Undergraduate Courses Spring 2027

AFST 3300 (24140) / EVST 3300 / SOCY 3242 / AFST 6000 / SOCY 7600

Veronica Waweru

W 1:30-3:25pm

Areas SO

This seminar course provides students with an overview of topics critical to the understanding of the outcomes of human manipulation of surface and ground water. Students will examine how water, a natural product, is used as a source of socio-political power, how the locus of this power has shifted in the post-colonial nation state and the impacts on varied demographics. This course focuses on Eastern Africa, a region that borders the Indian Ocean and is climatically diverse. Comparative case studies also be included. Students explore the socio-ecology of water in societies living in contexts of climate change, population pressure, water pollution, and water commodification. They examine changing beliefs in water rights, the role of water in food security, and the importance of water towers in conservation. The course also offers students opportunities to critically appraise successful water projects and propose solutions to problems discussed in this seminar. At the end of the course, students are expected to broadly understand topics on the nexus of water and human action, and their social, political, and economic dimensions in a global south region.

 

AFST 3353 (24389) / BLST 3142 / AFAM 7153 / AFST 6653

Hugo Canham

T 1:30pm-3:25pm

Areas HU

The course brings together black indigenous orientations to knowledge and planetary studies in the service of breaking ontological boundaries to redraw the temporal parameters, recast the human in relation to natural ecologies, and to think across species in ways that attend to relation and co-becoming. As a response to the need to think beyond the limitations of the Anthropocene, we center place, the interface between the human, oceans and other waterbodies, spiritual and ancestral cosmologies, and plant and animal ecologies in our multispecies world. By refiguring the parameters of our classic knowledge agendas, we open new ontological frontiers framed by a black worldview located on the African continent. Framed as black planetary, we attend differently from environmentalists, green activists, and scholars of subjectivity whose analysis ends at the boundaries of the anthropocentric. We center the human always in relation to more-than-human Africanscapes and ways of being. We suggest that this engagement with black geographies and emplacement may serve as an illustration of how scholars might work with black geographies on the continent and in the black diaspora. Some of the core concepts for this course are planetary theory, method, black ecologies, relation, co-becoming, and multispecies conceptions of being.

 

AFST 3698 (25056) / FREN 3698

Jill Jarvis

W 1:30pm-3:25pm

Areas HU, WR

Our planet’s landscapes are vivid with radioactivity that is difficult to perceive. Focusing on French nuclear infrastructures, we consider how such strange landscapes are made visible, audible, and palpable by novelists, filmmakers, poets, photographers, and other artists from across and beyond the former French empire. Beginning in 1960, the French military detonated 17 aerial and subterranean nuclear bombs in the desert ecosystem of what is now the Algerian Sahara. After 1966, the French military detonated another 193 atomic and hydrogen bombs on a living archipelago in the southern Pacific Ocean. Right now, more than 70 percent of the French energy grid is fueled by nuclear power that relies on uranium that is largely extracted from radioactive mines in northern Niger. Together, we learn about the ongoing impact of this history through artistic works. We also draw critical insight from architectural studies, Indigenous studies, African studies, environmental humanities, historiography, and histories of landscape, nuclear science, technology, and infrastructure. Students have the option to participate in a Radioactive Landscapes symposium that we are organizing through the Council on African Studies at the Yale Peabody Museum in March. All students are welcome. The course is taught in English. Reading knowledge of French is required, because some materials have not been translated into English. Reading knowledge of French. Contact instructor if you have questions about this.

 

AFST 4465 (24131) / ANTH 4868 / HSHM 4130 / URBN 3311 / AFST 5565 / ANTH 5812

Infrastructures of Empire: Control and (In)security in the Global South

Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen

W 1:30pm-3:25pm

Areas SO

This advanced seminar examines the role that infrastructure plays in producing uneven geographies of power historically and in the “colonial present” (Gregory 2006). After defining terms and exploring the ways that infrastructure has been conceptualized and studied, we analyze how different types of infrastructure (energy, roads, people, and so on) constitute the material and social world of empire. At the same time, infrastructure is not an uncontested arena: it often serves as a key site of political struggle or even enters the fray as an unruly actor itself, thus conditioning possibilities for anti-imperial and decolonial practice. The geographic focus of this course is the African continent, but we explore comparative cases in other regions of the majority and minority world.

 

 

AMST 2010 (21968) / TDPS 3310

Amanda Reid

T 1:30pm-3:25pm

Areas HU

If the world is ending, why does dance still matter? This class analyzes systemic crisis, or the overlapping global economic, political, and environmental crises that we confront in our news cycle daily, through the work of performing artists who offer alternative roadmaps and otherwise futures of survival and repair. After comparing theories of crisis authored by Habermas, Arendt, Agamben, Glissant, and others, we move through performances of 20th and 21st-century crises in the Americas. Case studies range from evangelical prophecies of apocalypse to gun violence, from the war on terror to climate change. We ask how performance can help us confront the unthinkable, and explore the unique affordances of the body for interpreting and representing states of crisis. How can performance move beyond the stage to help build and sustain coalitions, and how are performers negotiating the economic crises facing the arts today? Queer, black, and minoritarian theory and practice are the focus of this course. Moving between stagings of utopia and dystopia, this class explores how creativity has historically served as a space for generating hope and critique.

 

AMST 3010 (25033) / ER&M 3015

Quan Tran

Th 9:25am-11:20am

Areas HU

As an incredibly diverse population, Asian Americans have greatly influenced the foodscape of the United States. This interdisciplinary course explores the rich and complex foodways that Asian Americans have created and sustained, both historically and in the present, as well as the various challenges they have endured and overcome as racialized subjects. It also examines the impacts of such foodways on Asian American identity, social, political, cultural, and economic formations. The course is organized thematically and anchored in selected case studies. 

 

AMST 3313 (21947) / ENGL 4458 / ARCH 3118

Cynthia Zarin

W 9:25am-11:20am

Areas HU, WR

An exploration of reading and writing about place. Definitions of home; different meanings and intent of travel. Readings include exemplary contemporary essays from the eighteenth century to the present. Workshop for assigned student essays. Formerly ENGL 478.

 

AMST 3388 (24182) / EP&E 4304 / ER&M 3531

Madiha Tahir

M 4pm-5:55pm

Areas HU, SO

Technologies, especially digital tech and practices from nanotech to autonomous robots to big data and algorithmic finance have become a key issue in debates over shifts in capitalism, colonialism, militarism, and empire. Often imagined as placeless or as a “cloud,” technocapitalism remakes geographies through its infrastructures and its practices of value generation. This course approaches techno-capitalism from an angle: It asks: how does technocapitalism make use of, and reproduce, difference? What is the significance of race, gender, class, and difference in shaping the techniques, practices, and logics of technocapitalism? Moving from a consideration of technocapitalism as a form of racial capitalism, this course uses scholarly text alongside film and fiction to explore the making of difference through built environments, planetary extraction, and the making of digital subjects.

