Fall 2024 Courses

• Instructor: James Collins
• Variable Meeting Times
• EURO 30102, CRN 17588

The course consists of two overview lectures, attendance at the four Nanovic film screenings in the Browning Cinema, and participation in the discussions of each film that take place immediately after the screenings in the Browning Cinema co-hosted by Professor Jim Collins and another Nanovic Fellow who is a specialist in that national culture or has research expertise in the issues raised by the Film screenings:

Overview Lectures:
Friday, October 11 9:30-10:30am, Jenkins Nanovic Hall B062
Friday, October 18 9:30-10:30am, Jenkins Nanovic Hall B062

Film Screenings:
October 30 7:30 Screening/Discussion in Browning Cinema
November 6 7:30 Screening/Discussion in Browning Cinema
November 13 7:30 Screening/Discussion in Browning Cinema
November 20 7:30 Screening/ Discussion in Browning Cinema

• Instructor: Tobias Boes
• Tuesday and Thursday 11:00 am - 12:15 pm
• EURO 33000, CRN 15483

The idea of “Europe” has been contested ever since the ancient Greeks first came up with the term more than two thousand years ago. Over the course of the past two centuries, however, philosophers, poets, and politicians have articulated visions for a united (or at least more closely integrated) Europe with ever-increasing force and frequency. Politically, this trajectory culminated in the creation of the European Union in the waning years of the twentieth century. But what is the basis for a shared European identity? Is it race? Religion? National culture? Historical experience? Who gets to be European, and who has to stand apart, since any group needs an “other” against which it can define itself? And why has true integration proven so elusive?

In this writing-intensive seminar, we will investigate these questions through readings drawn from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Johny Pitts, and many others. Simultaneously, students will learn how to conceptualize, draft, revise, and peer critique research papers on topics in European Studies and the humanities more generally.

• Instructor: Marc Jacob
• Tuesday and Thursday 9:30 - 10:45 am
• EURO 30004, CRN 19436

This course requires an application to the Nanovic Institute: Due April 10, 2024.

Held each year in the fall, this course introduces students to the basic principles of research methods in European Studies. As the nebulous field of “European Studies” spans disciplines in the humanities and social sciences (and beyond), this course will be taught through a combination of introductory lectures and hands-on research workshops led by partners throughout campus (e.g., University Archives, Raclin-Murphy Museum of Art, Rare Books and Special Collections, Navari Center for Digital Scholarship, Nanovic Faculty Fellows, etc.). The instruction and workshops will be grounded in case studies from European Studies spanning a wide variety of disciplines, and students will apply this knowledge in practice during an immersive group research project in Europe over fall break (location and research topic to rotate each year). Following this immersive group research experience, the second half of the course will introduce students to Nanovic’s five research priorities and provide inspiration as they begin to develop their own research interests.

• Instructor: Heather Hyde Minor
• Monday and Wednesday 11:00-12:15pm
• EURO 20540, ARHI 20540, CRN 20498

In this class, we will explore the urban topography of the city of Rome from the first century BC to the year 2000 AD, or roughly the period from the emperor Augustus to the projects by Richard Meier, Zaha Hadid, and others to celebrate the Jubilee at the end of the second millennium. In our discussion of how buildings shape and are shaped to form the city, we will consider contemporary drawings, prints, texts, maps, and a range of other evidence. Special focus will be placed on critical strategies for understanding urban sites. In addition to the city of Rome, this course will focus on developing your skills as critical readers and writers.

• Instructor: Heather Hyde Minor
• Monday and Wednesday 2:00-3:15pm
• EURO 30375, ARHI 30375, CRN 20500

This class examines architecture and urban planning in one of Europe's most dynamic eras. During that time, capital cities like Paris, London, St. Petersburg, and Madrid were created. Elites used palaces, country houses, and gardens to project their power and status. Astounding churches and monasteries were created to heighten the intensity of religious experience. Architecture in the form of theaters and observatories, libraries, and universities, served the secular activities of the urban public.

