First-Year Seminars with Openings During Fall Semester 2011
Special designations
- LILE (Liberal Learning courses)
- Introduce students to ways of approaching knowledge that define a liberal education.
- DVPS (Diversity Perspectives courses)
- Examine ways in which disciplines, histories, and paradigms of knowledge are reconfigured by the study of diversity-related intellectual questions.
- WRIT (Writing-designated courses)
- Students draft and revise papers based on feedback about their prose.
AFRI 0110C: Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement (WRIT)
This interdisciplinary course plots the milestones of the civil rights movement through the lens of several autobiographies. The aim is to critique autobiography as a historical document as well as use it to tell the stories of the civil rights movement. Students will work with a writing fellow to develop one critical paper and one autobiographical paper.
Professor Francoise Hamlin
Wednesdays 3:00-5:20 p.m.
207 Smith-Buonanno
BIOL 0190P: Development of Scientific Theories
Students in this course will examine how the pace and shape of scientific progress is affected by the social/cultural context and the "personality" of the individual. We will look into how the interplay between society and the individual affects how scientific theories arise, are presented, are debated and are accepted.
Professor Stephen Helfand
Tuesday/Thursday 2:30-3:50 p.m.
218 Sidney Frank Hall for the Life Sciences
CLPS 0050A: Computing as Done in Brains and Computers
Brains and computers compute in different ways. We will explore discuss the software and hardware of brains and computers, and why they are good at such different things. We will talk about current research in the Ersatz Brain Project, an attempt to design a first-class second-class brain.
Professor James Anderson
Monday/Wednesday/Friday 10:00-10:50 a.m.
265 Hunter Lab
COLT 0510C: The World of Lyric Poetry
Lyric poetry is the prime mode for conveying emotion in many cultures, from ancient times to the present day. This course will survey the variety of forms and themes from the earliest texts from Greece, Rome, China and Japan, then the glories of the Renaissance and the Tang Dynasty, then move to the challenges for lyric expression in the modern world.
Professor Dore Levy
Tuesday/Thursday 9:00-10:20 a.m.
209 Marston Hall
EDUC 040D: Brown v. Board of Education (DVPS, WRIT)
Using sources in history, education, and law, this course will explore the landmark Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education, which found school segregation unconstitutional and challenged the entire foundation of legal segregation. We will explore the legal, political, and social issues that culminated in Brown and examine the development and deployment of remedies, with particular emphasis on school integration and educational equity. We will consider the legacy of Brown and analyze its impact on the civil rights movement, schooling, law, and politics in the late twentieth century and consider its implications for the future.
Professor Tracy Steffes
Wednesdays 3:00-5:20 p.m.
401 J. Walter Wilson
ENGN 0120C: Power: From Early Engines to the Nuclear-Powered Heart
Mechanical and electrical power have been the source of major changes in civilization in the last 250 years. This course starts by focusing on animal muscle power and harnessing nature to steam and then moves on to later sources of power and applications.
Professor Peter Richardson
Day/time: TBD
ENGL 0250G: The Green Renaissance (WRIT)
Modern ecological crises suggest that nature is a powerful agent, but that such views were prevalent in the renaissance, when empirical science was transforming nature into an object, needs investigation. How did renaissance poets and dramatists figure their own relationship to the natural world? We will seek answers by reading Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Marvel, among other writers.
Professor Jean Ferrick
Monday/Wednesday/Friday 2:00-2:50 p.m.
202 J. Walter Wilson
HISP 0750D: Mexico—Image and Encounter
This course explores portrayals of contemporary Mexican culture and attitudes in the media, art and literature, and by means of an on-line dialogue with Mexican university students. We will focus on Mexico City and Tijuana and the perspectives of regional, foreign, and social outsiders. Analysis of films, travel guides/accounts, and readings by Monsiváis, Pacheco, Poniatowska, Swain, Villoro.
Professor Beth Bauer
Monday 3:00-5:20 p.m.
G-12 Smith-Buonanno
HIST 0970J: Slavery and Historical Memory in the United States
How has America chosen to remember and forget the enslavement of millions of its own people? What are appropriate ways to acknowledge slavery in monuments, museum exhibitions, film, literature, and public policy? By approaching these questions through a wide range of visual and textual sources, we will explore the indeterminate space between history and memory.
Professor Seth Rockman
Thursdays 4:00-6:20 p.m.
