Fall 2006 • HUM 596A/ENGL 556B
Cyborg Democracy
Tom Foster (English)
The goals of this seminar are to assess the political claims made for new media and technologies and to define possible points of articulation and/or conflict and critique between Marxist traditions and theories of radical democracy, on the one hand, and new technocultural formations, on the other hand. Our objects of study will include both popular reflections on new technologies and social movements organized around them. The course will bring together three strands of inquiry: 1) the ongoing structural transformation of the democratic public sphere and the mass mediation of social relations and models of citizenship; 2) the emergence of new models of cultural belonging out of debates on intellectual property, including copyleft, the creative commons, and open source cultures; 3) debates about the political meanings of new forms of technological self-transformation, including post- and transhumanism, as well as biotechnology and cognitive theories of the expanded mind or the "natural-born cyborg." Syllabus • Website
Fall 2006 • Geography 600 C (SLN 19181) • 2 credits
New Wars? Terror, Military Violence, and Performances of Space
Derek Gregory (Geography, University of British Columbia)
The micro-seminar will serve as a critical exploration of the War on Terror as supposedly inaugurating a new paradigm. In this seminar Gregory will establish the contours of these 'new wars' and examine the ways in which imaginative geographies--specifically, identifications of the enemy on both sides of the War on Terror--are also performances of space. Over the course of four sessions participants will explore the dissolution of the distinction between war and occupation and chart the rise of new spaces of exception and consider their implications for international law. Throughout these discussions the focus will be on understanding the intimate implications of war, terror, and modernity. Website
Winter 2007 • HUM 596 • 5 credits (Credit/No Credit Option)
Public Humanities and the Digital University
Ron Krabill and Gray Kochhar-Lindgren (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell)
The digital revolution is powerfully reshaping the nature of university/community relationships as well as identity formation and embodiment practices. This course will explore, assess, and create new forms of public scholarship that address this transformation, examining the relationships between research, the production of knowledge, and community engagements that address us at the outset of the 21st century. Workshops (physical and virtual) with several of our local and global partner organizations will allow us to consider the uses of the public humanities as a means of building stronger bridges across various "digital divides," as well as the implications of the digitization of the university for new pedagogical strategies, for emerging university/community partnerships, and for the concept of the human itself. Website
Spring 2007 • HUM 596 /ANTHRO 536a • 5 credits
Visual Documentation Praxis • Download e-Flyer
Danny Hoffman (Anthropology) and Kari Lerum (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, Bothell)
This course will explore a diverse range of visual practices, from video activism to graphic political journalism. At a time when so much knowledge transmission outside the university depends on the production and circulation of images, students will focus on building the skills and the relationships to participate meaningfully as scholars, activists, and partners.
Participants will explore how literature from visual anthropology and sociology, participatory action research, and activist ethnography intersects with efforts to democratize visual technologies and techniques. Drawing from examples on and off campus, we will consider how new visual technologies can generate alternative community archives. Through visual production exercises, on-site visits with collaborating institutions, and classroom discussion, students will explore how visual production can expand their research interests and forge unexpected connections within and beyond the university. By translating their "vision" of research from text to digital videos and photographs, participants will consider how their work intersects with other spheres of visual production, from public access television to grassroots community documentary and video activism programs. Website
Spring 2007 • HUM 597 • 1 credit • SLN 18456
Surviving the History Ph.D. • Download e-Flyer
Geoffrey Parker (History, Ohio State University)
In conjunction with his visit to the University of Washington to deliver his Katz Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities, historian Geoffrey Parker will conduct a micro-seminar for graduate students.
Work for the course is limited to readings and discussion.
This micro-seminar will serve as a workshop on how to write history. The first two sessions will focus on surviving the History Ph.D.: how to identify a subject, how to research it, how to write it up, and how to revise it for publication. Although many examples will come from Parker’s areas of expertise—military and early modern history —he will adopt a broad approach to the problems posed by each stage of the graduate experience in History.
The second two sessions will deal with the problem of how to write “Big History.” Parker has just completed a book manuscript on a global history of the 1640s, a decade that saw both more wars and more cases of state breakdown around the world than any other. He will explain how he planned the work, revisit the problems he encountered in researching in so many different areas (both thematic and geographical), and justify the choices that he made. His Katz lecture, on April 19, entitled “Climate and Catastrophe: The World Crisis of the 17th Century,” will provide an introduction to the project. Website
Fall 2005 • Micro-Seminar - PHIL 600B (2 credits)
Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art
Alexander Nehamas (Philosophy, Princeton)
In conjunction
with his visit to the University of Washington to deliver his Solomon Katz
Lecture in the Humanities, distinguished philosopher Alexander Nehamas will
conduct a micro-seminar for graduate students. The seminar will discuss whether
it's possible to re-establish the connection between beauty and desire or between
the arts and the rest of life without the ancient moralization of beauty that
has re-emerged in some recent attempts to justify philosophical interest in it.
