ENROLL

Melinda Russell

This overview of the "interdisciplinary discipline" of American Studies will focus on the ways American Studies engages with and departs from other scholarly fields of inquiry. We will study the stories of those who have been marginalized in the social, political, cultural, and economic life of the United States due to their class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, citizenship, and level of ability. We will explore contemporary American Studies concerns like racial and class formation, the production of space and place, the consumption and circulation of culture, and transnational histories.

Sophomore Priority

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: AMST 115.WL0 (Synonym 59463)

Adriana Estill

Peter Balaam

An interdisciplinary investigation of the burgeoning, brash, alluring Other that the young Walter Whitman found in New York in the 1850s. Considering "Leaves of Grass," as well as his journalistic, "self-help," and political writings, we will reconstruct how Whitman found his muse, his voice, and his distinctively modern and democratic subject in the geography, demographics, markets, politics, and erotics of New York: "O City / Behold me! Incarnate me as I have incarnated you! I have rejected nothing you have offered me!--whom you adopted, I have adopted; good or bad..."

Luciano Battaglini

Have you just returned from Asia, Africa, Europe, or South America? This course is an excellent way to keep in touch with the culture (and, when appropriate, the language) you left behind. Relying on magazines and newspapers around the world, students will discuss common topics and themes representing a wide array of regions. You may choose to read the press in the local language, or read English-language media about your region, meeting once each week for conversational exchange. (Language of conversation is English.)

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

Kimberly Smith

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 instructor approval

Sophomore Priority

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: FREN 210.WL0 (Synonym 59263)

Candace Moore

This course introduces students to foundational interdisciplinary works in sexuality and gender studies, while focusing on the construction of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer identities in the United States. In exploring sexual and gender diversity throughout the term, this seminar highlights the complexity and variability of experiences of desire, identification, embodiment, self-definition, and community-building across different historical periods, and in relation to intersections of race, class, ethnicity, and other identities.

Candace Moore

This capstone seminar reads representations of racial, gender, and sexual minorities in popular culture through the lenses of feminist, critical race, queer, and trans theories. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in the late 1980s to describe an approach to oppression that considered how structures of power act multiply on individuals based upon their interlocking racial, class, gender, sexual, and other identities. This seminar takes up the charge of intersectional analysis—rejecting essentialist theories of difference while exploring pluralities—to interpret diversity (or lack thereof) in forms of art and entertainment, focusing on film, TV, and digital media.

Prerequisite: Gender, Women's & Sexuality Studies 110 or 212 or Cinema and Media Studies 110 or Women's and Gender Studies 110 or 112 or instructor consent

Meredith McCoy

Many Americans grow up with a fictionalized view of Indigenous people (sometimes also called Native Americans/American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians within the U.S. context). Understanding Indigenous peoples’ histories, presents, and possible futures requires moving beyond these stereotypes and listening to Indigenous perspectives. In this class, we will begin to learn about Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island and the Pacific through tribal histories, legislation, Supreme Court cases, and personal narratives. The course will focus on the period from 1887 to 2018 with major themes including (among others) agency, resistance, resilience, settler colonialism, discrimination, and structural racism.

Mike E Jirik

This course is a survey of early African American history. It will introduce students to major themes and events while also covering historical interpretations and debates in the field. Core themes of the course include migration, conflict, and culture. Beginning with autonomous African polities, the course traces the development of the United States through the experiences of enslaved and free African American women and men to the Civil War. The main aim of the course is for students to become familiar with key issues and developments in African American history and their centrality to understanding U.S. history.

William North

From churches and monasteries to universities, guilds, and governmental administrations, the medieval world was full of institutions. They emerged, by accident or design, to do particular kinds of work and to benefit particular persons or groups. These institutions faced hard questions like those we ask of our institutions today: How best to structure, distribute, and control power and authority? What is the place of the institution in the wider world?  How is a collective identity and ethos achieved, maintained, or transformed? How does the institution as a material community relate to the institution’s mission and culture, the institution as a concept/ideal? What characterizes good and bad leadership? Where does corruption and abuse of power come from and what motivates and advances reform? This course will explore these questions through discussion of case studies and primary sources from the medieval world as well as theoretical studies of these topics.

Brendan LaRocque

This course examines the history of the Indian subcontinent from 1500 to the current day. We will study the rise and decline of the powerful and religiously eclectic Mughal Empire, the subsequent expansion of the British Empire, and the emergence of the independent nation-states of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh and their post-colonial societies. We will analyze the dramatic political, economic, and social upheavals of this era, including left-wing and right-wing movements, and developments among Hindu, Islamic, and Buddhist communities. A special focus will be given to caste-based movements for justice and equality.  

Jennifer L Schaefer

Modern Latin American history is marked by both violent divisions and creative cooperation, nationalist proclamations and imperialist incursions, and democratic pursuits and dictatorial repression. This course offers a survey of this complex regional history from independence movements at the beginning of the nineteenth century though globalization in the twenty-first century. It addresses methodological issues that include the significance of multiple historical perspectives and the interpretation of sources. It considers the relationship between individuals and larger social contexts with an emphasis on race, ethnicity, class, citizenship status, and gender. It places Latin American culture and politics in regional and global contexts. 

