2025 Courses

Instructor: Martin Devecka

Islam emerged out of a Late Antique historical moment that, in its particularly Arabian instantiation, is still not well understood. We'll be looking at traditional Islamic accounts of Islamic origins alongside archaeological, epigraphic, and linguistic evidence as well as modern speculative historiography in order to get a sense of Islamic origins and what, if anything, connects the before time to the after time. That means trying to locate Islam as an outgrowth of Late Antiquity, but it means trying to answer some of these questions too: What is an origin, anyway? What do we mean when we talk about something "new" in history? And when does "antiquity" end, if it ever does?

Instructor: Colin Drumm

Today, the economic concept of “Value” is the nearly exclusive province of Marxists, whose claim to rigor is based upon preserving this concept in the face of the so-called marginalist revolution. But when Marx talked about Value he was not insisting on a partisan concept, but adopting and re-configuring a pre-existing one. This course examines the history of the Value concept leading up to Marx, who, as its first intellectual historian, presented this history as culminating in himself. We will re-examine this history by re-introducing the centrality, elided by Marx, of questions about the state: Value theories were developed by British and French economists to intervene into debates about the power of the state to tax, spend, and borrow and the implications of these activities. This trajectory will be traced through an examination of the works of Petty, Cantillon, Steuart, Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and others.

Instructor: Jules Delisle

Across cultures, children occupy paradoxical roles: they may be idealized as symbols of hope or cast aside as incomplete beings. They can simultaneously represent purity and vulnerability while also being treated as disposable resources. We will explore these extremes by analyzing "neontocratic" societies, where children are central to social structures, alongside "gerontocratic" ones, where they are subordinate until they achieve adult status. Themes such as attachment, play, caregiving, education, and social control will reveal how childhood shapes and is shaped by ecological, political, and economic conditions.