Fall 2014 MEMS Graduate Courses
English 470 Colonial and Revolutionary Literature of North America / Ellison
This course will introduce you to the key transformations and texts produced in North America and the
Caribbean from the era of European contact, or conquest, through the U.S. War of Independence. We
will look at the Spanish and English and Anglo-African narratives that emerged in the plantation zone
from Virginia to Surinam; writing and material culture in New England, especially during King Philip’s
War (c.1676) and the Salem witch trials (c.1692); colonial elite self-fashioning within an imperial Atlantic
world; revolutionary political thought and artistic anxiety. We will move at a brisk pace through the first
half of the term, covering ground quickly; during this time you will write a brief paper, a 1-page response
to a piece of criticism, and then take a midterm. Much of the second half of the term you will be working
— alone, in small groups, and in consultation with me — on a 12-15pp research paper. We will explore
the Clements Library, and its extensive collection of early Americana, as well as virtual archives (like the
“Early American Imprints” collection) so that you can find a topic that compels you, learn about archival
research, read scholarship and historiography associated with your topic, and write (and revise) an
original analytical paper. For seniors, I see this as one of the capstone experiences of your
concentration. For graduate students, especially Americanists seeking a longer historical view or Early
Modern specialists curious about the wider Atlantic and imperial world, this course will provide an
excellent introduction to the material, and help you expand your teaching repertoire.
(Probable) Course Texts: A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, Thomas Harriot
(1588); A True and Exact History of Barbados, Richard Ligon (1657); The Narrative of the Captivity, Mary
Rowlandson (1682); Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave, Aphra Behn (1688); Unchained Voices: An Anthology
of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the 18th Century, ed. Vincent Carretta; The
Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin (1771-1790); A Short Narrative of My Life, Samson Occom (1768); The
Coquette, or, The History of Eliza Wharton, Hannah Webster Foster (1797); Wieland, or, The
Transformation, Charles Brockden Brown (1798).
English 541 Medieval Romance: Genre, History, Theory / Sanok
This class surveys the medieval genre of romance, stories of chivalric and erotic adventure that
constitute the most important body of secular imaginative literature in the Middle Ages and a founding
genre of English literary history. Read by elite and non-elite audiences, male and female, romance
served as a forum for cultural, historical, and religious difference; competing modes of desire, affect,
and affiliation; the status of the body in the context of warfare and the sacred; and the possibility of
human agency in the face of social constraint, random chance, and pre-ordained fate. It also served as a
forum for reflection on the status of literature itself: metaliterary reflections on the the role of poet,
patron and audience, the conventions of the genre, and its material and social forms are in evidence
from some of its earliest examples. After a consideration of the earliest romance in English, the Old
English Apollonius of Tyre and some foundational French romances, we will read important English
examples of “literary” and popular romance, including Havelock the Dane, Sir Orfeo, Chaucer’s Troilus
and Criseyde, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Alliterative Morte Darthur, Siege of Jerusalem, Story of
Asneth, and Wars of Alexander, with attention to their formal features, historical contexts, and
audiences. At the end of the term, we briefly explore how romances' own metaliterary reflections find
an afterlife in modern critical theory, including Frye’s formalism, Lacans' psychoanalysis, and Jamesons'
historicism.
History 496 Monasticism: Byzantine East and Latin West / Poteet
Before there was a New World to be imagined and explored, before the age of revolutions when people
acted upon their visions for a transformed social order, before the back-to-the-land movement and
Woodstock, and before gravity-defying space travel became scientifically feasible, men and women
created other worlds in the most inhospitable of terrains: in deserts, on mountain tops, in caves, in
forests, and on islands lacking all the amenities of a resort or vacation spot. This course addresses the
phenomenon of men and women who chose to leave the world to achieve spiritual perfection and yet in
doing so redrew social and physical landscapes in such a way that their settlements became centers of
learning, economic production, the arts, controversy, and reform, as well as of spirituality and
introspection. We will consider in what ways monastic experiments in the Greek East and the Latin
West diverged, even as they shared common goals. We will follow the lives of those who dared to break
with social conventions while often (not always) being held up as exemplars of order and stability. And
we will try to understand how the “world” entered into the monastery and the monastery into the
world, between, roughly, the fourth and fourteenth centuries AD. Our readings will include monastic
rules and documents for monastic foundations, lives of saints and of those who never made it to
sainthood, historical and fictional accounts of monastic ventures, and related sources that will enable us
to situate this movement and these individuals in their historical settings. There will be opportunity to
consider what has been preserved of monastic traditions in our own times.
