Interdisciplinary (history / literature / philosophy / art)
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Culture: Cities, Makers of Modernity
In the eighteenth and increasingly in the nineteenth century, a curious thing happened: an age-old balance between large agrarian populations and small urban centers began to shift dramatically in favor of urban centers. Cities grew…
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Fate and Virtue
In this course—one of three in the Humanities foundation series—we will read one of the greatest poems ever written (Homer’s Iliad), excerpts from two writers who can lay claim to have created the discipline of…
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Identity and Perspective
That question underlies much of what we do in the humanities—in literature, philosophy, history, and the fine and performing arts. In this course, one of three in the interdisciplinary Humanities foundation sequence, we will investigate…
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Reason and Freedom
This course emphasizes the foundations of the modern world. Reason and Freedom explores the self-conscious nature of modernity and its belief in reason, and explores the paradoxes of our position in history. It examines the…
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Scholarship: War, Conflict, and History
War has long played a central role in the human experience and the scholarship of history; indeed, it might be said that the first “scientific historian” was the Athenian historian Thucydides, author of the History…
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Texts: Persian Letters
This course will focus on the Persian Letters. Published under cover of anonymity in 1721, this curious and clever epistolary novel rapidly became a runaway bestseller, catapulting its author, quickly unmasked as Charles Louis Secondat,…