Academics
Humanities Signature Courses
Signature Humanities Courses are faculty-taught courses in the Humanities or humanistic Social Sciences that afford students unique and memorable learning experiences, exemplary of humanistic inquiry. Designed as lecture courses, they allow students to sample the best that the various humanistic disciplines and fields have to offer. While open to majors and minors, they are aimed at students across the College and are ideal as general electives.
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Autumn 2024 Signature Courses
Instructors: Jason Bridges, Leslie Kay, Chris Kennedy
What is the relationship between physical processes in the brain and body and the processes of thought and consciousness that constitute our mental life? Philosophers and others have puzzled over this question for millennia. Many have concluded it to be intractable. In recent decades, the field of cognitive science--encompassing philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and other disciplines--has proposed a new form of answer. The driving idea is that the interaction of the mental and the physical may be understood via a third level of analysis: that of the computational. This course offers a critical introduction to the elements of this approach, and surveys some of the alternative models and theories that fall within it. Readings are drawn from a range of historical and contemporary sources in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science.
Instructors: Devon De Mayo, Jon Satrom
This course explores live theatrical and digital performance, centering on surprise as a key element. We will examine performance instigators and media activists who use experimental tactics to stage, document, and amplify their work. Through studying examples, exploring theoretical underpinnings, and creating art in this mode, we will investigate how performance can surprise, provoke, and delight-without relying on traditional resources such as space, time, money, or institutional support. What makes these forms resonate? What are their cultural and social reverberations?
Instructor: James Osborne
Why are so many societies - including our own - obsessed with building monumental things like pyramids and palaces? What do we learn about cultures past and present from the monuments they built? This course explores famous monuments from around the world to answer these questions through the lens of archaeology, architecture, and art history.
Instructor: Anand Venkatkrishnan
Is philosophy literature? Is literature philosophy? What constitutes either of these seemingly disparate enterprises, formally and thematically, and what kinds of conjunctions can we imagine between them (philosophy in/of/as literature)? Can one translate these terms across cultures? Are they the sole prerogative of leisured elites, or can they harbor and cultivate voices of dissent? Above all, what does it mean to reflect on these categories outside the parochial context of the Western world? This course explores these questions by introducing some of the literary cultures, philosophical traditions, religious poetry, and aesthetic theories of the South Asian subcontinent. Students will encounter a variety of genres including scriptural commentary, drama and courtly poetry, and the autobiography. Readings, all in translation, will range from Sanskrit literature to Sufi romances and more.
Instructor: Leslie Danzig
This course will examine what happens to the American Family Drama on stage when the 'family' is queer. Working in dialogue with a current production at Court Theatre, we will move beyond describing surface representations into an exploration of how queering the family implicates narrative, plot, character, formal conventions, aesthetics and production conditions (e.g. casting, venues, audiences, marketing and critical reception). Texts will include theatrical plays and musicals, recorded and live productions, and queer performance theory. This course will be a combined seminar and studio, inviting students to investigate through readings, discussion, staging experiments, and a choice of either a final paper or artistic project.