HOT STUFF
Long before humans walked the earth; before dinosaurs were wiped out; before any sign of sentient life on earth; volcanoes were a feature of our planet. With the power to help create life, as well as wreak devastation and destruction, volcanoes inspire awe and terror in equal measure. This seminar will explore the science behind volcanoes, their impact on the environment and societies, as well as our enduring fascination with them through the lenses of history, arts, mythology and religion. Where and why do volcanoes erupt? How do they affect nature, climate and society? How has our understanding of these amazing natural phenomena evolved over time? Why do people stay in close proximity to volcanoes, despite the dangers? Can we predict when the next catastrophic eruption will occur? Can we harness the power of volcanic activity as alternative energy source? These are some of the many questions that students will seek to answer and will serve as a starting point for our deeper investigation into the subject throughout the semester. Students will study historical texts, case studies, current data and methods of analysis, as well as depictions of volcanoes in art and film. Group discussion, independent study and individual and group presentations. Students will research case studies and present their finding to the class.
- TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Sedelia Rodriguez
CULPA: 1 Info - 3 points
BANNED: DANGEROUS ART
In this course we will engage with various forms of artistic production (literary, cinematic, pictorial, musical) that have been banned or censored by religious authority, governmental institutions, or by public opinion. While discussing these primary texts we will investigate who gets to censor art, to what ends, and according to which criteria. Who is protected from tasteless, subversive, or obscene art? How do these categories change with time, and from culture to culture?
- MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Karen Santos da Silva
CULPA: 4
Info
- 3 points
WITCHES
From ancient Greece to Wicked, the figure of the witch has fascinated and frightened, compelled and repulsed. In this seminar, well analyze written and visual texts from Homer to The Brothers Grimm and beyond to develop a deeper understanding of the witch and the anxieties about gender and power that she represents.
- TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Wendy C Schor-Haim
CULPA: 11
Info
- 3 points
REACTING TO THE PAST
In these seminars, students play complex historical role-playing games informed by classic texts. After an initial set-up phase, class sessions are run by students. These seminars are speaking- and writing-intensive, as students pursue their assigned roles objectives by convincing classmates of their views. Examples of games played in First-Year Seminar Reacting class include: 1) The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C. explores a pivotal moment following the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, when democrats sought to restore democracy while critics, including the supporters of Socrates, proposed alternatives. The key text is Plato's Republic. 2)
Confucianism and the Succession Crisis of the Wanli Emperor
examines a dispute between Confucian purists and pragmatists within the Hanlin Academy, the highest echelon of the Ming bureaucracy, taking
Analects
of Confucius as the central text. 3)
The Trial of Anne Hutchinson
revisits a conflict that pitted Puritan dissenter Anne Hutchinson and her supporters against Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop and the orthodox ministers of New England. Students work with testimony from Hutchinsons trial as well as the Bible and other texts. 4)
Greenwich Village, 1913: Suffrage, Labor and the New Woman
investigates the struggle between radical labor activists and woman suffragists for the hearts and minds of Bohemians, drawing on foundational works by Marx, Freud, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others.
- TR 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
- MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Kristina Milnor
CULPA: 21
Wikipedia
h-index: 10
Info
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Instructor:
Kate A Glasner
CULPA: 31
Info
- 3 points
Artful Adaptations
ARTS OF ADAPTATION
Can the violent fantasies of a fairytale shape romantic comedy? Can dance tell the same story as classical tragedy? What does Bollywood have to do with Renaissance England? Can ancient mythology animate American slave narrative? As biologists ask why does life appear in such a dazzling array of forms, this class asks why do certain stories get told and retold in such a dazzling array of varieties? Using as possible textual anchors Snow White, Medea, and Romeo and Juliet, this course will explore poems, short stories, plays, novels, paintings, films, musicals, dance, illustration, advertisement, song, memes, and other cultural objects to consider the accretion of meaning that results when stories cross, historical, cultural, and generic borders.
- TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Monica F Cohen
CULPA: 8
Info
- 3 points
Approaching Trauma
APPROACHING TRAUMA
Trauma today is evoked in a variety of contexts. But what precisely are we referring to when we use this term? Drawing on psychoanalytic and anthropological approaches, our seminar will interrogate the politics of diagnosing, treating and healing from disturbing past events. We will watch films and read case histories of hysteria, studies of infants, and attempts to integrate mind, brain and body. The course will also examine the rise of PTSD, attend to questions of intergenerational transmission, and learn about responses to national and racial trauma. Featured authors include Sigmund Freud, Beatrice Beebe, Allan Young, Marilyn Ivy and Resmaa Menakem.
