Religion

Religious traditions identify themselves with and draw sustenance from the texts that they hold sacred. In Sarah Lawrence College religion courses, those texts command and hold our attention. As students explore the sacred texts of a particular religion—whether studying Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity or Islam—they gain insight into the social and historical context of its creation. Using critical, hermeneutical, and intellectual historical approaches, students enter into the writings in such depth as to touch what might be the foundation of that religion. In addition, work with contemporary texts (such as those by religious activists on the internet) gives students insight into what most moves and motivates religious groups today. The College’s religion courses provide an important complement to courses in Asian studies and history.

Religion 2023-2024 Courses

First-Year Studies: Islam, Muslims, and America

FYS—Year | 10 credits

When presidential candidate Donald Trump said, “I think Islam hates us,” and called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, his words echoed and amplified the confusions and prejudices of many Americans. Paradoxically, once Trump became president, his first international visit was to Saudi Arabia—and photos show him holding hands with King Salman as they walked together. The disconnect between Trump’s words and actions was consistent with the long and complicated history that the United States has had with Islam and Muslims. Thomas Jefferson was intrigued by the Qur’an and Islamic law and argued that Muslims should be eligible for American citizenship, yet he remained silent about the enslaved Muslims working on his own plantation. The hypothetical Muslim worked well for Jefferson’s argument for freedom of religion in the new country but did little for actual Muslims living in America. Enslaved Africans were brought involuntarily to this country and were forcibly kept from practicing their religion. Many of their descendants began to rediscover Islam in the early 20th century and were joined by an increasing number of Muslim immigrants after the Immigration and Nationality Act ended racial quotas on immigration in 1965. Along the way, converts with European ancestry added their numbers, as Muslims became the most diverse religious community in the United States. Although Muslims currently comprise only 1% of the American population today, their significance goes well beyond their numbers. From Thomas Jefferson, to Malcolm X, to the post 9/11 era, perceptions about Muslims have functioned as barometers of deep social and political anxieties. To carefully examine these anxieties is to expose major fault lines in the domestic and foreign policies of the United States. In this class, we’ll explore these tensions but will also look at the variety of ways in which Muslim Americans have flourished in America and contributed substantially to its intellectual and creative heritage. Material studied throughout the year will include examples from the rich body of American Muslim memoirs, social and political critique, theology, literature, poetry, and art. During the fall semester, students will meet with the instructor weekly for individual conferences. In the spring, conferences will take place on a biweekly basis.

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The Buddhist Tradition in India, Tibet, and Southeast Asia

Open, Lecture—Fall | 5 credits

This intoductory course treats the evolution of Buddhism in India, from the origins of the religion as a group of “world-renouncing” ascetics through the development of large, state-supported monastic communities and the emergence of the major reform movements known as Mahāyāna and Tantra. The course also focuses on the Buddhism of two regions of the world—Southeast Asia and the Tibetan plateau—where the respective traditions have been most self-consciously concerned with maintaining precedents inherited from India. Equal attention is paid to: (1) matters of philosophy and doctrine, (2) religious rites and practices, and (3) social and institutional arrangements. The lectures are accompanied by copious audio-visual materials. 

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Jalal al-Din Rumi: Poet, Storyteller, and Mystic

