Fall 2008 Program

Faculty

Professor Christiane Andersson, the Samuel H. Kress Professor of Art History
Professor Andersson has taught Renaissance and Baroque art history and museum studies at Bucknell since 1997. She has taught at Stanford, Columbia, UC Berkeley, Williams College Graduate Program in Art History and the University of Frankfurt (Germany). Professor Andersson was the chief curator in the paintings department at the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, and has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery, Washington DC, at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Museum, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She specializes in Renaissance art, particularly images of women, popular culture, the censorship of art, and the history of drawings and prints.

Professor Jay Goodale, History
Professor Goodale teaches courses in late-medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation history. He has taught at UCLA and Beloit College, and has been awarded fellowship-appointments to the Max-Planck Institute for History in Göttingen, Germany; the University of Erfurt (Germany); and the Research Library at Castle Friedenstein in Gotha, Germany. His specialization is the interaction between culture, religion, and politics during the Reformation.

Program Highlights

This London Semester program will examine the dynamics between art, politics, and religion between roughly 1350 and 1700, that is, the time of the Hundred Years' War, the Black Plague, the War of the Roses, the era of Henry VIII, the Tudor Revolution in government, the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the discovery of the New World, the emergence and growth of capitalism, and the growth of London as one of the world's largest and most important cities. The core courses of the program will examine how art, religion, and politics interacted with one another during all these dramatic and epoch-shaping events. The program will be highly interdisciplinary, and will use the sites and museums in London and its environs as much as possible, as they are places integral to the actual course material.

Make London your home and classroom:

• Visit historic sites and museums to understand Britain's cultural, religious, and political
  past
• Gain entrance to special museum collections and displays not open to the
  general public
• Experience British theatre, art, architecture
• Study British and European Union economics from Europe's most
  important financial center
• Enjoy the vibrant life of central London
• Participate in overnight trips to other noteworthy cities in England such as
  Bath and York
• Participate in a trip to explore the still charming and medievalesque Belgian
  "wool towns" Brugge and Mechelen, cities that were central to late-medieval and
  Tudor-era English economic and foreign policy
• Earn Bucknell credit while studying abroad at Bucknell tuition and dorm rates
  (most financial aid applies)

THE COURSES

In the unique Bucknell-in-London program, students take the core course along with 3 electives for a total of 4 credits.

CORE COURSE

Art, Religion, and Politics in Tudor England
(UNIV 271) -- Andersson & Goodale
(required of all students) (1.0 credit)

Between 1485, when the Tudor Dynasty was founded, and 1603, when it ended, England experienced profound social, economic, political and religious changes. This course will survey the interwoven economic, social, religious, political, familial, and artistic developments that characterized this era. The key component of this course will be its utilization of art, broadly defined to include paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, public monuments, notions of urban planning, the rearrangement of interior space within churches and cathedrals, iconoclasm, architecture, and landscaping as media which played a direct role in the political, cultural, religious, ideological, and social transformations of the era. We will use London and its environs as a "living classroom" to bring immediacy to, and engagement with, the places and topics under discussion. The use of art is not arbitrary, for art was a main medium through which elites in a largely illiterate society conveyed their power and tried to manage and direct the turbulent religious, economic, political and social changes that characterize the era. The course will be a combination of lectures, discussions, student presentations, and guided excursions.

ELECTIVE COURSES

England during The Hundred Years' War and the War of the Roses
(HIST 247) -- Goodale (1.0 credit)

This course will examine how particular macro-historical events -- the Hundred Years' War and the War of the Roses (c. 1337-1487) -- usually studied militarily or geopolitically, affected various English micro-societies in countless ways. Students will explore the changes that occurred, as a result of these wars, in economic practice, systems of theology, the treatment of women, the persecution of minorities and marginal figures, notions of patriotism, attitudes regarding knights and their role in feudal society, urban politics, the role of guilds and other corporations, vernacular literature, and university curricula and politics. The course will also factor in England's experience of the Black Plague, which overlapped chronologically with the Hundred Years' War, and which affected the government's prosecution of the war as well as the popular response to it. The course will be as interdisciplinary as possible, and will utilize texts, primary and secondary, from various disciplinary perspectives, including religion, philosophy, literature, history, anthropology, economics, and the history of science/medicine. The course will feature many guided excursions in and outside of London.

British Architecture: From Tudor Castles to St. Paul’s Cathedral
(ART 215) -- Andersson (1.0 credit)

This course will survey the grand building tradition of the Tudor, Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, followed by the work of great Baroque architects. Beginning with a brief overview of Roman building in Britain and of monastic building types, the course will focus on the extensive building projects of Henry VIII, especially Hampton Court Palace and other royal residences. The English country house will be examined in its development from c.1485 until 1750, considering the structure of great households, their interior furnishings as they reflect social life, their setting in parks and estates and their relationships with nearby cities or villages. Architecture is a social art form reflecting the culture of its times and thus each building will be studied within its social, political, theological and artistic context. Critical to the course will be the numerous site visits within and around London. When visiting these sites, the course will consider how historic buildings should be preserved and presented to the public today. A British colleague, Professor Alan Colquhoun, formerly of the School of Architecture at Princeton and now residing in London, has agreed to give tours of some of the Baroque buildings about which he has published.

The London Theater
(Theater 264/ENGL 217) -- Sullivan (1.0 credit)

The London Theatre course introduces students to the influence and impact of British theatre in the world and to all aspects of the London stage. Students attend plays in the West End, at the National Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe and Swan, and in "Off-West End" theatres. They read plays that complement both the theatre course and the wider focus of the semester program. Students gain familiarity with theater criticism as well as with numerous aspects of production, from "backstage" visits to Shakespeare's Globe and to the National Theatre set and prop design facilities, to demonstrations at the Museum of Theatre's costume and make-up shops. Students will attend plays, keep a theatre journal of the plays attended, and participate in class discussions. Professor Sullivan has worked for years with the Bucknell in London Program, and selects plays for this course that relate to the theme of the program.

Contemporary British Economic Institutions, Policies, and Theories
(ECON 222) -- staff (1.0 Credit)

This course explores topics in contemporary British finance, trade, and monetary and fiscal policies. The course will examine Britain's role in the European and global economies, and will consider how factors such as immigration, environmental concerns, and health issues challenge the British economy as it develops in the first decades of the 21st century. Visits to the historic financial district, the Bank of England, and other relevant sites will be a component of the course.

ADDITIONAL OPTIONS
Independent Study -- Students may arrange independent study courses, contingent upon faculty participation and approval.

Internships -- It may be possible to arrange an internship during the semester in London for course credit in place of one of the elective courses.