reformers such as Luther, Calvin, and Tyndale.
Or, at least, so the story has been told. This triumphalist account of literary culture has recently been questioned from several points of view. The Reformation is no longer seen as a single event that sweepingly converted the English-speaking world, but a series of tumultuous “reformations,” none of them particularly complete. Great authors of the English Renaissance – Donne, Shakespeare, Jonson, Herbert, even Milton – have now proven far less susceptible to categorization; their relationship to the reformation far more agonistic – and perhaps far more interesting – than has been maintained. English poetry may be shaped more by antagonism to than by acquiescence in Reformation ideas.
This course will read literature and literary theory from before and after the Reformation – starting briefly with Dante and medieval examples before moving forward through the pivotal figure of Erasmus and to a series of case studies on Wyatt, Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, Donne, and Milton. Readings of primary material will be accompanied by both traditional and revisionary scholarship in the field, including Erich Auerbach, Brian Cummings, Stephen Greenblatt, Northrop Frye, Barbara Lewalski, Molly Murray, Kristen Poole, and James Simpson (with visits from two of these scholars). The course requires two panel-length papers (about 9 pages, with abstract), designed with particular conferences as potential venues, response papers, and one short book review (under 1000 words). Previous knowledge of the material is not required.
History
510:535 Colloquium in the History of Technology: Early Modern Atlantic & Global Exchanges
Professor James Delbourgo
This colloquium is specially designed to serve the needs of graduate students with several different ranges of interest: early modern history; Atlantic and colonial Americas history; global and diasporic history; and history of science, technology, environment and medicine. It asks what kinds of histories can now be written that recast our understanding of the entanglements of natural and cultural actors in the age of the ‘Columbian Exchange’ and the ‘First Globalization’ of the early modern era. We will not privilege scientific knowledge but see it as bound up with a range of material encounters in natural environments that involve humans from different societies, non-human animal life-forms, and artificial entities. We will address classic imperial themes like European colonial botany, bio-prospecting, collecting and natural history, but also shift our approach to consider a variety of perspectives not centered on European actors that link human experience and knowledge with plants, non-human animals and other entities. One general question thus concerns how it is now possible to write the history of knowledge of and intervention in the natural world using some notion of entangled histories, both human and not. More specifically, we will examine how recent scholars have wrestled with questions of material practice and writing about non-human actors’ histories, without losing sight of the inevitably mediated character of all human knowledge of such actions. Likely topics include the relation between global commerce and capital, natural history, medicine, and object and visual knowledges; the production of proto-anthropological bodily and racial surveys of human societies; the question of long-distance networks, how they operate, and who or what operates through them; the role played by technologies and instruments in mediating cultural encounters between different peoples; environmental histories that integrate non-human and human animals, ranging from livestock to mosquitoes to microbes; the relationship between the Atlantic slave trade, the circulation of African botanical knowledge, healing prowess and associated spiritual practices; the distinctive politics of Creole knowledges in Spanish and British American settler societies; the careers of go-betweens and cultural intermediaries who provide access to natural knowledge and resources across radically different cultural settings; and early modern histories of energy, environment and infrastructure. We will engage with a selection of theoretical readings in conjunction with a range of empirical case histories, while keeping our focus on the practical intellectual utility of what we read for students’ own future research projects.
Stony Brook University
English
EGL 520.01 (55043) Studies in Renaissance
This course is designed as a transition between undergraduate coverage of English Renaissance literature and
doctoral seminar work. In addition to the assigned plays, students will also do supplementary assigned readings; and will be required to submit weekly response papers at all class meetings (except the first and last). They will also prepare a term project.
TU 7:00pm – 9:50pm HUMANITIES 3008 Clifford Huffman