Open, Small Lecture—Fall | 5 credits

As growing numbers of people have turned away from institutional religions, many have turned instead to new forms of spirituality that freely adopt and adapt elements from long-standing traditions. One example of this can be seen in the explosion of publications and products related to the Persian-speaking poet Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273). Short inspirational quotes attributed to Rumi (sometimes falsely) appear on car bumper stickers and in wedding vows, and day books provide collections of quotes to provide inspiration 365 days of the year. For those whose interest and curiosity leads them to want to dive deeper, there are study groups that meet in locations scattered throughout the world to read and discuss Rumi’s works together. Online courses provide spiritual programs based on the insights of Rumi. In this course, we will explore passages (in English translation) from Rumi’s major poetic and prose works to better understand what makes these writings so compelling for contemporary spiritual seekers. Although many of these seekers do not consider themselves as members of a particular religion, Rumi himself was a practicing Muslim; his six-volume poem, entitled Masnavi, has been labeled “the Qur’an in Persian.” We’ll look at translations that stay close to the particularities of Rumi’s Muslim background and the original Persian, as well as to those that take liberties in the interest of presenting what one author describes as “universal spiritual truths.” We’ll discuss whether this trend represents a distortion or appropriation of Rumi or whether it is part of the natural flow of an evolving spiritual tradition in new environments. The class will consist of one interactive lecture each week (maximum 30 students) and one weekly group conference (maximum 15 students each).

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Chan and Zen Buddhism

Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

This course is an in-depth, historical examination of the philosophy, mythology, literature, institutional arrangements, religious practices, art, and architecture associated with this most famous and widely misunderstood branch of East Asian Buddhism. The Chan (Zen) school of Buddhism arose in China as the result of a cross-cultural exchange of epic proportions: the gradual intrusion of an alien set of religious ideas, values, and practices—those belonging to Indian Buddhism—into China between the first and eighth centuries of the Common Era and the subsequent efforts of some 20 generations of Chinese Buddhists to defend, adapt, domesticate, and finally make the foreign religion entirely their own. Chan became the most “Chinese” school of Buddhism by defining itself in terms of indigenous concepts of clan genealogy; by exalting members of its spiritual lineage as native-born buddhas; and by allowing those buddhas to speak in the vernacular, using a mode of rhetoric that was heavily influenced by the Confucian and Daoist traditions. We will begin by outlining the Indian Buddhist doctrines and practices that were imported into China and summarizing the indigenous cultural milieu that was initially quite hostile to the alien religion. We will then explore the various compromises and adaptations of Indian Buddhist teachings, practices, and institutions that took shape within the Chan tradition and enabled it to emerge in the Song dynasty (960-1278) as the predominant school of Chinese Buddhism. The main theme of the second semester will be the transmission of the Chan school of Buddhism to Japan, where it became known as Zen, and the subsequent development of the tradition in that country from the 13th century to the present. Background knowledge of East Asian history, languages, or religions is desirable but not required.

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Readings in Early Christianity: The Synoptic Gospels

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

There is perhaps no one who has not heard the name of a seemingly obscure carpenter’s son executed by the Romans around the year 33 CE. Why? His friends and followers preserved the memory of his life and teaching orally and then, after the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE, in written records that we have today in the Christian Bible’s New Testament. This class will focus on the Synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Why were they written, what do they have to say, and how were they intended to be read? To do this, we will immerse ourselves in the religion of the Holy Land; that is, the various forms of Judaism and the role of the dominant world empire of Rome. Our study will consist mainly of primary texts in the New Testament, but we will also have recourse to some Rabbinic materials, as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

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Introduction to Ancient Greek Religion and Society

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

Few people dispute the enormous impact that the Ancient Greeks have had on Western culture—and even on the modern world in general. This seminar will introduce the interested student to this culture mainly through reading salient primary texts in English translation. Our interest will range broadly. Along with some background reading, we will be discussing mythology (Hesiod), epic hymns and poetry (Homer), history (Herodotus), politics, religion, and philosophy. By the end of the seminar, students should have a basic understanding of the cultural contribution of the Ancient Greeks, as well as a basic timeline of their history through the Hellenistic age.

