The goal of this course is to explore how developments coming out of Europe helped shape the modern (western) world we live in today. We will concentrate on the period between roughly 1500 and 1800.  This is the period that includes such movements as the Protestant Reformation and ensuing wars, the rise of new scientific thinking, the beginning of capitalism, complex interaction between Europe and the Islamic Ottoman Empire, the Enlightenment, secularization, and the foundation of the nation-state system.  We will consider these crucial developments from a variety of perspectives in the social sciences (economics, political theory, sociology) and the humanities (art, literature, music, and philosophy). Topics to be discussed are:

1. Luther, the Reformation, the end of the Middle Ages, the birth of the modern individual (in conscience), and the “spirit of capitalism” in the Protestant work ethic.


2. The rise of science and the mathematization of nature (also in Renaissance painting); the role of “technology” in the history of science; scientific revolutions.


3. European encounters with the Ottoman empire and Islam; how there has been a constant engagement with this supposed “other” throughout early modernity;


4. The horrors of the Thirty Years’ War and the Age of the Baroque; how the modern system of the nation state and rationalist approaches to God and nature emerged out of the wars of religion.


5. Enlightenment concepts of reason, tolerance, natural (vs. revealed) religion, and science; inherent limits (dialectic) of the Enlightenment project; development of capitalism; the French Revolution as a founding moment of modern political life.


6. Art as a representation of social, political, and economic developments.

Kai Evers
Fall Quarter 2025
ES 100A
Revolutionary Europe

From the French Revolution to the “velvet revolutions” in 1989 that led to the collapse of the Soviet bloc, revolutions have shaped modern Europe.  These European revolutions continue to inform how we think about protest, resistance, civil disobedience, and the use and abuse of violence as a political means. How can revolutions be started? How can they be ended? How can they be prevented? Why do revolutions occur? Questions like this have preoccupied thinkers, writers, and activists like Edmund Burke, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Frantz Fanon, Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt, among many others.  But a gap opened again and again between the theory (and the promises and the propaganda) and the practice of revolutions. Who were the subjects and agents of the revolution in these narratives (working class, oppressed minorities, students, dissidents)? What revolutionary tactics were proposed, used, and decried?  Taking our examples from the rich and varied revolutionary history of modern Europe, we will explore how revolutionary (and anti-revolutionary) narratives have been constructed in European politics, literature, art, and film.
Days: TU TH  09:30-10:50 AM

Migrant Voices in European Cinema

From Alice Diop in France and Rosine Mbakam in Belgium to Fatih Akin in Germany and Arash T. Riahi in Austria, migrant and second-generation filmmakers have shaped and continue to shape European cinema. Initiatives like the film laboratory FunKino and Refugee TV Film Lab encourage young migrants to share their experiences through film, and at the same time risk funneling “migrant cinema” into formulaic narratives of hardship and persistence in the face of intolerance. What roles do national and European institutions play in shaping “migrant cinema”? What obstacles must first- and second-generation immigrants face to be successful on the art and mainstream circuits? Should the corpus of “migrant cinema” function as a genre, with its own codes and recurring themes? Or does this “genrification” of the migrant experience limit the breadth of identities constitutive of migrant cinema?

Days: WE FR  02:00-03:20 PM

No description is currently available.

No description is currently available.

No description is currently available.

No description is currently available.

No description is currently available.

No description is currently available.

No description is currently available.

No description is currently available.

No description is currently available.

No description is currently available.