- MW 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Nicholas A Bartlett
CULPA: 5
Info
- 3 points
Here/There: Migrant Narratives
HERE/THERE: MIGRANT NARRA
This first-year seminar brings together texts, films and contemporary art that focus on migrant, immigrant, refugee, expat and exile experiences. We will explore how migrant subjects negotiate dominant discourses of nationality and citizenship, and how their identities as migrants intersect with their other positionalities, with a particular emphasis on race, gender and queerness. Some questions we will consider: How are immigrant, migrant and refugees marginalized, racialized and queered by dominant discourses? How do immigrants, migrants and refugees negotiate belonging when they cross cultural, national, linguistic and religious borders? How do these authors, filmmakers and artists resist erasure and complicate our understanding of home, belonging and identity? Readings are subject to change but will likely include literary and nonfiction texts by writers such as James Baldwin, Fatimah Asghar, Ocean Vuong, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Jamaica Kincaid, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Kazim Ali, Edward Said and Hannah Arendt; films such as
Saving Face
and
Flee
; as well as contemporary visual art, op-eds and other media.
Creativity and Inspiration
CREATIVITY AND INSPIRATIO
Where do creative ideas come from? The Muses, according to Plato. The unconscious, according to some later thinkers. One thing both answers share is the thought that creative ideas come from something “other than” or “not controlled by” the creator – or, as we’ll put it, that creativity requires
inspiration
. In this class, we will explore this and related ideas in Western thinking about creativity. In doing so, we’ll examine how creative people themselves, from painters to mathematicians, have described their own creative process and experiences. We’ll examine approaches to creativity from the Taoist tradition, comparing them with the Western approaches that will be our main focus. At the end of the class, we’ll think about whether computer programs can be creative, and what it might mean for claims about inspiration if they can be. Readings will include selections from James Baldwin, Margaret Boden, Chung-yuan Chang, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, bell hooks, Immanuel Kant, Henri Poincaré, Flannery O’Connor, Elizabeth Robinson, and others.
- MW 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Christopher P Prodoehl
Info - 3 points
Dreamstories
DREAMSTORIES
The complex relationship between dreaming and narrative storytelling is as contemporary as it is ancient. In this first-year seminar, we will examine Greco-Roman, medieval, modern, and postmodern representations of dreaming in literature, philosophy and film - texts that range from classical epic (Homer, Virgil) through medieval allegory (Dante, Machaut) to psychoanalysis (Freud and his contemporaries), queer metafiction (Winterson, Sarduy, Lynch), and beyond. We will consider among other topics how dreams raise fundamental questions about being, memory, desire, interpretation, and Utopian politics. Students will practice critical writing and discussion, and also have the opportunity to engage their own dreams and fantasies both analytically and creatively.
- TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
-
Instructor:
Eugene A Petracca
Info - 3 points
Border Stories (Wkshop)
BORDER STORIES (WKSHOP)
The topic of this Seminar course takes an interdisciplinary approach to thinking about, and traversing, the constructs of the border. The U.S.- Mexico border delimits more than nations; it is both a political and a social geography, marked by bodies of water, mountains, walls, ideologies, repression, and resistance. The crisis currently taking place at the border is an unfolding story with many narrators. We will study literary texts: fiction, poetry, and memoir written by those who know the border, and borderlands, intimately. We will also engage histories, social movement doctrine, and media coverage to mine the stories they tell.
NOTE: This 4-credit version of First-Year Seminar (FYS)—FYS “Workshop”—is specially designed for students who believe they would benefit from extra support with their critical reading and academic writing skills. In addition to regular seminar meetings twice per week, students are assigned a Writing Fellow who they meet with for one hour every other week. APPLICATION IS REQUIRED BY 11/3 @ 5PM -- please fill out this form:
https://forms.gle/dZ9B1t4oxaRmE7c67
- TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Francesca E Austin Ochoa
Info - 4 points
The Secret Life of Stuff
THE SECRET LIFE OF STUFF
“It has a mind of its own,” we shriek as the TV channels change without our input or the garage door opens when no one is home. Things can spark joy, grant authority, lead to our demise, and reveal our deepest secrets. They mediate social relationships, define political alliances, and provide economic opportunities. Sometimes it is not the presence of things but their absence – a misplaced phone, an expired passport, a childhood home – that more keenly shapes our reality. While people make objects, objects also make people.
