The Core Curriculum:
Teaching Global Contexts from Interdisciplinary Perspectives

The LS Core is a pioneering curriculum for a global world by our faculty’s commitment to teaching global traditions from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Through the global core students learn to think across cultures, societies, and eras, while gaining the confidence and ability to ask critical questions from multiple points of view.

Arts and Cultures across Antiquity
Chris Packard

Selected Materials

  • Ovid, Metamorphoses 
  • The Bhagavad Gita 
  • Genesis
  • Gardner’s Art through the Ages: A Global History

Take just one origination myth that cultures of the Ancient World used to explain their existences: flood narratives. Many students already know about Noah and the Ark from Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, but most don’t know this tale has its origins from the contiguous region of Mesopotamia, where the Epic of Gilgamesh from the Sumerian culture, or the Atra-Hasis from the Akkadian culture, circulated thousands of years before the Levant and the Canaanites defined themselves by the stories they told themselves about their origins. These syncretic influences are essential to understanding how Ovid’s Metamorphoses described its flood narratives during the Augustan period of the Roman Empire. It’s easy enough to explain similar flood narratives circulating in the regions we now call Europe and the Middle East; it’s much harder to explain how flood narratives of Mesoamerican cultures—the Olmecs, the Mayan, the Moche, the Chavin—emerged spontaneously, with no possible contact between the flood narratives arising in Europe and the Middle East and those arising in the Americas.  

Arts and Cultures across Antiquity: Imitations of Life
David Larsen

Selected Materials

  • The Epic of Gilgamesh
  • The Book of Songs
  • The Iliad
  • Readings from the Qur’ān

“No center” is a good aim for the global humanities—a hopeful mantra, if not an enforceable ban. It goes some way toward reversing a very common approach to the ancient world—the teleological approach that looks to the past as a blueprint for where “we” are today. You might call this the “Ancient Athenians—they’re just like us!” approach. True, they enjoyed the theater, and voted on things (landowning citizen males, anyway), and so do “we moderns.” Aside from the distortive effects this kind of identification has on our conception of the ancients, it also tends to dampen student interest. I know it killed mine, up until late in my undergrad career when I wandered into a class on sex and gender in the ancient Mediterranean and discovered what a different world it really was. And then I got to work.

In my view it’s most enriching to explore ancient cultures as an anthropologist and a sociologist—to appreciate alterity, and how peoples use it to definite and organize themselves both internally and against other peoples. Alterity is where identity comes from. There’s a famous verse of the Qur’ān about this (49:13): “We made you into peoples and tribes that you may know one another.”

A truly centerless approach to the Old World would require more than just one semester! The cultural complex of West Asia (including Greece) is vast but has a strong centripetal pull all the same, and it’s useful to tune into different parts of the whole at different times. And interrelation and points of contact are what we’re after in GLS.

Environmental Studies
Leo Douglas

Selected Materials

  • Philpott, S.M. and Dietsch, T. “Coffee and conservation: a global context and the value of farmer involvement.”
  • Ettlinger, S. “Twinkie, deconstructed: my journey to discover how the ingredients found in processed foods are grown, mined (yes, mined), and manipulated into what America eats.”
  • Davis, H., Rice, R., Rockwood, L., Wood, T. and Marra, P. “The economic potential of fruit trees as shade in blue mountain coffee agroecosystems of the Yallahs River watershed, Jamaica WI.”
  • Butt, B. “Commoditizing the safari and making space for conflict: Place, identity and parks in East Africa.”
  • Davis, A.P., Chadburn, H., Moat, J., O’Sullivan, R., Hargreaves, S. and Lughadha, E.N. 2019. High extinction risk for wild coffee species and implications for coffee sector sustainability. Science Advances, 5(1).

I use Coffee—one of the most familiar and commonly consumed beverages in the Western world—as an entry point into a discussion about what is biodiversity, human use and value of biodiversity products, and the effects of the global trade in coffee as a commodity. I incorporate this unit on coffee by immersing students in the literature on coffee and its consumption and organizing field trips to local coffee outlets that support the ethical production, trade and sale of coffee. I also have coffee farmers in the Caribbean and Latin America meet with my classes live online to discuss what it means to be a coffee producer in the global south (where all coffee is produced).

