The Wednesday University provides Puget Sound residents with an intellectually stimulating way to continue their education in the humanities.

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Autumn 2008
For the Good of the Nation? Media Politics in America
David Domke (Communication)

Scholars and pundits chart a decades-long decline in Americans’ common values and shared civic purpose. Others contend that the very norms of citizenship and political engagement areundergoing profound transformation..At the center of these developments is the recent emergenceof a political system in which leaders and organizations are stunningly adept at using mass media for strategic purposes. Todaypolitical campaigns skillfully spin news coverage, embrace popular culture and advertising, and build and leverageinternet networks. In the new media politics, the style and speed of messages trump substantive and sober political debate, withconsiderable implications. On the negative side, these developments can explain polarization and disenchantment withinthe U.S. electorate. On the positive side, many Americans—in particular younger citizens—are developing new forms of political involvement that deploy media in innovative ways. This Wednesday University course will examine the rise of media politics in the United States and assess what it portends for the American experiment in democracy.

Winter 2009
Food for Thought: The Ethics, Culture, and Politics of Eating
Ann Anagnost (Anthropoligy and Chinese Studies) and Lucy Jarosz (Geography)
Course Blog

Food is the stuff of life. It is part of our very being as biological organisms dependent on our environment for sustenance. And since humans are inherently social beings, food is also the stuff of our relationships with others. Moreover, growing, distributing, and consuming food shapes the places and environments we inhabit.Thus food defines not only who we are but also where we are. Using key concepts and approaches drawn from ethics, political ecology, and cultural studies, this course will explore how food production and consumption creates meanings, identities, relationships, and values that extend far beyond nutrition alone.We will investigate how ethics and values inform who eats what, where, and how; issues of hunger and vulnerability; debates about farming and genetically modified food; movements to eat local and eat slow; food as a form of self-care; and the globalization of food economies. Whenever possible, lectures will make connections to Seattle’s local food cultures.

Spring 2009
Art and its Publics, from the Renaissance to the Present
JoLynn Edwards (Art History)

What lineages connect the Renaissance palazzi and churches toMOMA, Sotheby’s, and the buzz about the "creative economy" in our own day? Beginning with the thriving court and aristocratic patronage systems in Florence, Rome, Flanders, and Versailles, this course will trace the varied paths that lead to today’s art markets,philanthropy, and funding. We’ll visit The Netherlands and Paris of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to see how an expanding middle class and market economy affected the Old Masters. We’ll examine the nineteenth-century rise of art academies and the codification of the arts, as well as the increasing influence of museums, galleries, and art critics. Moving into the modern era, we’ll seehow corporate and government arts funding and themarket economics of the art sales room structure the contemporary creation, collection, and cultural consumption of art. Throughout we’llreturn to the themes of prestige and social identity, luxury, connoisseurship, expanding publics, taste, and value that wind their way through this history.

Autumn 2007
Religion, Politics, and the Modern American Presidency
David Domke (Communication)

Religion has been part of American politics since the nation's inception. Presidents have spoken of a higher power, sought divine favor, and expressed gratitude for providential outcomes. For much of the nation's history, this confluence of faith and politics has been perceived as largely symbolic and nonpartisan. But something significant seems to have changed in recent decades. On issue after issue, U.S. public debate today includes faith-based perspectives espoused by politically adept individuals and organizations. Citizens' religious affinities are now among the strongest predictors of presidential voting patterns. Political leaders speak openly and often about their religious beliefs, and news media respond. Religion has become a defining—and often partisan—part of the political arena. The course will examine how this change occurred, who has led these developments and why, and what it means for the American experiment in democracy.

Winter 2008
Art and Action in Ancient Rome
Sandra Joshel (History) and Margaret Laird (Art History)

Ritual saturated every aspect of ancient Roman culture and society, from official state religion to ordinary household practices. The art and artifacts of this vast empire—statues, sarcophagi, reliefs, and mosaics—depicted these rituals and played a part in them. Through these beautiful and useful objects, we discover urban forums and marketplaces, leisure entertainments, emperors' palaces as well as the households of simpler folk. Exploring the society and material culture of imperial Rome and its provinces between 27 BC and 300 AD, the course will examine how the ritual actions and representations of "being Roman" shaped daily life and the social order, from emperors and citizens to women and slaves. Associated with Roman Art from the Louvre at the Seattle Art Museum.

