This Studio course will be an overview of contemporary creative practices that are actively engaged in the wide range of social and environmental justice issues that confront us in an age where pre-existing injustice conditions are being amplified within the increasingly destabilized ecologies brought on by the climate crisis. This is an interdisciplinary course open to all mediums and techniques. In this class you will find your community of students who are seeking to develop their creative practice to one that is actively and ethically engaged with social and ecological systems outside of the studio.

A community engaged art/design practice requires training in ethics, collaborative skills, organizational logistics, and other skillsets related to working with outside organizations. This course provides an introduction to these skills, and then helps students develop their individual interests and identify potential partner organizations.

This course applies an intersectional social and environmental justice framework, engaging political ecology and outlining critical questions at the nexus of race, gender, sexuality, and the environment. Drawing upon theoretical and methodological frameworks from ecofeminism, critical race theory, queer ecologies, decolonial/postcolonial studies, African womanism, transnational feminist thought, and indigenous knowledges, this course engages problems and solutions related to environmental racism, borderlands and bodies, “un/natural" categories of gender and sexuality, Black and Indigenous land, water, and food sovereignty, and global social movements for justice.

Surveys personality theories, various concepts of psychological adjustment, and models of mental health. Specifically, the students examine bio-psycho-social foundations of human personality theories, and normal and deviant human behaviors. The class format includes lectures, discussions, and case studies.

Does being human have a special meaning related to possessing the power of creation? Does human meaning come from the self’s creative and productive interactions with an external world through art and work? What is the difference between art and work? Are there dangers, both environmental and moral, to a conception of human beings as manipulators of nature? It is these questions, all spinning off of the central issue of humanity’s creative nature, that is at the core of this course. The different historical/cultural understandings of the relationship of the creative - and creating - self with other objects (nature) and other selves (society), and these differences are connected with a set of larger fundamental questions about the purpose of human life. Beginning with the Prometheus myth, continuing through readings of Mary Shelley, Marx, Arendt, Kant, Joyce, Shakespeare, neuro-scientific studies of genius, and ending with student project profiles of a creating person (artist, artisan, or worker), literary, scientific, historical, and other theoretical perspectives are placed alongside accounts of artistic and working practices of creation - both exceptional and everyday - to provide students with a full range of the ways that different people have understood the meaning of their creative endeavors.

When words gather together with energy, other places, other people, and other voices stir in a parallel life. The writer can feel more alive too, alert and connected to a welling inner source that flows outward toward other lives. This at least is the ideal. But words sometimes refuse to be summoned, leaving a writer sluggish and adrift, or worse, alone and depressed. This class offers inspiration, purpose, and nurturing company for non-fiction writers. Throughout the semester we will engage with the best of new anthropological writing and write a great deal ourselves. Our aim is to improve our ability to describe with vivid accuracy, to lay out ideas with clarity, to make every word count. Writing composed with craft touches readers on several levels—intellectual, emotional, aesthetic—and the impact lingers longer than words dashed off. At its best, strong writing can direct attention to suffering and injustice, deepen compassion and outrage, elaborate imaginative alternatives, and mobilize energies for action. Become a crafter of words.

Humanity is a puzzle: we have highly developed intellects, yet again and again we make terrible decisions; we are co-operative yet also intensely selfish. We create beautiful art yet leave the world in an ugly mess. We create technologies which generate great wealth yet most of humanity lives in abject poverty. Why is humanity like this? How does the world work? Cultural Anthropology tries to solve these puzzles of our contemporary existence. Frequently its method is comparison. By looking at other cultures we realize that much of our own taken for granted life is neither natural nor universal. In this introductory course, we trace the history of the discipline, from it origins to the present day.

This course will explore issues in intercultural communication, balancing a review of primary research and theoretical writings with practical applications for international study and work, art-making, and media production. We will move from an understanding and critique of major work in the field of intercultural studies including theories focusing on adaptations in interactions, identity, effective communication, and adjustment. Significant features of the course will be guest lecturers from fields such as anthropology and intercultural education and a community engagement project in which we will apply theoretical understanding to service projects with community organizations working with diverse populations in Baltimore city.

The term “B movie” has taken on numerous definitions in recent years—some equate the phrase with “camp,” others with “cult,” and others with “inexpensive.” This class explores the origins of the B-movie as a marketing tool and its evolution into a film-type with a rough set of criteria. Aesthetic and historical examinations of films by Roger Corman, Orson Welles, Sam Raimi, as well as so-called “anonymous” directors are examined.

Explore neoliberalism historically, and its hold in contemporary society. Students read the work, primarily anthropologists, who detail in their ethnographies, the rise of neoliberalism across the world at the local level. The ethnographies of neoliberalism across the world will demonstrate how neoliberal sensibilities have become foundational to how we relate, respond to and understand topics as seemingly disparate as environmentalism, higher education, art practice, immigration, sexuality, homelessness, indigeneity, health care, globalization, non-governmental organizations, social justice activism, and humanitarianism.

This course is an introduction to Native American studies with a particular focus on Native American religion. Like other indigenous religions around the world, Native American religions permeate the entire way of life, and their cultural expressions are enormously rich and creative. Native American religion expands usual definitions of world’s great religions by including relationships to land and spiritual dimensions of the material world. The land has religious meaning, and the natural environment is ultimately sacred. Readings focus on Mesoamerican, Lakota (Sioux) and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) traditions. Students will explore Native American cosmovisions, creation stories, giving thanks prayers, vision quests, and ceremonial culture. Readings, films, and discussions address such critical issues as colonization and its consequences for Native Americans, sovereignty, freedom of religion, land rights, responses to climate change and globalization. The course invites students to reflect upon the contentious history of inter-cultural contact between indigenous and immigrant people of the Americas.

This course explores the biology of the body in a social world and examines constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality from a queer feminist science and technology studies perspective. Employing an inter-sectional approach, the texts and materials in this course survey the science of biological sex, scientific racism, histories of sexology and eugenics, reproductive technologies, asexuality and stigma, the medicalization of queer and trans identity, intersex traits and variations of sex development, and the psychology of sexual orientation, using methods of inquiry from feminist science and technology studies, psychology, evolutionary biology, queer theory, critical race theory, clinical research, social justice activism, and popular culture discourses.

Most people have heard of Linux, a free "open source" operating system which was developed collaboratively. Prior to the advent of the internet, some ideas and designs were shared, not sold, in academia or in non-profits but lacked access to the streamlined distribution system present in the market that would allow them to be developed and tested by users in many different contexts. Now that the digital divide is closing, open source concept testing is faster and has the opportunity to circumvent the marketplace. Now used in art and manufacturing as well, this work model impacts culture, social stratification, morality, politics, and conceptions of property. In this course, students use sociology of work literature to trace the origins of open source, identify its core elements, and begin to understand its consequences.

Since films are often periodized by the decades in which they were produced and received, examining the cinema of a particular ten-year cycle offers a convenient way of studying important works in their immediate social, political, and aesthetic contexts. Focusing on mainstream movies, art films, documentaries, and avant-garde experimentations will lend intellectual diversity and artistic variety to the survey. Required reading in film history, theory, and criticism will expose students to a range of perspectives and opinions, encouraging critical thinking and the formation of independent and perhaps idiosyncratic viewpoints. Exploring links between audiovisual expression and the wider zeitgeist is the course’s guiding principle and consistent purpose.

This course is an introduction to human development across the lifespan. It is designed to cover major developmental issues in physical, cognitive, and social/emotional realms from infancy, toddlerhood, early childhood, childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle adulthood and late adulthood. Students will learn the major developmental theories in the field, as well as current “hot topics” within human development from opposing points of view. Students will be expected to use critical thinking, research, writing and presentation skills.

Since the fall of the Communist regimes 20 years ago, it has been taken for granted in the West that the Capitalist economic system is the best possible economic system, indeed, the best by nature, and our destiny as a species. This was not always the preponderant view. For most of its history, Capitalism was not supreme, and its supremacy self-evident, but rather, it knew significant competition—and in many parts of the world, still does. In light of the recent—and devastating—credit crisis that rocked the global economy in 2008, Capitalism’s nature, and its self-evident supremacy, very much came into question. Perhaps, critics wondered, it’s time to reconsider our embrace of bare-knuckled Capitalism in the West; perhaps it is time to consider subtler variations, compromises, hybrids—and evaluate the strengths and drawbacks of the Capitalist system anew. Perhaps it is time to admit what kind of Capitalist economy we have cobbled together—its essential problem might be that it is not in fact very ‘Capitalist’ at all! Imagine that. In this course, we will look at some of the most prominent writings in the ‘canon of Capitalism,’ as well as important contemporary voices critiquing the nature and character of the Capitalist system, and how we have allowed it to develop today.

Have you ever felt the welling-up of rage, the tender pangs of love, or the emptiness of despair? The emotions are a tantalizing subject for examination because they appear to tell us about our true selves. Yet anthropologists suggest that the emotions are neither individual nor universal. In this course we consider a broad sweep of emotions: fear, disgust, paranoia, pride, envy, compassion, and desire, examining how they vary across the world. Why, for example, don’t Inuit people show anger? How can we explain the British "stiff upper-lip"? And does it feel the same to fall in love if you do it in Baltimore or Bali? We also consider the political economy of the emotions: when lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence, what happens to trust?

This course examines all types of cultural performances from a variety of perspectives that includes theatre and dance studies; anthropology cultural studies; race, ethnic, gender, and disability studies; postcolonial studies; and global studies. After a basic introduction, we will apply these frames to three specific thematic areas with implications for understanding performance, art, and the humanities in a global context: 1) technology as staging, the prosthetic body, new media and identity, 2) the cultural and natural ecologies of cities, and 3) the tasks of cultural diplomacy that asks how, as artists, we can form new alliances and create new cultural and economic opportunities in the world. In the last section of the course, we will generate a set of short performance scenarios as well as longer performance proposals/scripts that cut across the themes. Key activities will include reading and discussion studio work, fieldwork exercises, response papers, and a collaborative final research project that integrates theory and practice in relationship to topics of the students’ own choosing that are related to the three course topics.

This course is aimed at re-evaluating normative concepts of the body and its complex relationship with space through the unusual vehicle of Giles Deleuze’s cinema theory and its underpinning in Henri Bergson’s affect based philosophy. Close readings of key texts, film viewings in class and online discussions will lead to an interdisciplinary paper or project in which students engage their own studio practices in light of their learnings from the course.

Critical race theory scholars have argued that racial inequality is endemic to American society. This course examines how a critical framework that initially emerged from legal studies of structural racial inequity has influenced thinking in history, sociology, and education and how elements of critical race theory have been deployed, and resisted, in public debate. Students will read classic works on race and the law, whiteness, civil rights, colorblindness, and affirmative action and recent interventions attentive to gender, class, and sexuality. Throughout the course we will consider the possibilities and limitations of critical race theory as a lens for understanding current conditions of inequity.

