Previous Courses
“Techne” and Sophia (Technology and Wisdom)
Clearly, technology has advanced since the first century, but has wisdom? Maybe it has, or maybe it has only in specific areas, and declined in others. Anyway, that’s our challenge in this course.
Africa and the World: Ancient to Early Modern Times
This class introduces students to ancient, medieval, and early modern African states and societies.
An Epic Week with Homer: The Iliad
In this week-long Residential Seminar, we will read and probe some of Homer’s epics’ most famous episodes in various English translations from the Renaissance to today. We will also explore some of the vast array of responses to and transformations of Homer’s strange and wondrous tales in painting, cinema, and other arts.
Aristotle and Confucius on Leadership
The question of how to lead is intimately linked with the question of how to live. Two of the most brilliant thinkers and influential teachers in the world’s history, Aristotle in ancient Greece and Confucius in ancient China, offer models for how to understand the interweave between ethics and leadership and how to actualize them together in human life.
Aristotle and Homer: Ethics, Happiness, and Homecoming
Can a hero catch a break? Yes, but it takes time.
Colonial Fictions: Novels of Adventures, Exoticisms, and East and West
This course will examine what Empire was in the case of British India and the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia) by reading English and Dutch novels together with the work of Asian writers. This will help us develop an idea of how literature was both collusive with and critical of colonialism, how different cultures wrote about their contact with each other, and how the writing of that era has shaped our modern world.
COVID-19: The Social Sciences of Health and Medicine
The perspectives, methods, and concepts of the social sciences of health and medicine are vital in shaping how we understand and concretely respond to pandemics and public health emergencies. This course draws primarily on perspectives from the anthropology, sociology, and history of medicine and health to examine a range of questions raised by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Culture and Technology
This class will look at the interplay between technology and culture with a particular focus on the ways in which technological advancements impact cultural production in literature, the arts, and media.
Democracy in Historical Perspective: Tocqueville, Arendt, and Trump
This course seeks some purchase on the current crisis of American democracy by examining the character of Western democracy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Digital Ethics
The course will pair classic debates in applied ethics with case studies from recent developments in digital technology.
Documenting Blakelock: A Forgotten American Genius in the Gilded Age
This course is related to a film project now underway with documentary-maker Ric Burns about outsider artist Ralph Blakelock, America’s forgotten van Gogh.
Epics, Nations, Races, Worlds
The project of nation building, of bringing a national identity into existence, is often regarded as a defining aspiration of many ancient and modern epic poems.
Ethnographic Traditions
This class will introduce students to the practice of ethnographic field work, or participant observation research.
Foundations of Bioethics
This Residential Seminar course provides an introduction to the field of bioethics. Grounded in case-studies, it will explore how different philosophical and theological traditions describe and defend differences in moral choices in contemporary bioethics.
Greek Drama at the Movies
In this course we will study ten of the most powerful classical Greek performance texts as we view and discuss a set of film adaptations spanning more than fifty years of cinema history,
How Dictatorships Come to Power
In this course, we will consider how dictators come to power, liberation schemes deteriorate into tyranny, and the democratic process paves way for authoritarianism.
Human Rights and the Meaning of Work
This interdisciplinary course explores work — free and unfree — and the experience of working people from the vantage point of human rights.
Imagining the City
The rise of the modern city makes possible new modes of experience, new kinds of people, and new kinds of stories.
India in Film: Imaginations of a Decolonial Nation
Among all film producing countries in the world, India successfully resisted Hollywood’s hegemony. Some Hollywood blockbusters made their way to theaters in big Indian cities; some were adapted into Indian languages. Mostly, however, audiences remained loyal to Indian fare. What was the India that was depicted on-screen? To what extent was India produced by these filmic imaginations?
Leading Well and Doing Good: Insights from George Eliot’s Middlemarch
Our focus will be on Eliot’s story and the scenarios she presents in which characters face (or evade) ethical choices. To help us better understand how the characters, the narrator, and we ourselves come to grips with these situations, we will also read some short philosophical works about ethics.
Leading with Practical Wisdom: Navigating Self and the World
Recognizing that effective leadership requires navigating complex moral and strategic decisions, this course blends philosophical insights with practical tools.
Matter, Energy, Space and Time: The Rules that Govern the Physical World
The instructor will be smiling if the student takes away from the course what science is and isn’t, why it is important, a basic understanding of the fundamental laws of physics and how they have created the physical world around us, and the deep mysteries ahead.
