Spring 2024 Courses
Asynchronous online course description:
https://ufl.instructure.com/courses/339981
Instructor: Will Hasty, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Asynchronous online course description:
https://ufl.instructure.com/courses/339982
Instructor: Max Skjönsberg, Hamilton Center
Instructor: Florin Curta, Department of History
https://people.clas.ufl.edu/fcurta/courses/medieval-archaeology/
https://people.clas.ufl.edu/fcurta/medieval-italy/
Instructor: Yehoshua Ecker, Center for Jewish Studies
The local implications of the political and technological transitions of the modern world, the transformations in the Ottoman, Middle Eastern and Jewish spheres, European imperial and religious rivalries, and the ebbing of regional and national conflicts. This period is framed by the Ottoman Empire’s wars with competing European powers between 1768 and 1918, its cumulative concessions and dependencies. efforts to reform, and accelerated integration in European and global systems and developments
Instructor: Yehoshua Ecker, Center for Jewish Studies
The transitions and restructuring of the Jewish community of the Ottoman capital, the largest and one of the most influential in the Jewish world, through the upheavals, transformations, reforms, and imperial growth and demise of the long 19th century.
Instructor: Yehoshua Ecker, Center for Jewish Studies
Tracing the building blocks of personal and communal remembrance of the once largest ethnoreligious group in the city, through textual and visual materials, following the dispersal of Baghdadi Jews in the 20th century, particularly the mass departure and traumatic relocation after 1948.
Instructor: Mattieu Felt, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Explores the historical and cultural stimuli that led to war, recorded later as war narratives. Supported by images of architecture, narrative picture scrolls, and extant military accoutrements.
Instructor: Mary Watt, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Covers Italian poetry, literature, and images of obsessive, possessive, and romantic love from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. As early modern artists and writers struggled to understand how love could seem both demonic and divine, they looked to bawdy folklore, biblical imagery, and the language of sickness and health to describe an emotion that could drive lovers to distraction and transform them into wholly irrational beings.
Instructor: Sarra Tlili, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
This course explores the Qur’an from a literary standpoint. After a brief historical overview, we will focus on the style and themes of the Qur’an to consider how this text generates meaning and produces literary effect. The course consists of four major units: 1) History: This section explores the historical context where the Qur’an emerged, the Qur’an’s textual evolution, and the use of the Qur’an as a source of historical information; 2) Translation and interpretation: This section asks whether and to what extent the Qur’an is translatable and surveys some interpretative approaches to it; 3) Style and structure: This section explores some of the stylistic features of the Qur’an and studies its structure at the verse and sura levels; and 4) Themes: This section explores the major themes of the Qur’an and some of the themes that are of special interest to modern audiences. Approaches the Qur’an from a literary standpoint by examining its history, structure, style, major themes, and impact on Arabic literature, Islamic thought, and Muslim culture. Prerequisite: ARA 1131 or ABT 3500 or REL 2000 or REL 2362 or REL 4361 or senior standing.
Instructor: Richard Wang, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Explores the intellectual and social life of traditional China through the 18th century epic novel, Story of the Stone. Also studies interpretive theories of the novel, both Chinese and Western. All readings are in English. Prerequisite: CHI 3500 or CHT 3110, or instructor permission.
Fall 2023 Courses
Instructor: Valerie Hampton vhampton@ufl.edu
Asynchronous online course description: https://ufl.instructure.com/courses/339981
Credit Hours: 3
Residential section number: 1062 | UF Online section number: 2F59 | Innovation Academy section number: 2F49
Online
Narrating trouble and travel in the early modern information age, Jews and former Jews wrote about their life experiences in a variety of forms. We will discuss different autobiographical texts written throughout the Jewish world in what is loosely termed the Early Modern period, when communication and record keeping increased, and printing began to impact the perceptions of individual and society, and until the dawn of the modern age of industrialization, long distance transportation networks and mass communications, which changed the place of groups and individuals in society. Jewish memoirs, diaries, travelogues, letters, and published autobiographies, as well as legal statements, petitions, and other official documents reflect rapidly changing times, new experiences, and the ways they affected individual lives. Jewish forms and traditions of life writing, ego documents and autobiographical texts, as historical sources and as literary products, may challenge established approaches and invite new ways of interpretation.
