Study Abroad
Culture, Art and Politics in Twenty-first Century Buenos Aires
K55.9400 4 CR May 30–June 19 Dinwiddie/McMeley
Buenos Aires, known as "The Paris of the South," is one of the mythic cities of the world. Containing nearly one-third of Argentina's population, the city has had an inordinate impact not only on Argentina, but on Latin American consciousness and identity. This three-week course will trace the evolution of the political theorists, educational reformers, and creative artists whose works have shaped the culture, art and politics of Buenos Aires and Argentina. Readings include excerpts from the works of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Enrique Rodó, Robert Ferris Thompson, and George Reid Andrews; fiction by Jorge Luís Borges, Silvinia Ocampo, Julio Cortázar, Roberto Arlt, and Adolfo Bioy Casares; such documents as Nunca Más, and the film The Afro-Argentines. Field trips encompass the rich resources of the city's museums, historical sites, and ethnic neighborhoods. Sessions with leading Argentine jurists, educators, and artists are an important component of this course. In addition, students will spend one weekend in Montevideo, Uruguay.
Berlin: Capital of Modernity
K55.9500 4 CR July 4 –July 25 Hornick/Smoler
Some of the most thrilling, momentous, and terrible events of the 1900’s occurred in Berlin, and today its streets, buildings, and cultural monuments offer tales of warning and inspiration to the present century. This three-week course will take in many of the sights and sounds of old and contemporary Berlin, but our course will focus on the involvement of twentieth-century, Berlin-based politicians, activists, artists, architects, bohemians, writers, and intellectuals with the causes, experience, and consequences of World War II. Berlin’s streets, buildings, memorials, and cultural monuments offer cautionary tales about the folly of nationalist ambition; inspiring sagas of intellectual and physical courage; cold testimonials of crime and retribution; lyrical ballads of brutal honesty; personal records of hope and despair. From one perspective, all of these narratives are episodes in an epic whose grand and central scene is World War II—and that is the point of view to be adopted in this interdisciplinary seminar set in Berlin. Our period of study begins just before the outbreak of World War I and ends during the astonishing building boom of the post-Wall 1990’s and early 2000’s. Group site visits occur throughout the week and on weekends, but students will be given ample opportunity to explore Berlin and develop their own individual projects. Field trips encompass the rich resources of the city’s museums, neighborhoods, historical sites, memorials and cultural monuments. Classes, taught in English, meet four days a week.
Machiavelli's Florence: Political and Cultural Resonances
K55.9600 4 CR June 7 –June 27 Shulman/Giorgi
Many modern ideas about art, literature, and politics derive from the Italian Renaissance, and Florence was the crucial workshop where seminal innovations were forged. During a three-week, interdisciplinary course in beautiful Florence, students are offered a learning experience that explores renaissance creativity and its modern resonances, especially in terms of political philosophy and politics, aesthetics and visual artistic practice. At first, students read several significant texts from and about the Renaissance, to set a cultural and historical context. Then the course proceeds on two parallel tracks. On the one hand, students focus on the wide array of genres - from treatises to fables and plays - by which Machiavelli analyzed political life, but then trace Machiavelli's legacy in modern political thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Isaiah Berlin. On the other hand, students explore renaissance innovations in visual art and aesthetic theory by studying the work of Florentine painters such as Botticelli, Giotto, and Michelangelo, as well as the architectural contexts of their work. In both regards, students can experience the specific settings where Machiavelli re-imagined both Florence and politics, and where great artists created and displayed their work. Our goal is to move between texts and their context, between artistic artifacts and their settings, and between a seminal historical moment and its reverberations. Throughout the course, students will visit such museums, churches and other places of historic and cultural significance.