This class will investigate the secret life of stuff, from maps to cups and buildings to body parts, to explore how inanimate objects can be seen to have an agency and power of their own. Our discussions will draw on a wide array of authors from a variety of fields, including Bill Brown, Martin Heidigger, Anni Albers, Neel Ahuja, Katherine Ott, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and Anna Tsing. To accompany these texts, we will also turn to other, less traditional sources of information, from podcasts to museum exhibits and our own personal histories with things.
- TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Camilla Sturm
CULPA: 2 Info - 3 points
Storytelling
STORYTELLING
Why do we tell stories? Why do we feel a need to relate the things that happen to us? Why do writers and artists make things up? In this section of First-Year Seminar, we will explore these questions as well as others connected to the fundamental practice of storytelling. We will read and discuss short stories, novels, and memoirs that reflect on or call into question the narrator’s reasons for telling the story. We will also consider essays by literary critics, psychologists, and scientists on the human impulse to narrate. Literary texts may include works by Henry James, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Lydia Davis, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, and Carmen Maria Machado. Critical and theoretical texts may include works by Sigmund Freud, James Baldwin, and Joan Didion.
- MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
- MW 5:40 p.m.-6:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Michael Shelichach
Info - 3 points
Poetry, Identity, Word Sorcery
POETRY, IDENTITY, WORD SO
Poetry is a very complicated series of words found in perpetually dust-covered books written by white men who died a half of century before you were born. Or is it? Poetry is archaic. Poetry is academic. Poetry is hard. Or in the words of Ntosake Shange, it’s “razzamatazz hocus pocus zippity-do-dah.” The magic of poetry is not in its mystery, but in its ability to connect with people, and to connect people with people, even across space and time. In this class we will explore how poetry speaks to identity, speaks to history, and speaks intersections of race, gender, sexuality, tragedy, triumph, and trauma. We will read poetry – mostly contemporary poets, mostly female-identified poets, mostly poets of color, and mostly poets from the margins – read theories on poetry, and maybe try our hand at a little poetry writing. Readings will include such authors as Tina Chang, Yolanda Wisher, Jillian Weise, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Tracie Morris, Audre Lorde, Laylia Long Soldier, and the word sorceress herself Sonia Sanchez.
- MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Quincy Jones
Info - 3 points
On Friendships Between Women
ON FRIENDSHIPS BETWEEN WO
How do we reflect on the intimacies of friendship, and what might be particular to such intimacies between women? What makes a friendship good or bad? What tensions or correspondences might we trace between friendship and adjacent categories of relationality—’frenemies,’ sisterhood, lovers? In this course, we will apply close analytical examinations of literary and cultural texts in order to theorize the various shapes friendship may take. Throughout the semester, we will question how the friendships we encounter are situated within and/or against a variety of cultural and socioeconomic contexts. In doing so, we will explore friendship’s conceptual role in narratives of emotional development, education and intellectual life, work, community, and domesticity. Literary and theoretical texts may include works by Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, Maggie Doherty, Zadie Smith, bell hooks, Virginia Woolf, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich. Selections from film and television may include the tv dramatization of Elena Ferrante’s
My Brilliant Friend
and Keira Knightley’s portrayal of Georgiana Cavendish in
The Duchess
, among others. In discussions and writing assignments both formal and creative, we will consider how the (un)friendly relationships represented in these texts shift, break, and thrive given the conditions under which they are conducted.
- TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Elizabeth Weybright
Info - 3 points
The Ethics of Identity
THE ETHICS OF IDENTITY
This course will explore evolving understandings of three central aspects of identity - gender, race, and disability - by focusing on their impact on contemporary ethical issues. Should pregnant people be categorized as a 'vulnerable' population in medical research, for instance, and how can race and/or disability status be factored into these discussions in ways that support rather than erase marginalized groups? Is trans-phobia the reason people were so dismissive of Rachel Dolezal's claim to be Black, or is there a difference between gender and race that makes someone's claim to be transgendered quite different from Dolezal's claim to be transracial? If we could eliminate disabilities in the womb, should we, or is that just another form of objectionable eugenics? To address these sorts of questions, we'll need to talk about different views of what gender, race, and disability
are
, as well as what people's experiences of how these identities intersect tells us about power, prejudice, and pride. Readings will include selections from Simone deBeauvoir's
The Second Sex
, Cathy Park Hong's
Minor Feelings: an Asian-American Reckoning
, Kwame Anthony Appiah's
Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race
, the edited collection
What is Race?: Four Philosophical Views
, Elizabeth Barnes's
The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability
, and Eva Kittay's
Learning from My Daughter: The Value and Care of Disabled Minds
.
