This course surveys many genres and periods in order to consider and think about two traditional kinds of literary responses to war, glorifying it, and representing its horrors. We'll examine texts by Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Byron, Whitman, Hardy, Crane, Freud, Levi, Pynchon, and Sebald, among others; we may also screen one or two films.
Like Freud, Victorian novelists tell stories of desire that often center on a female character. This seminar examines some of the contexts, conventions, and tensions that go into the making of a "portrait of a lady" in this novelistic tradition. Texts to be studied include Freud's case history Dora, and novels by Brontë, Collins, Eliot, and James.
This course studies the design of organized markets, focusing on efficient organization and the incentives created by market rules. The analysis relies on a mix of documenting the rules of real-world markets, game theoretic analysis, empirical analysis, and experimental work.
Applications include:
Industrial organization is the study of firm behavior and market outcomes under different forms of competition, with emphasis on oligopoly, where firms interact strategically.
The course picks up where Intermediate Micro left and advances to models of Product Differentiation, Network Effects, Social Networks and Technology Adoption, R&D, Advertising and other features we observe in actual markets. Using models can help us understand complicated phenomena and suggest efficiency enhancing policies.
Methodologically, students can expect to gain knowledge and experience in translating real-world markets into models that they will be able to solve using calculus and game theoretic analysis. We will then demonstrate how the solutions of such models provide us with new insights about the markets that we study.
How did much of the world agree that female genital cutting should be ended? This course explores grassroots and international campaigns in Africa and in the West, effects of asylum and criminal laws, and international organizations' attempts to create evidence-based, scientific governance to end cutting. We will focus on ethnographies that problematize these interventions by analyzing their histories, cultural politics, contradictory effects on local communities, and global political ramifications. By examining interventions against cutting, this course offers a methodological and conceptual blueprint for researching local-global production of human rights crises and efforts to resolve them.
What makes gender useful to think with? What work is it charged with doing - in the "real" world and in scholarship? What is the explanatory and analytical potential of a category that has been appropriated to divergent ends? Drawing on multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, this course operates at two registers throughout: it offers students a productive set of analytical tools for theorizing gender and sexuality in culture and society; and it constructs a genealogy of anthropological analysis of gender and sexuality from a postcolonial perspective, exploring how ethnography and postcolonial theory have challenged liberal feminism.