Spring 2008
American Sabor: Latinos Shaping U.S. Popular Music
Shannon Dudley (Ethnomusicology) and Michelle Habell-Pallan (Women Studies)

From the resurgence of tango and salsa to the success of Buena Vista Social Club, the popularity of "Latin" music with a broad American public is as unmistakable as its distinctive rhythms and styles. But Latino contributions to the history of American popular music go much deeper. U.S. Latino musicians have served as interpreters of Latin American genres like salsa, mambo, and conjunto, and as innovators within "American" genres such as rock and roll, R&B, jazz, country/western, and hip hop. We will listen to the unique contributions of Latino communities across the country and to various artists, from Tito Puente and Celia Cruz to Carlos Santana and Linda Ronstadt. Through the music and the stories behind the music, the course will also highlight the social struggles, language differences, and generational changes that have shaped the lives of Latinos in the Americas. Associated with the EMP exhibit, American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music.

Autumn 2006
Nature, History, and Nation
Linda Nash (History)

How have human actions transformed the natural environments of North America? How have those environments, at once natural and man-made, influenced American history? What can landscape painting, nature writing, and the national park system tell us about our imaginative understandings of the non-human world? This course will uncover the ways in which human and natural history are fundamentally intertwined. Lectures will integrate the history of U.S. politics and culture with the history of forests, agriculture, rivers, animals, and air. We will consider the environmental and social impacts of nineteenth-century industrial expansion; the history of environmental conservation and the social conflicts those efforts created; the development of modern industrial agriculture, from the Dust Bowl crisis to current controversies over genetically modified crops; and the atomic fallout crisis of the 1950s and the subsequent rise of modern environmentalism.

Winter 2007
The Fool in the Frame: Film Comedy and 20th-Century America
Jennifer Bean (Cinema Studies)

As Aristophanes and Shakespeare knew well, the clown is a fool and the fool is the wisest of us all. Laughter sometimes hurts because comedy’s dramaturgical forms invite us to question cultural, political, and aesthetic norms, to experience anew habitual patterns of behavior and bits of meaning. This course looks at the cultural questions "framed" by American film comedy since the early twentieth century when Charlie Chaplin emerged as America's first international film star. The profoundly humorous approach to twentieth-century culture we find in Chaplin's duck-walking Little Tramp, Depression-era screwball antics, and witty conundrums posed in the films of Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, and Joel Cohen far surpasses a bit of clowning around. We will spend the winter laughing out loud while asking why—from aesthetic, political and historical perspectives—the rare vision of these cinematic clowns brings us just as close to tears.

Spring 2007
Sacred Cities of Asia
Vikramaditya ("Vikram") Prakash (Architecture)

Visually resplendent and architecturally captivating, sacred cities of Asia are rich in political, religious, and cultural history. Their spaces, iconography, and uses open windows into ways of thinking, believing, and feeling quite distinct from everyday Western life. This course will explore the architecture and cultures of five world-heritage sites from South to East Asia. In India, we will visit the holy Hindu city of Varanasi, where the spectacle of life, from birth to death, is ritually enacted on the banks of the River Ganges, and Madurai, the Tamil temple town whose annual rite witnesses the wedding of the goddess Meenakshi to Shiva. Three cities to the east ally temporal empires with divine powers. We will enter the Cambodian palace-temple of Angkor Wat, built to legitimize divine kings; tour the Forbidden City of Beijing, consecrating the Chinese emperor as the Son of Heaven; and visit Kyoto, the Japanese imperial capital arrayed in palaces, temples, and shrines.