Students will try to adapt ideas drawn both from Plato and from Kant in order
to reach an understanding of beauty that does not isolate it in museums and national
parks, explains why it has proved impossible to define and allows "aesthetic"
values to play a central, though in some ways strangely problematic, role in
everyday life.
Fall 2005 • DXARTS 411 (VLPA, 5 credits)
Applications of Digital Technologies to Humanities Research
Stacy Waters ( DXARTS)
This course will offer students
the opportunity to learn about the key technologies influencing
and transforming humanities research and scholarly communication.
This course will provide students a hands-on project based approach
to imaging, new media, electronic texts, databases, metadata, rights
management, and other issues central to contemporary humanities
research. Website
Winter 2006 • HUM 596A/ENGL 556C
Postcolonial Visuality
Zahid
Chaudhary (English)
This course will provide students with a genealogy of the newly-expanding
field of visual culture studies through a postcolonial optic. We
will take as our point of departure the 1936 essays by Martin Heidegger
and Walter Benjamin, on the function of art under modernity.
These two foundational
essays, written in the force field of the social and historical
contradictions within Europe that were finding their expression
in fascism and totalitarianism, articulated new and urgent questions about
the relationship of technology to art, of aesthetics to politics, and of
knowledge to representation. In this seminar we will explore the implications
of this questioning for global visual culture.
How is perception constituted
by the serial nature of modern images?
What are the relationships between materiality and the image,
history and simulacra, power and looking? How must we rethink
and revise notions of form, aesthetics, the picturesque, and the sublime
in light of colonial and postcolonial visual culture? The aim here is
not only to analyze the production of the "Western" gaze upon the "East,"
but also to explore, in Rey Chow's words, "the fact that the ‘East,' too,
is a spectator who is equally caught up in the dialectic of seeing."
Early Indian History
Romila Thapar (History, Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi)
Romila Thapar is in residence at the Simpson Center as the Katz Distinguished
Professor in the Humanities. Thapar is Emeritus Professor of History at Jawaharlal
Nehru University in New Delhi where she helped found the Center for Historical
Studies. One of the foremost experts on ancient Indian history, her work has
provoked fundamental rethinking of the history of India. She will be coming to
the UW from the Library of Congress, where she was named as first holder of the
Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South.
The Holocaust
Uta Poiger (History) and Sarah Stein (History)
This graduate course introduces students
to central debates on the Holocaust
such as the search for its origins in imperialism, racism, and modernity;
the meanings of "perpetrator" and "victim"; the significance of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality for understanding the Holocaust; the changing political and philosophical implications of Holocaust memories and memorials; and the "uniqueness" of
the Holocaust relative to other genocides. Syllabus
The Cultural Politics of Emotions: Theories and Practices
Kathleen Woodward (English)
This seminar proceeds from the assumption that studying the theorization, rhetorics, and expression of the emotions is itself a study in the politics and values of a culture. In the West, for instance, the emotions have been figured predominantly as feminine and in opposition to reason, with reason (or rationality) being accorded the higher value. This course will examine this implicit ideology of the emotions and will explore emotions themselves as a source of knowledge. That the emotions do not only vary from culture to culture but also have histories within cultures are guiding suppositions. Syllabus
Letters Writing Novels
Dianah Leigh Jackson (French & Italian
Studies) and Thomas Lockwood (English)
This is a jointly taught seminar
on early modern English and French
epistolary fiction, with course and texts taught in English. Early
modern European literary culture produced a great age of letter writing,
and this epistolary habit had a crucial impact on the growth of the
modern novel, which began almost literally by adopting the form of
the letter as a way of telling invented stories. We will survey this
subject from its beginnings in the Portuguese Letters (1669), with
glances at works like Marivaux's Life of Marianne (1731-41) and Richardson's Pamela (1740). The main reading of the course will cover two internationally triumphant examples of the genre: Richardson's Clarissa (1747-48), which sent not just England but all of Europe into a frenzy of reader involvement with that tragic story, and influenced our second main text, Rousseau's Julie, or the New Héloise
(1761), which, like Clarissa before,
had readers all over Europe in the grip of its love story and passionate
fictional debate about earthly versus spiritual value. Syllabus
Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Language Use and Acquisition
Julia Herschensohn (Linguistics)
This seminar brings together scholars from across campus to study language use and acquisition from several perspectives. The course will investigate language from the framework of both formal and functional theories, using core empirical data for analysis through cognitive, ethnographic, and linguistic perspectives.
