The Development of Western Civilization is at the core of the Providence College core curriculum—a four-course interdisciplinary study of history, literature, philosophy, theology, art and music from ancient Mesopotamia to the 21st century. All Honors DWC courses are team-taught by faculty drawn from various departments. Each faculty team develops its own particular syllabus (and thus topics and readings vary from semester to semester), but the following lists of topics are a representative sampling of the content and range of Honors DWC courses.
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Honors DWC I: Mesopotamia and Egypt, Epic of Gilgamesh, Enuma Elish, Hebrew Bible, Homer, Sappho, Persian Wars, Greek Art and Architecture, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Greek Sophists, Thales, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Epicurus, Stoicism, Alexander the Great, Hellenistic Art, Alexandria, Mystery Cults, Roman Republic and Roman Empire, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Catullus, Virgil, Ovid, Petronius, Roman Art and Architecture, New Testament, Plotinus, Constantine, Christological Controversies, St. Augustine, Decline of the Roman Empire, Early Medieval Art, Boethius, Monasticism, Beowulf, Byzantium
Honors DWC II: Rise of Islam, Koran, Islamic Art and Architecture, Avicenna, Averroes, Algazali, Shiites and Sunis, Maimonides, Charlemagne, Song of Roland, Crusades, Anselm, Marie de France, Hildegard of Bingen, Andreas Capellanus, Marco Polo, Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, Great Schism, Medieval Art and Music, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Petrarch, Renaissance Florence, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Marguerite of Navarre, Teresa of Avila, Henry VIII, Erasmus, Thomas More, Renaissance Art and Music, Luther, Calvin, Council of Trent, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Galileo, Cervantes, Hobbes, Locke, Milton, Baroque Art and Architecture
Honors DWC III: Scientific Revolution, The Enlightenment, Descartes, Newton, Absolutism and Louis XIV, Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Aphra Behn, Swift, Ben Franklin, Neoclassical Art and Music, Agricultural Revolution, Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade, Olaudah Equiano, French Revolution, Napoleon, Mary Wollstonecraft, Romanticism in Art and Music, Goethe, Wordsworth, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Jane Austen, Flaubert, Dickens, Industrial Revolution, New Ideologies and “isms,” Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Karl Marx, Darwin, Emily Dickinson, Newman, Islam and Modernism
Honors DWC IV: Modern Capitalism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Tolstoy, Conrad, Vatican I, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kafka, World War I, Vera Brittain, T. S. Eliot, Yeats, Freud, Karl Barth, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Cubism and Expressionism, Einstein, World War II, Elie Wiesel, Bonhoeffer, Camus, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Solzhenitsyn, Jacque Maritain, Vatican II, Africa and Decolonization, Chinua Achebe, Jazz Music, Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King, Vietnam War, Borges, Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, Pope John Paul II, Contemporary Islam, Naguib Mahfouz, Postmodernism