Ex Oriente Lux: Eastern Christian Mystics of the Light

Religious Studies 103-301
Tuesday & Thursday, 9:00 - 10:30
Instructor: Andreas Andreopoulos
PHF Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, History of Art & Religious Studies

Eastern mystics did not easily talk or write about their experiences. Nevertheless, a tradition of contemplative prayer that starts in the Egyptian desert in the fourth century and culminates with the flowering of the hesychastic theology in fourteenth century Byzantium, is characterized by the experience of the Uncreated Light, the same light that was experienced by Peter, John and James during the Transfiguration of Jesus, something that is related to the ascetic ascent of hesychasm.

This seminar will discuss these experiences within their historical, cultural, and spiritual background, and will present the thought of significant mystics such as Evagrius of Pontus, Maximus the Confessor, Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory Palamas, Theophanes of Nicea, the Slavic monastics who continued the hesychastic tradition, as well as the hesychastic councils of the fourteenth century.

Belief here will be approached as the agent that awakens the spiritual senses, both in the lives of the saints and mystics whose faith was transformed into experience, in the words of Maximus the Confessor "passing from flesh to spirit", where the physical and the metaphysical meet. Moreover, the mystical tradition of the light will be approached from a contemporary point of view, discussing the relationship of the contemporary reader with the mystical experience.

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Heresy and Inquisition in the Middle Ages

History 201–302
Monday 2:00–5:00
Instructor: Michael D. Bailey
PHF Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, History

This course will cover the history of heresy from the first known executions of heretics in the medieval West in 1022 until the Reformation of the sixteenth century, when questions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy become subsumed in larger issues of religious confessionalism.

Students will explore the origins of several major heretical movements during the European middle ages, and will examine the social, cultural, and religious factors that shaped the particular beliefs held by these groups. In addition, the course will also cover official ecclesiastical reaction to heresy, namely the institution of inquisitions in various areas of Western Europe intended specifically to combat heresy and enforce correct belief. Through heretical groups and individuals, the course will explore the nature of belief and the profound courses of action to which fervent belief and lead. Through the history of inquisitorial activity, the course will examine efforts and methods to control and shape belief, and the difficulties inherent in such actions.

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Soundings: Ways of Making Music

Instructor: Sidney Boquiren
PHF Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Music

Students will explore (1) the ways that composers today and in the previous century have approached the creation of music, and (2) the diversity of materials and sounds available for use at the hands of those composers. In the process, students will become acquainted with some of the seminal works of the twentieth century as well as more recently composed pieces, examining how composers have dealt with a host of compositional, aesthetic, and philosophical concerns.

This course is not intended just for musicians and music majors. Indeed, Soundings is designed as an introduction to inquiries on the nature of music. We will apply modes of inquiry that challenge and examine preconceived notions and understandings of music. We will also locate the music we study within broader contexts by relating the pieces we aurally examine and discuss to other forms of art. Along with historical and social contextualization, the course will encompass a multidisciplinary breadth that engenders a well-informed understanding of music.

The works to be studied and aurally analyzed, while primarily consisting of modern and experimental Western music, will present a gamut of compositional approaches, represented by but most certainly not limited to the following composers: Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Helmut Lachenmann, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Arnold Schoenberg, and Chen Yi. In the process of hearing, studying, and analyzing a diversity of compositions, students will begin to question, challenge, and carefully reconsider their long-held beliefs and unexamined assumptions regarding what music is, expanding their understanding of what music can be.

Given that a composition only truly comes to life upon its performance, students will be required to attend a certain number of performances. They will also be required to present a commentary (in aural and/or written format) on each performance experience. Additionally, I will guide students, as a class or in groups, through the creation of musical works and projects, as well as their performance, thereby affording them a glimpse of the creative and the performative questions and issues that composers and performers often face. This experiential method of learning, using compositional concepts adapted from the works being studied, is intended to complement and augment their understanding of the numerous ways that we do and can make music today. Representative readings will be taken from John Cage’s Silence, Elliott Schwartz and Barney Child’s Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, and Cole Gagne’s Soundpieces 2: Interviews with American Composers. These texts will be supplemented by readings from Arcana: Musicians on Music (edited by John Zorn), Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (by Michael Nyman), and New Dimensions in Music (by David Cope).

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"Artificial Delusions, Natural Truths": The Engendering of Human Knowledge and Truth in the Works of Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell

English 16–303
Tuesday & Thursday 3:00–4:30
Instructor: Yaakov Mascetti
PHF Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, English

When we think of scientific inquiry into the mechanism of natural events, the data obtained in our laboratories lack any kind of qualitative connotation. Truth of experience must be objective. Nature is a machine whose inner workings we are to understand, regardless of passions or expectations. To the natural philosophers of the later seventeenth century, however, Nature was conceived as woman to be known and possessed. The intellectual inquiry of natural philosophers a quasi-sexual experience, knowledge was invariably masculine, and the object of scientific research was connoted as feminine, passive, and receptive. The activeness of a mind could only be that of a male: women were relegated to the margins, or to an ignorant passivity.

Against the terms of this narrative, this course will focus on questions of early-modern gender-definitions in relation to the rise in empiricism and scientific research which characterized mid-seventeenth-century England. While the Royal Society was conceived as the shrine of absolute truth and of objective understanding, based on the empirical search for the secrets of nature, Margaret Cavendish (the first woman to be “allowed” to visit the Society, until then the masculine temple of knowledge) was aggressively justifying her writing and philosophizing as a woman by re-engendering the concepts of truth, belief, and observation. Opposing the textual dimension of her works to the social environment in which she lived, Cavendish recreated in her Female Academy, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, and Blazing World the locus of female knowledge, responding to the masculine hegemony in natural philosophy, and dismissing the epistemic binaries posited by the new philosophers of the Royal Academy.

In this seminar it will therefore be our objective to understand the ways in which early modern women writers like Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell could oppose the male establishment and create an alternative pole of female knowledge.

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The Poetics and Politics of Religious Conversion

Anthropology 026
Tuesday & Thursday 3:00–4:30
Instructor: Kate Ramsey
PHF Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Anthropology

This seminar will examine religious transformation as both a personal experience and a socio-historical force. We will consider the ways in which conversion has been narrated by those who experience them, those who incite them (e.g. missionaries), and those who seek to analyze and explain them (e.g., historians and social scientists). We will study the close historical relation between conquest and conversion, while also examining how conversions of the colonized have led to conversions of the colonizers and their cultures. Finally, we will examine cases in which conversion might be understood as an act of dissent and consider the liberatory possibilities of such transformations. Throughout the seminar, we will focus on what the process of conversion can teach us about human subjecthood, identity, cultural contact, and historical change. Readings will include autobiographical accounts, novels, and scholarly works by authors such as Chinua Achebe, Bartolome de Las Casas, Jonathan Edwards, Clifford Geertz, Robin Horton, William James, C. S. Lewis, Vicente Rafael, Sojourner Truth, Gauri Viswanathan, and Malcolm X.

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