 

ANTH 2255 (20708) / ARCG 7255 / ANTH 7255 / ARCG 2255 / LAST 1255

Richard Burger

TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

Areas SO

The history and organization of the Inca empire and its impact on the nations and cultures it conquered. The role of archaeology in understanding the transformation of Andean lifeways; the interplay between ethnohistoric and archaeological approaches to the subject. This course is not open to students who previously enrolled in ARCG 030.

 

ANTH 3172 (20962) / ARCG 3172 / ANTH 7272 / ARCG 7272

Piphal Heng

T 1:30pm-3:25pm

Areas SO

Archaeological studies of ancient cities and urbanism. Topics include the origin and growth of cities; the economic, social, and political implications of urban life; and archaeological methods and theories for the study of ancient urbanism. Case studies include ancient cities around the world. 

 

ANTH 3185 (21287) / ARCG 7185 / ANTH 7185 / ARCG 3185

Anne Underhill

M 1:30pm-3:25pm

Areas SO

Archaeological methods for analyzing and interpreting ceramics, arguably the most common type of object found in ancient sites. Focus on what different aspects of ceramic vessels reveal about the people who made them and used them.

 

ANTH 3226 (21289) / ARCG 7226 / ANTH 7226 / ARCG 3226

William Honeychurch

F 4pm-5:55pm

Areas SO

Examination of peoples of the steppe zone that stretches from Eastern Europe to Mongolia. Overview of what archaeologists know about Eurasian steppe societies, with emphasis on the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron, and medieval ages. Attention both to material culture and to historical sources. Topics range from the domestication of the horse to Genghis Khan’s world empire, including the impact these events had on neighboring civilizations in Europe and Asia.

 

ANTH 3873 (22795) / EVST 3873 / SAST 3830 / ENV 739

Lav Kanoi

M 1:30pm-3:25pm

Areas HU, SO

Water has become an urgent theme not just in current anthropology, but in development studies and environmental studies more generally. Beyond questions of scarcity and sustainability, water allows human life to flourish, and without water, there would be no civilization. Yet water is not equitably distributed across time or space, leading to contestation and conflict around water. Against such a background of strife, this course examines how human beings have related to water, to other life forms, and to each other through the control of water, in different historical moments and different parts of the world. The seminar is organized around four porous thematic clusters: (i) “urban water”, to do with cities and urban industrial life; (ii) “agrarian water”, to do with rivers, irrigation systems, and agrarian life; (iii) “rural water”, to do with coasts, lakes, dams and rural life; and (iv) and “living water”, to do with social, cultural and political values, and human and more-than-human life. This seminar introduces students to the everyday values of water, as well as the everyday politics of water, including the production of water and its attendant politics at the level of the nation-state as well as the city municipality while also being attentive to the moral ecologies of water. By studying water in different ways through the lens of culture, environment, social justice, and spirituality or faith, students develop a nuanced understanding of development, urbanization, environmental justice, and climate change.

 

ANTH 3891 (25039)

Katie Ulrich

M 4pm-5:55pm

Areas SO

How does capitalism (re)make natural worlds, and how do natural worlds (re)make capitalism? How does capitalism change how we understand what the natural world is in the first place? This course explores capitalism from an environmental lens, from the role of plantations in proto-capitalist imperialism and industrialization, to extractivism and capitalist growth centered on natural resource use, to market-based solutions for climate crises today. While the latter has become known under the banner of “green capitalism,” we take this phase as a provocation to think more expansively about the relationships between capital, markets, value, production, nature, the environment, ecologies, and multispecies worlds. This not only helps us understand more fully the historical, political, and social dynamics shaping market-based climate solutions in the contemporary moment. It also helps us assess how capitalism has long been a project about the natural world, one continuously reconfigured from many places by human and nonhuman actors. We read ethnographic and social theory texts about colonial botany, agricultural science, plantations, the Green Revolution, industrial pork production, climate crises, electric vehicles, solar power, carbon credits, biofuels, ecotourism, extinction, and more.

 

ARCH 1600 (23022) / URBN 1600

Ana Duran

MW 9am-10:15am

Areas HU, SO

An introduction to key topics, research methods, and practices in urban studies, an interdisciplinary field of inquiry and action rooted in the experience of cities. As physical artifacts, the advent of large cities have reflected rapid industrialization and advanced capitalism. They are inseparable from the organization of economic life; the flourishing of cultures; and the formation of identities. They are also places where power is concentrated and inequalities are (re)produced. Debates around equity are filtered through urban environments, where struggles over jobs, housing, education, mobility, public health, and public safety are front and center. The course is organized as a colloquium with numerous guests. 

 

ARCH 2101 (23678) / HSAR 3266 / MMES 1126 / SAST 2660

Kishwar Rizvi

MW 2:35pm-3:25pm

Areas HU

Introduction to the architecture of the Islamic world from the seventh century to the present, encompassing regions of Asia, North Africa, and Europe. A variety of sources and media, from architecture to urbanism and from travelogues to paintings, are used in an attempt to understand the diversity and richness of Islamic architecture. Besides traditional media, the class will make use of virtual tours of architectural monuments as well as artifacts at the Yale University Art Gallery, accessed virtually.

 

ARCH 3103 (23034) / URBN 3315

T 1:30pm-3:25pm

Areas HU

Cities have always been hotbeds of radical ideas and actions. Their cafes and taverns, drawing rooms and universities have been incubators of new ideas, revolutionary ideologies and debate, while their streets and public spaces have been the sites of demonstrations, protests, and uprisings. Since cities are key nodes in larger networks of trade and cultural exchange, these local events have often had a global audience and impact. This seminar explores the interaction of urban space and event, and the media and technologies of revolutionary representation, through case studies of particular cities at transformational moments in their development. These begin with Boston in the 1760s and 1770s, and may include Paris in 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871 and again in 1968, St. Petersburg in 1917, Beijing in 1949 and again in 1989, Havana in 1959, Prague, Berlin and Johannesburg and other cities in 1989, Cairo in 2011, Hong Kong in 2011-12, 2014 and 2019, and other urban sites of the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements. Course work in modern history is recommended.

 

ARCH 3108 (21786)

Ife Vanable

T 1:30pm-3:25pm

Areas HU, SO, WR

Groundlessness offers an extra-disciplinary interrogation and analysis of histories, theories, and inventions of zoning, land use classification, property valuation, and air rights in the making and imagining of territories deemed urban and otherwise from the late nineteenth century (following Reconstruction in the United States) to the present. Working across media from policy to poetry, film to form, memoir to historiography, fiction to finance, Groundlessness troubles and complicates the grounds and grounding(s) of urban and environmental imaginaries. Attending to cultural, aesthetic, technological, legal, economic, and environmental conditions, this course asks how these factors shape the work of the racial as visually and spatially performed (and in part, contribute to disdain for housing the black and poor in tall towers; the difficulty with imagining folks racialized as black holding a position up in the sky). Groundlessness explores the many ways the work of constructing the built environment occurs well before and beyond the involvement of any architect; and ultimately seeks out the promise and freedoms of leaving the land behind (and below), living untethered from the land, on invented lands, unstable ground, off the ground, and up high.

