During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the emerging profession of architecture in America was very much a man’s world. But several talented and tenacious women created doorways into it. Lecturer Bill Keene examines the careers of three of these pioneering women—Louise Blanchard Bethune, Marian Mahony, and Julia Morgan—and their importance in the development of the profession of architecture. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

Ernest Hemingway’s 1952 novella The Old Man and the Sea received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was also singled out when Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Literature professor Joseph Luzzi guides the audience through a close reading of this masterpiece, highlighting Hemingway’s brilliant characterization, detailed depictions of the natural world, and inquiry into the relationship between the human and animal worlds.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, the world witnessed a first in its history: Two global superpowers armed with enough thermonuclear weapons to destroy the planet several times over. While many Americans repeated the idea that nuclear war was too terrible to contemplate, a group of scholars and theorists within the defense and policy worlds thought deeply and carefully about how to wage—and win—such a conflict should it ever erupt. Historian Chris Hamner examines the thinking of scholars like Herman Kahn and those at RAND Corporation as they puzzled out how to deter World War III or, failing that, how the U.S. could emerge victorious—as well as how to understand what everyday Americans were thinking about the monstrous possibility of nuclear war.

On April 15, 2019, the world watched as Notre-Dame de Paris withstood a devastating fire. But the great Gothic cathedral itself has watched over its city for nearly a thousand years, from the beginning of its construction in 1163 to the French Revolution when its statues of kings were beheaded to witnessing the adversities of World War II. With its reopening scheduled for December, Met Cloisters curator emerita Barbara Drake Boehm traces the history of this monument through times of turbulence and triumph.

Discover the world’s deadliest caterpillars; a butterfly that shares its world with polar bears at one extreme and penguins at the other; and screaming moths that can jam the sonar of predatory bats. Wildlife documentary filmmaker Steve Nicholls looks at why it seems there’s no end to the tricks that evolution has come up with as it turned the Lepidoptera into one of the most successful of all insect groups.

Considered the most influential art school of the 20th century, the Bauhaus lasted merely 14 years, from 1919 to 1933.  Art historian Erich Keel traces the pressures that led to its formation, the changing aesthetic philosophies that guided the teaching of subjects as varied as architecture, weaving, and typography, and the inevitable exposure to political headwinds that questioned both the existence of a progressive art school and the very idea of a liberal republic following the defeat of Germany in World War I. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

Anxiety is usually thought of as a pathology, but some philosophers argue that anxiety is a normal, even essential, part of being human, and that coming to terms with this fact is potentially transformative. Philosophy professor Samir Chopra explores valuable insights about anxiety from ancient and modern philosophies, including Buddhism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory.

Painting on the cusp of the medieval and Renaissance worlds, Hieronymus Bosch continues to fascinate with his fantastic imagery and densely symbolic compositions. Even after decades of research and close examination, many of his masterpieces remain as perplexing as they probably appeared to their original viewers. Art historian Aneta Georgievskia-Shine discusses ways of approaching the unique vision of reality and human nature contained within Bosch’s painted worlds. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

In the late 1950s, having already won lasting fame as a novelist, John Steinbeck was seized by a powerful urge to return to a longtime dream: contemporizing Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d' Arthur. Public humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson offers a fascinating look at the book that became the critically dismissed The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights and Steinbeck’s quest to give new life to Malory and use the tales of King Arthur as a medium for his own expression.

The COVID-19 pandemic won't be our last, says biological anthropologist Sabrina Sholts of the National Museum of Natural History, because what makes us vulnerable to pandemics also makes us human. Drawing on her new book, The Human Disease: How We Create Pandemics, from Our Bodies to Our Beliefs, Sholts travels through history and around the globe to examine how and why such pandemics and many other infectious disease events are an inescapable threat of our own making.