Humanities (HMAN) Courses
This topics seminar in the humanities is available to junior or senior undergraduates as well as graduate students. The number, variety and topics of sections will vary from semester to semester and year to year. All classes are taught either by Brown faculty, as Cogut Center Faculty Fellows, or Visiting Professors in the Humanities from other institutions who are in residence at the Cogut Center. Topics are offered that relate directly to faculty expertise and research as well as to the interests and needs of relevant departments. This seminar provides an in-depth enhancement to humanities scholarship for the advanced undergraduate. Graduate students are welcome.
You may click on the highlighted course titles to link to the Banner listing.
Courses for Fall 2008
HMAN 1970H Q Hour (Th 4:00 – 6:20pm)
Specters of Comparison
Nergis Ertürk, Visiting Professor in the Humanities
Comparison, which posits a likeness between the dissimilar, is always profoundly haunted by the question of its ground and judgment. This seminar will examine the comparative logic of capitalist modernity in the works of Marx, Weber, Adorno and Horkheimer, Foucault, Heidegger, and Benjamin. We will ask the following questions: How is equivalence established between nonequivalent objects? How are actual social relations quantified and measured, and is there an ethics to modern forms of comparability? How does language reflect and produce these operations? Or, to put it differently: What are the forms through which difference "haunts" us? We will pay special attention to figures of the double and the ghost in Hoffmann and Freud. Other topics to be covered include rationalization and the disenchantment of the world, the modern uncanny, "mediauras," colonial comparison, and the ethics of incommensurability.
HMAN 1970A M Hour (M 3:00 – 5:20pm)
Eating Cultures: Food and Society
Matthew Garcia, Faculty Fellow
This course will look at various ways to understand the complex role of food in society. We will look at issues of food production and consumption, and how our relationship to food contributes to the political and social structures that we live with. Our approach will be historical and pay special attentions to the ways in which communities of color and immigrants have shaped, and have been shaped by, the food they cultivate, harvest, consume, and market. The readings explore how food creates ways for people to form bonds of belonging while also creating bonds of control and regimes of inequality.
HMAN 1970G P Hour (T 4:00 – 6:20pm)
A History of Humanness: Scientific & Popular Cultures in the 20th Century United States
Megan Glick, Visiting Professor in the Humanities
What does it mean to be human? Within the present moment, it is common to critically consider one’s race, class, gender, and sexual identities, but it is rare to imagine one’s “species” as part of this formulation of self. Rather, the category of “humanness” is often still understood as an essential, biological truth. This course asks students to contemplate scientific and cultural constructions of humanness in the 20th century U.S. in two primary ways. First, we will address the literal production and invocation of humanness, by historicizing the evolution and maintenance of the boundaries between the animal, human, and technological worlds. Second, we will consider the symbolic production of humanness, by reflecting upon instances in which particular groups of people are not treated as fully “human” in the socio-political sense. As such, this course understands the “human” to be both a biological marker of species difference, and a category of social difference produced alongside and in dialogue with the categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The course is organized both chronologically and thematically, and will draw upon historical, cultural theoretical, scientific, and popular works.
HMAN 1970K N Hour (W 3:00 – 5:20pm)
The Origins and Contours of American Nationalism, 1780-1900
Michael Vorenberg, Faculty Fellow
American Nationalism, a perennial subject of interest to historians, has received particular attention from all types of scholars in recent years, especially in the wake of international conflicts after the attacks of September 11, 2001. This course seeks to contextualize and historicize the topic of American nationalism by examining a series of interrelated questions: How and when did the United States become a nation, and how and when did American nationalism arise? How does American nationalism compare to nationalism in other regions? What have been the major tensions and conversations around the topic of American citizenship?
HMAN 1970F O Hour (F 3:00 – 5:20pm)
Visualizing History: The Politics of Material Culture in Modern South Asia
Vazira Zamindar, Faculty Fellow
This advanced history seminar will examine the making of art, art historical and archaeological knowledge through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in colonial and postcolonial South Asia, as sites and objects came to be ‘discovered’, interpreted and contested through scientific, religious and national claims. We will examine a series of sites, objects, and images, including the Indus Valley seals, Asoka’s Buddhist columns, Bodhgaya, sculptures of Hindu gods and goddesses, erotic sculptures, temple at Somnath, and more recently the Babri mosque at Ayodhya, the Bamiyan Buddhas and M. F. Husain’s paintings of Hindu goddesses. Unlike an art history course, the sites, objects and images that we will examine do not follow aesthetic or period styles, but rather serve as foci to historically and theoretically examine the making of different kinds of knowledge and the new contestations that they engendered.
For Spring 2009 classes, click here.
For related 2008-09 classes, click here.