Spring 2023 Courses

• Instructor: TBD
• Wednesday 9:25-10:15 a.m.
• EURO 30004

How can students best prepare to design a research project and undertake research abroad in an archive or special collections repository? What skills are necessary to locate appropriate source material and assess data quality? What is involved in qualitative data analysis? What makes a research grant proposal competitive? These are some of the questions this introductory, team-taught course will address. Students will learn how to design successful research projects, conduct archival research, identify the information that will enhance grant applications, and learn how to hone their written advocacy to enhance their applications in competitive grant processes. A significant portion of this course will engage students in a hands-on practicum examining a variety of original documents to gain the foundational skills necessary to prepare for and conduct research abroad.

• Instructor: Anna Dolezal
• Thursday 3:30-4:45 p.m.
• EURO 30006

This course will prepare students to participate in the Midwest Model EU simulation hosted by Indiana University, Bloomington. Through class meetings, assigned readings, and a final written “Draft Directive” to be used during the simulation, students will gain a practical understanding of the purpose and functioning of European institutions and European politics. In addition to familiarity with current EU policy issues and current events, students will gain an understanding of and experience with executing member states' policy positions, various EU decision-making processes, and EU policy creation. The course culminates with students' participation in Midwest Model EU at the beginning of April, representing European state governments in intergovernmental policy creation.

• Instructor: Shasta Kaul
• Tuesday 3:30 - 4:20 p.m.
• EURO 30017

In 1520, Giulio de Medici (Pope Clement VII) commissioned a history of Florence from Niccolo Machiavelli, which the latter reluctantly accepted. This commission produced Florentine Histories – a work which, much like others by its author, subverts the conventions of its genre. It is revealing of Machiavelli’s own political thought. Yet, much like his other works, it leaves a lot unsaid. In this class, we will read excerpts from Florentine Histories and Machiavelli’s other major works to become acquainted with Machiavelli’s Florence. Discussions will focus on the significance of internal Florentine politics (family feuds, murders, the works), and the rise of the Medici.

• Instructor: John Sikorski
• TIME TBD
• EURO 33702, BES 33702

The Deloitte International Business Scholars Colloquium is a new 1.5 credit undergraduate course affiliated with and organized by the Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership (NDDCEL), the Business, Ethics, and Society Program at the Mendoza College of Business, and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs. The course runs for both the fall and spring semesters, 1.5 credits per semester. A small group of selected students will meet in-person weekly to discuss assigned readings, to listen to and engage with invited speakers, and to form a community of Notre Dame business and/or other students interested in global affairs, to explore the nature of honorable business within our globalized world, and the ethical and professional challenges and opportunities for pursuing business as a force for good in the international context(s). The Colloquium will meet for two hours one afternoon per week during the academic semester. The first hour will be dedicated to discussion of readings or an invited speaker. During the second hour, we will have a meal together (provided by the NDDCEL) and continue informal discussion and conversation with faculty and practitioners. International Business Scholars will be encouraged to participate in the activities of the NDDCEL and the Nanovic Institute beyond the Colloquium. The NDDCEL will assist Deloitte Scholars in networking, internship opportunities, and so on. This year, participants of the Colloquium will be given the opportunity (though not required) to participate in an international immersion experience in Poland, sponsored by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, in May 2023. The trip will allow students to interact with business leaders and politicians, and explore the challenges and opportunities of business in one of Europe’s fastest growing economies, as well as exploring business in a post-communist free market economy within the context of Catholic Social Thought and the influence of Pope St. John Paul II.

• Instructor: Will Beattie
• Tuesday and Thursday 2:00-3:15 p.m.
• EURO 30218

The history of Christian Apocalypse is about trying to place humanity in linear time. It is about bodily death, the end of the world, and immortality of the soul. But it is also about rebirth. These concepts have shaped European cultures, societies, and discourse for centuries. Apocalypse has been used to help us make sense of the events unfolding around us, from the turn of the Millennium, to the Black Death, to Y2K and COVID-19. This course will ask where our images of Apocalypse come from, why it exploded in popularity during the Middle Ages, and how those medieval developments in apocalypticism remain deeply ingrained in our world today.

