Honors Study Abroad

In this course, students will engage foundational theistic and atheistic existentialist works, while discovering the aforementioned pivotal figures to be themselves deeply influenced by the works of William Shakespeare, especially the “four great tragedies,” Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth.

We will consider the surprising British roots of existentialism not only in Shakespeare, but also in T.S. Eliot, as well as in the oft-overlooked existential dimensions of Karl Marx’s writings in and about London. We will demonstrate the profound influence of Shakespeare on two foundational existentialist thinkers (Kierkegaard’s theistic and Nietzsche’s atheistic existentialism thought) and one paradigmatic French existential literary figure thinker (Camus). Likewise, we present the work of T.S. Eliot as moving from an atheistic existentialism in his early poetry to a deeply Christian existentialism in his later works. This poetry in turn exerts seminal influence on theistic existentialists such as Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich. Finally, we present the existentialist dimension of Marx’s writings that shaped his view of the London in which he lived and influenced the feminist existentialism of Simone de Beauvoir and the black existentialism of W.E.B du Bois and Franz Fanon.

Students will encounter the places and spaces our British and Britain based existential trailblazers lived, worked, and thought about.

This course examines the history and politics of Rome, paying special attention to the ways that immigrants have shaped Roman culture, politics and identity since the city’s founding some 2,500 years ago. Rome has worn many faces over those years, transforming from the monumental capital of one of the ancient world’s most potent empires, to a holy city and pilgrimage site in the Middle Ages, to a vast canvas for Renaissance artists and architects, to a modern metropolis shaped by the legacy of fascism and the forces of global tourism. Even as the city’s face has changed dramatically over time, Rome continued to be visited and called home by many different human faces. Ancient Greeks, Syrians and Jews; medieval Franks and Saxons; and modern Afghans and Africans have all helped shape Rome into a center of global diversity. Then as now, “the eternal city” is a place where great privilege and terrible deprivation exist side by side, where catholic universalism vies with racist xenophobia, and where competing narratives about the past remain very relevant to the concerns of the present. In this class, we’ll try to understand how Rome has always been a different city for different people, and how those many Romes can continue to coexist.