First-Year Seminars

Instructor: Josef Brandauer

Title // Department: Professor // Health Sciences

What is an “expert learner”? What is the reason that the hippocampus of a taxi driver may be larger than what you would expect? What are the neurobiological underpinnings that decide whether you can recall a fact, understand a concept, or apply previously acquired knowledge? How do our identities shape how we learn? In “Are you smart?”, we investigate the strategies and characteristics that define successful learning. The topics discussed in this first-year seminar range from central nervous system anatomy and physiology to habits and techniques that can help you find success in the transition to the academic challenges of college.

Instructor: Megan Benka-Coker

Title // Department: Associate Professor // Health Sciences

In this seminar STEM Scholars students will learn what distinguishes science from other modes of inquiry, and be introduced to skills used throughout the various STEM disciplines. Through readings, analyses, discussions and engaging group activities, the STEM Scholars will learn what scientists do and how they do it, with special emphases on the importance of problem solving, quantitative skills, and clear communication with fellow scientists and the general public. Students will learn about the history of science, proper experimental design, uncertainty, and methods for collecting, interpreting and analyzing data. We will discuss how basic scientific research informs technological applications used in our daily lives; learn about cutting-edge scientific discoveries as well as discuss the ethical issues involved in the pursuit and application of science. This seminar focuses on a multidisciplinary approach to learning, understanding, discussing and practicing the specific skills necessary for students participating in the STEM Scholar program in preparation to a successful career in the STEM fields at Gettysburg College and after graduation.

Instructor: Lindsay Reid

Title // Department: Assistant Professor // Political Science

Beyoncé empowers women everywhere to believe: “Who run the world? Girls!" When we look at the reality of who runs the world, however, a different picture emerges. In 2018, a record number of women were elected to the United States Congress, yet the United States still ranked a mere 88th worldwide in women’s representation. And, in 2019, while women held the highest positions of power in countries ranging from Bangladesh to New Zealand to Germany – women only led 19 countries. Ultimately, women have to close large representation gaps before they “run the world." At the same time, it is pretty apparent that women bring unique – and strong – experiences and perspectives to their political, economic, and social roles. This seminar delves into understanding questions about women in positions of political power. What do we know about women’s leadership in international politics? Are women leaders different than their male counterparts? What are the implications of increasing women’s participation in political, economic, and social leadership roles? Using a variety of academic and popular sources, we will engage, debate, and question theories and implications of women’s empowerment to better understand the pathways to and implications of a reality in which women run the world.

Instructor: Anne Douds

Title // Department: Chairperson/Associate Professor // Public Policy Program

Throughout your life, you have sought opportunities to be a difference maker, to be an agent for change in your school, your family, your community, and the world. The Eisenhower Scholars program recognizes your desire and ability to help solve social problems, and this course if your first step in the next phase of your policy education. In this course, you will learn how to become policy change agents and how to advocate for social reform. The course incorporates traditional forms of academic scholarship on agency, advocacy, and reform with up-to-the-minute literature in students’ specific areas of policy interest. Throughout the semester, we will take field trips to observe policymakers in action in Washington D.C. and Harrisburg; meet with local policy makers; craft individual policy reform proposals; write policy briefs and proposals; and learn from peers in a highly engaged, interactive, collegial environment. We will study policy arenas that matter to you, and you should leave this course feeling empowered and equipped to seek and effect social change.

Instructor: Brendan Cushing-Daniels

Title // Department: Associate Professor // Economics

This course is intended to encourage thoughtful analysis and discussion of the perennial problem of poverty. Too often, the wealthy and middle class tend to think about, talk about, and relate to the poor as though they are somehow inferior or defective. Ironically, the poor are chastised and denigrated for acting ‘rationally’ according to modern economic theory while the middle class and wealthy are praised for similarly responding the incentives they face. The course is also designed to give students the seed of an understanding of poverty in the United States and to allow students to model civil discourse on sensitive issues. Students should take from this course satisfaction that they have dealt with an important human as well as public policy issue with sensitivity and integrity.