Exoticism
Benjamin Schmidt (History)
This seminar explores the forms and functions of exoticism in Europe during a period of expansion from the 15th through the 19th century, seeking to account for the nature of exoticism as it succeeded among a wide range of Europeans. Although the seminar will focus on exoticism in European culture, it will also study how engagement with the non-European world shaped colonial policy and the social, cultural, and political lives of those who lived under European rule in the age of empire.
Modern Bodies and Modern Environments
Linda Nash (History)
This course addresses the perceived relationships between human bodies and their environments in modern American history and culture by exploring issues that have framed these relationships, historical linkages, and the cultural context and political significance of the struggle between popular concerns of environmental health and professional discourses of medicine, epidemiology, and risk.
Post-National American Studies
Bruce Burgett (Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, UW-Bothell) and Nikhil Singh (History)
This interdisciplinary graduate seminar will ask the question: how do we study the culture of the United States in an age of globalization? The question will be approached by mapping the wide range of meanings attached to the term "globalization" and by focusing specifically on three geographic regions that are serving as sites of exciting research in American Studies: the Black Atlantic, the American Southwest, and the Pacific Rim.
Abstraction: Modernism in Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts
Marek Wieczorek (Art History)
This interdisciplinary graduate seminar will examine parallel pioneering approaches to abstraction in literature and poetry, music, and the visual arts from the first decades of the twentieth century. The course will explore the rich cross-fertilization between the arts and different interpretations of abstraction, both text-based and visually and acoustically driven, by calling on the expertise of guest speakers from the University of Washington.
State and Society in the Ottoman Empire
Resat Kasaba (Jackson School of International Studies)
This seminar reviewed the different ways in which historians have studied the Ottoman Empire and paid particular attention to competing and conflicting images of the empire as presented by historians who approach this history from different perspectives and vantage points.
Imperial Reflections: Ottoman Cultural Legacy
Selim Kuru (Near Eastern Languages & Civilization)
This seminar offered a critical review of the scholarly works on Ottoman art and art history in order to contextualize and problematize the Ottoman cultural legacy. After an explication of the dynamics and function of artistic production in the Ottoman Empire, the seminar focused on the historical development of Ottoman architecture, calligraphy, miniature painting, book production, and text composition.
Deconstruction and the Arts
Marek Wieczorek (Art History)
This seminar examined the impact of deconstruction on the interpretation of the arts. It began with a general outline of the history of structuralist and post-structuralist philosophies and moved on to texts that employ deconstructive strategies for the interpretation of works of art, predominantly visual.
Art and Culture in Early Modern Antwerp
Christine Goettler (Art History)
This seminar discussed the interdependence of cultural/artistic media, and social, economic and religious practices within the historical context of a large urban environment. The course expanded on traditional art historical methods to larger discourses on nationality, ethnicity, gender, and class that were in fact already part of early modern discussions of the visual arts.
Empires and Culture
Sarah Stein (Jackson School of International Studies)
This graduate seminar compared experiences of and historiography on multi-nationalism in the Russian and Ottoman Empires in the late imperial period. Readings considered how religious and ethnic minorities were treated differently within and across the Russian and Ottoman Empires, and the extent to which this affected the shape of ethnic, religious, and political cultures in these two contexts.
The Platonic Tradition in Western Medieval Thought
Stephen Gersh (Solomon Katz Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Visiting Professor from the University of Notre Dame)
Assignment of a predominant role in intellectual life to Platonism was by no means an innovation of Renaissance thinkers such as Marsilio Ficino, since the medieval world subscribed to the same viewpoint despite its relatively brief preoccupation with Aristotelian pedagogical methods during the university period (XIII-XIVC). This course traced this Platonic tendency in European culture from ca. 200 to ca. 1450 C.E. by closely reading primary sources of both strictly philosophical and literary-philosophical character.
The Art of Literary Translation
Jin Di (Visiting Scholar, Simpson Center for the Humanities)
This course was designed as a study of translation in its various aspects, with the objective of establishing a sound approach in the practice of interlingual communication. The main focus was on literary translation, with most of the examples taken from translations of literary works into and from English, but the basic principles discussed will be applicable to all genres of translation.
Aesthetics and Ritual: Japanese Esoteric Buddhist Art and Ninth-Century Monastic Contexts
Cynthea Bogel (Art History)
This seminar considered selected aspects of the Esoteric ("Tantric") tradition in Japan, with an emphasis on Buddhist sites and religious art of the ninth century, including sculpture, painting, monastic layout and architecture, and various ritual implements. It focused on the first five decades of Shingon Esoteric Buddhist patronage by the Japanese court during the Heian period (794-1185), with reference to the related Tantric arts and religious traditions of India, Central Asia, Tibet, China, and Korea.
