Course Offerings - Summer 2009

Fine Arts  2232/3293
Papal Rome: Art and Culture in the Renaissance and Baroque Periods

This course will emphasize great masterworks from the Renaissance and Baroque periods in Rome. Students will analyze and interpret works of art and architecture in context and on site. Lectures will be held in the magnificent churches and museums of Rome. Masterpieces from the ancient Roman and Medieval periods will be considered in relation to their influences on later works. Renaissance and Baroque works will be studied in relation to their patronage, their meaning and their legacies. The class will visit the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Roman Fora, Santa Maria Maggiore, the Vatican Museums, St. Peter's Basilica and much more! A field trip to Florence, the "cradle of the Renaissance" will complement and expand our course.

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Fine Arts 1012/2300/3301
Studio Art– Introduction to Drawing, Intermediate Drawing, Advanced Drawing

An intense four week immersion into studio art through drawing. Students at all levels will create visual journals in the form of sketchbooks as they study drawing in close proximity to the great monuments of the Western tradition. Along with fieldtrips to the churches, palaces and museums of Rome-monuments which celebrate the past-visual art students will embrace the dynamics of present day Rome as a vital contemporary arts center. Notebook studies (and photographic imaging) will be the starting point for more critically developed projects done in the classroom in a variety of expressive and analytical ways.

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ENGL 2398: Shakespeare's Italy

Of Shakespeare's 38 extant plays, 11 have Italy as their setting. Clearly the Italian landscape held some sort of fascination for the Bard, and this course will examine at least six of those eleven plays with particular attention to the role of the setting in the drama. Plays we read will include comedies ( The Merchant of Venice and either Two Gentlemen of Verona OR The Taming of the Shrew ), tragedies ( Othello, the Moor of Venice and Romeo and Juliet ), and Roman history plays ( Julius Caesar and either Antony and Cleopatra OR Coriolanus ). This class will include various fieldtrips related to the subject of the course.

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ENGL 2398: The Ancient World in Literature and Film

Recently—and not so recently—the viewing public has been bombarded with cinematic renderings of the classical world. Whereas films such as Gladiator and 300 set records at the box office, regrettably few viewers go to the trouble of familiarizing themselves with the rich store of literature that serves as inspiration for these blockbusters and to a large extent as the basis for the study of Western civilization itself. This course sets out to fill the gap between celluloid depictions of antiquity and the literary heritage of the Greek and Roman world. We will examine how contemporary film understands and presents the past, to what extent films based in antiquity are disconnected from the stories and historical issues that inspired them, and what connections might exist and how those connections might help us better understand both classical literature and modern film. Written texts will include Homer's Iliad (a prose translation); the first two chapters of Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars (on Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar); book 7 of Herodotus' Histories (the battle of Thermopylae); and two comedies by Plautus, Miles Gloriosus and Pseudolus , as well as shorter handouts. Film texts will include Troy , 300 , Gladiator , A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum , and the first season of the HBO series Rome . This class will include various fieldtrips related to the subject of the course.