Instructor: Randall K. Wilson

Title // Department: Professor // Environmental Studies

Smokey Bear is one of the most highly recognized icons in American culture today. But while many know of his efforts to prevent wildfires, fewer are aware of the contentious issues surrounding the issue of fire policy on national forests. What would Smokey say if he knew that many foresters currently promote forest fires as part of efforts to maintain a healthy forest? Likewise, could he make sense of the fact that bison can be defined as a protected "threatened" species, a threat to livestock, or as "burger on the hoof" simply as a function of where they graze? Or how the strongest advocates for the wildlife refuge system are those who most enjoy shooting it? Or the way environmentalists have worked to eliminate grazing on public rangelands....by becoming ranchers themselves? Such conundrums can be a bit much for any level-headed bear to take in. This course investigates the surprising and often contradictory environmental policy and management challenges facing national parks, forests and wildlife refuges in the United States. To make sense of them, students visit a number of such places, interact with real managers, conduct a project, and consider the "big ideas" of nature that quietly underpin America's system of public lands.

Instructor: Sushmita Sircar

Title // Department: Assistant Professor // English

Why do we need to work? What counts as work? How does the work we do shape our identities and our relation to the world around us? We will read novels, poetry, artwork, and philosophical and critical texts drawn from a wide range of literary traditions how individuals and their social relations are formed by various kinds of work, including agricultural, industrial, reproductive, artisanal, and creative, labor. The course aims to get students to think critically about their relationship to work. We will read a number of texts that portray the different attachments that people develop for the work they do—whether in the form of a job or not. The course will consider how alienated labor under capitalism produces certain kinds of workplaces and workers, allowing students to read Marxist conceptions of the evolution of labor under capitalism. We will also linger on forms of work--reproductive and emotional labor, creative work, idleness, the desire for a different relation to the material world—which appear to exceed the commodification of the capitalist workplace, while also inevitably coming under its sway. Finally, we will think about how we might theorize other categories to understand our relationship to the work we perform.

Instructor: István A. Urcuyo

Title // Department: Associate Professor // Biology

Did you know the U.S. has nearly 23,000 miles of ocean shoreline and that half of the population lives within 250 miles of the coast? Were you aware that in the year 2000, beach pollution was to blame for at least 11,270 beach closings and swimming advisories in the U.S.? Does it surprise you to learn that almost 30 million pounds of pesticides are applied annually in areas that drain into the nation's coasts? Did you ever think of air pollution as the beginning of ocean pollution? Why is it that every year the practices of many fishing industries strip bare a section of the sea floor twice the size of the continental U.S.? Did you know that over the past 25 years a large ?Dead Zone? (the size of Massachusetts) has formed in the Gulf of Mexico? Were you aware that for every pound of commercial fish caught, up to 20 pounds of other marine life is discarded? Why are 58% of the world's reefs at risk from human impacts? Did you know that the largest oil spill on a marine environment occurred during the Gulf War? Would you know what seafood to choose at your local markets that's good for you and also good for the oceans? This seminar course will focus on the diverse environmental problems that have and currently are affecting our oceans and all of its organisms. It will examine and discuss the important role of the ocean in our planet, the interdisciplinary aspects of human use of marine resources (economical, political and biological) and how the current marine environmental problems affect all of us regardless of our location. We will investigate what steps have been taken (or need to be taken) to minimize and remove the multiple negative impacts that our growing human population has on our world's ocean. Critically reading, evaluating, discussing, and writing about the primary scientific literature as well as websites and books for the general public will accomplish this. A strong student participation and commitment is expected.

Instructor: Matthew C. Harrington

Title // Department: Visiting Assistant Professor // English

Taking something out of context can damage everything from cultures to reputations and the ability to assess the truth. But what about when we do so to be playful, to seek new understandings, or to challenge existing “truths?” There is a long literary and cultural history of pulling materials from their sources to recontextualize them, and it now extends to retweets, TikTok trends, and memes. In this seminar, we will examine what happens when writers and artists take things out of context to change our perspective on both where they came from and what they mean now.

