Fall 2023 | APMA1920, HIAA1875, HMAN 1400D | Form and Formalism
Lindsay Caplan, Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture & Govind Menon, Professor of Applied Mathematics
This seminar will examine formalisms across art and mathematics in order to chart an intellectual pre-history of the computer and our contemporary digital imaginary. We will investigate topics such as: conceptions of “form” in nineteenth-century theories of perception, collective psychology, and geometry; methods of abstraction in twentieth-century art history and mathematics; the emergence of cybernetics and artificial intelligence; and anxieties about historicity and agency that motivated thinkers across all fields. Central questions include: what is the relationship between computation and creativity? How are truth and beauty understood and valued in our respective fields? What in the history of formalisms made the computer—and computational imaginary—possible? Ultimately this course will inquire into an intellectual history in which the humanities have always been digital, and new ways of conceiving human experience and understanding were forged at the intersections of art history and math. (WRIT)

Spring 2024 | ENVS 1917, HMAN 1400E | Ice, Coral, Dust and Pollen: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Climate History
Daniel Enrique Ibarra, Manning Assistant Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences and Environment and Society & Brian Lander, Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society
Scholars in the humanities increasingly recognize that human societies are ecosystems enmeshed in global biogeochemical cycles, and this brings their research into communication with the natural sciences. This course focuses on one area in which these two domains of knowledge meet, namely climate history, a field that forces historians to employ biological and geological materials as sources. The difficulties faced in working between these fields often reflect different methodologies, research questions and writing styles between the humanities and the sciences, something this course will explore by juxtaposing work from the sciences, history, and other branches of the humanities.

Spring 2024 | HIST 1954H, SOC 1954H, HMAN 1400F | The City in Strife: Mapping Segregations, Inequality, and Insurrection
Patrick Heller, Lyn Crost Professor of Social Sciences, Professor of International and Public Affairs and Sociology & Vazira Zamindar, Associate Professor of History
This course examines the city as not just a place of emancipation, but also a site of segregation, inequality, and resistance. Drawing on historical and sociological perspectives on the city, the course focuses primarily on post-colonial cities and uses a range of methodological approaches to examine historical patterns of city formation and how these have shaped segregation, inequality, and contestation. The course will combine academic writings with primary documents, datasets, policy reports, and literary works, and emphasize collaborative research projects centered on mapping of in-depth case studies.

Fall 2023 | ENGL 2700A, HMAN 2401R | Capitalism and its Metamorphoses
Timothy Bewes, Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Professor of English & Peter Szendy, David Herlihy University Professor of Comparative Literature and the Humanities
Not only has capitalism been defined in many different ways (as this or that); it also redefines itself endlessly. Is capitalism as metamorphosis the best definition of it? And if so, could we encapsulate capitalism in the conjunction or preposition “as,” which registers both the expression of equivalence (“as much as”) and the fiction of it (“as if,” “as though,” “as it were”). This collaborative humanities seminar will explore the metamorphic masks of capitalism through readings ranging from Marx (capitalism as vampirism) and Benjamin (capitalism as religion) to Sylvia Wynter (capitalism as plantation). We will approach literary genres such as “it-narratives” (where money narrates its own circulation) and reflect upon the fictionality of personhood (corporations acting as persons), as well as metaphors of mining (data) and extraction (energy) as shared logics of the "capitalocene."

Fall 2023 | HMAN 1976E, HMAN 2401S | Experimental Ethnography for the Masses
Rebecca Louise Carter, Associate Professor of Anthropology
This course is a forward-thinking exploration of experimental ethnography, focusing on creative and multi-modal approaches and their relevance and application to humanistic social inquiry. Participants will consider both the lingering hierarchies and decolonial horizons of knowledge production and sharing, centering theory and practice from a range of disciplines within as well as outside of the academy. Geared to advanced undergraduate and early graduate students, learning takes place through modules and case study, supplemented by guest lectures, residencies, and other activities. The course also includes a series of lab sessions providing training in specific methods such as creative writing, drawing, photography, film, and performance, and culminates in a public sharing of participants’ collaborative and independent work.

