Advisory Committee: Professors Barbezat, Brandes, Ciepiela, Courtright, de la Carrera, Doran‡, Epstein, Frank†, Griffiths, Kallick*, Katsaros‡, Machala, Moricz, Rabinowitz, Raskin†, Rockwell, Rogowski, Rosbottom†, Schneider, R. Sinos, Staller, and Stavans†; Associate Professors Engelhardt, Gilpin, Lopez, and Wolfson; Assistant Professors Boucher, Brenneis (Chair), Christoff*, Infante, and Nelson; Five College Associate Professor Long; Five College Assistant Professor Gordon; Visiting Assistant Professor Cho.
*On leave 2016-17.
†On leave fall semester 2016-17.
‡On leave spring semester 2016-17.
European Studies is a major program that provides opportunity for independent and interdisciplinary study of European culture. Through integrated work in the humanities and social sciences, the student major examines a significant portion of the European experience and seeks to define those elements that have given European culture its unity and distinctiveness.
Major Program. The core of the major consists of eight courses that will examine a significant portion of European civilization through a variety of disciplines. Two of these courses will be EUST 121 and 122 (or the equivalent; see below), and two will be independent work during the senior year. In the second semester of the senior year, the student major writing a thesis may designate the research course as a double course (EUST 499D), in which case the total number of courses required to complete the major becomes nine. Comparative literary studies, interdisciplinary work in history, sociology, philosophy, political science, economics, performance studies, visual arts, architecture or music involving one or more European countries are possible approaches for the student's required senior project.
Application to the major will be considered only after a student has taken at least one of EUST 121, 122, or an approved, similarly broad course in European history or culture. A second such required course will be taken during the sophomore year or as soon as the student elects a European Studies major. The student major will select four core courses in consultation with the Chair or major advisor. All majors shall complete a substantial course-based research project on some aspect of European culture by the end of their junior year. Prior arrangement for supervision must be made if a student intends to do this project while abroad.
Honors Program. All European Studies honors majors must complete a thesis. Should, during the senior year, the Program faculty decide that a declared major is not qualified to proceed to work on a thesis, the student may elect to do a substantial research project instead. Students may be recommended for Program honors only if they complete a thesis. Save in exceptional circumstances, a major will spend at least one semester of the junior year pursuing an approved course of study in Europe. All majors must give evidence of proficiency in one European language besides English, ideally one that is appropriate to their senior project. Upon return from study abroad, the student will ordinarily elect, in consultation with the Program Chair or major advisor, at least one course that helps integrate the European experience into the European Studies major.
Topics in the past have included readings and discussion of a series of related texts from Homer and Genesis to Dante: Homer’s Iliad, selected Greek tragedies, Virgil’s Aeneid, selections from the Bible, and from medieval texts. Three class hours per week. Required of European Studies majors.
Open to European Studies majors and to any student interested in the intellectual and literary development of the West, from antiquity through the Middle Ages. Fall semester. Professor Doran.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Fall 2023, Fall 2024In this course, we will discuss writings and art that have contributed in important ways to the sense of what “European” means. The course covers the intellectual and artistic development of Europe from the Renaissance to the 21st century. The course will use a chronological and/or thematic template that focuses on dominant and persistent preoccupations of the European imagination. We will study poetry, drama, the novel, the essay, painting, photography, and film. In the past, we have studied works by Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Molière, Mann, Swift, Voltaire, Wordsworth, Austen, Marx, Flaubert and Tolstoy. We have looked at art ranging from Velásquez to Picasso, filmmakers from Chaplin to Godard. This course welcomes all students who enjoy studying literature and essays in depth, as well as those interested in the visual arts. Required of European Studies majors.
Spring semester. Professor Rosbottom.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2025Napoleon Bonaparte’s legacy in French domestic and international politics and military strategy profoundly influenced nineteenth-century Europe. But so did the legends surrounding him, created before his great defeat and exile, and nurtured after his death in 1821. In painting, caricature, and sculpture, literature, music, and film, the legends--positive and negative--of Napoleon have served many ends. The cultural complexity of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe becomes clearer when one understands the motives behind and results of these representations of Napoleon.
In this course, we will study painting (e.g., David and Goya), narrative fiction (e.g., Balzac, Stendhal, and Tolstoy), poetry (e.g., Wordsworth and Hugo), music (e.g., Beethoven), urban history and architecture (e.g., of Paris), and the silent and sound films of our century (e.g., Gance). We will examine how different generations and a variety of cultures appropriated the real and imagined images of Napoleon for social, political, and artistic ends, and thereby influenced the creation of modern Europe. Three class hours per week.
Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2016-17. Professor Rosbottom.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course is designed to introduce students to the impact that World War II (1939-1945) had and continues to have on the society and culture of several European nations. As the last of the generation that lived during the war passes on, their grandchildren persist in raising questions about the reasons and effects of this political cataclysm. During the war, and afterwards with more or less intensity, writers and filmmakers made and have made attempts to analyze and represent the memories, the guilt, and the false histories that the war left behind in every involved nation.
The course will examine the ethics of historical memory, the sincerity of representation, the clever use of history for political purposes. It will also probe and analyze persistent myths of the war as well as discover stories and facts that have been ignored or forgotten. Finally, the course will look at alternative scenarios, that is, “what if” narratives.
Readings might include works by Erich Remarque, Albert Camus, Irène Némirovsky, W. G. Sebald, Primo Levi, and Tony Judt. Films might include selections from Rossellini’s Roma città aperta, Holland’s Europa, Europa, Reed’s The Third Man, and Malle’s Au revoir les enfants.