Instructor: Stephanie A. Sellers

Title // Department: Adjunct Professor // Women, Gender, and Sexuality

This seminar looks at the changing practices in women's healthcare from the holistic, ancient, earth-based traditions that centralized women to the rise of the mechanomorphic American medical system, specifically gynecology. The course examines key historic events that shaped women's healthcare, issues of gender biology, the gardener/mechanic metaphor, the modern medicalization of women's natural cycles, the Wise Woman healing tradition, Chinese medicine and acupuncture, Ayurveda, and issues around women’s personal empowerment. Social issues concerning the control of women's reproduction and the impact of the environment on women's health are addressed. Additional topics include holistic nutrition for women, body image, gender identity, sexual orientation, negotiating young-adult social and emotional challenges, and power and control in intimate relationships. Particular attention will be on centralizing women in their own healthcare.

Instructor: Kerry Wallach

Title // Department: Chairperson/Professor // German

Exploration of what names and naming traditions suggest about many aspects of identity, from gender and age to national, ethnic, or religious background. Topics include names in songs, celebrity names, name changing, pseudonyms, code names, character names in literature and film, social/career advancement, and name-based prejudice and discrimination. Much of the course focuses on cultural texts from the U.S. and Europe (literature, film, TV, podcasts, popular music, historical examples).

Instructor: Henning Wrage

Title // Department: Associate Professor // German

This seminar is an investigation of myth and reality of secret societies from the “Underground Railroad” to the Freemasons, the “Black Hand,” “Skull and Bones” and the “Men in Black.” Have secret social networks really tried to influence the world? What role do they play in history and politics? What is a conspiracy theory? Who claims that the moon landings were a hoax and why? And what do “alternative facts” have to do with all this?

Instructor: Vernon W. Cisney

Title // Department: Chairperson/Associate Professor // Interdisciplinary Studies

What did you think of that movie? This seminar is a philosophical exploration, through both text and film, of the nature of the self and its relationship to the world. Along the way it addresses questions concerning the experience of time and its relation to memory, the meaning of suffering in and out of the context of religious faith, the nature and value of thinking as a practice of everyday life, and the roles and limitations of human knowledge and technology. In addition to textual analysis, the course examines these questions with some of the more provocative films in the history of the cinema (such as Blade Runner, Fight Club, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and others), mining and developing strategies for watching movies at various intellectual levels, thereby enriching the overall experience of the capabilities of film, and illuminating the significance of philosophy as a living activity of thought that finds and transforms us in even the most seemingly mundane moments.

Instructor: Nathifa Greene

Title // Department: Assistant Professor // Philosophy

Why do we apologize? Does an apology require sincere feelings of remorse in order to be valid? Can apologies sometimes cause more harm than good? Is it still right to apologize, even if the person delivering the apology does not believe that they were wrong? Apologies are powerful expressions, which can escalate or help resolve conflicts in personal and political life. This course examines moral and political questions that emerge in the aftermath of conflict, including various conceptions of harm, responsibility, forgiveness, and reparations. These concepts are considered through the analysis of various kinds of apologies, all of which attest to the power and ritual significance of this speech act. Some apologies ask for forgiveness, and some apologies are gendered or culturally expected utterances that function as social lubricant, for good or bad reasons. Nonapologies avoid responsibility and shift blame, and formal public apologies issued by prominent individuals and governments acknowledge harm done to social groups. Some examples of public apologies studied in this course include public apologies issued by governments of the United States, Germany, and Australia, as well as truth and reconciliation commissions in Canada and South Africa.

