Utopia and the Future

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

This interdisciplinary course will seek to understand and analyze human visions of our planet’s future. We will move between history, literature, political theory and cinema to explore contesting visions of Utopia. Philosophers, priests and artists around the globe have long speculated about the nature of the “perfect society,” how to achieve it and where to find it. However, it was an Englishman, Sir Thomas More, who coined the name we all use today in 1516: “utopia”. In the 506 years since More’s book Utopia appeared, changes in human history, including enormous advances in science and technology, the spread of liberal democracy and globalization, the challenges of climate change, and mostly recently the paralyzing shock of global pandemics, have all radically altered the deployment of the word. How can we understand the word in the 21st century? How has it been articulated in non-Western worlds? Particular attention will be paid to feminist works, as well as African-American, Russian and Japanese ones.