Courses

REN-R502 Topics in Renaissance Civilization: Investigations of Nature in the Renaissance (4 cr.)
Taught by Domenico Bertoloni Meli
Mondays at 9:30AM-12:00PM in Wendell Wright Education Building 0101, also meets with HPSC-X 705

The aim of this class is to offer a broad overview of investigations of nature in the Renaissance, ca. 1450-1600, including a wide range of fields and practices in geography and navigation, anatomy and natural history, alchemy and magic, astronomy/astrology and the science of machines, the transition from manuscript to print and the history of the book. We will pay attention to novel technologies of printing, navigation, and warfare. You are expected to give two presentations on different topics. Evaluation is based on oral participation, class presentations, and especially a final essay of about 25-30 pages.

FRIT M504 Renaissance Italian Literature & Culture: ‘High’ and ‘Low’ in Italian Renaissance Literature (3-4 cr.)
Taught by Massimo Scalabrini
Mondays at 4:00–6:00PM in Ballantine Hall 217

The creative energy of the Italian Renaissance drew as much on instability and restlessness as on discovery and innovation. Its artistic and literary production grew out of a world shaped by constant political and military conflict and by a cultural environment defined by both fruitful exchanges and sharp contrasts: between antiquity and modernity, the aristocratic and the popular, the local and the global, center and periphery, inside and outside, “high” and “low.”

Along with the forms and values of the canonical classical model (the “happy medium,” moderation, decorum, dialogue, and so forth), we find an alternative current—what we might call “anti-classicist”—which will be the focus of this course. We will explore genres such as eclogue, epic, comedy, and lyric poetry, including works in macaronic and rustic dialects, by authors such as Folengo and Ruzante, among others. Particular attention will be devoted to parody and satire, whose techniques of degrading imitation and critical exposure of human flaws—often producing distortion and caricature—serve as powerful tools for laying bare the creaturely condition of human life: its frailty, suffering, and contradictions.

The course will be taught in Italian or English; however, reading knowledge of Italian is required. All materials will be available on Canvas.

FRIT M605 Seminar in Modern Italian Literature: The Culture of the Neo-Baroque
Taught by Marco Arnaudo
Tuesdays at 12:00PM-2:00PM in Ballantine Hall, BH 331

This class analyzes the critical category of Neo-Baroque that was pioneered by the Italian critics Dorfles, Longhi, Calabrese, and Raimondi. We then apply that category to a range of cultural products from the 20th- and 21st-century in a comparative and intermedia perspective. Authors under discussion include Gadda, Zanzotto, Caproni, Eco, and Philip K. Dick. We will also look at games and interactive fiction as a particularly lively focus to gain Neo-Baroque insights.

FRIT F523 / CTIH T600 Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal: Three Modernities
Taught by Hall Bjørnstad
Tuesdays at 4:00PM–6:30PM in Ballantine Hall 106

What happens when a reader informed by recent theoretical inquiries approaches an early modern text? Will the theory illuminate the text or only colonize it? Is the absence of present-day concerns desirable or even possible while reading texts from the past? Conversely, to what extent can the engagement with earlier texts prove helpful, even essential for our thinking about more contemporary concerns? How does our theoretical understanding of the past as new beginnings, roots, genealogies, prehistories, thresholds, reoccupations or ruptures inform the purpose of the work we do in the humanities and our contribution to the thinking about contemporary problems? And how do foundational texts from the past change when we approach them with new questions addressing issues such as indigeneity and race?

This graduate seminar will explore questions like these through a comparative exploration of key texts by Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), René Descartes (1596-1650) and Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), and of their mobilization in canonical reflections on the predicament of modernity, not only among mid- to late-twentieth century French theorists, including Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Barthes, Nancy, de Certeau and Marin, but also German theorists from Benjamin and Auerbach to Blumenberg, just to mention a few. Montaigne, Descartes and Pascal have been posited as the origin of wildly different – and often competing notions of – modernity. What is left of these modernities today? How can each of them – and the constellation of the three – inform and challenge our theoretical inquiries in 2025/2026? Does the notion of an “early modernity” at work in key theories of modernity from the recent past have a future?

For the final project for this course, the participants will have the choice between writing a traditional research paper or a “book review essay,” where a minimum of two critical texts are assessed in a way that highlights and reflects on the relationship between recent critical inquiries in the humanities and an early modern text (by Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal or another early modern writer). The course will not require any prior knowledge of the three early modern writers or their historical context. Class discussion will be in English, and all the readings will be available both in English and in French.