Instructor: Vernon W. Cisney

Title // Department: Chairperson/Associate Professor // Interdisciplinary Studies

Students will explore monsters in literature, myths, movies, art, pop culture, and philosophy as manifestations of cultural symptoms and counter-values. What do we mean when we call something a “monster"? What does the monster tell us about us versus the other? What are the limits of the monstrous, and how do these limits overlap with, challenge, and extend notions of normality? Which cultural and social roles do monster play, and what can we learn from them? A parade of zombies, crippled, witches, cannibals, cyclopes, gigantic cockroaches, dragons, robots, and many other extravagant figures will guide us in answering questions about normativity and power (gender and ethnic norms), fear and fascination (the confrontation of the dissimilar and the other), perception (phenomenological approaches to what appears), self-representation (the monster as external repository of human dubious features), and critique (the power of the monstrous for challenging accepted views). Choose your own monster and let the abominable journey begin!

Instructor: James Day

Title // Department: Director // Sunderman Cons. of Music

What role can the arts play in building a vibrant, healthy community? In this FYS you will explore the importance of the arts in our society, experience how the arts strengthen communities by engaging with a variety of community-based arts programs, and discover the many ways in which you can play an active role in the cultural development of your community, and in the process find your path to becoming a more ethical leader and socially responsible citizen. In addition to utilizing class time to debate and discuss theories of placemaking and public policy, we will complete action research through several local site visits and a regional field trip to meet a diverse array of amazing people building exciting, vibrant communities through the arts.

Instructor: Christopher C. Oechler

Title // Department: Associate Professor // Spanish

Like the crackle and hiss of lead-in grooves that give way to spectacular sound, in this class we will explore the vinyl lp and its relationship to recorded music and life. We’ll learn how records are made, we’ll investigate why they are an enduring part of music and collector’s culture, and we’ll analyze how this format has affected music, life, society, and politics. Along the way, we’ll challenge ourselves to become better thinkers, speakers, writers, and especially listeners.

Instructor: Eleanor J. Hogan

Title // Department: Chairperson/Associate Professor // Asian Studies

Godzilla, Astro Boy, and Hello Kitty are all Japanese nationals who have become global citizens. Beginning with Godzilla, this course examines Japanese popular culture from the immediate post-war period to the present. People of all ages enjoy Japanese characters, stories, and culture through varied media such as film, animated films (anime), comics (manga), video games, game shows, fanzines and fan sites, and novels. Scholars write of Japan’s “Gross National Cool” and “soft power” as they joke about the cultural invasion of Japan. Using a variety of interdisciplinary methods, the course examines the sustained presence of these popular icons and cultural works in Japan and beyond. Identifying these cultural products/art forms as reflections of Japanese identity, culture, history, art, and literature, we then examine the portability of these icons/media into other cultures. We seek to answer such questions as: How and why do some characters survive and thrive outside of Japan, while others such as Sweetbread-man (Anpanman), Bacteria-man (Baikinman) have not made the trip across the ocean? What, if anything, has been changed to make a character/story/game more appealing to another culture? What is an otaku and how has the definition changed over time and place? What do these products say about post-war Japanese culture? Informed discussion, writing, research and presentations provide a thorough examination and analysis of the appeal of Japanese popular culture and its relation to Japanese identity and globalization.

Instructor: Stephen Jay Stern

Title // Department: Chair, Jewish Studies, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies & Interdisciplinary Studies // Interdisciplinary Studies

The topic of death raises more questions than answers. What happens when a person dies? Is there an afterlife? How does one deal with the loss of a loved one? How do our funeral practices compare with those of other religions and cultures? But the topic of death also raises personal questions of life: What is the meaning and purpose of our existence? What can I accomplish in my time here? How should I treat my elders, my peers, and my juniors who will predecease or survive me? While we will all experience death, too few of us talk about death. This course intends to begin that life-long discussion by considering death from a variety of angles. We will look at death and popular music and culture, death and the medical profession, the business of death, and the psychological impact of death. We will look at how other religions and cultures view death and deal with the dead. We will also explore various types of death, from illness and disease to suicide, murder, and genocide.

