This team-taught course introduces students to the History of Art as a global and interdisciplinary field. Led by a selection of professors from the department, in collaboration with staff and faculty of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, its primary aim is to familiarize students with the most significant geographical areas, epochs and works of art, as well as with methods employed in their study and analysis. The course will be organized around a changing selection of themes central to the history of art. The theme for fall 2024 is "Materiality." Considering how artists and artisans from antiquity to the present have mobilized a broad range of materials and processes to create works of art, we will explore the intimate relationship between makers, matter, and meaning.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 1100 - Art Histories: An Introduction

Ancient Rome was a village the size of Ithaca that grew into a world empire. In this course students will be introduced to some of its literature, art, and famous personalities in the classical period (2nd c. BCE – 2nd c. CE) and will read some of the greatest masterpieces of Latin literature. Special attention will be given to the late republic, Augustan, and Hadrianic periods, to Roman ethics, and to the rise of Christianity. No prior knowledge of the ancient world is necessary. All readings are in English.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 1615 - Introduction to Ancient Rome

How might we engage with communities, whether here in Ithaca or across the globe, in our diverse histories, experiences, and perspectives? What structural forces shape inequalities and how do communities go about addressing social and racial injustice? This course is designed to help students bring global engaged learning into their Cornell education with a focus on community engaged learning in Ithaca. It introduces skills that are vital for intercultural engagement, including participant-observation research, ethnographic writing, and the habits of critical reflexivity. Through readings, film, and community partnerships, we will learn about global/local issues including the gendered and racialized aspects of labor, food and housing insecurity, structural violence, and migration. Students will complete projects that help them learn with and from Ithaca community members and organizations.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for SHUM 1900 - Global Engagements: Living and Working in a Diverse World

In this course we will use the Game of Thrones series as a way of familiarizing ourselves with different tools of cultural analysis and approaches in literary theory (such as narratology, psychoanalysis, media studies, queer theory, disability studies, animal studies etc.). A strong emphasis will be placed on the different media "avatars" of the series: novels, TV series, graphic novels, spin-offs, fan fiction, blogs, fan art, etc.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for SHUM 2241 - Game of Thrones: Multi-Media Fantasies

This course introduces Korean popular culture in global context. Beginning with cultural forms of the late Chosŏn period, the course will also examine popular culture during the Japanese colonial period, the post-war period, the democratization period, and contemporary Korea. Through analysis of numerous forms of media, including films, television, music, literature, and music videos, the course will explore the emergence of the "Korean Wave" in East Asia and its subsequent global impact. In our examination of North and South Korean cultural products, we will discuss theories of transnationalism, globalization, and cultural politics. The course will consider the increasing global circulation of Korean popular culture through new media and K-Pop's transculturation of forms of American music such as rap. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korean culture is required.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 2269 - Korean Popular Culture

Full details for SHUM 2287 - Gods, Ghosts, and Gurus: A Global Exploration of the Fantastic in Asian Religions

Full details for SHUM 2369 - Race, the Nation, & American Outdoor Recreation

Maoism and Chinese Communism are not history after Mao's death in 1976. In China, Maoism holds the key to the enduring success of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), one of the most remarkable organizations of the 20th and 21st centuries that has survived the collapse of communism in Europe and the USSR. With the beneficial transformation brought by capitalism and globalization in China, the end of the Cold War and the narrative of the "end of history" cannot explain the resurgence of Maoism.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 2435 - Global Maoism: History and Present

How do humans organize production, distribution, exchange, and consumption? What social, political, environmental, and religious values underlie different forms of economic organization? And how do they produce racial, ethnic, class, gender, and sexual inequalities? This course uses a range of historical and contemporary case studies to address these questions, in the process introducing a range of analytic approaches including formalism, substantivism, Marxist and feminist theory, critical race studies, and science and technology studies. Course themes include gifts and commodities; the nature of money, markets, and finance; credit and debt relations; labor, property, and value; licit and illicit economies; capitalism and socialism; development and underdevelopment.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS, SSC-AS) (D-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 2437 - Economy, Power, and Inequality

This course explores the history of the Holocaust during which the Nazis murdered six million Jews. Topics covered in this class include the history of antisemitism in Europe and twentieth-century Germany, the origins and rule of the Nazis, the politics of World War II, the Final Solution and extermination camps, Jewish literary responses to the Holocaust, among other topics.

