Course offerings in human rights include six core courses and a host of introductory and advanced seminars. 

<see the latest Bard College course catalogue>

core courses include:

100-level courses

Introduction to Human Rights (HR 101)
Faculty: Thomas Keenan
What are humans and what count as rights, if any?  Where does the idea come from? What is the 'reality' of human rights in our world?  Is there such a thing as "our" world?
Last Offered September 1, 2004

back to top

Anthropology of Violence and Suffering (HR/ANTH 261)
Faculty: Laura Kunreuther
Why do acts of violence continue to grow in the ‘modern’ world?  In what ways has violence become naturalized in the contemporary world?  How do acts of violence challenge and support modern ideas of humanity?
Last Offered September 1, 2004

Colonialism, Law, and Human Rights (HR/ANTH 262)
Faculty: Jesse Shipley
This is designed for students actively involved in programs in Africa, providing some of the theoretical and empirical information for approaching projects with an informed eye. How do Western donor agencies, states, and individuals unwittingly draw on centuries-old tropes of poverty, degradation, and helplessness of non-Western peoples? What are the implications of “aid” for the development of global capitalism?
Last Offered September 1, 2004
Syllabus PDF

Free Speech (HR/LIT 218)
Faculty: Thomas Keenan
What is 'freedom of speech'? Is there a right to say anything? An introduction to the intersections between literature and human rights, from the Greeks to the French Revolution, Salman Rushdie, hate speech and censorship on the Internet. The course examines the ways in which rights, language, and public space have been linked together in ideas about democracy.
Last Offered September 1, 2004

Liberty, National Rights, and Human Rights (HR/HIST 2702)
Faculty: Gregory Moynahan
The history of ‘human rights’ formally existed only with the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the conventions that formed the International Bill of Human Rights.  What were the fatal gaps in the previous system of nationally instantiated ‘universal’ rights as they were initially developed in Europe and selectively applied to or adopted by its colonies?  How did the relation of politics to the infrastructures make both widespread human rights infractions and their curtailment possible?
Last Offered February 1, 2004

Theories of Human Rights (PS/HR 257)
Last Offered September 1, 2004

other courses include:

200-level courses

Arab-Israeli conflict (HIST 2122)
Faculty: Joel Perlmann
A Jewish national movement arose in the late nineteenth century to oppose the conditions of Jewish life in Europe, and an Arab national movement (and a specifically Palestinian movement) arose to oppose Ottoman and European rule of Arab peoples.  Out of these movements emerged the State of Israel and the Palestinian refugees in 1948. How have the political character and the military realities of the conflict changed over the decades?
Last Offered September 1, 2003
Syllabus PDF

Hispanic presence in the United States (SPAN 220)
Faculty: Melanie Nicholson
The best metaphor of America remains the dreadful metaphor--the Melting Pot. Fall into the Melting Pot, ease into the Melting Pot, or jump into the Melting Pot--it makes no difference--you will find yourself a stranger to your parents, a stranger to your own memory of yourself. ~ Richard Rodríguez...
Last Offered September 1, 2004
Syllabus PDF

Historical sociology of punishment (SOC 242)
Faculty: Michael Donnelly
From primitive societies, Puritan New England, 18th and 19th century western Europe, the American South, to the recent period in the United States and Great Britain.  Comparisons among such disparate cases suggest broad developmental patterns in punishment, and more specific queries about the connections between culture, social structure, and penal strategies. 
Last Offered September 1, 2004
Syllabus PDF

Judgment and dissent (PS 254)
Faculty: Daniel Karpowitz
What is the connection between law and morality? Judicial debates about rights, and the differing conceptions about the human beings who are thought to possess them, are central as judges undertake the work of applying fundamental texts to concrete social situations.
Last Offered January 1, 2003
Syllabus PDF

Justice after dictatorship (HR 238)
Faculty: Ian Buruma
How do we clean up the mess after the dictatorship has fallen? We will look at Germany and Japan after World War II, the use of international laws in sovereign states, the questions of truth-telling and retribution, of individual and collective guilt, and the use of human rights and international justice as the latest assertion of a universalist faith.
Last Offered February 1, 2004
Syllabus PDF

Women and international human rights (PS 248)
Faculty: Janet Benshoof
What is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)? How does it mandate a legal vision of women's equality that surpasses any current legal protections in the US constitution or laws?
Last Offered September 1, 2003

back to top

Aesthetics of evil (LIT 3115)
Faculty: Marina van Zuylen
What is radical evil? Can literature ever adequately portray the unspeakable side of human nature? Can there be poetry after Auschwitz?
Last Offered February 1, 2002
Syllabus PDF

Catastrophe of knowledge: an exploration of the Faust legend (LIT 3692)
Faculty: Mark Danner
Eve's apple is only the first in a succession of symbols the weight of which warns us that to learn is to court danger, that the enlightened mind is vulnerable, threatened, naked before the retribution of an unsentimental, wrathful world. This idea, in its modern form, is encapsulated in the Faust legend.
Last Offered September 1, 2003
Syllabus PDF

Human Rights film clinic (Film 335)
Faculty: Gillian Caldwell
The goal for the semester: to create two ?Rights Alert? web broadcasts via the WITNESS methodology. One is focused on Burma, and the other on women and psychiatric hospitalization in the US and abroad.
Last Offered January 1, 2002
Syllabus PDF

Japan: from feudal isolation to modern democracy (HIST 3115)
Faculty: Ian Buruma
This course takes Japan as an example of modernization in the non-Western world. Japan, given different western models to follow, often opted for the least liberal ones. To what extent does modernization mean Westernization, or democratization?
Last Offered February 1, 2004
Syllabus PDF

Memories of repression and political violence in Latin America (HR 305)
Faculty: Elizabeth Jelin
How do different societal actors, in various historical, cultural and national settings and scenarios, construct meanings and narratives of their past political violence and inter-group conflicts? What happens to the quests for justice, truth and institutional changes in post-dictatorial periods?
Last Offered January 1, 2004
Syllabus PDF

Occidentalism: the West through hostile eyes (SST 340)
Faculty: Ian Buruma
What do its enemies mean when they call the West 'the West?' We concentrate on a post-Enlightenment liberal-democratic idea of the Occident, which has become a nightmare vision to religious extremists, and anti-liberal nativists in East and West.
Last Offered February 1, 2003
Syllabus PDF

Politics of terror: confronting violent political change (PS 376)
Faculty: Mark Danner
How do violence and politics overlap, and where does terrorism come from? How is politics practiced through violence? Where did Al Qaeda come from and where is it going? How do journalists report on terrorism? And how are they manipulated by it?
Last Offered September 1, 2003
Syllabus PDF