This upper division course will explore, in detail, ancient Egyptian art from the Predynastic period (ca. 4000 – 3200 BCE) through the New Kingdom (ca. 1550 – 1069 BCE). Beyond discussing the major categories of art for each period and some of the more famous pieces of ancient Egyptian art, such as Khafre’s statue or Nefertiti’s bust, students in this class will become familiar with the varied contexts, purposes, and audiences of distinct categories of ancient Egyptian art through the discussion of thematic topics such as identity, propaganda, and ideology. Together, we will interrogate how ancient Egyptian art (and ancient art more generally) compares to our modern understanding of “art” and think about the place of ancient Egyptian art in the modern world as compared to how it functioned in the past.
Days: MO WE  03:00-04:20 PM

The art of death is one of the most important sources of information available to archaeologists and art historians for reconstructing the lives of ancient people. This course will explore the art and architecture of death and burial in ancient Greece and Rome, focusing on themes such as the function of rituals in society, religion and the afterlife, gender and status in life and death, and the political uses of funerary monuments. These topics will be contextualized in relation to the broader social and historical developments of early Greece, the Classical Athenian democracy, the Roman Republic, and the Roman Empire. Related issues in archaeology such as bioarchaeological analyses of skeletal material, ancient DNA studies, and the ethics of excavating human remains will also be considered.
Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

Detailed examination of key Greek and Roman myths, their interpretations, and the influence they have exerted on literature, art, and popular culture in subsequent periods.

(IV)
Days: MO WE  10:00-10:50 AM

CL 190W

This class engages in central issues of Indigeneity and explores contemporary film and video games, created by Indigenous people from nations including Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, Sweden, and the United States (in English or with English subtitles. We will investigate ways that these artists construct narratives of Indigenous community and selfhood, particularly within contemporary colonial national contexts. Among the issues we will focus on are constructions of gender and sexuality and the role of place within these narratives.
Days: MO WE  10:30-11:50 AM

The biblical Eve was the first rebel, the first penitent, the first mother, the first genetic experiment, the first person to ask a question, the first scientist, and the first woman to go off her diet.  No wonder she has always been an object of literary fascination, a mythic figure endlessly reimagined in response to changing ideas about female desire, curiosity, subjection, and potentiality.  In this class, we’ll explore some of the ways that Eve’s multivalent story has been told and retold over time.  That means embarking on the genre-sensitive journey through literary history that every English major should take.  It also means thinking about what it means to read Eve from a literary perspective, as opposed to a religious or historical one, and about how different kinds of readers have interpreted her in different ways at different historical moments.   As we journey from Genesis to today’s fembot EveR and…wait for it…Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, we’ll pay special attention to the ways that women or female-identified writers have imagined themselves as Eve’s daughters, while also examining Eve’s ever-complicated role in the gender ideologies of every cultural moment.  Over the reading quarter, expect to meet the self-seeking bride of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the curious ingenue of Frances Burney’s Enlightenment comedy of manners Evelina, the fallen woman demonized in Victorian gothic literature and pre-Raphaelite art, the ambitious competitor and fragmented housewife of modern times, the African demi-goddess collaboratively imagined by Toni Morrison and Kara Walker, and Angela Carter’s gender-role-bending, fairy tale-inspired new Eve.  If you’re a fan of Eve’s ‘other woman,’ Lilith, fear not:  She’ll be making more than a guest appearance, since one book on our syllabus is George MacDonald’s Victorian fantasy novel Lilith.  PLEASE BE AWARE THAT SOME OF THE READING FOR THIS CLASS IS CHALLENGING!!!!!  Course requirements:  midterm essay (4 pages), final 6-page ‘biography’ or ‘autobiography’ of Eve; a series of  super-short creative exercises/response paragraphs; active participation and periodic leadership in class  conversations.
Days: MO WE  11:00-11:50 AM

