ENROLL

Kevin A Wolfe

Numerous questions surround the Black Lives Matter movement. These include questions about its legitimacy as a movement and its “leaderlessness” and complaints about its tactics--for example, in a town-hall-like event in London on April 23, 2016, even President Obama, who has articulated support of the movement, complained that BLM “can’t just keep on yelling.” To answer some of these questions, in this course we will contextualize BLM in light of a series of tensions we find in African American political thought from the Civil Rights era (especially Black Power) to the present.

Ashley E Smith

Brendan LaRocque

This course will facilitate positive, respectful, and reciprocal relationships between Carleton students and people in India. Students will work with community groups that support local visions for an equitable and sustainable society. We will aim to transform ourselves and our place in the world through approaching communities with an informed curiosity, in-depth knowledge about local conditions, and open-minded engagement across various differences. The course will include scholarly readings, instructor and guest lectures, and require student presentations of their work. Students will work together as they engage community groups on topics such as economic development, tourism, gender, sexuality, and political representation.

OCS India Program

Tun Myint

Prerequisite: Students must have participated in an off-campus study program (Carleton or non-Carleton)

Kathryn L Steed

This class introduces the history of Rome from Augustus to Diocletian. From demented emperors to new religions to economic collapse, the course uses Rome as a lens to address enduring historical questions. For example, how do individuals get, keep, and hand on power? What are the relationships between a central power and those on the periphery of that power and between a ruling elite and those they rule? How do foreign affairs affect internal policies and politics? Since we rely largely on ancient sources, we will also devote time to the interpretation of those sources in all their delightful eccentricity.

Judith Howard

The study of dance is the study of culture. We will look at dance as culturally-coded, embodied knowledge and investigate dance forms and contexts across the globe. We will examine, cross-culturally, the function of dance in the lives of individuals and societies through various lenses including feminist, africanist and ethnological perspectives. We will read, write, view videos and performances, discuss and move. This course in dance theory and practice will include a weekly movement lab. No previous dance experience necessary.

Paul Petzschmann

Cathy Yandell

Keep up your French while learning about current issues in France, as well as world issues from a French perspective. Class meets once a week for an hour. Requirements include reading specific sections of leading French newspapers, (Le Monde, Libération, etc.) on the internet, and then meeting once a week to exchange ideas over coffee with a small group of students.

Prerequisite: French 204 or equivalent

Sophomore Priority

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: FREN 210.WL0 (Synonym 46598)

Josiah B Simon

This course draws on short literary and philosophical texts, poems and visual artworks to examine the historical and cultural conditions of the "golden age" of German Jewish literature and thought surrounding the First World War. In response to the religious and philosophical "crisis" of Jewish identity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we will explore what it means to live between two distinct cultural traditions,how this struggle impacts questions of authorship, cultural belonging and personal identity, and how critical engagement with the past helps to shape and determine our hopes and aspirations for the future. In English translation.

In Translation

Serena Zabin

William North

In Late Antiquity, Christians and pagans asked with particular intensity: How should I live? What should be my relationship to wealth, family, power, and the world? How are mind and body related in the good life and how can this relationship be controlled and directed? What place had education in the pursuit of the good life? Was the best life to be achieved through material renunciation, psychological transformation, or both? We will ask these and many other questions of a wide array of primary sources written originally in Latin, Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian while employing the insights of modern scholarship.

Extra Time Required

Antony Adler

The Pacific is the largest ocean on our planet, covering thirty percent of the Earth’s surface and bordered by four continents. This course will explore how a “Pacific World” framework can help us understand the movement of peoples, goods, and ideas across an oceanic space. Can we describe the history of the Pacific as having a unified history? This course will explore various topics in Pacific history including the history of exploration and migration, cross-cultural encounters, science and empire, and environmental history from 1750 to the present. While this course will be transnational in scope, it will focus primarily on U.S. exploration, trade, and the making of an American Pacific frontier. 

Serena Zabin

How Revolutionary was the American Revolution? This class will examine the American Revolution as both a process and a phenomenon. It will consider the relationship of the American Revolution to social, cultural, economic, political, and ideological change in the lives of Americans from the founding fathers to the disenfranchised, focusing on the period 1750-1790. Students currently enrolled in History 212 are eligible to take the optional 2-credit digital lab, History 210, “Boston Massacre in 3D.” We will use 3D modeling and GIS to create a Boston Massacre digital game.

Ellen L Manovich

This course examines the twentieth-century history of the United States city in global comparative perspective. It will focus on how exclusion, difference, inequality, and segregation have evolved along with diversity and heterogeneity in the modern city. We will explore this basic contradiction of the U.S. city in history as a contested site of opportunity and foreclosure, asking: how have American cities been both zones of exclusion and inequality while at the same time places in which diverse groups of people have interacted?

Annette Igra

Victoria Morse

What were women’s lives and experiences like in Europe before the modern era? What work did they do, how did they manage their private lives, their family commitments, their faith, and their intellectual lives? We will examine these questions through women’s own writings, writings about women, and secondary literature on family, gender, medicine, law, and culture. In 2016-17, we will have a special opportunity to think about Jewish women’s lives. Projects will include helping to create an exhibition related to William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice or working with Middle School students in the after school program.

