Courses

In this course, students will explore key moments in Chicago Jewish History and culture. We will read and examine primary source documents from the founding of the city's first Jewish communities, hospitals, and philanthropic institutions to the public performance of Jewish identity at Chicago's World's Fairs to the 2020 Metropolitan Chicago Jewish Population Survey. Drawing upon literary, journalistic, and archival accounts, we will uncover the vibrancy of Chicago's historic Jewish immigrant neighborhoods, Jewish urban politics, and Jewish suburbanization, mapping out a multivocal understanding of Jewish life in the city. The course will have a research project component.

Franz Kafka’s short stories are read and interpreted in a dizzying array of contexts. For some readers, universal questions of justice, fear, and other aspects of the human condition can be accessed in Kafka’s abstractions and applied to their diverse communities. For others, the sheer creative genius of Kafka’s prose makes it timeless and universally appealing. Scholarship on Kafka has approached his work using the author's individual and intersectional identities as a failed artist and lover, a multilingual speaker of German and Czech, and a Jewish person in a predominantly Christian multi-ethnic empire to offer allegorical reading of his work. Most recently, Kafka’s doodles have been used to suggest additional layers of meaning for his written oeuvre. In this course, we will closely read nine short stories by Kafka. In-class activities will include additional reading and videos that supply context for the approaches to interpreting these short stories mentioned above. Assignments will include analyzing the original German language of the assigned reading based on guided reading questions and social annotation activities. In addition to the reading, all assignments and class discussion will be in German. By the end of the course, students will be able to assert their opinions in German and English on whether additional information on Kafka’s biography and historical context of the Austro-Hungarian Empire are important to interpreting his short stories.

For as long as there has been art, there have been social critics worried about its potential for negative moral effects on its audience, from Plato’s banishment of the poets from his ideal city to conservative critics of Hollywood today. This course will examine such controversies in the context of theater, and will ask what role music plays in connection to spectators’ affective, aesthetic, and ethical experiences and responses. Does adding music to theater, as in an opera, heighten moral risk to the spectator? Or, instead, does music make theater more capable of operating as a social good? How does music (instrumental and/or vocal) relate to spoken theater? What are the pleasures and purposes of music? We will explore these questions across a wide range of time periods, reading and/or watching works by authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Racine, Boileau, Lully, Rameau, Rousseau, Goethe, Wagner and Brecht. In doing so, we will confront some of the (often strange and fascinating) criticisms that some observers have leveled at theater – as well as the ways in which playwrights and musicians have sought to redeem it.

This course is conceived as a pathway to the Humanities and an introduction to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). A range of Nietzsche’s work will be considered, but the focus will be on three themes to which Nietzsche recurred throughout his writing career: Culture: Nietzsche’s thought on the anthropological roots and the expressive forms of human meaning-making: Apollo/Dionysus; Gesture; Music; Metaphor Critique: the vacuous character of modern culture; romanticism, decadence, nihilism. Self-Transcendence: individual self-realization and freedom. The selection of these themes is motivated by the fact that they may be considered as fundamental dimensions of humanistic inquiry. Students will develop a sound understanding of a writer whose intellectual influence continues to grow, but at the same time they will become acquainted with such core concepts of humanistic/interpretive inquiry as form, expression, ideology, genealogy, discourse, self-fashioning, individuality, and value.

This course will explore the 1,000-year history of Yiddish language, literature, music, and artistic expression, covering key tests in Old Yiddish; the rise of secular literature; modern experiences of urbanization, immigration, and political change; the impact of the Holocaust and contemporary Yiddish life. Knowledge of Yiddish is not required; Yiddish texts will be provided by request and students can arrange to meet with me in office hours to discuss the originals.

This course is an introduction to one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century: Sigmund Freud. With his theory of the unconscious, Freud revolutionized how we understand what it means to be human. We do not act as rational, willful agents, he suggested, but are compelled through life by complexly organized desires and drives, much of which we are not aware of. Many of Freud’s terms—such as “Oedipus complex” or “superego”—have become so popularized that they are now part of common parlance, yet they are rarely understood as Freud meant. This course will take seriously the therapeutic imperative of Freud’s work and cover his major texts, including his early case studies on hysteria, his theories of psychosexual development and pathology, and his master narratives about the rise of civilization. We will read Freud in his context, learning about the history of psychoanalysis and life in early twentieth-century Vienna. No prerequisites required; this course is open to all students.

How do we account for the allure of fairy tales? For some, fairy tales count as sacred tales meant to enchant rather than edify. For others, they are cautionary tales, replete with obvious moral lessons. For the purposes of the course, we will assume that these critics are correct in their contention that fairy tales contain essential underlying meanings. We will conduct our own readings of fairy tales from the German Brothers Grimm, the Norwegians Asbjørnsen and Moe, and the Dane Hans Christian Andersen, relying on our own critical skills as well as selected secondary readings.

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This course explores memoirs, plays, essays, poetry, novels, and journalistic writing of women who wrote in Yiddish, as well as a discussion of the context in which they wrote and their reception and self-perception as "women writers." This course will be taught in English with readings translated from Yiddish.

