Dramatic Diversities
This course provides students with exposure to unconventional theatrical forms, encompassing works from diverse backgrounds, including those of femme, queer, and BIPOC makers. Through engaging in performances of non-traditional plays/pieces and the development of experimental works, students will cultivate their own performance skills. This course actively encourages artistic innovation, fostering a profound appreciation for the rich tapestry of possibilities within modern and experimental theater. The course concludes with students sharing prepared pieces.
What is Acting?
"What is acting? Who is a performer?" This course offers an overview of acting techniques and theories across cultures and historical contexts. Through critical analysis and practical exploration, students gain an understanding of the complexities of performance and its impact in the individual and society. Participants are encouraged to engage in interdisciplinary approaches to acting and performing, challenging themselves to cultivate a nuanced perspective on the role of performance in shaping cultural narratives and identities.
American Legal Theory
(Analytic Seminar) The discipline of legal theory has the task of making law meaningful to itself. But there is a variety of competing legal theories that can make law meaningful in divergent ways. By what measure are we to assess their adequacy? Is internal coherence the best standard or should legal theory strive to accord with the extra-legal world? Then too, the institutions and practices of law are components of social reality and, therefore, as amenable to sociological or cultural analysis as any other component.
Big Problems: Policy Methods
What are your community's most pressing problems? Policing? Housing? What are the world's? Ending global hunger? Climate? How might we address this problem today? This is the first course in the two course honors thesis capstone within the School of Public Policy, with the end product being a research proposal and design that will be carried out in the Spring semester. This course is an introduction to methodologies for analyzing, implementing, and evaluating public policy.
Afro-Am Poetry: Beginning 1900
An intensive look at African American poetry before the Harlem Renaissance. It will encompass orature and literature, including folk and popular music as well as the literary output of such African American writers as Phillis Wheatley, George Moses Horton, James Whitfield, Frances E.W. Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and Fenton Johnson. It will also take up the relation of African American poetry to broad political and cultural movements, such as U.S. Republicanism, abolitionism, romanticism, transcendentalism, local color, and modernism.
Lit. Harlem Renaissance
Survey of AfricanAmerican literature of the 1920s: fiction, poetry, essays, folklore. Through the eyes and ideas of the writers, time, place, and socio historical and political contexts of 1920s revealed. Themes include: Harlem as symbol; identity of New Negro; and role and responsibility of black writers, male and female. (Gen.Ed. AL, DU)
African-Amer Hist,Cv War-1954
Major issues and actions from the beginning of the Civil War to the 1954 Supreme Court decision. Focus on political and social history: transition from slavery to emancipation and Reconstruction; the Age of Booker T. Washington; urban migrations, rise of the ghettoes; the ideologies and movements from integrationism to black nationalism. (Gen.Ed. HS, DU)
Weird Feelings:LatAm ShortFic
In this course we will read and discuss a group of short stories written by contemporary female, queer and trans Latin American authors. These stories deal with (among other weird feelings and states) the uncanny, the unsettling and the horror of daily life as well as processes of becoming, embodiment and disidentification. This course considers the intersections of identity and imagination, race, gender, and class. Special attention is given to the way in which these writings depict oppression and resilience and how they reinvent the Latin American short story writing tradition.