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People of the Book: Jews and Literature

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

Across the ages, Jews have maintained an intimate relationship with the written word. From the destruction of the Second Temple through the chaos of modernity, reading and writing have grounded and animated Jewish life and practice. Together, we will embark on an examination of critical Jewish and human issues mediated through short stories, novels, and plays. By exploring the deep textual history embedded within Jewish culture, we will wrestle with topics as varied as romantic love and marriage, the encroachment of the secular world, cross-cultural conflict and exchange, and evolving concepts of gender and sexuality. Alongside our literary journey, we will engage with an array of artistic adaptations like music, film, and visual art. Accompanied by authors—including Yiddish luminaries Sholem Aleichem and Sholem Asch, American pioneers Philip Roth and Anzia Yezierska, and more recent visionaries Etgar Keret, Tony Kushner, and Dara Horn—we will interrogate the many ways that Jews both accommodated and broke convention.

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Documenting Jewish Lives: Past as Prologue

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

Time: a concept that has stymied many readers, authors, and thinkers alike. Measuring change over time, however, is central to Jewish thought and practice, as well as to the historian’s craft. From weeks to months, season to season, and across the stages of the lifecycle, Jews have historically engaged with time religiously, spiritually, philosophically, and practically. Human life, when mediated through the written word, leads to a rich portrayal of life's internal complexities and inconsistencies. In this class, we will attend to the poetics of time as it shapes human lives and to human lives as they shape the poetics of time. Specifically, we will explore Jewish lives, defined broadly, to examine the intricacies of everyday experience, innermost thoughts and feelings, and interactions with the Jewish and non-Jewish world. Beginning with Baruch Spinoza, the infamous Jewish maverick, and time-traveling forward through a selection of biographies, memoirs, and fiction to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the notorious Jewish jurist, we will pursue our quest to discern—and tell anew—what makes a Jewish life.

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Invisible Beings and Fantastical Worlds in Islam

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

The Qur’an declares itself to be a book “for those who believe in the unseen” and gives vivid descriptions of multiple worlds and beings that are invisible to the human eye. Muslims throughout the centuries have expanded upon this Qur’anic foundation in their explorations of what exists beyond or at the very limits of human perception and power. In this course, we will examine writings from the past and present about jinn, angels, satanic beings, and Heaven and Hell. We’ll read about the visions and travels of individuals who claim to have accessed other worlds and beings through their dreams, altered states, near-death experiences, and magic. When a philosopher named Ibn Arabi declared in the 13th century that he could hear and understand the speech of animate and inanimate objects on Earth, was he engaging in fantastical, imaginative, deluded thinking or paranormal observation? How have academics and others who live in disenchanted spaces engaged with writings and practices that reject a purely materialist understanding of reality? How has scientific study in such areas as quantum physics and plant intelligence led to alternative ways of viewing what used to be called “primitive” thought? While, in our class work, we’ll be looking at these questions and topics primarily through Muslim writings, individual conference projects could involve the exploration of these topics through the lenses of other traditions. No background in Islam is necessary for taking this seminar.

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Jews of New York

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” So wrote Sephardic New York Jew Emma Lazarus in 1883, putting her stamp on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and forever intertwining Jewish history with the professed American ideals of freedom, equality, and inclusivity. Whether as insult, compliment, or casual observation, the conflation of Jews and New York has become permanently entrenched in the American imagination. But how did we get from 23 Jewish refugees landing in New Amsterdam in 1654 to the New York City of Streisand, Sondheim, and Seinfeld? This course will explore 370 years of Jewish history steeped in the urban environs of the Empire State that millions elected to call home. From Lyman Bloomingdale’s retail empire to Mount Sinai Hospital’s pioneering medical research and from the groundbreaking literature of Chaim Potok to the feminist and queer activism of “Battling Bella” Abzug, the Jewish footprints on the streets and avenues of the city remain readily apparent. We will examine socialist Jews who demanded a brighter future for all, working-class Jewish women who rioted over the exorbitant price of kosher meat, and Jewish radicals who broadened the parameters of religious observance. Recognizing New York as the crucible of United States citizenship and a major center of the Jewish world, we will interrogate how—from generation to generation—the Jews shaped New York and New York shaped the Jews.

