This course explores our fascination with witches in history and pop culture and, in the process, touches upon timely topics such as misogyny and social panic.

Research universities are a 19th-century German invention. The course provides both an introduction to the modern university and an exploration of the relationship between knowledge and power. 

How are current threats to biodiversity inseparable from threats to cultural diversity? How is the history and concept of extinction implicated in histories of colonialism and imperialism?

The Naked Truth: Dissolution and Crisis in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

How was gender portrayed in Vienna 1900, and what did people do to resist and undercut rigid definitions and stereotypes? 

Designed For:

Anyone interested in changing society, rebelling against authority, and discovering how revolutions play out in history, film, music, and literature. 

What is trans literature? In this course, we not only read recent fictional texts that deal with transness, but we also ask critically how we read these texts. 

From dog-headed saints to unicorns and werewolves, this course examines how premodern cultures imagined monsters to define and challenge the boundaries of what it is to be human. 

In this course we will marvel at how fairy tales are part of a transcultural ecologies of storytelling that stretch from 16th century Italy to 19th century Germany to contemporary North America. 

Babylon Berlin: Gender, Identity and Sexuality Between the Wars - English Language course 

Modern research universities like the University of Washington are a 19^th-century German invention. We think of the university’s divisions into areas of knowledge (natural sciences, social sciences, humanities) and departments (e.g., physics, psychology, history) as naturally reflecting the world, but in fact these categories artificially shape and determine what counts as knowledge in the first place.