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Courses

Spring 2017


Art History and Archaeology

1120 and 1120W Renaissance through Modern Art
Yonan and Van Dyke. TT 2:00 – 2:50 and discussions Keller Aud.

This course is an introductory survey of architecture, sculpture and painting of Europe and America from the Renaissance to Modern times.

2150W Art of the Book – Writing Intensive
Stanton. MWF 1 - 1:50, Swallow 101

This course explores illustrated books from the sixth through the 21rst centuries, with special attention to illuminated manuscripts. Students will participate in the making of a small book and write about various aspects of manuscript book production.

3210W Byzantine and Islamic Art and Archaeology – Writing Intensive
Rautman. TT 9:30-10:45, Swallow 101

This course explores the visual world of the Middle Ages in southwest Asia and the east Mediterranean, from late antiquity through the rise of the Ottoman empire. This formative millennium saw the ancient cultures of the Near East transformed by the spread of monotheism, most lastingly in the form of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These traditions share overlapping textual foundations, yet their historical development reflects different approaches to the arts as a way of shaping doctrine and cultural identity. Their interaction and diffusion are fundamental to understanding the intellectual and cultural outlook of the early modern world.

4440 / 7440 Roman Architecture (Classical Foundations)
Mogetta. TT 11:00 – 12:15, Swallow 110

This course explores the history of Roman architecture, origin and development of forms and techniques, major monuments in Rome and its provinces through the 3rd century after Christ.

4490/7490 Late Antique Art and Archaeology
Rautman. TT 9:30-10:45, Swallow 110

This course investigates the visual culture of the Mediterranean world between the third and seventh centuries CE, a period that saw lifeways transformed by political upheaval, religious conversion, and social change. Historical accounts traditionally stress the disruption brought about by Rome’s gradual decline and ultimate eclipse, yet the material record documents prosperous creativity in many parts of the late empire, particularly the cities of the east Mediterranean. Study of a broad range of visual evidence — archaeological artifacts, works of fine art, standing buildings, field surveys, and excavated sites — offers a chance to reassess the period by exploring patterns of cultural change in late antiquity and historical study in modern times.

4540 / 7540 Gothic Art and Architecture
Stanton. MW 10 – 11:15, Swallow 110

This course will focus on the arts of England, from the late 12th century and the construction of the first “Gothic” building at Canterbury to the early 16th century and the great chapel of Henry VII at Westminster Abbey. It will include a combination of lectures, discussions, and presentations by students of selected monuments, articles, and of your own research projects.

8440 Ancient and Medieval Topography
Mogetta. F 3:00-5:00, Swallow 110

TOPOGRAPHY OF ROME
This graduate seminar explores the development of settlement in Rome from its origins to the 5th c. CE through the lens of ancient topography. After reviewing the intellectual debates leading to the definition of Roman Topography as a discipline in its own right, and tracing its evolution from the 18th century to the digital age, students are exposed to the basic methodologies that will allow them to combine textual and visual sources with the archaeological evidence. A series of case-studies, from the archaic Sacra Via to the Temple of Divus Augustus, will provide opportunities to discuss controversial problems in the mapping of ancient Rome and different approaches to their solution.


Classical Humanities

Check MyZou for courses available for the Classical Foundations options in the minor.


English

English 1160 Heroes and Monsters
Johanna Kramer. TT 11:00 – 12:15, Mumford 133

Who’s your hero? Who’s your monster? This course explores the making and unmaking of heroes and monsters by surveying some of the most (in)famous heroic and monstrous figures in western literary tradition from the heroic epic of the early Middle Ages to the graphic novel of the twenty-first century. Along the way, we will discuss the defining characteristics of “the hero” and “the monster.” Even the earliest sources complicate the boundaries between these categories and make us question what it means for ourselves to identify with the hero or the monster—or both! This course is interested in how a wide range of texts depict, construct, celebrate, complicate, undermine, and dismantle the concepts of “hero” and “monster.” Likely readings include: Beowulf, Grettir’s Saga (an Old Norse saga), lives of saints, medieval travel narratives, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a selection of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, fairy tales, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, The Hobbit, Harry Potter, The Watchmen.