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Jewish Mystics, Rabble-Rousers, and Heretics

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

Does God exist? How should one read the Bible? Who should read the Bible? How can humans connect with the Divine? How does Judaism relate to social justice? How do we reconcile the dichotomy of reason and revelation? What makes one Jewish? What does it mean to live Jewishly? These questions—and still others—represent but a smattering of those with which the Jews whom we will study have grappled, both philosophically and practically, throughout history. From the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria to the musical spirituality of Debbie Friedman and with a host of radical thinkers, rule-breakers, and religious innovators in between, this class will explore the myriad ways in which Jewish luminaries have broken with convention and disrupted the status quo. These individuals provide a lens into the humanity that undergirds the Jewish thought and ritual that, on the one hand, we take for granted and that, on the other, shocks or even appalls us. Drawing from an array of historical sources—including philosophical treatises, religious texts, and literary classics—we will explore how those Jewish pathbreakers have engaged with these questions across the ages and, in turn, offer our own responses.

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Anthropology and Images

Open, Seminar—Fall

Images wavered in the sunlit trim of appliances, something always moving, a brightness flying, so much to know in the world.—Don Delillo, Libra

A few cartoons lead to cataclysmic events in Europe. A photograph printed in a newspaper moves a solitary reader. A snapshot posted on the internet leads to dreams of fanciful places. Memories of a past year haunt us like ghosts. What each of these occurrences has in common is that they all entail the force of images in our lives, whether these images are visual or acoustic in nature, made by hand or machine, circulated by word of mouth, or simply imagined. In this seminar, we will consider the role that images play in the lives of people in various settings throughout the world. In delving into terrains at once actual and virtual, we will develop an understanding of how people throughout the world create, use, circulate, and perceive images and how such efforts tie into ideas and practices of sensory perception, time, memory, affect, imagination, sociality, history, politics, and personal and collective imaginings. Through these engagements, we will reflect on the fundamental human need for images, the complicated politics and ethics of images, aesthetic and cultural sensibilities, dynamics of time and memory, the intricate play between the actual and the imagined, and the circulation of digital images in an age of globalization. Readings will include a number of writings in anthropology, art history, philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, and critical theory. Images will be drawn from photographs, paintings, sculptures, drawings, films, videos, graffiti, religion, rituals, tattoos, inscriptions, novels, poems, road signs, advertisements, dreams, fantasies, phantasms, and any number of fabulations in the worlds in which we live and imagine.

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Ethnographic Writing

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

Transnational migration, human-animal relations, and American community life are but a few of the cultural realities that anthropologists have effectively studied and written about. This is no easy task, given the substantial difficulties involved in understanding and portraying the concerns, activities, and lifeworlds other than one’s own. Despite these challenges, ethnographic writing is generally considered one of the best ways to convey a nuanced and contextually rich understanding of people’s experiences in life. To gain an informed sense of the methods, challenges, and benefits of ethnographic writing, students in this course will try their hands at a concerted work of ethnographic writing. Along with undertaking a series of ethnographic writing exercises, students will be encouraged to craft a fully-realized piece of ethnographic writing that conveys something of the features and dynamics of a particular world in lively, accurate, and comprehensive terms. Along the way, and with the help of anthropological writings that are either exceptional or experimental in nature, we will collectively think through some of the most important features of the craft of ethnographic writing from the use of field notes and interviews, the interlacing of theory and data, the author’s voice in ethnographic prose, and the ethical and political responsibilities that come with any attempt to understand and portray the lives of others. This seminar will work best for students who already have a rich body of ethnographic research materials to work with, such that they can quickly delve into the intricacies of writing about their chosen subject.