Printed Texts
Thomas Lockwood (English)
One of the four required core courses in the Graduate Textual Studies Program, this seminar provided an introduction to the bibliographical resources for the study of printing as an art and as a means of textual transmission; a practical introduction to hand and machine press printing; an introduction to descriptive and analytical bibliography; to scholarly studies on textual transmission; to the history of the book; a review of current textual theories; and practical experience in editing printed texts.
The Written Word in Chinese Culture
Patricia Ebrey (History) and Jerome Silbergeld (Art History)
This course, on Chinese calligraphy in its artistic and historical context, was offered this term to take advantage of the exhibition at the Seattle Asian Art Museum on "The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection. Students had the opportunity to examine closely original pieces of calligraphy while discussing in class the central role of writing in Chinese culture.
Political Economy of Health and Development in Africa
Lucy Jarosz (Geography)
This seminar examined how neoliberal economic programs and policies focused upon development and debt repayment have restructured African agrarian economies, eroded food security, and reduced access to health care. The purpose of this seminar was to examine hunger and health in Africa in their relation to globalization processes and the politics of international trade and structural adjustment in order to understand the geopolitics underpinning health and healing in sub-Saharan Africa.
Nationalism, Scientism and the Question of Modernity in Modern China
Wang Hui (Chinese Academy of Social Science, Visiting Fellow, Program in Critical Asian Studies)
This seminar focuses on the intellectual discourse of nationalism and its relations to the transformation of knowledge and the education system during the period from the late Qing to the 1940s.
Inside Out: The Chinese Avant Garde
Jerome Silbergeld (Art History)
This seminar accompanied the exhibition "Inside Out: New Chinese Art" which was displayed from November 17-March 5 at the Henry Art Gallery and Tacoma Art Museum. Guest sections of the seminar were led by curators, artists, filmmakers, and art dealers involved in the exhibition and its programs, as well as by UW faculty from various disciplines.
Orthodoxy, Heresy, and Religious Coercion in the Early Church
Michael Williams (Near Eastern Languages & Civilization
and Jackson School of International
Studies)
This course investigated the themes of orthodoxy, heresy, and religious coercion in the formation of Christian tradition from the preaching of Paul of Tarsus to the episcopacy of Augustine of Hippo (395-431 CE).
Seminar in Textual Theory: Oral and Scribal Text
Paul Eggert (Visiting Professor of English from Australia)
The course offered an introduction to the forms and some of the specialized skills of literary scholarship: the use of literary archives; aspects of physical bibliography and the printing and production of books; scholarly editing; manuscript-based criticism, and the history and sociology of the book.
Post-Colonial Approaches to Identity Formation and Migration in African Worlds
Lynn Thomas (History)
Over the past decade, a number of philosophers, novelists, and social scientists have interrogated the foundational concepts and categories of African studies. They have posed questions ranging from "what is Africa?" and "who is African?" to "what is the relationship between African studies and global studies?" This seminar explored these vital and contentious questions through an examination of philosophical, literary, and social scientific productions addressing the themes of identity formation and migration in post-colonial African worlds.
Performing the Subject in 18th-Century Drama and Opera
Richard Will (School of Music), Claudia Zahn (School of Music), Jane Brown (Germanics and Comp. Lit.), Marshall Brown (English and Comp. Lit.), and Robert Dahlstrom (School of Drama)
Examining works by Mozart, Handel, Gluck, Racine, Goethe, Marivaux, Calderon, Metastasio, and others, this seminar asked what makes 18th-century characters seem so "modern," and how ideas about subjectivity--modern or otherwise--inform present-day performances of 18th-century theater pieces.
American Death Practices
James Green (Anthropology)
A course on the cultural construction of death in American society, directed primarily towards those preparing to enter a health care discipline.
Cosmopolitics in Question: The Borders of Culture and the Culture of Borders
Matthew Sparke (Geography and Jackson School of International Studies)
This seminar series provided a forum for examining and discussing some of the exciting interdisciplinary debates provoked by the impact of economic globalization and concerned with the development of border-crossing transnational public spheres of cultural exchange and development.
Orthodoxy, Heresy, and Religious Coercion in the Church
Michael Williams (Near Eastern Languages and Civilization and Comparative Religion) and Joel Walker (History)
A seminar investigating the themes of orthodoxy, heresy, and religious coercion in the development of Christianity in its first four centuries.
Undergraduate Courses