CULTURE AND EXPRESSION FALL 2019 IDEAS OF HEALTH AND WELLNESS IN THE ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL, & EARLY MODERN WORLDS HUHC 011 (Social Science Discussion Professors): Balbinder Bhogal, Timothy Daniels, Anthony Dardis, Eduardo Duarte, Warren Frisina, Terry Godlove, Amy Karovsky HUHC 013 (Humanities Discussion Professors): Anne Chen, Sharon Keller, Lauren Kozol, Vicente Lledo-Guillem, Adam Sills, Vimala Pasupathi, Patricia Welch Course Description: This semester, we examine what Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern people have to say about health and well-being. We do this because those ideas shape their world and ours. The artifacts we discuss approach well-being from a variety of perspectives, including: • Early scientific thinking about the diagnosis of physical ailments and their treatment • Love and desire as both cause of derangement and cure • Sin as a sickness with guilt, shame and suffering as penance • Mass illness or plague as collective retribution or simply as consequences of natural processes • Visions and supernatural visitors as divine gift/curse or alternatively as psychological affliction and madness Our works come from around the globe – East Asia, South Asia, the Near East and Europe, and include a variety of artistic and cultural forms – texts, performance, music and material culture. The Strategy: In Culture and Expression we explore life’s biggest questions: What does it mean to be human? What leads to human flourishing? What gets in the way of that flourishing? Where do our values come from that we need to make decisions throughout our lives? C&E consists of two year-long, team-taught courses designed by a hand-picked team of Hofstra's faculty. It fits into every Hofstra degree program by partially satisfying university-wide distribution requirements in the humanities and social sciences. Each year faculty teams select unique sets of primary texts and other objects of study from the ancient (fall) and modern (spring) periods. Via class-wide lectures and small group discussions students experience the breadth of university learning in microcosm and discover how disciplines approach cultural artifacts differently and thus produce different kinds of knowledge.