Autumn 2005
Mapping the Dickens World
Richard Dunn (English)

The British nineteenth century witnessed unprecedented social change with the onslaught of rapid industrialization and urbanization. The effects of such massive shifts altered the visible character of wealth and poverty, the nature of law and work, and the quality of both personal ambition and family bonds. By interpreting the tumultuous Victorian scene in vivid stories and unforgettable characters, Charles Dickens gave indelible shape to this era, imprinting it with his own imagination and idiom. Through his fiction, Dickens's chronicles of his times have come to inhabit ours. This course looked at Dickens as a social commentator by examining familiar stories—from David Copperfield and Oliver Twist to Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol—powerful and enduring tales that have traveled from newspaper serials, to library and paperback editions, to stage and screen. It considered Dickens's fictional takes on the law, work, and public spectacle; his treatment of private life and family obligations, honored and neglected among parents and children; and the moral imagination that ties his wide-ranging themes together.

Winter 2006
When Theatre Mattered
Barry Witham (Drama)

What is America's role in the world? Should it intervene in the face of ruthless dictators, civil strife, and invasions abroad? Will unregulated markets float all boats on prosperous, rising tides, or will they encourage stock manipulations that devastate thousands? What about those who labor in America's industries? To what share of wealth or future security are they entitled, and should this be the government's business? These questions, pressing today, were raised in this country with special urgency between the two world wars. Before television made the medium the message, theatre offered the vital, creative place to dramatize problems, debate issues, and imagine alternative futures. Consequently, theatre between the wars mattered as a social force and forum in a way it has in almost no other period. This course studied how plays, playwrights, and performers—from Eugene O'Neill to Lillian Hellman, and Sidney Greenstreet to Montgomery Clift—entertained the nation's grave concerns, engaging and even mobilizing audiences from the established venues of Broadway to the living laboratories of the "Workers' Theaters."

Spring 2006
Five Italian Cities
Claudio Mazzola (Italian & Cinema Studies)

Rome, Venice, Florence, Naples, Milan. The very names of these Italian cities conjure visions and stories the world over, even for those who have never walked their streets. Beneath the evocative images, their deeply layered histories have shaped distinctive regional identities, displayed in a gamut of dialects, cuisines, political beliefs, and sporting enthusiasms. Culture in these cities manifests itself in the highest human achievements and the unstudied rhythms of everyday life. From the art of Michelangelo to the rituals of a midday meal, these cities offer rich and varied feasts. This course linked the complex histories and contemporary cultures of the five fabled cities, exploring how Italians and foreigners have imagined each of them in art, literature, and cinema, and how Italians live in these legendary cities today.

Autumn 2004
Renaissance Italy: Merchants, Artists, and Princes
Mary R. O'Neil (History)

The brilliant artistic and cultural achievements of the Renaissance arose from the unique social and political circumstances of the Italian city states. Beginning in Florence and ending with the Sack of Rome in 1527, the course will examine the historical realities of the Renaissance through its literature, history, and art. The conflict-ridden histories of the city states have provided historians with a wealth of material for understanding the public and private worlds of merchants, wives, artists, and princes in the 15th and 16th centuries. The course explores how the Medici family rose to power under Cosimo and Lorenzo, and the challenges presented by their many enemies, including Savonarola and Machiavelli. The careers of Brunelleschi, Leonardo, and Michelangelo shed light on the complex relations of artists and their patrons, whether cities, princes, or Popes.

Winter 2005
Great Film Directors
Albert Sbragia (French & Italian Studies)

In 1954, Francois Truffaut claimed that film, ideally, is a medium of personal expression for the director, whom, for that reason, should be regarded as an artist with a distinctive style and practice—an auteur. Young critics and filmmakers of the time soon began to couple this “auteur theory” with the belief that a great director would also be a cinephile, a director infected with a passion for the films of great and minor auteurs and a desire to pay homage to their films. In this style of filmmaking, directors use references, often ironic, to the films of their predecessors in their own films, tributes that result in hidden delights for the viewer. This course will explore the development of the director as auteur and cinephile, each week focusing on a different director, including Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, Sergio Leone, Martin Scorsese, and Quentin Tarantino.

