Fall 2026
ART HIS 217B: Medieval Art
Lecture: Sem 1
Units: 4
Instructor: Gerstel, S.E.J.
Course description: Lecture, three hours. Variable topics in medieval art that reflect interests of individual regular and/or visiting faculty members. May be repeated twice for credit. Concurrently scheduled with course C117B. S/U or letter grading.
ART HIS 220B: Advanced Studies in Islamic Art
Lecture: Sem 1
Units: 4
Instructor: Balafrej, L.
Course description: This graduate seminar examines the arts, architecture, and material cultures of the Maghrib (western regions of North Africa). Textiles, manuscripts, jewelry, coins, devotional objects, the built environment, and the visual arts reveal the Maghrib as a geo-cultural zone of intersecting Mediterranean, Saharan, Atlantic, African, and Islamic histories. Combining global and connected approaches with a transhistorical perspective, the course moves from Amazigh histories of the Almoravid and Almohad empires to colonial modernity, decolonization, and the pan-African ambitions of the mid-twentieth century. Issues and themes include: definitions and imaginaries of the Maghrib; Amazigh histories and indigeneity; empire, conquest, and the making of difference; materials and material geographies of the Sahara; landscape and architecture beyond monuments; and the place of the Maghrib in Africa. The seminar will also host a guest lecture on the making of art histories of the Maghrib.
ENGL M296T / SPAN M296T: Translation Research Group
Lecture: Sem 1
Units: 2
Instructor: Fuchs, B.
Course description: Diversifying the Classics research group meeting, two hours. Limited to graduate students. Collaborative translation of early modern Hispanic plays to English. S/U grading.
HIST 246A: Introduction to U.S. History: Colonial Period
Lecture: Sem 1
Units: 4
Instructor: Pestana, C.G.
Course description: Seminar, three hours. Graduate survey of significant literature dealing with U.S. history from the Colonial period to the present. Each course may be taken independently for credit. S/U or letter grading.
HIST 282A: Seminar: Chinese History: Seminar 1
Lecture: Sem 1
Units: 4
Instructor: Zhang, M.
Course description: Seminar, three hours. Course 282A is requisite to 282B. In Progress grading (credit to be given only on completion of course 282B).
Lecture: 1
Units: 5
Instructor: Morosini, R.
Course Description: In light of the growing interest in the Mediterranean as a field of study, this graduate seminar approaches the Mediterranean as a methodological laboratory for interrogating how space is read, written, and produced. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s understanding of space as socially produced, the course investigates how literature, maps, and images name, describe, map, divide, connect, and invest space with cultural and political meaning. To read space, in this sense, is to interrogate the processes through which it is written and produced, and to ask by whom, for whom, and from where. Starting from the premise that the making of borders, Others, and otherness begins with the writing of space, the course adopts a geocritical approach to the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio and to medieval and Renaissance cartographic representations. It investigates the Mediterranean as a space produced through routes, crossings, encounters, and competing cultural imaginaries, with particular attention to representations of the Orient and Islam, the mobility of bodies, and the construction and crossing of borders. What difference does the sea make in these texts? What do their “opposing shores” (Dante, Par. IX, 85) reveal about centers and peripheries, belonging and otherness? Thinking at sea level, as Paul Gilroy would put it, the seminar explores the possibility of a blue humanism grounded in relations, crossings, and mobility.
POL SCI 292A: Introduction to Political Inquiry: Problems of Scientific Inquiry and Normative Discourse
Lecture: Sem 1
Units: 2
Instructor: Peters, M.E.
Course description: Seminar, two hours; discussion, one hour (when scheduled).
SOCIOL 204: Topics in Sociological Theorizing: Seminar 1
Lecture: Sem 1
Units: 4
Instructor: Emigh, R.J.
Course description: Seminar, four hours. Examination of selected issues and problems in classical or contemporary sociological theory.
SPAN 262B: Studies in Medieval Spanish Literature
Lecture: Sem 1
Units: 4
Instructor: Dagenais, J.
Course description: Discussion, two hours.