ENROLL

Wendy M. Sepponen

Ross Elfline

Wendy M. Sepponen

This course engages with the visual and material characteristics and practices particular to sculpture. Often relegated to the sidelines of art history classes, this course seeks to teach how to talk about sculptures and to explore the diverse contexts and processes with which sculptors worked. A medium-specific focus allows us to consider how sculptures functioned in the early modern period while allowing for effective bridges to the students' contemporary surroundings and viewing practices. While early modern European sculpture will be the course's core, direct engagement with sculptures and display practices will enliven our understanding of and appreciation for sculpture.

Prerequisite: Any one Art History course

Extra time required

Baird Jarman

This course surveys the history of European architecture while emphasizing firsthand encounters with actual structures. Students visit outstanding examples of major transnational styles--including Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Moorish, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical and Modernist buildings--along with regionally specific styles, such as Spanish Plateresque, English Tudor and Catalan Modernisme. Cultural and technological changes affecting architectural practices are emphasized along with architectural theory, ranging from Renaissance treatises to Modernist manifestoes. Students also visit buildings that resist easy classification and that raise topics such as spatial appropriation, stylistic hybridity, and political symbolism.

Requires participation in OCS Program: Architectural Studies in Europe

Baird Jarman

This course explores the theory and practice of cultural resource management by investigating how various architectural sites and urban historic districts operate. Students will consider cultural, financial, ethical and pedagogical aspects of contemporary tourism practices within a historical framework that roots the travel industry alongside religious pilgrimage customs and the aristocratic tradition of the Grand Tour. Interacting with professionals who help oversee architectural landmarks and archaeological sites, students will analyze and assess initiatives at various locations, ranging from educational programs and preservation plans to sustainability efforts and repatriation debates.

Participation in OCS Architectural Studies Program

Arnab Chakladar

Prerequisite: One English foundations course and one additional 6 credit English course

Sandra Rousseau

Through texts, images and films coming from different continents, this class will present Francophone cultures and discuss the connections and tensions that have emerged between France and and other French speaking countries. Focused on oral and written expression this class aims to strengthen students’ linguistic skills while introducing them to the academic discipline of French and Francophone studies. The theme will be school and education in the Francophone world.

Prerequisite: French 204 or equivalent

Christine Lac

Through the thematic lens of food, we will study enduring and variable characteristics of societies in the French and Francophone world, with a comparative nod to the American experience. We will analyze various cultural texts and artifacts (fiction, non-fiction, print, film, and objects) from medieval times to the present with a pinch of theory and a dash of statistics.

Prerequisite: French 204 or equivalent

Cathy Yandell

How to transcribe the self? How is a self created, examined, or reinvented through storytelling? Is cultural context inextricable from the writing of a memoir? Such readings as Montaigne, Descartes, Nathalie Sarraute, and Assia Djebar, as well as the films of Agnès Varda and Gillaume Galienne, the graphic novel L’Arabe du futur, and the Franco-Rwandan singer Gaël Faye, will inform our inquiry. During the course of the term, students will also produce their own autobiographical/ autofictional projects.

Prerequisite: One French course beyond French 204 or instructor permission

Allison Murphy

The era of Modern Philosophy is characterized in part by the foundational importance of epistemological questions, including especially questions about the very possibility of knowledge. In this course we will read works from four authors who are all members of the Modern tradition in some sense, but whose widely differing epistemological frameworks lead them to propose radically different answers to these questions: Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Pascal.

Kent Freeze

Sophomore Priority

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: POSC 120.WL0 (Synonym 48589)

Tun Myint

Dev Gupta

Lori Pearson

How do we define traditions if they change over time and are marked by internal conflict? Is there anything stable about a religious tradition—an essence, or a set of practices or beliefs that abide amidst diversity and mark it off from a surrounding culture or religion? How do people live out or re-invent their traditions in the modern world? In this seminar we explore questions about pluralism, identity, authority, and truth, and we examine the creative ways beliefs and practices change in relation to culture. We consider how traditions grapple with difference, especially regarding theology, ethics, law, and gender.