Past Courses
Spring 2026 Courses
Instructor: Richard Wang
This course features an interdisciplinary survey of Chinese civilization and culture. It introduces China’s return to the status of world power, carefully investigates how this return is connected to China’s cultural past, and actively questions the notions of “China” and “culture” as they are defined by the modern fields of sinology and cultural studies. By investigating and comparing different regions and aspects of China’s past and present, from diverse disciplinary perspectives, and using both primary and secondary sources, students will develop and demonstrate knowledge of the diverse traditions, institutions, texts, and practices that have shaped “Chinese culture” over time.
Instructor: Florin Curta
Late Antiquity is a period in history that has attracted much attention recently. In part, that is because of an old, 19th-century preoccupation with demarcating the clear chronological boundaries between Antiquity and the Middle Ages. An older generation of historians used to believe that once the Western Roman Empire disappeared in 476, the medieval world began. By now, scholarly opinions have shifted towards the model of a “transformation of the Roman world,” gradually leading to a new type of society, with different values and rules. Since that transformation took a long time, from ca. 300 to ca. 600, a new name was chosen to describe that period-Late Antiquity to cover the history of the Old World “between Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad,” as Peter Brown put it half-a-century ago in the subtitle of his famous book (the title of which was the inspiration for the subtitle of this course). The course consists of a survey of all aspects of the transformation, from political developments in the Late Roman Empire to the economic and social changes, both inside and outside the empire that marked Late Antiquity. Particular emphasis will be placed on the role of religion, especially the rise of Christianity, and the fundamental innovations in art and architecture epitomized by the great church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.
Instructor: Florin Curta
The Middle Ages were a formative period in the history of France. Irrespective of whether people in the 10th or 11th centuries thought of their land(s) as France, France existed, as did the political obligations to the French king. There has been a recent scholarly effort to dismantle the idea that France existed as such at an early date. Some have dismissed the idea as the product of the 19th-century nationalism, others have focused on regions of France, in an attempt to show how different various parts of the future France were in relation to each other. However, France was clearly a political concept (at the very least) during the reign of Louis VII. Louis’s title nonetheless still made reference to the Franks, for he was a rex Francorum. Suger, who wrote a biography of the king’s father, called the country regnum Franciae, the kingdom of France. Territory, not ethnicity was what mattered in the 12th century. A clear distinction between the French and the other peoples of Europe came with the Second Crusade, in which there was an opportunity to meet Germans in large numbers, who, though still perceived as Franci, were not French. With Breton, Basque, and Flemish pushed to the peripheries, a sense of linguistic commonality (if not yet uniformity) is expressed in the literary explosion of the 12th century. To look back from that century means therefore to understand how the basic elements of Frankish history became French. To look forward for another century or so, is to see how France began to be built.
This course is designed as a chronological and topical introduction to the history of medieval France, from the abandonment of the Roman province of Gaul to the beginning of the Hundred Years War. Since this is a survey, it is impossible to cover everything. Instead, the course will offer a selection of representative topics from a much larger possible list. We will examine some of the key political, economic, and social developments that had historical significance, the growth of the Church and its relation to the State, and the growth of urban culture in medieval France. Anyone with enough curiosity and desire to learn is welcome.
Instructor: Christopher Smith
Surveys Japanese literature of the Early Modern period (also called the Edo period), 1600-1868. Introduces and analyzes historically significant, foundational works of Early Modern Japanese literature and theater. Explores the history of the period and the development of print technologies and new genres and introduces critical aesthetic and cultural concepts.
Instructor: Sarra Tlili
What would happen if humans were dragged into court by animals? This is precisely what the medieval fable The Case of the Animals versus Man in the Court of the King of the Jinn imagines. And what if dogs turned out to be better than humans? The Book of the Superiority of Dogs over Many of Those Who Wear Clothes makes exactly that claim. We’ll also explore animal themes in scriptural sources and read Ibrahim al-Koni’s modern novel The Bleeding of the Stone, where desert creatures confront human greed. From cosmic comedy to ecological parable, this course explores Arabic and Islamic texts where animals are never just background characters but key players in history and imagination. challenging human-centered assumptions and asking whether humans are truly the stars of the show in the cosmic theater.
