Fall 2023 Class Schedule: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities

Fall 2023 Class Schedule

Course	Title	Instructor	Lecture
HUM 370-3-20	Race/Gender/Sex and Science	Steven Epstein	TTh 9:30 - 10:50 am
HUM 370-3-20 Race/Gender/Sex and Science How do developments in the life sciences affect our understandings of who we are, how we differ, and how social inequalities are created, perpetuated, and challenged? This seminar explores how scientific claims and technological developments help transform cultural meanings of race, gender, and sexuality. Conversely, we will consider how cultural beliefs about race, gender, and sexuality influence scientific knowledge and medical practice. By studying controversies, we will explore the dynamic interplay among expert findings, social identities, and political arguments.
Bio coming soon
HUM 395-0-22	Constructing Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean World	Ann Gunter	TTh 9:30 - 10:50 am
HUM 395-0-22 Constructing Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean World How did individuals define themselves in the ancient Mediterranean world, and how did they express their affiliation with multiple and diverse ethnic, religious, linguistic, and other collective social identities? How did groups portray perceived differences between themselves and others? What do we know of the construction of gender identities, race, age, and class distinctions? What dynamic roles did dress, hairstyle, body decoration or ornament, and personal possessions play in establishing and expressing individual and collective identities? This course explores evidence for self- and group-fashioning in Greece, Rome, and their neighbors in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia. We examine a wide range of textual and material sources, including works of art, archaeological contexts such as burials and religious institutions, biographies, autobiographies, and legal documents, including dowries. We also consider culturally significant modes of self-representation and commemoration, such as portraits and funerary monuments, along with the collecting and transfer of objects that represented accumulated social entanglements, such as heirlooms.
Bio coming soon
HUM 395-0-24	Beauty, Imitation, and Sympathy: The Moral Significance of Art in 18th Century British Thought	Rachel Zuckert	TTh 12:30 - 1:50 pm
HUM 395-0-24 Beauty, Imitation, and Sympathy: The Moral Significance of Art in 18th Century British Thought Eighteenth-century Britain saw an explosion of interest in aesthetics: many thinkers leapt to investigate beauty and sublimity, imitation and emotion in art, artistic creativity, and so forth. A major reason for this interest was the cynical account of human nature, morals and politics promoted by Thomas Hobbes and Bernard de Mandeville: that human beings are solely motivated by self-interest, and that morals and politics are merely tools of social control, aimed to limit and redirect self-promoting human impulses. Many thinkers argued in response that human attractions to beauty and art were powerful counterexamples to that portrayal of human nature, showing that human beings can love objects and others for their own sakes, and in a way that calls them to social harmony, perhaps through eliciting sympathetic responsiveness. In this course, we will read and talk about central texts and issues in this discussion, moving from Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees to several major responses to his cynical challenge in the British aesthetics tradition: Shaftesbury’s high-minded view of beauty as rational order eliciting disinterested pleasure; Hutcheson’s theory of humor as cognitive and morally corrective (not mockery or ridicule); Kames’ view of art, including tragedy, as arousing sympathetic emotional responses; and Adam Smith’s and Sophie de Grouchy’s views of art, morality, and politics as grounded in sympathetic imagination. In addition to discussing their claims concerning the importance of art for understanding human nature and morality, we will discuss questions such as: does appreciation of art and beauty require education, or contribute to moral and political education, or both? How does representational art (“imitation”) arouse sympathetic emotion or understanding of diverse others? How is taste (for beauty or art) influenced by wealth, social class, or national identity?
Bio coming soon