 

ARCH 3309 (23036) / URBN 3606

Jacob Koch

F 1:30pm-4:30pm

This Urban Lab explores greening as a core urbanistic strategy of cities, historically and contemporaneously. We look at the who - exploring stakeholder mapping and power analysis; the where - data-driven and community-driven efforts to prioritize where to work; the how - through the lens of public outreach and engagement techniques and tools, and operations and maintenance needs of urban infrastructure; and the why - the many social, environmental, and economic benefits of trees and other greening solutions. Trees have been planted in cities for thousands of years.  The history of tree planting in Asian cities dates at least to the Zhou Dynasty (1046–256 BC), which documents trees as solutions for flood and erosion control and as tools for ceremonial urban design. In Europe, Amsterdam began systematically planting trees in the 14th century and passed a city law in 1454 prohibiting the cutting down of trees.  Fast forward to 2007 when New York City launched the Million Trees campaign and hundreds of cities globally now have established ambitious tree planting goals to help catalyze public and private resources.  In 2023 the Inflation Reduction Act passed by the U.S. Congress approved $1.5 billion for the U.S. Forest Service to distribute through the Urban and Community Forestry grants program.  This is perhaps the largest-ever investment of public funds into urban forestry, making it a perfect moment for this Urban Lab to investigate the interlinkages in contemporary urbanism between greening and the climate crisis.  

 

ARCH 3601 (22987) / URBN 3306 

Justin Moore

W 9:25am-11:20am

Difference and the City is a transdisciplinary, cross-institutional hybrid seminar examining how the built environment shapes—and can positively transform—social, cultural, economic, environmental, and spatial inequities. Drawing on student-selected case studies from New York to Nairobi, Baltimore to Buenos Aires, and beyond, the course explores interconnected urban challenges: housing access and community development, food systems and economic inclusion, climate migration and environmental injustice, mobility infrastructure, and the contested politics of public space, heritage, and belonging. Students with backgrounds or interests in architecture, landscape, urban design, planning, preservation, public policy, and allied fields collaborate through seminar discussions, analytic exercises, and workshops to develop counter-stories that surface overlooked actors, buried histories, and unrealized possibilities. The heart of the course is an independent final project—a research paper or design project tailored to each student’s background and interests—that moves from analysis to proposition, advancing new knowledge and ideas for more just, inclusive, and resilient places.

 

BLST 4200 (23891) / ENGL 2842

Jonathan Howard

MW 11:35am-12:50pm

Areas HU, WR

Drowned in the ocean during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, forced to cultivate the soil on plantations, or lynched from trees across the Jim Crow South, black Americans are entangled with nature in incredibly complex and precarious ways. In contrast to a largely white tradition of nature writing that assumes a superior position outside of Nature, this course undertakes a broad survey of African American writing about nature. Over the course of the semester, we read broadly across several genres of African American literature while also exploring recent scholarship around black environmentalisms and ecologies. In this way, we center the unique environmental perspectives of those, who, once considered no more than livestock, were the nature over which their white masters ruled. But perhaps who also, for this very reason, may be recognized as pioneering a sustainable human life in nature, rather than apart from it.

 

CLCV 0351 (23997)

Malia Piper

TTh 4pm-5:15pm

Areas HU, WR

This first-year seminar is about how the stories we tell shape us, our values, and the culture(s) we live in through the lens of Greek and Roman mythology. Land can be many things depending on our worldview: ancestor and relative, home, country vs. city, nature vs. cultivated place, unknown opportunity, resource, or property. Students in this class gain a deeper understanding of the land stories they inherit, what they wish to continue to carry forward, and what they may need to leave behind to live in accordance with their values. Together we think concretely about Greek and Roman myth and the resonances and dissonances with the wide range of land stories that shape our world. Key Course Questions include: 1a. How could these myths affect Greeks’ and Romans’ relationship to and with land? 1b. What are our relationships to land? 2a. What values are promoted in Greek and Roman myths about land? 2b. How do these stories reflect and enact cultural values? 3a. How is land characterized? 3b. Is land gendered? 4a. What is the role of violence in shaping these characters’ interactions with each other and with land? 4b. How is this violence framed in the narrative? Enrollment limited to first-year students.

 

CMSC 2330 (24573)

Justin Beal

Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

Areas HU

The boundary between art and architecture has never been stable, yet academic and professional disciplines tend to impose strict limitations that often exclude the interesting work happening in the messy in between. This seminar focuses on those hybrid practices that occupy the gray areas where art and architecture overlap, the individuals and collectives who have blended the tools and techniques of disciplines to create unexpected forms and new ideas. This course moves through a progression of tightly focused weekly discussions about topics including Italian radical design; Gordon Matta-Clark’s theory of “anarchitecture;” Rosalind Krauss’s diagram of “Sculpture in the Expanded Field;” the curatorial categories of relational aesthetics and social practice; and Eyal Weizman’s project, Forensic Architecture. By tracing this interdisciplinary tendency across six decades of objects, exhibitions, and readings, students leave the course equipped to think more expansively about artworks by applying analytical tools from disciplines of art, architecture, and art history.

 

CPSC 2330 (24053) 

Leon McCarron

T 1:30pm-3:25pm

Areas HU

Travel writing is an act of sustained attention: to landscape, to movement, and above all to the people whose lives give a place its texture and meaning. At its best, first-person factual journey writing offers insight and testimony, and it is a genre that has adapted to be particularly reflective of the modern condition. Yet travel books have also contributed to imagined geographies that reinforce unequal relationships of power. Reading across global traditions of travel literature and contemporary reportage – from Ibn Battuta and Xu Xiake to Dervla Murphy, Amitav Ghosh, and Paul Salopek – we investigate how writers create authority on the page, and who gets to describe whom: the traveler and the travelee. Run as a writing workshop, the course begins with field notes and interview practice and moves toward carefully structured, substantially revised place-based essays. We pay particular attention to scene construction, character, point of view, voice, and detail. Travel here doesn’t mean distance: we are in New Haven, and the best subject may be something familiar and close to hand. Students finish the term with a portfolio of polished original work. No prior writing experience is required.

 

CPLT 3450 (23067) / HUMS 2228 / EVST 2228 / HIST 1759, section 01

Katja Lindskog

MW 9am-10:15am

Areas HU

What can the Humanities tell us about climate change? The Humanities help us to better understand the relationship between everyday individual experience, and our rapidly changing natural world. To that end, students read literary, political, historical, and religious texts to better understand how individuals both depend on, and struggle against, the natural environment in order to survive.