G.E. class and one of three main courses in UCI's world religions series. Two hundred students. No prerequisites. Lots of discussion on ten provocative topics in religion, a different one for every week in the term. The course is event-oriented and requires attendance for all sessions. Absences are discouraged and penalized. Since the word ‘dialogue’ appears in the title of the class and the word ‘discussion’ is appears in discussion section—you’ll be expected to speak and to listen when others speak. Here’s the method: Every Tuesday there’ll be a detailed lecture introducing a new provocative topic. Then every Wednesday there’ll be small-group discussions on the topic with your TA. Then every Thursday there’ll be a full-class discussion on the topic in the lecture hall with many student volunteers going on stage to speak and to receive questions from the audience. And so it will go each week, with a new topic introduced each Tuesday. No topic is ever settled or resolved and there is much disagreement among students. We must learn to manage permanent tensions that exist on matters of religion. Though everyone is asked to speak with absolute candor, it will be our policy to attempt civil, amicable exchanges. Course work is as follows: weekly short readings from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (via links; no books to purchase), weekly short written summaries of those readings, weekly short essays on 'thought questions’ pertaining to the week’s topic, and weekly short quizzes concerning the Tuesday lecture. No tests.

Same as HIST 16C.
(GE: IV, VIII)
Days: TU TH  09:30-10:50 AM

Emphasis/Category: Thematic Approaches to Religion (Category 2)
Introduction to how basic economic concepts such as demand, supply, consumption, production, competition, free-riding, innovation, regulation, and rent-seeking can be applied to understand observed religious behavior.

(III)

Emphasis/Category: Thematic Approaches to Religion (Category 2)
No description is currently available.
Days: Tu Th  12:30-01:50 PM

Emphasis/Category: World Religious Traditions (Category 1)
The course offers the history of an idea and the effects of that idea in history. Students will see very clearly how a single idea begins, how it evolves, and how it affects culture over thousands of years. We start by identifying a general devil-ish idea in world cultures, and then we trace the development of the specific devil mythos in Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic texts and contexts. We will then look at the ill effects of the devil idea in medieval Christian anti-Semitism and in the early Modern witch-hunts and in the persecution of heretics. We will also study the uses of the devil idea in folklore and literature. We will then trace the iconography of the devil in eighty or so images from 1500 years of Western art. We will view select movies with devil themes from over 130 years of film making. We might even listen to modern Scandinavian Death Metal music. The course work is as follows: weekly required readings, weekly required writing, weekly class discussions, and a final comprehensive exam. Inasmuch as the class meets once a week for three hours, any absence is tantamount to missing a week of class and therefore grades will suffer for an absence. Note: the class is not an examination of or promotion of the occult.
Days: WE  03:00-05:50 PM

Emphasis/Category: Thematic Approaches to Religion (Category 2)
Process Philosophy & Environment
Process philosophy emphasizes events over things, creativity over stasis, experiential perception over cognition, interdependence over individuality, and metaphysical/epistemic revision over certainty. Using a historical and contemporary analysis of environmental ethics as a backdrop, we will explore how process philosophy—notably associated with the mathematician and metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947)—offers a constructive foundation for thought and action in dynamic systems, societies, and multispecies communities. In addition to Whitehead, we will explore process perspectives from ancient Greece and India, continental thinkers such as Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze, American pragmatists, alongside contemporary applications in new materialism, health care, education, climate action, animal liberation, engaged mysticism, and hip-hop futurist poetics.
Days: TU TH  05:00-06:20 PM

Emphasis/Category: World Religious Traditions (Category 1)
Emphasis/Category: World Religious Traditions (Category 1)

The Jain Tradition is a small but globally-influential Indian tradition centered on nonviolence to multiple life forms, cultivating multiple perspectives, and mental/material practices of non-attachment. We will rely on the methods of history, philosophy, and ethnography to explore Jainism in relation to its historic and textual development, arguments with rivals about what is “real,” and its diverse ethical practices related to food, human-animal-plant relations, war, tolerance, among others. We will also consider the Jain tradition’s relevance to current planetary and social issues and students will have the opportunity to visit a Jain community in Orange County.
Days: TU TH  03:30-04:50 PM

Emphasis/Category: World Religious Traditions (Category 1)
Begins with the Gupta period's aesthetic legacies in South Asia's architecture, sculpture, and painting. Explores the dispersal of Islam throughout South Asia, including the Muslim communities of southern India.
Days: TU TH  11:00-12:20 PM

