Classes

    Vision and Justice: The Art of Race and American Citizenship (Gen Ed 1022)

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2024

    How does culture—from images of racial violence to Confederate monuments—determine who counts and who belongs in the United States?

     

    Aesthetics & Culture icon with textHistories, Societies, Individuals icon with text

    Sarah Lewis

    How has visual representation—from videos and photographs to sculptures and memorials—both limited and liberated our definition of American citizenship and belonging? Art is often considered a respite from life or a reflection of the times, but this class examines how art actually has created the times in which we live.... Read more about Vision and Justice: The Art of Race and American Citizenship (Gen Ed 1022)

    Permanent Impermanence: Why Buddhists Build Monuments (Gen Ed 1083)

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2024

    Why do Buddhists build monuments despite the core teaching of ephemerality, and what can we learn from this paradox about our own conception of time and space?

     

    Aesthetics & Culture icon with text

    Jinah Kim and Eugene Wang

    Banner of Buddhism images

    Everything changes. This is, in its simplest and most fundamental formulation, one of the essential teachings of Buddhism. Buddhist communities throughout history have preached, practiced, and written about the ephemerality and illusoriness of our everyday lives and experiences.... Read more about Permanent Impermanence: Why Buddhists Build Monuments (Gen Ed 1083)

    East Asian Cinema (Gen Ed 1049)

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2023

    How can we critically analyze and creatively respond to films, meanwhile letting cinema open up a window to other cultures and histories while serving as a mirror for ourselves and our own times?

     

    Aesthetics & Culture icon with text

    Jie Li

    This course introduces major works, genres, and waves of East Asian cinema from the silent era to the present, including films from Mainland China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. We will discuss issues ranging from formal aesthetics to historical representation, from local film industries to transnational audience reception.... Read more about East Asian Cinema (Gen Ed 1049)

    The Art and Politics of Propaganda (Gen Ed 1012)

    Semester: 

    Fall

    Offered: 

    2022


    Why did Nazi sights, sounds, and propaganda prove to be so captivating and compelling for German audiences of a modern nation and how do we explain the continuing impact of Nazi images and fantasies to this very day, which is to ask, what do “they” have to do with “us”?  

    Aesthetics & Culture icon with text

    Eric Rentschler

    As thinking beings we consider the limits of human potential and wonder what is the worst. The Nazis obsess us because they were masters of extremity who brought to the world unprecedented violence, destruction, and murder. They were also masters of propaganda who engineered sophisticated techniques of mass manipulation; in this endeavor cinema and modern media assumed a seminal role.... Read more about The Art and Politics of Propaganda (Gen Ed 1012)

    Classical Mythology: Myth in Antiquity and Today (Gen Ed 1110)

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2024

    Why do some stories get told over and over for thousands of years, and how do those ancient tales still shape (and get shaped by) us today?

     

    Aesthetics & Culture icon with text

    Rachel Love

    The myths of ancient Greece and Rome embody both our worst nightmares and our most fabulous fantasies. Heroism, happy endings, and everlasting love blend with disturbing themes of parricide, cannibalism, incest, misogyny, and unthinkable violence.  The resulting stories have fascinated generations of artists, writers, and thinkers, and this course will serve as an introduction to this distant but strangely familiar world. We will move from the very first works of Greek literature through the classic Greek tragedies and the Roman tales in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.... Read more about Classical Mythology: Myth in Antiquity and Today (Gen Ed 1110)

    Video Commune (Gen Ed 1072)

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2023

    From gifs and memes to confessions and controversies, what can the riotous festival of contemporary expression in video teach us about living together?

     

    Aesthetics & Culture icon with text

    Karthik Pandian

    In this hybrid lecture/production course, students will tune into the aesthetic, social, and political frequencies of video through individual and collaborative study, creation, and performance.... Read more about Video Commune (Gen Ed 1072)

    Creativity (Gen Ed 1067)

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2023

    Where does creativity come from, how does it work, and how can we deepen its role in our own lives?

