Fall 2026
Core Courses
Manichaeism: A World Religion?
(AHMA 210 / STRELIG 200)
Duncan E. Macrae, Adam Benkato
Tuesdays, 2 - 5 PM
Class #2617
This seminar will introduce the history of Manichaeism in late antiquity. The seminar will focus on a remarkable set of textual sources that attest to Manichaean ideas, practices and communities stretching across North Africa, Egypt and the Near East, Iran, to Central Asia and western China from the 3rd c. CE to the early 11th c. CE. We will also devote attention to the archaeology available from Kellis (Egypt) and Turfan (China), the sites of two particularly well-documented Manichaean communities, and to the materiality of the extant Manichaean texts. Our inquiry will center on the value of the categories of “religion” and “world religion” as tools for interpreting the history of Manichaeism and for understanding it in the context of early Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and other religions. For interested students, the instructors will support advanced readings for students working in Iranian languages, Greek, and Latin; there will also be opportunities to read Coptic texts.
Electives
Public and Private Personhood in Early Modern England
(HISTORY 280B / STRELIG 290)
Ethan Shagan
Wednesdays, 2 - 5 PM
Class #33441
Early modern England, once known to historians too grandiosely as the “first modern society,” was the site of precocious experiments to convert private subjectivity into public life, experiments we associate with the emergence of liberalism. In a wide range of contexts—religious interiority, republican theories of citizenship, life-writing, voting and majority rule, women’s roles in litigation, the rise of commercial credit, the bourgeois public sphere, and many others—interiority achieved a paradoxical new public significance, not only shaping people’s own experiences but shaping society. In this course, we will explore how early modern subjects created a familiar modern condition in which the more interiority matters, the more exposed it becomes. This focus will give students a chance to explore several canonical subjects in early modern British history and to think in novel ways about connections between them.
Imperial Russia
(HISTORY 280B / STRELIG 290)
Victoria Frede-Montemayor
Mondays 2-4 PM
Class #26826
This course offers an overview of scholarship on Imperial Russia. The first six weeks will survey standard readings on the nature of autocracy and its development in the nineteenth century, as well as the multilayered history of social "estates" and their transformation into social classes. In the second half of the semester, the syllabus will be tailored to student interests: ethnicity and religion; intellectual history; history of science, etc. Please contact me ahead of the semester so I can shape the syllabus to fit your needs!
German Jewry
(HISTORY 280B / STRELIG 290)
John Efron
Mondays 10-12 PM
Class #27851
This seminar is designed to introduce students to an intensive examination of the major themes and issues concerning the history of the Jews in Germany from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Among the topics to be explored are the debates over Jewish emancipation, the German-Jewish struggle with Jewishness, Wissenschaft des Judentums, integration into and separation from the mainstream, German antisemitism and Jewish responses, economic and family life, and Jewish culture in the Kaiserreich and Weimar Republic.