2014-2015 Curriculum
Current students can find syllabi for each quarter at Stanford Syllabus. Syllabi are posted as soon as they are received from faculty.
The first quarter of the Foundations sequence will range from the early second millenium BCE to the early first millenium CE. Among the major topics covered will be the Classical Ideal of Greece and Rome as illustrated in the art, literature, and philosophy of the period, and the central tenents of the world's most influential ethical and metaphysical traditions: Hinduism, Judaism, Confucianism, Christianity, and Islam.
Co-taught with Paul Robinson, Richard W. Lyman Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus.
Thematically, this course will focus on the historical, literary, artistic, and philosophical issues raised during The Long Nineteenth Century (1789-1914). Practically, it will concentrate on the skills and the information students will need to pursue MLA graduate work at Stanford: writing a critical, argumentative graduate paper; conducting library research; presenting a concise oral summary of work accomplished; actively participating in a seminar. Readings and assignments will include Austen, Mozart, Burke, Schubert, Mary Shelley, Mill, Marx, Dickens, Darwin, Freud, and Woolf, as well as selected poetry and critical writings. The course will culminate in a research paper and a presentation of each students' findings.
Music is a pervasive, often obsessive aspect of human behavior. We tend to strongly associate music with salient life events ('They're playing our song') and we often use music to (consciously or sub-consciously) assist us in remembering. Music is associated with physical motion - whether simply tapping feet or the carefully choreographed complex moves of a ballet dancer. Music and language share mental processing resources, yet have a high degree of independence. Over the past decade a number of hypotheses have been raised regarding the possibility that music is evolutionarily adaptive. In this course we will consider these theories, and, in so doing, explore the phenomenon of music in our lives.
Rapidly becoming the most influential country in the world, China has undergone epic changes over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the span of less than two hundred years, it has witnessed colonial incursions by multiple Western powers, the demise of an imperial system over two millennia old, a period of widespread political and social fragmentation, a debilitating war against Japan, a Communist revolution that dwarfed in size its Russian counterpart, and a tumultuous period of Communist rule that has itself fluctuated between periods of unprecedented economic growth and chaos.
This course is part one of a two-part Master Class in Modern Chinese History. Students will leave this class with a grounded and precise comprehension of modern China’s major historical transformations. This class will be of interest to scholars trying to grasp contemporary Chinese politics, society, economy, culture, gender, ethnicity, and international relations. This course is the required gateway to Modern Chinese History Part II: Master Class in Historical Research, to be offered during the 2015-16 academic year.
Students who have an approved prospectus should enroll in MLA 398: Thesis-in-Progress. Students who are working on their theses are part of this class and meet regularly to provide peer critiques, motivation, and advice under the direction of the Associate Dean.
Co-taught with Dr. Jeremy Sabol, Lecturer in SLE and in MLA.
The second quarter of the Foundations sequence will move from the early Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. Topics to be discussed will range from the origins of the Christian west, the barbarian invasions of the 5th century, the advent of Islam, the flowering of medieval culture from the 12th to the 14th centuries, Renaissance theater and art, the scientific revolutions of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
Co-taught with David Jordan, Assistant Director of Library Development, and Associate Curator for Paleographical Materials.
This introductory course in the history of writing and of the book, from the late antique period until the advent of printing, offers an opportunity to learn to read and interpret medieval and early modern manuscripts, primarily in Latin but also in vernacular scripts. The seminar focuses on paleography but touches upon several related disciplines in manuscript studies and codicology. It provides critical training and skills applicable to the reading of manuscripts of all eras for advanced students of the humanities and liberal arts. A special emphasis of this year’s course will be the examination of newly available digital content and recently developed transcription tools for the study of medieval manuscripts. Each session will include hands-on examination of original materials in Special Collections of Stanford Libraries, and each student will work with a manuscript related to his or her own fields of interest for the class project. Some acquaintance with Latin is desirable but not required.
In this course we will consider closely the work of photographers such as Alexander Gardner and Mathew Brady; painters such as Winslow Homer and Frederic Church; poets such as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson; and novelists and short story writers such as Stephen Crane and Ambrose Bierce. We will also “visit” different sites related to the war, including spots around Washington, D.C., and also the battlefields at Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and Spotsylvania, considering the affective remains of the past at these places. The course emphasizes close analysis of photographs, paintings, architecture, poems, prose, homely artifacts, and physical spaces and places.
This MLA course introduces, for discussion, some of the ideas, speculations, provocations and theories of ten individuals often considered to be “intellectuals.” The course will put this nomenclature under close observation and will, in so doing, be preoccupied with certain questions:
- Where did the word come from, what today does it mean, and is it, in fact, a usefully illuminating term?