Instructor: Richard Wang
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
Summer B 2025 Course
This Quest course counts for MEMS Credit
Instructor: Florin Curta
Who are you? Where are you from? The dynamics of migration have shaped identity throughout human history. Migrations change how we consider ourselves, how we view others, and how we think about our positions in the world. As we move through time and space, our identities
transform, becoming trajectories in their own right. Most contemporary analysis of migration and identity, however, lacks historical depth. In order to make better sense of our globalized present, this course presents a comparative assessment of migration around the world since the Middle Ages. Rather than focusing on a discrete region, the course emphasizes a series of case studies. These include: the Great Migration of Late Antiquity, the deliberate and forced mobility of the Armenians, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, displacement in Europe after World War I, migration to the United States. With each case, we will consider a series of questions: Why do people migrate? How have migrations affected the construction of personal, social, cultural, and ethnic identities? How have past migrations shaped our understandings of belonging, nation, and home? We will engage these questions from multidisciplinary perspectives and explore the theoretical, historical, psychological, and sociological dynamics of migration and identity. In addition to lectures and discussions, students will analyze memoirs, letters, maps, paintings, oral histories, and artifacts. Students will also participate in the faculty-student “workshops” on digital mapping, oral history, and analytical writing. In doing so, students will develop a deeper understanding of the connections between migration and identity, and of the complexities that lie behind two seemingly simple questions: Who are you? Where are you from?
Fall 2025 Courses
This course counts for MEMS Credit
Instructor: Thomas Vozar
This multidisciplinary course explores Great Books written in the early modern West, between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. These core texts raise questions that have occupied Western societies ever since. What is the nature of modern political communities? What should
be the role of religion in public life? What are our duties to our country and our family? What is citizenship meant to be in the modern world? Students will explore these questions and others through careful study of some of the great works of literature, art, history, philosophy and politics from the early modern West. Authors to be considered include Machiavelli, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Milton, Locke, Swift, Hume, Rousseau, Voltaire, Gibbon, Franklin, among others.
Instructor: Valerie Hampton
Instructor: Ben Guyer
Instructor: Will Hasty and Mark Law
In this online course, you will learn how technological innovations and basic physical principles underlying them (e.g., force, work, and energy) in the cultural domains of power generation, agriculture, sacred spaces, warfare, and textiles interact with belief- and value systems to shape the European Middle Ages.
Instructor: Yehoshua Ecker
Grateful spirits, vengeful ghosts, monstrous creatures, and marvelous objects and phenomena—stories of such oddities abound in Chinese literature. Perhaps best represented in medieval (ca. 220- ca. 960 CE) “chronicles of the strange” (zhiguai 志怪) and “transmissions of marvels” (chuanqi 傳奇), these tales have developed and changed through time and have greatly contributed to the development of Chinese fiction and fantasy. This course introduces students to traditional Chinese tales of the strange and primary sources that contributed to their development. We will also consider cross-cultural literary theories of the fantastic and uncanny, as well as interdisciplinary literary, discourse, and narrative theories. Early Chinese tales of the strange cannot be fully understood without knowledge of the worldviews in which they were conceived, composed, and initially circulated and read. As such, three major medieval Chinese cosmologies or worldviews informing these tales will be introduced and questioned to better situate accounts of anomalies in their own cultural contexts.
Instructor: Richard Wang
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.
Instructor: Florin Curta
Instructor: Staff
In Fall 2025, this course will focus on the literature and culture of medieval France. This course will be taught in English.
