This course explores loss as an inextricable part of human development. Loss, as examined in this course, includes not only that which occurs through death but also the psychological, emotional, relational, physical, and situational changes that affect us throughout our lives. This course will explore loss's seminal role in human development and its potential to be transformative or life-threatening. The effects of loss, coping mechanisms that can facilitate healthy adaptations to change and loss, personal growth, and the complex relationship between different types of losses will be addressed.
Religious Studies
This course addresses topics related to the field of religious studies not addressed in other courses and is offered depending on interest. Prerequisites vary with topic. This course may be repeated for credit when the topic differs.
This course addresses topics related to the field of religious studies not addressed in other courses and is offered depending on interest. Prerequisites vary with topic. This course may be repeated for credit when the topic differs.
Through the lens of sociology of religion, this course examines contemporary religious and social movements and kin-formation in a time of climate-change disruption such as Mormon family prepping, eco-poetics, dominionism, eco-communalism, survivalist culture, climate migration, and Extinction Rebellion. In what ways are the social, political, and economic reverberations of climate breakdown affecting the social imaginary? In light of ongoing perturbations of Earth-system stability, how are notions and practices of kinship and communal belonging being reconfigured?
This course examines religious narratives of collective traumas: Jewish representations of the Shoah and Islamic and Christian representations of the Palestinian Nakba. Comparatively, how are discourses of loss and redemption coded within the symbolic universes of these historically-related religious traditions and deployed in the sacralized politics of memorialization and remembrance? What is the symbiotic relation between conflicting narratives of victimization, imbued with religious meaning, and the historical and contemporary situation in Israel and Palestine?
This course examines key Buddhist philosophical concepts and explores a diversity of traditions along with their historical contexts. Investigations of the ways these traditions are lived are elucidated by short biographies. Buddhist modernism is also considered using themes such as globalization, gender roles, science, commodification, and popular culture.
This course addresses topics related to the field of religious studies not addressed in other courses and is offered depending on interest. This course may be repeated for credit when the topic differs.
This course addresses topics related to the field of religious studies not addressed in other courses and is offered depending on interest. This course may be repeated for credit when the topic differs.
Draws on an archive of American religion and culture to study gender and religion with an intersectional eye toward historical and contemporary dynamics of power. Introduces students to feminist, womanist, transgender, and queer scholarship in study of religion.
An advanced capstone seminar for seniors preparing for their comprehensive exams.
Rhetoric
Study of the principles, precepts, and strategies of informative, persuasive, and ceremonial speaking. Emphasis is placed on assessing the rhetorical situation and researching, composing, practicing, and delivering a speech. Ethical, political, and social questions raised by speaking in public are considered. Students deliver speeches, practice effective listening, and serve as speech critics and interlocutors.
Topical survey of the major questions and controversies in rhetorical theory, criticism, and practice, including rhetorical situations, classical canons of rhetoric, the role of rhetoric in civic life, and the relationship of rhetoric to power, politics, law, education, and ethics. Students consider the rights and responsibilities of speakers and critics. Accordingly, readings include selections from a wide array of rhetorical theorists and critics as well as a diverse and open canon of orators and speakers.
In this survey of the expectations for successful speaking across several disciplines, students will explore the techniques, strategies, and precepts peer and professional tutors may employ to help student speakers and listeners attain their goals. Participants will examine samples of student speaking and listening, discuss possible responses, and develop model interactions between and among tutors and students.
This course surveys the key topics, questions, issues, and controversies surrounding the rhetoric of mass and social media. Students explore not only how this rhetoric helps us inform, persuade, and move others to action, but also how—and whether—they are informed, persuaded, and moved to act themselves. Topics surveyed may include rhetorical framing, message bias, propaganda, the rhetorical propagation and circulation of misinformation, freedom of expression, protest, and visual rhetoric.
The seminar is designed to prepare and guide senior Rhetoric majors in the preparation of their senior theses. Weekly class meetings will be devoted to various topics related to their projects, including theoretical and practical problems of research, interpretation, analysis, scholarly writing and speaking, and the forms and standards of documentation and citation. Students will prepare and submit regular written and spoken assignments and read and critique each other’s work. They will deliver a final oral presentation of their completed project.
Study of the discursive and non-discursive aspects of protest in the period 1948-1973. Focus on the forms and functions of rhetorics and counter-rhetorics in U.S. controversies over communism, civil rights, free speech, war, students’ rights, women’s rights, farm workers’ rights, Native American rights, gay rights, the environment, and poverty.
Russian
An introduction to the fundamentals of the language and culture with emphasis on communicative proficiency, clarity of pronunciation and basic skills in reading, writing, and conversation. Use of language laboratory required. Four hours of class each week, plus an additional conversation meeting with a native speaker.
Continued study of grammar and review of basic grammatical structures; readings in Russian with emphasis on acquisition of vocabulary and continued development of conversational and writing skills. Four hours of class each week, plus an additional conversation meeting with a native speaker.
This class is a survey of Eastern European cinema from the 1960s until the present day. We will look at films and directors from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Russia, and the former Yugoslavia. Despite state control, the filmmakers of Communist Europe were often more bold, honest, and provocative than their profit-driven Hollywood counterparts. By drawing on political and cultural discourses, the course will offer pointed analyses of the most significant East European films that touch upon issues of ethnicity, gender, cultural identity, and censorship. Films screened with English subtitles.
A study of the emergence and development of the Russian literary tradition in the nineteenth century, with special attention to the intersection of Russian history and literature. Novels, novellas and short stories by Pushkin, Karamzin, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Durova, Leskov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov and others feature as the center of the course. The course is taught in English.