When the doors of Radio City Music Hall opened in 1932, New Yorkers entered a new world: a dazzling Art Deco fantasy of an entertainment palace far removed from the drab realities of the Great Depression. With its Hollywood films and lavish stage shows, “The Showplace of the Nation” has given generations of audiences a place to escape from the everyday and dream. Actor Tim Dolan surveys the history of this iconic theater, sharing its stories, secrets, traditions, and trivia.

Commissioned by Pope Julius II to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo used the most universal artistic language available—the human body in all its configurations. From the spark of life given to Adam and Eve to the Last Judgment, his frescoes blazed a path toward secularism despite the chapel’s religious themes. Art historian Liz Lev examines the evolution of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a work so astounding it changed the course of Western art. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

French gastronomy has long been the benchmark for the world’s finest cuisine. The creativity bubbling up in French food today is rooted in thousands of years of culinary history, the collective heritage of a country that has always focused (sometimes obsessively) on everything that is put on the table. Susan Herrmann Loomis, author, cooking teacher, and French cuisine expert, leads a lively tour through the centuries that showcases the rich history of a unique and beloved cuisine and the influences that shaped it.

The Arts and Crafts Movement was a dominant influence in visual and decorative arts and architecture in the decades leading up to and after the turn of the 20th century, offering an artistic and philosophical reaction to the florid, overdecorated, and industrialized designs of the high-Victorian era. Art historian Bonita Billman explores the rich flowering of the movement in Britain and America, as well as its enduring legacy. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1 credit)

Unlike other great painters of 16th-century Venice such as Titian and Paolo Veronese, Jacopo Tintoretto was born and bred in the lagoon city. A considerable number of his works remain there to this day in the churches, confraternity buildings, and palaces for which they were commissioned. Art historian Sophia D’Addio of Columbia University explores a selection of Tintoretto’s dramatic and expressive sacred works located in such beautiful settings as the Church of the Madonna dell'Orto, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, and San Giorgio Maggiore. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

Poet William Butler Yeats was a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival, the cultural movement that preceded the country’s political independence from Britain. Lucy Collins, editor of the Irish University Review and an associate professor at University College Dublin, explores the cultural politics of early 20th-century Ireland as the crucible within which Yeats’ work was formed and examines how the political and the personal combine in some of his greatest poems.

The late 18th century was a period rife with revolutionary fervor and transformative ideas that altered the course of history. The American Declaration of Independence, adopted in 1776, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, ratified in 1789, were radical manifestos that proclaimed new principles of governance and human dignity and challenged centuries-old political and social structures. Historian Alexander Mikaberidze explores these groundbreaking documents and the individuals who dared to imagine a new order that ignited flames of liberty that spread throughout the world.

Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are three influential philosophers whose ideas have significantly shaped political theory and the understanding of the social contract. In a fall series, join Georgetown professor Joseph Hartman as he explores these thinkers who offered distinct perspectives on the nature of human beings, the origins of political authority, and the formation of societies. This session focuses on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.