Instructor: Rori Bloom
In this class, we will survey the cultural history of France (important events and people but also literature, art, and ideas) with a focus on the 17th through 20th centuries. Along with readings from our textbook and from other primary and secondary sources, students will explore websites, listen to podcasts, and watch films related to the periods under study. As well, students will participate in a “Reacting to the Past” role-playing game in class, where we act out an historical conflict, with students representing various historical figures. The goal of this course is to give students a general knowledge of French history and possibly to serve as a foundation for future coursework, study abroad, or travel to France. This course will be taught in French.
Instructor: Matthieu Felt
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: Yehoshua Ecker
A survey of the history of Jews in Muslim societies from the Muslim conquests of the 7th century to the dispersions and transformations of the 20th century. The Arab-Muslim conquests brought most Jews in the world under one political entity. This reality has drastically altered in the past 100 years. This survey of about 1,400 years offers an overview of a crucial period in Jewish history. It uses the political history and chronology of the Muslim world as a scaffold for outlining and contextualizing the Jewish experience within this world, and the impact of this experience on Jews beyond it.
Instructor: Yehoshua Ecker
The Ottoman Turks conquered the region later known as modern Palestine (including Jerusalem) in 1516 and ruled it for four centuries. What was Palestine like under Ottoman rule? This course explores decentralized Ottoman governance, Middle Eastern and European interventions, and also the ways in which Muslims, Christians and Jews lived and interacted through the early twentieth century, when Palestine became one of the world’s most contested places.
Spring 2025 Courses
Instructor: Sarra Tlili
This course examines the Qur’an from a literary perspective. After a brief historical overview, we will focus on the style and themes of the Qur’an, considering how this text generates meaning and creates literary impact. The course is divided into four main units:
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- History: This section explores the historical context in which the Qur’an emerged, its textual evolution, and its use as a source of historical information.
- Translation and Interpretation: This unit examines whether and to what extent the Qur’an is translatable and reviews various interpretative approaches to it.
- Style and Structure: Here, we will analyze some of the Qur’an’s stylistic features and explore its structure at the verse and sura levels.
- Themes: This section discusses the major themes of the Qur’an, as well as themes of special relevance to modern audiences.
Instructor: Richard Wang
An overview of Chinese martial arts fiction from earliest times to the present day. Chinese martial arts is not just part of traditional Chinese culture. It has had a profound impact on modern world. In physical exercises, meditation and self-cultivation, entertainment, and the Olympic Games, martial arts plays a significant role. Martial arts films, TV series, and computer games all feature martial arts sagas and their famous characters. As the foundation of this global cultural phenomenon, the Chinese martial arts fiction deserves our reading, understanding, analysis, and entertainment. This course explores the historical and cultural stimuli that led to martial arts, recorded and represented later as martial arts narratives. The focus will be on the close-reading of literary narratives, but will also include discussion of the significance of these works against their broader historical and social background. Topics to be discussed: the literary pleasure of watching violence, the relationship between violence and the law, gender ambiguity of the woman warrior, the imperial and (trans)national order of martial arts narrative, and the moral and physical economy of vengeance. In addition, it touches upon Chinese religion and traditional medicine in addition to general culture. The course is also supported by images of martial arts movies.
Instructor: Florin Curta
Instructor: Nina Caputo
This class will examine the shifting terrain of historical and theological conceptions of war and holy war in the Middle Ages. The material is divided into four distinct sections: theological foundations, early medieval conceptions of war and community, the Crusades, and changes in the high and late Middle Ages. How did leaders and theologians talk about and mitigate war in the name of Christianity? When and under what circumstances was it deemed right or just to fight?