Examines theaters and performances in the context of diverse cultural traditions and communities as they have manifest within and across specific geographies. The theaters will span a varied number of styles, histories, social and political frameworks, and artistic practices. The course focuses on ways in which multicultural theater in the United States can be put in conversation with a variety of global theater forms, practices, and texts. The specific content of the course will vary according to instructor expertise.

Explore how complex anthropological concepts are conveyed through comics by reading graphic novels as a form of theoretical storytelling. Students identify key themes and narratives that emerge through the graphic novels that demonstrate the nuances and ethnographic details of anthropological fieldwork. Students formulate and create ways to tell stories through visual elements based on short fieldwork exercises at MICA and in Baltimore City using the graphic narrative format as a way of building understanding across cultural, religious, class, ideological and disciplinary divides. Students also learn how to work collaboratively as a team of anthropologists, artists and designers. Many, but not all, of the graphic novels will be based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Middle East and South Asia, thus students will learn about everyday life in these regions of the world.

While our world is divided into continents and nation states, our lives are influenced by factors that originate in far-away locations or that are completely de-territorialized. In this course we will investigate the multifarious interconnections that shape our world, and examine how people, places, practices, materials and ideas are linked across the globe through complex, multifaceted dynamics. This is a seminar course in which we will develop an understanding of globalization through theoretical texts as well as by reading ethnographies on global phenomena such as the ecological crisis and climate change, global migration, the wars on drugs and terror, global racial capital, and transnational indigenous activism.

Why do infants in Kenya sit unsupported at four months when most Western infants cannot achieve this skill before six months? Why are Chinese babies toilet-trained by twelve weeks, while American children remain in diapers into toddlerhood? Why do Beng mothers in the Cote d’Ivoire decorate their babies with jewelry and paint? Are babies divine, or do they have the devil in them? And should parents talk to their infants, or is it a waste of time? Child rearing is often viewed as a matter of “common-sense,” when, in fact, ideas about children and how they should be raised vary a great deal across cultures and throughout history. In this course we draw on anthropological research to study childhood from birth to adolescence. We examine infant development, asking how much is universal; discuss the every day actions—toileting, feeding, sleeping, and crying—that make babies into social actors; and evaluate the impact on children of poverty, migration, and war.

Efforts to understand human society have always been linked to activist struggles to achieve social change. This course examines some of the major social theories of the 19th and 20th centuries, including Marxism, critical theory, and postmodernism. Students consider the influence of these ideas on social movements such as the labor movement, the student movement of the 1960s and the anti-globalization movement and discuss the ways in which the form, content, and goals of activist efforts evolve in connection with ideas from philosophers and social scientists.

Through extensive screenings, readings, and discussions, this course explores the continually shifting and elusive boundary between reality and illusion in film, video, installation, and animation; identifies the ways in which the moving image constructs fantasy or reveals its self-reflexive nature, using as a theoretical framework key texts and concepts from the fields of aesthetics, semiotics, and ethics. Explorations include the structural components that connote a space of “fantasy” or “verism” and a meditation on the social dynamic that generates or bridges the distances between self and other. The examination is expansive and generous, ranging from Hollywood classics like Singing in the Rain to the recent emergence of the indie mumblecore movement, to documentaries, to the new realm of YouTube, and to experimental video and film.

In this course students watch and study a series of films by a single director, accompanied by historical and theoretical articles which help to contextualize the movies. Students look at such issues as the concept of the "auteur", art and film theory, audience reactions to work, reception theory, and the role of the director as artist. This course introduces students to analysis of the style and discourses of cinematic narratives and the complex and ever-changing relationship between studio production and audience consumption. The director whose work is selected vary each time the course is taught.

The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his corpse should be thrown over the city walls for dogs to eat. Why would anyone care what happens to a corpse? But people do. No culture has ever been indifferent to mortal remains. In The Corpse Class, we ask: why is this the case? Drawing from cultural anthropology and bioarcheology, and ranging across centuries and cultures, we consider the astonishing variation in ritual and grief, asking what the living owe the dead. We explore the dying process, illuminating the end of life as a site of complex vulnerabilities and forms of sociality. And we center the corpse, in its materiality, always more than a symbol as it stinks and decays. This class will take you from the funeral pyres of Banaras on the Ganges to Baltimore’s funeral parlors, from mortuary cannibalism to cryogenics, from the aftermath of genocide to museum skeletal collections to medical school cadavers, from the earliest burial practices to the modern crematorium. We learn that death is social process not merely a biological fact, and that the ways we treat the dead reveal a great deal about the values of the living.

Interactive fiction, social litmus test, provider of immersive virtual flow, source of pathological violence: as a new art form with an ever-expanding audience, the video game has been assigned any number of superpowers by the media, inspiring both fear from Luddite alarmists and Utopian hubris from fans and the tech industry. However, growing in the cracks of these extremes has been a fresh area of media inquiry–one that incorporates ludology, the study of games; investigations into race, gender and class in game narratives in the manner of critical theory; analyses of multimedia tropes and visual presentation, as in film inquiries; the study of cultures, as in anthropology and sociology; and engineering matters like interface design and end-user experiences. In this class, students will explore this world, using a variety of essays, critiques, and–yes–games to gain a working knowledge of how video games work, what their underlying ideologies teach us, how they have changed over time, how gamification has influenced the wider culture, and how games developed into the world-containing productions they have become.

This course is designed to deepen the student’s understanding of the phenomena of poverty and homelessness in the United States and internationally through critical and historical analysis of each as a social concept and human reality. Students will uncover and examine widely held beliefs associated with homelessness and explores the larger cycle of poverty from diverse interdisciplinary perspectives. This course explores the human, social and design problems presented by the intersection of poverty and homelessness as well as individual constructs with special attention to their causes and consequences. This will include global economic factors, migration patterns, and political/social crises; and governmental and NGO policies and programs. This course also provides an introduction to public policy and intervention which address the causes of poverty and homelessness and its effects on special populations as differentiated by race, ethnicity, class, gender, education, immigration status, disability, age, sexual orientation and family structure.

This course focuses on theories of what constitutes 'performance' in everyday life, ritual, art, and cyberspace interaction. As a new and interdisciplinary field, performance studies merges anthropology, sociology, theatre, art, and new media as a way to both blur and redefine the boundaries of what is considered performative. The theoretical framework of perform-activity, whether it is looking at the everyday presentation of the self or the performance of nations and states, is a tool that enables us to critically examine the canons which produce these constructed identities. The course looks at key writers of performance studies and cyber theory in order to understand the effects of performative actions, especially in the context of the global expansion of media culture.

Eight weeks until election day. Stakes are high: climate change, gun control, LGBTQ and reproductive rights…possibly democracy itself, are on the ballot. The race will be determined not only by the candidates, but the political ads that define them. In this class you will make those ads. But you won’t be alone. We will reference the work of political consultants and media professionals who have helped elect the most powerful leaders in the world. We’ll invite them into the classroom to share their experiences, techniques, and warnings about the future of political media. With a firm understanding of the elements of effective political advertising (including, but not limited to message, emotion, and targeting), students will assume the role of a political producer tasked with creating an ad that possesses the power to shape opinion and compel action. From initial concept to final cut, students will learn the fundamentals of creating a political ad in real time, with real issues.They will draft scripts, choose images and music, and participate in the production and post-production process to learn framing, pacing, shot selection, and graphics. The timing of the class during the critical final stretch of the 2024 election year allows students the rare opportunity to work parallel to, and in conversation with, actual ads being produced by the presidential campaigns. The class will culminate with a screening of the student-produced ads for an audience who will vote to determine which is the most effective ad.

Provides an introduction to gender as a critical tool for film analysis. Students watch films of various genres, different historical periods, and cultural backgrounds. In addition to analyzing and discussing film as cultural creation, the class reads essays on film theory and cinematic production and pays particular attention to the constructions and representations of concepts such as femininity and masculinity, and to racial, classed, and sexualized representations of otherness as they intersect with gender in film. The course also provides students with the scholarly vocabulary needed in order to critically engage with and write about film.

Every week, students screen films and determine (through class discussion) if the films viewed could be considered experimental, avant-garde, transgressive or subversive in some fashion. Students enhance the discussion further by examining films through various theoretical frameworks (Post-Colonial criticism, feminist criticism, Marxist criticism, etc.) Finally, possibilities for experimental film in the future, what’s on the horizon are discussed.

What happens when a thing goes bad? What is an unruly object and how does it get that way? Can an object get out of control? Can it be disobedient? In this course in material culture we explore the recalcitrance of things, investigating the moments when objects resist our intentions or confound our expectations. At these vital junctures, things expand beyond the limits of the human imagination, shaking up our sense of the world and our place in it. This course will consider how objects unsettle the presumed docile or one-way dynamic between human actors and material things. We will explore artifacts that surprise or horrify, magical objects, and fetishes, the naughty, the broken, the lost, the painful, and the perverse. Drawing from cultural anthropology, material culture studies, and museum studies, each class focuses on a different “very bad thing”: from slave brands to sex toys, from magical amulets to animated corpses.

At the heart of feminist critiques of film lies the belief that cinema, like patriarchal society, is deeply marked by power inequalities between social agents. Hegemonic social and ideological structures reinforce patriarchal representations of women and position spectators within dominant structures of looking and reading that further derogate women. In order to avoid a repetition of oppressive and misogynous modes of depiction and to open up spaces for new ways of looking at women, feminists called for cinematic practices that offered spaces to positively represent and read women. To offer positive images of women, however, proved to be at best a limited strategy in challenging patriarchal cinematic conventions and at worst a repetition of the oppressive structures feminists had set out to dismantle. When feminist film theory and feminist cinema addressed the difficult questions of how to organize knowledge not merely around the trope of gender and sexual difference, but also around differences within the category of sex, and differences in race, social status, geography, age, corporeality, religion, income and sexual orientation, it became clear that to lay bare the operations of hegemonic image and knowledge-making implicated and privileged some women to the detriment of others. This course serves as a general overview of the vast field of feminist approaches to film and feminist film theory that has been informed by theoretical frameworks ranging from structuralist and post-structuralist criticism to semiotics, psychoanalysis, queer theory and postcolonial theory. Hence, we will analyze films of various genres, different historical periods and cultural backgrounds. Since class time is limited, we will view the films outside of class, and you will have to be able to make available 2 extra hours in your schedule each week for a communal film screening on campus.

The scope and orientation of the class is global, looking at the rise and fall of centers of cultural and humanistic activity and considering as much as possible lines of influence from earlier civilizations to later ones. While some general historical and analytical books are assigned, the emphasis is on reading primary sources in their entirety and books that hold something of the status as major or classical contributions to the humanities or human knowledge. This course provides a foundation that can be further developed and explored in upper level courses in art history, literature, and the humanities.

The practice of history has been by its nature strictly human-centered, but historians in the past 50 years have challenged this anthropocentric understanding of the past and have incorporated a greater appreciation for how the non-human world has its own past, and how humans in the past have shaped – and been shaped by – the natural environment. This course will teach students in the theory and methods of Environmental History, employing a case-study approach to allow for a breadth of coverage across time from prehistory to the present day, and all over the world.

