Graduate Courses

Spring 2025

ENL 240: Medieval Literature - Abolition Past and Present

A few years ago, I published an essay arguing that the 6th-century philosopher Boethius had a worldview that was surprisingly compatible with the modern principles surrounding the abolition of police and prisons. Boethius (a prisoner himself) recognized the limits of human perceptual structures while acknowledging as-yet-unseeable possibilities. The willingness to imagine worlds not yet fully visible and available to a liberal society underlies abolitionist theory and praxis. The first time I taught a course based on these ideas, UAW 2865 began an unfair labor practice strike partway through the quarter. Because we had been talking about abolition and a long history of imagining liberated horizons long before the strike started, each of us had this conceptual framework for approaching the leadup to the strike as well as the strike itself.

This spring’s course will develop further both the insights derived from these material experiences of labor action and the foundational histories of abolition. We will pair premodern and modern readings to explore various subthemes within the abolitionist framework. These will include the critique of reform, the violence of liberalism, the vexed relation of labor and liberation, and why, in the past and the present, all cops are bastards.

Readings will all be uploaded on Canvas; there will be no required textbook.

Partial medieval reading list:

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
The Old English Genesis
The Tale of Gamelyn and other outlaw ballads
Chaucer, The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and The Franklin's Tale
Poetry from BL MS Harley 2253
William Langland, excerpts from Piers Plowman

James Simpson, excerpts from Permanent Revolution
Patrick Wormald, excerpts from The Making of English Law
Rodney Hilton, J. C. Holt, T. H. Aston on Robin Hood
 

MS Junius 11 p. 46

 

PHI 290: History of Philosophy

Leibniz: Existence, Necessity, and Substance
 
Why is there something, rather than nothing? What explains why some things exist, and some do not? Why are some things possible and some impossible?
 
Leibniz has answers. This world exists because it was created by God. In fact, He created the best of possible worlds. The things that exist are exactly those that occupy this perfect world; the things that are possible are those God considers while making the Decision.
 
In this seminar, we’ll make sense of these answers and, more generally, we’ll study Leibniz’s work on metaphysics with a focus on his theory of modality (including the notions of existence, contingency, and necessity) and his theory of bodies (including the notions of substance, monad, and idealism).
 
Other topics include: metaphysical principles (such as that of sufficient reason, non-contradiction, and the identity of indiscernibles), extension and material composition, Leibniz’s arguments against necessitarianism, and the problem of evil.

Winter 2025

Classics (CLA) 200A: Approaches to the Classical Past 

French (FRE) 207A: 18th-Century Literature: Philosophies - "Decadence and the Memoir"

  • (CRN: 41461); T 2:10-5; Olson 144

  • André Naffis-Sahely

    Course Description: This course will consider one of the world’s longest and most controversial autobiographies, Giacomo Casanova’s Histoire de ma vie, and place the infamous Venetian conman in the context of his time, with an emphasis on eighteenth century gender politics, morality and philosophy.

History (HIS) 201Q: Cross-Cultural Women's History 

  • (CRN: 41805); W 3:10-6; SSandH 4202

  • Lisa Masterson 

    Course Description:  This year’s 201Q will examine the diverse ways that gender has shaped colonial projects, colonial subjecthood, and post-colonial nation building. Readings will cover North America, Latin America, Africa, and Asia and will explore a range of themes through comparative and transnational frameworks. These topics include knowledge and power, suffrage and citizenship, masculinity, multiracial identities, sexuality and reproduction, anticolonial revolution, and post-colonial reparations.

    Tentative Reading List

  • Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1983).
  • Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (UC, 2003).
  • Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915. (UNC, 1994).
  • Tanya Harmer, Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America (UNC, 2020).
  • Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship (Cambridge, 2022).
  • Adria L. Imada Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire (Duke, 2012).
  • Edward Said, Orientalism (Verso, 1978)
  • Tiffany A. Sippial, Celia Sánchez Manduley: The Life and Legacy of a Cuban Revolutionary (UNC, 2003).
  • Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (Columbia, 2000).
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Philosophy (PHI) 290: History of Philosophy