 

CPLT 3808 (22024) / TDPS 3008 / HUMS 3850

Toni Dorfman

W 1:30pm-3:20pm

Areas HU

The sea covers over two-thirds of the earth’s surface. Only 20% of the ocean floor has even been mapped. Theater artists from Aeschylus to Alvin Ailey, other artists from Homer, Melville, and Dickinson to Brathwaite, and contemporary marine biologists such as Edith Widder evoke the immensity, mutability, and mystery of the sea that surrounds us. Their work poses questions about good and evil, love and death, the fate of the planet, and deep-sea bioluminescence. Students from a range of majors–humanities, arts, STEM–are encouraged to apply. Sophomore standing is required.

 

CPLT 4040 (21843) / ENGL 4754 / HUMS 3770 / EVST 4040 

Jonathan Kramnick

MW 11:35am-12:50pm

Areas HU, WR

Poetry of the natural world, beginning with classical pastoral and ending with lyric responses to climate change. We consider how poetry attempts to make sense of our interaction with the earth at important moments of change, from pre-industrial agriculture to global capitalism and the Anthropocene.

 

EALL 2050 (20100) / EAST 3204 / HSAR 4477 / HUMS 1810 / EVST 2205 / EALL 5050

Pauline Lin

MW 1:05pm-2:20pm

Areas HU

An introduction to Chinese philosophical, poetic, and visual explorations of landscape and the changing relationship between human beings and nature. Through texts, archaeological materials, visual and material culture, and garden designs from the 2nd c. BCE to modern times, we learn about the Chinese conception of the world, relationship to and experiences in nature, and shaping of the land through agriculture, imperial parks, and garden designs. We conclude with contemporary environmental issues confronting China, and how contemporary parks can help regenerate our ecosystem.

 

EAST 0320 (20252) / HIST 0430

Daniel Botsman

TTh 1:05pm-2:20pm

Areas HU, WR

Four centuries of Japan’s history explored through the many incarnations, destructions, and rebirths of its foremost city. Focus on the solutions found by Tokyo’s residents to the material and social challenges of concentrating such a large population in one place. Tensions between continuity and impermanence, authenticity and modernity, and social order and the culture of play. Enrollment limited to first-year students.

 

ENGL 1014 (21692) 

Sarah Guayante

MW 1:05-2:20pm

Areas WR

Instruction in writing well-reasoned analyses and academic arguments, with emphasis on the importance of reading, research, and revision. Using examples of nonfiction prose from a variety of academic disciplines, individual sections focus on topics such as the city, childhood, globalization, inequality, food culture, sports, and war. Formerly ENGL 114.

 

ENGL 1014 (21696) 

Rasheed Tazudeen

MW 11:35am-12:50pm

Areas WR

Instruction in writing well-reasoned analyses and academic arguments, with emphasis on the importance of reading, research, and revision. Using examples of nonfiction prose from a variety of academic disciplines, individual sections focus on topics such as the city, childhood, globalization, inequality, food culture, sports, and war. Formerly ENGL 114.

 

ENGL 3467 (20191) / EVST 3224

Alan Burdick

T 9:25am-11:20am

Areas WR

Exploration of ways in which the environment and the natural world can be channeled for literary expression. Reading and discussion of essays, reportage, and book-length works, by scientists and non-scientists alike. Students learn how to create narrative tension while also conveying complex—sometimes highly technical—information; the role of the first person in this type of writing; and where the human environment ends and the non-human one begins. Previously ENGL 418. Admission by permission of the instructor only. Students interested in the course should email the instructor at alan.burdick@yale.edu with the following information: 1.) A few paragraphs describing your interest in taking the class. 2.) A non-academic writing sample that best represents you.

 

EVST 0010 (23316)

Michael Fotos

TTh 1:05-2:20pm

Areas HU, WR

The rise and fall of the tides, the spider spinning her web in a bathroom corner, the chickadee that improbably survives another winter, floods that nourish the soil and fatten the fish, the praying mantis with a deadly grip on her mate.  Ordinary bits of nature.  What makes the ordinary holy?  In this first-year seminar, students find out.  First by reading books wherein the authors’ close observations of nature lead to their assigning moral standing to the things they document, second by studying the authors’ materials in the Beinecke Library collections for insight into how the processes, inspirations, and frustrations of developing complex ideas of nature and putting them on a page transform the experience of observing and recording into something with deeper meanings, and third by discussing these texts and materials in class and reflecting on them in short written assignments and oral examinations.  Students taking this course acquire knowledge of the major themes and key ideas that motivate the authors we study to write about nature, humans, the environment, and the human relationship with Nature. Enrollment limited to first-year students.

 

EVST 0090 (23819)

Paul Sabin and Kirke Elsass

MW 1:05pm-2:20pm

Areas HU, WR

An exploration of urban environmental history and policy in the United States, with a particular focus on New Haven as a case study. Thematic topics include energy, water, animals, transportation, industry, housing, public health, open space, environmental justice, and restoration ecologies. Historical subjects are connected to current debates about the city’s future. Subjects include the history of oyster harvesting in New Haven harbor and the construction of small dams on local rivers; the development of canal, railroad, and highway infrastructure and related changes in land use, including residential segregation and urban renewal; problems associated with air, water, and soil pollution and the challenges of designing and maintaining open space. Meetings with New Haven civic leaders and practitioners help us link urban environmental history to the present and future. The seminar also includes a field trip to visit historical sites around the city and visits to local archives to examine historical maps and other documents. Enrollment limited to first-year students.

 

EVST 1145 (20148) / EEB 1145

Linda Puth

TTh 9am-10:15am

Areas SC

The interaction of plants and people throughout history explored from biological, historical, anthropological, and artistic perspectives. Basic botany; plants in the context of agriculture; plants as instruments of trade and societal change; plants as inspiration; plants in the environment. Includes field trips to the greenhouses at Yale Marsh Botanical Garden, the Yale Peabody Museum and Herbarium, the Yale Farm, and the Yale Art Gallery.

 

EVST 2500 (24032) / PLSC 2487

Hilton Simmet

TTh 10:30am-11:20am

Areas SO

Climate change, coupled with relentless pressure on the earth’s resources, has intensified the need for policy responses at local, national, and global levels. Yet breakdowns in political leadership, public disenchantment, and popular backlash mean that we must also consider what it means to build a meaningful environmental politics in the 21st century: What issues speak to most Americans, what arguments might prove effective, what changes are needed in existing institutions? We address these questions by looking at the history, evolution, and dynamics of environmental politics in the United States, with a focus on events since the 1960s. The course is designed with the following aims: learn about major stages in American environmental thought and their reflection in policy; gain an overview of key environmental writings, actors, institutions, processes, and events; explore important policy concepts (e.g., risk, regulation, sustainability, environmental justice); relate US environmental politics to developments in other countries and emerging global perspectives; and develop critical tools for environmental policy analysis. Through this work, students gain critical insight into what Americans historically valued about the environment and how agreement might again be forged on the purposes of environmental politics.