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Romanesque and Gothic Art: Castle and Cathedral at the Birth of Europe

Open, Lecture—Spring

This course explores the powerful architecture, sculpture, and painting styles that lie at the heart of the creation of Europe and the idea of the West. We will use a number of strategies to explore how expressive narrative painting and sculpture and new monumental architectural styles were engaged in the formation of a common European identity and uncover, as well, the artistic vestiges of diverse groups and cultures that challenge that uniform vision. These are arts that chronicle deep social struggles between classes, intense devotion through pilgrimage, the rise of cities and universities, and movements that could both advocate genocide and nurture enormous creativity—in styles both flamboyant and austere—growing from places as diverse as castles and rural monasteries to Gothic cathedrals. The course will explore those aspects of expressive visual language that link works of art to social history, the history of ideas, and political ideology.

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Archaeology and the Bible

Open, Seminar—Fall

With the advent of early archaeological excavation in the Near East, biblical studies entered upon a new modern phase in which the criticism of scriptural revelation was no longer simply a matter of faith or theology. With the new discoveries at Nimrud just before the middle of the 19th century, the Assyrians and the other great powers of ancient Mesopotamia mentioned in Old Testament narratives suddenly became a visible reality, demonstrating that biblical narratives could now be evaluated or corroborated empirically against hard, material evidence. In due course, pioneering archaeologists also turned their attention to the Holy Land to pursue this new agenda. Since then, the convergence of archaeology and modern professional criticism of the Old Testament has increasingly enabled us to reconstruct the reality behind the biblical narratives. The course will explore this process, focusing primarily on the material culture of the ancient Levant—beginning in the Bronze Age with the Canaanites, the emergence and subsequent development of the Iron Age Israelite kingdom, its destruction, the Babylonian Captivity, the eventual return of the Jews under Persian rule, and the re-emergence from Hellenistic Greek domination of a Judaean kingdom under the Hasmoneans. Although focused largely on archaeological or material remains, the course will also make ample use of biblical and historical texts or sources to investigate the intersection of archaeology, culture, and religion.

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First-Year Studies: Romantic Europe

FYS—Year

Between the 1790s and the middle of the 19th century, European culture was powerfully shaped by the broad current of thought and feeling that we know as “Romanticism.” This course will examine the rise of the Romantic sensibility in the decades between the 1760s and 1800 and survey diverse manifestations of Romanticism in thought, literature, and art during the subsequent half-century. We will pay particular attention to the complex relations between Romanticism and two of the most portentous historical developments of its era: the French Revolution and the rise of national consciousness among Germans, Italians, and other European peoples. Readings will include prose fiction by Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Sir Walter Scott, and Edgar Allen Poe; poetry by Wordsworth, Shelley, Hölderlin, and Mickiewicz; works on religion, ethics, and the philosophy of history; and political writings by the pioneers of modern conservativism, liberalism, and socialism. We will also look at Romantic painting and other forms of visual art. Students will meet individually with me every week during the fall term and every other week during the spring term. I will advise you about the conference project that you will be undertaking each semester and will offer you what help I can in navigating life at Sarah Lawrence College.

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The Jewish Century: European Jewish History From Emancipation to Destruction

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

Europe during the 19th century witnessed the legal and social emancipation of Jews. But it also witnessed the emergence of modern racial antisemitism, which eventually underpinned the ideology leading to European Jewry’s near destruction during the Holocaust. Neither of those two developments was preordained. Moreover, European Jews were active in shaping their own history as advocates for their own rights, as makers of European and Jewish culture, and as resistors to their persecution and murder. In this course, we will try to make sense of this European story of Jewish emancipation and near destruction. In the lecture part, we will go over the broad developments and events in European Jewish history from the beginning of the 19th century to 1945. The focus will be on the years between 1848 and 1933. While we will also cover the Holocaust, this is not primarily a course about the murder of European Jews but rather about the lives of European Jews. In the weekly group conferences—with help from secondary and primary sources such as diaries, letters, photo albums, short stories, and movies—we will dive deeper into these lives. For example, we will discuss the experience of middle-class Jewish women in Germany, the Jewish working class in Poland, the emergence of distinctly Jewish politics between Zionism and non-Zionist Bundism, or Jews’ presence among their countries’ nationalists. During the semester, students will also engage in two group research projects exploring Jewish lives in the 1880s and the 1930s.

