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.
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.
George Frideric Handel’s Messiah is a work of triumphant joy, born in an age of anxiety: Britain in the early 18th century, a time of war, political conspiracy, enslavement, and conflicts over everything from the legitimacy of government to the meaning of truth. Historian Charles King draws on his new book, Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times that Made Handel’s Messiah, to unearth the backstory to a beloved classic and the tortured lives and times that made a musical monument to hope.
When classicist Michael Ventris deciphered the Linear B script in 1952, he shed light on our understanding of the politics, economy, society, and religion of the world of Late Bronze Age Greece, sometimes referred to as "Mycenaean." Classicist and archaeologist Dimitri Nakassis examines what this writing system and a second still-undeciphered “Minoan” script, Linear A, can tell us about life in the Aegean during the second millennium B.C.E.
Bletchley Park was Britain’s nexus of top-secret work during World War II, where under the cloak of secrecy, agents worked furiously around the clock to decode Germany’s secret messages, notably those encrypted with the Enigma machine. Alan Turing, Joan Clarke, and Dilly Knox were among the recruits. Sir Dermot Turing, Turing's nephew and author of The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park, shares the story of this unusual group of people whose mission was to save the world from destruction.
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)
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.
Artists use their palette as a vehicle for expressing their creative vision—and behind every great painting there’s a palette that tells its story. Art historian and author Alexandra Loske explores this symbiotic relationship, pairing the palettes of artists including Seurat, Rembrandt, and van Gogh with their masterpieces, revealing a fascinating aspect of the creator behind the canvas. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)
