UCOR Section Descriptions

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UCOR 1400-03 Reading the Posthuman (SUCCESS)

Course Type:

UCOR 1400 Inquiry Seminar in the Humanities

Faculty:

Koppelman, Katherine

Term:

Fall

Year:

2024

Module:

Module I

Course Description

Do we live in a posthuman (or transhuman) world? Is the category of the human no longer expansive enough to account for all the ways in which we live today? Virtual existences, scientific advancements, and philosophical investigations have pushed us to what some would consider the "limit" of a purely human existence. However, the category of the hybrid, the marvelous, the cybernetic has been a topic of literary investigation for hundreds (if not thousands) of years. This course reads some of those literary texts alongside the concepts of both humanism and posthumanism-interrogating the literary texts for the ways that they frame and respond to the category of the human.

UCOR 1400-04 Boundary Crossings

Course Type:

UCOR 1400 Inquiry Seminar in the Humanities

Faculty:

Weihe, Edwin

Term:

Fall

Year:

2024

Module:

Module I

Course Description

Stories are the vocabulary necessary to "cultural literacy." We need stories to read with. Without stories, the world is uninterpretable. In this course, students will explore a story archetype that they will quickly recognize in their own lives. It is the lived story, provocatively told in great films and literature, of our approaching, pushing, and transgressing boundaries.

UCOR 1400-05 Boundary Crossings

Course Type:

UCOR 1400 Inquiry Seminar in the Humanities

Faculty:

Weihe, Edwin

Term:

Fall

Year:

2024

Module:

Module I

Course Description

Stories are the vocabulary necessary to "cultural literacy." We need stories to read with. Without stories, the world is uninterpretable. In this course, students will explore a story archetype that they will quickly recognize in their own lives. It is the lived story, provocatively told in great films and literature, of our approaching, pushing, and transgressing boundaries.

UCOR 1400-08 Making America (SUCCESS)

Course Type:

UCOR 1400 Inquiry Seminar in the Humanities

Faculty:

Freeman, Bradley

Term:

Fall

Year:

2024

Module:

Module I

Course Description

Drawing on the work of U.S. writers, this course engages a range of historically divisive questions: what, for example, makes the U.S. unique and what--if anything--makes it great? Such questions animate a long history of American politics, but this course will explore the ways in which U.S. literature offers more nuanced lines of inquiry, interrogating definitions of and assumptions about national identity.

UCOR 1400-11 Women's Bodies (SUCCESS)

Course Type:

UCOR 1400 Inquiry Seminar in the Humanities

Faculty:

Reich, Robin

Term:

Fall

Year:

2024

Module:

Module I

Course Description

Well-aware of the scrutiny to which women's bodies are subjected in modern culture, this course turns its attention to the medieval attitudes towards women as bodies and bodies as female. We consider what- and when -medieval peoples thought about the female body through a close examination of laws, artwork, medical texts, and other sources, in order to examine the gendering of the body in many different facets of medieval society and culture.

UCOR 1400-12 History of Herbal Medicine (SUCCESS)

Course Type:

UCOR 1400 Inquiry Seminar in the Humanities

Faculty:

Reich, Robin

Term:

Fall

Year:

2024

Module:

Module I

Course Description

How did alternative medicines come to be separate from the mainstream, and why do they draw so much on Asian traditions? This course explores the history of herbal medicine in Europe, Asia, and America in order to understand the roles that race, gender, and colonial thinking have played in defining modern medicine. We focus on the medieval origins of this topic while keeping an eye on its modern realities.

UCOR 1400-13 American History Through Film

Course Type:

UCOR 1400 Inquiry Seminar in the Humanities

Faculty:

Kamerling, Henry

Term:

Fall

Year:

2024

Module:

Module I

Course Description

Hollywood films play an outsize role in shaping how Americans encounter the past. In this inquiry seminar we will examine genres of films that have a heightened relationship with the past: the Civil War film and the war movie, the western, the civil rights movement on screen, the immigrant’s tale, among others. Our project will be both to assess historical accuracy and to understand how a particular cinematic vision of the past speaks directly to the time period that produced it.

UCOR 1400-14 History of Coups

Course Type:

UCOR 1400 Inquiry Seminar in the Humanities

Faculty:

Purs, Aldis

Term:

Fall

Year:

2024

Module:

Module I

Course Description

This course uses the idea of a coup to discuss and study political legitimacy, the transfer of power, and the relation between state, citizen and political change. The course gives an overview of coups through history before examining the theoretical underpinnings of coups (what makes a coup a coup and when is the concept used incorrectly). Students will research and examine various coups across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

UCOR 1400-15 Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud (SUCCESS)

Course Type:

UCOR 1400 Inquiry Seminar in the Humanities

Faculty:

Kangas, William

Term:

Fall

Year:

2024

Module:

Module I

Course Description

This course will focus on an intellectual history of three of the primary critics of modern Western culture: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. We will be seeking to understand both the economic-social, philosophical and psychoanalytic critiques they developed of modern European culture and the historical contexts out of which these critiques emerged and to which they were responding.

UCOR 1400-16 Anc. Myths Reflections on Arts (SUCCESS)

Course Type:

UCOR 1400 Inquiry Seminar in the Humanities

Faculty:

Elkady, Marwa

Term:

Fall

Year:

2024

Module:

Module I

Course Description

The course studies myths and art of ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman Cultures from a historical perspective. Students in this course learn about concepts and aspects of myths and their depictions in art. The course involves studying mythical topics and includes a comparison between ancient Egyptian and Graeco-roman cultures. It teaches students how to assess similarities and differences between ancient cultures and evaluate inherited legacies that have affected modern cultures and societies.