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Medical Humanities is a humanistic and interdisciplinary approach to the topic of medicine. It explores the experience of health and illness as captured through the expressive arts (painting, music and literature), across historical periods and in different cultures, and as interpreted by humanistic scholars in the humanities and social sciences as well as in medicine and policy. Its goal is to give students and scholars an opportunity to explore a more holistic and meaning- centered perspective on medical issues. It draws attention not only to diagnosis, but to the meaning and experience of illness and healing, to the way that medicine is an art form as well as a science, and to the way institutions and culture shape illness.

Is it possible to imagine the universe? What does it mean to grasp, or attempt to grasp, the totality that surrounds us? What is at stake between the cosmos and the individual? Is there such a thing as an objective image of the universe, and what happens when different images of the universe are put into dialogue? This is a literature course. In our classes, we will look at these questions by testing the (im)possibilities of literature to help us making sense of the universe around us and our place in it. We will follow the works of various authors from the Italian tradition: Dante Alighieri, Ludovico Ariosto, Galileo Galilei, Giacomo Leopardi, Primo Levi, Oriana Fallaci, and Italo Calvino. Alongside our primary focus, we will also explore texts of authors in other literary contexts, such as Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, Farid al-Din Attar, Luis de Camoes, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, John Milton, H. P. Lovecraft, Vicente Huidobro, and Jorge Luis Borges. Finally, we will analyze how contemporary scientists such as Guido Tonelli and Carlo Rovelli, among others, use literature to organize their scientific discourses.The texts we read grapple in various ways with the challenges of imagining a synthetic view of our universe. They invite us to engage with the cosmos - sometimes in an attitude of contemplation and enthusiasm, and other times with doubt and fear, but always with wonder. This course argues for the centrality of literature in helping us make sense of the universe today.

This course analyzes the major critical motifs of Italian literature, art, and history from the 15th through the 18th centuries including such topics as love, power, faith, reason, and fortune. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, we focus on visual arts and their fertile relations with poetry, prose, theater, and music, so as to explore how their mutual reception and adaptation helped generate new meanings of reality and reshape tradition. All class discussion, reading, and writing will be in Italian. Recommended: ITALLANG 22A or equivalent (2 years of Italian). This course fulfills the Writing in the Major (WIM) requirement.

Writing about various topics in Italian Studies. Topics based on student interests: current politics, economics, European affairs, or cultural and literary history, medieval to modern, in Italy. Intensive focus on writing. Students may write on their experience at Stanford in Florence. Fulfills the WIM requirement for Italian majors.

Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

The intersection of play and violence has been a focal point for historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, even psychologists. In today's world, "gaming" represents a multi-billion dollar industry; in the Middle Ages, those with the means also invested vast sums on games and battle. These ranged from the tournament and the warhorse to hunting and falconry, ivory chess pieces, and musical "rap battles" that pitted contestants against one another. Treatises on the Art of Courtly Love described the conquest of a lover's body as a sport that could be played by women or men. This seminar traces the twin themes of violence and play as enacted by the fighting classes of medieval Europe, beginning with the emergence of the tournament and the crusading movement in the eleventh century. We will investigate how the new ethos of chivalry impacted social relations and the organization of feudal society. And, we will see how tactics and social structures changed with the coming of the gunpowder age. In addition to primary sources including Boccaccio and Machiavelli, the course introduces modern theories of play. Why do humans identify so powerfully with a team? What explains the compulsion to invest financial and emotional resources in play and games?

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.

What does it mean to say the personal is the political, or, in the case of Arendt, that the personal is NOT political, especially if you are a woman? This course explores how Weil, De Beauvoir, Arendt, and Caverero contend with the question of personhood, in its variegated social, political, ethical, and gendered dimensions. Particular attention will be given to a philosophy of social change and personal transformation, and to the enduring relevance of these women's thought to issues of our day. Texts include selections from Gravity and Grace, The Second Sex, The Ethics of Ambiguity, The Human Condition, Between Past and Future, Stately Bodies, and Relating Narratives.