HPSC X705 Topics in the History of Science: Investigations of Nature in the Renaissance
Taught by Domenico Bertoloni Meli
Mondays at 9:30AM-12:00PM in Wendell Wright Education Building 0101

The aim of this class is to offer a broad overview of investigations of nature in the Renaissance, ca. 1450-1600, including a wide range of fields and practices in geography and navigation, anatomy and natural history, alchemy and magic, astronomy/astrology and the science of machines, the transition from manuscript to print and the history of the book. We will pay attention to novel technologies of printing, navigation, and warfare. You are expected to give two presentations on different topics. Evaluation is based on oral participation, class presentations, and especially a final essay of about 25-30 pages.

MUS T565 Stylistic Counterpoint: 16th Century (3 cr)
Taught by Kyle Adams
Mondays & Wednesdays, 11:10AM–12:25PM in Simon Music Building, SM149C

This is an immersive course in counterpoint and composition as practiced from the generation of Josquin des Pres through Carlo Gesualdo. Students need not have any familiarity with Renaissance music, but do need to be fluent in reading musical notation. Coursework will comprise daily assignments in composition and singing alongside primary-source readings on Renaissance music theory. The course will culminate in a final project that entails the composition of a mass movement or motet in three or four voices.

MUS M510 Topics in Music Literature: The Italian Madrigal (3 cr)
Taught by Massimo Ossi
Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12:45PM-2:00PM in Simon Music Building, SM267

A comprehensive look at the Renaissance madrigal in Italy, from about 1530 until the 1630s. Focus on Italian poetic forms and versification, the socio-cultural context of both the poetic and musical genres , and stylistic developments of the latter.

MUS M601 MA Seminar in Musicology: Music in Early Modern Cities (3 cr)
Taught by Giovanni Zanovello
Mondays at 2:20PM-5:20PM in Simon Music Building, SM263

In the course of Western history, musical innovation has mostly happened in cities. In this seminar we will use a few exemplary Renaissance cities to raise questions about what fuels innovation in music and the arts. In particular, we will look at the early-modern city as a place of social and cultural exchange; at specific rituals (both civic and religious) happening in the city and creating a demand for music and arts; at the multiple patronage systems coexisting in the urban fabric and at the place of musicians within them; and at the different musical languages used in the different places of the city and addressed at different audiences. Students will be expected to prepare a formal paper to be read at a private conference at the end of the seminar.

MUS M652 Renaissance Music (3 cr)
Taught by Giovanni Zanovello
Mondays & Wednesdays, 9:35-10:50AM in Simon Music Building, SM267

In this class we will explore the repertoire, history, and musical practices of Western Europe, ca. 1380-1600. We will study many masterpieces that often became models in the following centuries. More broadly, we will approach performance and compositional practices as well as a role of music in society that differ sometimes remarkably from practices today. The class is organized as a pro-seminar: the class time will involve a moderate amount of lecturing, in addition to class discussion and musical listening. Class attendance is strictly mandatory.

REL R602/762 The Hermeneutics of Translation 
Taught by Rebecca J. Manring
Tuesdays at 2:30PM-5:00PM in Sycamore Hall, SY 224

Thinking of translation not only from one language to another, but also in terms of making conceptual frameworks legible to new audiences, we will explore the ways scholars working in one tradition “translate” their work for a broader audience. The seminar is designed for any students (including those whose research area is not South Asia) trying to do just that. We’ll read recent scholarship on the subject as well as some translation theory.

HISP S659 Topics in Colonial Studies: Botany & Empire
Taught by Olimpia E. Rosenthal
Mondays and Wednesdays at 11:10AM-12:25PM in Sycamore Hall, SY001

This course focuses on textual and visual narratives about plants, tracing how colonial relations and institutions of power have shaped plant commodification and extractivism. We will read primary sources from the early modern period—including descriptions and drawings of plants in the Códice Florentino, and in works by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo—, as well as secondary texts on botany, botanic gardens, plant commodification, ecocriticism, and empire. We will also analyze and discuss archival sources and cultural production from the 19th-21st centuries, focusing on narratives about the latex-bearing tree Hevea brasiliensis and on postcolonial imperial extractivism. While course material will mostly cover sources from/about Latin America, it also foregrounds the global networks of plant circulation and the planetary implications of plant commodification.