Conversions: Histories of Change

3 credits · Undergraduate credit

This seminar investigates change. How human beings have faced and described change in the past, and how we think about and tell of it today. We will explore change of various kinds, in multiple guises. Beginning with cultural and religious transformations that have contributed (and imprisoned us within?) certain terms of reference, we expand our vocabulary and expectations. While one focus will be the proliferations of Christianity in an expanding world, we counteract the tendency to see certain periods (i.e. late Antiquity; early Latin America) or set of actions in splendid isolation. We will study how individual identities and group allegiances form and remain dynamic, keeping a special eye on the power of interaction and translation, of mixedness and incompletion, of gradual emergence and reinvention. Principal subjects and settings will vary from year to year, as we find and investigate transformations everywhere. And we will draw from an array of methodological "thinking tools" to inform our interpretations of change, most notably anthropology, literature and art history, but also cognitive science and linguistics. A series of short, creative assignments will encourage students to regard themselves -your own lives and writing, your own memories and surrounding cultures- as conversions in the making, as emergent and changing, and thus entwined with the transformations and tellings we discern in the past.