A richly illustrated account of how premodern botanical illustrations document evolving knowledge about plants and the ways ...

Exploration of ancient Germanic fantasy worlds with their gods, giants, dwarves, dragon-slayers, werewolves, shapeshifters, and witches. Readings of short texts and excerpts from myths, epics, legends ...

The course explores the critical analysis of the creative products of the human intellect in mystical experiences including the symbolic stories of Avicenna, al-Gazali, Ibn Tufail, Suhrawardi & Mulla ...

Early oceanic explorations, European invasion of North America, the evolution of race slavery, and the responses of the native American peoples.

Examines practices of translation, imitation, reception, and adaptation between epic poetry and related literary and performance genres (e.g., chivalric romance, Baroque tragedy, and early opera).

Is there any chance that Leonardo Da Vinci’s concept of a flying machine could be realized in a model drone with an 87 inch wing span mimicking a large bird of prey? This project, by a double major in ...

The Sleep of Behemoth, Jehangir Yezdi Malegam explores the emergence of conflicting concepts of peace in western Europe during the High Middle Ages. Ever since the early Church, Christian thinkers had ...

The history of magic and witchcraft in western culture from the Renaissance to the present, with particular attention to the relationship of supernatural beliefs to religion and science. The renewal ...

The marvellous, a key concept in literary debates at the turn of the seventeenth century, involved sensory and perspectival transformation, a rhetoric built on the unexpected, contradictory, and ...

Prior to the Spanish conquest, the Nahua indigenous peoples of central Mexico did not have a notion of “sex” or “sexuality” equivalent to the sexual categories developed by colonial society or those ...

Within modern imaginaries, Aztecs and Mayans become seen as those who engaged in brutal sacrifice and cannibalism atop their great temples. In order to question this pornographic assumption, this ...

How has thinking with premodern cultures shaped criticism? Seminar explores aspects of medieval Euro-Mediterranean cultures as perennial objects of thought, investigating the ways the surviving ...