Teaching
University of Chicago
Power, Identity, Resistance - III
This seminar is the third quarter of a three-quarter sequence in the social sciences. This quarter of Power, Identity, Resistance grapples with colonialism, political violence, environmental degradation, racial and gender inequality, and other acute crises of modern bourgeois society. We examine five critical moments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when major intellectuals turned their attention to urgent social and political problems. We will read Friedrich Nietzsche, W. E. B. Du Bois, Carl Schmitt, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Simone de Beauvoir. This seminar will continue to develop your ability to think critically and communicate clearly.
Power, Identity, Resistance - II
This seminar is the second quarter of a three-quarter sequence in the social sciences. This quarter of Power, Identity, Resistance examines major works of modern political economy. We consider how commercial society remade the division of labor, transformed class relations, and privileged productivity and growth. Commercial society, or what Marxists call capitalist bourgeois society, has had its fair share of critics. How did these critics respond to the problems of economic inequality and excess wealth? What alternative forms of exchange did they propose? We will read Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Marcel Mauss, and Georges Bataille—four thinkers concerned with the relationship between political power and economic life. This seminar will continue to develop your ability to think critically and communicate clearly.
Power, Identity, Resistance - I
This seminar is the first quarter of a three-quarter sequence in the social sciences. Power, Identity, Resistance introduces students to the history of social and political thought in the modern era. The first quarter examines the evolution of liberal political theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We consider how state power was legitimized by common consent, how state power should be limited, and how ideas of what was natural anchored principles of freedom, equality, and property (or the lack thereof). We will read Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Edmund Burke—four thinkers concerned with power and political systems. This seminar will develop your ability to think critically and communicate clearly.
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Europe in the World
This course explores European encounters and incursions in what was once called the Third World. Our story begins in 1952 when Alfred Sauvy, a French demographer, wrote of “three worlds, one planet” in an article published in L’Observateur. Over the course of the semester, we will follow Europe’s shifting place in the world during the era of decolonization. Course readings will emphasize the perspectives of both colonizers and the colonized, and will include memoirs, novels, travelogues, and classic critiques of colonialism. We will focus on the enduring effects of European colonialism on ecology, ethnography, religion, and race relations in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
Europe in the Twentieth Century
This course explores the major episodes, ideologies, and cultural forces that defined European experience in the twentieth century. Over the course of the semester, we will follow the events that took Europe from the mire of 1914 to the untethering of 1989. An age of unprecedented growth and unthinkable violence, the twentieth century brought technological innovation and an expansion of liberal democracy as well as wrenching upheaval and the rise of fascism. Topics covered include: World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, Nazism, World War II, the Holocaust, consumer society, the Cold War, the end of European empires, and the end of the Soviet Bloc. We will examine films, memoirs, novels, and paintings, and pay close attention to relations between cultural expression and historical experience. We will focus on six major themes—utopia, resentment, memory, consumption, violence, and nostalgia—in the work of European writers and artists.
Technology in Western Society
This course explores the technologies that have shaped the experience of western modernity. Over the course of the semester, we will follow technological developments in Europe and the United States from the Industrial Revolution to the twenty-first century. An age of unprecedented growth and unthinkable violence, the twentieth century brought both technological innovation and wrenching upheaval. We will examine technologies such as the automobile, plastics, chemical weapons, nuclear energy, and carbon capture machines. Topics covered will include: gender roles and gender relations, materialism and consumer culture, and climate change and social equity. We will study the work of historians, journalists, politicians, novelists, and filmmakers, and pay close attention to relations between technological change and historical experience. Course readings will explore some of the fundamental debates in the history of technology: Does humanity shape and control technology, or does technology shape and control us? Is modern technology an engine of social progress or a runaway train speeding toward disaster?
Modern European Thought and Society
This course surveys European social thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It examines critical moments when major intellectual figures turned their attention to the age’s most urgent social problems. The social realities they confronted included capitalistic alienation, nationalistic fervor, bureaucratic control, sexual repression, anti-Semitism, gender inequality, racism, and humanity’s growing domination of nature. Course readings are quintessential expressions of modern social thought whose influence is still palpable and whose ideas are still relevant. We will assess works written by Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Fanon, and Lefebvre. All of the assigned reading is primary. Lectures will provide the social and political context of these figures, as well as interpretations of the texts. Throughout the semester, we will use imaginative literature, film, and the arts to better understand the climate that shaped European thought and society in the modern age.
Modern Tales of Primitive Culture
This course investigates the historical and intellectual dimensions of some of the tales that moderns told about supposedly primitive cultures. It examines primitivist literature from Europe and the Caribbean written between 1885 and 1955. We will assess works written by Friedrich Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, Sigmund Freud, D. H. Lawrence, Georges Bataille, and Aimé Césaire. Course readings creatively blend empirical and fictional accounts and include novels, memoirs, poems, dialogues, and imaginative essays. Across six two-week parts, we will consider the vexed relationship between the primitive and another idea deeply rooted in modern thought—progress. Since at least 1750, European historical consciousness was dominated by the optimistic belief that the human condition was steadily improving. Primitivists, however, thought otherwise. They argued for returning to what was earliest, simplest, and most direct in human culture—or at least what they believed to be so. For them, primitive was not a pejorative but a potent word of praise. Of course, there was no consensus on what was really primitive, and primitive cultures were found everywhere, in primal hordes and Paleolithic hunters, pre-Socratic Greeks and pre-Columbian Mesoamericans, diasporic Africans and sheltered Tahitians. Primitivist authors, then, spent a lot of time uncovering and venerating evidence of remote ages and distant nations. They scoured histories of magic, myth, and religion; they poured over records written by travelers, ethnographers, and archaeologists; they even probed the archaic depths of the human psyche.
California State University, Los Angeles
Introduction to Comparative Religions
This class is an introduction to the academic study of religion and religious phenomena. As a discipline, the study of religion has often been called comparative religion, history of religion, phenomenology of religion, and, most recently, religious studies. As an introduction to religious studies, this class is primarily concerned with examining some of the most influential theories of religion formulated over the last century and a half. More specifically, we will examine how seven different theorists approached and answered the question: What is religion? In so doing, this class provides students with an introductory glimpse into anthropological, feminist, historical, phenomenological, psychological, socio-economic, and sociological approaches to the study of religion. As James Frazer writes in The Golden Bough, “There is probably no subject in the world about which opinions differ so much as the nature of religion, and to frame a definition of it which would satisfy every one must obviously be impossible.” Fortunately for us, our task is not to formulate our own definition of religion, but instead to explore a few of the ways religion has been defined during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.