The outlaw is a paradigmatic figure that elicits admiration and fear, sympathy and revulsion, and whose example promotes both subversion and conformism. As a figure that, by definition, is removed from society, the outlaw’s example tests the limits and validity of society’s institutions in the popular mind, and thus outlaw stories have become vital tools for the questioning of authority and institutions for centuries in all societies. Larger issues such as the place of the Individual in the State, the interplay between mainstream and underground culture, crime and punishment and the police, and the limits of community solidarity, can all be addressed through the history of the outlaw.

This course examines the role of maps and cartography in the context of overseas colonization during the early stages of European imperialism (1500-1800). It addresses a number of questions and issues including: 1) the ways in which maps represented (or misrepresented) indigenous peoples and their cultures; 2) the relationship of printed maps to manuscript maps, and the importance of secrecy in overseas exploration and imperial rivalry; 3) the relationship of maps to their accompanying written texts in the articulation of geographical space; 4) the development of a "cartographical rhetoric," which used maps to articulate and assert claims of sovereignty and possession under the ius gentium or "law of nations."

The course is an overview of world history from the birth of the first human civilizations to the end of the European Middle Ages. The main emphasis is on building a framework of major political, military, intellectual, and religious events and movements that have shaped world history from the Western perspective. As most people know, when Columbus set sail in 1492 he was not trying to find the Americas; rather he sought a sea shortcut into the vibrant Afro-Asiatic trading system and the center of the world’s wealth and culture at the time. But most people don’t know much about this world cultural center that extended for 1,000 years from the fall of Rome (ca. 400) to the rise of Europe (ca. 1500) and encompasses the land areas of Africa and Asia, a cultural and economic system centered on the Indian Ocean. This class proposes to explore the intellectual history of the Afro-Asiatic world system that attracted the interest of Europeans and gave them their intellectual and scientific foundations. It includes the empires of Mali and the Ottomans; the rise of Islam and the Islamic World; the Buddhist cultures in South East Asia and Japan.

This course is designed to introduce students from a non-Western educational background to key concepts of thought that shaped Western civilization from Antiquity to the Enlightenment. Using Gombrich’s "A Little History of the World" as the guiding textbook, reading excepts from key documents that are considered important milestones for understanding Western thought, listening to lectures and interacting with guest historians, this course explores how history connects with ideas that shaped certain eras definitive of a Western understandings of self. The course also introduces students to the tools of historical research–from posing a research question, to evaluating primary and secondary sources to annotating sources and compiling a bibliography, that is, students learn the building blocks of how to approach and write a humanities research paper.

This introductory, orienting course examines racism as a structure and practice and surveys critiques of race and racism as well as various forms of resistance to racism and visions for anti-racist social relations.

Addresses the rise and decline of the witch hunt, exploring the underlying social, cultural, and intellectual changes that gave rise to the European and early American “witch craze.” During the period 1450–1750, upwards of 110,000 women and men in Europe alone stood accused of maleficia—of being in league with the devil and practicing “witchcrafts.” Almost half were convicted and subsequently executed. The belief in witches was at this time pervasive and held at all levels of society from the lowest peasantry to elite society; this included high-ranking magistrates who took the threat of witchcraft to the security of the state very seriously, producing a number of learned treatises on how it might be effectively countered. This course examines a variety of readings from the period, including treatises on witchcraft, inquisitor’s manuals, literary sources, and actual transcripts of witchcraft trials.

City living is literally synonymous with civilization: the root of the word civilization is the Latin word civis, meaning city. This course will trace the history of urban life back to its origins in the Middle East, to understand the roots of urban culture, its meaning, its significance, its varieties. This investigation will combine studies of particular cities: what they looked like, their inhabitants, their rituals, but will also engage in an extensive look at theories of what cities are and how they have shaped the mentalities of those dwelling in them. Is there an urban personality? Are cities the zones of cultural and artistic dynamism? Do cities create freedom or restrictions on human life? What are the environmental impacts of cities? For their semester-long project, each student will select one particular city on which he/she will focus: possibilities include Rome, Delhi, Beijing, Babylon, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Paris, Tenochtitlan/Mexico City, and many others.

This course examines the history of interactions between Greek and Persians cultures in the 6th - 4th centuries BCE through the use of ancient texts and archaeological discoveries. Frequent competitors in the political arena, Greece and Persia came to represent to the clash of two civilizations, east and west. The primary focus of the course are the historical, political, religious, and cultural aspects of the Persian empire and Greece in the context of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Ancient Near East. Additionally, the course concentrates on iconography most representative of the two entities, their literary heritage, social history as it relates to the notion of the other, as well as such issues as the status and role of women and minorities.

Civic humanism refers to a cluster of themes in Western political thought emphasizing the active, engaged life of the citizen and the cultivation of civic “virtue.” This course examines the development of civic humanism in Western political thought from ancient through Early Modern times, the varieties of civic humanist thought (communitarian and juridical), and the evolving attitudes of civic humanist writers towards the emergence of commercial society. Authors studied may include Aristotle, Cicero, Niccolo Machiavelli, John Milton, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine.

Throughout history, humans in many parts of the world have dealt with calamity and expressed their fears of the unknown through beliefs in the inevitable end of the world and its eventual radical renewal. Such eschatological imagination, accompanied by distinct imagery, came to be known as “apocalypticism.” Although ancient in origin, apocalyptic thought has had a remarkable staying power affecting both religious and non-religious sensibilities in the modern world. This course critically investigates ancient apocalyptic traditions in order to describe and evaluate their contexts, purpose, worldview, terminology, and the communities in which they originated. Using primary and secondary Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic–among others– sources, students explore sociological, religious, and political dimensions of apocalypticism as a mindset and a literary genre with its own unique set of terminology and structure. The seminar also address how apocalyptic anxiety manifested itself in modern history and “changed the spirit of an age.”

A survey of the hidden origins of Europe in the period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance of the 12th century. This course begins with Roman explorations into barbarian Europe (Tacitus, Agricola, and Germania) and looks at the movements and settlement of various tribes (Goths, Franks, Huns) that became the nations of Europe. It covers the great epics such as Beowulf, Song of Roland, Niebelungenlied, or Scandinavian sagas of Grettir, the Volsungs, or Burnt Njal. Religious writings running from St. Augustine (The City of God) through the pious De Contemptu Mundi of many popes and finally to the Vatican Councils are covered. Finally, this course looks at medieval science in writers such as Isidore of Seville.

In addition to exploring salient technological achievements such as bronze metallurgy and chariot construction, the main focus of this course is on archetypical literary genres, conventions, and themes in pre-dynastic China. Attention is paid to the origin and development of the Chinese writing system, the format and materials of early manuscripts, as well as the emergence of ink-brush calligraphy as a uniquely Sinitic art form. The beginnings of ethical thinking, sayings of Confucius, and excerpts from the books of Mengzi, Mozi, and Zhuangzi are critically analyzed. Special emphasis is placed on political theories, found in the writings of Laozi, Xunzi, and Han Feizi, which support an autocratic merit-based system of government.

This course examines the political and social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic across the globe and in the United States, comparing this event with previous pandemics such as HIV/AIDS, 1918 Influenza, cholera, and the Black Death. How do existing conditions and mentalities (inequality, social divisions, community formation, etc.) affect and reflect the response to the outbreak of disease? How does a crisis like a pandemic fundamentally alter such conditions and realities? What changes can we expect from COVID-19? Readings include background and primary source accounts on historical epidemics, as well as articles, essays, online materials, and videos from the current COVID-19 crisis. Students engage with this material through seminar discussion, research, group projects, creative and analytical responses, and personal reflection incorporating their own experience of the pandemic.

The United States as a political formation, physical space, and cultural ideal has been shaped by its encounters with other nations. This course examines American civilization from the late eighteenth through the twentieth centuries as it was wrought on a world stage, through dialog as well as violent conflict at and beyond its borders. It focuses on the role of ideas about the frontier, manifest destiny, and American exceptionalism in the formation of the US; the expansion of settlement and influence westward and into the Pacific; immigration; war and commercial enterprise abroad; and the symbiotic relationship between foreign affairs and domestic culture.

This course begins with some representative Enlightenment thinkers in various fields and genres (Bacon, Newton, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Jefferson, de Sade). The second part of the course focuses upon some traditional critiques of the Enlightenment found in the writings of the Romantics and the German Idealist philosophers, as well as in the works of various nationalist, Marxist, and conservative writers. After considering the very different approaches to the Enlightenment of Nietzsche, William Morris, and Dostoevsky, the course examines contemporary American “culture wars” as a battle over the legacy of the Enlightenment.

This course explores ways of conceptualizing the Russian experience in the 20th and 21st centuries, spanning the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. While the creation and evolution of the socialist state and the Cold War is covered, the primary focus is on the period from the 1970s onward: stagnation under Brezhnev; glasnost and perestroika in the 1980s; the economic, cultural, and political shock of transition to a market economy in the 1990s; and Russia's quasi-authoritarian landscape under Putin. Drawing on the work of sociologists, anthropologists, and historians, themes pertaining to everyday life, identity, political culture, stratification, public and private spheres, socialization, and the role of ideas, images, symbols, and rituals in relations of power are focused on. Students look at empirical studies on Russia through a sociological lens.

Covers the history of socialism, extending from the early Utopian socialists, to the writings of Karl Marx, to the American labor movement, and up to and including the current presidential election. This course discuss and engage in the debates within the socialist movement: between reformers and revolutionaries in the Soviet Union, during the American Civil Rights movement, and elsewhere. The course explores the possibility of a contemporary socialism that addresses the problems besetting capitalism: environmental disasters, racial and sexual oppression, and income inequality.

This course is an introduction to the literature, music, and ideology of African Americans as a specific culture in the New World. Beginning with the music and literature of the Slave Narrative and extending through the congregational singing of the Civil Right Movements in the 20th century and more current examples of the signature of survival. The course asks the student to read, perform, and lead discussions of historic text exploring the nature of American society's engagement with the ideals of diversity.

This course in the history of science, medicine, and American culture examines scientific ideas about race, sex, sexuality, and heredity form the early nineteenth century through the present. Scientific and medical ideas about differences in anatomy, physiology and psychology have shaped social norms, public policy, and the development of identity. To better understand these processes, students examine the ways in which scientific ideas about difference have evolved and persisted in American culture (as well as in Western Europe, occasionally, whose intellectual cultures informed American scientific and medical discourse). Authoritative scientific arguments about what makes people different from one another and what these differences mean has taken many forms. In particular, the historical intersections of scientific, medical, and popular ideas about differences in bodies and behavior, the relationship between ideas and heredity and the evolution of sexual mores, gender norms, definitions of deviance, and the ways the exotic, the beautiful, the monstrous, and the pathological have been constructed and culturally and politically embedded is examined.