Fall 2023 | HMAN 2401T | Critique of Political Theology: Ancient Texts and Contemporary Questions
Adi Ophir, Visiting Professor of Humanities and Middle East Studies
The seminar examines political theology through critical readings of ancient canonical texts considered as foundational in the traditions of Western philosophy, Judaism, and Christianity. Texts from Anaximander, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristotle, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Renaissance musings of Etienne de La Boetie will be read alongside 20th-century thinkers — Carl Schmitt, Pierre Clastres, Cornelius Castoriadis, Hans Blumenberg, Michel Foucault, Regina Schwartz, Jan Assmann, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig. Can readings of ancient canons be both non-anachronistic and critical? Must critique be secular? Or Gnostic? Can the political be separated from the theological? What can formations of ancient theo-political imagination teach us about the limits of ours? The seminar is taught in parallel with Professor Stathis Gourgouris and his class at Columbia university. Collaborative work will take place among students at Brown and across the two campuses.

Spring 2024 | HMAN 2401U | Into the Wild: In Search of Eco-Democracy
Mark Cladis, Brooke Russell Astor Professor of Humanities, Professor of Religious Studies & Sharon Krause, William R. Kenan, Jr. University Professor of Political Science
How are we to respond to ecological crises that interweave politics, economy, religion, and culture, and that affect and position people differently based on their race, class, gender, sexuality, and other aspects of their identities? What resources do we have — or can we create — for reimagining “the human” and the more-than-human in ways that might be emancipatory for both? What kinds of cultural efforts, artistic work, social practices, and political institutions might figure in this reimagining? This collaborative humanities seminar explores a diverse range of contemporary and historical works, including poetry, fiction, film, theology, social and political theory, nature writing, and environmental studies, including work by Wordsworth, Shelley, Thoreau, Bennett, Vogel, Du Bois, Kateb, Silko, Keller, Kymlicka, Gomez-Baris, Jarman, and Nixon, among others. The course emphasizes collaborative thinking and writing, both inside and outside the classroom.

Spring 2024 | HMAN 2401V | Marking Meaning: Visual Signs, Language, and Graphic Invention
Stephen Houston, Dupee Family Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology, Professor of History of Art and Architecture & Felipe Rojas Silva, Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and Egyptology and Assyriology
To be human is to make many marks: tags and emblems of identity, memory aids that direct and guide human action, and writing that records the sounds and meanings of language, or that might exult in the purposively meaningless asemic script. This process reveals the powers of human invention and facilitates and deepens the “graphospheres” that envelop human life. Visible, concrete signs form an environment from which people construct and construe meaning. This collaborative humanities seminar addresses the nature of graphs from past to present. Topics include: the technology of graphs; their many precursors and parallel notations; their emergence, use, and “death”; their development over time, especially in moments of cultural contact and colonialism; their setting and presence as physical things; the perils and possibilities of their interpretation; acts of grapholatry and graphoclasm; and the nature of non-writing.

Spring 2024 | GRMN 2662O, HMAN 2401W | Versions of Emptiness
Thomas Schestag, Professor of German Studies & David Wills, Professor of French and Francophone Studies
This collaborative humanities seminar will address the question of what we understand by “emptiness.” Conversely, we will ask what we mean by “fullness,” and how that is conceived of as the opposite of emptiness. Beginning with Lucretius’ notion of the void, and ending with the free jazz of Ornette Coleman, the seminar will examine a series of philosophical and artistic versions of emptiness (and fullness) as they have played out from ancient/classical to modern/contemporary times. Further examples will include the poetry of Paul Celan, novels by Marguerite Duras, a miniature by Gentile Bellini, and the paintings of Mark Rothko. The constant backdrop to our discussions will be how the passivity or potentiality of blankness is, or is not, transformed into activity or actuality (as well as the ethical and political consequences of that transformation).

Spring 2024 | HMAN 2500 | Project Development Workshop
Amanda Anderson, Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities & Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities, Professor of History
In this capstone course, students completing the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities pursue individual or collaborative projects, such as a dissertation chapter, an article on method/theory, or a stand-alone essay related to the larger field. The workshop provides a collaborative and supportive space in which students from different disciplines can share their work and receive and give feedback that will broaden and sharpen the framing of their projects. At the end of the semester, participants present in a Collaborative Public Workshop. Admission to the seminar requires a formal application process and the completion of two seminars in the HMAN 24*** series.

