Courses

Fall Semester information

300AA: HoScho AH Sem:King Arthur: Archaeology, History, and Legend

The figure of Arthur as a 'good' king resonates strongly in the historical, mythic, and cultural imagination of the British Isles, Brittany, and beyond. This course examines the material contexts, the early written evidence, and the oral traditions that authors, bards, and artists developed into the epic cycle of Arthur and Camelot. The course starts with Stonehenge and ends with Malory's Morte d'Arthur (1470, printed 1485), a publication that popularized Arthurian tales on a grand scale and whose framework still shapes modern retellings. The course will consider the contradictions and complications of the Arthur cycle, the complex symbolism of its varied characters (e.g., Merlin, Guinevere, Mordred, Morgan le Fay, Percival) and features (e.g., the Round Table, Excalibur, Avalon, the Grail Quest), and their enduring resonance. Students will prepare, present, and lead discussions on assigned materials during the first half of the course, write two papers respectively on the prehistoric and Roman backgrounds for Arthur, and complete their work for 'W' certification with a paper and presentation on a film related to this foundational set of stories about the ideals and burdens of leadership.

300AB: HoScho AH Sem:History, Lineage, and Impact of Sound in Black American Music

An examination of the history and lineage of select African American artists and music through the lens of sound and its influence on generations of creators in American music. A project in sound creation will serve as the culmination. We will listen to artists who have had a profound influence on the way music sounds and explore how creativity, eclecticism, social movements and technology have contributed to the soundscape of America and the world. Synthesis and the component parts of sound creation will offer an opportunity to explore your own creativity.

300BA: HoScho SM Sem:Evolution and Human Nature

The Philosopher Daniel Dennett once called evolution "the single best idea anyone ever had." If this claim has any merit, then surely evolutionary perspectives can shed light on important questions about human nature in general, and issues like cooperation, aggression, sex and gender, aesthetics, emotion, cognition, moral judgments, and environmental concerns in particular. We will look at current and historical attempts to develop scientific accounts of human nature, and examine their strengths, weaknesses, and motivations.  The course offers an opportunity to explore how the "single best idea anyone ever had" can be applied to human nature and important contemporary concerns.

300BB: HoScho SM Sem:Climate Change - Science and Action

300CA: HoScho SS Sem:The Power of Pop: How Pop-Culture matters in Politics, Economics and Society

Whether we actively seek it out or not, pop-culture permeates everything around us- our entertainment, our news, our consumption habits, and our politics. In this course we will examine this often-dismissed area of our collective experience seriously by examining how scholars and commentators across political science, history, economics and cultural studies, to name a few disciplines, understand the significance of pop-culture. We will consider questions such as the role of pop-culture in representing dominant and marginalized identities and why this matters, the pop-culture memorialization of key events, the role of culture industries in the economy, the pop-culture of conservative and right-wing movements, the importance of pop-culture in state's soft-power as well as the impact of celebrities on various policy issues, in an election year where this may be particularly salient. We will ponder these questions through the lens of various cases of 'texts' - drawing on students' interests and the instructor's research interests in Bollywood and KPop, and be attentive to pressing issues in pop-culture from the West as well as the Global South. Students will research a topic of their choice applying class concepts and materials.

300CB: HoScho SS Sem:Introduction to Human Rights

What are human rights, where do they originate, and how do they function in today's legal and political arenas? To whom are human rights accessible? Who is responsible for protecting your human rights? This course will introduce students to human rights as an interdisciplinary area of study and practice. It exposes students to the field of study of human rights that can be applied across all disciplines. In this course, we will investigate human rights within historical, political, legal, and cultural frameworks, posing questions about what they are, how they work, and whether they have any restrictions. This course will also consider the contextual approach to human rights from a globalized perspective-African, Asian, Middle East, European and Western perspectives. This course will further reflect on the contextual, culturally diverse, and universalist approaches to rights. Students will be exposed to the works of practitioners and activists and understand how and why we use the lens of human rights to examine contemporary issues including women's rights, children's rights, prisoner's rights, gender issues, etc.

300CC: HoScho SS Sem:Feminist Inquiry

This course offers hands-on experience in the interdisciplinary field of Women's Studies. Students will survey research methods by reading excellent examples that show how various research methods have been applied; by reading about, and discussing, the practical details and the ethical issues involved in doing research; and by applying research methods themselves in class exercises and the undertaking of an individual project. Prerequisite: WGSS 140.

Spring Semester information

300AA: HoScho AH Sem: Chicagoland

Chicagoland encompasses a historical landscape that transcends a major U.S city's boundaries to include city, suburbs, and a vast hinterland. As a central place, Chicago has drawn together people and material resources from around the world by every kind of transportation imaginable: rivers, roads, and canals, planes, trains, and automobiles. This course examines the story of Chicagoland in a thoroughly interdisciplinary fashion, putting history in dialogue with the arts. Through the eyes and ears of a variety of writers, musicians, architects, actors, and scholars, we will see and hear how greater Chicago has made, remade, broken, and re-formed itself across two centuries and into our own time.