Surveys modern conceptions of political violence through direct engagement with primary texts. The course follows a broadly chronological order and considers a wide array of theoretical texts deriving from and dealing with a range of modern historical matters of political violence—from state-sponsored violence and popular uprisings to mass extermination and anti-colonial revolutions. Major themes for discussion and debate include the distinction between political violence and warfare; the relationship between violence, national identity, and the rise of modern states; the causes and consequences of violence as a form of political contestation; the rise of the police as a modern institution of violence; the dynamic interaction of terrorism and torture in modern warfare; the correlation of various ideologies (based on religious communities and texts, scientific discourses on health and hygiene, and rhetoric of progress and enlightenment, etc.) to political violence; and alternatives to violence within political discourse. Most readings come from leading modern theorists of violence. Authors whose authority stems from a personal relationship to political violence (purveyor, victim, witness) are considered. The goal of the course is to provide the student with both a general background in the modern intellectual history of political violence, and a deep understanding of the problems and challenges political violence poses for the contemporary world.

From Aristophanes’ Lysistrata in 410 BC to the early Quakers, from The Beatitudes of Jesus to the writings of Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King, the vision of peace has been one of the great hopes of mankind. In times of war, who are the peacemakers? This course examines the seminal writings of the advocates of peace and nonviolent solutions to political conflict, from the ancient Greeks to the 21st century. The course questions the received wisdom, challenges conventional assumptions, and envisions our way toward a just and lasting realization of peaceful societies in the century to come.

The violent revolutions and uprisings of the 19th and 20th centuries base many of their revolutionary ideologies in the ideas of secularism that characterized the enlightenment and informed 19th and 20th century ideology. This course traces some of the dominant ideas and movements that defined and fed revolutionary fervor and culminated in revolutionary actions from the 18th century to the present, where revolution is characterized by fragmentation, competing schools of thought, and movements, and in some cases a return to a religious order. To understand what kinds of epistemologies (knowledge-forming ideas) dominated and influenced the worldview of the writers and thinkers, scientists, artists, and activists, students immerse themselves in the intellectual climate of the time. This course is interdisciplinary and therefore looks beyond the ideas of revolutions, cultural revolutions, social movements, and the tenor of revolutionary ideas in de-colonizing nations in a variety of texts — ranging from literature, the arts, and philosophy to political and economic theory.

For the 10000 years since human beings first started living in complex societies, civilization has had its supporters and its detractors. For some, being human necessarily means striving to create, to build, to order, to civilize. Others have attempted to reject or critique civilization by returning to the wilderness and celebrating the natural over the constructed world. In all, defining the civilized has been a fundamental part of to defining the modern. This course investigates and interrogates the intellectual history of the concept of civilization, reading both those who have sought to define and celebrate it, and those who have, in some way, rejected it. Readings and topics may include: the pros and cons of the Agricultural Revolution, Early Christian wilderness saints, medieval Wildman legends, Norbert Elias's "Civilizing Process," Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents," living 'off the grid' and John Krakauer's "Into the Wild."

What is the best political state in which humans should live? What form of state delivers and protects individual freedom best? Is individual human freedom even a desirable political goal or concern in the first place? What can ensure peaceful cohabitation of diverse populations within a state? What can ensure peaceful cohabitation between nations? What political constitution is best equipped to achieve economic prosperity? Alternately, what form of state is most suited to fostering great cultural achievements? What makes for the most tolerant state? When, if ever, is political, cultural or religious tolerance excessive? These are some of the most significant and vexing questions that recur among political theorists over the past 2 centuries. This course examines the writings of modern and contemporary political theorists and consider their- and our- responses to these urgent questions, among others.

This course examines the recent literature concerning the emergence of print culture since the introduction of moveable print to Western Europe in the 15th century. Particular themes and issues explored include the relationship of the new media of the printed book to the existing media of orality and manuscript, the social, economic, and political circumstances under which books were produced and consumed, and the evolving nature of reading practices.

All historical societies have routinely described collective groups of people as primary actors in political and community life. Current politicians invoke "the American people”; pollsters and historians speak of a community's public opinion; medieval chronicles and modern newspapers alike describe scenes of mass hysteria, the dangerous rabble, and other similar manifestations of a sort of collective will. This course discusses the phenomenon of crowds, riots, and the mass and the various theories that have been developed to explain them. Topics include: theorizations of the crowd and the collective, mass hysteria and fear, demonstrations, sociological/mathematical modeling of crowd dynamics, the "flash mob," and the relationship of the individual with mass society. Includes readings from Plato, Marx, Rousseau’s concept of the General Will, Freudian studies of the collective psychology such as Gustave Le Bon, Canetti, contemporary sociological studies, and Existentialist literature, as well as materials from other media such as the 1928 classic film The Crowd, supplemented by field studies of crowds in action and other activities.

Surveys the history of commerce: the exchange of goods, services, and ideas for profit concentrating on the early modern beginnings of global trade through contemporary systems of digital exchange within a supposed knowledge economy in the global North. Students investigate the social context of production and sale, including gendered, racially based, and classed forms of labor as well as negotiated conceptions of value and fair exchange and the development of influential national business systems (e.g., the East India Company, Wedgwood, Toyota). This course traces the historical genealogy of fixtures of contemporary business such as capitalism, mass production, labor migration, the notion of “the economy” as a discrete object, banking, debt, intellectual property, marketing, the “start-up,” and the “gig" economy.

Examines the contested nature of historical inquiry and narrative during the past 100 years, addressing a number of central themes: what is the nature of the historian’s craft, and what is the relationship of historical research and writing to art, literature, and the social sciences? What is the role of moral judgment in historical inquiry, and what ethical duties must historians consider in interpreting the past? What is the nature of historical “truth,” and on what basis does the historian make truth claims? What is the nature of the historical “record,” and what constitutes historical evidence? What is the relationship of theory to historical practice, and has the use of theory enhanced or hindered our understanding of the past?

This course is an exploration into Marxist theory. The primary focus of the course is the work of Karl Marx, both his own and those written with his colleague Friedrich Engels. Students will gain a basic understanding of the key concepts and theories, such as alienation, exploitation, fetishism, dialectic, historical materialism, surplus value, wage-labor, class struggle, and social revolution. The goal of the course will be to break through the misunderstandings and myths which surround Marxist theory, first by understanding Marx’s thought, then of those who came after.

In 1348, the disease that would be called the Black Death swept west from Central Asia to Europe, where it quickly annihilated up to a third of Europe’s population in the span of one short year. This was neither the first nor the last occurrence of this dread disease in world history. The effects of the plague on the social fabric of the societies with which it came into contact were considerable, but so were the psychic effects, and the intellectual and artistic worlds felt compelled to attempt to understand what the plague was, as well as its grander philosophical and moral implications. This course studies some of those efforts, with discussions of readings from Boccaccio, Defoe, Villon, Camus, danse macabre and grotesque literature, artistic responses, and the necessary social background of the Black Death and theories about the impact of disease in history from writers such as William McNeill, Jared Diamond, and others.

What is the relationship of the perfect and the impossible with the imperfect and the immediate world? What is the commitment of those imagining utopia to their visions? What is the purpose of utopian literature? What role has it played in the development of political thought? Intellectuals and dreamers throughout history have imagined utopias - perfect worlds in which the moral and social problems that eternally plague human societies are absent. Imaginings of utopia have produced some of the most vivid and profound religious, political and artistic literature in history, and real-world efforts to create utopia have resulted in social experiments in better living both tragic and fantastic. This course investigates many of the expressions of utopia in human history, beginning with the ancient writings of the Bible and Plato and continuing to the present day. Medieval millennia heretical movements, Renaissance political manifestos, modern revolutionary texts and poems, futurist and science fiction texts, art and films, dystopian writings, and cult, fundamentalist, and environmental beliefs also discussed. While Utopian literature has been a major theme in Western culture, similar prophetic vision movements and expressions in non-Western societies, including the Maya, in African, anti-European struggles, and in the Middle and Far East discussed. The topic of utopia allows for true cross-disciplinary study, as it combines literature, political philosophy, social science, and history; utopian writing straddles several genres and forms, such that it has become its own genre of literature.

It is often said that totalitarian societies are characterized by propaganda and control of symbolic productions, while democratic societies maximize freedom of belief and expression. This course begins with the opposite assertion -- propaganda and thought control are, in fact, the cornerstone of democratic societies. In societies where governments and moneyed elites cannot easily use brute force to control people, they must adopt more subtle means of control, and in the 20th and 21st centuries this has been the control of thought through carefully designed spectacles and constructed meanings of contemporary events. This is not to say that force isn’t used in democratic societies, but an important part of the constructed meaning of “democracy” is that it is not used. While totalitarian societies control bodies, democratic societies control people’s minds. This is the lesson of George Orwell’s 1984. The contest over symbols and meanings in so-called “free or open societies” is therefore more crucial than it is in “closed societies.” Thus, public relations and propaganda have merged in the 20th century with news reporting and journalism so that now they are completely indistinguishable, or, to say it another way, most major journalism is in reality public relations. One of the founders of public relations, Edward Bernays, wrote that, “The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process.”

This course surveys the development, since the mid-nineteenth century, of mostly American museums focused on natural history and ethnography as sites of research and public engagement. After focusing on networks of collection and the establishment of metropolitan museums for displaying the goods of scientific fieldwork and imperial activity, investigate the politics of collecting, what it means to present things as “natural,” humans as museum objects versus subjects, and the ongoing roles of museums as sites of preservation, education, and public memory. Visits to museums in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. will provide opportunities to observe firsthand how curators have dealt with these issues and how the museums function as a result.

Write poems, stories, essays, and scripts while focusing on the fundamental elements of a variety of genres, learning from the examples of a spectrum of prose writers, poets and dramatists. Topics include experimenting with character and scene development, narrative strategies, dialogue, point of view, autobiography, time and space, poetic compression, form, and the documentary practices of journalist. The work familiarizes students with the many ways writers turn experience into expression and form into meaning. Visiting guest writers may offer observations in their respective crafts.

Engages historic and contemporary uses of language in the arts, moving beyond words as simply descriptive tools and toward an understanding of the plasticity and contingency of language. Genres explored include automatic writing, various uses of appropriation in poetry and visual art, the artist's statement, and the interview. Texts include selections from Conversing with Cage, Dialogues with Duchamp, Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader; I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, and others.

This course is an introduction to translation not only as an artistic act but also as a means of honing of one’s own literary craft and cross-cultural understanding. Reading knowledge of a foreign language is required (characters).

Serves as an introduction to Colonial literature in the canonized male and the lesser-mapped female traditions. While works such as Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, and A Passage to India have been linked with the Imperialist project of empire, works like Jane Eyre and Orlando have only recently come under similar critical scrutiny. The female Colonial legacy — in which women have traditionally held a more precarious position with respect to nation building — has perhaps been less charted because women were located on a continuum of simultaneous oppression and domination within empire-building. This course serves as an overview and introduction to Colonial texts by juxtaposing men’s and women’s Colonial writing to study how the writers represented (or omitted) Colonialism, and how the ideologies of Empire surface or are critiqued in their works. Students read and analyze the literature in its socio-political context and focus particularly on the contradictions and paradoxes of nation-building and gendered and racialized involvement in the projects of Colonialism.