Spring 2005
What’s So Hot About Art?
Ron Moore (Philosophy)

Alexander Calder’s mobile Pittsburgh was donated to Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, in 1958 for installation in the Greater Pittsburgh International airport. Originally, the mobile was black and white, but when it was installed, the airport repainted it green and gold, the official colors of Allegheny County. Calder was outraged, but the airport refused to restore the original colors. Does it make sense to think that the artwork itself has rights and thus should be protected from the violation of its integrity? Should art be taken out of the hurly-burly of value competition to secure a separate, secure place in the life of our culture? Do artworks have a right to be themselves? Using examples from ancient and contemporary art, Professor Moore will make a philosophical case for the rights of artworks based, ultimately, on the evidence that moral and aesthetic values are closely allied. Shakespeare's Ghostly Traditions: From the Romans to the Renaissance in British Theatre and Drama
John C. Coldewey (English)

"Remember me," the Ghost in Hamlet calls out again and again. Though not all of Shakespeare's works feature so literal a ghost, the plays implore the reader and viewer to "remember" that the ghosts of Britain's theatrical past haunt the halls of Shakespeare's writings. This course explored the theatrical legacy that Shakespeare inherited by examining the traditions of performance in Romanized Britain, between the first and fifth centuries; the liturgy of the Roman Church, well before the turn of the year 1000; and in the later Middle Ages. By this last era, theatrical ventures were flourishing wildly in every town and parish across the country, leading ultimately to witty, word-savvy plays performed in the universities and at court.

The Belle Époque
Raymond Jonas (History)

Those who experienced the Great War of 1914-1918 invented the term Belle Epoque as a nostalgic evocation of the "beautiful years" from the end of the nineteenth century up to 1914. This course explored both the Belle Epoque of history and the Belle Epoque of the imagination. It began by exploring France, specifically Paris, at the end of the nineteenth century as the setting for new artistic, literary, and architectural styles. The course will explore particular sites, topics, and innovations--Bohemian Montmartre, tourism and the business of entertainment, the spectacular city-- before moving on to consider the Belle Epoque of memory as evoked in the performances of Maurice Chevalier and, most recently, the vividly imagined Belle Epoque of the film Moulin Rouge.

Mummies, Myth, and Magic: Ancient Egyptian Concepts and Beliefs
Scott Noegel (Near Eastern Languages & Civilization)

Though the last pharaoh was buried more than two thousand years ago, ancient Egypt continues to fascinate us. Despite several centuries of archaelogical discoveries, Egypt continues to yield new artifacts and raise questions about its place in the ancient world. The more we examine its monumental remains and mummies, the more we become enthralled with the ancient Egyptians' cultural worldview. This course explored this worldview by focusing on a number of distinctive elements of ancient Egyptian civilization. Amply illustrated with striking visual imagery, the course focused on the ways Egyptians practiced their religions, how they conceived of death and the afterlife, and their conceptions of self, gender, and sexuality.


Why Human Rights Should Be Universal
William J. Talbott (Philosophy)

"We hold these truths to be self-evident . . ." so begins the U.S. Declaration of Independence. But what follows those words is not self-evident. Indeed, throughout most of human history, more people would have judged what follows those words to be self-evidently false than would have judged it to be self-evidently true. If it is not self-evidently true, what is the status of the proposition that there are basic human rights that should be universally respected? This course considered the view that that proposition is a historical discovery about how best to promote human well-being. It asked the following questions: How are moral discoveries possible? What characteristics of human beings make it appropriate to treat them as bearers of human rights? Which, if any, human rights should be universal? Is there a conflict between respect for cultural differences and a belief in universal human rights? Is there an alternative to moral relativism that avoids moral imperialism?

Druids, Poets, Clerics: Ireland's "Golden Age"
Robin C. Stacey (History)

Christian missionaries arriving in Ireland in the fifth century C.E. encountered something they had never seen before: a powerful class of native intellectuals charged with the perpetuation and preservation of traditions distinctly different from their own. Druids, poets, and seers had existed also among Celtic-speaking peoples on the continent. In Ireland, however, which had never been Romanized, these and other native professionals were too thoroughly integrated into contemporary political structures to be dislodged. This course explored the various ways in which in these two great traditions-one native, pagan, and oral, and the other Latin, Christian, and literate-came to terms with one another. How did they reconcile their priorities, perceptions, and personnel? How did the Church rewrite native concepts of gender, of kingship, and of heroic tradition in a manner acceptable to itself? And how does the remarkable literature that results from this fusion of cultures complicate our ideas about "native tradition"?