Full details for SHUM 2467 - Holocaust in History and Memory

These seminars offer an introduction to the humanities by exploring historical, cultural, social, and political themes. Students will explore themes in critical dialogue with a range of texts and media drawn from the arts, humanities, and/or humanistic social sciences. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society for the Humanities Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to relevant local sites and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in these seminars will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the annual focus theme of Cornell's Society for the Humanities and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research.

Full details for SHUM 2750 - Introduction to Humanities

This course uses the history of the Spanish Inquisition, and the richness of its archival records, to explore the variety of ways in which the pursuit of heresy was intertwined with transforming how knowledge was constructed, scrutinized, repressed, and deployed in the early modern world. Topics covered will include the struggle over religious authenticity in the age of Reformation, the formation of the bureaucratic state, the rise of empiricism and the scientific revolution, the birth of modern psychiatry, and the intellectual revolutions typically associated with the Enlightenment.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 3175 - Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition: Inquisitors, Heretics, and Truth in the Early Modern World

This course examines major writers, works, and developments in modern and contemporary Korean literature from the early twentieth century to the present. Beginning with the cultural transition at the end of the Chosŏn dynasty, we will consider how social issues such as class, gender, sexuality, race, migration, and the environment factor into literary constructions of the self, community, and nation. The course integrates creative writing workshops to illuminate the process of literary composition and deepen analytical engagement. We will engage numerous theoretical frameworks to explore and interpret Korean literature in a transnational and global context, including (post)colonial criticism, feminist criticism, and ecocriticism. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korea is required.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 3324 - Modern and Contemporary Korean Literature

This class considers the relationship between the body, knowledge and experience. We investigate the production and reproduction of the body across different times and spaces. Students examine specific histories through which the physical body came to be the purview of science, and its meaning the purview of social science and the humanities. In addition, students study other ways of knowing and being that capture the relations though which bodies emerge as simultaneously material and social. Ethnographies concerning healing and medicine, discipline and labor, governance and religion, aesthetics and desire offer alternative ways of approaching the body as both subject and object. Together, we will consider the historicity of the body, and in so doing explore questions of gender, race, class, sexuality, and coloniality.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS, SSC-AS) (D-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 3465 - Anthropology of the Body

This course addresses central debates in the philosophy of legal punishment. We will analyze the leading theories of punishment, including the familiar retributivist and deterrent alternatives, as well as lesser-known hybrid, self-defense, and rehabilitative accounts. We will ask whether each theory offers a general justification for establishing institutions of punishment, and whether each theory justifies specific acts of punishment. Other topics may include criminal responsibility, the legitimacy of collateral consequences (e.g., the denial of felons' voting rights), alternatives to punishment, etc.

Catalog Distribution: (ETM-AS) (KCM-AG)

Full details for SHUM 3475 - Philosophy of Punishment

What are comics? While it's easy to identify a cartoon, graphic novel, or comic book, it's hard to understand the wide world of comics. As a medium, comics are part of a global tradition of visual storytelling and sequential art, including premodern tapestries, early modern pamphlets, and modern children's books, political cartoons, and animated films. With a focus on the German-speaking world, we will examine a wide range of comics genres (e.g., fiction, history, autobiography, journalism, comix) and formats (e.g., books, strips, pamphlets, zines). Our discussions will address questions of taste, aesthetics, materiality, censorship, representation, and word-image relations. While we will primarily be reading and writing about comics and comics studies, students will also gain some exposure to making comics.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 3555 - Comics as a Medium

This course engages classical antiquity and its reception through the prism of queer studies. Cruising Homer, Sappho, Euripides, Plato, Ovid and more, we will explore how queer theoretical frameworks help us account for premodern queer and trans bodies, desires, experiences, and aesthetics. We will trace how people historically have engaged with the classical past in political and affective projects of writing queer history and literature, constructing identities and communities, and imagining queer futures. We will unpack how classical scholarship might reproduce contemporary forms of homophobia and transphobia in its treatments of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in the classical past, and in turn how modern uses of the classical might reinforce or dismantle exclusionary narratives around 'queerness' today as it intersects with race, gender, sexuality, and class. Finally, we will consider how the work we are doing in this class (where the 'Queer' in 'Queer Classics' may be taken as an adjective or an imperative) relates to the ways that contemporary writers, activists, artists, and performers have animated the classical past with queer possibilities. All readings will be in translation; no knowledge of Latin and Greek is required.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 3635 - Queer Classics