- TR 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
- 3 points
American Exceptionalism
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
In this course we probe the ideology of American "exceptionalism." We treat the literary history of this idea as a transtemporal conversation involving its founding architects, ardent critics, and experimental reformers, concerned with the question of what should be valued on the American continents and within American experience. We become cartographers of this conversation and interlocutors within it, as we explore how habits of conceiving truth, power, and the relationship of human beings to the natural world have controlled what counts as exceptional and what ordinary. Where should we direct our awe? Readings will include James Baldwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, bell hooks, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Audre Lorde, Henry David Thoreau and William Carlos Williams.
- MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Kristi-Lynn Cassaro
Info - 3 points
The End of the World
THE END OF THE WORLD
According to the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” What, then, is the world? Is it an object? An interpretation? An inheritance? A point of view? Is the world a social and linguistic construct? If so, how many worlds are there? If Wittgenstein is right and every world ends at the limits of its language, then what lies beyond? What happens after the end? This course will consider these questions by investigating the end of the world in a variety of texts and contexts from the fourteenth century to the present: as a recurrent literary theme, religious fixation, philosophical conundrum, source of endless entertainment, and spring of existential anxiety. Contrary to what the phrase portends, we will find that there is no singular “end” of the world. Worlds end all the time. We therefore will approach the idea of the end as a question of ruins and remnants, an encounter with the void at the end of history, but also as a site of new beginnings, of futures we have yet to imagine—or can only imagine, if this means to glimpse what might be beyond the patterns of thought, belief, and action, the terms and conditions, the very language of the decaying world we inhabit. Authors, texts, and other materials will include fiction by Giovanni Boccaccio, Octavia Butler, Daniel Defoe, and Jeff VanderMeer; plays by Tom Stoppard and Samuel Beckett; films including
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Aniara
,
Bombay Beach
, and
Manufactured Landscapes
; and studies in cultural anthropology, environmental humanities and radical ecologies.
- MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
- MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
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Instructor:
Nathan Gorelick
Info - 3 points
Gender Outlaws
GENDER OUTLAWS
This course explores literary and historical figures who challenge gender norms and contravene laws about gender and sexuality. We will encounter trans rogues, desiring women, ballroom queens, and feminist killjoys as we think through how these rules are enforced and resisted. Cultural objects we may consider include literary works by Toni Morrison, Jordy Rosenberg, and Virginia Woolf; the documentary
Paris is Burning
; and art from
Against Our Vanishing
. We will bolster our understanding with historical and critical works by Judith Butler, Saidiya Hartman, Sara Ahmed, and more.
- MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Sarah Schwartz
Info - 3 points
Tracing the Mystic
TRACING THE MYSTIC
What does it mean to be a mystic?--to follow a mystical path? This course will explore questions posed by narratives gesturing at such a path. We will expand our purview to examine how artists, writers, and thinkers have employed mystical approaches in their respective creative processes, sometimes to a surprising degree. In addition, this course will invite personal reflection, storytelling, and creative work that re-envisions the ways that our lives can be enriched when engaged in the process of tracing the mystic; i.e., viewing texts through a mystical lens. Our readings will unfold in a process of discovery and will likely include the works of William Blake, Nella Larsen, bell hooks, W.B. Yeats, Valorie D. Thomas, and others, alongside cinematic, musical, and astrological texts.
- MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
-
Instructor:
Safia Jama
Info - 3 points
Anger
ANGER
This course is a transcultural exploration of anger through significant works of contemporary literature, with a particular focus on situations inflected by gender, sexuality and race. Students will reflect on the representation and role of anger, what S. Ngai has called a dysphoric, “ugly” affect at the border between internal feeling and objective reality, affective consciousness and material political conditions, by reading a range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, short stories and poetry, and by viewing films. Authors will include Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Virginie Despentes, Elena Ferrante, Nawal El Saadawi and Tayeb Salih.
- TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
-
Instructor:
Melanie Heydari
Info - 3 points