Currently Offered Seminars

Fall 2009 HSP Classes

65-101 The Effect of War (Timothy Haggerty)
War is a continuing aspect of the human condition. This course will introduce students to the manner in which war is conceptualized in modern societies, using readings from philosophy, literature, history and the social sciences to examine how warriors, belligerent societies and cultures describe the benefits and costs of war. The course will focus on the experience of war in the twentieth and twentieth-first century, from the Great War to the War on Terror, while also examining the Cold War and the antecedents to contemporary conflict (this course fulfills the Freshman Seminar requirement for General Education).

65-201 Utopias (Peggy Knapp)
Utopian fiction has a long history, starting well before Thomas More gave the title Utopia to his description of an ideal society early in the 16th century. Such fiction has been written in many forms, some for elite and some for popular audiences, much of it recently in the form of science fiction. Utopian fiction investigates how human societies can be established and managed to make the best possible use of natural and human resources and thereby create a version of social justice that is both legal and economic. The course will start with Plato's Republic, More's Utopia, and Bacon's New Atlantis, and go on to the remarkable array of 19th and early 20th-century utopias created by authors like Edward Bellamy, H. G. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Then we will examine some later 20th-century fictions and their slide toward dystopias, like Orwell's 1984. Throughout the term we will be looking at some important films and televised narratives with a utopian or dystopian emphasis (this course fulfills a "Reflecting: Societies & Cultures" requirement for General Education).


Spring 2010 HSP Classes

65-102 Beyond the Border: Inventing the Americas in Culture, History, and Literature (Paul Eiss & Therese Tardio)
This course intends to explore the issue of "the border" as it manifests itself in historic, cultural, and literary discourses in the Americas, from the initial encounters of Colombus with the Taino, to the contemporary as it has been transformed both by transnational capital, and by the proliferation of “contact zones”. The first part of the course will concentrate on the discursive narratives used to establish borders and frontiers in the Americas, such as civilization and barbarism, native and other. The second part of this course will address border culture - its history and cultural production, with particular attention to the U.S - Mexico divide. This analysis will allow us to explore the frontiers of language, race, and ethnicity, and how these concepts have become firmly ensconced in the popular imaginary of the nation. As well, we will consider how these same concepts are problematized by cultural, social and political theorists who have taken the border as their central concern. This course will focus on the convergences and disjunctures in representations of the border experience in the Americas from the perspectives of Anthropology, History, Literature, and Film Studies (this course fulfills a "Reflecting: Societies & Cultures" requirement for General Education).

65-202 New Horizons in the Humanities: Performance Studies
(Tim Dawson & Kristina Straub)
This seminar will explore the expanding and highly controversial field of performance studies. Emerging from anthropology, semiotics, theater studies, and cultural studies, Performance Studies is both a recognized area of academic study (with degree-granting programs at NYU, Northwestern and Brown, for examples), and the object of attack by many academicians—especially those whose discipline is the dramatic arts—who doubt its integrity as a disciplinary field. We will focus on the problematic but intellectually exciting connection between performance as a way of understanding the practice of everyday life and performance as a formalized mode of expression tied specifically to the theater. To that end, we will read classic theorists of the theater, such as Bertolt Brecht as well as speech-act theorists such as J.L. Austin, and his more recent adaptors, like Judith Butler. On the practical level, we will become observers of performance both on and off the stage. We will attend formal theater performances and learn about how plays are staged and performed, as well as analyzing “performances” as they give shape to a wide variety of everyday human practices, from fashion to organic gardening (this course fulfills a "Creating: Designs & Productions" requirement for General Education).