Spring 2026 MA Seminars

HUM 720: CURRENT TOPICS IN HUMANITIES (Prof. David Peña-Guzman)

This seminar explores reading as a cultural, historical, and mental ‘event.’ Long assumed to be a purely passive act, reading is a complex phenomenon that transcends the activity/passivity binary. When we read, we are receptive, but we are also actively producing meaning. That’s because to read is to simultaneously have one’s thoughts altered by something external to the self and to create something new from the core of one’s own being. 

But what made reading possible in the first place? And how has manifested itself differently over time? In this class, students will learn about the history of books as material objects, the spread of different attitudes about reading, and the neuroscience of reading.

By the end of the semester, students will hopefully gain a new appreciation for reading as both a cultural artifact, a cognitive proves, and a living, evolving human act.

CWL 820  Medieval and Early Modern Encounters (Prof. Shirin Khanmohamadi)

This graduate seminar examines discourses of travel and encounter from the pre- and early modern eras, focusing in particular on encounters between Europe and Asia including the Islamicate world.  We will survey a wide swath of cultural production including travel reports, literature, cartography, and artistic production emerging from diverse types of encounter, from the Crusades, pilgrimage, and missions, to trade and exchange along the Silk Road and across Africa, to the New World conquests. Throughout we will trace the interplay between the real and the imaginary within premodern travel writing and endeavor to identify its preoccupations, themes, tropes, and transformations up through the early modern era. No previous experience with the premodern period required. Graduate standing or permission of the Instructor.