Spring 2026
Core Courses
Historiography and Identity
(MELC 298 / STRELIG 200)
Yonatan Binyam
Wednesdays, 2 - 5 PM
Class #27999
Recent scholarship on the study of the premodern past has witnessed important shifts in perspective in the study of past identities, especially collective or group identities. Scholars across various disciplines (e.g. Classics, religious studies, medieval studies) have called for critical reassessments of the kinds of past that contemporary historiography produces. These shifts in perspective are in part precipitated by efforts to employ critical or postcolonial theories with the goal of decentering or reframing Eurocentric reconstructions of the premodern world. This course investigates the theoretical and methodological issues raised in this context. Particular attention will be paid to how historians of premodernity define analytic categories like identity, race/racism, ethnicity, and religion, emphasizing the contrast between conventional and critical formulations of these concepts. Interrogations of these issues will include the analysis of key historiographical problems like periodization, the objectivity question, and the problem of translation, along with an examination of relevant historiographical approaches like “the History of Ideas” and narrative and history. The course aims to foster a deeper understanding of how the mutually constitutive dynamics between identity and historiography play out both in premodern sources and in contemporary scholarship.
Students must register for 4 units to receive credit for DESR.
Electives
Power and the Art of Writing: From Machiavelli to Hobbes
(ITALIAN 215 / STRELIG 290)
Kinch Hoekstra and Diego Pirillo
Thursdays, 2 - 4 PM
Class #33680
The seminar considers how thinkers communicated their ideas in the context of the new forms of power, domination, and surveillance that emerged during the Renaissance and early modern period. How did rulers, states, and churches regulate intellectual life? How did dissidents and minorities criticize power? How did they circumvent censorship and avoid persecution? How did intellectuals manage to speak truth to power, or to tailor their ideas to the needs of their patrons, helping to construct social hierarchy and cultural hegemony? We will read a selection of authors and genres, including works by Machiavelli, Erasmus, Elizabeth I, Sarra Copia Sulam, Paolo Sarpi, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes. The close reading of primary sources will be complemented by attention to the technologies through which ideas circulated and the barriers they encountered (print/manuscript/censorship). To facilitate access to rare books and archival material, the entire seminar will be held at the Bancroft Library. During the last month of classes, the seminar will host Filippo De Vivo (https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-filippo-de-vivo), Chair of Italian Culture at Berkeley in Spring 2026, who will share his work on power and communication, considering forms of propaganda and control, and also the arts of communicative resistance by subaltern groups.
Students must register for 4 units to receive credit for DESR.
Renaissance: Ascetic Imagination (17th Century through Milton)
(ENGLISH 246D / STRELIG 290)
David Marno
Mondays 3:30 - 6:30 PM
Class #34218
Seventeenth-century English literature is haunted by the afterlife of the monastery. Dissolved in the Reformation and remembered largely through polemic, the monastery was recast as a space of unnatural enclosure—an image of idleness, corruption, or confinement that shaped Protestant cultural memory. Yet writers continued to reimagine this figure of the cloister, sometimes reproducing its pathology, sometimes exploring how monastic habits of discipline, devotion, and community might be reinvented. This course examines how literary forms—lyric, sermon, drama, and epic—engage the legacy of monasticism, treating enclosure not only as a site of claustrophobia but also as a resource for imagining freedom. Readings include Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus, Donne’s and Herbert’s devotional works, Milton’s Paradise Regained, Herrick’s Hesperides, and Marvell’s lyrics, alongside key scholarship on poetics, devotion, and cultural memory.