Instructor: Joseph Robert Radzevick

Title // Department: Chairperson/Associate Professor // Management

This course examines the operation of the studio system that gave rise to Hollywood’s “Golden Age” during the middle of the 20th century. Along the way, students learn about the business and creative elements that combined to create these films while they explore a number of specific films from the major Hollywood studios released during this period. We also look closely at the economic, political, and social forces intertwined with film making at this time. The course places emphasis on reading, writing, discussion, and film screenings.

Instructor: Dina Lowy

Title // Department: Chairperson/Associate Professor // History

This course examines the significant impact tea had on world history as the love of tea spread from East to West. It moves both chronologically and episodically from early developments in China to Japan and India and Great Britain and the United States, with brief side trips to Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa as well. Topics and themes include religion and rituals, health benefits and environmental issues, trade, diplomacy and empire, sabotage and espionage, and social interactions. Throughout the course, historical inquiry and methodology are paired with a hands-on exploration of the Japanese tea ceremony and related cultural practices.

Instructor: Joshua Wagner

Title // Department: Manager, Innovation and Creativity Lab // Educational Technology

Most of our lives we are taught to avoid failure. However, many of the world’s most successful people have failed repeatedly on their paths towards success. Using the equipment, tools, and materials in the Innovation and Creativity Lab we will experiment with failure as a strategy for learning and a catalyst for creative problem solving. Through engaging discussions, hands on design thinking projects, and perplexing activities this course will challenge your preconceived notions of what it means to fail and how to successfully embrace failure in your future endeavors.

Instructor: Christopher D'Addario

Title // Department: Chairperson/Professor // English

From the hit show 24 to coming of age comedies such as Superbad, we remain fascinated with how much or how little can happen to us in one day. This course studies exclusively literature and film that cover events that take place over 24 hours. We examine how literature represents the close passage of moments as well as the profound transformations and stasis that might occur in one day. How do authors and filmmakers choose to represent the details of everyday existence? What gets close attention? Perhaps more importantly, what gets left out? What are the psychological and ethical implications of such inclusions and omissions? Can one's life really change unalterably in one day?

Instructor: Alvaro Kaempfer

Title // Department: Chairperson/Professor // Spanish

How is the 2024 US American Election process covered and presented across US American newspapers and other global media outlets? What are the linguistic and narrative formulations of the events, issues, programs and leadership across these media outlets? Is there a consistent network of words, a semantic political field organized around a specific (and limited) number of verbs, sentences, and even formulaic constructions of the daily dynamic? How much do they inform or consolidate common places over the global mediascape? How do these outlets build up their audience? Is there a global perspective or universalizing narrative in place? How is this electoral process translated or appropriated throughout local concerns? Is there a share common data and data-building sources feeding these editorial and media narratives? How does the information/data build up process function as a narrative device?

Instructor: Benjamin Bartlett Kennedy

Title // Department: Alumni Professor in Mathematics & Professor // Mathematics - Sciences

This course introduces students to the fundamental skills of descriptive data analysis, examines some important contemporary social questions from a data-analytic perspective, and helps students build the quantitative sophistication critical to informed citizenship.

Instructor: Kathleen M. Cain

Title // Department: Professor // Psychology

The United States is often called “a nation of immigrants,” and yet Americans have always debated immigration policies and treated certain immigrants as less desirable than others. These contradictions are echoed worldwide in an era of unprecedented migration. Some individuals arrive in new countries by choice; others flee war, persecution, and poverty. How are people affected by the experience of immigration? How can we understand the development of children of immigrants? What are the needs of refugees? Of undocumented immigrants? How do individuals with family histories of immigration come to understand themselves and the diverse communities to which they are connected? What kinds of experiences help immigrant youth feel at home in their new countries, and which experiences lead to a sense of alienation? In this course, we ask how the social sciences, psychology in particular, approach immigration, identity, and development. We address topics such as impact of immigration, models of identity and acculturation, and the diverse paths by which families, communities, and colonial legacy shape identity. The course addresses immigration in general in the context of western countries, and also offers an in-depth exploration of the two immigrant-origin groups in the United States, namely Latinos/Latinas and immigrant Muslims. In class projects, students utilize qualitative research methods and personal stories of immigration – from memoirs, our own experiences and those of our family members, and interviews with immigrants – to examine identity among immigrants and those from immigrant families. The course includes a community-based learning project with local Latino/a youth.

