Professor Angela Haddad

The Mediterranean has captured the imagination of writers, thinkers, artists, and travelers for centuries, but the study of this zone is often overdetermined by the borders of its northern shores. What Mediterranean emerges when it is narrated from its southern or eastern coasts or by its othered denizens, passing visitors, and theorists from other worldly shores? This course focuses on cultural works from the 20th century onward and maps realities of colonization, borders, ethnocentrism and cosmopolitanism, citizenship, and movement onto Mediterranean aesthetics and foundational tropes such as hospitality and conquest. We will adopt comparative frames in terms of genre and geo-linguistic production as we discuss fictional and non-fictional prose narratives by Amara Lakhous, Assia Djebar, Claude McKay, and André Aciman; poetry by Nouri al-Jarrah and Victor Hernández Cruz; and films by Tassos Boulmetis and Annemarie Jacir; alongside cultural thinkers like Albert Camus, Taha Hussein, Franco Cassano, and Amin Maalouf among others.

Professor Juan Manuel Avila Conejo

*also open to pre-college students

In 1934, a historic strike in Costa Rica brought the mighty United Fruit Company to its knees. The multinational behemoth, infamous for its unchecked power and ability to overthrow governments with its own army and navy, was suddenly powerless against its own labor force. But how did this happen? This course delves into the role of plantation literature as a tool for revolutionary education and organizing. Working through the lens of ecocriticism, we will examine a collection of texts from across the Caribbean basin, including Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (Colombia 1967), Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (Cuba 1949), and Miguel Ángel Asturias’ The Green Pope (Guatemala 1954), exploring the concept of plant-thinking as a form of revolutionary politics in the context of plantation societies. With the help of authors like Edouard Glissant, Michael Marder, Michael Taussig, Frantz Fanon, Donna Haraway, and Anna Tsing, we'll analyze four novels and a compilation of short theoretical texts on diverse topics related to plantation literature, including racism, colonialism, imperialism, and the history of United Fruit. As we progress, we'll broaden our focus to consider how these early plant-based revolutionary ideas can be applied to our current era of ecological crisis, or the "plantationocene" as defined by scholars like Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing. Alongside our readings, we'll also watch films by Manthia Diawara, whose work explores themes of colonialism, identity, and representation in the context of the African diaspora. Join us for an exciting and thought-provoking journey through the history and literature of plantation societies, and discover how they can inform our understanding of today's world. By the end of this course, you'll have a deeper appreciation for the power of literature to inspire social change, and a new set of tools for navigating our complex, interconnected world.

Professor Claire Song

*also open to precollege students

It is a common scene today to speak to an intelligent machine, assuming that it is capable of some kind of response and understanding. What are the revolutions and evolutions of our understanding of language that predate and inspire Siri or Alexa? Language is often seen as a distinctive attribute of human beings, but at the same time, there have always been attempts to transcribe, formalize, and automate language. Recall Turing’s famous Immitation Game in 1950, where he replaces the question of whether machines can think with the test for the digital computer to pretend as human, in the mode of typed communication where it can “brag.” With ever evolving Large Language Models, with machines bragging, “truth” is increasingly indistinguishable from misinformation, but we shall also look at how human expression can be enhanced or even enabled by such technology. In Plato’s Phaedrus, we will see how writing was seen as an alienating technology, rather than a mode of communication innate to humankind. Can some kind of automaticity already be within writing, and are automaticity and creativity not always in contradiction? We shall investigate conceptions of language widely in philosophy of language, phenomenology, translation theory, structuralism and semiotics, as well as in cybernetics and artificial intelligence research, and ask what is language, and what are the units and structures of language? How can digital systems and artificial networks be configured to represent and reproduce meaning?  With the sweeping success of ChatGPT, the foreseeable normalization of machines writing in our stead requires us to redefine the future of work, to reevaluate our strategies and pedagogies, and to renew our understanding of our technical condition. Through close reading of texts, discussions and writing assignments, we shall explore what composes meaningful communication and effective writing for us. We will also collectively examine machine-generated texts, and see where critical thinking remains essential.