Instructor: Florin Curta
Instructor: Yehoshua Ecker
The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, by Elias Habesci, published in English translation in 1784, is an 18th century country survey claiming to be more interesting and entertaining than the competition. It is an irreverent book, full of historical fact and possibly fiction, gossip and anecdotes, written by a shady and obscure character, called an assassin and a fraud. This was one
of the ways English readers were exposed to Ottoman realities, history, customs and opinions. It serves as an introduction to the Ottoman world, to the way it was viewed and studied by others, and to the craft and practices of writing large scale survey projects that try to describe everything you need to know. (One credit)
Instructor: Valerie Hampton
Instructor: Ben Guyer
Instructor: Élie Pinta
Beginning with an overview of Vikings and the Viking Age, we will concentrate on the movements of people and the shared heritage and culture that connected them. Specific examples of Norse everyday activities and interactions with their environments will take us from modern-day Russia to the North American shores. We will also explore several craft activities and techniques relying on wood use or textiles. Different aspects of the Norse economy will be tackled, including agropastoralism and hunting practices. A final element of the class will cover the interactions between Vikings/Norse and other populations living at the edge of their world.
Fall 2024 Courses
Instructors: Mark Law, with Will Hasty and Mary Watt
In this online course, you will learn how technological innovations and basic physical principles underlying them (e.g., force, work, and energy) in the cultural domains of power generation, agriculture, sacred spaces, warfare, and textiles interact with belief- and value systems to shape the European Middle Ages. (H, P, and N pending)
Instructor: Richard Wang, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Pre-modern Chinese narrative from its philosophical and historical origins to the fiction at the turn of the 20th century. Emphasizes the 16th and 17th centuries when Chinese vernacular fiction flourished. (H and N)
Instructor: Mary Watt, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Semester-long, in-depth examination of Dante Alighieri’s text, Inferno, with the support of a variety of visual materials and digital resources devoted to Dante and his world. Special attention paid to the political, historical, and religious context in which Dante wrote. Taught in Italian.
Prerequisite: ITA 3420 or ITA 3500 or ITA 3564 or ITW 3100 or ITW 3101 or instructor permission.
Instructor: Florin Curta, Department of History
Instructor: Valerie Hampton
Instructor: Ben Guyer
Instructor: Mattieu Felt, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
An investigation of literary texts from the 8th through the 17th centuries presented within the framework of Western literary and feminist criticism.
Prerequisite: Critical Tracking semester 2 or greater.
Instructor: Yehoshua Ecker, Center for Jewish Studies
A survey of the history of Jews in Muslim societies from the Muslim conquests of the 7th century to the dispersions and transformations of the 20th century. The ArabMuslim conquests brought most Jews in the world under one political entity. This reality has drastically altered in the past 100 years. This survey of about 1,400 years offers an overview of a crucial period in Jewish history. It uses the political history and chronology of the Muslim world as a scaffold for outlining and contextualizing the Jewish experience within this world, and the impact of this experience on Jews beyond it.
Instructor: Yehoshua Ecker, Center for Jewish Studies
The Ottoman Turks conquered the region later known as modern Palestine (including Jerusalem) in 1516 and ruled it for four centuries. What was Palestine like under Ottoman rule? This course
explores decentralized Ottoman governance, Middle Eastern and European interventions, and also the ways in which Muslims, Christians and Jews lived and interacted through the early twentieth century, when Palestine became one of the world’s most contested places.
Spring 2024 Courses
Instructor: Valerie Hampton, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
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/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
Attribute: General Education – Humanities (H), General Education – International (N)
Instructor: Valerie Hampton vhampton@ufl.edu
Asynchronous online course description: https://ufl.instructure.com/courses/339981
Instructor: Yehoshua Ecker yehoshua.ecker@ufl.edu
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.
Instructor: Yehoshua Ecker yehoshua.ecker@ufl.edu
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.
Instructor: Rori Bloom ribloom@ufl.edu
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.
Instructor: Max Deardorff deardorff.max@ufl.edu
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.
Instructor: Richard Wang rwang1@ufl.edu
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.
Instructor: Yehoshua Ecker yehoshua.ecker@ufl.edu
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.
Instructor: Florin Curta fcurta@ufl.edu
https://people.clas.ufl.edu/fcurta/holy-war-in-the-middle-ages/