Fall 2023 | HMAN 2301 | Digital Humanities Capstone Seminar
Ashley Champagne, Lecturer in Humanities
Participants in the Digital Humanities Capstone Seminar will learn how to design and build their own digital humanities project and/or participate as a key member on an already established digital humanities project with a faculty leader through hands-on, step by step instruction. Students will grapple with key methodologies and theoretical frameworks (including critical, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx digital humanities) and consider how to situate their own work within these ideas. Seminar participants will participate in the Digital Humanities Salon, where they will also present their project. Where desired and advisable, the capstone project may build toward dissertation work. Admission in the course is conditional on enrollment in the doctoral certificate in digital humanities, and partial or full completion of the digital tools and methods requirement.

Spring 2024 | HMAN 2300 | Introduction to Digital Humanities
Tara Nummedal, John Nickoll Provost's Professor of History, Professor of Italian Studies
Digital humanities uses digital methodologies and formats to answer humanities research questions, produce and share knowledge, and teach. It encompasses critical studies of digital environments, innovative modes of researching and advancing arguments (including methodologies for constituting archives, analyzing texts and images, and visualizing data), new forms of scholarly and general publications, and digital pedagogy. The digital changes the way we research, understand, and share information in the humanities. This course will introduce students to a range of methodologies and critical lenses. Students will learn to collect resources formatted for machine-actionable research, analyze qualitative and quantitative datasets, and visualize and present their findings. They will consider the ethics of digital work and publication. Each student will plan a digital humanities project. This course is open to all graduate students and fulfills a requirement for the doctoral certificate in digital humanities.

Fall 2023 | HMAN 1976D | Advanced Topics in the History of American Feminisms
Emily Owens, David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History
This interdisciplinary seminar encounters the question “what is feminism?” through the history of women, queers, and gender outlaws in the 18th, 19th, and 20th century United States. We will read documentary sources, feminist theory, and historical scholarship to ask who women were, what they were up against, and what they wanted. We will hold “women” as a contingent category that changed over time often in relation to categories such as race, reproduction, violence, protest, work, and queerness. And we will center major debates and keywords of contemporary feminist theory, including misogyny, gender essentialism in the era of trans*feminisms, the phrase “white feminism,” ugly and minor affects (including especially nostalgia, besiegedness, anxiety, and purity), institutionalization and the history of women’s studies, and the question of the canon.

Fall 2023 | COLT 1815W, HMAN 1976F | How to Do Things with Modernism
Michelle Clayton, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
In the wake of the recent wave of centenary celebrations — of avant-garde movements, of revolutionary prose and poetry, of paradigm-shifting artworks, and of performances that have gone down in history — this course will explore ways of working with modernism today. Treating it as a sweeping aesthetic upheaval across an international horizon that tied together a range of different disciplines — literature, the visual arts, music, dance, and philosophy — we will study both its monuments and its margins, its languages and its gestures, against a backdrop of new forms of experience, education, and entertainment: museums, variety theaters, amusement parks, world’s fairs. We will also delve into recoveries or continuations of modernism by other means and to different ends, in recent exhibitions, performances, and rewritings.

Spring 2024 | HMAN 1976G | Politics of Migration
Benjamin Hein, Assistant Professor of History
Outside of each philosophical system stands a non-philosopher who laughs at it. From Aristophanes’ mockery of Socrates, to Lucian’s mockery of the Stoic lifestyle, to Erasmus’ mockery of the Scholastics, to Voltaire’s mockery of Leibniz’ “best of all possible worlds,” it often seems that philosophy, no matter how seriously it may be taken, barely has a leg to stand on. And yet, the outsiders arguably fare no better: what are their beliefs? Why do they refuse to tell us? Are they just quasi-philosophers who simply are too cowardly to commit to what they believe? All texts in translation.

Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 | HMAN 1000A and B | Cogut Institute Research Seminar
Peter Szendy, David Herlihy University Professor of Comparative Literature and the Humanities
This yearlong seminar involves reading and discussing in-progress research by the annual fellows of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, an interdisciplinary group of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates engaged in extended research on a major project or honors thesis. Students read a wide range of works-in-progress, prepare questions and participate in seminar discussions, intervene as first questioners for specific sessions assigned to them in advance, and present their own work twice during the year. Students are required to complete both semesters (HMAN 1000A in the fall and HMAN 1000B in the spring) to receive credit.

Fall 2023, Spring 2024 | HMAN 1971S | Introduction to iPhone/iPad Moviemaking Using 3-D and 360 VR Comparisons
Theodore Bogosian, Visiting Assistant Professor of the Practice of Humanities
Mobile Devices are democratizing movie-making by lowering barriers to entry, enabling students to become full-fledged members of the film industry virtually overnight. This pioneering course provides the basic tools for students to create and distribute no- and low-budget live-action motion pictures with professional production values utilizing only their personal smartphones. Students will acquire the skills to plan, capture and edit short motion pictures through hands-on instruction and experimentation with low-cost accessories, including selfie-sticks, lens adapters, directional microphones and iPhone apps like Filmic Pro, Vizzywig and iMovie. Limited to junior, senior and graduate students.

Spring 2024 | HMAN 1976I | The World We Share: An Encounter Between a Continental Philosopher and Five Africana Thinkers
Adi Ophir, Visiting Professor of Humanities and Middle East Studies
What is “this world” we inhabit and share with others? Who are “we” in the name of whom “the world” is questioned and its apocalyptic end announced? Who are “they” — friends, neighbors, strangers, enemies, animate and inanimate beings — with whom the world is shared? To explore these questions, the course stages an encounter between French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, who wrote at the radical edge of continental philosophy and critical theory, and Black radical thinkers Ta-Nehisi Coates, Achille Mbembe, Toni Morrison, Christina Sharpe, and Olúfémi Táíwò, whose works reflect upon concrete and inherited experiences of colonization, slavery, and forced modernization. Through class discussions and assignments, participants will practice close readings of relatively short, selected texts drawn from the reading materials. There are no prerequisites; some experience in continental philosophy, postcolonial theory, and African American studies is recommended.

Fall 2023 | ANTH 0350, HMAN 0900K | Suffering and Compassion
Michael Berman, International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities
One might say that to be human is to suffer, but what is suffering? Is it to be avoided or embraced? To what ends? The answers to these questions are not just personal or psychological. Rather, they are deeply sociocultural and historical. Orientations toward suffering shape major aspects of life, such as religion, politics, humanitarianism, and medicine. This course explores different ways that society and culture create suffering, and ways that suffering shapes society and culture. This happens not just in suffering itself but also in ways that people try to overcome suffering. Therefore, we also consider the relationship of compassion, empathy and sympathy, and other forms of care to suffering, always paying close attention to questions of the unequal distributions of both suffering and compassion to different groups of people. (RPP)

Fall 2023 | EAST 1704, HMAN 1976K | Anarchisms in Asia and Beyond
Manimporok Dotulong, International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of East Asian Studies and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities
This course examines the transnational legacy of anarchist thought and action as it emerged in various places in Asia from the 19th century onward. We will explore anarchism as a worldly phenomenon rather than an import from “the West” — paying special attention to how it emerged out of connections between aristocrats, commoners, colonial bureaucrats, plantation workers, first-wave feminists, and ethnographers in Japan, China, Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, and elsewhere. Working with primary source materials will give you a taste of what it is like to be a scholar of transnational intellectual history — a detective and storyteller in one.

