Undergraduate

The east Roman polity (aka Byzantium) lasted for over a thousand years, from around 300 to 1453 AD. Situated at the meeting point of Europe and Asia, it faced down countless challenges to its existence, mustering the resilience, cohesion, and adaptibility necessary to rebound from repeated shocks while retaining its identity as an Orthodox Roman society. Meanwhile, other states and empires around it collapsed, fragmented, or changed out of recognition. “Byzantium” has often been studied as a case-study in decline and fall, but this course will flip the script and search for the sources of its resilience. How were its rulers able to tax subjects efficiently with little resistance? Why did its structures of governance never fall into chaos? Why did subjects not seek to break away or carve out separatist domains? The course will have an experimental and exploratory quality, as these questions have not been studied systematically in the scholarly literature.

This course aims to enable students to attain conversational fluency and to become independent users of the language who deal effectively and with a good deal of accuracy.

This course expands on the material presented in MOGK 20100, enabling students to speak about topics related to employment, current events and issues of public and community interest.

This course aims to enable students to attain conversational fluency and to become independent users of Modern Greek language.

This course expands on the material presented in MOGK 10200/30200, reviewing and elaborating the basic patterns of the language.

This course offers a rapid review of the basic patterns of the language and expands the material presented in MOGK 10100/30100.

This course aims to develop elementary proficiency in spoken and written Modern Greek and to introduce elements of cultural knowledge. The course will familiarize the students with the Greek alphabet, Modern Greek pronunciation rules and the basic morphology and syntax, with an emphasis on reading and conversational skills. The students will be able to communicate minimally with formulaic and rote utterances and produce words, phrases and lists.

Tertullian was the first to attribute the authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews to Barnabas, and that ascription found favor with no less an ancient figure as Jerome, and even with notable scholars of the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries, such as Albrecht Ritschl and Friedrich Blass. Although no one can know who wrote it, there are fruitful literary and thematic parallels between the Epistle that bears the name Barnabas and the canonical Hebrews, including their critique of Judaism and their interpretatio Christiana of the Hebrew Bible, with particular regard to Levitical institutions and the temple. We will read thoroughly the Greek text of each treatise with focus on the language and style of the two texts, their relation to Hellenistic and Alexandrian Judaism, and their respective treatments of Hebrew Bible/Septuagintal themes.

It's traditional for the humanities and sciences to be regarded as different fields—non-overlapping magisteria, to adapt Stephen Jay Gould's term. But is this true? In this class we examine the role of the humanities in science. Eight faculty from elsewhere in the university will also come to speak about the sciences and humanities in their own work. Join us as we try to think more broadly about the impact of humanistic thought.

Since the (western) 18th century, it has been normative to separate humanities and the sciences. The institutional side of this divide is reflected on college campuses, where there is little intellectual exchange between these areas. This course seeks to challenge that separation by (1) familiarizing ourselves with the history that led to it; (2) exploring materials from Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Foucault; and (3) studying points of intersection such as metaphor in science, science fiction, the Turing Test, humanistic medicine, the cyclical nature of scientific ideas since antiquity, and the metaphysics of science.