“The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again,” announced the critic Theodor Adorno on German radio in 1966. By this he meant not only the education of children, but also the re-education of the German people. After World War II, with the Third Reich in ruins and confronted with the horrors of the Holocaust, Germans were forced to reckon with their past as they attempted to build the country anew, entering into a period of dramatic political and cultural reorientation. This course traces the history of “rebuilding” Germany after 1945, from the immediate postwar period through the East/West division to reunification to today. Drawing on a broad range of source material, including film, literature, government documents, art, and architecture, this interdisciplinary seminar studies the limits and possibilities of conceiving of Germany as a post-war Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), and its implications for German cultural production. We will pay special attention to the way that debates from the postwar era still reverberate today, for instance in racial discrimination and the rise of the German far-right. This course is required for all Germanic Studies majors and minors. Readings and discussion in English. Pending interest and enrollment, this course will also have an optional LxC section in German.

In a present where humanity faces planetary challenges with an unprecedented urgency, the human form – what Marx calls our "genus-being" (Gattungswesen) – has become a focus for artistic production of all sorts. The thesis of the class is this: Contemporary art is an actualization of the human form that doesn't presuppose the form, doesn't take it for granted, but instead troubles the form and poses it as a question. The class considers presentations of the form in performance art (Tino Sehgal, Anne Imhof, Wu Tsang), sculpture (Kara Walker, Cai Guo-Qiang, Cecilia Vicuña), writing (Friederike Mayröcker, Layli Long Soldier, Tracie Morris), sound (Maria Chavez, Christina Kubisch, Samson Young), and painting (Michael Armitage, Tammy Nguyen, Mark Bradford). The class contextualizes these artists with theoretical work by Sylvia Wynter, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Peter Sloterdijk, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Jane Bennett, Achille Mbembe, Eva Horn, and Emanuele Coccia. Readings and discussion in English.

What would an intellectual history of the environment look like when told from the perspective of art history writing? The geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who first began using the term "Umwelt" ("environment") in a systematic way, claimed that, up to the end of the 19th century, the idea of environment had been primarily discussed not in scientific contexts but rather in aesthetic ones, by "artistically predisposed thinkers." In this course, we will take Ratzel's claim seriously and aim to recuperate the aesthetic side of theories of environment across diverse areas such as: notions of landscape ("the picturesque"); aesthetic and biological theories of media (Haeckel's "ecology," Taine's "milieu," Uexküll's "Umwelt"); the "sculpture of environment" (Rodin and Rilke); in architectural and urban space (Camillo Sitte, Otto Wagner, Paul Scheerbart); and in modern dance’s "space-body" (Rudolf Laban). We will trace evocations of air as the material space surrounding an artwork in texts that thematize the continuity between artwork as image and material object. We will also trace evocations of air in which the media-theoretical notion of medium and the biological concept of milieu and environment intersect. Additional materials include: Claude Cahun, Anaïs Nin, Hilda 'H.D.' Doolittle, Aby Warburg, Siegfried Ebeling, Alois Riegl, Wassily Kandinsky, Loie Fuller, and others. Readings and discussions in English. All students welcome!

An intensive study of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics. The aim is a grasp of Hegel's conception through a discussion of core sections from the expansive text. To mark our engagement, we ask what to make of the conception for our own thinking about the aesthetic today, with a look to examples from contemporary art. Reading in English or German, discussion in English. Please use Hegel's Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Arts, 2 vols., trans. T.M.Knox, Oxford University Press. For the German text, use Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I-III, Suhrkamp Verlag.

This seminar aims to introduce students to the work of Walter Benjamin, one of the most important literary theorists and cultural critics of the twentieth century. More than any other member of the so-called Frankfurt School, Benjamin was committed to bringing German letters into dialogue with other national literary traditions and literature itself into contact with the newly emergent media of his time. He fundamentally changed the way we study both literature and culture to this day. While we will be reading most of his best known works, we will be organizing our syllabus around four major topics: 1) Benjamin’s studies of media and technology, especially photography and film, and their impact on literature and culture; 2) his writings on allegory in early modern drama; 3) his essays on modern literature and culture and, more generally, his theorization of modernity; and 4) his theoretical essays on language and history. Reading and discussions in English. A reading knowledge of German is helpful.

Lady Gaga has a Rilke quote tattooed on her arm; Jimin of the band BTS showed off a temporary tattoo of a Rilke poem in 2023; Gwyneth Paltrow cited Rilke when asked what gave her “spiritual sustenance”; Oprah Winfrey’s website features the volume Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties on her website. This list could go on and on. Rilke’s writing is famous for its lyrical intensity. The pathos of his poetic language appears to “move” and “touch” readers in an unparalleled way. Soldiers going to fight in WWII carried volumes of Rilke's poetry in their knapsacks and letters of fallen soldiers contained quotes from his verse (“Who talks of victory? To endure is all.”) Editions of his writings, such as Rilke for the Stressed, Words of Consolation, Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation attest to Rilke being viewed as someone who can provide The Poet’s Guide to Life. This course introduces students to Rilke's poetry and correspondence as well as excerpts from his writings on art to critically examine his language’s ability to express our innermost feelings and to offer solace. Along the way, we will also situate his work in the context of “modernism,” and we will consider it in the framework of bibliotherapy (reading therapy, poetry therapy). Readings and discussions in English. All students welcome! 

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