This course explores United States literatures from the post-World War II period to the present. We will traverse a range of literary forms (prose, poetry, essay, drama, comics), movements (e.g., postmodernism, Black Arts), and periods (e.g., the Cold War, the Vietnam era, the post-9/11 period). The course is explicitly reading focused: we will read a new piece or pieces in every class in order to expose ourselves to a broad range of literary texts and contexts.

Jazz Ensemble Seminar I: In this performance-based introductory class, students will begin to develop the skills and techniques of jazz performance, including ensemble playing and improvisation. Students will study the forms and concepts of jazz composition and theory and apply them in the composition and performance of repertoire. They will learn to compose elements of jazz pieces and will present their original work in a spring concert performance. There will be assigned readings and a short, final paper.

From Kurukshestra to the Swat Valley and from Troy to Baghdad, the experience of war shaped and shattered lives as much in the ancient world as it does in our own and in much the same ways. This course will examine and compare the accounts of war and its wounds-visible and invisible-as well as the forms of healing, reconciliation, and forgiveness that are to be found in epic and dramatic literature, as well as philosophical and religious writings, ancient and modern.

Childhood is no more an essential category than is gender; it is constructed. The course focuses on recent Latin American films that are not marketed to children, but feature minors (menores de edad) as organizing figures. It explores the way in which the child has been used to (re)envision collective histories and imagine different national futures and/or social change, but also to consider the problems that can arise from staging the child as a redemptive figure.

This introductory seminar on media analysis and production will consider how constructions of power are embodied in technologies and conversely, how technologies shape our notions of authority and how we actively mobilize against it. In recent years, access to information and images has shifted dramatically. PDAs/Handheld technologies, social media networks, live web-streaming, video games, and podcasts eclipse mass-media broadcast channels distributing entertainment, news, and information.

This course will interrogate concepts of the city and of urban imagination through literature and film set in or featuring cities both real and fictive. We will explore the city's paradoxical claims to modernity, as well as its postmodern and postcolonial transformations. Specific themes and problems will include the relationship between the city and capital; figures of the masses and the crowd; circulation and control; boredom and novelty; the aesthetic, psychosocial, and political significance of architectural structures; the rise of the megacity and post-industrial dystopias.

This course is designed to introduce students to several religious traditions of the world through a selective study of their chief canonical texts. In part our concern will be with fundamental thematic issues: what do these records seek to reveal about the nature of life and death, sin and suffering, the transcendent and the mundane, morality and liberation? In addition, we will address wider questions of meaning, authority, and context. Why do human communities privilege particular expressions as "sacred" or "classic"?

Philosophy today is generally conceived and practiced as a purely theoretical discipline dedicated to answering conceptual questions and solving intellectual problems. Yet philosophy began as a practical discipline dedicated to helping human beings live their lives in the fullest and best way possible. In this course, we will read and discuss the work of various philosophers-ancient, modern, and postmodern-for whom philosophy is a practical tool for living.

In this course we investigate works of original art and material culture from the Americas, ancient to contemporary, in the Five College area. We experience works by artists such as Diego Rivera, Carmen Lomas Garza, Jean Charlot, Enrique Chagoya, Leopoldo Mendez, and Jose Guadalupe Posada as well as material objects such as textile fragments, religious figurines, and ceramics. Defying a culture constantly propagating the rushed assimilation of images, we engage in slow and meaningful looking.

This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of painting, such as composition, value, and color. Students will learn about material and the technical issues of painting. Drawings will often be produced in tandem with paintings in order to illuminate visual ideas. We will work with water based and oil based paint on various surfaces. Besides creating individual paintings, students will collectively prepare and work on large-scale canvases. This course will develop from individual representational set-ups towards collective, abstract work.