• Instructor: Katie Jarvis
• Tuesday and Thursday 11:00-12:15pm
• EURO 30450, HIST 30450, CRN 20501

Between 1643 and 1789, France underwent one of the most pivotal national transitions in modern European history. In the second half of the seventeenth century, Louis XIV reigned as the most powerful divine right monarch on the continent. He marshaled religious ideology, set cultural standards, pursued economic projects, and waged wars to consolidate his authority over the French and foreign powers alike. Yet, by the late eighteenth century, Louis XVI's crumbling crown gave way to the Revolution. The French ultimately dethroned the king and established a republic. Our class will explore how the French negotiated this tumultuous trajectory from subjects to citizens. We will analyze three main themes over the course of the Old Regime. First, we will wrestle with issues of modern state building including administrative reform, military campaigns, financial ventures, and expansion in the New World. Second, we will study the relationship among politics, culture, and religion as the French vacillated between critique and reform. Finally, we will probe the origins of the French Revolution. These sparks ranged from Enlightenment debates over contract theory and social privilege to the stresses of everyday life including taxes and food shortages. We will close as the revolutionaries imagined nascent citizenship on the eve of the republic. In sum, this course will ask: how did European democracy find its roots in an absolute monarchy? And how did generations of French work out this transition through their everyday lives?

• Instructor: Arpi Movsesian
• Monday and Wednesday 11:00-12:15pm
• EURO 33102, RU 33102, CRN 19460

Armenia, one of the oldest countries on the Silk Road and the first nation to adopt Christianity as a state religion, possesses a rich literary and cultural heritage in which one finds localized variants of devices, themes, and, broadly speaking, cross-cultural tropes. Armenia’s geographic location has also posed a hindrance to its self-determination: Arab, Persian, Ottoman, and Russian empires have shaped, reformulated, and at times suppressed literary and cultural traditions. Like the best writers of any nation, the Armenian greats have concentrated their efforts on universal themes and concepts such as suffering and strength, death and determination, sadness and joy, proving again and again that literature, like the human self it often takes as its subject, is not sui generis. In this course, we will examine Armenian literary works in their historical, intercultural, and colonial contexts, tracing these patterns through prose and verse. In this course, students will cultivate skills in close reading, critical thinking, and writing through various assignments that target these areas of growth. The written assignments in this course will help students exercise their ability to advance an argument based on textual evidence in writing and become astute interpreters of ideas presented in the assigned texts. Course discussions, in-class workshops meant to improve argumentative writing, and critical essays (expository, creative, and research) will familiarize students with literary theory and critical tools useful for the analysis of literary works and cultural elements. Moreover, specific assignments in this course will allow students to approach the topics at hand less conventionally and more creatively through art, music, or other media, approaching each text comparatively and interdisciplinarily to broaden students’ horizons in order to understand other cultures in a wider context.

• Instructor: Rory Rapple
• Tuesday and Thursday 12:30-1:45
• EURO 30410, HIST 30410, CRN 20502

The period from 1485 to 1603, often feted as something of a 'Golden Age' for England, saw that country undergo serious changes that challenged the traditional ways in which the nation conceived of itself. These included the break from Rome, the loss of England's foothold in France, and the unprecedented experience of monarchical rule by women. Each of these challenges demanded creative political responses and apologetic strategies harnessing intellectual resources from classical, Biblical, legal, chivalric and ecclesiastical sources. This course will examine these developments. It will also look at how the English, emerging from under the shadow of the internecine dynastic warfare of the fifteenth century, sought to preserve political stability and ensure a balance between continuity and change, and, furthermore, how individuals could use these unique circumstances to their own advantage.

• Instructor: Sean Griffin
• Tuesday and Thursday 2:00-3:15pm
• EURO 33103, RU 33103, CRN 19461

In this interdisciplinary course, students will trace the development of Christian theology and culture in Eastern Europe—from the baptism of Rus in 988 to the classic novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and from the liturgical theology of Alexander Schmemann to the religious cinema of Putin’s Russia. Throughout the course, students will grapple with the “accursed questions” that have long defined Russian religious thought, while also examining the diverse and divergent images of Christ put forward by Russia’s greatest theologians, artists, philosophers, and writers.

