Netherlands

This is an overview course of the history of Western art and architecture from the late Middle Ages to the present. Special attention goes to the art of the Dutch and Italians. Gain familiarity with some of the major periods of Western artistic production, including the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque, the Dutch Golden Age, Impressionism, and Modern Art. The course provides the fundamental knowledge of art history, with a particular focus on Western Europe. In case of interest, a global perspective in the history of art is offered in the course Global Visions, taught in Block 2 (English course and not part of the minor.) A museum excursion is planned as part of this course, for which the students need to support their individual costs of travel and admission.

The course invites students on an exciting literary and historical journey through the grand shifts of Europe in the twentieth century: from Great Britain’s crumbling class systems at the turn of the centuries to the French trenches of World War I and from there to the reactionary roaring twenties, the rise of fascism and Hitler’s claim to power in 1933, resulting in the horrors of the Holocaust. The course culminates at the shallows of the Cold War period, with its absurdities and the shadows of the past still lingering. The chosen texts for this class provide a trident of literary historical accounts: autobiographical, fictional, and historiographical. The course begins with a cultural, political, and physical view of fast-changing early-century Europe. It then moves to World War I and how that changed landscapes for civilians, soldiers, and the insider-outsider American expatriate community, most famously of Paris. During discussions of WWII and the Shoa, the focus is on the histories that have remained and the histories that have been lost since the war. This is discussed through the lens of those who documented (in the form of diaries), those who retold the stories as second-generation survivors, and those who didn’t have access to the stories of the horrors of the war, and therefore had to fill in the blanks themselves. The last chapter of the class discussion is devoted to the aftermath of Nazi terrors and the contradictions of living under Cold War conditions. During the seminars, students are encouraged to engage with the texts from a critical point of view: for example, what does a feminist reading of WWI literature look like? How do we de-colonialize our understanding of the Roaring Twenties? What histories have still gone untold in our existing Holocaust-literature canon? The class comes with a day-long academic field trip (specifics to be announced) that gives students the chance to experience some of the topics discussed in class.

This course examines the linguistic processes in language contact situations and how these relate to both societal and individual aspects of multilingualism. The first part of the course introduces the concepts of sociolinguistics that are needed to address issues of multilingualism and language contact, while the last part of the course develops this interdisciplinary perspective further by treating as a case study the island of Aruba, where multiple languages are spoken by overlapping linguistic communities.