From cautionary tales about the dire consequences of thumb-sucking to bedtime stories with socialist values and queer-positive coming-of-age narratives, German literature for young audiences traces a shifting arc from obedience to identity and imagination. This course explores children's and youth culture through authentic materials such as picture books, short films, songs, and graphic novels. Topics may include moral education and discipline, friendship and coming-of-age, gender and queerness, and experiences of migration and belonging. Students investigate changing ideas about childhood and adolescence while developing interpretive and linguistic skills.
This course investigates narratives and images of Berlin in literature, film, and popular media. As both a limitless, high-energy playground and a scarred urban landscape, portrayals of Germany’s first metropolis contrast possibilities of the future with the burdens of the city’s history. Students read and analyze how depictions of Berlin negotiate its past, conceptualize its future, and position the city within networks of commerce, migration and cultural exchange. Through their analysis, students critically engage with Berlin as a site for identity formation in a globalized Europe.
Reading and study of texts from the whole range of German literature in English translation. No knowledge of German required. This course is taught in English.
Global Citizenship
Students reflect on the study away experience, use storytelling techniques to consider and express the personal impact of study away, and undertake a project that puts into action the awareness, skills, and attitudes of global citizenship. Through topics including culture shock, identity development, and readjustment to social life in the US, students work to integrate their study away experience with their academic and co-curricular work at Sewanee and beyond.
Students reflect on the study away experience, use storytelling techniques to consider and express the personal impact of study away, and undertake a project that puts into action the awareness, skills, and attitudes of global citizenship. Through topics including culture shock, identity development, and readjustment to social life in the US, students work to integrate their study away experience with their academic and co-curricular work at Sewanee and beyond.
Greek
An intensive, introductory course in classical and koine Greek emphasizing forms and syntax and with extensive readings. Four class hours per week.
One gospel and one epistle are read.
History
Two principles central to modern American culture are "separation of church and state" and individual freedom of religious choice. For most of Western history, however, these principles would have been largely incomprehensible. This course examines the close relationship between religion and "the state" in ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and medieval Europe, analyzing the ways in which they reinforced each other as well as instances in which they came into conflict. More broadly, the course examines ways in which religion reinforced or challenged social norms relating to gender, hierarchy, and the identification of "insiders" and marginalized groups.
This course studies the sciences and their histories as social practices. Focusing on the cultural meanings and politics of scientific work in many different contexts, special attention is given to the early modern period of global history. Consideration is given to the important role archives play in the work of historians. Topics include knowledge networks, translation, archives and imperialism; secrecy and the suppression of scientific expertise, scientific consensus and policy-making; science and gender; scientific racism; artificial intelligence and cultures of innovation; observation and the history of objectivity.
The course delves into the intellectual, social and cultural aspects of the Native American/European encounter in what came to be called Latin America in the first century after the arrival of Columbus. It examines such facets as the underlying religious and political legitimation of the Iberian conquests, indigenous responses, and the issue of "othering" and mutual perceptions. It also scrutinizes material and institutional factors such as Spanish imperial and Indian policy, forms of surplus extraction established by the Spanish, and political arrangements embracing native peoples and Europeans.
This course examines some of the most significant conflicts and turning points in the history of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth in Europe and its Caribbean slave colonies from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. We approach women’s reproductive bodies as contested sites of political struggle over issues as diverse as slavery, colonialism, population growth and birth control, religious reform, midwifery, the medicalization of childbirth, and nation-building. Centering women’s voices and experiences of the birth process where the sources allow us, we study the cultures and communities that women of diverse racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds constructed around biological reproduction.
A general survey of the political, constitutional, economic, and social history of the United States.
A general survey of the political, constitutional, economic, and social history of Britain, Ireland, and the British Empire from the Revolution of 1688 to the present.
A study of nation building and strongman government in the nineteenth century, the Mexican Revolution 1910-20, Argentina under Peron, and twentieth-century Brazil. Special emphasis on the roles of women and blacks.
A survey of the major topics and issues in African-American history from 1865 to the present: the era of emancipation, the turn-of-the-century nadir of race relations, black participation in both world wars, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and various dimensions of contemporary black life. The course will also explore some of the historiographical themes that have catalyzed current scholarship and will analyze diverse theories about the black experience in America.
An introduction to the history of German-speaking Europe, c. 1450 to 1850. The course examines the complex history of the Holy Roman Empire, a vast, economically and culturally rich, multi-ethnic state. It also focuses on imperial politics in theory and practice, territorial expansion and diplomacy, the relative autonomy of many German cities, the Protestant Reformation and its aftermath, peasant revolts, the Thirty Years War, the German Enlightenment, and the Vormärz period that culminated in the 1848 Revolutions.
Although modern France is a product of the same tumultuous nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments experienced by the rest of Europe, the French reacted to the processes of industrialization, urbanization, and the democratization of politics, and the two world wars in their own fashion. This course considers in detail how France became "modern" and what the effects of this process were on different groups of individuals in French society. Readings center on primary documents.
An introduction to the field of environmental history, which asks how the natural world has shaped the course of human civilization, and how humans, in turn, have shaped the natural world, over time.
This course introduces students to the experience of thinking historically and doing historical work. Students will learn about historiographical debates, lenses or approaches to history, how to locate and to interpret primary sources such as letters, journals, images, and maps. They will also have opportunities to engage with historical sites, monuments, special collections materials and to work with digital tools. Students examine how historians formulate questions or lines of inquiry, how to conduct library and archival research and practice organizing and presenting research in oral and written form. Required of all history majors and minors.
This second offering in a two-course sequence addresses the modern Middle East, and emphasizes the region's place in global politics and the world economy. Among the topics considered are European imperialism and local responses, nineteenth-century reform movements, the rise of the nation-state, the impact of Arab nationalism, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Islamic political movements, gender relations in the region, the importance of oil, the Iraq conflict, terrorism and the peace process.