• Instructor: Cliona Ni Riordain
• Tuesday and Thursday 11-12:15
• EURO 30128, IRLL 30128, CRN 22086

This course will examine Irish poetry, written both in Irish and English, through the prism of protest. It will explore the public role occupied by the poet in Ireland and the concurrent anxieties and responsibilities felt by the poets who have occupied that role. The course will examine the formal prosodic dimensions of the poems and students will also learn about the historical circumstances in which the poems were produced. The course will include the work of WB Yeats, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Seamus Heaney, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Paula Meehan, Liam Ó Muirthile, Michael O’Loughlin, Aifric MacAodha and Thomas McCarthy.

• Instructor: Sarah McKibben
• Tuesday and Thursday 9:30am- 10:45am
• EURO 30314, IRLL 30314, CRN 17512

A cliché, a painful truth, an old story, a new one—this course explores alcohol and alcoholism in Irish literature, Irish society and Irishness, examining how alcohol infuses the stories Irish people tell and those told about them, and asking what happens if we take alcohol(ism) seriously as a framework and topic of analysis. We will think about the romance and conviviality of drink and drinking, pubs and wakes and more; and counterposed crusades against drinking (by Father Mathew and others), as well as the unromantic and destructive dimension so central to recent writing. We will think about alcohol(ism) in relation to political authority and nationalism, as well as in relation to colonial resistance, recalcitrance and recovery. We will ask how this "inheritance" travels into Irish America, and even to this campus, asking what legacies are being lived out, and why, and what we make of that. The course will feature a diverse set of texts across a span of Irish literary tradition, including medieval and contemporary, fiction and memoir, poetry and prose, verbal, visual and musical media. On the way students will work on their speaking, analytical and writing skills. Course work will include short writing assignments and analytical papers, a presentation, and a creative assignment.

• Instructors: Bill Donahue and Mark Kettler
• Monday and Wednesday 2:00 pm - 2:50 pm
• EURO 20410, CRN 19458, GE 20410 / GE 22410

A vampire stalks you through a dark tunnel. A mad scientist gives human form to an android. Regimented masses march beneath monumental swastikas. Some of the most enduring images of the twentieth century were crafted by German filmmakers. They filmed in the shadow of the First World War, in the midst of economic turmoil, in the service of the Nazi dictatorship, and in a Germany divided by the Cold War. They used cinema to grapple with the legacies of military defeat, to articulate their anxieties about industrial modernity, to envision utopian futures, to justify the murder of millions, and to come to terms with these monstrous crimes.

This course will integrate the disciplinary insights of history and film studies to examine how Germans confronted the upheavals and traumas associated with modernity, the utopian fantasies and cataclysmic horrors of the twentieth-century. Together, the class will pursue three major objectives. First, students will learn about the most important events and developments of modern German history. They will examine how shifting economic, cultural, and political realities shaped the German film industry, and how filmmakers used their work to understand and intervene in their social, political, and cultural issues of their day.

Second, students will learn to critically analyze films. They will learn how the structural components of a film - choices in composition, editing, and sound-mixing - craft meaning through immersive spectacles that speak to audiences on multiple intellectual and emotional levels. Students will explore how filmmakers deploy these techniques to produce awe-inspiring entertainments, sophisticated instruments of propaganda, and radical social critiques. As historical artifacts, films reflect the society which created them. But students will also consider how films, as works of art, survive beyond their historical context, and are reinterpreted by new audiences with new priorities.

Finally, students will practice the skills of historical literacy. They will digest, analyze, and criticize important scholarship (secondary literature). They will discern the relevance of particular interpretations for important debates. They will use sustained analysis of films as primary sources to develop, articulate, and defend their own historical interpretations and arguments.

• Instructors: Bill Donahue and Mark Kettler
• Friday 2:00 pm - 2:50 pm
• EURO 22410, CRN 19459

*Co-requisite with EURO 20410 (see description).