Fall 2023 | HIAA 1627, HMAN 1976L | Material Histories of American Capitalism
Eric Johnson, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities
Political upheavals of the last decade have re-centered capitalism as a social ill, at the root of our current climate crisis, racial and gendered inequality, and the alienating experience of work and life in the 21st century. But how did we get here? A historical approach to capitalism can help us better understand our current conditions. But this history is more than a timeline of events. This course will examine capitalism mainly in North America from 1750-1950 through three types of material culture: landscapes/architecture, objects, and infrastructure. We will examine concepts argued to be associated with “capitalism”: modernity, individualism, industrialization, waged work, enslavement, dispossession, consumerism, and patriarchy. Methodologically, we will examine these concepts through specific material histories tied to spatialized and object forms, such as factories, lumber, plantations, mines, railroads, teacups, or greenbacks. (RPP, WRIT)

Fall 2023 | ITAL 1001, HMAN 1976M | Borders, Belonging, and Memory in the Black Mediterranean
Eleanor Paynter, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Italian Studies and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities
How do histories of empire and extraction bear on the contemporary Mediterranean? How have scholars, writers, and artists documented and responded to these dynamics? In this course, we will examine the relationship between (post)coloniality, race, and mobility, focusing in particular on the expanding body of scholarly, literary, and artistic work on the Black Mediterranean. Looking both within and beyond Italy, we will consider how shifting notions of belonging shape Italian society and Europe more broadly, and how a Black Mediterranean framework can inform understandings of borders, migration, citizenship, and questions of racial and social justice. (RPP)

Fall 2023 | HISP 1371T, HMAN 1976N | Reimagining the Line: Contemporary Arts and Political Imagination at the Mexico-US Border
Sebastián Antezana Quiroga, International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Hispanic Studies and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities
This course explores contemporary literary works, film, and art from and/or about the Mexico-U.S. border. Concentrating on its political and aesthetic dimensions, the course focuses on the divisive nature of the border, the systematic exploitation of its gender and ethnic minorities, and the freedom produced by border experiences and arts. Students will analyze how border writers and artists come up with rhetorical and political strategies that allow them to reimagine themselves and their bi-national territory, and to generate challenging notions of citizenship, nationhood, and culture to establish more fluid and socially responsible modes of representation. The course pays close attention to works and creators that understand the border experience as one of instability and hardship, but also as a form of ideological resistance, subversive power, and freedom. Students are encouraged to bring their own interests and experiences to the course.

Fall 2023 | ANTH 2325, HMAN 2900Y | The State and the Circulation of Meaning
Michael Berman, Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities in the Department of Anthropology and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities
This course is designed as a disorientation of the State. Rather than seeing the State as a fixed, absolute entity that exists on a separate plane of existence, this course analyzes the state as an effect-producing abstraction that arises in contested circulations of meaningful signs. Viewing the state as a material abstraction (a complex sign) rather than as an absolute entity, we turn to theories of differentiation in circulation and movement. We attempt to answer the questions: What is movement? What moves? And what does movement create, break down, and change? Thinking about the implications of such questions, we will consider the extent to which differentiations in movement carve out units of governance, how the differences produced in those units might generate change, and how forms of difference might partially escape and alter such movement (or not).

Spring 2024 | COLT 1815U, HMAN 1976B | Encountering Monsters in Comparative Literature
Hannah Silverbank, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Departments of Classics and Comparative Literature and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities
What is a monster? What happens when one encounters a monster? This literature-based seminar considers monsters in different literary traditions, including ancient epic, folktale, poetry, theory, science fiction, and cinema. Monstrous figures from different cultural traditions, places, eras, genres, and forms will guide us through various representations of monstrosity — a concept which both invites and defies definition. We will ask: What cultural and imaginative needs do monsters fill? How do monsters help us think about identity politics, and the cultural production of ideas of self and other? To what extent are monsters tools of ideological oppression, and to what extent are monsters liberatory figures that offer conceptual alternatives to systems of oppression and violence? (RPP)

Spring 2024 | CLAS 117, HMAN 1976O | Reception of Latin in Americas
Ambra Marzocchi, International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Classics and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities
This course will explore the reception in colonial Mexico of the Ovidian Latin poetry centered on the theme of exile, tackling also related topics such as displacement, nostalgia, geographical discoveries, the encounter with the Other, barbarity, and linguistic and national identity. Class activity will involve the close reading of a selection of pieces, literary and not, which we shall intersect with a survey of the historical circumstances that shaped the three colonial centuries of Mexico (from the 16th to the 19th). Departing from this core, we shall follow the several lines of our enquiry along their path from the Old to the New World (and back to the Old) — to eventually end up exploring the possibility that literature itself (as much as other arts) might serve as a viable means to find some comfort for the exilic distress.

