2021-2022

What is the relationship between film, myth, ideology, and revolution? What are the features of Soviet comedy? What could it mean for a film to be "poetic" and how is this concept understood by and manifest in the work of directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Alexander Sokurov? These are only some of the many questions we will explore as we engage in a survey of Russian-language cinema from its very beginnings (in the 1890s) to the present, engaging with representative texts and cinematic works from each of Russian cinema's primary periods. The course features films by Bauer, Eisenstein, Vertov, Kalatozov, Tarkovsky, Muratova and others. 

This course introduces diaspora studies through visiting and analyzing several diasporic museums in Chicago and through readings in diaspora histories and museum theory. It also includes training in the collection of oral history provided by the Chicago History Museum. The course culminates in a practical collective project in which the students will use their acquired knowledge to contribute to a new museum concept – in this case, based on the history of the Belarusian community in Chicago. We will use the instability of Belarusian identity from Tsarist times to the present to shape a model of a multi-ethnic, open emigrant community with the potential of cooperative democratic integration into a larger multi-ethnic landscape of Chicago. This project’s relevance also goes beyond the Chicago community, for the model of multi-ethnic integration has implications for the development of civil society in the Belarusian homeland. The course will be relevant to those considering careers in museum curatorship and public humanities. Syllabus and readings posted on Canvas. IFK Classroom 104 Wed 10:30 am to 1:20 pm. Most classes will take place in the museums. Transportation by the university bus.

"Food Politics" means so many things: Trust, risk, danger. Safety, regulation, retail, and consumption across wildly different scales: global, (trans)national, urban, regional, local, distant, foreign. Diets, fasts, binges. Canning, refrigeration, cafeterias, farmers' markets, and the cold aisles of supermarkets. Educated consumers, mass panics, and the "distant" bodies of humanitarian aid. In this class, ethnographic and comparative approaches to food politics will be our lens into recognizing, discussing, and thinking about food as a critical site of global politics. We will examine articulations of social differences, performances and performativities of bodies (gendered, migrant, public, private, clandestine, hungry, satiated, healthy, and criminal), transnational battles over regional and local "purity," and sensibilities that do or do not trust sites of economic and/or political authority positioned far away. Indeed, food politics are just as much a window into the investigative and critical potentials of ethnography in a global world as they are a way to recognize the moral, popular, imaginary, and experiential processes at work and constitutive of taken-for-granted political actor-abstractions such as "the state" "the economy" and "the public."

This course looks at the traditions of anticolonial thought from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Comparing movements for national liberation, realignment, and literary self-determination from across the world, we'll consider the shifting claims of the British, American, French, Spanish, and Russian empires, and the colonial subjects, postcolonial frameworks, and decolonial movements that sought to contest these formations from Chile to Alcatraz, India to Ireland, and Azerbaijan to Martinique. Our focus will most often be on the manifestos and essays in which anticolonial writers outlined their literary and political programs, but we may also look at a few poems, stories, and films. From Vicente Huidobro's fantasies of a secret international society to end British Imperialism to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's call to abolish the English Department, how did the radical claims of anticolonial political thought take shape in literary writing?

This two-quarter seminar focuses on the transformation of the Muslim Ottoman principality into an imperial entity--after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453--that laid claim to inheritance of Alexandrine, Roman/Byzantine, Mongol/Chinggisid, and Islamic models of Old World Empire at the dawn of the early modern era. Special attention is paid to the transformation of Ottoman imperialism in the reign of Sultan Süleyman the Lawgiver (1520-1566), who appeared to give the Empire its "classical" form. Topics include: the Mongol legacy; the reformulation of the relationship between political and religious institutions; mysticism and the creation of divine kingship; Muslim-Christian competition (with special reference to Spain and Italy) and the formation of early modernity; the articulation of bureaucratized hierarchy; and comparison of Muslim Ottoman, Iranian Safavid, and Christian European imperialisms. The first quarter comprises a chronological overview of major themes in Ottoman history, 1300-1600; the second quarter is divided between the examination of particular themes in comparative perspective (for example, the dissolution and recreation of religious institutions in Islamdom and Christendom) and student presentations of research for the seminar paper. In addition to seminar papers, students will be required to give an oral presentation on a designated primary or secondary source in the course of the seminar.

World War I in the Ottoman Empire. This course will examine WWI in in the Ottoman Empire broadly, considering social, economic, and military aspects of the conflict and with attention to the wartime experience for those at the front and on the home front. This is a two-quarter seminar, where the first quarter can be taken independently as a colloquium-style course for credit.

This course will introduce students to the key developments in the history of gender and sexuality in Europe from the French Revolution to the present. Topics will include, but are not limited to, the struggle for suffrage and other women's rights; gender and empire; the impact of WWI and WWII on gender and sexuality; the sexual revolution of the sixties; and gender in communist Eastern Europe. By examining a variety of visual and textual material-political pamphlets, medical literature, personal testimonies, posters, and films-students will explore the constructions of masculinity and femininity and sexual desire in a variety of domains, from political ideologies to everyday life. The course will show how categories of gender and sexuality change over time and not always in a linear fashion.

Jewish history, politics, and culture across a century of enormous transformations and transformative enormities in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. Topics include the impacts on Jewish life of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the postimperial reordering of Eastern Europe and the Middle East; Zionism and other modes of Jewish contestatory politics; secular-religious Kulturkampf and the interactions and tensions of Jewish cultural renascence, acculturation, and assimilation; the consolidation of American Jewry; Nazism and the Holocaust in Europe; formation and development of the State of Israel; the global reordering of Jewish life amid crosscurrents of the Cold War, conflict in the Middle East, and success in the United States; trajectories of Jewish culture, thought, religion, and relations to modernity in a century of tremendous creativity but also centrifugality, fracture, and bitter cultural conflict. The course will pay substantial attention to recent and contemporary history including the dramatic changes in Israeli (Jewish) society, polity, and culture over the past forty years, the ongoing conflict in Israel and Palestine, and the entangled lives of Jews and Palestinians. Twice-weekly lectures followed by substantial time for text-related and thematic discussion. Prior study of Jewish history not required. Students at all levels and in all fields welcome.

When most Americans think about "the left," Marxism, Soviet state socialism, or European social democracy spring to mind. This class will explore alternative-but now largely forgotten-blueprints for revolutionizing the political and social order that emerged in the nineteenth century. We will pay special attention to utopian socialism, early anticolonial movements, the Jewish Labor Bund, and anarchism. Examining the intellectual underpinnings of these movements, their influence on the modern world, and the factors that led to their demise, we will also consider what lessons they can teach to those committed to realizing a better future today.

This course, a continuation of Islamicate Civilization I, surveys intellectual, cultural, religious and political developments in the Islamic world from Andalusia to the South Asian sub-continent during the periods from ca. 950 to 1750. We trace the arrival and incorporation of the Steppe Peoples (Turks and Mongols) into the central Islamic lands; the splintering of the Abbasid Caliphate and the impact on political theory; the flowering of literature of Arabic, Turkic and Persian expression; the evolution of religious and legal scholarship and devotional life; transformations in the intellectual and philosophical traditions; the emergence of Shi`i states (Buyids and Fatimids); the Crusades and Mongol conquests; the Mamluks and Timurids, and the "gunpowder empires" of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Moghuls; the dynamics of gender and class relations; etc. This class partially fulfills the requirement for MA students in CMES, as well as for NELC majors and PhD students.