• Instructor: Mark Kettler
• Tuesday and Thursday 3:30-4:45 p.m.
• EURO 30214, GE 30214

In the wake of the Holocaust, the German author Gunther Grass concluded that we now finally knew ourselves. The Holocaust changed everything. Nazi Germany murdered more than six million men, women, and children in a systematic effort to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Its shocking and spectacular barbarism shattered comfortable ideas about European civilization and called into question the essential goodness of humanity. It compelled scholars to search for new ideas about evil, new words like “genocide” simply to place and comprehend the scale of the slaughter and devastation. Politics, art, culture, and even religions would be fundamentally and irrevocably transformed by the Holocaust. This course will investigate why Nazi Germany attempted to systematically exterminate the Jews of Europe, explore why so many Germans either participated in or accepted this act of mass violence, and consider why other Europeans so often assisted them. It will investigate the legacies of the Holocaust; how survivors and their families attempted to rebuild their lives in the wake of horror, how Germans variously struggled to come to terms with what they, their countrymen, or their ancestors had done, and how various understandings of the Holocaust have shaped political, cultural, and social discourses around the world. Along the way, students will practice the skills of historical literacy. They will digest, analyze, and criticize scholarship (secondary literature). They will discern the relevance of particular interpretations for important debates. They will use sustained analysis of primary sources to develop, articulate, and defend their own historical interpretations and arguments.

• Instructor: Charles Leavitt
• Tuesday and Thursday 2:00-3:15 p.m.
• EURO 30510, ROIT 40510

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 and adventure, comedy, crime, documentary, melodrama, mystery, thriller and more. The course is taught in English and all films will have English subtitles.

• Instructor: Abby Lewis
• Tuesday and Thursday 12:30-1:45 p.m.
• EURO 30217, HIST 30217

This class analyzes the politics and cultures of remembrance in Europe from the late nineteenth century to today. Taking examples such as the politicization of Holocaust memory in Europe or the grassroots removal of monuments in Britain as points of departure, students will learn about processes of remembering and forgetting, and how memories of the past have shaped European identity and culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will pay particular attention to the mobilization and commemoration of Europe’s traumatic pasts, including the World Wars, imperialism and decolonization, the Cold War, and histories of genocide, to investigate how Europeans have remembered these difficult histories and how these memories have shifted over time. We will look not only at how the traumatic past is represented today; but how memory work was enacted at the time and how Europeans have fought to revise these representations and demand new recognition of alternative visions of the past. In its focus on memory, broadly defined, this course will deeply explore how representations of the past have shaped European identity, culture, and politics both at the time and today.

In its focus on memory and memorialization, this class also attends to the visuality and material culture of history and historical research. Students will learn to read visual and material sources as sources akin to political tracts, diaries, and memoirs. We will engage with sources including photo albums, monuments, memorials, museum spaces, memorial landscapes, film, cultural kitsch, and art all as critical primary sources to understanding the production and circulation of memory. We will read foundational texts on collective memory and remembrance to understand how scholars and theorists have defined and conceptualized memory. Students will also conduct an original research project on a topic of their choosing by exploring a case study of memory work or collective memory in the context of Modern Europe.

• Instructor: Semion Lyandres
• Monday and Wednesday 11:30 a.m. - 12:20 p.m. (plus Friday discussion sections)
• EURO 30207

This upper division lecture course examines some of the most important events, ideas, and personalities that shaped late Imperial, Soviet, and early post-Soviet periods of Russian history during the last one hundred years: from the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War and the Revolutions of 1905, WWI, and 1917 through the Great Terror of the 1930s, the experience of the Second World War and the emergence of the Soviet Empire, late Stalinism, the developed or mature socialism, the collapse of the communist regime and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, as well as Russia’s uneasy transition “out of Totalitarianism” and into Putin’s authoritarianism. The course is open to all students, including freshmen, with or without background in modern Russian and European history.

• Instructor: Alexander Martin
• Monday and Wednesday 3:30 - 4:45 p.m.
• EURO 30477, HIST 30477

Europe made a violent and dramatic entry into the modern age in the tumultuous decades from 1789 to 1871. The period opens with the French Revolution and closes with the unification of Germany and Italy. In between lie the revolutionary Reign of Terror in France, the Napoleonic Wars, the independence wars of Latin America, the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the Industrial Revolution, and the invention of liberalism, conservatism, socialism, feminism, nationalism, democracy, atheism, and modern science. Europeans in 1789 still lived in a world that in many ways was similar to the 16th and 17th century; by 1871, the outlines of Europe in the 20th century were beginning to form. How this profound transformation occurred will be the subject of the course.

• Instructor: Andrzej Podraza
• Monday and Wednesday 2:00-3:15 p.m.
• EURO 30216

The main objective of the course is to analyze the position of Central Europe within the framework of transatlantic security relations after the end of the Cold War, taking into account the changing international order, the strategies of the major players in the Atlantic community (the United States, major European countries, the European Union, NATO), policy of revisionist powers (Russia, China) and the nature of contemporary security challenges and threats. Although the emphasis will be on the presentation and analysis of the situation from the beginning of the 1990s to the present day, the broader historical perspective covering the Cold War period will also be taken into account. The course will be empirical and theoretical as the key theories of international relations will be used in the analyzes and discussions. Nowadays, from the geopolitical point of view, Central Europe may include, in the narrowest sense, the countries of the Visegrad Group or, more broadly, the countries of the Three Seas Initiative or the Bucharest 9.