Antony Adler

A two-credit course in which students work with faculty oversight to complete a variety of public history projects with community partners. Students will work on a research project requiring them to identify and analyze primary sources, draw conclusions from the primary source research, and share their research with the appropriate audience in an appropriate form. We meet once a week at Carleton to ensure students maintain professional standards and strong relationships in their work. Potential projects include educational programming, historical society archival work, and a variety of local history opportunities. 

Extra Time Required

George Vrtis

Annette Igra

Susannah Ottaway

This course explores the history of Ireland from Medieval times through the Great Famine, ending with a look at the Partition of Ireland in 1920. We examine themes of religious and cultural conflict and explore a series of English political and military interventions. Throughout the course, we will analyze views of the Irish landscape, landholding patterns, and health and welfare issues. Finally, we explore the contested nature of history and memory as the class discusses monuments and memory production in Irish public spaces.

Adeeb Khalid

Jennifer L Schaefer

Revolution, dictatorship, civil war, and armed resistance shaped twentieth century Latin American history. This course examines the Mexican Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, Argentina’s Process of National Reorganization, the Guatemalan Civil War, and indigenous uprisings in Mexico and Bolivia. It analyzes practices of inclusion and exclusion, violent repression, demands for rights, and calls for justice. Drawing on sources including memoirs, testimonies, press accounts, and literature, the course considers how participants in revolution, survivors of repression, and advocates for rights drew from international precedents and shaped their narratives in appeals for transnational solidarity.

Thabiti Willis

This course examines the causes, features, and consequences of wars across two critical phases of African history, colonial and post-colonial. It covers four cases studies from modern Central, East, and West Africa: the Congo (first under the rule of King Leopold and later the Belgian colonial government), Tanganyika (under German colonial rule), Nigeria (during the first republic through the civil war), and Uganda (under the rule of Idi Amin). Students will learn how certain memories or interpretations of events are narrated, fashioned, truncated, contested, forgotten, or silenced. Students also will learn how different historical actors participated in and experienced war.

Adeeb Khalid

In the junior year, majors must take this six-credit reading and discussion course taught each year by different members of the department faculty. The course is also required for the History minor. The general purpose of History 298 is to help students reach a more sophisticated understanding of the nature of history as a discipline and of the approaches and methods of historians. A major who is considering off-campus study in the junior year should consult with their adviser on when to take History 298.

Prerequisite: At least two six credit courses in History (excluding HIST 100 and Independents) at Carleton.

Required for History majors and minors

Annette Igra

Was the Progressive Era progressive? It was a period of social reform, labor activism, and woman suffrage, but also of Jim Crow, corporate capitalism, and U.S. imperialism. These are among the topics that can be explored in research papers on this contradictory era. We will begin by reading a brief text that surveys the major subject areas and relevant historiography of the period. The course will center on the writing of a 25-30 page based on primary research, which will be read and critiqued by members of the seminar. 

Victoria Morse

We will examine the development of regional states in fourteenth-century Italy.  We will explore the social, religious, political, environmental, and cultural aspects of a changing world between the medieval and the modern. The Black Death, a triad of literary greats (Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio), maps, humanism, political theory, water rights, saints, business, and travelers to and from Italy are some of the themes we will engage with as we try to understand how contemporaries conceptualized the political, spatial, and cultural boundaries of their world.  Students will conduct original research relating to the seminar topics culminating in a substantial research paper.

Laurence Cooper, Alan Rubenstein

Laurence Cooper, Alan Rubenstein

Stacy Beckwith

Judaism emphasizes transmitting memory from one generation to the next. How have pivotal events and experiences in Jewish history lived on in Jewish collective memory? How do they continue to speak through artistic/literary composition and museum/memorial design? How does Jewish collective memory compare with recorded Jewish history? We will study turning points in Jewish history including the Exodus from Egypt, Jewish expulsion from medieval Spain, the Holocaust, and Israeli independence, as Jews in different times and places have interpreted them with lasting influence. Research includes work with print, film, and other visual/ performative media.

Allison Murphy

Are human beings radically individual and atomic by nature, political animals, or something else? However we answer that question, what difference does it make for our understanding of the ways in which larger political communities come into existence and are maintained? In this course we will explore these and related questions while reading two of the most foundational works in political theory, Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’s Leviathan, as well as several contemporary pieces influenced by these thinkers.

Douglas B Marshall

If I can't rule out that I'm dreaming, does it follow that I don't know that I'm in Minnesota right now? Are there sound arguments establishing either the existence or non-existence of God? If I can divert a train from one track to another so that only one person loses her life instead of five, am I morally required to do so? In this course we will address questions concerning skepticism, God, and moral dilemmas, and explore some of their interrelations. We will pay close attention to issues of philosophical methodology along the way.

Daniel Groll

This course examines a variety of topics in medical ethics. We begin with a unit on pandemic ethics: Who should get ventilators when there aren't enough for everyone? Do medical providers have a duty to treat during a pandemic? We then turn to the question "When is someone dead?" and consider how different answers to that question affect arguments over organ procurement. Our third unit is on the place of race, and racial judgments, in medicine. Is there a place for racial judgments in medicine? Finally, we turn to the question of how to think about decision making in a clinical context: what values are at play? And how should we think about disagreements between clinicians and patients? What about disagreements between patient's past wishes and their current wishes?

