Reed College
Reed College

Humanities 221/222

Modern European Humanities

Fall 2025 Syllabus

Books

Bronte, Charlotte, Jane Eyre (Oxford)
Kant, Basic Writings (Modern Library)
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (Modern Library)
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Marx-Engels Reader (Norton)
Popkin, Jeremy D. A Short History of the French Revolution (Prentice-Hall)
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Univ. of Chicago)
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, ed. Butler (Oxford)
Smith, Adam. The Essential Adam Smith (‎W. W. Norton & Company)
Voltaire. Candide and Related Texts (Hackett)
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Penguin)

Schedule

Note on Lectures: All lectures will be recorded and available online (links below). There will be no live lectures this Fall.

Week 1 (Sept. 1 - Sept. 5)

Conference 1
  • Lecture: “Free Candide!” / Hugh Hochman
  • Reading:
    • Voltaire, Candide
Conference 2

Week 2 (Sept. 8 - Sept. 12)

Conference 1
  • Lecture: “The Very Image of Technology (Diderot and the Encyclopédie Plates)” /  Kris Cohen
  • Reading:
Conference 2
  • Lecture: “Economics and Sentiment” / Maureen Harkin
  • Reading:
    • Smith, Adam, The Essential Adam Smith. Selections, pp. 64-88, 100-104, 133-36, 143-147; 158-175, 248-258, 264-267, 293-294, 302-307, 321-324 

Week 3 (Sept. 15 - Sept. 19)

Conference 1
  • Lecture: “What’s Neo about Liberalism” / Benjamin Lazier
  • Reading:
    • Smith, Adam, The Essential Adam Smith. Selections, pp. 64-88, 100-104, 133-36, 143-147; 158-175, 248-258, 264-267, 293-294, 302-307, 321-324
Conference 2
  • Lecture: “Rousseau and Narrative Genealogy” / Luc Monnin
  • Reading:
    • Rousseau, The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau [instructor selections].

Week 4 (Sept. 22 - 26)

Conference 1
  • Lecture: “Rousseau and the Politics of Being-with-Others” / Benjamin Lazier
  • Reading:
    • Rousseau, The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau [instructor selections]. 
Conference 2

Week 5 (Sept. 29 - Oct. 3)

Conference 1
  • Lecture: “‘The Inhuman Traffic': Atlantic Slavery and the Making of Europe” / Radhika Natarajan"
  • Reading:
    • Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, Chs 1, 2, 4-7, 9, 11-12. 
    • Equiano, Image gallery
Conference 2
  • Lecture: Equiano and the Legacies of British Abolition" / Radhika Natarajan
  • Reading:
    • Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, Chs 1, 2, 4-7, 9, 11-12.
    • Equiano, image gallery

Week 6 (Oct. 6 - Oct. 10)

Conference 1
  • Lecture: “Becoming a Revolutionary” / Mary Ashburn Miller
  • Reading:
    • Abbe Sieyes, “What is the Third Estate?” (e-reserve)
    • Declaration of the Rights of Man & Citizen (e-reserve)
    • Popkin, A Short History of the French Revolution chapters 1-3
Conference 2
  • Lecture: “To Preserve the Constitution: France, India, and Edmund Burke's Conservatism” /  Radhika Natarajan 
  • Reading:
    • Edmund Burke, selections from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (e-reserve)
    • Edmund Burke, selection from “Speech on Fox’s India Bill” (e-reserve)
    • Edmund Burke, selections from Reflections on the Revolution in France (e-reserve)

Week 7 (Oct. 13 - 17)

Conference 1 
  • Lecture: “Posing the Woman Question” / Jay Dickson
  • Reading:
    • Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Recommended selection: author's introduction, Author’s Dedication (3-7); Author’s Introduction (11-16) Chs. 1-3, (19-67), Ch 9 (175-86).
    • William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) (e-reserve)
    • Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) (e-reserve)
    • Olympe de Gouges, "Declaration of the Rights of Woman" (link)
Conference 2
FALL BREAK

Week 8 (Oct. 27 - OCT. 31)

Conference 1
  • Lecture: “This is Not My Beautiful Revolution” / Mary Ashburn Miller
  • Reading:
    • Popkin, A Short History of the French Revolution, Chapters 4-6
    • Robespierre, "On Political Morality" (link)
    • Robespierre, "Report on Religious and Moral Ideas and Republican Principles" (e-reserves)   
    • “The Revolutionary Calendar" (e-reserve)
Conference 2
  • Lecture: “On the Subject of Wordsworth” / Hugh Hochman
  • Reading:
    • Wordsworth, Major Works. "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey"; "The Old Cumberland Beggar"; "Michael"; "Ode ('There was a time')" [also called "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"]; "Lines Written in Early Spring;" (e-reserve)

Week 9 (Nov. 3 - Nov. 7)

Conference 1
  • Lecture: “The Colonial Imaginary” /  Kris Cohen
  • Reading:
    • Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. “‘Whose Colour Was Not Black nor White nor Grey, But an Extraneous Mixture, Which No Pen Can Trace, Although Perhaps the Pencil May’: Aspasie and Delacroix’s Massacres of Chios.” Art History 22, no. 5 (1999): 676–704. [Content Warning: mention of depicted rape on p. 683-4; no graphic descriptions. Illustration of racial caricature, p. 692] (e-reserve)
Conference 2

Week 10 (Nov. 1 - Nov. 14)

Conference 1
Conference 2
  • No Lecture
  • Reading:
    • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, continued

Week 11 (Nov. 17 - Nov. 21)

Conference 1
Conference 2
  • Lecture: “Marxian Thought” / Peter Steinberger
  • Reading:
    • Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader, Instructor Selections. (Recommended Readings: The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology)

Week 12 (Nov. 24 - Nov. 28)

Conference 1
  • Lecture: “Man the Maker” / Mary Ashburn Miller
  • Reading:
    • Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader, Instructor Selections. (Recommended Readings: The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology)
Conference 2
  • No Lecture

THANKSGIVING BREAK - November 27-30

Week 13 (Dec. 1  - Dec. 5)

Conference 1
Conference 2

  • Lecture: Jay Dickson, Jane Eyre

  • Reading: Jane Eyre

Week 14 (Dec. 8 - 12)

Conference 1
  • No Lecture
  • Reading: Jane Eyre, continued

Course outcomes

Hum 221-222 are courses that can be used to satisfy Group I or Group II requirements. After completing the course students will be better able to:

  • Understand how language or other modes of expression (symbols, images, sounds, etc.) work , make an argument, present a vision, convey a feeling, and/or convey an idea;
  • Analyze and interpret a text, whether a literary or philosophical text, or a work of the visual or performing arts;
  • Evaluate arguments about texts;
  • Analyze social, political or economic institutions, cultural formations, languages, structures, and/or processes;
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social change and/or the relationship between individual and society; 
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.