This course is concerned with the nature of language and communication; it considers the history of the English language, with particular emphasis on the following areas: phonology (the patterning of sounds); morphology (the structure of words); syntax (the structure of sentences); semantics (the meaning of words); pragmatics (language in context), and etymology (the origins of words). Students explore the nature of language variation (dialects and idiolects), language change over time, the psychology of language, and the science of forensic linguistics. Students are introduced to the structure of English words of classical origin, including the common forms and rules by which their forms are derived. Students may expect to achieve substantial enrichment of their vocabulary while learning about etymology, semantic change, and the abstract rules of English word formation.

Shakespearean drama – including history, comedy, and tragedy – serves as the anchoring focus of this course. Read and discuss Shakespeare’s playwriting alongside contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, with particular attention to the historical and cultural conditions informing their work. Explore topics like social class, familial relations, human sexuality and selfhood, as depicted in early modern literature. In turn, students consider how those representations might inform our understanding of society today.

This course focuses on the origins of western philosophy and the pre-history of superstition and religion, considering the origins and tenets of hermetic belief systems such as alchemy, the occult, Kabbalah, freemasonry, and other gnostic traditions and styles of thought.

Focus is the Hebrew Bible in English translation. Students become familiar with the great stories and sublime poetry of the Hebrew Bible and learn what modern scholars/translators have to teach us about the making of the Bible, and how it can be read as literature and how it was read, through millennia, as a source for religion and art. Students come to appreciate the decisive significance in Western history, and in the English-speaking world in particular, of the translation of the Bible. Translations are the King James Version, sections of the Tyndale Bible, and contemporary literary translations by David Rosenberg, Robert Alter, and Ariel and Chana Bloch. Students engage sections of Genesis, Exodus, Judges (Samson story), 1, 2 Samuel (story of David), Jonah, Job, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and the Prophets.

This course introduces the initiate poet to the basic poetical forms and the tradition of poetry in America in English. However, it focuses on developing the student’s facility to think critically and use language in ever more innovative ways as a transferable strategy for engaging creativity as a process. Requirements include portfolio assignment poems, one analytical peer essay review, one analytical essay based on assigned texts and two copies of a ten-page chapbook of original poetry to be celebrated at two required public readings with classmates.

In this course students read the works of salient contemporary authors who have contributed richly to the art of prose fiction. The first half of the semester is devoted to novels and stories that engage with historical subjects in some fashion. Students consider how these books reflect the concerns and pressures of the present, what, if anything, makes them “post-modern”, and what they have to say about this country’s history and literary tradition. In the second half of the term, students turn to fiction set more or less in the present—books that give shape to the anxieties, stresses and absurdities of contemporary life.

In this course, students will read and analyze short stories from around the world, both in English and in translation. We will consider the development of the short story as a significant literary form and a space for aesthetic innovation and ideological expression.

Why do cunning and guileful characters figure so prominently in Greek myth and epic? Does Greek philosophy begin with ruse? The purpose of this course is to explore the ancient Greek fascination with cunning and to discover its place in Greek literary and intellectual culture. Readings include myth, Homer's works, Pre-Socratic philosophy, Plato, Greek tragedy, as well as Aesop's fables.

Intellectual history involves the study of philosophers, intellectuals, artists and traditions of thought in their cultural and societal settings, with special attention to understanding the causes of intellectual change, the statics of intellectual traditions, and the dynamics of intellectual movements. This course focuses on the literature and history of the Victorian period and its importance in the modern Western intellectual tradition. In addition to poetry and literature, the course studies social and historical texts from the period, both "official" and demotic, including crime statistics, and looks at the origins of photography, the flourishing Victorian underworld, political and religious influences, and the vicissitudes of Colonialism and the power of the British Empire.

Primary sources created by writers, activists, and thinkers from diverse parts of the Americas are considered along with reaction and influence. Poems, essays, short stories, video, and autobiographies are examined in conjunction with secondary sources anchoring these voices in historical context.

Today’s folklore is not restricted to rural communities but may commonly be found in cities, and, rather than dying out, it is still part of the learning of all groups from family units to nations, albeit changing in form and function. Folklore as a creative activity and as a body of uncriticized or unverifiable assertions and beliefs has not vanished. Folklore has come to be regarded as part of the human learning process and an important source of information about the history of human life. It is a complex and subtle social phenomenon having to do with the production and transmission of narratives. In this course, students study contemporary ideas and beliefs, traditions, narratives, legends and anecdotes from the perspectives of anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, and literature.

Semiotics is the study of signs and sign systems. Language is the most elaborate and pervasive of sign systems, but it is far from the only one — images, clothes, advertising, sports, social behavior, in fact almost all cultural expression may be considered to be governed by an intricate network of signs out of which “meaning” and “significance” arise. This course explores a range of signs and sign systems in an attempt to understand the codes they embody and the principles that govern their creation and operation.

This multi-genre creative writing course will reflect on representations of women and illness in narratives from different media. Students will read, explicate, and generate their own writing experiments in response to several of these texts.

Designed to provide students the opportunity to develop their creative and analytical abilities through the practice of screenwriting and to the basic formal structures common to all dramatic writing. Each week, students approach screenwriting through a new set of workshop exercises designed to both enhance your creative imagination and your understanding of the form.

Beginning with the anti-academic reactions of Beat poetry, contemporary American poetry has often been concerned with subverting the theories and criticisms of poetry in favor of philosophically and politically charged poetry that breaks down literary canons. Such subversion has created a schism between elitist and populist poets. In this course, students read, discuss, and write about contemporary American poetry after the Second World War, focusing largely on poets, formal and avant-garde, who are living and writing today. Poets covered may include Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Sylvia Plath, Sherman Alexie, and Lyn Hejinian, among others.

Edgar Allan Poe is usually regarded as a writer of short horror stories, but his range and influence is actually far wider. He was an innovator and inventor of a number of popular genres, and his work offers us valuable insight into philosophy and psychology. Beyond this, he had a huge impact on literary and cultural history. His writing was central to the development of Symbolist poetry, modernist painting and illustration, film, psychoanalysis, and literary theory. This focuses mainly on Poe’s works of what he described as the “Grotesque and the Arabesque,” including his Gothic tales of doubling and haunting, his tales of sensation, his philosophical speculations, and selected poems and criticism. The work of his best-known illustrators, watch movies based on his works, and trace his legacy in Baltimore are also considered.

In this poetry writing course, students collectively engage in poises—the process of making—by balancing tradition with innovation, curiosity with critical thinking, and discipline with play. As a foundation for writing, students consider 20th and 21st century poems and poetry collections (with occasional poems from other time periods), along with a few works in other mediums.

This course will be devoted to the work of a particular author (or group of authors) to be considered in socio-historical, literary, philosophical and critical contexts

Black American music has long inspired writers, gifting them with new aesthetic moves and providing insights into the unique dynamics of American cultural life. In addition to influential blues and jazz recordings, we will encounter essays, poetry, drama, and fiction arising from imaginative engagement with these musical traditions.

Writing is important in all Humanistic Studies classes, but this class takes a practical stance. With publication as a goal, we will write for journals, blogs, conferences, and zines. Each student will produce and refine three essays, with the help of workshop-style critiques and selected readings. We will focus our energy in particular on art and cultural criticism, taking as our subjects of inquiry selected works of visual art, film, literature, and performance, as well as certain cultural phenomena. As we read the work of influential critics and write our own essays, we will consider the purpose, value, and potential of criticism, and strive to develop our own unique critical voices.

Many filmmakers begin their careers with short films. Short films allow new filmmakers to fully practice and display their craft with limited resources. But short filmmaking is a distinct form in its own right. The course provides instruction in general screenwriting while focusing on the specific techniques used to make engaging shorts. This writing-intensive course examines the elements particular to screenwriting for short films via lectures, screenings, writing assignments and in-class readings/critiques. Topics include the history of short-films, idea generation, three act structure, creating compelling characters, and dramatic scene construction. Students complete several writing projects and deliver a production-worthy 8-15 page screenplay by the end of the semester.

Examines the social history of masculinity, beginning with a survey of the goals, methods, and controversies in the growing field of gender studies and men’s studies. Students use theoretical and literary texts to analyze the construction of masculinity as a concept in relation to race, class, and sexual orientation.

This course offers a chance for in-depth study of a seminal 20th-century thinker. Texts include The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Moses and Monotheism, Totem and Taboo, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

This workshop is for students who already possess a basic understanding of narrative writing techniques. Readings and assignments provide an opportunity to explore the craft of both traditional and experimental forms of short fiction. A significant portion of class time is devoted to sharing and discussing student work.

Examines the contributions of feminist theories to the cultural understanding of power and oppression and to the struggle for social justice. Emphasis is on race, class, and gender as intersecting variables in a matrix of domination. Special attention is made to practical applications of theories for creative artists.

Starting with a critique of the hegemony of translation and the term “Latin America”, along with a foundational overview of LATAM literary movements, this literature course dives into English translations of contemporary short stories, poetry, and novels from the vast area known as Latin America.

Study salient works of American fiction published in the second half of the twentieth century (primarily in the fifties, sixties and seventies). Discussions consider the literature's relationship to cultural and historical currents of the era, such as the Cold War, America's imperialist projects abroad, the struggle for Civil Rights, "the sexual revolution", feminist thought, and the nation's growing affluence).

This course considers the historical body of "rejected knowledge", mainly associated with magic and divination, that has been accepted neither by the scientific establishment nor by orthodox religious authorities, including: Gnosticism, hermeticism; alchemy; sacred Grail traditions; astrology, spiritual mediumship.

The advanced topics courses offer students opportunities to go deeply into a particular genre. Where the emphasis in introductory and intermediate writing workshops is on exploration, experiment and on developing a critical sensibility, the advanced courses invite a commitment to a specific body of work: a collection of poems; personal or critical essays; a novella or collection of short stories. Each semester faculty teaching these courses offer specific, focused topics for their particular course.

This course focuses on mainly American and British narratives of true crime in non-fiction, essay, and documentary (as distinct from fictional crime narratives, mysteries, thrillers and detective fiction). Drawing on the earlier discourses of confession, memoir and speculation, true crime first received attention as a form of literature with the publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), and has since diversified into a variety of other media, including documentary film, essay, and graphic novel. In this course, students consider how these texts shed light on the process of justice and law enforcement (and their deficiencies), and investigate why stories of real-life murder and mystery strike such a deep chord in their audiences. Through the study of indicative texts and high-profile crimes from the 1950s to the present day, consider how our feelings about real-life crime can help us understand how a culture defines itself by its taboos and transgressors.

This advanced course is designed for students who are interested in contemporary literature that uses both words and pictures. Students discuss assigned works to create and workshop their own process-driven comics. Readings include five full-length comics. These works are chosen specifically to depart from graphic novels, while representing a range of formats present in the last 30 years of comics publishing. Cultural criticism and comics theory as it applies to the texts are explored.

