NEW STUDY ABROAD IN VENICE

Its official! The Relgious Studies Department will offer a new study abroad course in January 2016 called VENICE: CROSSROADS OF RELIGION, ART, AND CULTURE (fulfills RELS 200 or 300 requirement).

The course is the brainchild of Prof. Mehnaz Afridi who conceived of the program as a two-week winter intercession course exploring the interreligious character of Venice, against the backdrop of the 500th Anniversary of the Venetian Jewish Ghetto, the oldest such ghetto in the world, to be celebrated in 2016.

Daniel Savoy (Art History) will offer daily lectures and tours, using the Venetian Center for International Jewish Studies (Centro Veneziano di Studi Ebraici Internazionali) as a base and the city of Venice as a classroom. Students will explore how Venetian Christians and Jews from the sixteenth century to today have negotiated their identities in relation to Venetian culture, a bricolage of diverse ethnic and religious traditions.

Each class will begin with a one-hour lecture at the Venetian Center, followed by visits to world-class museums, galleries, palaces, churches, and public spaces. In these settings, students will study the experience of Venetian Christians and Jews first-hand through the syncretistic application of analytical tools drawn from the disciplines of Religious Studies and Art History. Using art-historical methods, such as formal analysis, students will examine the visual form, subject matter, function, and physical setting of Venetian art and architecture with an eye toward what those qualities reveal about the cross-cultural and interreligious dynamics of local Christian and Jewish life. Employing religious studies models, students will analyze the ways that the beliefs, scriptures, and aesthetic/ritual practices of the community have shaped a way of life in the Ghetto and beyond. At the same time, students will explore the ways that the particular lived context of Venice in turn shaped the religious beliefs, practices and self-understandings of the community over the centuries. In addition to visual and textual studies, we will attempt to bridge the gap between our understanding of pre-modern and modern Christian and Jewish experience through ethnography, particularly by conducting “life-history” interviews with contemporary Venetian Christians and Jews.

Throughout the course, this interdisciplinary approach will compel students to grapple with the following questions: What was religious life like in pre-modern Venice and in the Jewish Ghetto in particular? How did religious beliefs and practices inform the ways in which residents interacted with other religious cultures? How did the visual culture of the City and the Ghetto, from the decoration of its synagogues and liturgical objects to the design of its residential architecture and street network, reflect the lives and cultural interactions of its residents? How were Jews represented in relation to Catholics and Muslims in Venetian art and what religious convictions underwrite these representations? Did the Venetian government include or exclude Jews in state sponsored art and architecture, and what might that say about the status of Jews in Venetian society? How did various religious communities present themselves visually through dress? Did they dress differently depending on whether they were in public or private, in the Ghetto versus the Piazza San Marco, why or why not? What is life like today in the Jewish community of Venice? What role does interreligious dialogue, and also aesthetics, play in the current effort to restore the Ghetto?

In addition to class meetings, each student will be asked to give disciplined attention to these and other issues through presentations, ethnographies, and regular journal entries.

Students can expect a life-changing experience, while also fulfilling course requirements in either Catholic Studies (RELS 200 or 300), Roots of the Modern World: Art, or an Art Elective.