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The Disreputable 16th Century

Open, Seminar—Year

Sixteenth-century Europeans shared a variety of fundamental beliefs about the world that a secular-minded Westerner of today is likely to find “disreputable”—intellectually preposterous, morally outrageous, or both. Almost all well-educated people believed that the Earth was the unmoving center of the universe, around which the heavenly bodies revolved; that human destinies were dictated, at least to some extent, by the influence of the planets and stars; that the welfare of their communities was threatened by the maleficent activities of witches; and that rulers had a moral duty to compel their subjects to practice a particular religion. In this course, we will examine 16th-century ideas on these and other topics and see how those beliefs fit together to form a coherent picture of the world. We will also look at the writings of pioneer thinkers—Machiavelli, Montaigne, Galileo—who began the process of dismantling this world-conception and replacing it with a new one closer to our own. It is not only ideas, however, that render the 16th century “disreputable” to modern eyes. Some of history’s most notorious kings and queens ruled European states in this period—Henry VIII of England with his six wives; Mary Queen of Scots with her three husbands; Philip II of Spain, patron of the Inquisition. In the spring semester, therefore, we will look at the theory and practice of politics in 16th-century Europe. Since most European states were monarchies, we will start by examining 16th-century ideas about princes and their courts. How should princes be educated for their role? How, and to what ends, should they exercise their power? What were the qualifications of the ideal courtier? We will go on to consider the actual lives and policies of a number of European princes: the Tudor kings and queens of England; the monarchs who ruled France during the religious wars that convulsed that kingdom between 1562 and 1629. Later in the semester, we will consider what to us may appear to be the most exotic of 16th-century European states. This was not a monarchy at all but a republic: the splendid and idiosyncratic Most Serene Republic of Venice. We will examine, along with its institutions, the revolutionary developments in painting that unfolded there. Students will have great freedom in the choice of conference paper topics. Depending on their interests, they can pursue research in political or religious history, literature, philosophy, or art.

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The Middle East and the Politics of Collective Memory: Between Trauma and Nostalgia

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

In recent decades, historians have become increasingly interested in the unique role and power of memory in public life and have sought to understand the innumerable ways that collective memory has been constructed, experienced, used, abused, debated, and reshaped. This course will focus on the rich literature on historical memory within the field of modern Middle Eastern history in order to explore a number of key questions: What is the relationship between history and memory? How are historical events interpreted and rendered socially meaningful? How is public knowledge about the past shaped and propagated? How and why—and in what contexts—do particular ways of seeing and remembering the past become attached to various political projects? Particular attention will be paid to the following topics: the role of memory in the Palestine-Israel “conflict”; postcolonial state-building and “official memory”; debates over national remembering, forgetting, and reconstruction following the Lebanese Civil War; Middle Eastern diaspora formation and exilic identity; the myth of a “golden age” of Arab nationalism; Turkish nostalgia for the Ottoman imperial past; and the role of museums, holidays, and other commemorative practices in the construction of the national past across the region. Throughout the course, we will attend to the complex interplay between individual and collective memory (and “counter-memory”), particularly as this has played out in several formulations of Middle Eastern nationalism.

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Women and Gender in the Middle East

Open, Seminar—Spring

Debates over the status of Middle Eastern women have been at the center of political struggles for centuries—as well as at the heart of prevailing Western media narratives about the region—and continue to be flashpoints for controversy in the present day. This course will explore the origins and evolution of these debates, taking a historical and thematic approach to the lived experience of women in various Middle Eastern societies at key moments in the region’s history. Topics to be covered include: the status of women in the Qur’an and Islamic law; the Ottoman imperial harem; patriarchy and neopatriarchy; the rise of the women’s press in the Middle East; women, nationalism, and citizenship; the emergence of various forms of women’s activism and political participation; the changing nature of the Middle Eastern family; the politics of veiling; Orientalist discourse and the gendered politics of colonialism and postcolonialism; women’s performance and female celebrity; archetypes of femininity and masculinity; and women’s autobiography and fiction in the Middle East. Throughout, we will interrogate the politics of gender, the political and social forces that circumscribe Middle Eastern women’s lives, and the individuals who claim authority to speak for women. The course will also briefly examine gender and sexuality as categories for historical analysis in the modern Middle East.