• Instructor: Anne Schaefer
• Monday and Wednesday 3:30-4:45 p.m.
• EURO 30600, ROFR 20600

Beret, baguette, Marcel Marceau, Edith Piaf are images and icons that one associates with the French identity. But what does it mean to be French? What does it mean to be Francophone? What is this French “je ne sais quoi?” This course will focus on the multi-faceted question of French identity in France and in the Francophone world, but also in America. French is intrinsically linked to the history of America and its people, but how? Why is there such an important French presence in the US and what does it mean from an identity standpoint? This course is taught in English, but students counting it towards the French major or minor will complete a portion of the assignments in French.

• Instructor: Clemens Sedmak
• Tuesday and Thursday 9:30-10:45 a.m.
• EURO 30007

Diplomacy is a way of doing politics: the established method of negotiating inter-state relations and of influencing the decisions and behavior of foreign governments and peoples through presence and engagement, dialogue, and negotiation. Diplomats are committed to their home country, but also their host country and the bigger picture of the common good. Contributors to peace building and peacekeeping, diplomats, serve political purposes through cultural engagement. In this way, they contribute to “integral human development” in the design of international relations. The Nanovic Institute invites undergraduate students to join our Diplomacy Scholars Program through Deep Dive Into Diplomacy. This course will examine diplomacy as a tool in European relations and affairs while providing students the opportunity to hone diplomatic skills such as conflict mediation, judgement and decision making, intercultural competencies, and written and oral communication. Students will learn from present and former diplomats about the diplomatic way of life and participate in a number of simulations and activities beyond the classroom.

• Instructor: Tetyana Shikhar
• Monday and Wednesday 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m. (plus Wednesday evening film screening)
• EURO 30357, RU 301001

Over the last two decades of Putin’s presidency, Russia’s geopolitical strength and imperial ambitions were placed at the center of Russia’s political line. Military incursions in the neighboring countries have expanded Russia’s territorial claims and reasserted its aspirations to former Soviet spheres of influence. While Russian identity continued to be imperial after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians set off on a journey of building their national identity. The course considers how post-Soviet cinema revives tropes and aesthetic tendencies of the earlier periods, such as stark depictions of the self and Other, spiritual superiority and monumentalism, as well as updates them for a contemporary context. The class explores the Putin-era Russian cinema and Ukrainian national cinema of the last two decades in the light of the common past that these two countries share and how the past is reshaped for the present. No previous knowledge of Russian is required, the course is taught fully in English.

• Instructor: Sonja Stojanovic
• Monday and Wednesday 2:00-3:15 p.m.
• EURO 30610, ROFR 40610

This course will examine the period of the Second World War known as the Vichy regime (1940–1944). We will explore France’s complex history through sources of the period as well as through representations of the Vichy regime in contemporary cultural productions; course materials will be drawn from primary sources such as testimonies, novels, memoires, newspapers, documentaries, paintings, German and Vichy propaganda. The course will address the myth of “la France résistante” (a resisting France); the relationship of France to its empire in the colonies (de Gaulle and the Free French Forces); anti-Jewish legislation and the deportation of Jews; as well as the memory of the period from amnesia and negationism to the “devoir de mémoire” (the duty to remember). We will conclude the course by exploring the contemporary legacies of such figures as the Général de Gaulle and the Maréchal Pétain in French politics.

• Instructor: Clemens Sedmak
• Tuesday and Thursday 9:30-10:45 a.m.
• EURO 60007 (graduate section)

Diplomacy is a way of doing politics: the established method of negotiating inter-state relations and of influencing the decisions and behavior of foreign governments and peoples through presence and engagement, dialogue, and negotiation. Diplomats are committed to their home country, but also their host country and the bigger picture of the common good. Contributors to peace building and peacekeeping, diplomats, serve political purposes through cultural engagement. In this way, they contribute to “integral human development” in the design of international relations. The Nanovic Institute invites undergraduate students to join our Diplomacy Scholars Program through Deep Dive Into Diplomacy. This course will examine diplomacy as a tool in European relations and affairs while providing students the opportunity to hone diplomatic skills such as conflict mediation, judgement and decision making, intercultural competencies, and written and oral communication. Students will learn from present and former diplomats about the diplomatic way of life and participate in a number of simulations and activities beyond the classroom.