401 J. Walter Wilson
HIST 0970T: The Measure of All Things
Interest in measurement is a peculiarly modern pre-occupation. This seminar will look at intellectual, cultural, and historical forces that have shaped attempts to reduce the world to numbers from Newton to Einstein.
Professor Joan Richards
Tuesday/Thursday 9:00-10:20 a.m.
501 J.Walter Wilson
JUDS 0050A: Believers, Agnostics, and Atheists
Contemporary society is divided over issues of religious faith. In this seminar, we will read and discuss contemporary short stories that explore the ways that these ongoing differences over spiritual matters affect people. These works portray a variety of human situations: the affirmation and rejection of religious faith, confusion over the existence and nature of God, and positive and negative views of religious institutions and the clergy who lead them. Writers of both Christian and Jewish background will be studied.
Professor David Jacobson
Monday/Wednesday/Friday 9:00-9:50 a.m.
104 Wilson Hall
MUSC 0021F: Popular Music in Latin America (DVPS, LILE)
This course examines the way that popular music shapes, and is shaped by, its social environment, with a special focus on twentieth-century Cuban and Brazilian styles. It introduces students to sociomusical analysis, by exploring the way that selected styles connect with the lived experiences of local audiences, the artistic and political goals that have motivated key performers, and the effect of their actions on broader regional debates.
Instructor: TBD
Monday/Wednesday/Friday 10:00-10:50 a.m.
109 Orwig Music Hall
MUSC 0021G: Duke Ellington
This class examines the life and work of Duke Ellington. We will use recordings, scores, films, autobiographies, interviews, oral histories, and other primary source materials as well as biographical, theoretical and analytical readings to study Ellington's three careers: the composer, the performer, and the band leader. We will analyze his work largely within the musical parameters of form, improvisation techniques, orchestration, instrumentation, rhythmic and chordal structures, and concepts of tone quality. Although musical literacy is not required for this course, students may opt to receive tutorials in the rudiments of theory and score reading.
Professor Matthew McGarrell
Thursdays 4:00-6:20 p.m.
109 Orwig Music Hall
POBS 0910: On the Dawn of Modernity
Students in this course will analyze how a new mindset that would later be called “modernity” slowly emerged from the medieval world and how the trials and errors of the 15th and 16th century navigators helped shape that transformation. The seminar is interdisciplinary insofar as the readings will include developments in astronomy, geography, shipbuilding, mathematics, philosophy, as well as what could be called early anthropology, as stepping stones to the first scientific revolution. Conducted in English.
Professor Onesimo Almeida
Wednesdays 3:00-5:20 p.m.
501 J. Walter Wilson
POLS 0820Q: Politics of American Federal Holidays
Why were ten national holidays created? The answer requires a review of key events in American political history from 1775 to 1983. Why was the Civil War pivotal? Which presidents were most important in generating support for special days? Conflicts occurred not only in creating the day but which day would be the holiday.
Professor Roger Cobb
Mondays 3:00-5:20 p.m.
111 Thayer Street 114 Watson Institute
RELS 0090F: Friendship in the Ancient World
How have ancient societies understood friendship, and how do ancient ideas about friendship differ from or resemble those of contemporary Westerners? This seminar, a comparative investigation of the ways in which friendship has been represented in the Hebrew Bible, Mesopotamian literature, and Greco-Roman texts, will address these and other questions through study of materials such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Book of Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel (on Jonathan and David), the Wisdom of Ben Sira (Sirach), and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
Professor Saul Olyan
Wednesdays 3:00-5:20 p.m.
204 Sayles Hall
POBS 0910: On the Dawn of Modernity
This course involves a close reading of Tolstoy's major novel, with a focus on its interweaving of fictional and historical narrative and metahistorical discourse. We will attend to issues of genre (e.g. the tension between "epic and novel"), literary tradition, the poetics of time and space, as well as his iconoclastic ideas about narrative, art, religion, and society. Tolstoy's formal innovation will be considered in a broader historical and cultural context.
Professor Svetlana Endokimova
Mondays 3:00-5:20 p.m.
111 Thayer Street 138 Watson Institute
TAPS 0800B: Asian American Theatre and Performance (DVPS, LILE, WRIT)
This course examines Asian American Theater and Performance as a genre, highlighting the transnational and intercultural aspects of its dramatic production. Using both play analysis and historical studies, we will look at a spectrum of dramatic traditions and performance practices that situate and interrogate the space between "Asia" and "America" within the United States.
Professor Eng-Beng Lim
Monday/Wednesday 9:00-10:20 a.m.
212 Lyman Hall