Courses

Long before today’s sensational headlines about so-called AI, science fiction writers and filmmakers were dreaming up countless thinking and feeling machines: rebel robots, emotional androids, cyborg machine-human hybrids, digital souls without bodies. Reading these fictions, this seminar explores how writing and visual culture imagine, interrogate, and critique scientific and technological change, and how the sciences of mind… Continue Reading – Science/Fiction: Ghosts in the Machine

This class uses the life of John Lewis as a way to study the Civil Rights Movement. Lewis, who died in 2020, was a 19-year-old seminary student when he became involved in the 1960 sit-ins in Nashville— one of the events that kicked off a decade of activism and progress toward racial equality. Lewis was a central participant in many other events, including the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the Mississippi Freedom Summer… Continue Reading – John Lewis and the Civil Rights Movement

This Honors Seminar will explore the Broadway musical as a reflection of its time. It will consider the productions of select works and how they relate to social events that were taking place when they opened.

The seminar will begin with a look at the roots of the musical in vaudeville, the variety show, and operetta at the end of the nineteenth century and its emergence as a genre in its own right in the first three… Continue Reading – The Broadway Musical as a Reflection of its Time

Events of the last two years appear to reinforce the argument, often attributed to Santayana, that “only the dead have seen the end of war.” They remind us that humanity faces few greater challenges than eliminating war, or at least limiting its frequency and severity. That task requires that we first understand what causes war. Philosophers and others have been searching for an answer to this question for over two millennia, but… Continue Reading – Why War?

From the native Americans, to colonists, to the immigrant communities of yesterday and today, the United States has never spoken just one language. This course offers an exploration of this dynamic tapestry, tracing the history and ever-evolving demographics of languages spoken across the nation. Though addressing topics such as language policy, bilingual education, language contact and revitalization, language attitudes, and… Continue Reading – The Multilingual United States

Digital stories are powerful instructional tools that allow students to communicate complex concepts and emotions through both linguistic and nonlinguistic modes. A digital story is a 3-6 minute multimodal video through which students can engage in critical reflection about their experiences, participate actively in the learning process, and give voice to their identities.

This course will lay a foundation for understanding… Continue Reading – Authoring Identities: Digital Stories of Critical Narratives

Christianity makes these claims:

1. The evil that men do (women too) has a hidden source. It’s all due to something called “sin.”
2. Sin is a problem we’re born with. We have this problem because of something our remote ancestors did.
3. If sin isn’t cured, something very bad happens to us after we die.
4. It has a cure. What cures it happened 2,000 years ago.
5. A man back then was God. Something was, and is,… Continue Reading – Philosophy Meets Christian Theology

One of the ways to think about what philosophers do is to imagine them tending to concepts we use routinely in thinking to ourselves and speaking with one another, but which remain controversial even after more “scientific” folks have had their say. There have been many such concepts in the history of philosophy, among them the concept of “person.”

Thinking about “persons” is, by the conventional standards of the history of… Continue Reading – Personal Identity in Philosophy and Pop Culture

“Why do bad things happen to good people, and good things to bad?” is as old and challenging a question as any in intellectual history, going back at least as far as the Old Testament’s Book of Job, otherwise known as the problem of evil—the perniciously difficult to satisfy “need to find order within those appearances so unbearable that they threaten reason’s ability to go on,” as Susan Neiman has described it. (1) It’s a very… Continue Reading – The Problem of Evil in Philosophy and Popular Culture

Everywhere we look, government officials and policy makers, non-governmental and intergovernmental organizations, philanthropists, business organizations, and social scientists are engaged in deliberate projects to change the behavior of groups and populations. As opposed to attempts to influence individuals to do something once, or initiatives that only incidentally have an impact on behavior, in this class we will examine… Continue Reading – How Government and Business Try to Change What We Do

Attic pottery is one of the largest dataset for the study of ancient Greece: it was used in homes, temples, and tombs, and its decoration gives us insights on many aspects of Greek culture, from religion to gender roles. However, most Greek vases displayed in modern museums do not come from Greece. These pots were, in fact, widely exported in the Mediterranean over the course of several centuries, and have been found in Italy,… Continue Reading – Traveling Images: Greek Vases Abroad

What stories do we tell about forests? What stories do forests tell?

Science and literature might seem to exist only in opposition, as when we find ourselves drawing lines between truth and fiction, or nature and culture. But intuitively, we likely know that it is something more like a creative tension. This class aims to consider that tension by considering how environmental science has given life to new modes of literary… Continue Reading – Writing Forests: Literature and Science

This seminar will examine the strategic ways in which leaders have sought to institutionalize their activism and public dissent. The class will utilize an interactive discussion format. On a macro-level, the focus will include founders of civil and human rights organizations and other social change pressure groups. On a micro-level, we will contrast leadership roles of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his co-founding of the… Continue Reading – Anti-Apartheid and Civil Rights Movements: King and Mandela, Lessons in Leadership

Buddhism is often represented as a religion that rejects society as a precondition of enlightenment. Its concern with law is usually regarded as limited to monastic rules with jurisdiction over only the community of monks and nuns. It is rarely acknowledged that Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism developed robust social, legal, and political theories that have exerted, and in many cases continue to exert, a profound influence… Continue Reading – Buddhism and Law

How do bilinguals handle having multiple languages in a single mind? Why do adults have difficulty achieving native-like competence in a foreign language? Why do some people learn foreign languages more easily than others? In this course, students will learn about a myriad of topics related to the bilingual mind. These include neural underpinnings of bilingual processing, biological, linguistic and cognitive effects on adults’… Continue Reading – One Mind. Two Languages.

