ENROLL

Jay Beck

Sophomore Priority. Extra Time required for screenings

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: CAMS 110.WL0 (Synonym 61966)

Andrew Rosendorf

TV is a very specific, time-driven medium. Using examples from scripts and DVDs, students will learn how to write for an existing TV show, keeping in mind character consistency, pacing, tone, and compelling storylines. Students will also get a taste of what it's like to be part of a writing staff as the class itself creates an episode from scratch. Topics such as creating the TV pilot, marketing, agents, managers, and more will be discussed. Finally, general storytelling tools such as creating better dialogue, developing fully-rounded characters, making scene work more exciting, etc., will also be addressed.

Prerequisite: Cinema and Media Studies 110 or 111 or instructor permission

Winter 2022: CAMS 278 will be offered as a hybrid course, with fewer than 50% of classes held over Zoom and the majority of classes in-person.

Ethan Struby

The seminar will explore contemporary approaches to the analysis of the macroeconomy and financial markets. Topics include tests of canonical, micro-founded models of household, investor, and firm behavior; the analysis of business cycles and the dynamic response of the macroeconomy to exogenous shocks; proximate and fundamental theories of long-run growth across countries; and the design and effects of stabilization policies. Students will also be exposed to empirical methods suited for the causal analysis of cross-sectional, time series, and panel data.

Prerequisite: Economics 329, 330 and 331 or instructor consent

Anita Chikkatur

Sophomore Priority

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: EDUC 110.WL0 (Synonym 62410)

Peter Balaam

This course is designed to demystify the practice of academic writing and to introduce students to the skills they’ll need to write effectively in a variety of academic disciplines and contexts. Students will learn how to respond to other authors’ claims, frame clear arguments of their own, structure essays to develop a clear logical flow, integrate outside sources into their writing, and improve their writing through revision. All sections will include a variety of readings, multiple writing assignments, and substantial feedback from the course instructor.

Does not fulfill curricular exploration

Jessica Leiman

This course explores the history and form of the British novel, tracing its development from a strange, sensational experiment in the eighteenth century to a dominant literary genre today. Among the questions that we will consider: What is a novel? What makes it such a popular form of entertainment? How does the novel participate in ongoing conversations about family, sex, class, race, and nation? How did a genre once considered a source of moral corruption become a legitimate literary form? Authors include: Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Bram Stoker, Virginia Woolf, and Jackie Kay.

George Shuffelton

This class will focus on three of the most popular and closely connected modes of narrative enjoyed by medieval audiences: the epic, the romance, and the saint's life. Readings, drawn primarily from the English and French traditions, will include Beowulf, The Song of Roland, the Arthurian romances of Chretien de Troyes, and legends of St. Alexis and St. Margaret. We will consider how each narrative mode influenced the other, as we encounter warriors and lovers who suffer like saints, and saints who triumph like warriors and lovers. Readings will be in translation or highly accessible modernizations.

Pierre Hecker

An exploration of drama approached as literature and in performance. New digital resources enable us to take world-class productions from the National Theatre and elsewhere as our texts. Drawing examples both globally and across time, we will consider plays and recent productions in their historical and cultural contexts. Students will develop critical vocabularies, debate interpretations, and hone their interpretive and rhetorical skills in writing reviews and essays.

Constance Walker

“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought”—Audre Lorde.  In this course we will explore how poets use form, tone, sound, imagery, rhythm, and subject matter to create works of astonishing imagination, beauty, and power. In discussions, Moodle posts, and essay assignments we’ll analyze individual works by poets from Sappho to Amanda Gorman (and beyond); there will also be daily recitations of poems, since the musicality is so intrinsic to the meaning.

Gregory Hewett

You will work in several genres and forms, among them: traditional and experimental poetry, prose fiction, and creative nonfiction. In your writing you will explore the relationship between the self, the imagination, the word, and the world. In this practitioner’s guide to the creative writing process, we will examine writings from past and current authors, and your writings will be critiqued in a workshop setting and revised throughout the term. 