• Instructor: Charles Leavitt
• Tuesday and Thursday 3:30 pm - 4:45 pm
• EURO 30510, ROIT 40510, CRN 20652

This course explores the history of Italian film from the silent era to the 1960s, an epoch stretching from Francesca Bertini's Assunta Spina to Federico Fellini's La dolce vita. At the center of this period is the age of Italian neorealism, when directors such as Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, and Luchino Visconti invented new ways of looking at the world that radically transformed the history of world cinema. Focusing their attention on issues and individuals that had gone unseen in Fascist and post-Fascist Italy, the neorealists challenged established norms by making the experiences of ordinary Italians increasingly visible, developing techniques for representing reality that continue to influence filmmakers across the globe. We will analyze how questions of class, faith, gender, identity, and ideology intersect on screen as Italian directors explore and attempt to intervene in a rapidly transforming modern world. With a filmography featuring both masterpieces of world cinema and cult classics, this course will investigate how the quest to capture reality reshaped every genre of Italian film, including action & adventure, comedy, crime, documentary, melodrama, mystery, thriller and more. The course is taught in English and all films will have English subtitles.

• Instructor: Charles Leavitt
• Tuesday and Thursday 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm
• EURO 30914, ROIT 40914-01, CRN 20285

Primo Levi has been called “a major, universally recognized, icon in Holocaust literature” (Geerts), indeed “the witness-writer par excellence,” because “his narrative, poetry and essays about his time in Auschwitz are among the most widely read and most widely lauded of all writings on the Holocaust” (Gordon). Levi was this and more: witness and storyteller, scientist and writer, he was among the greatest authors and moral authorities of the twentieth century. In this course, taught in Italian, we will read Levi’s first and most famous work, Se questo è un uomo (If This is a Man, 1947), a masterpiece and milestone in the Italian tradition, in which Levi recounts his internment in Auschwitz. With Levi, we will ask what it means to live, what it means to be human, in and after the Nazi death camps. With Levi, too, we will broaden our exploration to address vital questions of faith, identity, meaning, truth, responsibility, love, friendship, freedom, diversity, survival, science, and salvation as we read selections from such fundamental works as La tregua (The Truce, 1963); Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table, 1975); Lilìt e altri racconti (Moments of Reprieve, 1978); and I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved, 1986). Throughout the course we will also make use of materials from the Primo Levi Collection of Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library, one of the world’s foremost collections dedicated to the study of Primo Levi. Taught in Italian.

• Instructor: Laura Banella
• Tuesday and Thursday 12:30 pm - 1:45 pm
• EURO 30115, ROIT 40115, CRN 20283

Dante's Comedy is one of the supreme poetic achievements in Western literature. It is a probing synthesis of the entire Western cultural and philosophical tradition that produced it, a radical experiment in poetics and poetic technique, and a profound exploration of Christian spirituality. Dante I and Dante II are an in-depth study, over two semesters, of the entire Comedy, in its historical, philosophical and literary context. Dante I focuses on the Inferno and the works that precede the Comedy (Vita nova, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia); Dante II focuses on the Purgatorio and Paradiso, along with the Monarchia. Students may take just one of Dante I and II or both, in either order. Lectures and discussion in English; the text will be read in a facing-page translation, so we can refer to the Italian (but knowledge of Italian is not necessary).

Counts as an Italian Studies course for the Italian major, secondary major, and minor. Students with Italian have the option of also enrolling in a one-credit pass/fail Languages Across the Curriculum section, which will meet one hour per week to read and discuss selected passages or cantos in Italian. LIT - Univ. Req. Literature. Ways of Knowing Core designations: Catholicism and the Disciplines; Fine Arts and Literature.