In the Iliad, perhaps the greatest war story ever told, Homer writes: “How can I picture it all? It would take a god to tell the tale.” War is profoundly difficult to convey. It reconfigures nations, separates families, destroys landscapes, and kills in terrifying numbers. These extreme conditions pose a significant challenge to men and women’s ability to communicate—whether soldier, civilian, nurse, or grieving parent. And yet,… Continue Reading – Stories of War—From Diaries and Letters to Video Games and Films

This course considers how we remember and make sense of “difficult pasts”– historical events where there is little consensus about the meaning of the events, or pride in the events themselves. Difficult pasts might include the legacy of slavery in the US, movements for White/Christian supremacy that were pervasive in the 1930s, and even the Vietnam War or the AIDS crisis. There have been battles about whether and how to remember… Continue Reading – Remembering “Difficult Pasts”: Memory, Meaning, and Politics (Fall 24)

Prereq: FSH placement, SPA 204, or permission of the instructor

Cuerpos ensangrentados, almas en pena: afectos, política y cultura en el Siglo de Oro español
(Bloodied bodies, souls in pain: affects, politics and culture in the Spanish Golden Age)

The biological construct of pureza de sangre has unequivocally conditioned all genres within early- modern Spanish literature. However, the literature of… Continue Reading – Cuerpos ensangrentados, almas en pena: afectos, política y cultura en el Siglo de Oro español

The European Middle Ages are the origin of many important inventions, from representative government to universities to romantic love -- even the first robots date from this period! In this class, we’ll learn about the political, social, and religious world of the late Middle Ages, including the perils of the Black Death, journeys to purgatory, the Knights Templar, monsters, gothic cathedrals, troubadour music, and more. We will… Continue Reading – Age of the Black Death

This seminar will focus on the role of religion in 21st-century right-wing movements in Europe and the Americas. For each case study, we will spend one week learning the basic history and contours of the case and one week reading and discussing material that analyzes and attempts to explain the case. Categories and explanatory models covered in these more analytical weeks will include religious nationalism, secularism and laicism… Continue Reading – Religion & 21st-Century Right Wing Movements

Unruly Bodies of Global Cinema offers a close examination of the cinematic discourses surrounding those bodies that are considered abnormal, queer, weird, and monstrous throughout diverse global contexts with specific attention to those works of global cinema.

In this multilateral search for the intersection of theories of "weird" with the spaces of the other, we will search for the queer, the weird, the outsider, the… Continue Reading – Unruly Bodies in Literature and Media

This course is an introduction to select aspects of the social, cultural, intellectual and political history of the Papacy from the early modern period to the present. Put briefly, the seminar aims to analyze the human (as opposed to theological or strictly ecclesiastical) element in the Papacy. As such, the course through a case-study approach generally addresses trends in the social background of Popes over the past five… Continue Reading – The Popes and the City of Rome, 1500-Present

“A landmark report from the United Nations’ [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, its Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 oC, dated October 8, 2018,] paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought,” Coral Davenport writes, in the December 7, 2018 edition of The New York Times, according to which “avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a… Continue Reading – The Climate Crisis in Philosophy and Popular Culture - Sp 25

Prereq: FSH placement, SPA 204, or permission of the instructor

This seminar is open to students with a high proficiency in Spanish that wish to deepen their conversational and writing skills in the language. Readings of both canonical and non-canonical texts will be provided in class. The course is open to students that love Spanish literature but may not have the opportunity to delve in the language… Continue Reading – Don Quijote: una crónica de absurdos, lectores y el placer de leer

Science communication is an integral part of scientists’ everyday lives.  From writing papers and proposals, to giving talks, creating lectures, or composing tweets, it is imperative for scientists to learn how to effectively communicate to a wide range of audiences in order to be successful.  Science communication has become a field within the scientific community in recent years and it generally refers to the public… Continue Reading – Talk Science to Me

GRAPHIC MEMOIR—WHAT’S ON ALISON BECHDEL’S MIND

The seminar will examine the works of Alison Bechdel—her comic strips and her three graphic memoirs. The seminar will begin by learning how to read graphic materials, the better to appreciate and analyze Bechdel’s work. The facet of Bechdel’s graphic memoirs that we will focus on will be the literary, psychoanalyOc and spiritual works that she engages on her life… Continue Reading – Graphic Memoir —What's on Alison Bechdel's Mind

The particular power of the word, and by extension literature, in forming and transforming people’s worldview has been widely used by governments focused on ideology to describe to those whom they control the kinds of social and political character they desire for their society. This course explores, through primary and occasional secondary texts, the literature created during three periods of social… Continue Reading – Literature Under Tyranny

In this course, we will read, think, and talk about health, science, and medicine, and we will explore what happens when we face the messiness of language, history, economics, and politics. Throughout the course, we will examine fiction, nonfiction, narrative, and metaphor. The course has four sections. We begin by reading and writing about pandemics and metaphors, juxtaposing the film Contagion and the more literary play and… Continue Reading – Introduction to Health, Medicine, and Literature