Monsters and Fantastic Creatures

This course probes the origins and histories of creatures such as dragons, centaurs, mermaids, kappa, and nine-tailed foxes, using textual and material evidence from the ancient world. We survey the cultural domains in which these and similar monstrous creatures held sway, and we reflect about their impact on ancient (and modern) ideas about “nature”, “race”, “gender”, “identity”, and what it means to be “human”.