Advisory Committee: Professors Barbezat, Brandes‡, Ciepiela, Courtright, de la Carrera, Epstein, Griffiths, Katsaros‡, R. López, Machala, Móricz†, Raskin*, Rockwell†, Rogowski†, Rosbottom‡, Sarat, Schneider, R. Sinos†, Staller‡, and Stavans; Associate Professors Boucher, Brenneis, Engelhardt (Chair,fall), Gilpin‡, Nelson, van den Berg*, and Wolfson*; Assistant Professors Gordon‡, Infante, and Zanker; Five College Associate Professor Long.
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). All majors must give evidence of proficiency in one European language besides English. Save in exceptional circumstances, majors will spend at least one semester of the junior year pursuing an approved course of study in Europe. By the end of their junior year, all majors shall complete a substantial course-based research project on some aspect of European culture. Prior arrangement for supervision must be made if a student intends to do this project while abroad. For their senior year, European Studies majors will then opt into one of two possible paths: Thesis or Capstone.
Thesis Option. Students wishing to pursue an independent project as an honors thesis will take one thesis research course in the first semester of the senior year, and another in the final semester. Students may designate the research course of the final semester as a double course (EUST 499D), in which case the total number of courses required to complete the major becomes nine.
Possible approaches for the senior thesis project include 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. Students are encouraged to take a relevant methods class fitting their research approach (such as HIST-301 or SOCI-315), which, with permission from the EUST chair may count toward the major’s eight courses.
Capstone Option. In the capstone option students, after having completed a substantial course-based research project on some aspect of European culture, will complete their eight European Studies courses without an independent project. A month into their final semester, capstone majors will submit a five-page retrospective essay on the entirety of the course of their studies in the major, which will be followed by a conversation with the European Studies faculty members.
Honors Program. Students may be recommended for Program honors only if they complete a thesis.
*On leave 2020-21.†On leave fall semester 2020-21.‡On leave spring semester 2020-21.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. Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2020-21.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Fall 2023, Fall 2024(Offered as EUST 122 and HIST 122 [EU, P]) This course offers a critical examination of the concept of European civilization from the seventeenth century through the present day. What did it mean to be “European” in the modern era? To what extent was “European” civilization forged by Europe’s connections to the wider world, and by ideas, art, literature, and politics that originated outside the geographical boundaries of Europe? How was the idea of a coherent European culture and character used as a tool of conquest within the European empires? And how did various people—in Europe, in the empires, and beyond—forge new social, cultural, and political solidarities through their critiques of the idea of European civilization? Does the concept of European civilization remain valuable in our modern, globalized era? This course will combine a study of canonical works of European art, literature, and politics with less well-known texts and works of art created by “non-European” people. Required of European Studies majors.
Limited to 18 students. Spring semester: Professor A. Gordon.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2025This 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.
2023-24: Not offeredA close reading of significant portions of the Five Books of Moses, done from the perspective of literature: how are the human and divine characters built, what interior life do they display and what philosophical view do they convey? Attention will be given to the nineteenth-century theories that approach the Bible as a composite book delivering a nationalistic story. Students will also reflect on the impact of the Bible in Western literature, from Dante’s Divine Comedy to R. Crumb’s cartoon retelling of Genesis. Taught in English.
Omitted 2020-21. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course rotates around the shifting notion of the divine in Western Civilization, focusing on theology, philosophy, literature, and music. Students explore the development of the three major prophetic religions as well as some of the mystical movements they fostered. Discussions rotate around the King James Bible, Augustine’s Confessions, the Koran, Maimonides’ The Guide for the Perplexed, the Zohar, the Popol Vuh, the Ramayana, and Spinoza’s work as a cornerstone to the Enlightenment. We will contemplate secularism in modern culture and analyze the contemporary atheist movement of Dawkins and Hitchens . Music explorations range from Johann Sebastian Bach to John Cage; in science, from Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking; and in film, from Ingmar Bergman to Woody Allen. Readings include parts of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, Kafka’s The Castle, Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, Borges’ “The Secret Miracle” and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offeredTaught 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. In Spring 2018, four plays were the focus: As You Like It, Macbeth, Hamlet, and The Tempest. Conducted in English.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as EUST 303, ENGL 320 and RUSS 310) 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.
2023-24: Not offeredIndependent reading course.
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
2023-24: Not offeredAn in-depth, thorough chronological study of Antisemitism—“the longest hatred”—from Hellenistic and Roman times to early Christian thinkers, the development of Islam, the Middle Ages, especially the Holy Office of the Spanish Inquisition, the Enlightenment, Nazism and other forms of fascism, Communism, to the twenty-first century. Special attention will be placed on geographical varieties and national traditions (France, Germany, Russia, Iran, the United States, Spain, and Argentina), the Dreyfus Affair, the Protocols of the Wise of Zion, Henry Ford, and other focal points. The class will analyze in detail the metastasis of antisemitism into anti-Zionism before and after the creation of the State of Israel. We will also discuss antisemitism in politics, education, culture, and media, and its link to racism, anti-immigration, xenophobia and other hatreds.
This course will be conducted online. Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offeredSpring semester. The Department.
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