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Nationalism

Sophomore and Above, Large seminar—Spring

This course provides a broad historical and theoretical inquiry into the phenomenon of nationalism—one of the most enduring ideological constructs of modern society. Indeed, the organization of the globe into a world of bordered territorial nation-states—each encapsulating a unique social identity—is such a taken-for-granted feature of contemporary geopolitics that it is easy to forget that nations did not exist for most of human history and that nationalism dates back only to the mid-to-late 1700s. And yet, despite many predictions of its imminent demise at different moments in history—Albert Einstein quipped, famously, that nationalism was an “infantile disease” that humanity would eventually outgrow—nationalism remains, perhaps, as powerful an ideological force as ever in the United States as elsewhere. This course will examine a range of foundational questions about the emergence of nations and nationalism in world history: What is a nation, and how has national identity been cultivated, defined, and debated in different contexts? Why did nationalism emerge when it did? Who does nationalism benefit, and how do different social groups compete for control over national identity and ideology? How and why did nationalism become such a vital feature of anticolonial political movements beginning in the late-19th century? Is nationalism fundamentally a negative force—violent and exclusionary—or is it necessary for forging cohesive social bonds among diverse and far-flung populations? The course will begin with the emergence of nations and nationalism in Western Europe but will then move on to explore its evolution and spread to all parts of the globe, exploring a number of case studies along the way. The course will conclude with a brief survey of the state of nationalist politics today, with a particular emphasis on Brexit and white nationalism in the United States.

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Celebrity, Spirituality, and the Cult of Sainthood in the Middle Ages

Open, Seminar—Fall

The saint was the celebrity of the Middle Ages. The rise of pilgrimage, the fascination with relics, and sensational tales of martyrdom and miracle popularized individual saints across Europe and England. This course will focus on texts interested in the heroism, intercession, and sacrifice of saintly figures, as well as spiritual biographies and autobiographies that made bold claims to mystical authority and described fearless navigations of a shifting religious landscape. We will consider how the paradox of saints—disembodied yet concretely present between Heaven and Earth—transformed conceptions of the spiritual life. Special attention will be given to narratives of female mystics such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, as well as the lives and records of heroic women saints including Joan of Arc and St. Katherine of Alexandria. Other works, such as The Life of Christina of Markyate and Chaucer’s “saintly romances,” will ask us to challenge the generic distinction between literature and saint’s life. To complement our study of the textual remains of saints, this course will encourage visits to local collections of reliquaries and other saintly artifacts, as well as explorations of digitized illustrations of medieval religious subjects.

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Interrogating God: Tragedy and Divinity

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

The Greek gods attended the performances at the ancient theatre of Dionysos, which both recognized and challenged their participation in human affairs. The immediacy of divine presence enabled a civic body, the city, to enter into conversation with a cosmic one—a conversation whose subject was a shared story about the nature of experience and its possible significance: tragedy. Divinity is less congenial about playgoing in later periods but seems to have lent tragedy both a power to be reborn and a determination to address the universe even as Christianity, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Industrial Age reimagine it. In this course, we shall read essential Western texts in which the constant of human suffering is confronted and the gods are called into question even as they shift their shape. Among our authors are Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, Ibsen, Beckett, Susan Glaspell, and August Wilson.