Full details for SHUM 3636 - Introduction to Critical Theory

What is authenticity and why does it matter? Connoisseurship—the expertise required to make discerning judgments—involves assessments of quality,authenticity, historical and cultural significance, and many other issues. This course focuses on connoisseurship in the fine arts, archaeology, and ethnography in both academic contexts and the art world. Emphasis is on developing a nuanced understanding of authentication, at the core of the art market and an important determinant of relevant data for academic art historians and archaeologists. Topics include the role of authenticity in assigning value; looting and faking in relation to antiquities markets; technical analysis and forgery detection.

Full details for SHUM 4231 - Fakes and the Authentic: Connoisseurship, Value, and Judgement

Full details for SHUM 4252 - Pop Music in the Archive: Researching Subcultures of the Recent Past

This seminar explores the intertwined histories of sex, sexuality, and gender at the intersection of major themes in American transnational and global history: race, labour, empire, and the state. What would a queer history of American foreign relations look like? How has the legacy of sexual violence in plantation slavery underwritten the systems – such as private property, police power, white supremacy, and carcerality -- that structure modern American society and its international entanglements? How can a focus on gender help us to better understand the contemporary challenges of globalisation and the Anthropocene? Uncovering the pasts of the most marginalised historical actors – enslaved women, rape victims, trans and queer people – requires innovative methodologies and new relationships to the archive. In this seminar, then, we will also think about how we do gender history, and develop tools for reading, writing and researching that take us beyond the boundaries of the written record and into the realm of the speculative, the spectral, and the imaginary.

Full details for SHUM 4265 - Gender, Sexuality, and the U.S. in the World

Full details for SHUM 4317 - Ottoman Modernity, 1798-1925

Evaluation is a pervasive feature of contemporary life. Professors, doctors, countries, hotels, pollution, books, intelligence: there is hardly anything that is not subject to some form of review, rating, or ranking these days. This senior seminar examines the practices, cultures, and technologies of evaluation and asks how value is established, maintained, compared, subverted, resisted, and institutionalized in a range of different settings. Topics include user reviews, institutional audit, ranking and commensuration, algorithmic evaluation, tasting, gossip, and awards. Drawing on case studies from science, technology, culture, accounting, art, environment, and everyday life, we shall explore how evaluation comes to order our lives – and why it is so difficult to resist.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS) (SBA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 4561 - Evaluation and Society

In this course, we will take an inter-and multidisciplinary approach that examines works of fiction, film, performance, and photography to explore how specters intervene in and mold the social, political, and cultural landscape of contemporary Latin America. We will discuss how different spectral figures challenge official narratives of memory, ground political authority, complicate transitions and endings, and fuel social movements and revolutions. As we engage with overlapping times, uncanny spaces, and restless bodies, we will also consider how spectrality shapes is shaped by the development of new media, the contemporary resurgence of populist discourse, the global migration crisis, and the urgency of ecological concerns.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS)

Full details for SHUM 4666 - Specters of Latin America

How do queer people make family? What cultural and artistic practices sustain queer bonds? To answer these questions, this course examines queer and trans kinship narratives across a range of genres, including literature, film, television, and critical theory. We will theorize kinship's relationship to cis-heteronormativity, capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism, and debate whether queer and trans kinships can model new political forms.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for SHUM 4705 - How to Make Queer Kin: Sustaining Bonds in LGBTQ Culture

How can a small sculpture produce monumental effects? Recent shifts in metal-detecting and excavation practices have transformed our understanding of the scope of figural art after the Roman empire's collapse; the field is newly flooded with evidence of toys, puppets, and other tiny bodies. Working across the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and gender studies, this course investigates how figurines shaped space, ritual, and concepts of personhood in the early medieval world.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for SHUM 4706 - The Poetics of Embodiment: Figurines in the Early Middle Ages