Instructor: Kirby Farah

Title // Department: Assistant Professor // Anthropology

This course explores the social and scientific contexts that shaped Darwin’s understanding of the world and that shaped a world ready to accept his theories. Students will engage with poetry, literature, art, scientific writing, and pop culture to situate Darwin in his time and examine the long- and short-term implications of his works, good and bad. Crosscutting the sciences and humanities, this course emphasizes the full body of knowledge and experiences that contributes to how we understand ourselves and our origins.

Instructor: Jennifer Collins Bloomquist

Title // Department: Professor // Africana Studies

What kind of linguistic choices do people make, and why do they make the choices they do? This course entails the study of regional and social varieties of American English from sociolinguistic perspectives, focusing on the forces that influence different types of language variation in the United States. We will investigate the social basis of language, and the linguistic basis of social life; what happens when languages come into contact, how dialects form, how and why language changes and how and why different social groups (age, gender, ethnicity, and class) speak differently. Through the use of film, literature, music and poetry, we will examine issues of linguistic identity, language status, and communicative pride and prejudice, and in doing so will develop a multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary perspective on the role of language in daily life.

Instructor: Timothy J. Shannon

Title // Department: Professor // History

The lives and fates of humans and whales have been intertwined for millennia. Whaling became the world’s first global industry during the nineteenth century and the focus of the first international conservation movement in the twentieth. The peculiar biology of whales has long fascinated marine biologists and contributed to our understanding of evolution. Writers, filmmakers, and other artists have used whales to reflect on humankind’s own place in the cosmos and natural world. In this seminar, we will examine whales and their relationship with humans from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including history, literature, and science. Our primary focus will be on the rise and fall of the American whaling industry, c. 1780-1920, but we will also examine modern conservation efforts to “save the whales” and representations of whales in popular culture. We will assess the place of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in American literature as well as the experiences of women, African Americans, and indigenous peoples in the whaling industry.

Instructor: Jill Ogline Titus

Title // Department: Interim Director, Public History Minor & Civil War Era Studies // Civil War Institute Office

The American Civil War itself may have ended in 1865, but its fault lines, reverberations, and unfinished business continue to shape American society today. Americans of every generation since Appomattox have approached the war with one eye on the past and the other on the present. This course will provide an introduction to the diverse ways that memories of slavery and the Civil War have shaped American culture and politics from the immediate postwar years through the present day, and look ahead to the discuss possible futures for these narratives of memory. Topics to be discussed include preservation of sites related to slavery & the Civil War; monuments & memorials; the emergence of Juneteenth as a federal holiday; slavery & the Civil War in popular culture; the reparations movement; and the place of Confederate symbols in the 21st century US. Expressing ideas in writing and experimenting with different forms of written expression will be central to this course, and we will devote considerable attention to the process of writing and revising.

Instructor: Florence Ramond Jurney

Title // Department: Professor // French

How does a woman create a relationship with men in the #Me Too Era? What does beauty mean in a world of beauty-enhancing apps? How do you navigate the social media scene when it can make or break you? This course will focus on these issues and other pivotal concerns in a young woman’s development from adolescence to the years of early adulthood.