 

EVST 3034 (24024) / TDPS 3034

Matthew Suttor

T 9:25am-11:20am

Areas HU

Can sound convey information? This interdisciplinary course explores how new technologies, such as artificial intelligence together with environmental data mapping, can deepen our understanding of the physical world and how performance might further enhance that understanding. Indeed, before and after Aristotle, the movement and behavior of large animal groups, such as the flocking of birds, have long fascinated humanity. Students will engage in hands-on experiments that translate natural phenomena—like avian murmuration or shifting ecosystems—into dynamic performative expressions, including music, movement, and visual installations. CCAM technologies in the Leeds Studio, including the motion capture system, multichannel sound system, and AI-driven data sonification and visualization software (developed with a Yale Planetary Solutions Seed Grant), allow course participants to collaborate across disciplines and interpret complex environmental processes in creative ways. Through this semester-long investigation of the physical world to the digital and back to the physical, students will develop new modes of storytelling that blend the arts and sciences to communicate the complexities of our planet.

 

EVST 3255 (24621) / PLSC 3220

John Wargo

W 1:30pm-3:25pm

Areas SO

We explore relations among environmental quality, health, and law. We consider global-scale avoidable challenges such as: environmentally related human illness, climate instability, water depletion and contamination, food and agriculture, air pollution, energy, packaging, culinary globalization, and biodiversity loss. We evaluate the effectiveness of laws and regulations intended to reduce or prevent environmental and health damages. Additional laws considered include rights of secrecy, property, speech, worker protection, and freedom from discrimination. Comparisons among the US and  EU legal standards and precautionary policies will also be examined.  Ethical concerns of justice, equity, and transparency are prominent themes.

 

EVST 3263 (20777) / ARCG 3263 / NELC 3300

Harvey Weiss

Th 4pm-5:55pm

Areas HU, SO

Empire is rarely studied cross-culturally, although it is second only to hunting-and-gathering as the most successful, longest-lived, regional politico-economic organization. Despite major empire-specific research efforts, there remains, as well, little consensus as to empires’ genesis and function. Here we attempt to define the features of empire, their genesis and their function, in ancient and modern times. Comparative study of origins, structures, efficiencies, and limitations of imperialism, ancient and modern, in the Old and New Worlds, from Akkad to “Indochine” and from Wari to Aztec. The contrast between ancient and modern empires examined from the perspectives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century archaeology and political economy.

 

EVST 3357 (23525) / SPAN 3370 / ER&M 1673 / HUMS 3441 / LAST 3352

Santiago Acosta

TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

Areas HU, LA (5)

This course examines the relationship between energy systems and contemporary societies in Latin America, framed through literature, art, and environmental thought. Students will analyze the historical significance and cultural impacts of oil capitalism, nuclear energy programs, lithium extraction, and debates around renewable energy. Participants will gain insights into the legacies of colonialism, energy politics, and the environmental challenges faced by the region while exploring their artistic and cultural expressions.

 

EVST 3399 (20774) / NELC 3990 / ARCG 4278

Harvey Weiss

Th 9:25am-11:20am

Areas SO

Seminar analysis of agriculture, from its revolutionary origins ten thousand years ago out of a million years of hunting and gathering, through selected periods of intensification, upheaval, and social transformation, to the post-industrial environmental and hyper-capitalization crises. When, where, and why did hunters and gatherers first practice agriculture? What were its societal effects? When, how, and why was agricultural surplus first produced? What were its transformative consequences? Are you surplus? What are the social and technological characteristics of intensive and extensive agricultural systems? Which agricultural system forces engendered western European capitalism? What environmental and social forces drive agricultural changes such as the invention and now global use of ammonium nitrate fertilizer? What will be the future relationship between agricultural innovation  and social change? The seminar integrates modern formulations and critical recent appraisals within articles, book chapters, and five classic films for analytic weekly discussion.

 

EVST 3401 (25020) / HSHM 4400

Instructor TBA

T 1:30pm-3:25pm

Areas HU, WR

Everywhere there are humans, there are birds. This seminar explores the wide variety of ways that humans have known birds—in scientific, vernacular, Indigenous, and recreational contexts—and the ways that humans have drastically shaped birds’ fate. Topics range from scientific illustration and colonial collecting to the global trade in parrots, the use of feathers in fashion, domestic poultry farming, medieval falconry, and contemporary debates around de-extinction. Readings are drawn from the history of science, animal studies, the environmental humanities, anthropology, and ornithology. The course includes visits to collections on campus and optional excursions to a local bird sanctuary.

 

ER&M 3036 (23114)

Leigh-Anna Hidalgo

T 1:30pm-3:25pm

Areas SO

This course explores Latinx experiences of urban life, politics, and geographies. We understand “the urban,” in many different ways as cities where urban spaces are lived, negotiated, and transformed. Urban scholars continue to grapple with the ways racial violence and multiple intersecting oppressions are woven into the very fabric of cities, as they are navigated and contested by racialized political actors who enact alternative ways of making place and home. In this course, we engage with scholarship and learn how Latinx people, organizations, scholars, and activists address key urban issues in the U.S., from segregation, gentrification, policing, labor, and migration.

 

ER&M 3593 (24821) / HUMS 3565 / HSHM 4390

Hi’ilei Hobart

Th 9:25am-11:20am

Areas HU

In the Western intellectual tradition, “rot” is often a symbol of decay, waste, and moral corruption. It evokes the repulsive—whether in the decomposition of a once-fresh fruit or the moral putrefaction of political and social orders. This course invites students to explore the ideological, material, and political contours of rot from a multidisciplinary perspective, examining its complex role as both a literal and metaphorical process. From Achille Mbembe’s insights on the relationship between life and death to Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ engagements with queer of color critique to understand the aesthetics of putrefaction, rot is not merely a sign of decline but also a potent force of transformation. We consider how rot serves as a generative process that gives rise to new forms of life, through the work of microbes, scavengers, and decomposers that metabolize life after life. Through the study of taphonomy, the science of decomposition, and the role of organisms like maggots and dermestid beetles in the recycling of organic material, students engage with the idea that decay is not just an end but a beginning—a process that requires collectivity and collaboration across species. As a Franke Seminar, in addition to weekly class meetings, this course features four public events with invited speakers. The events are held on Wednesday evenings and include dinner with speakers. Students are expected to attend all events and dinners.

