Linguistics 83. Language, Structure, and Culture
L. Julie Jiang
What do the world’s almost 7,000 languages have in common? Why do they show recurrent commonalities and principled differences? What do they reveal about the human ability for speaking and thinking? How do languages develop? How do they die? This course addresses these and related questions while introducing the languages of the world; their distribution, recurrent structural properties, and genetic classification; processes of language contact; and the relationship between language and the brain.
Visual and Environmental Studies 23. Conceptual Figure
Matthew Saunders
Model, Person, Subject, Self, Cipher, Being, Effigy, Corpse, Anatomy, Portrait, Body. This painting course will delve into many ways of approaching the human figure. Working first from life, we will also consider the body in media, the body in history, the body in ideas. Note: Open to beginners, while also appropriate for more advanced students.
Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality 1263. Sexuality and Intimacy in British Literature, 1680-1815
Henry Abelove
Desire, same-sex sexual practice, cross-sex sexual practice, sexual ethics, gender, marriage, friendship, libertinism, and love, in writings by the Earl of Rochester, David Hume, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Mary Leapor, John Cleland, Martha Fowke, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, and Jane Austen.
Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 50. Literature and Medicine
Karen Thornber
Examines the relationship between literature and medicine through creative texts that question understandings, shatter binaries, and reconceptualize notions of normality/disability, health/disease, and life/death. Pays particular attention to the work of physician-writers and narratives by patients.
Culture and Belief 11. Medicine and the Body in East Asia and in Europe
Shigehisa Kuriyama
Comparative historical exploration of the striking differences and unexpected similarities between traditional conceptions of the body in East Asian and European medicine; the evolution of beliefs within medical traditions; the relationship between traditional medicine and contemporary experience.
East Asian Film and Media Studies 202. Rip and Tear--The Body as Moving and Moved Image in Japanese Film
Instructor to be determined
This course traces the role of the body as a discursive anchor in moving image culture in Japan. The focus will lie on the period after WW II, although the mapping of historical contexts will entail investigations into earlier histories as well.
Literature 154. Music, Literature, and the Voice
John T. Hamilton
A comparative examination of literary, philosophical and theoretical works that deal with music and the phenomenon of the voice. Topics include: the role of the voice in myth; verbal and musical form; musical meaning and expression; reading, hearing and listening; music and psychoanalysis; evanescence and silence; narrative voice and responsibility.
History and Literature 90ap. American Prizefighting, 1801 to the Present
Eoin Francis Cannon
This seminar will explore the history of boxing in the United States, as a significant social and commercial phenomenon in its own right, and as a unique window onto labor practices, race and gender ideologies, and cultural hierarchies in different eras. Readings will be organized around historically resonant fights, and will include media reports, literary texts, films, still images, and scholarship.
Music 105r. Fundamentals of Improvisation and Composition
Jill Johnson
Students will thoroughly investigate fundamental skills of improvisation and composition. The course will employ a series of specific physical tasks and systems, taught through intensive exercises and guided improvisations which generate and modify movement and link the mind and body to innovation.
Philosophy 158. Self, Body, and Other
Matthew Boyle
An exploration of the distinctive ways in which we know (1) our own minds, (2) our own bodies, (3) the minds of other persons. A central concern will be how each of these kinds of knowledge differs from our knowledge of mere objects. Readings from philosophical sources and from some relevant literature in contemporary psychology and cognitive science.
Religion 40. Incarnation and Desire: An Introduction to Christianity
Courtney Bickel Lamberth
An introduction to Christianity focused on conceptions of the human in relation to the divine, with particular attention to the categories of desire, freedom, the body, incarnation and grace. Texts will include selections from the Gospels, as well as the writings of Paul, Augustine, Abelard and Heloise, Gregory of Nyssa, Julian of Norwich, Luther, and Calvin, as well as several 20th century and contemporary authors.
English 90pe. Postcolonial Epidemics
David John Babcock
This seminar investigates how cultural obsessions with disease and contagion get coded within postcolonial contexts. A broad range of Anglophone fiction will provide us with a multifaceted picture that ranges from destructive social phobias to positive collective responses. These novels explore how the tragic experience of epidemics such as yellow fever, malaria, and AIDS might lead communities to better understand themselves. Authors include John Edgar Wideman, Mary Okurut, Amitav Ghosh, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Jamaica Kincaid.
Dramatic Arts 110. Beginning Acting
Thomas Derrah
An exploration of the basic techniques of acting, beginning with exercises that flex the imagination and heighten observation; the course will then move towards work on rhythm, an actor’s instincts, focus, concentration, and character with an ongoing emphasis in improvisation. The texts of Anton Chekhov will be used as a point of reference for the work. The latter part of the course will concentrate on selected scene study from Chekhov’s major plays.
Dramatic Arts 119. Vocal Production for the Stage
Nancy K. Houfek
Whether one is performing in a play, speaking professionally, teaching a class or leading a group, the ability to use one’s voice effectively is a primary element of the success of the presentation. Using several major techniques of speaking training, students learn not only how to use the voice, but how these various approaches to voice training correspond to specific performance challenges.
Folklore and Mythology 114. Embodied Expression/Expressive Body: Dance in Cultural Context
Deborah D. Foster
An examination of the ways in which the dancing body internalizes and communicates cultural knowledge to both dancer and observer. By participating in dance workshops, watching dance performances (live and on film), and reading ethnographic and theoretical texts, we attempt to understand the emergent meaning of dance performances from multiple perspectives.