Instructor: John P. Murphy

Title // Department: Chairperson/Associate Professor // French

Food is always about more than just what’s on our plates. It’s a medium of communication used as much to drive wedges among us as it is to foster feelings of community. It’s thus no wonder that food often incites conflict and debate. This seminar examines some of the controversies surrounding food by critically considering the following questions: How did French cuisine come to dominate the global elite food scene in the first half of the 20th century and why is its importance receding today? What explains the rise of foodie culture and what role does it play in maintaining or producing new forms of social distinction? How have industrial methods of food production and processing changed what and how we eat and what are the consequences for our health and for the future of our planet? In what ways has home cooking evolved in recent decades and what does this evolution tell us about gender roles? How does the American food safety net work and in what ways has its implementation shaped definitions of human value and worth? What is culinary tourism? How might this phenomenon reflect or express an entrenchment of local, regional or national identities? Inversely, how might it promote new forms of cosmopolitanism?

Instructor: Aristides Dimitriou

Title // Department: Assistant Professor // English

Toward the end of the twentieth century, many science fiction and fantasy writers took interest in the subject of “disembodied consciousness" an imagined byproduct of life in the virtual terrain of “cyberspace." New currents in science fiction and fantasy, however, are returning to an older engagement with the subject of “embodiment," especially within the representation of technologically advanced, near-future societies marked by ecological crises and dystopian regimes. A renewed focus on the status of the body within the context of contemporary, imminent, and potential scientific revolutions revisits the historical tensions between Romantic and Enlightenment thought, famously portrayed, for example, in the nineteenth-century works of E.T.A. Hoffman, Mary Shelley, and H.G. Wells. Returning to this subject, as questions of racialization and proletarianization grow larger in the popular imagination, the broad field of science fiction and fantasy—often termed “speculative fiction"—interrogates with renewed intensity the social legibility and legitimacy of bodies. As such, speculative modes of writing, especially those written by authors that belong to marginalized groups, give expression to the embodied experiences of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability: experiences that often shape identity by way of exploitation, alienation, and disempowerment. In this course, we will engage with literature, film, and other media to examine the speculative representation of embodied experience. As we explore the projected realities of genetic engineering and cloning; of cyborgs and hybrid life-forms; of orphaned monstrosities and disposable androids, we will focus on what it means to be human, precisely as the human subject enters a new stage of posthuman and transhuman redefinition. How and why might speculative fiction endow the non-human body with a greater sense of humanity? Why do some works assume that subhumanized bodies, such as monsters and zombies, deserve unmitigated violence (even to comedic or effect)? How does speculative fiction interrogate what it means to exceed the human, i.e., to be “more human than human" within an economic structure that renders such excess illegitimate for society yet suitable for the maximization of profit? In other words, how and why does the representation of embodied experience represent the way that society defines human, posthuman, or non-human subjects? In this class, we will read, watch, and interact with various media to explore these questions, while developing our critical thinking skills to improve our writing and composition.

Instructor: Christopher Richard Fee

Title // Department: Professor/Graeff Chair // English

“Homelessness" is a term that conjures up unsavory images in the popular imagination, flat, generic, clichés that owe as much to fear as to fact. The truth is that children account for a shocking proportion of the homeless in America today, as do women fleeing abuse, as do the working poor, many of whom find it impossible to secure affordable housing in many of our cities. If working men and women and school-attending children number among the homeless, why do the stereotypes of the pushy panhandler and the drunken skid-row bum continue to dominate our collective vision of homelessness? Why does this population continue to grow? What can be done to alleviate the circumstances surrounding homelessness in America? Should we act? Should we care? Designed in collaboration with the Center for Public Service, this course combines the traditional academic component with experiential education through a number of Service-Learning opportunities. Each student will participate in regular service commitments in the local community throughout the semester, and the keystone of the course will be a group Service-Learning trip in October. We will meet and work with many people who are or who have been homeless, as well as quite a few who have dedicated their lives to serving those less fortunate than themselves. If experience is any guide, we will like a great many of the people with whom we will come into contact; we most certainly will learn from all of them. In the classroom portion of this course, we will study portrayals of homelessness in popular works of fiction and film in order to refine our understanding of how the American understanding of homelessness has evolved since the Great Depression. Some of these works will reflect common assumptions about the homeless while others may challenge such views, but all will contribute to our understanding of how we as a people face the realities of poverty, homelessness, and social inequities.