 

FILM 3440 (23880) / GMAN 3440

Fatima Naqvi

W 7pm-10pm, Th 9:25am-11:20am

Areas HU

Movement through post-1945 landscapes and cityscapes as a key to understanding them. The use of cameras and other visual-verbal means as a way to expand historical, aesthetic, and sociological inquiries into how these places are inhabited and experienced. Exploration of both real and imaginary spaces in works by filmmakers (Wenders, Herzog, Ottinger, Geyrhalter, Seidl, Ade, Grisebach), architects and sculptors (e.g. Rudofsky, Neutra, Abraham, Hollein, Pichler, Smithson, Wurm, Kienast), photographers (Sander, B. and H. Becher, Gursky, Höfer), and writers (Bachmann, Handke, Bernhard, Jelinek). Additional readings by Certeau, Freytag, J.B. Jackson, L. Burckhardt.

 

GMAN 3900 (24130) / HUMS 4100 / PHIL 3900

Paul North

Th 9:25am-11:20am

Areas HU

It is odd, paradoxical even, that the so-called modern world should begin with a question, what is world, and should lead to a skeptical version of the question, are there other worlds? This course studies the strange phenomenon of thinking, writing, art-making, and dreaming of other worlds in European culture since about the 17th century. This is a trope or a dream that crosses disciplines, so we will read works from physical astronomy, philosophy, literature, and science fiction. Our hypothesis will be that the question of worlds was posed philosophically first by Leibniz, in his Protogaea (1719) and Monadology (1714), even though it had been roiling astronomy for a century or so. The class will have two philosophical touchstones, Leibniz and Heidegger, and two literary touchstones, Paul Scheerbart (Lesabendio) and Ursula K. LeGuin (The Left Hand of Darkness). With these works, and others, we hope to understand the drive to have a world (not merely a planet), even if it requires finding another.

 

GMAN 4840 (21687) / HSHM 4840 / HIST 3785 / HUMS 4180

Deborah Coen

W 1:30pm-3:25pm

Areas HU, WR

This seminar considers Vienna from the 1860s through the 1930s as the site of intellectual, political, and aesthetic responses to the challenges of modern urban life. As the capital of the multi-ethnic Habsburg Monarchy, Vienna was a pioneering experiment in “multiculturalism.” It was a field of confrontation between east and west, innovation and tradition, imperial pomp and urban grit, cosmopolitanism and nationalism–with such disparate results as psychoanalysis, Expressionism, Austro-Marxism, logical positivism, and sexual science. Through readings in science, politics, literature, and philosophy, as well as through art, architecture, music, and film, we consider the legacy of this place and time. Students acquire methods for situating science in its historical context.

 

HSHM 2340 (21679) / HIST 1734

Taylor Moore

TTh 9:25am-10:15am

Areas HU

From the Industrial Revolution and the Space Race to IUDs and A.I. lovers, the history of technology is as personal as it is global. Technology has presented societies with new possibilities and new challenges. This course charts a critical social history of technology from the early modern period to the present day. We question: What is technology? What role has technology played in the often-perilous pursuit of the social, political, and cultural transformations we call modernity? At what (or whose) cost? We consider how technology and the drive for technological innovation have shaped ideas, culture, bodies, power, and politics on the global scale. In addition to guns, steam, and the Industrial Revolution and the costly calculus of war in the Nuclear Age, we examine how gender, sex, race, animals, and environments act as and inform technology, shaping the matter of everyday life. We conclude in the contemporary moment by reflecting on AI, data, and our changing relationship to AI in the age of the attention economy and ChatGPT. To underscore the pervasiveness of the question of technology to the human condition, we engage a diverse range of course materials, including canonical texts in the history of technology, historical documents, public writing, literature, material culture, and art. No prior knowledge of the history of science and technology is required for the course.

 

HSHM 2730 (22686) / HSAR 3232 / HUMS 4327 / ITAL 4208 / HIST 1223

Ivano Dal Prete

MW 10:30am-11:20am

Areas HU

Few historical figures have captured the public imagination as powerfully as Leonardo da Vinci, mythologized as the unparalleled universal genius whose art, thoughts and inventions would prefigured the modern world. This course deconstructs Leonardo’s myth by situating his life, works, and writings into historical context and using them as a springboard to explore natural knowledge and technical invention in the Renaissance. With emphasis on textual, visual, and material primary sources, this lecture reconstructs the culture and formation of artists/craft people as social actors who played a central role in the investigation of the natural world and the rise of technical invention in the early modern world. Topics include the emergence of modern anatomy and the shift from book-based learning to dissection as the primary means to understand the human body; medieval and Renaissance elaborations on the nature of the Earth, fossils, and geological time; and cosmological conceptions including how Leonardo used direct observation and his artistic training to speculate on the nature of the celestial bodies. The class includes numerous field trips to the Beinecke Library, the Medical Historical Library, the Yale Art Gallery and the Peabody Museum.

 

HSHM 4380 (20326) / HIST 3761

Elaine Ayers

W 4pm-5:55pm

Areas HU, WR

Penetrated jungles, “mother” nature, and quests to preserve the redwoods – for hundreds of years, colonial agents have characterized environments in racialized, gendered, sexualized, classist, and ableist terms, anthropomorphizing nature along ongoing systems of inequality.  This class traces shifting conceptualizations of nature from the early modern period to the present, focusing on how naturalists and scientists have described, collected, and displayed “new” environments and peoples while building extractive and exploitative natural history collections, from cabinets of curiosity to Yale’s own Peabody Museum. By analyzing methodologies like classification, conservation, and scientific communication, we will discuss how divisions between the “natural” and “unnatural” were created in western cultures along unequal ideas about human bodies. Critical analyses of sources across multiple disciplines will inform conversations about knowledge production with the goal of interrogating how these power structures have silenced voices and enacted long-lasting violences on both environments and the peoples inhabiting them. Using both primary and secondary sources while conducting original research, students will learn how binary and reductive categories have been used and abused in colonial science and beyond. This class will include visits to museums around Yale’s campus and beyond, with two of your assignments focused on the Peabody Museum.

 

HIST 2757 (23805)

Chris Gratien

T 4pm-5:55pm

Areas HU

The discovery that human activity could fundamentally alter the climate and the environment of the entire planet reshaped not only how we think about the future but also how we understand the past. This realization also sparked new debates about how we define humanity itself and how we narrate causality and culpability for large-scale environmental destruction. This course explores the globalization of the environment over the past millennium, from the Mongol conquests to the COVID-19 pandemic. We learn how the emergence of an interconnected, industrialized world ecology transformed the environment and uncover the often unseen role of the environment in history’s momentous events. Our approach interrogates the competing ways in which scholars interpret world history, not merely focusing on how a particular relationship to the environment rooted in modern European capitalism “went global” but rather decentering Europe in the story of how the modern world was made. In the process, we learn how to think ecologically about the past, how to read sources “ecocritically,” and how to identify unexplored avenues of inquiry in environmental history.