Emphasis/Category: Thematic Approaches to Religion (Category 2)
The term “diaspora” has traditionally referred to the historical exile and displacement of the Jewish people. In recent years, however, the term has come to refer to migrant and émigré communities that have left their places of origin—either by choice or under duress—and comprise a group defined primarily in relation to its historic “homeland.” Using the Jewish diaspora as a jumping-off point, this course will examine the history of diasporic groups from the Middle East (such as Iranian, Armenian, Kurdish, Turkish, Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese communities) between the late nineteenth century and today. Themes under discussion include transnational migration, trading diasporas, integration policies, intergenerational trauma, diaspora tourism, and memory.
Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

Emphasis/Category: Thematic Approaches to Religion (Category 2)
The Jewish people have often understood themselves as the “people of the book,” because of the Jewish tradition’s reliance on texts and textual study as a central component of religious culture and practice. This course will take the idea of the book as a starting point for a survey of Jewish history, literature, and culture. Spanning the biblical period to the present, we will read primary texts important to Jewish life and culture as well as scholarship from various disciplines. In doing so, we will learn about the varied communities that produced these texts; the languages they spoke and read; their particular religious and cultural practices; and how they have understood themselves in the context of other social and political communities and movements.

Emphasis/Category: Thematic Approaches to Religion (Category 2)
No description is currently available.
Days: Tu Th  11:00-12:20 PM

Emphasis/Category: Thematic Approaches to Religion (Category 2)
No description is currently available.
Days: Tu Th  12:30-01:50 PM

Emphasis/Category: World Religious Traditions (Category 1)
Zoroastrianism is one of the world’s oldest religions and has been the religion of the Persian Empire throughout antiquity. It has influenced immensely the development of other religions attested in Asia and the Mediterranean in the pre-modern period. Unlike other faiths professed in the ancient world, Zoroastrianism has survived to this day, and Zoroastrian communities exist in India and Iran, as well as in Europe and North-America. In fact, many believers in the Best Religion now live in Southern California. Zoroastrian religious tenets developed in constant dialogue with other traditions, during our classes we will see how this happened in the various historical periods.

The aim of the course is to introduce the history of the Zoroastrian community from beginnings to the present day while discussing its religious beliefs seen from an historical point of view. The main text that will be used is Mary Boyce’s Zoroastrians. Their Religious Beliefs and Practices. Other points of view will be introduced in class.
Days: TU TH  02:00-03:20 PM

Emphasis/Category: Thematic Approaches to Religion (Category 2)
While for many people, hip-hop and religion are incompatible, this course challenges this assumption. With the tools of black studies, we will explore hip-hop (mainly the music, but also film) as a location within popular culture to critically think about religion, politics, and race (which includes gender and sexuality).
Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

Emphasis/Category: Thematic Approaches to Religion (Category 2)
Folks have all kinds of views about the relation between religion and science; some think they're irreconcilable, others that they're mutually supporting, still others that they have nothing to do with each other.  But people are generally poorly informed about the nature and practice of religion or science or both.  In this class, we'll examine the nature of contemporary religion-science interactions at both the theoretical and practical levels.  We'll start by exploring lessons from the philosophy of science and how they may parallel issues in the philosophy of religion.  In the second half of the course, we'll try to apply our theoretical insights to a variety of real-world encounters between religion and science, from vaccine hesitancy to indigenous knowledge in New Zealand public schools to a telescope on a sacred Hawaiian mountain.  Along the way we'll learn how to speak thoughtfully across religious divides, engage with ideas radically different from our own, and dissect both academic and non-academic work.  There will be goats and cookies of course.

(This course has no prerequisites and presumes no background knowledge in (any) science or in religious studies.  Please note that we will approach the study of religion from an academic perspective.  All texts will be made available for free.)
Days: MO WE  10:00-10:50 AM

Emphasis/Category: World Religious Traditions (Category 1)
No description is currently available.

Emphasis/Category: Thematic Approaches to Religion (Category 2)
No description is currently available.

Emphasis/Category: World Religious Traditions (Category 1)
No description is currently available.

Emphasis/Category: Thematic Approaches to Religion (Category 2)
No description is currently available.

Emphasis/Category: Thematic Approaches to Religion (Category 2)
No description is currently available.