ENROLL

Kathleen M Ryor

Pictures of the floating world, or ukiyoe, were an integral part of popular culture in Japan and functioned as illustrations, advertisements, and souvenirs. This course will examine the development of both style and subject matter in Japanese prints within the socio-economic context of the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. Emphasis will be placed on the prominent position of women and the nature of gendered activity in these prints.

Ross K Elfline

Prerequisite: Any one term of art history

Matt S Rand

The myths surrounding human reproduction and sexuality may outweigh our collective knowledge and understanding. This course will review the basic biology of all aspects of reproduction--from genes to behavior--in an attempt to better understand one of the more basic and important processes in nature. Topics will vary widely and will be generated in part by student interest. A sample of topics might include: hormones, PMS, fertilization, pregnancy, arousal, attraction, the evolution of the orgasm, and the biology of sexuality.

Sophomore Priority

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: BIOL 101.WL0 (Synonym 65888)

Carol Donelan

After Americans grasped the enormity of the Depression and World War II, the glossy fantasies of 1930s cinema seemed hollow indeed. During the 1940s, the movies, our true national pastime, took a nosedive into pessimism. The result? A collection of exceptional films populated with tough guys and dangerous women lurking in the shadows of nasty urban landscapes. This course focuses on classic American noir as well as neo-noir from a variety of perspectives, including mode and genre, visual style and narrative structure, postwar culture and politics, and race, gender, and sexuality. Requirements include two screenings per week and several short papers.

Extra Time required. Evening Screenings.

Adriana Estill

This course engages the borderlands as space (the geographic area that straddles nations) and idea (liminal spaces, identities, communities). We examine texts from writers like Anzaldúa, Butler, Cervantes, Dick, Eugenides, Haraway, and Muñoz first to understand how borders act to constrain our imagi(nation) and then to explore how and to what degree the borderlands offer hybrid identities, queer affects, and speculative world-building. We will engage the excess of the borderlands through a broad chronological and generic range of U.S. literary and visual texts. Come prepared to question what is "American", what is race, what is human.

Jessica L 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

Candace I 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.

William L North

Acknowledged by contemporaries as one of the leading intellects of her time, Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364-ca. 1431) became an author of unusual literary range, personal resilience, and perceptiveness in a time of ongoing warfare, civil strife, and intellectual ferment. In addition to composing romances, poetry, quasi-autobiographical works, royal biography, and political theory, she became an articulate critic of the patriarchy and misogyny of her world, contemporary patterns and cultures of violence, and a critical voice in defense of female capability. Using Christine's writings together with other contemporary voices, we will examine how contemporaries confronted fundamental questions of identity, status, violence, ethics, and love in domestic and public spheres in late medieval France. 

Elizabeth H Trudeau

What is gender and how do we make sense of it? Ideas about gender have a powerful influence on our lives and society but understanding this influence can be complex. From the recent women’s march and #MeToo movement to debates about transgender rights, our social landscape is full of pressing questions related to gender. Why does gender inequality persist? How is gender identification determined? Is it possible to eliminate gender categorization or is it inevitable? This course will offer students an overview of sociological theories that explain how societies think about and are built on gender and gender differences. It will cover variations in how individuals experience and identify based on embodied and lived differences as well as the social forces that shape how society defines gender categories and gendered behavior.

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

Meera Sehgal

India is a region of immense diversity where more than one billion people live. We will explore social structures in India--through a focus on key areas of everyday life such as family, religion, economy, systems of stratification and social movements. Close attention will be given to religious nationalism, globalization and militarism as dominant trends affecting contemporary India. We will consider: How has India been represented in the Western imagination and why do such representations matter? What are the forces of modernity and tradition in India? What are the similarities and differences in systems of stratification in India and the United States?

Requires participation in OCS India Program