The question of women writing in the global south is linked to issues of difference, othering, colonization, subjugation, and religious fundamentalism, among others. This course introduces work that directly addresses the conditions of women under Islamist, patriarchal, and postcolonial rule. To gain insight into the intertwined nature of what has been called (and constructed as) the "Orient" and the "Occident," and to assess critically our own involvement in some of the issues that women in the global south face, students read novels and explore in scholarly work the ramifications of notions such as "Orientalism" and the conditions of post- and neo-colonialism, and the emergent religious fundamentalisms that shape the ways women live and tell their stories. This course analyzes the intersections of nation, religion, gender/sex/sexuality, class/caste, and race/ethnicity and study how they are represented in the readings.

Where does nature begin or end? What is the natural? What do eco-terrorism, global warming, and the poisoning of the oceans and the Earth have to do with art? Are they art? Engage with naturalists and other writers and thinkers from Aldo Leopold’s seminal work to contemporary authors like Annie Dillard, Tom Horton, Dianne Ackerman, and David Foster Wallace.

This seminar surveys the literary and intellectual history of America’s late nineteenth century. During this time, the abolitionist movement reached its apex, Lincoln emancipated the slaves, the North defeated the Confederacy, and Reconstruction came to the South. The country witnessed the rise of the women’s suffragist movement, the advent of Darwinian thought and great leaps in technology and industry. In short, the United States became modern in the late nineteenth century, and the nation’s writers played a vital role in advancing narratives, aesthetics and ideas that would change how Americans think.

Those who work in the genre of creative nonfiction recognize that writing can be creative while using factual materials. This course focuses on learning and refining the craft of creative nonfiction through the development of personal narratives. Students work on refining the traditional techniques of journalism and reportage, while maintaining a strong and special individuality, and a singularly distinctive voice. They read a series of essays that which all possess this unique subjectivity of focus, concept, context, and point of view, and analyze the way in which information is presented and defined. The final project includes the completion of a longer narrative or a series of shorter narratives.

Students in this seminar will consider The Wire, a "television novel" about crime in Baltimore, alongside the literary tradition of naturalism. Like the American naturalist writers of the early 20th century, The Wire suggests that individuals are captive to powerful social forces and political structures beyond their control. The program also shares with the naturalists an interest in the urban poor, abuses of power and social hierarchies. As we read from naturalists texts and view HBO's groundbreaking series, we will investigate the relationship between naturalism and political advocacy, representations of the poor by the privileged, and the intellectual underpinnings and consequences of naturalism. Possible readings include novels and stories by John Dos Passos, Richard Wright and Richard Price. We will also view the first three of the five seasons of "The Wire".

In this course, using Sigmund Freud's famous essay as a springboard, students explore various manifestations of the Uncanny as it appears in fiction, aesthetics, architecture, poetry and film, with particular attention to the inflection of the Uncanny in the literary arts. In an attempt to get to the root of the question posed by the Uncanny - how can something be both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time? --we will consider phenomena that are marginal, liminal, obscure, threatening and subversive - all characteristics can be also found in familiar and apparently harmless everyday phenomena.

This course examines the different movements initiated for the reform of western Christendom in late medieval and early modern Europe. The course will examine the medieval, scholastic, and renaissance contexts of the reformations of the sixteenth century, as well as the thought of the leading reformers. These will include, not only the major figures of the Protestant Reformation, but also those calling for internal reform from within the Catholic Church. Particular readings will include selections from the writings of such authors as Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Ignatius Loyola, as well as the decrees of the Council of Trent.

This course surveys the rich culture of religions that grew in the eastern Mediterranean, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in their historical framework; survey precursor pagan religions in Egypt, Israel, Persia, and Greece before considering the early development of Christianity and Islam. This course examines both the complex world-views of these religious traditions, and the role they played in everyday life, dealing directly with the texts, rituals, and religious symbols. Special attention is paid in a comparative manner to the development of law derived from religious texts.

This course examines ancient and early medieval philosophy primarily through the major works of Plato and Aristotle, but with Augustine and Aquinas as well. Our focus will be primarily on Plato and Aristotle as they, in many ways, set the agenda for many of the questions still thought fundamental to philosophical inquiry though they approached these questions in a distinctive spirit from that of most modern philosophers. In particular, they thought of philosophy less as a conceptual exercise and more as a way of life indeed, as the best way. The main topics we will cover in our effort to make sense of Plato and Aristotle will be: ethical virtue and its relation to the good life (happiness), the soul and its relation to the body, and the objects and nature of knowledge. The main topics to be taken up with regard to Augustine and Aquinas, who are primarily concerned with the fall and our possibility of salvation are: sex, death, time and free will. Throughout we will make an effort to flesh out the nature of the social and political climate that set the stage for these philosophers and their ideas.

This course provides an opportunity to appreciate the Quran and hadith as foundational texts for multiple intellectual traditions and thinkers on theology, law, philosophy, mysticism, and political thought, from 800 AD to 1800, from Spain to North Africa to Iran, to the Indian sub- continent. As an exploration in intellectual history, students attempts to understand social and political history through readings in literature, philosophy, and the arts. While participants in this course certainly read primary texts and works that have gained the status of classics, the chief goal of this course is to introduce students to critical frameworks that allow them to situate intellectual histories and legacies into larger processes of empire making and the attendant violence that accompanies such processes. Thus more recent texts by scholars that engage longstanding (mis)-understandings of Islam and Muslims historically are integrated throughout the course and serve to caution students and re-orient how they can more productively engage with the intellectual legacies of another era. The class takes a decolonizing approach to exploring the intellectual thoughts of Muslims (and others) across historical time periods, and thus critical and creative thinking is required for this collective commitment. At stake throughout this course is a persistent need to interrogate the criteria for what/who gets the designation Islamic and/or Muslim, and what makes an intellectual history a Muslim one?

This course introduces basic principles in East Asian philosophy, particularly Confucianism, Daoism, and Zen Buddhism through direct contact with primary texts, including the Analects, the Dao De Jing, and the Zhuangzi. The course also looks at East Asian philosophical principles — such as the transcendent quality of nature — as they appear in select examples of East Asian art, particularly Daoist landscape painting, and especially the unique and unsual art forms of ?? (qi shi), ?? (guai shi), and ?? (suiseki).

Early Greek philosophers posed the fundamental questions that have dominated philosophy for the past two millennia: what is the good? What is happiness? How can I attain happiness? What is the best political arrangement for humans? Is the human soul unique and immortal? What is justice, and why is the pursuit of real justice so often inimical to everyday society? We will explore these and other essential questions in reading from Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus among others, and some of the Greek tragedians.

Takes an interdisciplinary approach to the problem of evil: If God is all good, all knowing, and all powerful, then why is there so much evil and suffering in the world? Readings will include some biblical literature, early Christian thinkers like Ireanaeus and St. Augustine, as well as selected poetry, fiction, and drama, including Voltaire’s Candide, Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, Albert Camus’ The Plague, and others.

Myths attempt to make sense of incomprehensible and powerful forces in the world, the elements, the heavens, the realm of the dead, and human destiny. In these stories, passed through the ages from their origins as oral and communal stories, generations have witnessed the birth of gods and goddesses, immortals who reside apart from humans, procreating, waging war, and intervening in the affairs of mortals. This course examines Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology, and the continental myths of Amazonian and Native American cultures. The course traces the enduring influence of myth on literature, art, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, opera, comic books, and film as we make the case for myth’s vital relevance to our understanding of ourselves today.

How can consciousness be explained? Is conscious experience ultimately reducible to matter, to events and causes in the material world, or is mind substantially different from the material world? The first part of this course examines different accounts of subjective experience, from Descartes to contemporary neurology. We consider contemporary debates concerning whether artificial intelligence provides the right model of the human mind. In the process we ponder famous thought experiments such as “the Chinese room,” and the possibility of zombies, creatures that seem to do everything we do, only they don’t have minds. The second part of the course focuses on accounts of self-consciousness. In addition to learning theories of self-consciousness and higher order thought in the philosophical tradition, we examine important modern literary and cinematic explorations of self-consciousness. The last third of the course tests past and present interpretations of a famous mind that is super-conscious of its own consciousness, the mind of Hamlet. In groups, students learn and apply the principles of different contemporary schools of psychology in order to develop a persuasive account of Hamlet’s self-consciousness and madness.

This course traces and highlights some of the great philosophical thinkers from the late Renaissance up through the Second World War. Philosophers discussed include Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche and Camus. Topics addressed include the nature and possibility of skepticism, knowledge, meaning, morality and laughter.

Examines the development of Existentialism from its roots in the 19th century with thinkers such as Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky to its emergence as a major philosophical movement in the aftermath of the First World War. Students consider the basic elements of the philosophy, its aesthetic implications, and its applications in the fields of psychology and political science as a philosophy of moral freedom. Writers studied include Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Sartre, Camus, Hemingway, Kafka,

Examines changing conceptions of self-hood and human nature and how they have informed political and moral theory since the 17th century. Is human nature constant in all times and places or is it historically contingent and the product of environment? What are the ramifications of modernity’s progressive erosion of the strong conceptions of selfhood that informed classical moral thought? Readings include Descartes, Locke, Bentham, Dostoevsky, Ortega y Gasset, Golding, Sartre, Heidegger, Taylor, Derrida, and MacIntyre.

This course will examine the fundamental themes and principles of Buddhist philosophy, beginning with the early life experiences of Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), continuing through the development of the Hinayana and Mahayana schools of Buddhism, and culminating in the philosophy and way-of-life of Zen Buddhism. Texts will include: The Dhammapada, The Heart of the Buddha, and Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.

Writing women and women’s difference into history is a contradictory project. Too often “women’s thought” is seen as separate or in opposition to men’s thought, rather than in congruence with it. Yet, when looking at the gross of intellectual history survey courses, it becomes all too obvious that women, and feminist thought, are still conspicuously absent from the canon. This course seeks to overcome the bias that there is only a marginal female intellectual tradition that remains outside of “proper” history before the advent of the contemporary women’s movement. This does not involve the exclusion of men from the ranks of liberatory thinkers concerning the woman’s question. When looking at feminist and women’s thought in Europe and the U.S. from the 18th century to the 1970s, it appears that gendered intellectual production is relational. Hence the revolutionary period of the late 18th century attracted men to write about education, citizenship, human rights, and poverty. Enlightenment ideals and the Industrial Revolution had staunch critics in figures like George Sand in France, Mary Shelley in England, and the Romantic salonières Varnhagen, Günderrode, Schlegel-Schelling, and Arnim in Germany. The 19th century has been characterized as solidifying the separation of gendered social spheres for men and women, and many women wrote about and undertook social and philanthropic work in this period. The course examines suffrage and abolitionism as feminist preoccupations in the U.S., nationalism and imperialism as forces that influenced women’s intellectual lives in Europe, and writing on gender and the conditions of the working class. Finally, the focus shifts to Simone de Beauvoir in the mid-20th century in Europe and Betty Friedan in the U.S. as advocates of an active intellectual tradition of thinking about gender and women in the West.

