The emergence of the industrial revolution and large cities permanently changed the relation of human beings to nature and created the modern built environment.  This course will introduce the principal developments in architecture and urbanism from the French Revolution to 1932. It will treat advances in engineering, industrialization, rapid scientific progress, the emergence of the railroad, and automobility as preconditions for the development of the metropolis, the skyscraper, dwellings in a modern style, exhibitions, the factory, public housing, and the suburb.  We will consider canonical designs by international architects such as Ledoux,
Boullée, Berlage, Loos, Schinkel, Sullivan, Behrens, Gilbert, Wright, Gaudi, Sant’Elia, Rietveld, Le Corbusier, Melnikov, Ginzburg, Mies, Oud, Wagner, Gropius, Poelzig, Taut, Mendelsohn, and Aalto. The aesthetic projects of the arts and crafts movement, art deco, futurism, the German Werkbund, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, and Russian constructivism will be approached as varied responses to political and social change and the perceived need for a style appropriate to the modern age.  Finally, we will track the shifting agency of the architect, a figure often associated with change and social improvement, in a period marked by war, colonialism, revolution, class conflict, fascism, the onset of consumer capitalism, and large-scale patronage by government and institutional clients.  Course requirements: Regular attendance, and completion of weekly reading questions,  a take-home midterm, and a final research paper.
Days: TU TH  05:00-06:20 PM

This course surveys the nature, development, and practice of ancient Greek religion from the Bronze Age (ca. 1800 BCE) to the end of the Classical period (323 BCE). A wide range of ancient sources will be studied to see what they can tell us about Greek religion: literary sources (such as the epic poet Homer, the tragedian Aeschylus, and the historian Herodotus); inscriptions (civic and funereal); vase paintings and sculpture; and archaeological sites and monuments (such as temples and tombs). One of the focuses of the course will be on the differences between state-based worship and private worship of the Greek gods, on the respective roles that the gods were thought to play in the life of a Greek city-state (polis) and in the life of a Greek individual.
Days: TU TH  11:00-12:20 PM

A course in western drama’s Ur-genre, tragedy, whose profound idea of the human condition affects the
literature that succeeds its Greek origins in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, and that, through
Aristotle’s Poetics, shapes the assumptions of centuries of literary criticism. Tragedy makes use of a
culture’s mythology to confront the existential discrepancy between an individual’s or community’s
expectations and the different actualities it must confront—between our understanding of justice and
right, reason and truth, and what experience teaches instead. To that extent, it explores humanity’s
blindness—our incorrigible egotism—but also the species’ determination to carve out an identity in the
face of an apparently senseless, implacable cosmos. The readings include plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles
and Euripides; Dante’s Inferno; Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear, as well as a contemporary Irish
example by Marina Carr, The Bog of Cats.

Writing requirements are two exams.
Days: TU TH  11:00-12:20 PM

This class addresses the history of the Second World War within the context of its origins in Europe. The course will discuss some of the many wars that made up this global conflict, such as the civil wars between collaborators and resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Europe, the Allied bombing war that targeted civilians, the Nazi war against the European Jews. The course will highlight the moral dimensions of World War II that appeared in the daunting choices faced by both individuals and groups. We will examine the attempts, at the war's end, to administer justice and address questions of memory and of loss.
Days: TU TH  02:00-03:20 PM

Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies, Locating Asias (Nation, Culture, and Diaspora)
This upper division course looks at Germany’s storied engagements with China, Japan, Vietnam, and South Korea since the founding of the German Empire in 1871 through to Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative at the onset of the twenty-first century. We will explore Germany’s colonial settlement in China and its role in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion, the influence of German culture, broadly understood, during the Meiji Restoration in Japan, the economic ties with South Korea during the Cold War and East and West Germany’s varied approaches to Vietnamese immigration. Through a study of historical documents as well as cultural artifacts Beyond Europe and Beyond Trade traces the evolution of Germany’s economic, territorial, political, and cultural ambitions in Asia from the late nineteenth-century to the global present and asks how and why Germany’s ties with Asia have evolved from colonial settler policies to soft power economics and cultural exchange in the present time. We will conclude the course by looking at the reversal of power dynamics between Germany and Asia and the impact of global Asia’s economic might in Germany and in the European Union more broadly.
Days: TU TH  11:00-12:20 PM

Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies, Inter-Area Studies
Of all film genres, none was more quintessentially American than the western - until 1964, when director Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars exploded onto the scene, inaugurating a new globalized era of Italian (or ‘spaghetti’) westerns. These films were typically more violent, darker in tone, and more parodic and self-conscious in thematic treatment than their American prototypes. From the mid-60s to the mid-70s more than 600 spaghetti westerns were produced, filmed primarily in Italy and Spain, and taking the genre in radically new directions, often by subverting the ideological underpinnings of the American western. Drawing inspiration from such diverse sources as Japanese samurai film and Greek mythology, the spaghetti western took a fresh look at the American past, often raising to heroic prominence figures typically marginalized in the traditional western –such as native Americans, Latinos, and Asian immigrants. At the same time, these films turned to new historical subject matter, above all the Mexican Revolution, in order to give expression to contemporary political concerns on the Italian left, such as American imperialism and the exploitation of capitalist underclasses. In this course we will examine a representative sample of the most ground-breaking and influential spaghetti westerns, including A Fistful of Dollars, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Django, Navajo Joe, The Return of Ringo, They Call Me Trinity, The Big Gundown, A Bullet for the General, Face to Face, and Tepepa. We will consider the historical events, myths and films that spaghetti westerns draw inspiration from, as well as their enduring influence on the cinematic output of subsequent eras, as evidenced most recently in the Mandalorian series. The course will be conducted in English; any film without a satisfactory English-language version will be viewed in the Italian version with English subtitles.
Days: T TH  09:30-10:50 AM