Current 360° Offerings, Spring 2013
The Mediterranean as a Crossroads: History, Migrations, Identities
This 360°, composed of courses in History and French, examines the social, historical, artistic and cultural shape of the Mediterranean through the study of circum-Mediterranean port-cities and their populations. The two courses examine how cities have been affected by colonization, decolonization, Europeanization (EU), and political change (e.g. the current so-called “Arab Spring”) since the 19th century. They focus particularly on political economy, anti-colonial struggles, human migrations, and cultural movements. We ask: How have migrations affected the development of cities around the Mediterranean? How do diverse ethnic, religious, and political interest groups affect these cities and their regions? How have migratory movements affected art, urban planning and social structure? What infrastructures have supported this migratory flux? As a result of the migratory flux, how have city officials engaged the challenges of migration through policies?
Performance Across Language and Culture
Cross-language performance has been a constitutive component of live theater since antiquity. It has returned to center stage in recent years, both for practitioners and scholars of theater, for a variety of reasons. For theater practitioners, site-specific performance and expanding theater outreach programming have focused attention on increasingly diverse audiences. For scholars, the emergence of video archives has made it possible to track and study the evolution of specific productions and dramatic works across multiple languages and venues. A lively cross-pollination of critical concepts between performance studies, acting practice, and cultural theory now provides a rich vocabulary for doing so. A series of international festivals such as the Globe to Globe Cultural Olympiad in London in 2012 has raised the visibility of cross-language productions, yielding a messy but rich trove of reception records in social media, scholarship, and reviews. This 360 takes a close look at these phenomena, asking students to engage it as performers, audience members, teachers, and scholars – studying and experimenting with multilingual and vernacular stagings.
Space and Identity: Psychological, Artistic and Spatial Approaches to Hamburg, Philadelphia and Beyond
This 360° brings together three different disciplinary perspectives to explore the notion of individual and group identity across time and space in urban environments. We will probe issues of the self and society in relation to the built environment, social upheaval and migration. The unifying element of the 360 is a field trip to Hamburg, a millenary port city that has occupied a key role in global trade and migration networks from the 13th-century until today and that has served as a major migration hub for Eastern Europeans traveling to the United States.