     

    Aesthetics & Culture icon with text

    David Atherton

    Geniuses are said to possess it. Self-help books offer to teach it. Both the arts and the sciences celebrate it. It sits at the heart of some of our oldest myths and is the subject of up-to-the-minute neuroscientific research. Some say it comes in momentary flashes; others call it a way of life. Some identify it as the key to deep fulfillment; others claim that it entails intense suffering. Many agree that it sets us apart as a species—but does it? What is creativity?... Read more about Creativity (Gen Ed 1067)

    Poetry Without Borders (Gen Ed 1057)

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2024

    Why do poems and poets today boldly cross the borders of language, geography, form, and how are those border-crossings charged politically, ethically, and aesthetically?

     

    Aesthetics & Culture icon with text

    Stephanie Sandler

    A stem with berries attached and a curved hand casting a shadow, both resting on a piece of wood.

    Without borders, can there be poetry? The border of white paper surrounds printed poems; national boundaries keep cultural and linguistic traditions distinct; and aesthetic practice and its conventions create genres and demarcate poetry from music or dance or film. How poetry requires but also perversely challenges these limits will be the subject of this course.... Read more about Poetry Without Borders (Gen Ed 1057)

    Satire (Gen Ed 1010)

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2024

    Is satire a dying art, and do we need it?

     

    Aesthetics & Culture icon with text

    Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja

    A course on satire, its power and limitations, from Classical Rome, through medieval Italy, to Elizabethan theatre and 19th-20th century American cartoonists. Serving as both a critique of social norms and the oppression of minorities (anti-women, anti-Jews, etc.), satire has been one of the most practiced and effective languages in Western culture.... Read more about Satire (Gen Ed 1010)

    Mental Health and Mental Illness through Literature and the Arts (Gen Ed 1144)

    Semester: 

    Fall

    Offered: 

    2022

    How have mental illness and mental health been understood across time and space, and how have literature and the arts both perpetuated and undermined stigmas against individuals with mental illness?

     

    Aesthetics & Culture icon with text

    Karen Thornber

    Mental health experts believe that globally, more than 1 billion people have a mental illness.  And yet the biases and misperceptions surrounding mental illness, not to mention the dehumanization and abuse in many communities of individuals with a mental illness, remains acute.  This course uses literature and the arts to help students learn about more about some of the prevalent biases/misperceptions/myths/stigmas against individuals with mental illness and how these biases can be (or in the past have been) ameliorated.... Read more about Mental Health and Mental Illness through Literature and the Arts (Gen Ed 1144)

    Tragedy Today (Gen Ed 1168)

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2024

    How can ancient Greek tragedy help us to address some of today’s most pressing sociopolitical problems?

     

    Aesthetics & Culture icon with text

    Naomi Weiss

    “It’s a sad tale, it’s a tragedy / It’s a sad song…. We’re gonna sing it anyway.” So sings Hermes at the start of Hadestown, the hit broadway show that deals with capitalism, demagoguery, borders, and climate change. Based on the ancient artform of tragedy, this musical provokes its audiences to reflect on very modern concerns; it also, as the show’s creator Anaïs Mitchell says, “lets us cry.”

    ... Read more about Tragedy Today (Gen Ed 1168)

    Superheroes and Power (Gen Ed 1165)

    Semester: 

    Fall

    Offered: 

    2023

    What makes superheroes popular, and how can their stories answer enduring questions about identity, power, disability, symbolism, law, and the state?

    Aesthetics & Culture icon with text

    Stephanie Burt

    Image of superhero

    What’s a hero? What’s a superhero? Who gets to be one, and who decides? Why are superheroes so popular now? What do their stories tell us—casual viewers and devoted readers, fans and non-fans and aspiring writers-- about how power works, about its social, emotional, material and economic dimensions, and about how we represent power in art?... Read more about Superheroes and Power (Gen Ed 1165)

    Language in Culture and Society (Gen Ed 1177)

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2023

    How is verbal art -- from story-telling to poetry and from hip hop to church song -- created from linguistic and musical form, and how does its performance mediate social relations as well as construct cultural meanings that are central to our lives?