• Instructor: Korey Garibaldi
• Tuesday and Thursday 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm
• EURO 30103, AMST 30102, CRN 19797

This class examines the social, spatial and intellectual history of integration in the United States & Europe from the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract (1762) up to the so-called "global revolutions" of 1968. Students will gain a comprehensive introduction to how peasants, (im)migrants, people of color, and other disempowered populations negotiated confraternity and inclusion despite tenacious and arbitrary subjugation and exclusion within and across Western nation-states and colonial possessions between these years. Related topics range from "Indian removal" to persecuted religions; from absolute monarchies to gender discrimination and anti-homosexuality; and from legalized slavery and indentured servitude to histories of genocide. Our seminar, eclectic in scope and method, will put particular emphasis on the transnational implications of related social movements and cultural transformations. Course readings will include: Alexander Pushkin's The Negro of Peter the Great (1837), Maya Jasanoff's The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (2017), Todd Tucker's Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan (2004), and Winston Churchill's "United States of Europe" (1946) speech. No prior background in history is either required or assumed.

• Instructor: Fr. Greg Haake
• Tuesday and Thursday 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm
• EURO 40310, ROFR 40310, CRN 20282

This seminar constitutes quite simply an introduction to seventeenth-century French theater. Considered the golden age for the genre in France, with the ‘Big Three’ playwrights Molière, Corneille, and Racine, this period produced the greatest tragedies and comedies in the French tradition. We will ride the highs of the tragic heroes, descend with them into the depths of their lows, and then learn to laugh at these ups and downs with our study of some of the most famous comedies in Western literature. While we will primarily approach these plays as literature––for the text is usually the star––we will also explore their embodiment as a living, breathing work of art. Taught in French.

• Instructor: Claire Reising
• Monday and Wednesday 3:30 pm - 4:45 pm
• EURO 20608, ROFR 20608, CRN 20281

This course explores journalism and media from French-speaking countries, deepening students’ understanding of cultural diversity within the Francophone world. Students will analyze media in different forms, such as online newspapers, videos, political cartoons, and social media. Each class unit will explore a current event in a French-speaking nation, examining how topics are presented across various media outlets. We will also gain insights into French and Francophone perspectives on global issues. The course will develop students’ French proficiency, as we build vocabulary to discuss journalism and current affairs. Students will increase reading and listening comprehension skills by analyzing media and will practice writing and speaking through reflections, presentations, and discussions. Taught in French.

• Instructor: Johannes Junge Ruhland
• Wednesday 3:30 pm - 6:15 pm
• EURO 63110, ROFR 63110, CRN 20503

Medieval books were hand-written luxury objects that were costly to produce, prestigious to read, and valuable to hold. Yet the attitudes of medieval readers and book owners could surprise us as being very “hands-on”: they kissed images of Saints, ate bits of parchment, and on occasion even erased depictions of “the bad guy” such as the devil. This seminar, which requires no familiarity with medieval literature or the history of the book, is meant to show you how medieval books were multisensory objects that appealed to the eyes, the hand, the nose, the ears, and the mouth. With a focus on manuscripts in French and in Latin, you will learn what “reading” might have felt like over 500 years ago. Graduate level course.

• Instructor: Madison Mainwaring
• Monday and Wednesday 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm
• EURO 40710, ROFR 40710-01, CRN 20504

Britney Spears. Anna Nicole Smith. Janet Jackson. We thought we knew their tragic stories; we thought they only had themselves to blame. In recent years, however, we have reappraised these maligned women and the pervasive misogyny to which they were subjected in a supposedly post-feminist era. In this seminar, we will examine the gendering of celebrity in France and its former colonies over the course of the long nineteenth century, engaging with legacies of famous women from Marie Antoinette to Aïssa Maïga. Each week, we will study conflicting depictions of a public figure, seeking to understand the structures with which commentators controlled women’s narratives—and how women in turn developed their own strategies of resistance. Drawing from a range of sources including sculptures, choreographies, films, and autobiographies, we will engage with interpretive approaches that interrogate hierarchies of memory, history, and culture. Taught in French.