Credit Hours: 3
Section number: 08JS
Late Ottoman and British Palestine as it is revealed in footage from the first 50 years of motion pictures. The images from Palestine captured hallowed landscapes and medieval buildings, and the interplay of traditional society with new fashions and technologies. Replacing and complementing earlier forms of visual representation, they catered to the curiosity of distant viewers and still offer glimpses of a bygone past to modern viewers. With a mix of archeological and ancient sites, medieval Byzantine and Crusader edifices, historical reconstructions, pilgrimage routes, modes of transportation and street scenes, the footage created in Palestine captured wartime and peacetime, tradition and change, past and present, state visits, and the impact of political and social realities as they transformed the area.
Credit Hours: 3
Section number: 09JS
In 1697, Charles Perrault published the stories of Cinderella, Puss in boots, and Sleeping Beauty, but his little book of tales was part of a larger movement of fairy tale writing. In this course, we will read 17th century tales by Perrault, d’Aulnoy, Murat and their contemporaries, and then turn to 20th century rewritings of fairy tales as well as film versions by Cocteau, Demy, and Disney. Throughout the course, secondary readings (by Propp, Bettelheim, Darnton, Harries, and others) will help us understand the tales from formalist, psychoanalytical, historical, and feminist perspectives. This course will be taught in English, but I will also provide links to original French versions of primary texts for those who prefer to read them that way.
Credit Hours: 3
Section number: FRX7
Covers Spanish history from 1469-1716. During that period, the monarchy rose from regional importance to the world’s greatest empire on a global scale, before settling into a long decline in the second half of the seventeenth century.
Credit Hours: 3
Section number: 10JS
This course is designed to explore the religious culture, cultural history and literary expression of traditional China through a 100-chapter novel known as Journey to the West, or Monkey. Based on the famous Tang Buddhist monk Xuanzang’s (596-664) historical pilgrimage to India, and encompassed the story cycle of the journey to the west developed in a millennia, the novel of the Ming dynasty demonstrates its rich texture of religious and literary themes, sentiments, and assumptions in this novel, a work considered one of the masterpieces of traditional Chinese fiction, and the finest supernatural novel. The Journey’s scope includes a physical journey, a heroic adventure, a religious mission, and a process of self-cultivation, through the encounters between the pilgrims, mainly the well-known character Monkey who is Xuanzang’s chief disciple and guardian, and various monsters. This novel has an unsurpassingly penetrating impact on Chinese cultural history and society. It represents the maturity of the novel, and most literary genres in its pages. While basically a supernatural novel, it also describes social customs and daily life of different regions of China. More than any other traditional Chinese narratives, the Journey presents concerns and themes directly related to Chinese religious, intellectual and cultural history, in addition to literary tradition.
Credit Hours: 3
Section number: 222X
The course offers a hands-on exploration of local history as it is practiced and conceived in the Jewish context. “Local history” is a rather wide concept, that encompasses many options for research. It can be located within a group of historical approaches and methodologies that fall under a variety of labels, such as community studies, micro-history, prosopographical studies, biographical collections, regional history, family history, genealogy, urban history, oral history, projects of commemoration, and the general label “public history”. It can also be understood to contrast and complement projects of national history, world or global history.
The course will explore the place of local history in Jewish studies, and its relationship to other historiographical traditions. It will examine methods, products, ways of presentation, questions and sources. The readings will include excerpts from local histories and many kinds of primary sources. The weekly and final assignments will be geared towards making contributions to the study of local Jewish history, with focus on specific regions and places.
Credit Hours: 3
Section number: 10JS
https://people.clas.ufl.edu/fcurta/holy-war-in-the-middle-ages/
Credit Hours: 3
Section number: HIS3
https://people.clas.ufl.edu/fcurta/history-research-reminar-catastrophes-in-the-middle-ages/
Credit Hours: 3
Section number: HIS2