1 - 4 of 4 results for: HISTORY234

This course explores the European Enlightenment: the eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural movement that gave rise to some of the ideas that informed the American and French political revolutions at the end of the century. These included ideas of human equality and human rights, and the foundation of knowledge and authority in reason and experience rather than in religion and tradition. At the same time, Enlightenment writers also habitually ranked human beings by sex, race, and class and drew upon the European conquest and plunder of the rest of the world to frame their theories. Because of its importance and its profound contradictions, the Enlightenment has recently been the focus of much controversy. In the course, we will discuss all of this ¿ the ideas, the contradictions, and the controversy.

In April of 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, a huge controversy erupted in Germany on the relation between Postcolonial and Holocaust Studies. Previously, in 2012, Judith Butler on the occasion of being awarded the Adorno Prize was assailed for her support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. This time, the philosopher Achille Mbembe, from Cameroon, the former German colony, was accused of antisemitism. His comparison of Israel with the apartheid state in South Africa and his critique of Palestine's occupation as a form of settler colonialism is condemned for relativizing the Holocaust and questioning the Israeli state's right to exist. The allegation of "postcolonial antisemitism" resurfaced in 2022 in the context of the Documenta 15 in Kassel. The curators, ruangrupa, an Indonesian art collective, are accused of antisemitism, of supporting BDS and of the "silent boycott" of Jewish-Israeli artists.These controversies confront us with the challenge of how to think together antisemitism and racism. In this class, we will engage with critical scholarship to address the conundrums of memory politics and to engage with the "unfinished conversations" between Jewish and Postcolonial Studies.

(Undergraduates, enroll in 234P. Graduates, enroll in 334P) The arrival of plague in Eurasia in 1347-51 affected many late medieval and early modern societies. It transformed their understanding of disease, raised questions about the efficacy of medical knowledge, and inspired new notions of public health. This class explores the history of medicine in the medieval Islamic and European worlds. Changing ideas about the body, the roles of different healers and religion in healing, the growth of hospitals and universities, and the evolution of medical theory and practice will be discussed. How did medicine and society change in the age of plague?