• Instructor: Orla Stapleton
• Tuesday and Thursday 3:30 pm - 4:45 pm
• EURO 30129, GLAF 30129, CRN 20505

Ireland’s changing political landscape and evolving sociology, throughout the 1900s and 2000s, tell the story of a country undergoing a turbulent century of conflict and unity, protest and peace, hope for the future while lamenting the past. To understand Ireland’s development more fully then, this course considers the political and sociological, as well as infrastructural and financial factors affecting Ireland as it is increasingly impacted by a changing international context. Two examples include Ireland’s accession and membership of the European Union (EU) and the influx of foreign direct investment (FDI) to the country. The course asks questions such as: to what extent did Ireland’s famous - yet often misinterpreted culture – contribute to facilitating and/or hindering development? To what extent can we attribute Ireland’s rapid economic growth to the “luck of the Irish”? Is this development specific to Ireland or are there lessons to be drawn from the Irish context that can be applied to currently developing nations?

• Instructor: Maurizio Albahari
• Monday and Wednesday 11:00-12:15pm
• EURO 30390, ANTH 20390, CRN 19826

This course offers an ethnographically grounded understanding of contemporary European cultures and societies. We start by presenting a brief history of the idea of Europe. Then, we define its geographical focus: where are the boundaries of Europe? Are Israel and Turkey part of Europe? Who gets to decide? Are there European Muslims? We will then read recent works focusing on selected regions and on diverse urban populations. We will explore and discuss socio-cultural facets of European everyday life; trends and challenges in technology, the environment, popular culture, demography, and politics; and the diversity of urban/rural, north/south, and more generally intra-European ways of life. The course will be of interest to students of contemporary global issues, and in particular to students who intend to spend a semester in Europe; are back from the field; or intend to write a related senior thesis.

• Instructor: Andy Gould
• Tuesday and Thursday 9:30 am - 10:45 am
• EURO 30201, POLS 30421, CRN 20251

In this course on European politics we will examine the literature on three major issues: regional integration, origins of modern political authority, and industrial political economy. We will seek to understand the origin, current functioning, and possible futures for key European institutions, including the EU, nation-states, social provision, unions, and political parties. Readings on the European Union, monetary politics, Germany, France, and Spain will be drawn from both scholarly sources and contemporary analyses of political events.

• Instructor: Rose Luminello
• Monday and Wednesday 12:30 pm - 1:45 pm
• EURO 30141, ANTH 30307, GLAF 30141, CHR 30141, AFST 30692, HIST 30926, CRN 20636

This course examines the origins and development of contemporary opinions and policies concerning migrations and migrants. It does so by looking backward to the age when transoceanic mobility became more frequent and increasingly more accessible before moving forward to our own times. It is the central claim of this course that it is impossible to understand what drives policy today without first surveying the changing ideas of migration and the movement of people over time. It will therefore take students through the history of migration in the modern world, as well as studying the migrant journey, connections to home, the process and difficulties of assimilation and community creation, and the problems or opportunities that could arise for migrants from characteristics like race, religion, ethnicity, or language. Also considered will be the complex relationship between colonization and migration. In the process, Migrants and Mobility will also examine how different societies place value judgments upon migrants and analyze how and why migration/migrants have been categorized as “good” or “bad” over time. Students will also encounter and consider the effects of growing urbanization and industrialization, changing demography and global trade patterns, and, more recently, the impact of climate change. Migrants and Mobility will be primarily seminar based, placing a premium on participation and analytical discussion.

• Instructor: John Sikorski
• Tuesday 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
• EURO 33702, BES 33702, CRN 16310

The idea of “Europe” has been contested ever since the ancient Greeks first came up with the term more than two thousand years ago. Over the course of the past two centuries, however, philosophers, poets, and politicians have articulated visions for a united (or at least more closely integrated) Europe with ever-increasing force and frequency. Politically, this trajectory culminated in the creation of the European Union in the waning years of the twentieth century. But what is the basis for a shared European identity? Is it race? Religion? National culture? Historical experience? Who gets to be European, and who has to stand apart, since any group needs an “other” against which it can define itself? And why has true integration proven so elusive?

In this writing-intensive seminar, we will investigate these questions through readings drawn from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Johny Pitts, and many others. Simultaneously, students will learn how to conceptualize, draft, revise, and peer critique research papers on topics in European Studies and the humanities more generally.