 

HIST 3214 (23505

Maria Jordan

T 9:25am-11:20am

Areas HU, WR

This seminar is dedicated to the reality and the perception of the night across time and in different cultures. We explore how religious and philosophical beliefs, political and economic forces, changes in technologies of lighting, human biology, and the shift from rural to urban and agrarian to industrial societies affected attitudes toward time in general and the night in particular. These changes influenced the perceptions, uses, and the ways different groups experienced nocturnal time, and how we act, sleep, work, interact, and even dream. The traditional binary view of day and night is questioned by presenting a more complex “and dynamic face” of the night. Nightfall provides multiple opportunities for dissent and rebellion and becomes an ideal space for marginal and subordinate people. Historical analysis, literary texts, medical and scientific writings, and primary sources provide the class with a cross-disciplinary approach to examine how the night became the abode of the ghost, the devil, the witch, and the dead, and how the night became criminalized, commercialized and even politicized. In our time, improvements in lighting changed the nocturnal world, but also had detrimental effects on sleep and dreams, and caused contemporary movements–aesthetic and scientific–to “rescue” the night.

 

HIST 3401 (25066) 

Fabian Drixler

W 4pm-5:55pm

Areas HU

Japan is a land of ancient trees––more than 70,000 according to one government database. Trees are, among many other things, portals into the human past. Some trees live so long that they encapsulate the history of the place where they root. Others died long ago or only ever existed in a poem or a painting, and yet still stir the imagination. This is a seminar about the cultural, economic, and environmental history of Japan and its web of global connections. The pith of the course is a collaborative effort: to jointly craft A History of Japan in Trees, with each student contributing one module on one tree and the history it encapsulates. No prior knowledge of Japanese history is required, just an interest in active learning and a joy in making an artifact that can be shared with the world. The course is designed to delve deep into Japanese history. While prior knowledge of Japan, its language, and its history would be assets to our collective project, all that is required is an interest in the subject. Since the course is collaborative, students will learn from one another and complement each other’s skills.

 

HIST 3403 (25064)

Hussein Fancy

MW 1:05pm-2:20pm

Areas HU, WR

What is the history of water? An essential building block in all life and in planetary systems, water is at the heart of many of the stories and much of the science that humans use to understand their world. Throughout time different societies have defined themselves in relation to water. Greco-Roman civilization is synonymous with the Mediterranean or mare nostrum (our sea) and the trade and migration that occurred across its waters. Spain, Portugal, Britain, and the Netherlands built reputations as global seafaring nations during the Age of Exploration. Closer to Yale, the name Quinnipiac or “long-water people” in Quiripi reflects the centrality of water to Quinnipiac indigenous identity.  This course is centered on three questions: (1) How have different cultures, societies, and civilizations deployed water to write their own histories? (2) How have these histories shaped how we think water should be managed today and in the future? (3) How does the study of water in the past challenge our assumptions about people who lived before 1750?

 

HIST 3567 (22620)

Manoel Rendeiro Neto

MW 2:35pm-3:50pm

Areas HU, WR

This course examines the contested history of the largest rainforest on the planet and one of the world’s most complex fluvial ecosystems: Amazonia, in equatorial South America, from its pre-human history to the present day struggles over Indigenous autonomy, land reclamation by Afro-Indigenous and Maroon communities, extractivist industries of oil and mining, and environmentalism debates. The course includes readings and discussions on the region’s ecological origins; the social history of its diverse Indigenous populations, immigrant groups, and African-descended populations; exploration myths and European colonial projects; and more recent efforts to exploit and protect Amazonia’s extraordinary natural and human resources. The course uses tools and resources from archaeology, anthropology, biology, and social and cultural history, and also examines popular representations of the Amazon through novels, newspapers, and film.

 

HIST 3711 (24790) / GLBL 3711

Stephen DeCasien

T 1:30pm-3:25pm

Areas WR

This course examines naval power in the ancient Mediterranean from the Bronze Age through the end of the Roman Republic. We explore how ancient states and maritime peoples used naval forces to wage war, project power, control maritime space, and pursue political and economic objectives. Throughout the course, students examine how developments in warship design, naval technology, strategy, and maritime infrastructure shaped the rise and decline of ancient naval powers. Drawing on archaeological discoveries, literary accounts, and visual evidence, students develop a comprehensive understanding of the central role of sea power in the ancient Mediterranean world.

 

HIST 3758 (20249) / SAST 4210

Sunil Amrith

T 1:30pm-3:25pm

Areas HU, WR

Most histories of the environmental movement still privilege the American and European experience. This research seminar examines the diverse forms of environmental thought and activism that have emerged from the global South—drawing examples from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America—since the early twentieth century. The course examines: the environmental legacies of colonialism, the role of ecology in anticolonial movements, early articulations of environmental justice in the 1970s, the role of violence and repression in state responses to environmental activism, the rise of increasingly networked environmental movements from the Global South that made themselves heard at the Rio Earth Summit of 1992—which took place 30 years ago, and the moral and political histories that underpin the negotiating stance of countries of the Global South in climate change negotiations. This class makes extensive use of primary sources, including material from the Yale collections and it straddles the boundaries between environmental, intellectual, and political history.

 

HSAR 3217 (20958)

Jennifer Raab

TTh 11:35am-12:25pm

Areas HU

This course offers a survey of American art from European colonization of the continent to the establishment of a US overseas empire circa 1900. Through paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, photographs, and material culture, we consider the role of the visual arts in settler colonialism and nation building, in the invention of race and enforcement of its categories, and in the construction of citizenship. Throughout the term we think about how American art is shaped within wider Atlantic, Pacific, and Caribbean worlds. We look at plantation and “frontier” landscapes, the art of natural history, the cult of presidential images, the emergence of photojournalism, the creation of the modern museum, and the politics of public monuments. The aim of this course is three-fold: to acquire a foundational understanding of the art and visual culture of the United States, to situate the visual in the context of a historical and cultural framework, and to learn how to think and write about objects. The course is open to students at all levels, including those with no prior background in art history.

 

HSAR 3286 (20309)

Morgan Ng

MW 1:30pm-2:20pm

Areas HU

The period known as the Renaissance (1400–1600) witnessed the rise and spread of ambitious new forms of architecture. During this era, builders pushed an earlier tradition of gothic design toward unprecedented heights of structural daring and ornamental expression. At the same time, they found inspiration in ancient pagan and non-European monuments, which offered alternative models of technical virtuosity, material splendor, and magnificence. Engineers invented fortifications of colossal scale to combat powerful gunpowder weapons, while new media such as print transmitted architectural designs across the globe. This course explores such developments across Europe and its cultural and colonial networks in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It surveys a wide range of Renaissance building types, from palaces and gardens to churches, civic buildings, and urban infrastructure. Lectures consider how buildings and cities were reshaped by urban elites, absolutist monarchs, religious warfare, paper and print, and global expansion. Along the way, the course equips students with critical visual-technical skills and language to describe and interpret the built environment. Majors and non-majors of all years are welcome. Graduate students may register with advanced coursework.

