ENROLL

Zaki Haidar

In this course we will study representations of the environment in modern Arab culture, across the media of film and literature. In our approach to Egyptian culture we will study depictions of the exemplary space of the cityscape and the village, and their entanglement with myths of nation. In the film and fiction of North Africa and the Persian Gulf we will explore representations of the desert, and a literary and visual approach that defies the typical casting of arid spaces as barren. We will explore how works from Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon envision the relationship of their societies to the mountain and sea. Through our close study of Arab fictions we will think about how environments have shaped those societies, and how members of those societies have made claims of their own about and upon their surroundings. In translation, no Arabic required. All course readings will be in English. 

In translation

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

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.

Laurence Cooper, Alan Rubenstein

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.”

Hector Melo Ruiz

This course studies the cultural representation of labor in Latin America. It focuses on the racial division of labor over the colonial, industrial, and neoliberal periods. We will analyze a wide range of visual and literary representations of Native, Black and women workers under the Encomienda labor system; peonages during the period of independence and specific national contexts (i.e. rubber tapper); industrial workers throughout the twentieth century (blue-collar workers); as well as the role of unemployment and precarized labor within the context of globalization.

Prerequisite: Spanish 205 or above