HUM

Independent study is available to those students who wish to continue their learning in an area after completing the regularly offered courses in that area.

This course surveys a wide range of software tools and technologies that are becoming associated with the domain of scholarly activity known as the "digital humanities": micro- and macro-directed text analytics, annotated timelines, multimedia presentation platforms, data and network visualizations, NGrams, thick maps/GIS, topic modeling, immersive simulations, etc. During the first third of the course, students read conceptual material about digital methods and look at representative completed projects that have made use of such tools and methods.

Expressly designed as an experiential learning opportunity, this course invites students to dive into the workings of a 21st century library by undertaking, completing, and documenting a small library project. Specific project roles include: Metadata Creator, Exhibit Curator, Instructional Designer, Digital Publisher, and Transcriptionist/Historical Investigator.

This course presents a constellation of influential critiques of Western intellectual history, especially examining Enlightenment liberalism and its ideological afterlives. Themes include: critique, Euro-American centrism, orientalism, de-colonial struggles, postcolonial theory, pathologies of freedom, power, hegemony, racialization, identity, liberalism, the democratic illusion, mass deception, the Holocaust, camps, mass migration, terrorism, comprador intellectuals, and culture war.

'Print Culture' habits of reading work against the dramatic and visual nature of medieval composition, in which words were to be heard aloud and images visualized. Medieval manuscript illumination of literary texts reflects this active, visual process of reading. Humanities 367 immerses readers in medieval manuscript culture to experience a performative mode of reading essential to the appreciation of medieval literary genres like dream vision, chivalric romance, and allegory.

This colloquium explores the development of theory in the Marxist critique of Capital and capitalist cultures, especially in its relation to revolutionary praxis in Late Capitalism. The course examines foundational themes of Critical Theory as elaborated by Frankfurt School authors (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Marcuse) and study revolutionary movements and practices (Situationists, 1968, Autonomists, Tarnac 9, and Occupy) in relation to Marxist theory.

This course explores some of the major theoretical and cinematic approaches to film genre, and provides the opportunity for students to produce a short film project based upon this exploration. The specific genre (e.g., documentary, horror, melodrama, film noir, etc.) under study for any given semester is at the discretion of the professor. Through the analysis and subsequent production of the selected film genre, students interrogate the ways that industrial, social, technological, and aesthetic factors shape the development, circulation, and reception of a film genre over time.

This course examines the works and times of prominent intellectual critics of modern European society. It centers on the texts of nineteenth-century writers, theorists, scientists and revolutionaries who formulated far-reaching analyses of and challenges to modern cultures, practices, values and economies. Special emphasis is placed on the generation of ideas and ideologies of the period, such as materialism, psychoanalysis and Marxism, and their application in culture and the arts. Cross-listed as HIST/HUM 317.

Why does monstrosity assume such a visible place in medieval culture? Gothic babwyns (grotesques) gambol in the margins of liturgical manuscripts, function as downspouts on cathedrals, and appear in epics and chivalric romances as forces of both good and evil. This course explores medieval ontology, the nature of creation, and our human ability to know it fully, through the monstrous. The course begins with an art historical introduction to Classical theories of monstrosity reflected in visual traditions that medieval artists and writers inherited.

This course offers students an introduction to high medieval culture through verbal and visual experience of the quest. Medieval romances and spiritual quest literature are informed by the neoplatonic idea of a transcendent reality, a divinely ordered world beyond us that yields an ultimate truth. At the same time, all such journeys begin in the post-Edenic world where the fallen senses can deceive the knight, the pilgrim, and the visionary navigating the dark forest, the garden of erotic pleasure, or the castle, where seemingly noble conduct masks sin.