 

ITAL 3041 (24951) 

Pierpaolo Antonello

TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

Areas HU, LA (5)

In this course, students explore the development of Italian science fiction and the fantastic from the postwar period to the present, examining how writers and filmmakers use these genres to reflect on modernity and Italy’s rapid social, cultural, and technological transformations. Through stories by Dino Buzzati, Tommaso Landolfi, Italo Calvino, and Primo Levi; films by influential directors; comics such as Ranxerox; and Laura Pugno’s Sirene, students analyze how Italian creators adapt, parody, and transform conventions traditionally associated with Anglo-American science fiction. The course investigates themes including consumer society, the atomic age, the space race, artificial intelligence, mass media, family and gender roles, ecological anxiety, and the shifting boundaries between humans, animals, and machines. Students consider how imagined futures illuminate contemporary concerns and reveal distinctive Italian approaches to technology and modernity, often characterized by irony, skepticism, and attention to everyday life. Taught in Italian, the course also strengthens students’ oral and written communication skills through discussions, presentations, and writing assignments, while familiarizing them with a wide range of linguistic styles and registers, from scientific terminology to dialect, slang, and poetic prose. ITAL 1400 or equivalent, or permission of the instructor

 

ITAL 4204 (23397)

Simona Lorenzini

MW 9am-10:15am

Areas HU, LA (5)

What is a city? What can a city tell us about human life? How can we position ourselves in a city? How can cities bridge social, political, and cultural differences to become more inclusive? Can the richness and variety of past urban experience teach us lessons for understanding our modern urban landscape? This course explores the transformation of the Italian urban landscape from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance from a multidisciplinary and comparative perspective, encompassing fields ranging from art to economics and from literature to urban design. It examines various discourses and representations of the city, including maps, city views, travel and narrative literature, tourist guides, and films. These sources offer different perspectives on the experience of the Italian urban environment, the evolution of Italian towns, changes in their size and organization, the emergence of new spaces and functions, and the challenges they face, such as public health crises, demographic decline, destruction, and military sackings. By considering the city as both a physical and conceptual space, the course connects the material covered in class to the world beyond the classroom. The course is taught in Italian. Prerequisite: ITAL 1400 or equivalent.

 

NELC 3220 (20893) / NELC 6850 / ARCG 3122 / URBN 3321

Nadine Moeller

TTh 4pm-5:15pm

Areas HU

The aim of this seminar is to challenge prevailing views on Egypt’s non-urban past and to investigate Egypt as an early urban society. The emergence of urban features are traced diachronically starting with the Predynastic period up to the disintegration of the powerful Middle Kingdom state into the New Kingdom with its powerful royal cities and up to the urban transformation of the Late Period and Graeco-Roman times. This seminar offers a synthesis of the archaeological data that sheds light on the different facets of urbanism in ancient Egypt and looks at theoretical concepts and models of urbanism more generally, and how they can be applied to ancient societies. Drawing on evidence from recent excavations, the changing settlement patterns are explored by contrasting periods of strong political control against those of decentralization. On a microlevel, the characteristics of households and the layout of domestic architecture are addressed, which are key elements for understanding how society functioned and evolved over time. In addition, settlement patterns provide further insights into the formation of complex society and the role of the state in the urban development of ancient Egypt. Prerequisite: Some background knowledge of ancient Egyptian history is required

 

PORT 1200 (call number varies by section)

Instructor varies by section

Time varies by section

Areas LA (2)

In the second semester of Portuguese, students continue to deepen their understanding of the language and cultures of the Luso-Brazilian and Lusophone Africa worlds by engaging with interdisciplinary themes. Instead of traditional textbooks, students explore diverse authentic materials. This course invites students to explore lugares da memória (places of memory) to analyze how subjectivity is shaped by the spaces we inhabit and how modern transformations of these places impact our relationship with the environment. Organized into four content units, “What is Culture?”, “Anti-Touristic Guide”, “Displacement of Memories”, and “Ludic Spaces”, students create a variety of projects (clips, podcasts, story maps, video essay, puppet theater) that explore the interplay between language and culture, our perception and connection with cities and sites of diasporic memory, food as historical and cultural heritage, and the loss of playfulness in adulthood. The course engages students through a variety of genres and paced activities focused on comprehension, contextualization, reflection, and creation of new meaning. By the end of this course, students have developed an understanding of the language and cultures across various textual genres and gained deeper insights into multiple aspects of Portuguese-speaking world. Students can submit their productions for publication in the Yale Portuguese Students’ Digital Magazine. Conducted in Portuguese. Prerequisite: PORT 110.

 

PORT 1240 (25099)

Adriana Bezerra da Silva

MTThF 2:35pm-3:25pm

Areas LA (1), LA (2)

This course is an introductory course designed for advanced students of Romance languages and/or heritage speakers of Portuguese and other Romance languages, equivalent to Portuguese 110 and Portuguese 120. The course explores the Portuguese language and cultures through in-depth involvement with cultural topics of the Lusophone world. Organized into four content units, namely, Who Are You in the City?, What Do You See from Your Window?, Between Here and There, and Ludic Spaces, students express reflections and produce projects in Portuguese about their connections to cities and places of memory. By delving into the transformative nature of urban spaces, the course explores the intricate link between subjectivity and the cities or places we inhabit. It examines how structures of coloniality we inherit and modernity can alter our relationship with the environment. Students engage with authentic materials such as visual arts, songs, clips, movies, and texts of different genres to investigate the proposed topics. Paced activities focus on comprehension, contextualization, reflection, and the creation of new meaning to correlate with both academic and personal life. Each unit concludes with a small project, involving different media or text creation, allowing students to apply the knowledge and skills acquired individually and in groups. Upon completing this course, students will have gained an understanding of the language across various textual genres, delving into diverse aspects of Portuguese-speaking cultures. At least one of the following language levels: SPAN 140 or 145, FREN 140 or 145, ITAL 140 or 145, or higher; a satisfactory placement test score; heritage speakers of Portuguese; or instructor’s permission.

 

PORT 1440 (24533) 

Giseli Tordin

MTThF 10:30am-11:20am

Areas LA (3), LA (4)

This course is designed for advanced students of Romance languages or heritage speakers of Portuguese. It follows a content and project-based learning approach. The course examines a variety of perspectives on the environment and cities, featuring Indigenous art and film, essays on the Amazon, and the works of women photographers, filmmakers, and authors. Students explore how we can decolonize our viewpoints by revisiting the past and reimagining the future. Instead of traditional textbooks, students analyze authentic materials, such as newspaper articles, short novels, essays, media, and academic texts that address contemporary political, social, and environmental issues. Through compelling themes, author interviews, and cultural topics, students deepen their language skills while critically examining social issues. Students refine their Portuguese through multimodal texts and projects, with an opportunity to submit their work for publication in the Yale Portuguese Students’ Digital Magazine.