ENROLL

Peter Balaam

"O City / Behold me! Incarnate me as I have incarnated you!" An investigation of the burgeoning metropolitan city where the young Walter Whitman became a poet in the 1850s. Combining historical inquiry into the lives of nineteenth-century citizens of Brooklyn and Manhattan with analysis of Whitman’s varied journalistic writings and utterly original poetry, we will reconstruct how Whitman found his muse and his distinctively modern subject in the geography, demographics, markets, politics, and erotics of New York.

Held for new first year students

Baird Jarman

This course considers the history of academic campuses in the United States, using Carleton as a detailed case study. We will examine campus design in relation to social history, treating campuses as complex educational districts reshaped over time to adapt to changing institutional priorities. Topics will include the founding of sectarian colleges, land-grant universities, and state normal schools; collegiate gothic and modernist design; the G.I. Bill® and other education policies; beaux-arts planning; sustainability initiatives; etc. Utilizing primary documents in the college archives, students will research Carleton’s planning history, culminating in a spring-term exhibition at the Perlman Teaching Museum.

Prerequisite: Two Art History courses, or instructor consent

Extra Time Required

Sandra Rousseau

Can everyone read graphic novels? Of course; however, their accessibility doesn't mean they are simple. In this course, students will learn to read graphic novels as cultural products generated by artists, places, and institutions. Coming from French-speaking countries in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, these texts argue for different (and sometimes contradictory) definitions of the genre; but also bring to the fore political and societal issues at stake in the francophone world. Using the tools of contemporary theory, students will draw connections between art and cultural representations. Conducted in English. Texts in translation.

Held for new first year students

George Vrtis

Held for new first year students

William North

What roles do images play in premodern societies? What are these images thought to be and to do? Why, at particular moments, have certain groups attempted to do away with images either completely or in specific settings? How do images create and threaten communities and how is the management of the visual integrated with and shaped by other values, structures, and objectives? This course will examine these and related questions by looking in depth at image-making and veneration and their opponents in a range of case studies (from the medieval west, Byzantium, Muslim lands, and Protestant Europe) and by examining theoretical discussions of images, vision, and cognition from the fourth through sixteenth centuries. This course is discussion intensive and each student will develop a research project on a topic of their own design.

Prerequisite: Previous history course or instructor consent

Neil Lutsky

This interdisciplinary course addresses one of the signal features of contemporary academic, professional, public, and personal life: a reliance on information and arguments involving numbers. We will examine how numbers are used and misused in verbal, statistical, and graphical form in discussions of world events, health, science, and social issues.

Held for new first year students

Lin Winton

This course will enhance students' quantitative skills and provide opportunities to apply those skills to authentic problems. Topics covered will vary depending on students in the class; possible topics include unit conversions, significant figures and estimation, exponents, logarithms, algebra, geometry, probability, and statistics. We will explore how these skills are relevant in contexts ranging from making personal finance decisions to understanding medical research reports.

Prerequisite: Interdisciplinary Studies 099, Undergraduate Bridge Experience

Instructor Permission, 1st five week