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How do you get to heaven, and who has the right to decide? The Reformation ruptured Europe and ultimately fractured Western Christianity with competing claims about the soul's health, and the necessary personal beliefs and communal norms to sustain it. It plunged this world into compounding crises of faith, politics, and conscience. At the same time, a media revolution heralded an age of propaganda and censorship. The emergent technology of printing unleashed fiercely public debates that encouraged people to question everything, giving rise to new ideas about skepticism, doubt, and certainty, and new social methods of controlling opinion. We will examine the Reformation by looking at the intersections of media, science, and politics with faith, and grapple with religion's inadvertent role in secularizing society.

Between 1200-1600, Venice created a powerful empire at the boundary between East and West that controlled much of the Mediterranean, with a merchant society that allowed social groups, religions, and ethnicities to coexist. Topics include the features of Venetian society, the relationship between center and periphery, order and disorder, orthodoxy and heresy, the role of politics, art, and culture in the Venetian Renaissance, and the empire's decline as a political power and reinvention as a tourist site and living museum.

Current scholarship on Britain,1640-1700, focusing on political and religious history. Topics include: causes and consequences of the English civil war and revolution; rise and fall of revolutionary Puritanism; the Restoration; popular politics in the late 17th century; changing contours of religious life; the crisis leading to the Glorious Revolution; and the new order that emerged after the deposing of James II.

Human rights, national sovereignty, terror, even revolution itself - the French Revolution gave rise to modern politics. This course examines the causes, course, and consequences of the revolution from the crisis of the Old Regime to the Napoleonic period. We will read both original documents and current historical scholarship on the French Revolution. Throughout, key themes will include the role of ideas and language in political change, the relationship between revolution and violence, the politics of rights, and the global legacies of the revolution.

This colloquium for advanced undergraduate and graduate students will investigate the political economy of modern empire, focusing on the British empire. Topics include the history of imperial corporations; industry and empire; the commodification of nature and life; racial capitalism; the formation of the global economy; the relationship between trafficking and free trade; and the relationship between empire and the theory and practice of development.

This course investigates the relationship between culture, revolutionary decolonization, and post-colonial trajectories. It probes the multilayered development of 20th and 21st-century African literature amid decolonization and Cold War cultural diplomacy initiatives and the debates they generated about African literary aesthetics, African languages, the production of history, and the role of the intellectual. We will journey through national cultural movements, international congresses, and pan-African festivals to explore the following questions: What role did writers and artists play in shaping the discourse of revolutionary decolonization throughout the continent and in the diaspora? How have literary texts, films, and works of African cultural thought shaped and engaged with concepts such as "African unity" and "African cultural renaissance"? How have these notions influenced the imaginaries of post-independence nations, engendered new subjectivities, and impacted gender and generational dynamics? How did the ways of knowing and modes of writing promoted and developed in these contexts shape African futures?

This course examines the history of gender and sexuality in twentieth and twenty-first century Africa. It explores how concepts, identities, and practices of gender and sexuality have changed in shifting social, cultural, political, and economic contexts across the continent and in connection with global currents. This historical journey encompasses European colonialism, independence, postcolonial nation-building, and current times. Course materials include African novels, films, material culture and multinational scholarly research and primary sources. We will also engage multidisciplinary perspectives, methodologies, and theories as tools for critical thinking, writing and varied modes of producing knowledge. Gender and sexuality(ies) as examined in this course act as gateways to explore transformations in : selfhood, peoplehood, and life stage; health, medicine, reproduction, and the body; law and criminality; marriage, kinship, family, and community; politics, power and protest; feminism(s); popular culture; religion and belief; LGBTQI+ themes; and the history of emotions, including love, joy, desire, pain, and trauma.

This course will explore the histories of race and slavery in the African continent. We will consider how these histories developed alongside and independent of global developments, including but not limited to imperialism, capitalism, and slavery in the Arab world, as well as the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Students will engage with an array of primary and secondary sources that centralize the voices, experiences, and perspectives of Africans from different time periods. We will grapple with the complex histories of slavery within the continent and how the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion evolved over time.

The tragic death of Ambassador Chris Stevens has recently highlighted the dangers of diplomacy in the modern era. This class will look at how Americans in embassies have historically confronted questions such as authoritarian rule, human rights abuses, violent changes of government, and covert action. Case studies will include the Berlin embassy in the 1930s, Tehran in 1979, and George Kennan's experiences in Moscow, among others. Recommended for students contemplating careers in diplomatic service. *IR majors taking this course to fulfill the IR WIM requirement should enroll in INTNLREL174. As space is limited, first-year students must obtain the instructor's prior consent before enrolling. Non-matriculating students are also asked to consult the instructor before enrolling in the course.