From the population exchange that forged modern Greece and Turkey to the post-WWII division of South Asia and Palestine to the more recent dissolution of Yugoslavia, the 20th century was a time of partition and the compulsory movement of peoples. Often narrated as the inevitable result of different national and ethnic groups inhabiting the same territory–the outcome of “age old” prejudices and mutual hatred–partitions are in fact a thoroughly modern phenomenon. Why, when peoples who have lived alongside one another for centuries, does such an arrangement become no longer tenable? What forms of identity and statecraft make living together impossible? And why–despite so much evidence to the contrary–do many still conceive of the partition of peoples into ethnically homogeneous territories as both natural and inevitable? ...

Søren Kierkegaard—Hamlet’s equally melancholic Danish counterpart—is frequently regarded as the father of existentialism for his exploration of concepts such as subjectivity, anxiety, and absurdity. This course will be an introduction to the main ideas of the nineteenth-century philosopher and theologian. How did Kierkegaard—through puzzles, pseudonyms, and ruminations on mysteries—challenge and in turn influence systemic philosophy? What is the appeal of existentialism today? ...

Feminism is often recognized as a political movement. But is there a feminist way of thinking about politics? If so, what is it? In this course, we’ll investigate the core premises and questions of feminism as they relate to political thinking, focusing particularly on feminist political thought as it developed in the twentieth century. What does it mean to be a woman, and who counts as one? How does gender shape our conceptions of knowledge and action, power and leadership, the public and the private? ...

Aristotle’s Poetics offers an account of imitative art and its pleasures that stands at the origins of Western aesthetic theory. In response to Plato’s critique of poetry as twice-removed from reality, Aristotle defends—and theorizes—imitation as an essential component of human education and of the “discovery of form in things.” Fiction is false in its particulars, but somehow true in its universality. What does drama teach us that history and philosophy cannot? ...