It is invaluable to introduce students to the globality of coffee, because scholars make clear that commonly consumed commodities are immersed in economic systems and human populations from very different geographies that have profound implications for biodiversity, sustainability and social justice. Agriculture is a leading cause of global environmental degradation. Coffee helps students to think about the global effects of agriculture, the importance and concerns facing biodiversity in tropical/developing countries, and the opportunities and responsibilities of western coffee consumers to contribute to the ethical and sustainable production and consumption of coffee from farm to cup. Coffee really provides an invaluable and familiar case study to learn about many key themes in Environmental Studies, including the impact of common forms of agriculture, pesticides and pollution, the commodification of nature, and its links to western affluent lifestyles and issues of privilege and class.

I hope that students will leave this course with an understanding of this important global commodity chain, including where their coffee comes from, how their own consumption of coffee and the specific types of coffee they purchase (“regular,” organic, fair-trade, shade grown) can have profound implications for tropical deforestation, climate change, endangered species, and for the health and wellbeing of hundreds of thousands of nameless coffee farmers globally. As consumers, I also hope that students gain an appreciation for the complex network of other concerns that are connected to their consumption of coffee, including the industry’s connection to problematic milk/livestock industry, to single use cups and plastic straws, and how they can be part of meaningful change.

Global Works and Society: Antiquity: Rulers, Rebels, and Sinners: Law and Transgression in the Ancient World
Pınar Kemerli

Selected Materials

  • Rostam: Tales of Love and War from the Shahnameh
  • Plato, Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo
  • Lao-Tsu, Tao Te Ching

While completed in the 11th century, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh tells the stories of the ancient kings of pre-Islamic Iran. As such, it offers an opportunity to explore themes of law and transgression outside of the usual western-centric framework. For instance, it offers an early example of the “mirror for princes” genre. While many students might be familiar with the most famous example of this genre—Machiavelli’s The Prince—produced in 16th century Western Europe, they rarely have the opportunity to discuss the career and significance of this form of political writing in the Middle East. Like The Prince, the epic poem raises questions of sovereignty and the challenges sovereign power faces. In a similar way, studying Rostam further enables a comparative exploration of the question of the mythical and the tragic in political life and history. Students in the class considered how the role of the tragic in Rostam is similar to, and differ from, the Aristotelian theory of tragedy. Comparing and contrasting these texts provides a global perspective through which to explore questions of sovereign power, law-making, and religion and politics. By studying Rostam in this class, we were able to more extensively and deeply explore central questions of political thought while also critically questioning the limitations involved in seeking to understand questions about law and power within the frameworks of existing “canons.”

Global Works and Society: Modernity: Revolutionary Times
Mitra Rastegar

Selected Materials

  • John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
  • Mahatma Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings
  • Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
  • Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
  • Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam

The texts that we read emerge from concrete, specific struggles and yet have resonance beyond the particularities of their situation. It is important to know those historical contexts to understand the nuances, biases, and significance of the works. I encourage students to consider why some works are read as speaking to human “universals” and hence relevant to many different times and places, and others are not. Whose perspectives are deemed universal and whose are not? We also read texts that are explicitly “particular,” grounded in and engaged with a specific historical moment, and I ask them to identify the work’s insights which might be relevant to other context. Whether a work feels universal or particular, being a sociologist, I encourage my students to identify the underlying theories of social relations, of how society works and how power operates. We apply these theories to contemporary examples, for example, looking at the Bangladeshi garment industry to examine theories about capitalism and communism, looking at the culture and regulation of smoking (and vaping) to examine theories on how to protect individual liberty, or looking at the role of women in the Arab Spring to examine theories on the interaction between feminism and (neo-)colonialism. In their research papers, students extend this line of thinking, using theories that come out of our readings to arrive at a new understanding of topics of deep interest to them. These papers are for me the highlight of the course where students themselves decide how these texts speak to their world and their passions.

Writing as Exploration and Writing as Critical Inquiry
Jennifer Zoble

Selected Materials

Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms, edited by Alan Ziegler (Persea Books, 2014).

Even though my Writing as Exploration seminar, “The Short and the Short of It,” emphasizes the formal attributes of short prose literature and its utility for practicing close reading and stylistic emulation, I choose as the main course text an international anthology that contains both works originally written in English and works in English translation. As an educator and literary translator, I believe it’s important for students to encounter voices from beyond our borders—that the “news that stays news” includes “news from elsewhere.” Literature is a conversation across time and place, and an essential antidote to the echo chamber of our current public discourse. I encourage students to see themselves as participants in that conversation, and using a text that places translated texts alongside English-language ones gets them thinking about who else can, and should, participate.