- Are “intellectuals” a class; do they all work in roughly the same way; by what, if anything, are they unified?
- Are “intellectuals” to be found on a particular place within the spectrum of ideological belief and practice?
- By whom are “intellectuals” taken seriously? What impact have they had on the societies in which they have been found?
- Are “intellectuals” fundamentally (but perhaps usefully) inimical to value of the societies they inhabit?
The course will focus on one individual “intellectual” each week and the aim of our meetings will be to bring to the table our best thoughts about the assigned reading and, thereafter, to come to an evaluation of that reading.
This course is generously supported by David Soward, MLA '04.
Students who have an approved prospectus should enroll in MLA 398: Thesis-in-Progress. Students who are working on their theses are part of this class and meet regularly to provide peer critiques, motivation, and advice under the direction of the Associate Dean.
Foundations III explores how men and women attempted to locate themselves in the modern world through different rational, mental, humanistic, artistic, and conceptual ways. The course begins at the moment of the French Revolution and moves through to our contemporary global present. Along the way we will address capitalism and its critiques, liberalism, evolution and anthropology, world wars, the rise and fall of colonialism, struggles for equality, modernism, and the impact of modern science on the human condition.
This seminar focuses on issues of tropical sustainability with a particular emphasis on the Osa-Golfito Region of Costa Rica. The course highlights issues of human development in the tropics, through such means as agricultural development, ecotourism, conservation efforts, private and indigenous reserves, and mining. The course will draw from diverse disciplines including anthropology, rural sociology, and conservation biology, to ask can one truly put together integrated conservation-development projects (ICDPs) or are they merely a pipe dream? Course readings include a selection of classics on the topic, as well as key readings and lectures from the INOGO project. Some researchers view the Osa-Golfito Region as a microcosm of a more global challenge: can we find a viable path to sustainable development for the planet? What will it look like?
This seminar examines the vital issues facing the Obama Administration’s foreign policy during its last two years in office.
President Obama took office in 2009, not in the context of the expected peace and prosperity and thriving democracy but instead facing severe challenges globally. This seminar will examine those challenges, how the Obama administration has responded to them and analyze the quality of that response---speculating about future policy outcomes.The seminar will begin with an examination of historical trends and experiences in American foreign policy. Then the seminar will discuss the landscape of current challenges followed by a week by week focus on specific issues. These will include the myriad of troubles in the Middle East, the resurgence of Russian belligerence and its consequences including the conflict in the Ukraine. It will also look at the continued economic troubles in Europe and the European Community that have been weakening the Western Alliance. Finally the seminar will explore the Administration’s declared “pivot to Asia, including the relationship with China, with Japan, with southeast Asia. Finally, the seminar will try to assess the quality of President Obama’s foreign policy especially as it compares to recent, previous presidential administrations.
We will be reading narratives by U.S. Latinas and Latinos of Mexican, Dominican, Guatemalan, Cuban and Puerto Rican descent through the lens of latinidad, exploring both commonalities and distinctiveness. The terms Latino, Latina and Latin@ refer exclusively to people of Latin-American descent living in the United States. The peoples of Latin-American nations all share the historical experience of Spanish colonization and U.S. (neo)imperialism, yet they differ in their im/migration patterns to the U.S. from Mexico, the Caribbean and other Latin American countries (as well as similarities and differences in their very ability to im/migrate). The narratives we will study trace the relationships between Latin@s’ social, cultural, and political trajectories and concepts of home and homeland, nation and family, diaspora and migration, history and memory. We will use the critical lens called queer of color critique to examine how processes of racialization inform the production of sexualities and genders as well as how these processes are inflected by socio-economic status. Additionally, we will analyze the formal strategies of these narratives (looking at narration, detail, style, point of view, characterization, dialogue and figurative language). By the end of the quarter, you will have a solid command of Latin@ literature and a good grasp of the issues defining the field.
Students who have an approved prospectus should enroll in MLA 398: Thesis-in-Progress. Students who are working on their theses are part of this class and meet regularly to provide peer critiques, motivation, and advice under the direction of the Associate Dean.
This course will focus on the early part of the career of James Joyce. We will read and discuss Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the first three episodes of Ulysses. We will seek to understand the complex relationship of Joyce's life in Dublin to the fictions recording and reshaping that life. We will also try to determine how the fictional techniques employed in the first two works led to those in Ulysses.
Students who have an approved prospectus should enroll in MLA 398: Thesis-in-Progress. Students who are working on their theses are part of this class and meet regularly to provide peer critiques, motivation, and advice under the direction of the Associate Dean.