3200-1 Survey of British Literature, Beginnings to 1784
Lee Manion. MWF 1:00-1:50, Tate 110

This course introduces the great first ten centuries of literature in English through a series of heroic, tragic, and romantic texts across various genres. From the rough music of Beowulf and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to the sweeter tones of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and John Milton to the biting wit of Aphra Behn and Alexander Pope, each reading sets different literary forms in their historical context while also drawing out their common elements. As the semester unfolds we will explore how literature reflects and affects cultural realities, as well as how it produces our modern conceptions of self, love, nature, and imagination.

4167/7167-1 Shakespeare's Tragedies and Romances
Lee Manion. MW 3:00-4:15, Tate 111

The world of Shakespeare's tragedies and romances is wonderful, inspiring, dark, and twisted. While the tragedies portray love destroyed by fate, terrible errors, conflicts between laws and values, or bittersweet revenge, the romances take us to the brink of disaster and then seem to find resolution through the magical and the fantastic. This course traces Shakespeare's exploration of philosophical, ethical, and political problems in plays that end badly or that turn to a surreal world of art for happiness. Lofty, idealistic heroes and heroines will enact deeds of noble generosity as well as of devious cruelty while we consider how Shakespeare's drama relates to the history of the English Renaissance. Plays will likely include Roman plays (Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Cymbeline), well-known tragedies (Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello), and romances (Pericles, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest). Film versions will help us to explore the role of performance in Shakespearean drama.

4186/7186 Medieval Women Reader/Writers
Emma Lipton. MWF 2-2:50 p.m., Tate 110

This course explores women’s relationship to medieval literary culture. We will read works by medieval women (including Marie de France, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe) as well as books accessible to or written for women, such as saints’ lives, devotional literature, moral instruction and civic drama. Special attention will be given to the social context in which literary activity took place, focusing on the arenas of the court, the cloister and the city. We will explore medieval attitudes to sexuality and the regulation of desire, and consider the relationship between the female body and the construction of female subjectivity and identity. We will also consider how female literacy and female patronage affected literary texts, what conventions governed the representation of women, what kinds of texts were written by and for women, and how women’s access to particular genres affected the meaning of those traditions.

4210/7210 Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Emma Lipton. MWF 12-12:50, Middlebush Hall 205

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales provide an introduction to a broad range of medieval literature, revealing the surprising variety of genres and forms in the period, from the bawdy fabliaux, to the courtly romances, to the theological lessons of saints' lives. With each of the tales told from the perspective of a person from a distinctly different social position within society, Chaucer's tales allow us to study competing notions of community in the Middle Ages and the ways that social class shaped individuals' values. We will study the tales in relation to both social and religious politics, and investigate such topics as governance and authority, the construction of individuality, chivalry, fin amor ("courtly love"), gender and sexuality, and forms of spirituality. The course will focus both on close analysis and on the ways that major historical and cultural issues shaped literary texts.

4220/7220 Renaissance and 17th-century Literature: Renaissance Writers on the Human Condition
David Read. TT 2:00 - 3:15, Tate 102

What does it mean to be human? What is our place in the universe? How should we conduct ourselves in this world? How should we govern ourselves? The period between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe is exceptionally rich in works that reflect on these very basic questions--works that stand in the background of the English literature that we read from the same period, and have had a substantial impact on that literature. In this course we will read some of the most influential of these works, including Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man, Machiavelli's The Prince, Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, Erasmus's Praise of Folly, Luther's On Christian Liberty, and selections from Montaigne's Essays. The course should be of interest to majors in both English and History, and any student interested in the intellectual culture of early modern Europe.

8200 Beowulf
Johanna Kramer. T 12:30 – 3:00 pm, Tate 310

The Beowulf seminar is dedicated to an intense study of this most famous of Old English poems. We will read the text in its entirety in the original Old English. While students gradually make their way through the poem’s 3182 lines, we will address a range of topics relevant to the text, its production and reception, and its historical contexts, such as the unique manuscript, pagan versus Christian elements, the larger Germanic context, the nature of heroism, monsters and humans, the poet’s perception of history, female figures, material culture in the poem and archaeological finds (e.g., the Sutton Hoo Ship Burial, the Staffordshire Hoard), oral tradition and performance (medieval and modern), and the poem’s relationship to other genres of Anglo-Saxon poetry and prose. We will also study the history of Beowulf scholarship, gain an overview of the diverse critical approaches that have been applied to the poem, and attend to the current status of scholarship. Class requirements will consist of one or two oral presentations (on thematic and/or critical issues), daily translation and discussion, some recitation, and a seminar paper. Students should have taken English/Linguistics 4200/7200 “Introduction to Old English” or an equivalent class.