300AB: HoScho AH Sem: [Cultural Studies of] Satan Then & Now

Across various times and places, the concept of "the satan"--found in texts like Job 1:6--has consistently proven to be a rich source of intellectual engagement: Satan, it seems, is "good to think with" (then and now). This course employs transdisciplinary approaches to investigate the contours and functions of the (sometimes-mundane, sometimes-magnificent, always-interesting) satanic imaginary as expressed in literature throughout history. Tying together select ancient (then) expositions from Abrahamic traditions (Judaism | Christianity | Islam) with select (now) [more] contemporary expressions, we will explore the host of positions and interests such voices bring to their discourses on Satan (and the satanic). How might we contextualize the diverse ways that "then and now" folk relate to the satanic? What discourses and relations of power are at work in "then and now" satanic musings? More broadly, how might we imagine our relationships with the "then and now" satanic imaginary, while growing in (self-)critical awareness of the ideological/contextual nature of engaging with the past, present, and future? Come and see!

300BA: HoScho SM Sem: Molecular Motors

Do a Google video search for kinesin or F1 ATPase. What did you find? Though they look like alien robots, those are mechanical motors made out of protein and you have thousands of them in every cell of your body! A broad range of disciplines come together to understand these amazing machines. Using basic ideas from physics and statistics we will dig deep into what humans have learned about these motors so far and propose verifiable questions about what still remains a mystery. In our time together there will be discussion and interactive lectures. We will also do experiments along with analyzing primary literature about the structure and function of these tiny motors. For the final project you will use 3D printing to create and analyze models of your own design, synthesizing everything you have learned in the course.

300CA: HoScho SS Sem: Culture in Context and Conflict

The trade in cultural heritage, both licit and illicit, is one of the most lucrative global markets. Historically, that market has been fueled by imperialism and more recently by military conflict. For archaeologists and anthropologists, the collecting of cultural heritage presents a dilemma. On the one hand, museums and collectors preserve, protect, and make accessible objects from around the world; on the other hand, undocumented excavation of artifacts destroys context, making the reconstruction of the social, economic, and political significance of past cultures impossible. This course explores several related topics: who has rights and responsibilities regarding the preservation and protection of cultures? How does the art market function and what role does the museum industry play in that market? And, what international laws and policies govern the protection of culture?

300CB: HoScho SS Sem: Rhetoric and Popular Culture

This course engages the rhetorical tradition as a way of understanding and interrogating popular culture.  Unlike other courses in rhetoric, this course is not concerned with the obviously important; rather, it regards the everyday, the ordinary, and the mundane as significant sources of persuasion and influence.  The overarching concern for the course is not popular culture for its own sake.  Instead, the course seeks to understand what popular culture does and how it contributes to the construction of our social reality.

300CC: HoScho SS Sem: God at War & Peace

Religion can be a call to war and an inspiration for peace. Religion is also the source of most of the world's moral norms about peace and forgiveness, (for good and for ill), and has been an important root for positive social change and nonviolence, through, for instance, the deeply faith-based work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas K. Gandhi. As you might guess, religion can be one of the more powerful influences in conflict. In fact, some argue that religion is so often used as an excuse for violence and hatred that ending all religions would significantly reduce incidences of war (Richard Dawkins). Others, however, argue that religion may also be the best way to resolve or respond to some of the deepest and most troubling conflicts of our time. For instance, R. Scott Appleby says that "the parts of Islam and Christianity that speak for openness, diversity, and unity have been 'a woefully underdeveloped resource in conflict resolution in general.'"     

The class will explore the underlying questions shaping these debates, including how religious identity, theology, psychology, and religious moral norms serve both as a source of inner guidance, and as ideological tools for dominance. We will examine various explanations for how religion is being used as a source of division, and why and how that succeeds. Some wonder if the danger is that with increasing success, selective religious interpretations are being used to escalate conflict with a goal of creating new, theocratic regimes and movements.

300CD: HoScho SS Sem:Interpreting Science and Technology in the Modern World

In this seminar, we will approach modern European science and technology from a socio-cultural viewpoint, seeing scientific methods and theories as both products and producers of larger social contexts (including their institutional and commercial backgrounds, their bases in cultural traditions, and the uses to which they are put). We will focus on case studies from the German scientific tradition in its European and global contexts as well as lessons drawn from them to apply to our current technological age. Coinages like sustainability, empathy, and aspirin were originally German words (as were racial hygiene, blitzkrieg, and heroin). German-language scientists emerged in the 19th century as worldwide experts in a number of fields (e.g., physics, chemistry, public health, psychology, and biology) and German technology gained worldwide importance in various industries (automobiles, mechanical and chemical engineering) and was also of key importance in many of the political and military disasters of the 20th century. Equally important for our investigations will be German social critiques of where science seems to be heading as well as alternative models of natural science and technology. Using a variety of text-types, we will explore together both the fascinating details of some of these developments as well as the larger social implications of living in "an age of science." Though any scientific expertise is welcome, it is not necessary for the class; in fact, we will be trying to see that there is perhaps less distance between natural science and social structures than our distribution requirements suggest.