JACK THE RIPPER'S CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Catalog description

This course considers the spate of serial murders attributed to Jack the Ripper as a springboard for exploring the social universe of late-Victorian London. Topics such as medicine and science, crime and policing, sex work and gender, ethnicity and race, and poverty and social class will be considered. Students will draw on skills from several disciplines in order to situate this phenomenon in its historical and cultural context, and to translate these skills to our own time, ultimately identifying the intersectional politics at work in acts of urban social violence today.