When Beijing hosted the summer Olympics in 2008, its opening ceremony left viewers, journalists, and visitors impressed and sometimes alarmed by its enormity, encompassing a massive cast of dancers, musicians, and other performers led by iconic film director Zhang Yimou. It was judged as not just a celebration or an artistic achievement, but as a message: China was ready to overwhelm the world. Size mattered, likely in the moment's design, and certainly in its reception and interpretation. This interdisciplinary seminar takes an innovative approach to politics in Asia, considering size and its meanings: from the small and the close-knit to the expansive and powerful. We will consider especially the varied techniques of their political, public, and pop cultural representations.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for SHUM 4707 - Scale, Size, and the Politics of Expression in Asia

Full details for SHUM 4711 - Staffage: Figures for Scale, 1500-1850

This course is designed to support seniors in the Humanities Scholars Program working on their capstone projects. Students in the course will be guided in their project research and writing. The course aligns with the following HSP learning goals.

Full details for SHUM 4750 - Senior Capstone Seminar for Humanities Scholars

China, a cultural giant of East Asia, made a passive entrance into modernity. With the advent of Western and American colonialism and imperialism, coupled with recent successes in westernization by the Japanese, Chinese artists had to redefine their roles as well as their visions. This turmoil bore witness to a vibrant beginning in modern Chinese art. Interactions between the Chinese themselves, and Chinese interactions with foreigners in the major cities of Shanghai and Beijing, fostered new directions in Chinese art and helped shape western visions of Chinese art history. Issues covered include: Chinese debates on western influence--their theoretical foundations and rationales; New visions for the future of Chinese art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Pluralistic approaches and arguments on "Chinese identity" in the modern era; Collecting art and the vision of history; The identity of traditional literati painters in the modern era-their roles, artworks, and deeds; Foreigners in China-the formation of major European collections of Chinese art, and the formation of "Chinese art history" in the West.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 4916 - Modern Chinese Art

Full details for SHUM 6317 - Ottoman Modernity, 1798-1925

In this course, we will take an inter-and multidisciplinary approach that examines works of fiction, film, performance, and photography to explore how specters intervene in and mold the social, political, and cultural landscape of contemporary Latin America. We will discuss how different spectral figures challenge official narratives of memory, ground political authority, complicate transitions and endings, and fuel social movements and revolutions. As we engage with overlapping times, uncanny spaces, and restless bodies, we will also consider how spectrality shapes is shaped by the development of new media, the contemporary resurgence of populist discourse, the global migration crisis, and the urgency of ecological concerns.

Full details for SHUM 6666 - Specters of Latin America

How do queer people make family? What cultural and artistic practices sustain queer bonds? To answer these questions, this course examines queer and trans kinship narratives across a range of genres, including literature, film, television, and critical theory. We will theorize kinship's relationship to cis-heteronormativity, capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism, and debate whether queer and trans kinships can model new political forms.

Full details for SHUM 6705 - How to Make Queer Kin: Sustaining Bonds in LGBTQ Culture

How can a small sculpture produce monumental effects? Recent shifts in metal-detecting and excavation practices have transformed our understanding of the scope of figural art after the Roman empire's collapse; the field is newly flooded with evidence of toys, puppets, and other tiny bodies. Working across the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and gender studies, this course investigates how figurines shaped space, ritual, and concepts of personhood in the early medieval world.

Full details for SHUM 6706 - The Poetics of Embodiment: Figurines in the Early Middle Ages

When Beijing hosted the summer Olympics in 2008, its opening ceremony left viewers, journalists, and visitors impressed and sometimes alarmed by its enormity, encompassing a massive cast of dancers, musicians, and other performers led by iconic film director Zhang Yimou. It was judged as not just a celebration or an artistic achievement, but as a message: China was ready to overwhelm the world. Size mattered, likely in the moment's design, and certainly in its reception and interpretation. This interdisciplinary seminar takes an innovative approach to politics in Asia, considering size and its meanings: from the small and the close-knit to the expansive and powerful. We will consider especially the varied techniques of their political, public, and pop cultural representations.

Full details for SHUM 6707 - Scale, Size, and the Politics of Expression in Asia

Full details for SHUM 6711 - Staffage: Figures for Scale, 1500-1850