History 537 Crusades / Emberling, Mallette
The broadly accepted story of the Crusades goes like this: From 1095 to 1291, Popes and European
rulers appealed to Christian piety, mobilizing elites and the broader population alike to besiege and
conquer the Holy Land — particularly Jerusalem — which had fallen into the hands of “infidel” Muslims.
Muslim rulers, on the other hand, invoked Muslim piety by declaring jihad against the “unbelievers” in
order to drive them from their land. The simplified story of the Crusades retains its power to agitate
public opinion, and is still used by both Christians (like Samuel Huntington, who imagined a “clash of
civilizations” based on cultural and religious difference) and Muslims (Al Qaeda continues to call western
states “Crusaders”) in attempts to raise support and win hearts and minds. Yet almost nothing about the
Crusades story is as it seems. In this class we will explore the complex realities beneath the seemingly
clear surface of this story. We will focus on four topics in particular: the historical, economic and
ideological factors that motivated both Crusaders and Jihadists; the intricate history of competition and
cooperation in the Christian and Muslim settlements in the Holy Land during the era of the Crusades;
the cultural exchange that occurred during the Crusades — in particular, new cultural practices that
Crusaders took back from the eastern Mediterranean to Europe; and the afterlife of the Crusades in the
modern European and Arab imagination.
History 698 History and Historiography of the Tang & Song Dynasties / de Pee
History 698 / Italian 660 (MEMS Prosem) Premodern Cities: Comparative Studies / Van Dam
and Squatriti
With a few deviations into Asian and African contexts, this course investigates European urban cultures
and history across the very long duration. It takes in ancient, medieval and early modern examples of
urban development and un-development, trying to probe the particularities of cities, city life, and urban
culture in an array of times and places. One important theme will be the unique characteristics of urban
physical plant, especially how urban fabric structured people's existence. We will also look hard at urban
representation, in words as well as in bricks and stones. The practicalities of urban "metabolism" and
the in- and out-flow of energy from urban communities will be another theme the course addresses. In
this seminar most of our readings will be modern books, articles, and chapters on our very various
topics. Classes will consist of discussions of the readings, discussions of students’ reviews of the
readings, and presentations of students’ projects. Requirements include short written reviews, a
substantial research project and paper, and participation in all class discussions.
Musicology 513 History of Opera to 1800 / Stein
This course is devoted to the study of opera in the first two centuries of its existence, from its
beginnings just before 1600 to nearly the end of the 18th century. Opera is to be studied critically as
music, theater, spectacle, performance medium, and cultural expression. Special aspects of this course
include a focus on the singers of baroque opera, opera's arrival in the Americas, and the financing and
staging of early opera. While some of the lectures and listening assignments will be organized around
excerpts, others will be designed to focus on whole operas, their music and musical dramaturgy,
historical significance, economics, modes of production, and reception in performance. Composers to
be studied include Peri, Caccini, Da Gagliano, Monteverdi, Cavalli, Lully, Purcell, Hidalgo, A. Scarlatti,
Handel, Vivaldi, Hasse, Rameau, Gluck, Salieri, Sarti, Piccinni, Mozart, and Haydn. The assignments in
this course will be primarily listening assignments, supplemented by score study, readings from
materials on reserve and on C-Tools, and some in-class performances. Grades will be based on written
work and class participation.
Musicology 578 Renaissance Music / Mengozzi
Musicology 639 Medieval Music: Cantus and the Geography of Latin Christendom / Borders
This seminar will trace the complex transmission of the Western Christian liturgy and plainchant from
medieval through early modern times, paying particular attention to migration and other social patterns
including urbanization. The course will begin with the earliest period for which evidence survives, but
the chronological scope will be determined by students’ interests and individual research projects.
Scholarly readings will be assigned and discussed, and students should also expect to work with modern
editions and facsimiles of music and texts (in Latin). A substantive term paper (topics to be developed in
consultation with the instructor) preceded by bibliographies, an outline, and a draft will be required. The
ability to read Latin and French would be useful. Graduate only.