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Sophomore level

The Byzantine Empire HUM 204 (fa26)

  • ✔️ Byzantium: A Very Short Intro. by Peter Sarris
  • The Social History of Byzantium by John Haldon
  • A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities: Strange Tales & Surprising Facts from History’s Most Orthodox Empire by Anthony Kaldellis
  • Secret History by Procopius
  • Alexiad by Anna Komnene
  • Three Byzantine Military Treatises by George T. Dennis
  • Accounts of Medieval Constantinople: The Patria by Albrecht Berger
  • Digenis Akritis: The Grottaferrata and Escorial Versions by Elizabeth Jeffreys

Classical Mythology HUM 212 (fa26)

  • The Greek Tragedies: 17 Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, & Euripides
  • Metamorphoses by Ovid
  • Anthology of Classical Myth: Primary Sources in Translation by Trzaskoma et al.
  • The Odyssey by Homer
  • The Poems of Hesiod by R.M. Frazer
  • Sophocles II: Ajax, The Women of Trachis, Electra, Philoctetes, The Trackers
  • Apollodorus’ Library & Hyginus’ Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology by Smith & Trzaskoma
  • The Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture I: Literature & the Arts HUM 216 (fa26)

  • The Satyricon by Petronius
  • A Presocratics Reader: Selected Fragments and Testimonia by Curd & McKirahan
  • The Oresteia by Aeschylus
  • Questions on Love and Charity: Summa Theologiae, Secunda Secundae, Questions 23–46 (Rethinking the Western Tradition) by Thomas Aquinas
  • Aristophanes: Frogs and Other Plays by Stephen Halliwel
  • The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
  • Poetics by Aristotle
  • Confessions by Saint Augustine
  • The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version
  • The Five Books of Moses by Robert Alter
  • ✔️ The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
  • Selected Political Speeches by Cicero
  • The Divine Comedy by Dante
  • Cyclops by Euripides
  • The Histories by Herodotus
  • The Iliad & The Odyssey by Homer
  • The Epistles of Horace
  • Hannibal’s War by Livy
  • The Nature of Things by Lucretius
  • Poetry by Marie de France
  • Metamorphoses by Ovid
  • Republic by Plato
  • Symposium by Plato
  • Plato: The Last Days of Socrates
    • Euthyphro
    • ✔️ Apology
    • Crito
    • Phaedo
  • Four Comedies: The Braggart Soldier; The Brothers Menaechmus; The Haunted House; The Pot of Gold by Plautus
  • If Not, Winter: Fragments by Sappho
  • The Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles
  • The Aeneid by Virgil
  • History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
  • The Annals by Tacitus

Great Books in Buddhism HUM 229 (fa26)

  • The Dhammapada: The Sayings of the Buddha
  • Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma
  • Two Buddhas Seated Side by Side: A Guide to the Lotus Sūtra by Lopez & Stone
  • The Life of Milarepa by Tsangnyön Heruka
  • The Words of My Perfect Teacher by Patrul Rinpoche

East Asian Humanities I: The Classical Foundations HUM 233 (fa26)

  • ✔️ Analects by Confucius (my highlights)
  • Zen Sourcebook: Traditional Documents from China, Korea & Japan by Addiss et al.
  • The Complete Writings by Zhuāngzï
  • The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
  • A History of East Asia: From the Origins of Civilization to the 21st Century by Charles Holcombe

Identity in the Spanish-Speaking World HUM 251 (fa26)

  • I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala by Rigoberta Menchú
  • Love After Death by Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Pompeii HUM 253 (fa26)

  • The Complete Pompeii by Joanne Berry
  • The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost & Found by Mary Beard
  • The World of Pompeii by Dobbins & Foss
  • Pompeii & Herculaneum: A Sourcebook by Cooley & Cooley

Violence HUM 264 (fa26)

  • Righteous Dopefiend by Bourgois & Schonberg
  • After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives by Edward W. Said
  • Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation by Eyal Weizman
  • Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability & Political Violence in Turkey by Salih Can Aciksoz
  • Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul by Deniz Yonucu
  • Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War & the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani
  • The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens by Bernard E. Harcourt
  • Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor by Rob Nixon
  • States of Terror: Begoña Aretxaga’s Essays
  • Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America by Hansen et al.
  • The Land of Open Graves: Living & Dying on the Migrant Trail by Jason De León
  • Violence in War & Peace by Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois
  • The Notion of Family by LaToya Ruby Frazier
  • Ongoing Return: Mapping Memory & Storytelling in Palestine by Rana Barakat
  • Leave If You Can: Migration & Violence in Bordered Worlds by Amelia Frank-Vitale
  • Do Muslim Women Need Saving? by Lila Abu-Lughod
  • ✔️ The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
  • Illuminations: Essays & Reflections by Walter Benjamin

The Anthropology of Lying & Deception HUM 294 (fa26)

  • How to Do Things with Words by J.L. Austin
  • The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption & Citizenship in Côte d’Ivoire by Sasha Newell
  • Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money by Jacques Derrida
  • Passing: Two Publics in a Mexican Border City by Rihan Yeh
  • Mistrust: An Ethnographic Theory by Matthew Carey
  • Mules & Men by Zora Neale Hurston
  • Defacement: Public Secrecy & the Labor of the Negative by Michael Taussig

Junior level

Musical Theatre & Fan Cultures HUM 340 (fa26)

  • Fandom in Musical Theatre by Jessica Hillman-McCord
  • John Proctor is the Villain by Kimberly Belflower

The Bible as Literature HUM 390 (fa26)

  • The Literary Guide to the Bible by Alter & Kermode
  • The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version

Senior level

Translation, Migration, Culture HUM 400 (fa26)

  • Migrant Brothers: A Poet’s Declaration of Human Dignity by Patrick Chamoiseau
  • Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli
  • In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri
  • Translations by Brian Friel

Between Selves: Living Letters from Antiquity to the Present HUM 416 (fa26)

  • Letter to the Father by Franz Kafka
  • The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
  • ✔️ The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (my highlights)
  • Heroides by Ovid
  • The Ides of March by Thornton Wilder
  • The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
  • Selected Letters by Seneca

19th-Century European Art: Painting & Literature in 19th C. France and England HUM 451 (fa26)

  • The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
  • The Masterpiece by Émile Zola
  • The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac
  • Like Death by Guy de Maupassant
  • Villette by Charlotte Brontë

Graduate level

20th-Century French Narrative Prose: Reading Proust HUM 524 (fa26)

  • In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Prisoner & Finding Time Again by Marcel Proust

Modern Art: Science & Its Fictions in the Long 19th Century HUM 577 (fa26)

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