Meaning and Motive in Social Thought
This core course in the Social Sciences studies classic works of social thought that remain foundational in contemporary theory, law, and policy.
Models of the Universe
The readings and lectures of this course will trace the development of our view of the universe starting with the Earth-centered cosmology of Aristotle, through the Sun-centered universe in the Copernican revolution, to the modern big bang theory, and recent speculations about a quantum origin of the universe. The course focuses on the ideas as well as the people who shaped our view of the universe. The readings and lectures will not require mathematics or physics, only a curiosity about the universe.
Perspectives on Modernity: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Max Weber
The course aims to demonstrate the historicity of various modern attitudes towards work, economy, and society, historicize the lived experience of modernity, and recover the utopian visions (as opposed to the now more commonly dystopian ones) associated with it.
Philosophical Reflections on Leadership: From Machiavelli’s Prince to Dr. King’s Drum Major
This course explores the ideas of key political thinkers, with a focus throughout on the figure of the leader.
Russia and the West
There are few problems as enduring and central to Russian history as the question of the West—Russia’s most passionate romance and most bitter letdown. In this course we will read and think about Russia from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries through the lens of this obsession.
Science, Technology, and Moby Dick
We often think about Moby Dick as a description of American society as told through the microcosm of a whaleship. But Moby Dick is also a book about what knowledge is, what is knowable in the world, how humans relate to nature, and how scientific knowledge impacts society.
Society Before Letters
Communications technology seems so modern that it is easy to forget it merely iterates techniques and practices used before the written word even existed.
Some Versions of the Apocalypse
In this course we will explore what is both fearful and alluring about catastrophe on an unimaginable scale, as we read and view some paradigmatic apocalyptic works across a wide historical range. The course will focus on close attention to the aesthetics of individual works, locating those works in their historical contexts, and the theoretical analysis of the texts’ motivating concerns.
Technology in America
This course is an introduction to the history of technology, with a particular focus on the ways in which arts and manufactures, mechanisms and devices have shaped American culture and experience.
Technology, Science, and Self
Theories about technology and its relationship to society and self are everywhere, even if we don’t always recognize them or articulate them.
The Ancient Art of Leadership
The question of how to lead is intimately linked with the question of how to live. Like many ancient civilizations, classical Greece offers us a rich body of teaching that invites its readers to explore the possibility that both living and leading are arts.
The Current Crisis of American Democracy
Our democracy is in crisis, as manifest in unprecedented levels of inequality, abysmal levels of trust in government, political polarization, and the traction of anti-democratic movements to overturn or restrict the vote. How did we get here? (And how do we get out?)
The Florentine Renaissance
This course offers an introduction to the intellectual, social, and political transformations that are reflected in the astounding explosion of artistic creativity that occurred in Florence in the years 1400-1540.
The Moral Arc of America: Justice, Morals, and Power in U.S. History
This course examines pivotal issues and moments in U.S. history, where morals, justice and power took on heightened urgency, becoming focal points of public debate
The Neurobiology of Everyday Life and its Dilemmas
This course will focus on the nervous system, how the nervous system produces behavior, how we use our brain every day, and how neuroscience can explain the common problems afflicting people today.
The Normal and the Pathological: Sickness, Care, and Wellbeing Across Cultures
Taking its title from an important text by historian and philosopher of medicine Georges Canguilhem, this class considers how sickness, care, and wellbeing have been differently understood and embodied over time and between different cultural settings.
The Pivotal Decade: 1970s Literature & The Rise of Inequality
This course will explore the relation of postmodernism and works by major American fiction writers, including Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tom Wolfe, William Gaddis, to the broader political and economic shifts of the 1970s and the rise of economic inequality in the US.
The Problem of Evil
“If God exists, whence comes evil; and if God does not exist, whence comes good?” (Boethius). This course will consider the theological problem of evil, starting with the Book of Job.
The Science of Pollution and Climate
This class will explore the science behind contemporary issues such as global warming and forms of pollution such as urban aerosols, lead in drinking water, the global mercury cycle, endocrine disrupting organics, plastics, and other issues.
Tsars, Soviets, and Putin: Modern Russia, 1860-present
This course provides an overview of the history of Russia and its empires, told through original primary sources.
Twentieth Century American Fiction
This course presents America’s major writers of short fiction in the 20th century.
World Wisdom Literature
How to live and how to lead are questions that every human community has sought to answer. The thinkers on ethics and leadership whose writings we explore in this course come from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.