Sophomore Priority

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: ENGL 160.WL0 (Synonym 62550)

George Shuffelton

When medieval writers imagined worlds beyond their own, what did they see?  This course will examine depictions of the afterlife, the East, and magical realms of the imagination. We will read romances, saints' lives, and a masterpiece of pseudo-travel literature that influenced both Shakespeare and Columbus, alongside contemporary theories of postcolonialism, gender and race. We will visit the lands of the dead and the undead, and compare gruesome punishments and heavenly rewards. We will encounter dog-headed men, Amazons, cannibals, armies devoured by hippopotami, and roasted geese that fly onto waiting dinner tables. Be prepared. Readings in Middle English and in modern translations.

Peter Balaam

Attempts to discern the nineteenth-century Zeitgeist come down, Emerson says, to a "practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live?" This interdisciplinary course will investigate the works of the American Transcendentalist movement in its restless discontent with the conventional, its eclectic search for better ways of thinking and living. We will engage major works of Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Whitman alongside documents of the scientific, religious, and political changes that shaped their era and provoked their responses.

Susan Jaret McKinstry

Two exceptional groups of artists changed aesthetic and cultural history through their writings, art, politics, and lives. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood began in 1847 when art students united to create “direct and serious and heartfelt” work; the Bloomsbury group began with Cambridge friends sharing their insistence on aesthetic lives. Critics said the PRB “extolled fleshliness as the supreme end of poetic and pictorial art,” and the Bloomsbury Group “painted in circles, lived in squares and loved in triangles.” We will study Dante Rossetti, Holman Hunt, John Millais, William Morris, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, Vanessa and Clive Bell.

Nancy Cho

Michael Kowalewski

Extra Time required.

Arnab Chakladar

Arnab Chakladar

We are living in perhaps the height of what might be called the "foodie era" in the U.S. The cooking and presentation of food dominates Instagram and is one of the key draws of YouTube and various television and streaming networks; shows about chefs and food culture are likewise very popular. Yet a now less glamorous form with a much longer history persists: food writing. In this course we will track some important genres of food writing over the last 100 years or so. We will examine how not just food but cultural discourses about food and the world it circulates in are consumed and produced. We will read recipes and reviews; blogs and extracts from cookbooks, memoirs and biographies; texts on food history and policy; academic and popular feature writing. Simultaneously we will also produce food writing of our own in a number of genres. 

Susan Jaret McKinstry

This journalism course explores the process of moving from event to news story. Students will study and write different forms of journalism (including news, reviews, features, interviews, investigative pieces, and images), critique one another’s writing, and revise their pieces for a final portfolio of professional work.

Gregory Smith

Prerequisite: One prior 6-credit English course

Jessica Leiman

This course traces the development of a sensational, morally dubious genre that emerged in the eighteenth-century: the novel. We will read some of the most entertaining, best-selling novels written during the first hundred years of the form, paying particular attention to the novel’s concern with courtship and marriage, writing and reading, the real and the fantastic. Among the questions we will ask: What is a novel? What distinguished the early novel from autobiography, history, travel narrative, and pornography? How did this genre come to be associated with women? How did early novelists respond to eighteenth-century debates about the dangers of reading fiction? Authors include Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen.

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

Constance Walker

Mass protests, police brutality, reactionary politicians, imprisoned journalists, widespread unemployment, and disease were all features of the Romantic era in Britain as well as our own time. We will explore how its writers brilliantly advocate for empathy, liberty, and social justice in the midst of violence and upheaval. Readings will include works by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Percy and Mary Shelley, and their contemporaries.