8220 Renaissance Poetic Genres: Rage and Beauty: Forms of Lyric in the English Renaissance
Bill Kerwin. T 6:30 – 9:00 pm, Tate 310

In its various engagements with political life and aesthetic form, lyric poetry in the English Renaissance comes up with a rich set of answers to this question in Shakespeare’s 65th sonnet. Shakespeare asks what the role of beauty is in a dangerous and political world, and in this seminar we will pursue a related inquiry, reading in a variety of Renaissance short poetic forms and consider poetry’s relation to the broader culture, paying attention to how recent criticism has read these forms in different ways. We will consider the virtues and shortcomings of a range of ways of reading as we both engage in formal analysis and discuss how poetry is part of the broader tapestry of the discourse of early modern Europe. The lyric forms we will read include the sonnet, the complaint, the epigram, the topographical poem, the elegy, the metaphysical poem, the ballad, and the Ovidian love poem; we will also spend a bit of time on the verse satire of the period. Authors whom we will read include John Skelton, Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, George Gascoigne, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Isabella Whitney, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth I, Christopher Marlowe, Walter Raleigh, John Harington, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Robert Herrick, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, Katherine Philips, and John Wilmot (the Earl of Rochester).


History

1570 Survey of Early Modern Europe, 1350-1650
Kristy Bowers. MWF 2:00-2:50, Middlebush 133

An overview of western and central European history from the Black Death to the end of the Thirty Years' War, including the major epochs of Renaissance and Reformation.

3560 The Scientific Revolution, 1550-1800
Kristy Bowers. MWF 12:00-12:50, Strickland 221

This course covers the development of science (or “natural philosophy”) from the late Renaissance through the Enlightenment. It encompasses a variety of fields, including astronomy, cosmology, physics, medicine and biology, chemistry, and geology. Our purpose will be to gain a basic understanding not only of the changes in scientific thought that occurred over the period covered, but also of the various reasons underlying those changes.

3600 The Later Middle Ages
Mark Smith. TT 8:00-9:15, A&S 236

The chronological span of this course will be roughly 400 years, from the late eleventh to the late fifteenth century. Within that span we will focus on a variety of topics ranging from socio-political and economic history, through Church history, to the history of art, philosophy, and theology. Geographically, we will range from Scandinavia, through the European heartland, to Italy and even to the Levant—all in an effort to gain a general sense of high- and late-medieval culture.

4555/7555 Medieval France
Lois Huneycutt. MWF 11:00 – 11:50, Middlebush 208

This course is an examination of French history from the Merovingians to Joan of Arc, with a long unit focusing on Paris in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Non-Historians are welcome.

4640/7640 Age of the Reformation
John Frymire. TT 9:30-10:45

The Protestant Reformation has been credited or blamed for everything ranging from the disintegration of the Western Church, to the rise of absolutist and repressive states, to the birth of modernity and notions of freedom of conscience. We shall focus on the cohesion and tension between religious, social, economic, political, and psychological factors as a complex matrix, within which the Reformation movement took shape. Our goal is to recognize and elucidate the various contextual structures that influenced the unfolding of this history, and to give equal prominence to those less quantifiable elements such as religious motivation and mentality, without which the period cannot be properly understood. Religion will be taken seriously and not reduced to ideological or other such factors. The hopes and fears of women and men, just as much as any social or economic forces, helped cast the drama of unfolding events. General themes addressed will include: 1) Society, economy, politics, and daily life in the Holy Roman Empire; 2) Late medieval piety and religiosity, including popular religion and theology; 3) Reform movements and the institutional church on the eve of the Reformation; 4) The development of Martin Luther’s theology, his reform program, and its reception; 5) The Reformation of the "Common Man," including the Peasants’ War; 6) The programs of Martin Bucer and Huldrich Zwingli, and their reception; 7) The City Reformation; 8) The Radical or Sectarian Reformation; 9) John Calvin and the Reformation in Geneva; 10) The Catholic Reformation, the Council of Trent, and Counter-Reformation; 11) The Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the rise of confessional (i.e., denominationally exclusive) states.

8540 Seminar in Medieval Culture
Lois Huneycutt. T 3:00 – 5:20

The emphasis of this seminar is going to be on women and gender. Students will complete a variety of readings in the first half of the course, then develop, write, and present their own article-length paper. Non-Historians welcome.