     

    Aesthetics & Culture icon with text

    Nicholas Harkness

    Clearly, ideas about what language is and what it does shape scientific inquiry well beyond the discipline of linguistics. Language serves not only as a primary medium for formulating and communicating scientific ideas, but also, and very often, as a paradigm for generating these scientific ideas. Where do these ideas about language—whether they be intuitions, assumptions, popular beliefs, rumors, trends, or theoretical models—come from?... Read more about Language in Culture and Society (Gen Ed 1177)

    LGBT Literature, Politics, and Identity (Gen Ed 1176)

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2022

    What is the relationship between LGBT literary representation and politics, activism, and culture?

     

    Aesthetics & Culture icon with text

    Linda Schlossberg

    In this course, we’ll learn how sexual identity and desire are understood and represented in different social and historical circumstances, We’ll move beyond the binary of identifying images as “positive” or “negative,” paying attention to how depictions, definitions, and understandings of sexuality are shaped by specific historical moments, as well as the aesthetic traditions and personal experiences shaping these individual works.... Read more about LGBT Literature, Politics, and Identity (Gen Ed 1176)

    Novel Thought: Being (In)Human (Gen Ed 1182)

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2024

    How can the novel enable us to think in ways that other forms of knowledge production cannot and what does that allow us to understand about the world?

     

    Aesthetics & Culture icon with text

    Annabel Kim

    French novelist Émile Zola famously conceived of the novel as a laboratory: a space to experiment with characters, treated as human subjects, and discover truths about humanity and society. This course takes seriously the idea that the novel constitutes a kind of laboratory that enables us to apprehend things about humankind that cannot be understood save through the experience of reading fiction. The novel allows us to know what we cannot know, to experience what we haven’t experienced, and in so doing, sheds light on parts of ourselves that we might otherwise want to leave hidden and unexamined: the inhumanity that is just as much a part of our humanity as the humane. Where the social sciences and hard sciences produce empirical data, the novel produces experience and holds open a space of possibility between the world as it is and the world as it might be. By reading a broad range of novels from the past century, you will hone your critical analytical and interpretative skills as a reader and come away with a better understanding of the (in)humanity behind the mass production, mass consumption, mass war, and mass death that led to the twentieth century shattering what humanity had been and making us what we are today.... Read more about Novel Thought: Being (In)Human (Gen Ed 1182)

    Texts in Transition (Gen Ed 1034)

    Semester: 

    Fall

    Offered: 

    2024

    What makes some texts long-lived while others are ephemeral, today and in the past?

     

    Histories, Societies, Individuals icon with text Aesthetics & Culture icon with text

    Ann Blair and Leah Whittington

    We live in a moment of “crisis” around regimes of preservation and loss. As our communication becomes ever more digital— and, therefore, simultaneously more ephemeral and more durable—the attitudes and tools we have for preserving our culture have come to seem less apt than they may have seemed as recently as a generation ago. This course examines how texts have been transmitted from the past to the present, and how we can plan for their survival into the future.... Read more about Texts in Transition (Gen Ed 1034)

    Faith and Authenticity: Religion, Existentialism and the Human Condition (Gen Ed 1069)

    Semester: 

    Fall

    Offered: 

    2024

    How do the possibilities of faith and the demands of living authentically square with the developments of the modern west and its threats of nihilism?

     

    Aesthetics & Culture icon with text

    Courtney Bickel Lamberth and David Lamberth

    This course engages some of the most fundamental questions of human existence through the philosophical, theological and literary works of 19th and 20th century authors many of whom are associated with the movement called “existentialism.” What is an authentic individual life?... Read more about Faith and Authenticity: Religion, Existentialism and the Human Condition (Gen Ed 1069)

    The Ancient Greek Hero (Gen Ed 1074)

    Semester: 

    Fall

    Offered: 

    2024

    How did ancient Greek heroes, both male and female, learn about life by facing what all of us have to face, our human condition?

     

    Aesthetics & Culture icon with text

    Gregory Nagy

    How to face death? Concentrating on this central human question, we will explore some of the greatest works of ancient Greek literature in English translation. For the Greeks, a special way to address the problem of death was to think long and hard about what they called "heroes" in their myths.... Read more about The Ancient Greek Hero (Gen Ed 1074)

Pages