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

William North

In this course we will explore a variety of distinct but interconnected worlds that existed between ca.300 and ca.1050. We will interrogate primary sources, especially written and visual materials, as they bear witness to people forming and transforming political, social, religious, and cultural values, ideas and structures. We will work to understand how communities adapt to new conditions and challenges while maintaining links with and repurposing the lifeways, ideas, and material cultures of the past. We will watch as new and different groups and institutions come to power, and how the existing peoples and structures respond and change. Projects in this course will build capacity to interpret difficult primary documents, formulate research questions, and build arguments that combine rigor and humane sympathy.

Susannah Ottaway

The Enlightenment: praised for its role in promoting human rights, condemned for its role in underwriting colonialism; lauded for its cosmopolitanism, despised for its Eurocentrism... how should we understand the cultural and intellectual history of the Enlightenment, and what are its legacies? This course starts by examining essential Enlightenment texts by philosophes such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, and then the second half of the term focuses on unpacking the Enlightenment's entanglements with modern ideas around topics such as religion, race, sex, gender, colonialism etc.

Amna Khalid

At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947 India and Pakistan, two new nation states emerged from the shadow of British colonialism. This course focuses on the political trajectories of these two rival siblings and looks at the ways in which both states use the other to forge antagonistic and belligerent nations. While this is a survey course it is not a comprehensive overview of the history of the two countries. Instead it covers some of the more significant moments of rupture and violence in the political history of the two states. The first two-thirds of the course offers a top-down, macro overview of these events and processes whereas the last third examines the ways in which people experienced these developments. We use the lens of gender to see how the physical body, especially the body of the woman, is central to the process of nation building. We will consider how women’s bodies become sites of contestation and how they are disciplined and policed by the postcolonial state(s).

George Vrtis

To many Americans, wild lands are among the nation’s most treasured places. Yellowstone, Yosemite, Mount Rainier, Joshua Tree, Grand Canyon – the names alone stir the heart, the mind, and the imagination. But where do those thoughts and feelings come from, and how have they both reflected and shaped American culture, society, and nature over the last three centuries? These are the central issues and questions that we will pursue in this seminar and in its companion course, ENTS 307 Wilderness Field Studies: Grand Canyon (which includes an Off-Campus Studies program at Grand Canyon National Park).

Prerequisite: Acceptance in Wilderness Studies at the Grand Canyon OCS program. History 205 is recommended but not required.

Spring Break OCS Program Course. ENTS 307 required for Spring Term registration.

Victoria Morse

This course is designed to support majors in developing advanced skills in historical research and writing. Through a combination of class discussion, small group work, and one-on-one interactions with the professor, majors learn the process of constructing sophisticated, well-documented, and well-written historical arguments within the context of an extended project of their own design. They also learn and practice strategies for engaging critically with contemporary scholarship and effective techniques of peer review and the oral presentation of research. Concurrent enrollment in History 400 required. By permission of the instructor only.

HIST 400 required.

Seth Peabody

This class introduces students to the various theoretical frameworks and the many approaches scholars can use when analyzing a text (whether this text is a film, an image, a literary piece or a performance). What do words like ‘structuralism,’ ‘ecocriticism,’ 'cultural studies,' and ‘postcolonial studies’ refer to? Most importantly, how do they help us understand the world around us? This class will be organized around interdisciplinary theoretical readings and exercises in cultural analysis.

Prerequisite: At least one 200- or 300-level course in Literary/Artistic Analysis (in any language) or instructor permission

Sarah N Lahasky

A survey of American music with particular attention to the interaction of the folk, popular, and classical realms. No musical experience required.

Justin London

An investigation into the nature of musical sounds and the way they are combined to form rhythms, melodies, harmonies, and form. Topics include the nature of musical pitch, the structure of musical scales and their influence on melody, chords and their interval content, the complexity of rhythmic patterns, and chromatic harmony and modulation. Student work includes building a musical instrument, programming a drum machine, writing computer code to create harmonies and timbres, and an extended music analysis project.