In this course, students study the history, origins, development and transformations of psychoanalytic theory, as handed down from Freud. It starts by examining some precursors to Freudian psychoanalysis, in Greek and Early Modern European philosophy and psychotherapy. Then, the focus shifts to Freud’s work, the basic doctrines of his theory, and its changes over his lifetime. Finally, the developments and transformations in Freudian theory in his followers and successors: Jung, Adler, Rank, Lacan, Kristeva, Klein, among others are examined.

The course draws on the latest scholarship on such diverse traditions as African and Afro- Diasporic, Caribbean and New Orleans Vodou/Voudou/Voodoo syncretism, Hindu Adi- vasi, Shinto, Sami duodji, the Siberian Orochen Reindeer Herders and Hunters, and Hau- denosaunee Great Law of Peace. Critical concepts: indigenous ontologies, sovereignty.

Since the fall of the Communist regimes 20 years ago, it has been taken for granted in the West that the Capitalist economic system is the best possible economic system, indeed, the best by nature, and our destiny as a species. This was not always the preponderant view. For most of its history, Capitalism was not supreme, and its supremacy self-evident, but rather, it knew significant competition—and in many parts of the world, still does. In light of the recent—and devastating—credit crisis that rocked the global economy in 2008, Capitalism’s nature, and its self-evident supremacy, very much came into question. Perhaps, critics wondered, it’s time to reconsider our embrace of bare-knuckled Capitalism in the West; perhaps it is time to consider subtler variations, compromises, hybrids—and evaluate the strengths and drawbacks of the Capitalist system anew. Perhaps it is time to admit what kind of Capitalist economy we have cobbled together—its essential problem might be that it is not in fact very ‘Capitalist’ at all! Imagine that. In this course, we will look at some of the most prominent writings in the ‘canon of Capitalism,’ as well as important contemporary voices critiquing the nature and character of the Capitalist system, and how we have allowed it to develop today.

This course takes up the age old questions pertaining to Beauty. What is it? Where is it found? Who can see it? When? How? Under what conditions? Is Beauty universal? Eternal? Immutable? Does beauty pertain only to art, or to natural objects, too? Or is Beauty an outdated, irrelevant aesthetic norm? We will take up these and other concerns, through a variety of influential authors, including Plato, Susan Sontag, Immanuel Kant, bell hooks, W. F. Hegel, Arthur Danto, and others.

Whether we experience our bodies as the site and center of our being, or we feel we are the proprietors of a shell called “the body,” whether we are at one with it or feel alienated from it, our body is always with us, we are in our body, and we desire to know it. To understand and define it, fix it, liberate it, expose it, invent and imagine “truths” that are inscribed in the flesh, however, we turn, necessarily, to symbolization and language. When studying the body, we therefore recognizes the somatic players in the drama such as skin and bones, hair, organs, ova, semen, blood—but one can be amazed at the stories woven into intricate plots by theorists from a variety of disciplines that offer often strange, often profound, and often literal insights into the body. This course serves as an introduction to the complex and extensive field of body theory, exploring texts that narrate the sexed body, the gendered body, the orgasmic body, the ascetic body, the tortured body, the uncanny body, the raced body, the foreign body, the body in images and film, and the body and technology through a variety of discourses, ranging from religious to scientific discourses, discourses on aesthetics, political activism, cultural theory, and psychoanalysis.

A course in the philosophy of language and interpretation (hermeneutics) that examines what it is to understand a language, and to address fundamental problems in the understanding of oneself, others, and beings who are “wholly other” like gods, or devils as the case may be. Some of the questions addressed: Does the fact that we speak a particular language (that we are situated in a specific culture at a certain time) preclude us from understanding persons who express themselves in a different language, persons with “conceptual schemes” that seem radically different from ours? How does a community based upon an authoritative text, like the Bible or the U.S. Constitution, handle unbridgeable conflicts in interpretation? Why would a god speak to human beings in figures, in a concealed or riddling manner? And how are we to understand such veiled language? Are there certain times when we must be unintelligible to others and even to ourselves? Are there conditions of our humanity which by their nature resist understanding? The thinkers examined may include: Heidegger, Heraclitus, Herodotus, Saint Augustine, Montaigne, and Kierkegaard.

Today, the concerns of Deep Ecology’s movement that started in the Ecological Revolution of the 1960s continue to address climate change with a sense of urgency. Deep Ecology asks deep questions and aims to bring about long-range goals in moving away from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism, calling for a fundamental paradigm shift in perception, values, and lifestyles. There is an urgent need for a new environmental ethic that will fundamentally reorient human relationships to the natural environment. The course examines cross-cultural perspectives of environmental ethics from Western, Eastern, and Indigenous ecological traditions. Readings include current debates on climate change, multicultural survey of ecological ethics from world’s religions, selections from Deep Ecology, and Indigenous perspectives.

Religion is a universal feature of human civilization, and a central motivating factor in much that humans do, how they live, and organize their lives. This course seeks to understand religion as a motivating force, and offer students the opportunity to evaluate it as such. This entails analyzing ideas, arguments and concepts central to religion, or at least many or most religions: the nature of the divine, the afterlife, virtue, the soul, and the like. Other issues of interest to be the interaction of philosophy and theology, the nature of religious language and practice, and the problem of evil. Naturally, a prime consideration in any philosophy of religion class will be the very existence of god, however, consider the prospect of a secular age, and whether humans may be able to live without religion.

An interdisciplinary area of scholarly inquiry in which Islam is not considered a religious, spiritual, or cultural tradition, but rather becomes the focal point of an area of study that explores, through a variety of disciplines and methodologies, how we produce knowledge that is no longer organized by the West/Non-West divide. Students investigate global ways of thinking and being in the world, raises questions about decolonization and postcolonial approaches to understanding the world, and critiques Islamophobia, Euro-centrism, and other forms of Xenophobia. This course introduces materials from a variety of fields, which may include Anthropology, Sociology, Literature, History, Cultural Studies, Critical Studies, and Islamic Studies.

The course introduces students to key ideas of Nietzsche: "God is dead," Dionysian art, eternal recurrence, beyond good and evil, nihilism, the will to power, the diagnosis and overcoming of resentment, the superman. Nietzsche's influence on artists, writers, and philosophers of the last century is considered as we ask what significance Nietzsche's thought may have for us in the 21st century.

How do you describe and picture a god who transcends all names, images, sensuous representations and attributes, and what’s so important about such transcendence? How can you grasp infinity by means of the finite imagination? This course explores the intellectual roots of this problem of the sublime in Judaic thought, in neo-Platonic philosophy and mysticism, and in the aesthetics of the sublime. We explore how different concepts of the sublime spur the poetry of Blake, Dickinson, Crane, and Stevens as well as the “ethical sublime” in post-World War II artists and thinkers such as Celan, Levinas, Rothko, and Anselm Kiefer. We also consult continental and analytic philosophers for light on the problem.

Explores the field of bioethics. Students examine basic moral theory in the writings of Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Mill, and others and review the principal philosophical concepts (autonomy, personhood, justice, beneficence) underpinning ethical considerations as they influence medical research and practice. Special attention is paid to medical ethics history, from Hippocrates to contemporary medical ethics policies and regulations. The course includes case studies and case presentations that identify ethical conflicts, present options, recommend resolutions, and defend/challenge decisions.

This course explores religion and ways of being religious through juxtaposing locative and utopian ways of inhabiting material worlds. Discussions consider the cultural distances between western and indigenous ways of life, and how religious ideas inform and shape cross-cultural modes of consumption. Readings focus on Meso-American religious rituals, Guatemalan woman's life, development of consumerism and its spaces in America, an economic hitman's confessions, and commodification of religion through popular culture. The course encourages students to think creatively about religion and to challenge themselves to think critically as well as self-reflectively about their own culture. Is consumerism a way of life? What does consumerism reveal about Western culture and its core values?

Look at issues and authors prominent in 20th and 21st century political theory. Questions considered include: what is the role and place of religion in the modern liberal democracies? How shall liberal democracies negotiate multi-culturalism, and integrating not so liberal populations? What is the relationship of violence to the modern state? What roles should the government play in alleviating poverty and social ills, and what specific policies are most effective? Why does our democracy in particular suffer increasing apathy, and how does that compare to other regimes? Authors may include Charles Taylor, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Martha Nussbaum, among others.

Engage with the emerging field of animal studies and considers the role played by non-humans in the field of cultural studies, social theory, philosophy and literature. In particular, the history of animal representations in the Western literary tradition, in film, and in popular culture. Also consider the social and cultural implications of pet-keeping, dog shows, animal sacrifice, scientific experimentation, taxidermy, hunting, fur-wearing and meat-eating through recent films, novels, and cultural events that reveal how our interaction with non-human animals shapes the understanding of the human.

In this course, students are introduced first to the fundamentals of astronomy, and building on that foundation, and through the wonders of NASA’s Hubble Telescope, to the wild, wonderful, absolutely beautiful and profoundly mysterious nature of the universe. We shall explore its strange realities as revealed through modern physics. Supernovas, the Big Bang, neutron stars, black holes, extrasolar planets, and even our own tiny solar system. In a lucid manner suitable for the non-specialist, we will explore the impact of quantum theory, elementary particle theory and relativity on our understanding of perhaps the deepest questions of modern science: What is the origin of the universe and where, if anywhere, is it headed? Does the universe have meaning? Is there life on other planets? What is the meaning of time and eternity? Who are we and how did we get here?

The overall goal of this course is to provide students with an understanding of the structure and composition of the earth, and of the processes that are continuously reshaping it. The course material is presented within the context of plate tectonics, geology's unifying theory. Emphasis is given on how we know what we know and students learn to understand the processes that formed the landscapes that they see around them.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the world's foremost scientific body documenting the current status and projected future of climate change on earth and its effects on natural systems and human societies around the world, as well as human and institutional capacities for adaptation and mitigation processes. Each assessment report takes years to complete and represents the work of thousands of researchers from the 195 member nations. This course will read significant portions of the latest IPCC report in detail, along with appropriate additional readings from the peer-reviewed literature in the sciences and social sciences and media coverage of the IPCC's findings.

This course is about birds, bees, slugs, flies, beetles, and small mammals, and the strategic plants they pollinate. Students explore the co-evolution of flowering plants and their pollinators, the idiosyncrasies of many of these core species, and their ecosystem services; provisioning food, clean water, and recycled nutrients. The loss of these symbiotic species would alter the planet and severely compromise mankind's current lifestyle. Animal behavior, botany, physics, chemistry, climate change, agricultural practice, psychology, economics, and politics is discussed. Students research and present unusual topics and observe and interact with a bee hive. Students are challenged to present a poster at a scientific conference on pollinators.

