Relevant Courses Taught in Other Departments
ARCN 222: Experimental Archaeology and Experiential History. This course offers an experiential approach to crafts, technologies, and other material practices in premodern societies. Through hands-on activities and collaborations with local craftspeople, farmers, and other experts, this course will examine and test a variety of hypotheses about how people in the past lived their lives. How did prehistoric people produce stone tools, pottery, and metal? How did ancient Greeks and Romans feed and clothe themselves? How did medieval Europeans build their homes and bury their dead? Students will answer these questions and more by actively participating in a range of experimental archaeology and experiential history projects. Lab required. Prerequisites: One previous Archaeology pertinent course 6 credits; Science with Lab; offered Spring 2025 – Austin Mason
HIST 131. Saints and Society in Late Antiquity.
In Late Antiquity (200-800 CE), certain men and women around the Mediterranean and beyond came to occupy a special place in the minds and lives of their contemporaries: they were known as holy men and women or saints. What led people to perceive someone as holy? What were the consequences of holiness for the persons themselves and the surrounding societies? When they intervene in their worlds, what are their sources of authority and power? How did these holy figures relate to the established institutions–secular and religious–that surrounded them? Working with a rich array of evidence, we will explore themes such as asceticism, embodied and verbal pedagogy, wealth and poverty, work, marginality, cultural difference, and protest/resistance. We will journey from the lands of Gaul, Italy, and Spain to North Africa and Egypt and the Holy Land, to Armenia and the Fertile Crescent. 6 credits; Humanistic Inquiry, Writing Requirement, International Studies; Not offered 2024-25
HIST 133. Crisis, Creativity, and Transformation in Late Antiquity This course investigates the dramatic transformations that shaped the eastern Mediterranean world and surrounding regions between ca. 250-850 CE. We will focus in particular on how people in late antiquity used environmental, institutional, socio-economic, and cultural resources to address an ongoing series of changes and challenges in their worlds. It also examines these responses from multiple perspectives: winners and losers, elites and non-elites, people of different ethnicities and cultures, urban and rural populations, and diverse religious groups and sects within these groups. The emergence and implications of Christianity and Islam as major organizing identities will also be explored. 6 credit; Humanistic Inquiry, Writing Requirement, International Studies; not offered 2024-25
HIST 137. Early Medieval Worlds in Transformation.
In this course we will explore a variety of distinct but interconnected worlds that existed between ca.300 and ca.1050. We will interrogate primary sources, especially written and visual materials, as they bear witness to people forming and transforming political, social, religious, and cultural values, ideas and structures. We will work to understand how communities adapt to new conditions and challenges while maintaining links with and repurposing the lifeways, ideas, and material cultures of the past. We will watch as new and different groups and institutions come to power, and how the existing peoples and structures respond and change. Projects in this course will build capacity to interpret difficult primary documents, formulate research questions, and build arguments that combine rigor and humane sympathy. 6 credits; Humanistic Inquiry, International Studies, Writing Requirement; not offered 2024-25
HIST 201. Rome Program: Power and Piety in Medieval Rome, 300-1150 Through site visits, on-site projects, and readings, this course explores the ways in which individuals and communities attempted to give physical and visual form to their religious beliefs and political ambitions through their use of materials, iconography, topography, and architecture. We will also examine how the material legacies of imperial Rome, Byzantium, and early Christianity served as both resources for and constraints on the political, cultural, and religious evolution of the Italian peninsula and especially Rome and its environs from late antiquity through the twelfth century. Among the principal themes will be the development of the cult of saints, the development of the papal power and authority, Christianization, reform, pilgrimage, and monasticism. 6 credit; Humanistic Inquiry, International Studies; Spring 2025–William North
HIST 233. The Byzantine World and Its Neighbors, 750-ca. 1453 The Byzantine world (eighth-fifteenth centuries) was a zone of fascinating tensions, exchanges, and encounters. Through a wide variety of written and visual evidence, we will examine key features of its history and culture: the nature of government; piety and religious controversy; art and music; the evolving relations with the Latin West, Armenia, the Slavic North and West, and the Dar al-Islam (the Abbasids and Seljuk and Ottoman Turks); gender; economic life; and social relations. Extra time will be required for special events and a group project (ecumenical council). 6 credits; Humanistic Inquiry, International Studies, Writing Requirement, Quantitative Reasoning Encounter; Winter 2025 — William North
PHIL 113. The Individual and the Political Community. Are human beings radically individual and atomic by nature, political animals, or something else? However we answer that question, what difference does it make for our understanding of the ways in which larger political communities come into existence and are maintained? In this course we will explore these and related questions while reading two of the most foundational works in political theory, Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’s Leviathan, as well as several contemporary pieces influenced by these thinkers. 6 credit; Humanistic Inquiry, International Studies, Writing Requirement; not offered 2024-25
PHIL 270. Ancient Greek Philosophy. Is there a key to a happy and successful human life? If so, how do you acquire it? Ancient philosophers thought the key was virtue and that your chances of obtaining it depend on the sort of life you lead. In this course we’ll examine what these philosophers meant by virtue and how they understood its implications for your everyday life. We will situate the ancient understanding of virtue in the context of larger questions of metaphysics (the nature of being and reality), psychology, and ethics, as they arise in foundational works from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. 6 credits; Humanistic Inquiry, International Studies, Writing Requirement; offered Spring 2025 — Allison Murphy
POSC 160. Political Philosophy Introduction to ancient and modern political philosophy. We will investigate several fundamentally different approaches to the basic questions of politics–questions concerning the character of political life, the possibilities and limits of politics, justice, and the good society–and the philosophic presuppositions (concerning human nature and human flourishing) that underlie these, and all, political questions. 6 credits; Humanistic Inquiry, Writing Requirement; offered Fall 2024, Spring 2025–Mihaela Czobor-Lupp
POSC 250. Kings, Tyrants, Philosophers: Plato’s Republic In this course we will read Plato’s Republic, perhaps the greatest and surely the most important work of political philosophy ever written. What are the deepest needs and the most powerful longings of human nature? Can they be fulfilled, and, if so, how? What are the deepest needs of society, and can they be fulfilled? What is the relation between individual happiness and societal well-being? Are they compatible or in conflict with one another? And where they are in conflict, what does justice require that we do? The Republic explores these questions in an imaginative and unforgettable way. 6 credit; Humanistic Inquiry; not offered 2024-25
POSC 254. Freedom, Excellence, Happiness: Aristotle’s Ethics What does it mean to be morally excellent? To be politically excellent? To be intellectually and spiritually excellent? Are these things mutually compatible? Do they lie within the reach of everyone? And what is the relation between excellence and pleasure? Between excellence and happiness? Aristotle addresses these questions in intricate and illuminating detail in the Nicomachean Ethics, which we will study in this course. The Ethics is more accessible than some of Aristotle’s other works. But it is also a multifaceted and multi-layered book, and one that reveals more to those who study it with care. 6 credit; Humanistic Inquiry; not offered 2024-25
RELG 213: Religion, Medicine, and Healing. How do religion and medicine approach the healing of disease and distress? Are religion and medicine complementary or do they conflict? Is medicine a more evolved form of religion, shorn of superstition and pseudoscience? This course explores religious and cultural models of health and techniques for achieving it, from ancient Greece to Christian monasteries to modern mindfulness and self-care programs. We will consider ethical quandaries about death, bodily suffering, mental illness, miraculous cures, and individual agency, all the while seeking to avoid simplistic narratives of rationality and irrationality. 6 credits; Does not fulfill a curricular exploration requirement, Writing Requirement, Intercultural Domestic Studies; offered Winter 2025 —Sonja Anderson