This course will explore one enduring question: Why and how has hip-hop become equally a tool for revolution and capitalist expansion across the world? As hip-hop has attained the interest of corporate America, it has gone from being vilified by […]
Few ideas have stirred the human imagination as has the question of the end of life. This course examines visions of the process of dying and accounts of a possible second life from Judaism to Hinduism, Dante to Milarepa, The […]
For a problem of intriguing complexity, look no further than the contemporary city. Home to two-thirds of the worlds population, modern cities — gloriously diverse cultural, innovation, and artistic hubs, and often refuges for those who seek opportunity or escape from […]
How does art help to advance the work of activists and how do artists enable activists to think more creatively? Social justice movements often use the tools of artwork to support and further their aims; students in this course explore […]
This course will look at the amazing discovery of planets around stars other than the sun. This wondrous adventure is happening right now and showing us much more about our place in the universe. We will look at how these discoveries […]
This seminar examines questions of contemporary world cinema from multiple perspectives by working back and forth between concepts of examining single, individual texts and broader, globally relevant contexts. As part of that project, each student studies in detail a single […]
In our society, divided by inequality and ideology, many demand civil discourse to solve the problem of incivility. This course challenges our assumptions about incivility and “civil discourse.” Course themes may include how ideals of civility connect to language and […]
Have you ever thought about how podcasts influence your knowledge and opinions? Any topic or theme you can imagine has a podcast covering it; they are modern, flexible modes of storytelling. But, the sense of shared experience and bond between […]
Diseases, colloquially, are caught, transmitted, and contracted in many different ways: miasmas, bugs, germs, and vectors–to name just a few. How does the language people use to describe illness indicate beliefs about illness? This class studies historical, scientific, and popular […]
From William Shakespeare to Beyonce, much of what we consider original art depends on borrowed text, recycled images, and familiar melodies. But where do we draw the line between influence and plagiarism? In this course, we consider questions of creative […]
From Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the Mahabharata, the Popol-Vuh to the Norse Eddas, myth gave people ways to understand the world, to develop cultural identity, to share values. But what is the role of myth in modern cultures? We now tend to use the wordmythto mean a […]
What is wonder’s purpose and progress in the human story? Investigating this question, The Shape of Wonder seeks to articulate the purpose of structures, stories, music, drama, and other arts and sciences that are engineered to inspire not fear or instruction but […]
This course examines how dominant understandings of LGBT identity came into being in the Western world at the turn of the twentieth century and alternative paradigms for sexual and gender difference that have been offered by racial minorities, transgender communities, […]
When a New York resident sued the Metropolitan Museum in 2015 for displaying allegedly ‘racist’ paintings of a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus, it was simply the latest iteration of an enduring philosophical debate. What does God look like? Is the divine […]
This interdisciplinary course explores a pressing intellectual challenge of our time: Americans’ ambivalent historical relationship with the state. It explores how Americans from the era of Alexander Hamilton to the Age of Obama conceptualize and confront the state by demanding, […]
Michael Jackson is a complex cultural text that provides critical insight into U.S. and global history, politics and society. A popular child singer in the 1970s, a global superstar in the 1980s, Jackson was eventually ridiculed and criminalized in the […]
This course examines the search for and performance of ideal models of American manhood on theatrical, political, and social stages. Through investigating gender theory and masculinity studies, reading and analyzing plays, viewing theatrical productions and films, unpacking political posturing, and […]
Many scholars have regarded the 21st century to be the watershed era for inclusiveness on Broadway. This course examines a chronology of such representation on “The Great White Way,” including titles from current and/or Broadway seasons such as “Falsettos” and […]
From early amorphous blobs of computer generated sounds, to the pulsating beats of contemporary hip hop, we are experiencing electronic music in both conscious and unconscious ways. This course will explore the impact that electronics have had on music since […]
Classifications of high and low art in music have existed well before our listening lives began. Likewise, disagreements on those boundaries have always been part of the conversations among composers, performers and listeners. Now, more than ever, these lines continue […]
Drawing on museum collections in D.C., this course explores how visual images constructed, claimed, and sometimes contested identities across the geohistorical spectrum. Students consider how images convey identities tied to cultural conceptions about politics, religions, race, gender, disability, and sexuality […]