Focusing on the central role of images in Byzantine culture, this course pays attention to how images and their powers in the medieval world can inform the ways we think about images today. Spanning the crucial years of the Byzantine Empire (330-1453 CE), this course looks at the art, architecture, and theories of visual culture in the medieval lands of the eastern Mediterranean, encompassing diverse places such as Sicily, Venice, North Africa, the Levant, the Balkans, and modern-day Turkey, Greece, Syria, and Russia.
Days: MO WE  10:30-11:50 AM

An investigation of visual arts and design in Europe circa 1905-1940. The course follows European artistic and intellectual developments from the radical dissolution and reassembly of the visual field offered by the Cubists in the first decade of the century to the Surrealists’ explorations of unconscious desire on the eve of World War II. The period covered is one of extreme dislocation, including the breakup of the Victorian social order, the horrors of World War I, the Russian Revolution, the promises of new technology, the chaos of economic panics, and the deadly rise of totalitarian governments around Europe. Against that background, artists used their media to investigate the nature of representation, propose new expressions of male and female sexuality, adapt popular and consumer culture into the fine arts, combat social norms, celebrate the machinery of the modern world, advocate revolution, resist (and promote) Fascist authoritarianism, and model utopian societies. The course will primarily examine painting and sculpture, but will also introduce students to developments in industrial and graphic design, architecture, photography, and film of the era.
Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

Made in Germany, made in China: for 130 years, the two labels have kept trading places. Germany treated China as a testing ground for German models — colonial, spiritual, theatrical, socialist, economic — while China, at intervals, looked to Germany for models of its own renewal. From the “model colony” at Qingdao to a Ruhr coking plant dismantled, crated, and rebuilt in Shandong, the course follows these transfers and asks one question of every text and case: who changes whom? That is the only German phrase you will need this quarter — Wer wandelt wen?

The question rarely points in one direction for long. Working with speeches, treaties, translations, films, pamphlets, and policy documents, you will learn to track how models move — who exports them, who reworks them, who is changed in the exchange. And the story is never Germany’s alone: from the Yellow Peril to today’s debates over risk, the German encounter with China is where Europe’s ideas of China — and of itself — have taken their sharpest form. Whether Germany transformed China, or the reverse, is the question we shall be asking in this course.

(same as 24038 Euro St 100B, Lec A;   and 26730 History 114, Lec A)

Days: MO WE  02:00-03:20 PM

The 19th-century British novel has long been notable for the detail and precision with which it presents the physical world its characters inhabit.   Because this novel has come to be known as “the realist novel,” our impulse might be to assume that the authors of such novels just thought it obvious that their task should be to present readers with as many of the details of the actual world as they could describe.  But the kind of detailed noticing is not a self-evident condition of being human and inhabiting the earth; it is the consequence of the 19th-century development of practices of attentiveness and evidence-gathering associated with   new forms of scientific knowledge. The century brought revolutionary shifts in understandings of the human body and of what constituted effective medical treatment; how various animal species, including humans, were linked to one another and evolved over time, and, finally, the standard practices by which individual and local observations could be organized into reliable scientific principles. In the course, we will read realist novels alongside the scientific texts that helped turn the concepts of Victorian empirical noticing into a set of practices that could be taught and regulated. 

Some of the authors and texts we will read are the following: Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White; John Stuart Mill’s, On Liberty, ‘What is Poetry?’ and On the Subjection of Women; William Henry Fox Talbot’s, “The Pencil of Nature;” Thomas Malthus’s “Essay on the Principle of Population,” Charles Darwin’s The Origins of Species and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, and William Whewell, Of Induction.

Students will be expected to write two 5-7page papers over the course of the quarter, and to engage actively in class discussions.
Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

Made in Germany, Made in China
Euro Studies 100B; EAS 110; HIST 114 · Winter 2027 · Instructor: Prof. Broadbent

How have Germans understood China, and what have their accounts revealed about Germany itself? This course examines German Chinese encounters from the nineteenth century to the present. We consider attempts to change China alongside efforts to learn from it, asking what particular people and institutions sought from the relationship.

Through accounts of colonial Qingdao, translations of Chinese classics to films, political documents, and debates about trade, we examine how descriptions of China supported claims about progress, authority, and Germany’s international position. The course’s recurring question is Wer wandelt wen? —who changes whom? We ask what Germans and Chinese sought from one another, and how far these encounters met their expectations. Through this relationship, we also examine Germany’s understanding of its place in Europe: when did German actors claim to speak for Europe, and when did their interests differ from those of other European states?
Days: MO WE  02:00-03:20 PM