The class will study how nations too have attempted to make sense of this hecatomb, seeking explanation, expiation, and often excuses. We will also study how the Second World War’s legacy still affects contemporary European culture and politics.
Students will be expected to participate in discussion, give oral reports, and write a research paper.
Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2016-17. Professor Rosbottom.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as SPAN 384 and EUST 233.) This panoramic, interdisciplinary course will explore the concept of love as it changes epoch to epoch and culture to culture. Poetry, novels, paintings, sculptures, movies, TV, and music will be featured. Starting with the Song of Songs, it will include discussions of Plato, Aristotle, Catullus, and other Greek classics, move on to Dante and Petrarch, contemplate Chinese, Arabic, African, and Mesoamerican literatures, devote a central unit to Shakespeare, continue with the Metaphysical poets, and move on to American literature. Special attention will be paid to the difference between love, eroticism, and pornography. Multilingual students will be encouraged to delve into various linguistic traditions, in tongues like French, Russian, German, Yiddish, and Spanish. Conducted in English.
Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as EUST 235 and SPAN 380.) An interdisciplinary exploration of the causes behind the social, racial, artistic, and political act—and art—of posing, passing, or pretending to be someone else. Blacks passing for whites, Jews passing for gentiles, and women passing for men, and vice versa, are a central motif. Attention is given to biological and scientific patterns such as memory loss, mental illness, and plastic surgery, and to literary strategies like irony. As a supernatural occurrence, the discussion includes mystical experiences, ghost stories, and séance sessions. The course also covers instances pertaining to institutional religion, from prophesy from the Hebrew and Christian Bibles to the Koran and Mormonism. In technology and communications, analysis concentrates on the invention of the telegraph, the telephone, and the Internet. Entertainment, ventriloquism, puppet shows, voice-overs, children’s cartoon shows, subtitles, and dubbing in movies and TV are topics of analysis. Posers in Greek mythology, the Arabian Nights, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip Roth, Oliver Sacks, and Nella Larsen are examined. Conducted in English.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2016-17. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as EUST 259 and SPAN 365.) Taught at the Hampshire County Jail, the course is devoted to close readings and staging of parts of Shakespeare’s plays while exploring in depth his historical context, dramatic and stylistic style, and world view. The topics of bondage, revenge, injustice, and forgiveness will serve as leitmotifs. On this iteration, four plays will be the focus: As You Like It, Macbeth, Hamlet, and The Tempest. Conducted in English.
Omitted 2016-17. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offered
(Offered as EUST 265 and SPAN 382.) An exploration of forbidden behavior in diverse cultures from ancient times to the present. The course delves into the moral dilemma of the accepted and the rejected by analyzing concentric circles of power. Interdisciplinary in nature, the material will come from theology to government, from jurisprudence to medicine, from pedagogy to finances, from pornography to literature, from activism to computer hacking. It includes the Inquisitorial trails in fourteenth-century Spain, the orchestration of anti-Semitic propaganda under Nazism, the gulag in the Soviet Union, the public crimes during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, McCarthyism and the N.S.A. Contemporary books and movies discussed include Lawrence’s Women in Love, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and the Harry Potter saga, as well as Last Tango in Paris and Deep Throat. Conducted in English.
Omitted 2016-17. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as EUST 303 and ENGL 320) Acts of translation underwrite many kinds of cultural production, often invisibly. Writers of the Harlem Renaissance, for instance, engaged with black internationalism through bilingualism and translation, as Brent Edwards has reminded us. In this course we will study literary translation as a creative practice involved in the making of subjects and cultures. We will read key statements about translation by theorists and translators, such as Walter Benjamin, Roman Jakobson, Lawrence Venuti, Peter Cole and Gayatri Spivak. We also will directly engage in translation work: each student will regularly present translations in a workshop format to produce a portfolio as a final project. The class will be “polyglot,” meaning that students are welcome to translate from any language of which they have knowledge; when they share translations, they will be asked also to provide interlinear, or “literal,” translations for those who may not understand the language they are working in.
Requisite: two years of college-level study of the chosen language. Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Professor Ciepiela.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as EUST 331 and SPAN 377.) Is there a difference between a traveler and a tourist? Does travel always involve movement in time? What is the relationship between travel and technology? In what sense is the self always changing? How to describe a fake experience? And are immigrants travelers? This course explores questions of travel across history, from the Bible to the age of social media. It will contemplate literature, cinema, music, and photography. Theories articulated by Joseph Campbell on myth and Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking on time will be discussed. Authors include Dante, Samuel Johnson, Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Darwin, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, Isak Dinesen, Franz Kafka, Elizabeth Bishop, Ryszard Kapuściński, and Gabriel García Márquez. Conducted in English.
Omitted 2016-17. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offered
(Offered as EUST 334 and SPAN 360.) An in-depth, multifaceted analysis of the philosophical, theological, esthetic, and political trends of the Argentine hombre de letras Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) and how he reassessed the European and American intellectual traditions. The course starts with his early poetry in Fervor de Buenos Aires and concludes with his world fame as one of the most influential twentieth-century writers. Special attention is paid to his mid-career works, especially Otras Inquisiciones and Ficciones. Borges’ aesthetic and intellectual development is examined against the current of Argentina’s political events and in the context of Latin American history. His views on God, death, memory, nationalism, and translation are explored as are his connection to the Bible, the Arabian Nights, the Icelandic sagas, Dante, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Nazism, and Gaucho literature. Conducted in English.
Omitted 2016-17. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offered
Fall and spring semesters.
2023-24: Not offeredA double course. Spring semester.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2025