Geomorphology is the scientific study of landscapes and the processes that shape them. More than just backdrops for activity at the planet’s surface, landscapes are dynamic systems which impact and are impacted by the solid Earth, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere. This course is designed for students interested in understanding the ways in which environmental change influences the physical evolution of Earth’s surface.
Geomorphology is the scientific study of landscapes and the processes that shape them. More than just backdrops for activity at the planet’s surface, landscapes are dynamic systems which impact and are impacted by the solid Earth, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere. This course is designed for students interested in understanding the ways in which environmental change influences the physical evolution of Earth’s surface.
(Offered as ENST-270 and SOCI-270) Food and farming make fundamental connections between humans and the earth. This course examines how agriculture, food systems, and rural development are entangled with environmental and social transformations around the world, and how we can cultivate solutions for global health, sustainability and social justice.
(Offered as ENGL 480 and FAMS 411) The “essay” derives its meaning from the original French essayer: to try or attempt. In its attempts to work through and experiment with new ideas, the essay form becomes a manifestation of observation, experience, and transformation. Originally developed through the written form, the essay has also taken shape in visual work–photographic, installation, and, of course, cinematic. The “essay film” is exploratory, digressive, subjective; the “video essay” is similarly personal and simultaneously transformative.
This advanced research seminar reframes “accent” as something that conditions not just speaking, but also looking, listening, acting, reading, and thinking. There is no such thing as a voice without an accent, and yet, colloquially as well as in scholarly literature on voice – from film studies to linguistics to machine learning – accents are treated as the exception rather than the rule. We will begin with the opposite premise.
(Offered as: ASLC-XXX, ENGL-356 (before 1800), RELI-256) At the heart of Buddhism is the story of Siddhartha Gautama, a young prince who had everything but renounced it all to become a homeless wanderer, attain awakening, and found one of the world's largest religions 2,500 years ago. His story has been told in countless ways in literature, art, and ritual practice. It is a story that begins in his distant previous lives and encompasses a vast time-scape of pursuing human perfection. It also includes the stories of his family and closest disciples.
(Offered as ENGL 316 and SWAG 316) “From whence comes my help?” “From where does your strength come?” The psalmist and Adrienne Rich ask these questions, which we will face while we read coming-of-age narratives that fit in a genre known by its German name, the Bildungsroman. These novels go beyond the pilgrimage out of adolescence, and into explicit representation of intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual growth experienced in unison with sexual development, awakenings, thrills, mishaps, and marriage.
(Offered as ENGL 278 and BLST 212 [A]) This course will examine how African writers incorporate digital technologies into their work when they publish traditional print texts, experiment with digital formats, or use the internet to redefine their relationship to local and international audiences. We will reflect on how words and values shift in response to new forms of mediation; on the limits these forms place on the bodies they represent, and on the protections they occasionally offer.
(Offered as ENGL 256 and BLST 256 [D]) In this course, we will develop a thoughtful understanding of the idea of Africa and the African diaspora and a complex appreciation of the meanings of black presence in the world. We will ask five questions that will allow us to explore the ways literary and philosophical texts from Africa and the African Diaspora challenge the Global Matrix of Power, question anti-Black racism in philosophy, literature, and cultural studies, and shape conceptions of being and identity in Africa and the African diaspora, namely: What is Africa?
(Offered as ENGL 251 and FAMS 251) This course will explore how the cinematic practice of representing reality – or as it is commonly known, documentary – has given rise to distinct formal conventions, audience expectations, film movements, ethical problems, political commitments, institutional frameworks, and communities of makers and viewers. Documentary, perhaps most famously defined by the Scottish filmmaker John Grierson as “the creative representation of reality,” is as old as cinema itself.
