Here be the current term's graduate-level MEMS courses with descriptions. Additional 400-level courses may be found via the undergrad/current courses links.
MEMS Graduate Courses Fall 2025
MEMS 611 | Plato Latinus | Sara L Ahbel-Rappe
In this course, we survey the receptions of Plato in Latin from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance, focusing on major writers whose creative adaptations of Plato’s dialogues allowed them to become soaring authors in their own right. This survey takes us through over one thousand years of literary experimentation, from North Africa to Florence and from Macrobius and Martinanus Capella to Marsilio Ficino and beyond. The class is designed to appeal to anyone who wants to gain a sense of one intellectual arc of the European tradition, while appreciating the diversity and aesthetic influences of Plato Latinus.
HISTART 646 | Problems in Medieval Art | Achim Timmermann
This seminar offers a multi-faceted investigation of the medieval and early modern city, actual and ideal. We will not only study given cities in Europe and the Levant as functioning social spaces but also consider the city as a concept that fed the popular and literary imagination. In part, the course will be historical and archaeological. The expansion of urban centers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries will be situated within larger trajectories, and we will study both new foundations and sites with deep and remembered pasts, all the while making an effort to reconstruct the character and quality of urban life. Another aspect of the course will involve analysis of texts and images: descriptions and depictions of cities (past and present), cartographic representations, and literary evocations of real and fictional urban environments. Cities under discussion will be many, including Constantinople, Rome, Jerusalem, Paris, London, Prague, Florence, Lü beck, and Nuremberg. Students from the widest possible range of fields are encouraged to participate. It is expected that research projects will be diverse in terms of chronology, geography, theme, and approach.
HISTORY 592 | Japan to 1700: Origin Myth to Shogun Dynasty | Hitomi Tonomura
This course covers the complex and intriguing history of the Japanese archipelago from about 300 BCE to 1700 CE. You might have wondered how the Sun Goddess became the ancestral deity of today’s tenno (imperial family); if the samurai really flaunted bushido and committed seppuku; or if today’s manga dates back in style to a 12th century scroll of wrestling animals; and, finally, if there is any truth to the TV drama, “Shogun.” We consider these and other questions by examining patterns of transformation along the twin axes of time and theme.
We read translated primary sources, such as tales, chronicles, diaries, and documents, and a scroll intimately narrated by a samurai who fought against the Mongols. Films and video clips will help expand our visual understanding of the intricacies of the history. Scholarly essays encourage the reader to think analytically and evaluate our own perception of how history can be written and presented. These materials should show the diversity of ideas and practices, different from the universalistic assumptions about the “Japanese traditions,” many of which were invented in the 19th century partly to meet the challenge from the West. Students will come to appreciate Japanese history beneath the veneer of fuzzy robots, ramen, and Toto toilets.
SPANISH 855/COMPLIT 780 | Special Topics Seminar: Translation and Anxiety | Ryan Szpiech
Translation and Anxiety: This seminar will explore translation as a problematic, anxiety-producing practice, both from a theoretical perspective and through concrete historical examples. We will begin by considering the issues at play in translation that might produce uncertainty or anxiety — the loss or preservation of meaning, beauty, authenticity, identity, truth, or power. We will consider the act of translation as a hermeneutic process that negotiates, expands, or creates meaning, and also from a post-structural perspective as an act of the destabilization of meaning and the undermining of signification itself. We will then look at a few historical cases of translation as it intersected with anxiety (about authorship, bloodlines, orthodoxy, revelation, kingship, gender, or empire) possibly including the polemics surrounding the translation of the Bible (Jerome and Augustine), polemics over the translation of the Qur’an and the spread of Islam, the translation projects of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Castile (surrounding the court of king Alfonso X), translation and religious power (the 13th century to the 17th centuries), the birth and growth of vernacular European literatures in the later middle Ages (Dante’s Italy, Alfonso’s Castile), translation in the context of imperial expansion in the Americas, and the birth of fiction (Cervantes).