Prerequisite: Music 101, or permission of the instructor as assessed by a diagnostic exam administered at the start of the term

Brooke Okazaki

This class expands students’ understanding of Western music by concentrating on the social ecosystem of performers, musicians, and consumer-listeners of both past and present. Students will explore broad themes in music history, such as concepts of sound, materiality, religion, politics, embodiment, and narrative. Through a variety of assignments including listening analyses, creative responses, and a final project, students will develop critical thinking, research, and communication skills to help them be successful in their various musical endeavors.

Prerequisite: Ability to read Western Music Notation recommended

Brooke Okazaki

Over the decades, video game music has evolved from simple beeps and boops into a genre that has garnered millions of fans worldwide. This course traces the history of video game music aesthetics and technology. We will consider how it relates to a variety of musical traditions and engages with broader social issues. We will learn to listen for loops, styles, structures, and function in games via direct engagement with primary sources: the games themselves. The course culminates in the practical application of knowledge via a creative project. 

Prerequisite: Music 110 and/or Music 204

Eddie E O'Byrn

What does it mean to be heroic? Are heroes in the Western world consistent across contexts and vantage points? In this introduction to philosophy, we explore some lauded philosophical discussions on heroism, ethical complications, and shifts in the valuation of heroic and ethical acts. Students will read contemporary and historical philosophical texts by figures such as Thomas Carlyle, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others. Students will explore illustrations of heroism by the primary authors and we will explore counter examples that challenge these views. Finally, students are invited to explore the meaning of heroism today utilizing the course's philosophical resources.

Jason Decker

Anna Moltchanova

Douglas B Marshall

An introduction to the philosophy of mathematics focusing on the history and development of mathematical proofs. The course is organized around three central questions: i. What is the relationship between a mathematical proof and our knowledge of the theorem that it proves? ii. Do some mathematical proofs go beyond establishing the truth of their theorems and actually explain why the theorems are true? iii. How has our mathematical knowledge grown throughout history? We will first address these questions by reading and discussing Imre Lakatos's book Proofs and Refutations. We will continue with readings drawn from classic and contemporary sources in the history and philosophy of mathematics. This course has no formal prerequisites, though it does presuppose a willingness to read, assess, and write about mathematical proofs.  

Daniel Groll

The idea that various things are socially constructed is ubiquitous. But what exactly does it mean for something to be socially constructed? And what things are socially constructed? Race? Gender? Quarks? Mental Illness? Everything? We will read, among others, Sally Haslanger (Resisting Reality), Ian Hacking (The Social Construction of What?), Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking) and Ásta (Categories We Live By).

Prerequisite: One previous course in Philosophy

Juan Diego Prieto

Sophomore Priority

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: POSC 120.WL0 (Synonym 62497)

Christina Farhart

Laurence Cooper

Greg Marfleet

Prerequisite: Statistics 120, 230, 250, (formerly Mathematics 215, 245, 275), AP Statistics (score of 4 or 5) or Psychology 200/201 or Sociology/Anthropology 239

Summer Forester

In the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. launched the Global War on Terror to purportedly find, stop,and defeat every terrorist group with a global reach. Without question, the Global War on Terror has radically shaped everything from U.S. foreign policies and domestic institutions to civil liberties and pop culture. In this course, we will examine the events of 9/11 and then critically assess the immediate and long-term ramifications of the endless Global War on Terror on different states and communities around the world. While we will certainly spend time interrogating U.S. policies from the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, we will also examine reactions to those policies across both the global north and the global south.

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.

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.

Sonja Anderson

Who was Jesus? What’s in the Bible? How did Christianity begin? This course is an introduction to the oldest Christian documents we have (27 books in the New Testament) as well as several ancient texts that did not become part of the Bible. We will study this literature critically and historically by situating it within its ancient Jewish, Greco-Roman context, but we will also learn about the different ways modern readers have interpreted it. As we work our way through the texts, we will pay special attention to three topics of enduring debate and political significance in the history of biblical interpretation: (1) suffering, liberation, and empire; (2) antisemitism, and (3) gender, sexuality, and marriage.

