“Ev’ry Part was full of Vice/Yet the whole Mass a Paradise,” wrote the English satirist Bernard Mandeville in 1705. Sound familiar?  Mandeville’s subtitle, Private Vices, Public Benefits, captured the moral contradictions that ruled his 18th-century English society—contradictions we find in today’s US, many of whose moral and political roots lie in the 18th century.  In no other culture do we find more of an obsession with gambling, drinking, debauchery, and crime . . . or more of a fascination with honor, integrity, and, simply, ‘being good.’  The literature we will read in this course (all of it written between 1660 and 1776, the start point of the American Revolution) explores these moral extremes; it was written at a time when human virtue and human vices were no longer understood in terms of sin and piety but rather looked like aspects of personal character interacting with social habits and conventions, all increasingly dictated by capitalism and its new definitions of what counts as virtue.  In this class, you’ll meet saintly sex workers and determined virgins, liars and truthtellers, thieves and preachers, rakes and pilgrims, ruling-class coquettes and one so-called “royal slave.”  The big picture?  A rambunctious human scene brimming with hedonism and hypocrisy where literature’s ambivalent power both to correct and to seduce, to moralize and to make mischief, gives it an important role to play.  The reading list mixes Rochester’s naughty libertine lyrics with the austerities of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress; Wycherley’s raunchy comedy The Country Wife with Behn’s heroic Oroonoko; and Pope’s witty, wicked take on female vanity in The Rape of the Lock with Pamela, Richardson’s controversial novel of “virtue rewarded.”  Requirements:  a quarter-long “commonplace book” (a journal of your responses to the reading); 5-page ‘companion piece’ essay pairing two works;  memorization and recitation of at least one literary passage; several unannounced in-class quizzes.
Days: MO WE  03:00-03:50 PM

Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies
Few cities have been as relentlessly estheticized, romanticized, and theorized as Paris. Across literature, cinema, photography, advertising, and tourism, the French capital has been imagined less as a lived space than as a symbolic surface: a screen for projecting fantasies of love, style, freedom, modernity, or revolution. This course explores how Paris functions as a dense cultural signifier, structured by what Roland Barthes called mythologies—narratives and images that transform historical, social, and political realities into self-evident truths.
Rather than treating these representations as secondary to urban experience, we will analyze them as central to how the city is perceived, inhabited, and consumed. Our focus will be on five intersecting myths that organize the global imaginary of Paris: the city of love and romance; the capital of fashion; the bohemian and artistic haven; the city of exiles and outsiders; and finally, the city of light, whose universal ideals often obscure its racialized and postcolonial realities.
Through close readings of literary texts, visual media, and critical theory, we will ask how these myths emerge, circulate, and persist. The course invites students to read the city not only as a physical space but also as a semiotic and ideological construction in which beauty often masks violence and desire coexists with exclusion.
Days: M W  12:00-01:20 PM

Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies
European colonial expansion reached its peak between 1880 and 1914 with the conquest and colonization of large regions of Africa and Asia, where European ideas about race, civilization, and cultural superiority were systematically employed to justify imperial rule. This course begins by examining the ideological foundations of this period—often referred to as the era of "New Imperialism"—and explores the systems of governance and administration implemented within colonized territories. Following the collapse of Europe’s empires after the Second World War, decolonization movements significantly reshaped European societies. We will investigate the domestic impact of demographic shifts, immigration policies, cultural identities, and societal debates in Europe. Finally, the course addresses ongoing controversies surrounding Europe’s colonial past and examines how colonial histories continue to inform contemporary politics, memory cultures, and national identities. Through case studies drawn from Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and France, students will gain insight into how European societies continue to confront—and at times avoid—the complex legacies of their imperial histories.
Days: MO WE  02:00-03:20 PM

Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies, Inter-Area Studies
This course explores the culture of international relations, diplomacy, and humanitarian organizations in France and the French-speaking world with an emphasis on oral communication usually through the completion of simulated professional tasks in a professional context. The course is taught entirely in French.
Days: MO WE  01:00-02:20 PM