| 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, stu... |
| 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'l... |
| 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. |