SUMMER-ABROAD.UCDAVIS.EDU August 21, 2008 03:20 AM
Class Size: 26-30
Imagine eating organic Mexican cuisine based on indigenous recipes, relaxing in a temescal (a ritual sauna), exploring pre-Columbian sites, discovering traditional herbal remedies, and learning how the most ancient civilizations in the Americas still resist the modern world. In Cuernavaca, the city of “eternal spring,” we study literature, culture, and nature of the Americas. In the second week, we visit Veracruz, where we study the Pre-Columbian civilizations in Mexico before the Conquest and understand how the Pre-Columbian legacy still resists American globalization. Journals. Teamwork. Reader and paperbacks required. Spanish strongly recommended but not required.
Marc Blanchard, Agrege de Lettres (University of Paris), Ph.D.
Comparative Literature Department, UC Davis
meblanchard@ucdavis.edu
Marc Blanchard taught at Yale and Columbia before joining the UCD faculty in 1970. He trained as a classics scholar, but his longstanding research interests are in Comparative Literature, Theory, Semiotics and the Critique of Culture. He was co-founder of the Comparative Literature Program in 1971, the founding Director of the Critical Theory Program in 1985 and of the Humanities Program in 1987. His articles and books include, La Revolution et les Mots, Description: Sign, Self, Desire: Critical Theory in the Wake of Semiotics, In Search of the City and Trois portraits de Montaigne. He has published more than seventy articles in major journals on topics of Theory, European, Latin American, Caribbean and especially Cuban Literature. He has held several visiting professorships (NYU, CCNY, UNC Chapel Hill, Stanford, the Ruhr Universitaet, Bochum, Germany) and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984.
Raquel Scherr, Ph.D.*
University Writing Program, UC Davis
* Recipient of Academic Federation Excellence in Teaching Award
rlscherr@ucdavis.edu
Raquel Scherr holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches for the University Writing Program at University of California, Davis. Her publications include: Face Value: The Politics of Beauty and West of The West: Imagining California. She is presently working on an essay on mixed race theory to be published in a collection for University of Texas Press (2002). She has also worked as an editorial consultant on such documentary award winning films such as: "Edward James: Builder of Dreams," and Maureen Gossling’s "Blossoms of Fire."
This Program carries a total of 8 units. Enrolled students must take both courses listed. Auditing is not an option.
TBA
Course Reader (provided by Summer Abroad)
Students will be asked to visit historical sites in and around Cuernavaca. In addition, we will be organizing field trips to historical and cultural sites in Mexico City. We will visit the internationally acclaimed Anthropological museum, which houses the largest collection in the world of pre-Colombian artifacts; we will visit as well the house where Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo lived, which is now a museum, in order to help us put into context how Rivera, in his famous murals, interpreted the Conquest and the culture that emerged from it. Chapultepec Park, in which the museum is housed, is of interest to us not only because Maximillian lived there, but also because it is an Indian site, as is the historic center of Mexico City, which was built from the ruins of Aztec pyramids.
We will explore as well Teotihuacan, 30 miles northeast of Mexico City, whose pyramids and remaining streets provide a glimpse of the extraordinary urban planning, art, and architecture that sustained the commerce, military, religious, and every day life of the Toltecs and later the Mexicas. Teotihuacan and the ruins in Tula will give us not only a view of the powerful indigenous kingdoms that existed in the new world at the time of the conquest, but also a sense of why indigenous communities today may be said to be reversing the conquest.
Students will be staying
at Villa Calmecac, a hostel in Cuernavaca, the city of eternal spring, about 45 minutes from Mexico City. Students will experience a ritual sauna in the temascal located on site. Students will stay in shared rooms (3-4 students/room). 
Breakfast and dinner will be served at Villa Calmecac. Students will need to purchase lunch daily and all meals while on fieldtrips.
Fees for Summer Abroad include the Summer Abroad Program Fee, Course Fee, and Accommodations and Activities Fee. The Accommodations and Activities Fee covers lodging, selected meals (if included), selected field trips, group accidental death & dismemberment and emergency health insurance, select publications, and additional program specific costs. Air fare is not included. All fees are subject to change.
| $1000.00 | UC Davis Summer Abroad Program Fee (includes $300 non-refundable deposit) |
| $1176.00 | Course Fee ($147/unit X 8 units)* |
| $1813.00 | Accommodations and Activities Fee |
| $3989.00 | TOTAL ESTIMATED FEES |
* This fee level is based on the proposed 2007-08 governor's budget. The fees are subject to Regental, legislative, and gubernatorial action and may change without notice.