This class examines how anthropology and speculative fiction (SF) each explore ideas about culture and society, technology, morality, and life in "other" worlds. We investigate this convergence of interest through analysis of SF in print, film, and other media. Concepts include traditional and contemporary anthropological topics, including first contact; gift exchange; gender, marriage, and kinship; law, morality, and cultural relativism; religion; race and embodiment; politics, violence, and war; medicine, healing, and consciousness; technology and environment. Thematic questions addressed in the class include: what is an alien? What is "the human"? Could SF be possible without anthropology?

This class examines the ways humans experience the realm of sound and how perceptions and technologies of sound emerge from cultural, economic, and historical worlds. In addition to learning about how environmental, linguistic, and musical sounds are construed cross-culturally, students learn about the rise of telephony, architectural acoustics, and sound recording, as well as about the globalized travel of these technologies. Questions of ownership, property, authorship, and copyright in the age of digital file sharing are also addressed. A major concern will be with how the sound/noise boundary has been imagined, created, and modeled across diverse sociocultural and scientific contexts. Auditory examples--sound art, environmental recordings, music--will be provided and invited throughout the term.

Childhood is a source of fascination in most Western cultures. It is both a major inspiration for artistic creation and a political ideal, which aims at protecting future generations. Which role does it play in French society and in other francophone areas? Why is the French national anthem (La Marseillaise) addressed to its 'children'? This course will study the transformation of childhood since the 18th century and the development of sentimentality within the family. We will examine various representations of childhood in literature (e.g. Pagnol, Proust, Sarraute, Laye, Morgivre), movies (e.g. Truffaut), and songs (e.g. Brel, Barbara). Course taught in French.

In this podcast, Professor Roberta Pearson from the School of American and Canadian Studies, discusses the fictional representation of terrorism in modern day television programmes and why more and more people are using fiction instead of the news to inform their opinions of world events.

Professor Pearson considers the frequent engagement of modern audiences with such television series' as '24' and 'Battlestar Galactica' and how these common cultural experiences should not be underestimated as a factor in affecting the way public issues are viewed.

This course explores stereotypes associated with Asian women in colonial, nationalist, state-authoritarian, and global/diasporic narratives about gender and power. Students will read ethnography, cultural studies, and history, and view films to examine the politics and circumstances that create and perpetuate the representation of Asian women as dragon ladies, lotus blossoms, despotic tyrants, desexualized servants, and docile subordinates. Students are introduced to the debates about Orientalism, gender, and power.

This seminar offers a review of recent historiographical approaches within the history of science. Students will read a wide variety of recent studies covering topics from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. Emphasis will be placed on the intertwining of epistemology with institutions in various settings.

An interdisciplinary subject that draws on literature, history, anthropology, film, and cultural studies to examine the experiences of Asian Americans in US society. Covers the first wave of Asian immigration in the nineteenth century, the rise of anti-Asian movements, the experiences of Asian Americans during WWII, the emergence of the Asian American movement in the 1960s, and the new wave of "post-1965" Asian immigration. Examines the role these historical experiences played in the formation of Asian American ethnicity, and explores how these experiences informed Asian American literature and culture. Addresses key societal issues such as racial stereotyping, media racism, affirmative action issues, the glass ceiling, the "model minority" syndrome, and anti-Asian harassment or violence.

This course introduces the history and practice of English as a scholarly discipline. After outlining basic approaches to the text, the course embarks upon a genre-study, devoting each of the four remaining units to a different genre of writing: poetry, the novel, drama, and rhetoric and the critical essay. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: demonstrate mastery and/or awareness of the major skills, techniques, and approaches necessary for college-level literary and cultural studies; explain and employ in close readings of texts (i.e., poems, novels, plays, etc.) a variety of approaches to textual and discourse analysis; define and identify a number of theoretical approaches to literary and cultural studies (such as Marxist, feminist, and New Historicist approaches); employ poetic scansion and analysis techniques in the analysis of poetry; explain basic concepts in narrativity and be able to identify various forms of the novel; define a number of dramatic techniques and forms of theater and drama; recognize, compare, and contrast a variety of rhetorical forms and terms as well as concepts involving the essay form. (English Literature 101)

history, art and science, art vs. science, history of science, religion, natural philosophy, mathematics, literature, cosmology,physics, astronomy, alchemy, chemistry, plays, theater history, cultural studies, Shakespeare, Ford, Tate, Behn, Francis Bacon, Burton, Hobbes, Boyle, 17th century, England, English history, Charles I, Charles II, Cromwell,

" This class explores the creation (and creativity) of the modern scientific and cultural world through study of western Europe in the 17th century, the age of Descartes and Newton, Shakespeare, Milton and Ford. It compares period thinking to present-day debates about the scientific method, art, religion, and society. This team-taught, interdisciplinary subject draws on a wide range of literary, dramatic, historical, and scientific texts and images, and involves theatrical experimentation as well as reading, writing, researching and conversing. The primary theme of the class is to explore how England in the mid-seventeenth century became "a world turned upside down" by the new ideas and upheavals in religion, politics, and philosophy, ideas that would shape our modern world. Paying special attention to the "theatricality" of the new models and perspectives afforded by scientific experimentation, the class will read plays by Shakespeare, Tate, Brecht, Ford, Churchill, and Kushner, as well as primary and secondary texts from a wide range of disciplines. Students will also compose and perform in scenes based on that material."

Examples of the conceptual metaphor of the “heart” pervade our culture. More than just a representation of romantic love, the heart metaphor contains the residue of ancient beliefs concerning the seat of cognition and the basis for thought and emotion. This paper explores the hypothesis that the notion of the heart as a meditating organ is more than just a metaphor, that it is an instance of how certain core (i.e. of the heart) beliefs persist across time and differing media. This paper briefly summarizes the portrayal of the heart in western culture and examines the implications of its persistence in contemporary public discourse and media products.

Supplementary work on individual or group basis. Registration subject to prior arrangement for subject matter and supervision by staff. Also, students may petition for elective credit for participation (with additional assignments) in an undergraduate subject, with permission of instructor. This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of commercial videogames as texts, examining their cultural, educational, and social functions in contemporary settings. Students play and analyze videogames while examining debates surrounding how games function within socially situated contexts. Readings include contemporary game theory (Gee, Squire, Steinkuehler, Jenkins, Klopfer, Zimmerman and Salen, Juul, Bartle, Taylor, Aarseth) and the completion of a contemporary commercial videogame chosen in consultation with the instructor.

This course will serve as an introduction to the interdisciplinary academic study of videogames, examining their cultural, educational, and social functions in contemporary settings. By playing, analyzing, and reading and writing about videogames, we will examine debates surrounding how they function within socially situated contexts in order to better understand games' influence on and reflections of society. Readings will include contemporary videogame theory and the completion of a contemporary commercial videogame chosen in consultation with the instructor.