Upcoming Courses

Instructor: Jules Delisle

Framed by the debate on technology and humanity between Günther Anders and Hans Jonas, the course will explore Prometheanism and technological arms races from the era of medieval warfare to the atomic bomb. Focusing on the use of God-like technology, human capacity for losing control of what we have created, and the ethical responsibility of managing the catastrophic consequences of our ‘progress,’ we will discuss transhumanism, eugenics, and the shame engineering humans experience at natural imperfections in a silicon and efficiency-driven ideological landscape. The desire to bring about technology that ends death and perfectly preserves knowledge has resulted in a toxic world where human agency is nullified and omnicide appears inescapable. Having generated the capacity for self-annihilation, how can humanity defend itself from its own technology and regain control of our fate? Can the shem be removed from the mouth of the golem?

Instructor: Sean Capener

This course serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, it is offered as an introduction to theology as a distinct literary genre, surveying some of its most influential texts from late antiquity to the twentieth century. On the other, it is structured as a collaborative inquiry into what, exactly, distinguishes theology from rival discourses like philosophy and law.

Instructor: Daniela Tolchinsky

History of Zionism traces the political, theological, and intellectual tradition of Zionism in its various secular, revisionist, Christian, diasporic, and anti-anti-Semitic iterations. Special attention will be given to the intervention that Zionism endeavors to make in monotheistic theological history, and how this intervention lays the groundwork for familiar political and ethical discourses of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Instructor: Colin Drumm

Considers the history of the United States Dollar System from the colonial period to the present with an eye towards the relationship between monetary systems and domestic and international constitutional order. A guiding assumption of the course will be that monetary phenomena are best studied not through the lens of economic optimization problems but rather as an arena of social and political conflict.

Instructor: Jan Deleater

Considers major financial operations, transactions and flows of money in the history of the Low Countries, such as the funding of warfare, commercial ventures and (marriage) alliances by top elites such as governments, (high) nobility, great merchants and firms. We will consider the political economy of (high) finance, such as the role and effects of in- and outflows of moneys, luxury consumption, urbanization, conjuncture and crisis. Specific attention will be paid to questions of power, coercion and consent in the participation of elites and non-elites in taxation, public debt, and in the financial regulations and monetary policies which seek to alter or redistribute monetary flows.

Instructor: Sean Capener

Is evil a 'thing' or merely the absence of one? This course surveys a number of competing accounts of the nature of evil either incorporated into or repudiated by the theological, philosophical, and legal discourses retrospectively claimed as part of the inheritance of the so-called 'Western' intellectual tradition. Special attention will be given to link between theories of evil and theories of law and legitimacy.

Instructor: Alirio Karina

Enormous breadths of practice are captured in the word ‘witchcraft’; widely ranging social roles in the word ‘witch’. This rude assemblage is, to some degree, an artefact of translation, seeming to connote no more than a malicious and sinful exterior world to that of Abrahamic religious law. Proposing to find what else might link these forms, this course surveys a range of ‘witchcrafts’, across the world and across history, considering how magical, occult, esoteric, and secret knowledges, their practice, and their practitioners shape and interrupt the order of political life.

Instructor: Xafsa Ciise

This course offers a brief political history of the genealogical evolution of the idea of ‘trauma’ and its treatment in the Western medical tradition. Our analysis will foreground an internal tension which appears to organize this history: the idea that influence (or suggestion) is inextricable from the experience of subjection and domination. We’ll pay special attention to whether and how this discourse intersects with colonial and imperial constructions of difference.

Instructor: Colin Drumm

Considers the history of the Roman empire during the period of its constitutional transformation from a senatorial republic to a principate. The course will focus especially on the monetary history of the period and the social context and consequences of the introduction of a circulating gold coinage. Follows upon (but does not require as a prerequisite) previous courses on early Rome and the Punic wars.

Instructor: Malulani Castro

Reviews the modern arguments for why land should be returned to or acquired by indigenous peoples in the larger history of how humans have validated the acquisition, ownership, and management of land and natural resources. Special attention is given to understanding the limitations of these arguments (e.g., moral, ecological) and how they reflect a longer tendency in political thought and action to defer questions of sovereignty, power, and provisioning.