Browse Items (53 total)

  • Tags: disciplines

Nature: Course Notes from the College de France

Merleau-Ponty, one of the greatest 20th Century thinkers of perception, the body, and its operation in the natural world, gives a course on the history of nature and its relationship with human freedom and thinking. These are notes on the course…

La Mettrie's L'Homme Machine

Vartanian establishes the authoritative French text of La Mettrie's L'Homme Machine, and several essays on its background, claims, its materialism, and its place in 18th Century science.

Linnaeus, Natural History, and the Circulation of Knowledge

Contributors examine the various techniques, materials and methods that originated within the ‘Linnaean workshop’: paper technologies, publication strategies, and markets for specimens. Fresh analyses of the reception of Linnaeus’s work in Paris,…

Critical Theory: Essays

Collection of Horkhiemer's early essays that define the program of critical theory. Includes seminal essays such as "Traditional and Critical Theory" and "The Latests Attacks on Metaphysics," providing background and context for many of the wartime…

Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

A landmark text critiquing the universalizing project of the European enlightenment. It argues the so-called promises of the intellectual movement remain unfulfilled, as does the forward-moving, developmental picture of history as a progressive…

Worksheet on the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission II

Worksheet on the ABCC II Accessible.pdf
This is an in-class assignment about the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, a US research institute established after WWII in Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to study effect of radiation on humans. The worksheet is based on a couple of…

Worksheet on the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission I

Worksheet on the ABCC I Accessible.pdf
This is an in-class assignment about the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, a US research institute established after WWII in Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to study effect of radiation on humans. The worksheet is based on a couple of…

WGSS 497: "Bad Mothers"

Bad Mothers.pdf
An undergraduate women's studies course that examines why women are often judged on their ability to have and raise children, and that charts the evolution of attitudes toward mothering. We begin by reading works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Sigmund…

History of Sexuality in Modern Science

History of Sexuality in Modern Science Accessible.pdf
This upper-level undergraduate course examines scientists’ changing approaches to sexuality in a range of different societies from the beginning of sexology in the late nineteenth century to the revival of biological studies at the end of the…

Comparative History of Sexuality, Health, and Illness

Comparative History of Sexuality, Health, and Illness Accessible.pdf
The history graduate course explores histories of sexuality, health, and illness in the contexts of colonialism and post-colonialism between the mid-nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth-century, with a focus on pertinent issues such as…

FR597: The Abnormal Early Modern

The Abnormal Early Modern.pdf
A graduate seminar in French that examines texts from the 16th-18th centuries organized around the theme of abnormality. Students also read critical theory in gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and queer studies, among others.

FR543: Studies in the Enlightenment: Kinship, Community, and State

FR543 syllabus.pdf
A graduate seminar in French that examines 18th-century novels and poems from France and Haiti exploring the relation of kinship and community to the State. Students also read critical theory in psychoanalytic theory, gender and sexuality studies,…

WGSS 497: "Bad Mothers," Creative Project description

Bad Mothers- Creative Project.pdf
Final project for Women's Studies course on mothers and mothering. Students have the option of creating an artistic piece or a blog that analyzes motherhood from multiple perspectives.

Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France

Vila's study is now a classic, not only for its revealing interdisciplinary treatment of sensibility but also for its precise methodology and the clarity of its prose.

The Great Cat Massacre

Translated into 18 languages to date, this work is delightful read and also gets one thinking about the many ways in which we impose our own cultural assumptions, inaccurately, on previous eras; very useful as a pedagogical tool to get students out…

“Liberté, Égalité, Sororité: The Regime of the Sister in Graffigny's Lettres
d'une Péruvienne.”

Discusses 18th-century author Françoise de Graffigny's important novel (Lettres d'une Péruvienne), focusing on the form of the letters in the novel, which are constructed first in quipos (a peruvian form of communication involving knotted cords), and…

Man and Society in Calamity: the Effects of War, Revolution, Famine, and Pestilence upon the Human Mind, Behavior, Social Organization, and Cultural Life

This is a new edition of a book published originally in 1942 by one of the founders of American sociology, Pitrim Sorokin. At the time the book fell under the radar and it remains little known today, but it is a pioneering work in many ways,…

Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism: the Politics and Aesthetics of Fear in the Age of the Reign of Terror

Crawford offers a new take on the rise of the Gothic in the late 18th century. Most interpretations see the gothic as a reaction to the upheavals of the revolutionary era. The new realities created by Revolution, so the argument goes, gave rise to…

Death and the Maiden

A play written by the Argentine-Chilean playwrite and activist, Ariel Dorfman. It tells the story of a woman confronting the man who allegedly took part in her torture under the previous, dictatorial regime. The woman's husband is a magistrate who is…

Alimut Elohit: Shnei Hiburim al Elohim ve Asson[Divine Violence: Two Essays on God and Disaster]

Ophir, an Israeli philosopher, examines the connection between God and disasters. From the bible and through much of western history, disasters were seen as caused in some manner by God's will. Ophir examines this tendency and argues that in the…