This year’s cycle of Humanities Core is organized around the theme Empire and Its Ruins, which will emphasize how humans have made sense of the rise and fall of societies and the effects of dominant structures on people who are marginalized. This quarter, we will address the formation and maintenance of the Roman Empire, the concept of “ruins” in Enlightenment-era philosophy and visual art, and the impact of the American ideology of Manifest Destiny on indigenous communities. We will reflect on how empire structures the way we think about “civilization,” …
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Winter
This quarter centers on various forms of resistance to empire. We will challenge received ideas about conquest through an examination of the Inca empire and Spanish colonization of Peru; reflect on how revisions of canonical texts, such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest, destabilize the power structures that sustain empire; and analyze the responses of Indian anti-colonialists to the British Raj. We will explore how empires and their ruins structure the way we think about conquest, colonization, …
Spring
The final quarter of Empire and Its Ruins centers on diaspora and the effect on empire on individual and community experience. We will explore how race and gender shaped early American encounters with indigenous peoples as well as the trans-Atlantic slave trade and economy; reflect on American imperialism in Vietnam, Cambodia, and the …