Religious Studies

4001/7001 Topics in Religious Studies: History of Islamic Mystical Traditions
Nate Hofer. T 2:00 – 4:30, A & S 233

Most introductory texts on Sufism describe it as the “mystical tradition of Islam.” This not only begs the question of what constitutes mysticism, but whether or not there is a single, coherent Sufi “tradition” within Islam that might be described as such. The social movements and intellectual trends usually labeled “Sufi” are actually so variegated that the mind reels at any attempt to categorize them all together. In other words, are the ascetics of eighth-century Iraq, the organized Sufi orders of late medieval Egypt, and the anti-colonial Sufis of Sub-Saharan Africa all part of the same “tradition.” Are all of them “mystical?” If so, are they mystical in the same way? How can we discuss the history of Sufism without flattening the rich contours of its many developments? We will address these questions by focusing on three salient issues in the long history of Sufism. Using a combination of primary and secondary sources, we will explore 1) the emergence of a movement called “Sufism” in Iraq in the ninth century; 2) the development of Sufi brotherhoods or orders after the twelfth century; and 3) the various political and social roles Sufis have played in Islamicate societies. These three issues will not only provide us with a clearer understanding of the history of Sufism, but will also furnish us with the tools to think about that that history’s relationship to our category of the “mystical.”

4005/7005 Topics in Religious Studies: Tangible Christianity
Rabia Gregory. T 2:00 – 4:30, A & S 235

This course approaches Christianity thorugh the artifacts Christians make and purchase. We will explore the textures, landscapes, and imagined worlds of Christians in the present day and the historical past. Students will read and discuss scholarship on the study of religious media and material culture and learn how to read and interpret Christian objects through working directly with the holdings of the University of Missouri’s Museum of Art and Archaeology, and Rare Books and Special Collections, and through field trips to a few Missouri locations.

8005 Topics in Religious Studies: Feasting and Fasting
Duncan. W 2:00-4:30, A & S 312A

Discussions of food, food-related metaphors, rituals of eating, and the deliberate avoidance of food are just some of the ways that food, feasting, and fasting intersect with religious discourse and praxis. The course will use Caroline Walker Bynum's Holy Feast Holy Fast (and subsequent reactions and challenges to its theses) as a unifying theoretical model, and simultaneously investigate the phenomenon of religious feasting and fasting in ancient, medieval, and modern contexts and in a variety of religious traditions through reading a wide variety of articles. Its intention is to expose students to a range of ideas about the presence and absence of food in religious contexts in order that they begin to formulate, articulate, and contest their own definitions and categorizations pertinent to their own research.


Romance Languages and Literatures

French 4710/7710 History of the French Language
Moore. TT 2:00-3:15, A & S 234

French 4710/7710 covers the history of the French language from its Latin origins to modern incarnations. We focus on understanding how the language has evolved to become one of the most sophisticated and poetic of the modern Romance languages by reading literature produced in French that touches on our course’s main theme, Crime and Punishment. The class is taught through variety of texts from the Roland to Sade to Modiano, and is taught in French. Readings will be in modern French.

Spanish 4422/7422 Spanish Theatre in the Golden Age
Presberg. MW 2:00-3:15, Strickland 115

“Nobleza y Vileza” (The Noble and the Vile): Spanish Theater of the Golden Age.
This course centers on five masterworks of drama in the Golden Age of Spanish literature (the 16th and 17th centuries). We examine in each work the common theme of “Nobleza” (the noble) and “Vileza” (the vile) in several senses, both in bono and in malo. First, nobleza as a term referring to the highest social rank, the aristocracy, contrasting with vileza, referring to the lowest social rank, the villager, or the peasant. Next, nobleza as a term also referring to moral probity, as in noble character, contrasting with vileza (the villainous and the vile) referring to a lack of moral probity, or ignoble character. This fourfold perspective (noble/vile, social rank/moral rank, in bono/in malo)guides our exploration of how our chosen dramas both reflect and refashion the ethical and poetic discourses of their age. All readings and discussions in Spanish.

Spanish 8427 Studies in Colonial Spanish American Literature (with focus on conquest of Peru)
Reyna. W 3:00-6:00, A & S 202

This seminar will focus on two different historical events: The conquest of the Incas and the Encomenderos war of 1544-1548. We will be reading chronicles, the “Spanish Requirement” and other legal documents of the time in order to understand the ethical issues surrounding both events and their implications. This seminar is taught in Spanish. Most of the readings will be in Spanish.