Brendan LaRocque

Indian democracy presents a complicated social and political terrain that is being reshaped and remapped by a wide variety of efforts to bring about economic development, social change, political representation, justice, and equality. In this course we will examine, among other topics, the history of modern India with a focus on political movements centered on issues of colonialism, nationalism, class, gender, and caste. We will also examine changes in contemporary India brought about by globalization, and study how particular groups and communities have reacted and adapted to these developments.

Prerequisite: OCS India Program

OCS India Program

Thabiti Willis

Andrew Fisher

Required for History majors and minors

David Tompkins

In the aftermath of the Second World War and through the 1980s, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for world dominance. This Cold War spawned hot wars, as well as a cultural and economic struggle for influence all over the globe. This course will look at the experience of the Cold War from the perspective of its two main adversaries, the U.S. and USSR, but will also devote considerable attention to South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Students will write a 25 page paper based on original research.

Victoria Morse

Prerequisite: Concurrent registration in History 400

HIST 400 required.

Thabiti Willis

Prerequisite: Concurrent registration in History 400

HIST 400 required.

Austin Mason

Laurence Cooper, Alan Rubenstein

Laurence Cooper, Alan Rubenstein

Kathryn L Steed

Prerequisite: Latin 204 or the equivalent

Andy Flory

In this course, students will investigate the interest of white literati in jazz during the 1930s and 1940 through the lens of former Carleton English professor Jack Lucas. An writer for the well-known jazz appreciation magazine Down Beat, Lucas taught courses about jazz in the 1950s, and donated his large historic record collection to the College. We will read early written criticism and consider issues of canonization of jazz. Students will create their own compilation of early jazz recordings according to a theme, revisiting a common form of agency among jazz critics during the 1950s. 

Prerequisite: Music 126

Anna Moltchanova

Jason Decker

Prerequisite: 100-level Philosophy course or instructor permission

Daniel Groll

How should we live? This is the fundamental question for the study of ethics. This course looks at classic and contemporary answers to the fundamental question from Socrates to Kant to modern day thinkers. Along the way, we consider slightly (but only slightly) more tractable questions such as: What reason is there to be moral? Is there such a thing as moral knowledge (and if so, how do we get it)? What are the fundamental principles of right and wrong (if there are any at all)? Is morality objective?

Douglas B Marshall

Laurence Cooper

Cross-listed with POSC 354. What does it mean to be morally excellent? To be politically excellent? To be intellectually and spiritually excellent? Are these things mutually compatible? Do they lie within the reach of everyone? And what is the relation between excellence and pleasure? Between excellence and happiness? Aristotle addresses these questions in intricate and illuminating detail in the Nicomachean Ethics, which we will study in this course. The Ethics is more accessible than some of Aristotle's other works. But it is also a multifaceted and multi-layered book, and one that reveals more to those who study it with care.

Crosslisted with POSC 354

Cross-listed with POSC 354.00

Mihaela Czobor-Lupp

Barbara Allen

Laurence Cooper

Cross-listed with POSC 254. What does it mean to be morally excellent? To be politically excellent? To be intellectually and spiritually excellent? Are these things mutually compatible? Do they lie within the reach of everyone? And what is the relation between excellence and pleasure? Between excellence and happiness? Aristotle addresses these questions in intricate and illuminating detail in the Nicomachean Ethics, which we will study in this course. The Ethics is more accessible than some of Aristotle's other works. But it is also a multifaceted and multi-layered book, and one that reveals more to those who study it with care. Seminar paper required.

Crosslisted with POSC 254

Shana Sippy

How can we best understand the role of religion in the world today, and how should we interpret the meaning of religious traditions -- their texts and practices -- in history and culture? This class takes an exciting tour through selected themes and puzzles related to the fascinating and diverse expressions of religion throughout the world. From politics and pop culture, to religious philosophies and spiritual practices, to rituals, scriptures, gender, religious authority, and more, students will explore how these issues emerge in a variety of religions, places, and historical moments in the U.S. and across the globe.

Noah Salomon

Kristin Bloomer

South Asia is home to some of the world’s most vibrant religious practices. This course offers a survey of the origins and development of the major religious traditions of the Indian subcontinent: Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Jainism, and Sikhism. We will consider classical and historical texts along with ethnographies, modern and contemporary politics, and, most likely, site visits. Readings span the gamut -- from Indian sources in English translation to news, novels, and poetry. Film and other media will also serve as fodder.

Shana Sippy

Sonja Anderson

This course introduces students to the structure, history, and theology of the Catholic Church through the lens of gender and power. Through a combination of readings and conversations with living figures, students will develop the ability to critically and empathetically interpret Catholicism in its various manifestations. Topics include: God, rituals, salvation, the body, women, materiality, sex; the authority of persons, texts, and tradition; conflicts and anxieties involving masculinity, feminist theologies, the ordination of women as priests, the censuring of heretical theologians, and the clerical sex abuse crisis. Conditions permitting, this course will include trips to local Catholic sites.

Kevin A Wolfe

Kristin Bloomer

Michael McNally

Prerequisite: Religion 300 and acceptance of proposal for senior integrative exercise and instructor permission.

Iveta Jusova

Sophomore Priority

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: WGST 110.WL0 (Synonym 46239)

Katie L Bashore