Allison Murphy

Is there a key to a happy and successful human life? If so, how do you acquire it? Ancient philosophers thought the key was virtue and that your chances of obtaining it depend on the sort of life you lead. In this course we’ll examine what these philosophers meant by virtue and how they understood its implications for your everyday life. We will situate the ancient understanding of virtue in the context of larger questions of metaphysics (the nature of being and reality), psychology, and ethics, as they arise in foundational works from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.

Mihaela Czobor-Lupp

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.

Cross-listed with POSC 354

Cross-listed with POSC 354.00

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.

Cross-listed with POSC 354

Cross-listed with POSC 354.00

Mihaela Czobor-Lupp

Ideological fanaticism is on the rise today. Individuals prefer the incantation of slogans and clichés to autonomous thinking, moderation, and care for the diversity and complexity of circumstances and of human beings. The results are the inability to converse across differences and the tendency to ostracize and exclude others in the name of tribal and populist nationalism, as well as of racism. Hannah Arendt called totalitarianism this form of ideological hypnosis, which characterizes not only totalitarian political regimes, but can also colonize liberal-democracies. In this class we will read some of the works of Arendt to better understand the power of imagination to enhance critical and independent thinking and resist totalitarianism.

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.

Cross-listed with POSC 254

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.

Cross-listed with POSC 254

Cross-listed with POSC 354.00

Caleb S Hendrickson

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.

Michael McNally

Kristin Bloomer

Hinduism is the world's third-largest religion (or, as some prefer, “way of life”), with about 1.2 billion followers. It is also one of its oldest, with roots dating back at least 3500 years. “Hinduism,” however, is a loosely defined, even contested term, designating the wide variety of beliefs and practices of the majority of the people of South Asia. This survey course introduces students to this great variety, including social structures (such as the caste system), rituals and scriptures, mythologies and epics, philosophies, life practices, politics, poetry, sex, gender, Bollywood, and—lest we forget—some 330 million gods and goddesses.

Caleb S Hendrickson

Is religion an illusion we create to explain what we don’t understand? An elaborate means to justify the violence we commit? Modern thinkers have put religion under the microscope and held faith to account. This class considers a number of historically significant critiques of religion in modern western thought and how those critiques have shaped the modern theological and literary imagination. Is God dead? Or only hiding--in aesthetic experience, solidarity with the suffering, projects of liberation, or the depths of human love?  

Elizabeth F Dolfi

This course introduces students to Western Christianity by studying Christian movements, theologies, communities, eschatologies, and sensibilities through the lens of marriage, sexual revolutions, and counterrevolutions. Using a multidisciplinary approach, we will engage with scholarship from media theory, history, anthropology, sociology, and literary studies to consider the boundaries of “Christian traditions” and the transformation of religious and sexual cultures. While “sexuality” and “religion” are often imagined as oppositional social forces, this course will introduce students to a rich and complex range of practices, modes of embodiment, and territories of socio-cultural negotiation in which religion and sexuality are entangled, imagined, and co-constituted. 

Asuka Sango

This course will explore the intersection of religion, sex, and power, focusing on Asian religions. Key questions include: In what ways do religions normalize certain constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality while marking others deviant and unnatural? How do they teach us to perform (and sometimes to overcome) "masculinity" or "femininity"? We will probe these questions by studying both traditional and contemporary examples—such as abortion and reproductive politics in Buddhism, Confucian-influenced practice of foot-binding, Buddhist masculinities and male-love, sati (widow burning) and same-sex marriage in Hinduism, and the concept of a “third sex” in these traditions.

Palmar Alvarez-Blanco

Are you interested in talking about current news while practicing your oral skills in Spanish? Have you ever considered participating in a radio program? This course is an excellent way to keep in touch with your Spanish while collaborating with “El Super Barrio Latino” a radio program conducted by the Latinx community of Northfield. In each program we will explore international and domestic news and we will interview people in our community. Relying on international newspapers, students will discuss common topics and themes representing a wide array of regions. (Language of conversation is Spanish)

Prerequisite: Spanish 204 or equivalent

Palmar Alvarez-Blanco

Have you ever wondered if not capitalism, then what? In this course we will critically approach the historical background, the causes and, most importantly, the consequences of the civil and ecological crisis unleashed globally in 2008. Both in its origin and its consequences, this crisis went beyond the financial field, extending into the realms of politics, economics, culture, media and ecology. In light of this context, we will take a transdisciplinary approach to the study of capitalist culture and analyze the main changes that have developed from the cycle of social mobilizations surrounding the "indignados" movement or Spanish 15M in 2011. With a primary focus on Spain, we will concentrate on analyzing cultural artifacts that mark a paradigm shift from a capitalist culture towards the development of a culture of the commons that seeks to improve the living conditions of the social majority, defending both human rights and ecological justice.

Prerequisite: Spanish 205 or equivalent