SLA 318/ECS 318/JDS 318 Russian Jewish Renaissance
This course will focus on Russian Jewish visual and literary culture from the end of the 19th c. through the 20th. We will examine the ways in which it represented Jewish identity; reflected changing notions of selfhood and nationhood; and refracted anti-Semitic predispositions. Most of the course will unpack the impact of the Russian revolution and the transformatoin of a traditional, pious, and provincial Jewish ecosystem into an urban-dwelling, Russian-speaking secular society.  Anna W. Katsnelson

ECS 321 Cultural Systems: Modernist Classics of European Cinema (LA)
The masterpieces examined in this course--that sometimes are also referred to as European art films--seem to resist interpretation to the extent that they often appear enigmatic or obscure. Close analysis and the historical and theoretical context of these challenging films will enable us to see them more clearly. We will discuss the cinematic ideas of Wajda, Antonioni, Bunuel, Bergman, Fellini, Chytilova, Fassbinder, and Tarkovsky among others.  Erika A. Kiss

ECS 331/GER 331Communication and the Arts: In Search of Enlightenment (HA)
What was the Enlightenment? This seminar aims to help its participants develop an answer to that question. We will examine the state of the art in scholarly answers and test them against a series of major primary sources that illuminate the contours of 17th and 18th century European debates about a wide range of important topics: biblical criticism, deism and natural theology, Pietism and the "cult of sensitivity," religious toleration and freedom of the press, commerce and its moral implications, Newtonianism, rights and representation, and revolution.  Simon W. Grote

ECS 350 Books and Their Readers (LA)
This course will offer an intensive introduction to the history of the making, distribution and reading of books in the West, from ancient Greece to modern America. By examining a series of case studies, we will see how writers, producers, and readers of books have interacted, and how the conditions of production and consumption have changed over time.  Anthony T. Grafton

ART 450/ECS 450 Seminar. 19th-Century European Art (LA)
Rethinking Aestheticism: This course seeks to recover the intensity and strangeness of the art and artwriting associated with Aestheticism in Britain, c.1860-1900. Long a byword for frivolity and excess, British Aestheticism, centered on the re-imagination of bodily experience and the life of the senses, has emerged as a crucial episode in the development of modernism. Figures considered will include Ruskin, Swinburne, Pater, Rossetti, Morris, Whistler, Burne-Jones, and others. Topics will include the intersection of art with utopian politics; practices of sexual dissidence; theories of the decorative; and the impact of Darwin on the arts.  Jeremy Melius

ART 458/ECS 458/ARC 458 Seminar. Modern Architecture (LA)
This seminar studies the radical forms of urban renewal that altered the city of Paris during the heyday of Impressionism. The often violent redistribution of social classes across the urban territory, creation of new forms of infrastructure, and transformation of the city into spectacle had a pronounced effect on citizens. Urban mobility, new forms of leisure and consumption, but also spatial segregation and class antagonisms all helped pave the way for new cultures and counter-cultures. We shall analyze how notions of identity were being forged and reinvented as traditional class and gender roles changed. Esther da Costa Meyer

ART 486/ECS 486 Order and Chaos in 18th C. European Art (LA)
This seminar looks at order and chaos as organizing principles for an exploration of 18th century European art. Drawing on primary texts, the course focuses on key figures in British, French, and Italian art to understand their relationship to fundamental Enlightenment discourses concerning the ordering of knowledge and society at a time of dramatic social, economic, and political change. The course will draw heavily on period literary sources, and on both key individual creative artists and wider social contexts.  James C. Steward