Harvard Summer Program in Venice, Italy

Gordon Teskey, PhD, Professor of English, Harvard University
4 credits
UN, GR Limited enrollment.

Monday/Wednesday, 9:15-11:45am

William Blake called the Bible “the great code of art.” Nowhere was this statement truer than in the famous Italian centers of art, Rome, Florence, and Venice. But the biblical culture of Venice was special because of her rich contacts with the East: with Islam, with the Greek culture of the Eastern Mediterranean, and with the Holy Land itself. The great cathedral of Venice, Saint Mark’s, is named for the city’s patron, who wrote the oldest and most venerable of the Christian gospels. The Bible provided the artists of Venice with a rich fund of subjects for painting and sculpture. This course gives students an outline of the contents and structure of the Bible similar to what most people in Venice would have had during the period when its greatest art was produced. The aim is for students to be able to look at a work of Venetian art and read not only its biblical subject but also its biblical thinking, especially the subterranean connections between episodes. We also consider how extra-biblical subjects such as saints’ legends and episodes from the apocrypha are themselves extensions of biblical reading. Meeting times are about equally divided between classroom discussion and field trips to sites around Venice. Among the more important of these are Saint Mark’s cathedral, the Doge Palace, the Basilica dei Frari, the Scuola di San Rocco (with its amazing Tintorettos), the Basilica di Santi Giovanni e Paolo, the Basilica della Salute (with Titian’s biblical paintings in the sacristry), and the Accademia gallery, with its great hall containing Veronese’s gigantic and exuberant Feast in the House of Levi and Titian’s large but intimate Pieta,with its subtle biblical meanings adopted to personal expression. The course’s final class concludes in this room, in front of these contrasting visions of the meaning of life, seen through the lens of the Bible.

Stephen Greenblatt, PhD, Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University
Shaul Bassi, PhD, Full Professor of English, Ca’ Foscari University
4 credits
UN, GR Limited enrollment.

Monday/Wednesday, 12:45-3:15pm

A great early modern metropolis and a richly symbolic landscape, Venice is the setting of two seminal plays by Shakespeare, a comedy and a tragedy. The Merchant of Venice and Othello have made the Jewish moneylender Shylock and the Moor Othello the emblematic ethnic and cultural outsiders, figures who both foreshadow and challenge the modern notion of a multicultural community. This course analyzes the Shakespearean texts, reads their principal sources, and charts their controversial critical and theatrical histories. We examine the rich cultural and literary material that informs the plays, including the representations of Africans, Jews, and Muslims, and their multiple resonances in different times and places, including modern adaptations in fiction and film. Our presence in Venice is crucial to our understanding: we explore why the setting for these plays had to be here and not elsewhere, and we visit Venetian sites that illuminate the biblical, classical, and ethnographic contexts that forged Shakespeare’s notions of cultural and religious difference.

Joyce E. Chaplin, PhD, James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History, Harvard University
4 credits
UN, GR Limited enrollment.

Tuesday/Thursday, 9:15-11:45am

Saving the planet is necessary and will actually make us happy, right? The good news is that we’re already using ethics to define how we can and should do the right thing in relation to the natural world. In fact, all ethics in the western tradition have used “nature” and “natural” as foundational definitions—we’re more than halfway there! But obviously, we need to be conscious that we’re using those definitions and we must decide which of them to correct or reject. (Ethics from western philosophy have an outsized place in global debates over policy and science, for instance, but should this continue to be the case?) And we’ll need to be more disciplined in how or when we use these ethical definitions, in a calm and rational way, even during panic-inducing states of emergency, such as the climate crisis. (Or a pandemic.) This class is designed to give you, as a human being with rights and as a global citizen with obligations, an intellectual, verbal, and ethical toolkit for dealing with the debates over imperiled natural resources and competing human needs that have become urgent. To do that, you’ll read classic texts in western ethics, analyze contemporary statements on the human-nature interface to how those ethics continue to be used, and write some ethical statements of your own.

Prerequisite: none

Jay M. Harris, PhD, Harry Austryn Wolfson Professor of Jewish Studies, Harvard University
4 credits
UN, GR Limited enrollment.

Tuesday/Thursday, 12:45-3:15pm

This course engages with the ethical challenges presented by personal and group identities. Built around K. Anthony Appiah’s book, The Ethics of Identity, in conversation with his predecessors, interlocutors, and opponents (among them Kant, Mill, and Rawls), the course focuses on contentious contemporary issues regarding inclusion and exclusion, and on how we can engage with our multiple identities in ethically responsive ways.