Department: MLA Program

Code Name Description
MLA101A Foundations I Required of and limited to first-year MLA students. First of three quarter foundation course. Introduction to the main political, philosophical, literary, and artistic trends that inform the liberal arts vision of the world and that underlie the MLA...
MLA101B Foundations II: the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Required of and limited to first-year MLA students. Second of three quarter foundation course. Introduction to the main political, philosophical, literary, and artistic trends that inform the liberal arts vision of the world and that underlie the MLA...
MLA101C Foundations III: the Enlightenment through Modernism Required of and limited to first-year MLA students. First of three quarter foundation course. Introduction to the main political, philosophical, literary, and artistic trends that inform the liberal arts vision of the world and that underlie the MLA...
MLA102 An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Graduate Study Limited to and required of second-year MLA students. Historical, literary, artistic, medical, and theological issues are covered. Focus is on skills and information needed to pursue MLA graduate work at Stanford: writing a critical, argumentative gra...
MLA262 The Economics of Life and Death This course is a survey of economic perspectives on issues of life and death. The central idea of economics is that scarcity and constraints are unavoidable facts of life. While economists traditionally focus on the role of scarcity in decisions th...
MLA295 The American Enlightenment Eighteenth-century America was like a laboratory for exciting new political, religious, scientific, and artistic theories that we collectively call "the Enlightenment." But to what extent were the major ideas and questions of the Enlightenment shaped...
MLA298 Heretics, Prostitutes, and Merchants: The Venetian Empire Between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries the republic of Venice created a powerful empire that controlled much of the Mediterranean. Situated on the shifting boundary between East and West, the Venetians established a thriving merchant repub...
MLA300 Oxford Summer Programme No Description Set
MLA305 Russia Encounters the Enlightenment: The Art, Culture, and Politics No Description Set
MLA322 Coffee, Sugar, and Chocolate: Commodities and Consumption in World History. 120--1800 No Description Set
MLA326 Nature through Photography No Description Set
MLA338 William Blake: A Literary and Visual Exploration of the Illuminated Poetry No Description Set
MLA339 The Human Predicament in Three Masterpieces The human predicament is in many ways tragic¿or so argues the pessimistic South African philosopher David Benatar in his new book by that title. We are beset by pain and evil and we can eke out order and meaning only with sustained effort. In this c...
MLA341 Aesthetics of Dissent in Contemporary Iran No Description Set
MLA344 Making and Unmaking Apartheid: Topics in South African History No Description Set
MLA347 Rome: From Pilgrimage to the Grand Tour No Description Set
MLA348 Modern Iranian Politics Through Modern Iranian Art and Literature No Description Set
MLA350 From Literature to Opera No Description Set
MLA351 The Civil Rights Movement in History and Memory No Description Set
MLA352 Virus in the News No Description Set
MLA353 The Fourth R: Religion, Education and Schooling in America No Description Set
MLA357 Historic Journeys to Sacred Places In a world of touchscreens and instant knowledge, going on a journey for the good of the soul might seem strange. But pilgrimage¿spiritual travel¿has witnessed a huge resurgence. Why? We¿ll investigate the pilgrimage through its long history, studyin...
MLA358 The Intersection of Medicine, Science, Public Policy, and Ethics: Cancer as a Case Study No Description Set
MLA359 The Big Shift: Demographic and Social Change in America What are the most pressing and challenging issues facing Americans today? Is the middle class shrinking? How do people who live at the extremes of American society- the super rich, the working poor and those who live on the margins, imagine and exper...
MLA360 The Impossibility of Love: Opera, Literature, and Culture Opera has been called 'A Song of Love and Death,' and most plots feature love forbidden by family, rivals, or social rules. This seminar will study five operas from the Romantic era in which star-crossed love is not merely forbidden but impossible du...
MLA361 History of Modern Turkey This course focuses on the Ottoman Empire, its transformation, collapse, and the emergence of the Republic of Turkey. In the first half of the class, we will discuss the multi-ethnic and multi-religious character of the Ottoman world, spread over thr...
MLA362 Darwin, Evolution, and the Galapagos The tiny, remote islands of Galápagos have played a big, central role in the study of evolution. Not surprisingly, they have also been important to the study of conservation. The fascinating adaptations of organisms to the isolated ecosystems of the...
MLA363 Living on the Edge: Literature of the Western Fringes What does it feel like to live on the edge, facing an expanse between you and the next place? Who has lived on the Western fringes of Britain and America? Who has named, formed, and been inspired by that land? Whose voices are silenced in the (re)mak...
MLA364 A Short History of Security This course interrogates what people mean when they talk about security. Security justifies inconveniences like passwords that are nearly impossible to memorize, and metal detectors to enter sporting events, political talks, and airports. Security is...
MLA365 The Poetry of Animality: Romantic to Contemporary Animals have always appealed to the human imagination. This course provides basic a rubric for analyzing a variety of animal poems in order (1) to make you better readers of poetry and (2) to examine some of the most pressing philosophical questions...
MLA366 Critical Approaches to Literary and Historical Approaches This seminar aims to introduce students to the complexities of the primary source in its broadest sense, focusing principally on the written word, on images, and on material remains from 1000CE to the present day. We shall investigate how meaning is...
MLA367 Muwekma: Landscape, Archaeology, and the Narratives of California Natives This is a service based, field oriented, Integrative Learning course. California supported the greatest population density of Native people in all of North America, and was one of the world's most diverse linguistic regions. This class will review th...
MLA368 Russia and Ukraine: Historical Interconnections The course explores the separate histories and cultures of Ukraine and Russia -- from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries -- and concludes by analyzing nationalist discourse on both sides in eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and Russ...
MLA369 Mapping Poverty, Colonialism and Nation Building in Latin America Cartography is one of the main devices through which humans have attempted to capture and understand complex social, economic and political phenomena. Map-making in Latin America was one of the most important processes of discovery and appropriation...
MLA370 Henry David Thoreau: Seeing Into the Light of Things When you go to Walden Pond these days, you inevitably find yourself walking the trails with hundreds of pilgrims from around the world: Brazil, France, Korea, China, Turkey . . . Thoreau has long been one of our country's secular saints, and not jus...
MLA371 Narratives of Enslavement Widely dispersed narratives by and about enslaved persons are the focus of this course. We'll seek different ways to understand the concept of `slave narrative' by comparing enslaved pasts via texts from the ancient Mediterranean, the Cape of Good Ho...
MLA372 Shakespeare in Love Love¿requited and unrequited, faithful and false, heterosexual and same-sex¿was a topic that obsessed Shakespeare throughout his career. Fluid, ever changing, fresh and quick, love has always been the stuff of imagination: who can define it? We¿ll se...
MLA373 Artificial Intelligence and Society Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform society in a way that has not been seen before. AI can bring many positive benefits, such as allowing ideas to more flexibly cross language barriers, improve medical outcomes, and enhance th...
MLA374 Gender and Sexuality in Chinese History This graduate colloquium explores gender and sexuality in China during the last few centuries through a survey of scholarship in history and anthropology. Our focus is the Ming-Qing, Republican, and Maoist eras. Readings have been selected to intro...
MLA375 An Archival Intensive Course Description TBA
MLA398 MLA Thesis in Progress Group meetings provide peer critiques, motivations, and advice under the direction of the Associate Dean.
MLA399 MLA Thesis Final Quarter Students write a 75-100 page thesis that evolves out of work they pursued during their MLA studies.