Spring 2024 | ANTH 1815, HMAN 1976P | Listening and Society
Michael Berman, International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities
Politics, power, and even a sense of self are frequently identified with having a voice. Creating such a voice, however, is not solely up to speakers. Listeners also play an important role in determining who is heard and in what ways. The same could be said for personal relationships and care. We seem to pay more attention to how we can speak and what we can say to care for someone than to specific ways we can improve our listening skills. In this class, we will consider different ways that listening shapes our relationships with other people and the broad social effects of different ways of listening. We will consider listening in a wide range of settings, including cities, deaf communities, places of suffering, legal hearings, and prisons.

Spring 2024 | HIAA 1626, HMAN 1976Q | Settler-Colonial Placemaking: From Vikings to the Homestead Act
Eric Johnson, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities
The term “settler colonialism” has become popular in recent years to define a spatialized structure of inequality between settler societies and Indigenous peoples. What exactly defines a “settler” in this context? What motivates the movement of people to “new” lands? What forms of violence do settlers enact on Indigenous land? And how has the contemporary landscape been shaped by settlement? To answer these questions, this course examines material and ideological transformations of space, architecture, infrastructure, and landscape that comprise the built environments of European settlements in the North Atlantic World. How might Colonial homesteads, plantations, fields and fences, mines and factories, mills and suburbs, capitals and museums, pipelines and railroads be considered built environments of settler colonialism and capitalism? How do these places come about, and what kinds of relations do they attempt to impose on Indigenous land? (RPP, WRIT)

Spring 2024 | EAST 1702, HMAN 1976R | Pacific Indigeneities: From Māori Mythology to James Cameron’s Avatar
Manimporok Dotulong, International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of East Asian Studies and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities
What does it mean to be indigenous? Considering how the term has been used both to claim reparations for oppressions suffered in the past but also to reproduce those oppressions in the present (e.g. anti-immigration campaigns by “indigenous people of Great Britain” in the 21st century), the answer seems all but straightforward. This course turns to the Western Pacific, where questions of indigeneity attain another level of complexity as they overlap with questions of creolization, hybridity, and coloniality. We will explore Māori Mythology, the Kuroshio Current, Okinawan cuisine, Southeast Asian revolutionary thought, Oceanian cosmology, and James Cameron’s Avatar to find unique vantage points into a tricky concept whose meaning is often taken for granted. A nuanced and critical understanding of indigeneity may change the way we study a place like the Western Pacific, and different ways of understanding the Western Pacific may impact the way we understand the concept of indigeneity on a global scale.

Spring 2024 | HISP 0750B, HMAN 1976S | The Latin American Diaspora in the US
Sebastián Antezana Quiroga, International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Hispanic Studies and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities
This course is designed to bridge academic learning about Hispanic/Latina/o/x cultures in the United States with work for agencies serving Latinas/os/x in Providence. Course readings, films, and guest presentations in Spanish will focus on the major Hispanic populations of the U.S. highlighting their historical and cultural background as well as issues of concern to these groups, including immigration, acculturation, trans nationalization, race, bilingualism, access to social services, and family life. Spanish language learning, particularly the development of advanced communication skills, will occur in the classroom and in greater Providence, where students will enrich and test course content through direct community experience.

Spring 2024 | ITAL 1002, HMAN 1976T | Ethnography, Oral History, and Storytelling: Theories and Methods of Narrating Italy
Eleanor Paynter, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Italian Studies and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities
This course introduces students to the study of culture through field methods and dynamic modes of storytelling. With contemporary Italy as our case study, we will explore how ethnographic and oral history forms document, conceptualize, and theorize key social movements, underrepresented histories, and aspects of everyday life, focusing especially on the post-war period through the present. Taking up questions of method and genre, we will consider how these grounded, narrative approaches can inform a range of scholarly inquiry, from a focus on memory, to migration, to language, to feminism, to the environment. Students will have the opportunity to apply these methods in final projects.