Courses

"America" has often served as a canvas for projecting European anxieties about economic, social and political modernity. Admiration of technological progress and democratic stability went hand in hand with suspicions about its–actual and supposed–materialism, religiosity and mass culture. These often contradictory perceptions of the United States were crucial in the process of forming European national imaginaries and myths up to and including an European identity. Accordingly, this course will explore some of the most important examples of the European imagination of the United States–from Michel de Montaigne to Hannah Arendt.

Building on Elementary Italian, this course focuses on developing student skills in speaking, reading, and writing in Italian. After a brief review of earlier material, the course will orient students to remaining elements of Italian grammar, develop more advanced reading skills, and develop greater listening comprehension and speaking ability. The course will meet three times a week.

This course explores the politics of citizenship in Modern Europe. Students will be introduced to the history of the European nation-state with a special focus on France, Germany and the UK. They will become familiar with basic concepts such as state, nation, ethnic and civic citizenship and how these are used by scholars and practitioners. This historical and conceptual backdrop will prepare them to understand post-war developments in West European politics, most importantly the politics of welfare and migration and their continued salience. Students will be challenged to think critically about larger questions about national and non-national identity and political membership.

EUST 110 is cross listed with POSC 110.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the experience of war and conflict for the founding of the European Union. The enlargement of the EU to include the much of Eastern Europe has brought this kind of “History” once again to the fore of policy-making in Brussels and in Europe’s national capitals. It has also exposed the contradictions that have made a coherent European Foreign and Security Policy so difficult to achieve. In this course we will examine the history of the EU’s founding alongside an introduction to the history and politics of Eastern Europe, culminating in an examination of the ongoing war in Ukraine. We will benefit from multiple class visits by Ukraine scholar Prof Komarenko of Tarras Shevchenko University, Ukraine.