Interest in meditation has surged in recent years, partly as a therapeutic response to stress, pain, and depression, and partly due to growing attentional challenges associated with our era of distraction (smart phones, social media, the internet, etc.). Available meditation techniques range from practices rooted in ancient contemplative traditions to secularized clinical protocols and app-based mindfulness exercises—but what is meditation, at once ancient and timely? This course brings a cosmopolitan perspective to the global history of meditation, treating it both as a humanistic object of study—normative, contested, and interpretively rich—and as a versatile suite of practices that might contribute to the humanities. In addition to experimenting with and developing their own attention practices, students encounter and reflect on contemplative genres of art, literature, and music.