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Emersonian Quartet: Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, and Stevens

Open, Seminar—Spring

In an 1842 lecture, Emerson lamented that no American poet had yet emerged who could answer the rich legacy of European literary tradition with an originality and genius commensurate to a new civilization. Whitman would later remark that he had been “simmering, simmering, simmering” until Emerson’s injunctions brought him “to a boil.” The outcome was his sublime, democratic, discontinuous, homoerotic national epic, “Song of Myself” (the “greatest piece of wit and wisdom yet produced by an American,” Emerson immediately judged it). In unique but related ways, Dickinson, Frost, and Stevens also set out to answer Emerson’s call. Like Whitman at the end of “Song of Myself,” their most inventive poems seem always out in front of us, waiting for us to arrive. We will do our best to catch up—to conceptualize and paraphrase their rhetorical tropes, while acknowledging the inevitable failure of merely discursive language to transmit a poem. Our central task will be to interpret and appreciate the poetry we encounter through close, imaginative reading,; informed speculation, and an understanding of historical contexts.

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Punk

Open, Large Lecture—Spring

This course will examine punk rock as a musical style and as a vehicle for cultural opposition. We will investigate the musical, cultural, and political conditions that gave birth to the genre in the 1970s and trace its continuing evolution through the early 2000s—in dialogue with and opposition to other musical genres, such as progressive rock, heavy metal, ska, and reggae. We will begin with the influence of minimalism on “proto-punk” artists like the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith, which will provide a foundation for seeing how minimalism—as well as modernism, atonality, and electronic music—continue to resonate in punk and rock music. We will examine the intellectual background of early UK punk, with readings by Guy Debord and the Situationist International, and look at the theories of Gramsci and Foucault on the question of institutional power structures and the possibility of resistance to them. To deepen our understanding of punk style and the culture of opposition, there will also be readings by Theodor Adorno, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Antonin Artaud, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Julia Kristeva, and others. We will trace the splintering of punk into various sub-genres and the challenges of negotiating the music industry while remaining “authentic” in a commercialized culture. Another major focus will be the Riot Grrrl bands of the 1990s as a catalyst for third-wave feminism. Given the DIY aesthetic at the heart of punk and in addition to listening to, analyzing, and reading about the music, students who want to incorporate creative work will be given the opportunity to work with musicians and write some punk songs. In light of the abundant documentary film footage relating to punk culture, the course will include a film viewing every other week.

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Human/Nature: Philosophical Perspectives

Open, Seminar—Spring

What is humanity? What, if anything, makes us different from other modes of being, and what kind of responsibility do we have with respect to what is considered nonhuman? To broach these questions, this seminar will offer a critical survey of the history of Western philosophy with a focus on the development of humanism and subsequent critiques of it. Specifically, we will look at different ways in which the philosophical tradition defined the human being in contradistinction from, or relation to, nature. Texts will range from ancient philosophy (the Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle), to modern philosophy (Descartes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche), to recent developments (New Materialism, Eco-Feminism, philosophy of technology). This course will fully participate in the spring 2024 Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) Mellon course cluster. The semester will include two interludes during which students will engage in collaborative projects across disciplines and in partnership with students from Bronx Community College. Students will have the opportunity to develop field-based conference projects

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Kant’s Political Philosophy

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone is a book about religion, but it is also a book about Enlightenment—or how to build a rational society; for this purpose, religion, in Kant’s view, is indispensable. We shall study how Kant seeks to reform Christianity to make it compatible with a rational society and what the limits are on this enterprise. The topic is of interest nowadays, when the attempt of Kant and others to make religion compatible with Enlightenment is under challenge, and religion has once again come into some tension with science and the hope for progress founded on collective rationality.

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Creative Nonfiction

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Fall

This is a course for creative writers who are interested in exploring nonfiction as an art form. We will focus on reading and interpreting outside work—essays, articles, and journalism by some of our best writers—in order to understand what good nonfiction is and how it is created. During the first part of the semester, writing will be comprised mostly of exercises and short pieces aimed at putting into practice what is being illuminated in the readings; in the second half of the semester, students will create longer, formal essays to be presented in workshop.

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