Chumie Juni

Mind and body are often considered separate but not equal; the mind gives commands to the body and the body complies. Exploring the ways the three religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam think about the body will deepen our understanding of the mind-body relationship. We will ask questions such as: How does the body direct the mind? How do religious practices discipline the body and the mind, and how do habits of body and mind change the forms and meanings of these practices? Gender, sexuality, sensuality, and bodily function will be major axes of analysis.

Chumie Juni

How does gender shape the Jewish tradition, and how have Jewish historical moments, texts, and practices shaped Jewish notions of gender? Taking Judaism as a test case, this course will explore the relationship between historical circumstance, positionality, and the religious imaginary. We will examine the ways that Jewish gender and theology inform each other. We will see how gender was at play in Jewish negotiations of economic and social class, racial and ethnic status, even citizenship. Following the threads of practice and narrative, we will think about how intersectional gender has shaped the stories Jews tell, and the stories that are told about them.

Caleb S Hendrickson

This class examines the ethical principles that often guide decision-making in health care. It focuses on principles espoused by many religious and humanistic traditions, within the context of a modern, pluralistic society. Using plentiful case studies, we consider a number of issues in bioethics, including assisted suicide; maternal-fetal relations; artificial reproduction, including human cloning; the use of human subjects in research; health care justice and reform; triage and allocation of sparse medical resources; and public health issues surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sonja Anderson

When will the world end, and how? What’s wrong with the world—morally, politically, naturally—such that people have seen its destruction as necessary or inevitable? Are visions of “The End” a form of sophisticated resistance literature, aimed at oppressive systems of power? Or are they evidence of a disturbed mind disconnected from reality? This seminar takes a deep dive into the contours of apocalyptic thought, which in its most basic form is about unmasking the deceptions of the given world by revealing the secret workings of the universe. We will begin with the earliest apocalypses, found in ancient Jewish and Christian texts, and move into modern religious and “secular” visions of cosmic collapse. Our approach will be historical and comparative, and we will explore topics ranging from doomsday cults to climate catastrophe, visions of heaven to tours of hell, malevolent angels to meddling UFOs, all the while asking how the apocalyptic imagination creates, as one thinker put it, “another world to live in.”

Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg

Prerequisite: The department strongly recommends that Sociology/Anthropology 110 or 111 be taken prior to enrolling in courses numbered 200 or above

Annette Nierobisz

Since the 1980s, the United States criminal justice system has embarked on a social experiment we now call, “mass incarceration.” The outcome – unprecedented rates of imprisonment, particularly in BIPOC communities – has had devastating consequences for individuals, families, neighborhoods, and American society. This course explores the causes and consequences of mass incarceration. Potential topics include: race, class, gender, and age in the prison system; the impacts of incarceration on children and intimate partners who get left behind; punishment strategies such as solitary confinement and the death penalty; the lucrative business of the prison industrial complex; and the promise of prison abolition.

Prerequisite: Prerequisites: The department strongly recommends that Sociology/Anthropology 110 or 111 be taken prior to enrolling in courses numbered 200 or above.

Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg

Prerequisite: Socilogy/Anthropology 110 or 111, and at least one 200- or 300-level SOAN course, or permission of instructor.

Humberto Huergo

Muslims conquered Spain in 711 and lived in the country roughly until 1614. This course will examine the Islamic origins of Spain from a variety of disciplines, including literature, religion, history, and art history. Topics covered include:Hispano-Arabic literature, the fall of Granada, the repression of Moriscos under Philip II, aljamiado literature (literature written in Spanish with Arabic characters), the expulsion of Moriscos, and the diaspora in Tunisia. We will also devote two weeks to the study of the representation of Turks, Muslims, and Moriscos in Cervantes’ plays and novels, including several chapters of his famous Don Quixote. All texts are in Spanish, including Arab sources by Ibn Hazm, Wallada, Muhya, and other Hispano-Arabic and Morisco writers.  

Prerequisite: Spanish 205 or above