This course explores materials and new media, applying basic principles in chemistry and materials science. Color, tactility, viscosity, flow, and magnetism are among the phenomena examined in materials and consider how to exploit. Students discover the art, architecture, and engineering of molecular forms, discuss the implications of molecular aesthetics, melodies, machines, and structures, and learn how to connect observable macro-scale behaviors and invisible nano-scale (molecular) and microscopic interactions. Historical and contemporary examples of artists innovating with new materials and their mutualistic relationship with chemists will be analyzed and evaluated for their influence on artists practice and impact on society.

This course will introduce students to essential concepts in physics through a visually-based, but rigorous investigation of a range of topics including energy, gravity, mechanics, optics, statics, waves, special relativity theory and how they apply to the environment. This applied problem-solving approach will often be connected to questions of art and design practices. Students will learn about, and at times partially recreate, historical experiments in physics on topics such as optics, kinematics, mechanics, energy, gravity, electricity and waves, and special relativity, among others. It is a course specifically designed for art and design students, but not a "physics for poets" course - that is, the course involves investigation and analysis, rather than a simple discussion of physical concepts. The primary objective of the course is to present students with an understanding of physics, as well as an appreciation of the methodological and thematic relationship between science and art/design.

What is “the environment” and how do we understand our relationship with it? Students will explore different approaches to studying humans’ biophysical environment and apply interdisciplinary perspectives to complex environmental problems with implications for justice and equity such as pollution, ecosystem degradation, global climate change, and more.

Water is fundamental to life on earth. This course introduces students to scientific perspectives on water, including the global water cycle, hydrologic measurements, the watershed concept, aquatic ecology, and exobiology. Students will use these scientific perspectives to examine social dimensions of water such as security and scarcity, conservation, and access conflicts central to environmental and economic injustice.

An introduction to the science of biodiversity. This course introduces the principles of ecology as they are related to biodiversity, including species niches and interactions, micro- and macroevolution, the measurement of biodiversity, and the effects of climate change and human land use practices on habitats, among others. Consideration will also be given to cultural, management and policy approaches that have been taken to address biodiversity issues around the world. This includes an emphasis on considering the ethics and understanding needed to be advocates for the natural world.

This course introduces students to ecological thought by exploring the ecosystem concept, a powerful tool for understanding the phenomena and processes that animate the living earth. Ecosystem science offers one way to read the planet across space, through time, and beyond the human scale, and can provide valuable insights into human entanglements with their environments. Course work including field trips, data collection and analysis, and creating visualizations of ecological processes and systems prepares students to apply the ecosystem concept to questions about climate change, conservation, and environmental justice.

Thoughtful citizenship requires numeracy. This course provides a basic numeracy toolkit wherein students: learn quantitative skills through data organization, analysis, and visualization; develop an eye for good design with data; and learn to approach data critically, using a framework grounded in critical and decolonization studies.

This course covers a range of mathematical and statistical topics needed to think critically and creatively as a consumer or producer of knowledge and information. The goal is to expand students appreciation of mathematical ideas, and facility with their application as powerful tools which have practical and aesthetic purposes. This course explores these connections for artists, creative communicators and designers through lectures, class discussion, and hands-on experience. Topics introduce students to the vocabulary of mathematics and descriptive statistics as a language and as a work of art in itself used to abstract, interpret, analyze, visualize and communicate contemporary and historical human understandings. As an applied mathematics course, it will additionally provide analytical skills that are the foundation of many social science classes in humanistic studies.

Sustainability connotes lasting solutions to environmental problems and privileges harm-reducing and restorative environmental practices. Yet invoked within policy debate and science, and by corporations, "sustainability" reflects a wide variety of meanings and priorities. This course explores scientific dimensions of sustainability discourses in diverse arenas, focusing on scientific reasoning related to habitat conservation, energy infrastructure, manufacturing, food, waste and pollution, natural resources, and the concept of ecological impacts. While focused on the biophysical bases of these discourses, we will encounter some of the contestation and controversy surrounding definitions and realizations of sustainability, preparing students to engage with criticism and application of the sustainability concept in academic and professional settings.

Microbial life is ancient, diverse, ubiquitous, and entangled with every aspect of our lives. This course will explore what we know about life at the microbial scale, how microbes shape the living world, microbial entanglements with human health and society, and life at the extreme margins of habitability. Classroom instruction includes individual student writing and activities, work in small groups and with partners, class discussions, and lecture presentations by the instructor. Students will manipulate and observe microbial life in classroom and outdoor activities on campus, and some class sessions may include field trips on and near the MICA campus and possibly beyond to directly observe microbial influence on ecosystem structure and function.

How do human beings interact with the natural world? How do they think about and describe that experience? This interdisciplinary course pairs learning about fundamental ecological principles with readings from the work of naturalists, environmental thinkers, and creative writers in other related genres. The course considers how writers express their relationship with nature and their environment, but also addresses questions of identity and culture as they relate to the environment, including who has access to natural spaces, who “gets” to write about it, and how “naturalist” and other kinds of environmental writing are defined. Students write and workshop original creative non-fiction essays using ecological studies and natural history experiences as catalysts, with a final written project presented in the medium of their choice.

This course will introduce the principles of ecology as they apply to food systems, and consider the socio-economic, historical, and cultural contexts within which these systems occur. These contexts will focus on groups historically marginalized in the food and farming systems in the United States. Concepts from ecology, evolution, and ecosystem science will be applied to the study of agroecology and the design and management of sustainable production systems. Inquiry in this course will include the consideration of how different disciplines ask and answer questions, and how the disciplines can work together to further understanding. Learning about core ecological principles will be contextualized by a wide range of non-scientific readings around specific agroecological case studies.

This is a collaborative course exploring astrophysics through Animation. Meet scientists from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and explore a concept of their choice associated with the Fermi Space Telescope to turn it into animation. Topics include dark matter, cosmic rays, black holes and more. The course starts with very basic fundamentals of astrophysics and an overview of the phenomena chosen by the students. Those concepts are to be developed and translated into animation. The last 5 weeks will be spent on animation and different ways of projections. Trip to NASA and to the Maryland science center will be part of the class.

This course uses the Anthropocene concept to explore geologic time, the Earth as a complex biophysical system, processes of planetary change, and scientific reasoning. It also examines critical perspectives on the Anthropocene related to climate change, biodiversity, environmental justice, and more.

Geographical information systems (GIS) are computer-based platforms for visualizing and analyzing spatial data and turning them into high quality maps. In this course students learn the principles of GIS through extensive use of ESRI's ArcGIS software. Data used for tutorials and lab assignments come from disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Readings and assignments will also consider the ethical use of data and mapping from a justice perspective. Later in the course, students learn to gather their own data online and use them to tell effective stories with data, integrating text, maps, and images into compelling online projects.

Previously titled Frameworks, Ways of Writing is an introduction to college-level reading and writing. Organized around a central theme, course reading material exposes students to different genres (forms) of written expression with various functions and audiences, e.g., scholarship, short stories (fiction), personal essays, journalism, memoir. As such, HMST 101 explores critical reading, attribution, and ways of writing. As part of their practice of active reading, students develop comprehension skills and increase their information literacy. Ways of writing include the writing process, from initial exploration and articulation of ideas to a polished piece. Students explore attribution, including questions of whose voices and ideas to include, accept, and use and how writers build upon previous work, ethically and practically.

In this course, students whose first language is not English develop their proficiency and fluency in communication about art and design. Students will develop skills and strategies for listening to academic content, practice speaking and paralinguistic communication, and build confidence participating in discussion and critique as well as presenting their ideas to a group. Students will also refine their comprehension of spoken and written material and develop familiarity with visual and cultural studies vocabulary that will help them succeed in their coursework.

The first required class for majors in Humanistic Studies exploring the question of what it means to be a human being through a review of concepts developed by thinkers and writers throughout history and in a global context on the problem of human nature. Students' build analytical reading skills along with substantial experience in research and writing. Readings include texts in literature, philosophy, history, the sciences, as well as an examination of material productions such as art, architecture, states, and nations.

Increasing mastery in English grammar and syntax presents a unique opportunity for language learners. Students practice complex grammatical forms and sentence structures, developing skills to proofread and edit their own writing to produce effective writing in academic and professional contexts.

This course examines the practices of research and community engagement and differences between them; and surveys influential instances of research misconduct in history. Students investigate the ethics of research and engagement, particularly issues of informed consent, institutional authority, researcher positionality, and intellectual property as they apply to working with and learning about other people.

Take part in editing the next issue of Full Bleed, an annual journal devoted to the visual and literary arts. As an assistant editor for the journal, you will gain hands-on publishing experience as we curate and edit original content and collaborate with contributors. Students will also take part in editing a new issue of Scratch, a print publication for new writing by current MICA students. In addition to taking part in the editorial work for Full Bleed and Scratch, students will study other art and literary journals and hear from guest speakers in the publishing industry.

In this interdisciplinary program, you will visit historical national pavilions in the Biennale Gardens and the nearby Arsenale as you witness first-hand the magical transformation of these spaces, including the work of Simon Leigh in the 2022 U.S. pavilion. In addition to exploring the historical sites of the biennale, we will seek out projects and installations located throughout the seductive architecture of this labyrinthine city. You will tour the centuries-old Accademia museum, Peggy Guggenheim’s jewel-like collection of modern art, the creatively curated Mario Fortuny Museum, the François Pinault Collection, and the Prada Foundation to gain insights into the international art scene embedded in Venice. As you absorb the sights and sounds of contemporary Venice, the Murano glass industry, the dramatic mosaic of the Last Judgment in the Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta on Torcello, and Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua, you will practice the craft of art criticism on site. We will also make day trips to nearby towns such as Ferrara, Trieste, and Rovereto. Classes are held both in the classroom and on location throughout the program. Local experts, curators, art historians, and participating artists in this year’s Biennale will provide special lectures. As you experience the sights and sounds of Venice, you will live on the beautiful breezy island of San Servolo, just ten minutes away from the historic Piazza San Marco. Fully equipped with wireless connections, an affordable cafeteria, luxurious grounds, and access to the nearby Lido beaches, San Servolo provides a wonderful balance to the academic side of this program.

Fall and Spring of the senior year, thesis is taught by a single instructor who serves as the mentor for each student’s senior thesis project. The course also focuses on contemporary issues in Humanistic Studies. This serves as a culmination of work done at the lower levels. The thesis project begins very early in the fall with a written proposal by each student. Some students choose research papers; some choose an integrated project linking their studio work with their academic work. Students should undertake a major project that grows organically out of their three years of experience at MICA as a combined Studio Art + Humanistic Studies major.

Students concentrate on their thesis projects. Class presentations and group critiques take place as work progresses; students work toward a public presentation at the senior show.

Provides a survey of literature about the hero’s trip to the underworld, and what the hero learns from the dead that he needs to take back with him to the realm of the living. The course begins with the myths of Orpheus, Hercules, Odysseus, and other heroes who make it, alive, to the underworld and back, and follows with Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, and then Dante’s Inferno. The second half of the course examines variations of this theme in poetry, novels, drama, and film, including the work of Rimbaud, G.B. Shaw, Sartre, Pound, Broch, Monteverdi, Henze, and Birtwistle.