The World of Islam: From Prophet to Crusaders
Jere L. Bacharach (History)

Considered the fastest growing religion in the world, Islam has its roots in seventh-century Arabia. In this course, participants looked at how Islam emerged as an important force on the world stage, including the development of its core beliefs, its political and social structures, and its cultural expressions. Some of the questions considered were: Who was the Prophet Muhammad and what was the legacy he left his followers? How did the Quran develop as a sacred text? The course provided a focused exploration of this sophisticated urban-based civilization with its markets and mosques, palaces and scholars. It moved from the 17-century conquests of the Middle East by nomadic Arab-speaking Muslims to the arrival of nomadic Turkic-speaking Muslims from the plains of Central Asia and Christian Crusaders from the West five centuries later.


Early Shakespeare, Early Love
Charles H. Frey (English)

In the mid-1590’s, Shakespeare wrote lyrically about young lovers: the aristocratic youth of the sonnets, Adonis pursued by Venus, the tangled quartet of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Romeo and Juliet. In the 1990's, film-makers, in an effusion of popular adaptations, refashioned Shakespearean lovers to their own, and audiences' tastes. This course explored Shakespeare's versions of lyrical love and connected them to views in recent Shakespeare films of Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as Shakespeare in Love. Participants were asked how Shakespeare melds the silly and the serious in love, how he compares love with friendship, and how his lyricism works in varied media.

The Silk Road Observed and Imagined
Daniel Waugh (History)

The "Silk Road" is a concept embracing two millennia of cultural and economic interactions along many routes across Eurasia, a subject best introduced through the eyes of its contemporary observers. Participants learned from Han China's own historians (ca. 200 BCE-ca. 200 CE) why the Great Wall was built. They found Buddhist enlightenment in Central Asian oases and India with seventh- century Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang. They discovered how nomadic life and Christianity intersect at the emperor's court in the steppes of Mongolia with Franciscans Carpini and Rubruck. They learned how Marco Polo's description of Khubilai Khan's China brought Columbus to the New World. And they visited the Islamic splendors of Tamerlane's Samarkand in the early fifteenth century with the Spanish ambassador Clavijo.

A House Divided: The Civil War and American Values
Tracy McKenzie (History)

In this course, participants approached the American Civil War in much the same way as the men and women who experienced it—one year at a time—examining the five years from the spring of 1860 through Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in the spring of 1865. Integrating political, social, and military history, the course investigated the war as a window into the values of common Americans. What did the war reveal about who we were as a people in the 1860s? How has the conflict contributed to who we are today?


Silent Cinema and Modern Culture
Jennifer Bean (Comparative Literature)

An exploration of the histories and aesthetics of the silent cinema, a 32-year period in which this uniquely modern art form was born, flourished and stabilized.

Baroque Personae: Politics and Personality in Early Modern Art
Jeffrey Collins (Art History)

Collins examined how individuals of various social classes during 17th-century Europe—from popes, kings and saints to merchants, tradesman and artists—used painting, architecture and sculpture to create public images for themselves.

Greek Myth in Art and Culture
Catherine Connors (Classics)

Connors led her students through Homer's Odyssey and Ovid's Metamorphoses as guides to considering Greek myths of the formation of the world, the birth of the gods, the creation of humans and families, tragic conflicts, and heroic quests and contests.

How Duchamp Trumped Picasso: New Art Forms Since 1960
Patricia Failing (Art History)

Failing led her students through the heady shifts in artistic expression since the 1960s in the United States and Western Europe in the wake of Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso. Posing questions about modern and outdated art forms, she traced the fates of Pop art, installations, video, earth, and performance art, leading up to today’s artists and their modes of expression.

Fiction and the Family
Willis Konick (Comparative Literature)

Konick analyzed fiction’s impact on our ideas about family life, depicting how crises of the heart, ethics, and civilization depicted in 19th- and 20th-century literature mirror real life.

Race and the American West
Quintard Taylor, Jr. (History)

Taylor’s lectures focused on African American history in the American West and trace the long-neglected five-century story of settlement by blacks in this region. Taylor explained that while the histories of adventurous individuals and families among European descendents, Native Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans populating the West had been researched in the past, little was known about black families settling this part of the country until he began his research on this topic.