Spring 2025 Graduate Courses

Spring 2025

ELTS 202 – Studies in History of Ideas: Italy and Global Renaissance: Literature, Diaspora, and Forced Migration

Instructor: Diego Pirillo

Whether or not Renaissance truly was first global movement in history of ideas, it is certain that global turn has transformed early modern studies. Growing body of scholarship is recovering Renaissance connections with Mediterranean world; and examines different ways in which Renaissance humanism spread beyond Europe, and responses it produced from Mexico to China. Through focus on early modern Italy, introduction to both foundational texts of Italian canon and expanding secondary literature on global Renaissance. Students read some of most prominent period authors (Leo Africanus, Ariosto, Bruno, Campanella, Machiavelli, Morata, and others). Students also see how literary texts responded to early modern phenomena such as forced migration, diaspora, slavery, and refugee question. Introduction to book history, incorporating materials from UCLA special collections to engage directly with early printed books, artworks, and material culture.

ELTS 207 – Topics in Literary Studies: Biography: Life Narrative as Genre and Model

Instructor: Lia Brozgal

Study point of departure is notion that robust and creative biographical practice is alive and well in contemporary Europe. Study also posits that biography can be understood as method of humanities investigation that can be relevant to wide variety of projects. Students read selected biographical writings that are paired with critical and theoretical texts in order to problematize relationship between biography and history and the novel, payoffs and pitfalls of experimental biography, and advent of subgenres such as biofiction and heterobiography. Students speculate on types of raw material deployed in service of narrating a life story. Students also explore archive, both literal and figural, as source of information, evidence, and inspiration.

FRNCH 203 – Contemporary Francophone Literature: Understanding Genocide in Rwanda

Instructor: Alain Mabanckou

In 1994, more than one million people (U.N. estimate) were killed in Rwanda within a few months. International community witnessed one of last genocides of 20th century. At first glance, it was conflict between two ethnic groups: Hutu and Tutsi. Study reviews this conflict by analyzing it on several levels: research perspective, through works of Catherine Coquio, Jean-Pierre Chrétien and Marcel Kabanda; testimony of writer-journalists, in particular Jean Hatzfeld; and gaze of novelists, through work of Guinean writer Thierno Monenembo.