Feeling curious and ready for an adventure, but not sure you want to spend multiple semesters on any one topic? Enroll in a one-semester First-Year Seminar!
First-Year Seminars are small, interactive, discussion-based courses that offer students a unique opportunity to delve deeply into focused subject matter. Seminar courses are hosted by a range of departments and immerse you in the methods and topics of that discipline. First-Year Seminars are limited only to first-year students, so you’ll get the opportunity to build community with other first-years and develop meaningful, lasting relationships with faculty and peers.
Offerings for 2026-2027
Spring 2027
#boymom: Monstrous Mothers, Then and Now
This class considers early mother-son pairings in Western literature next to the “boymom” of social media infamy. “#boymom” has almost 20 million posts on Instagram, and is often a red flag for anyone who isn’t a mother obsessed with her son. The content of posts tagged with #boymom ranges from playfully possessive to violent and misogynistic as mothers express sadness or anger toward their toddlers’ future wives, imagined women who will someday steal away their sons. In this class, we will interrogate the term “boymom” in its contemporary context as a means to engage with the literary history of entangled motherhood and masculinity. We will read premodern texts like Oedipus Rex, Beowulf, and Hamlet alongside some of their contemporary interpretations, such as Robert Icke’s Oedipus, The Mere Wife, and Hamnet. Are boymoms always monsters? What roles do other family members play next to a mother-son relationship? What about these relationships inspires continued exploration by both writers and readers? We will end our pursuit of these questions with recent iterations of monstrous mothers who may or may not differ from premodern boymoms, such as the titular character in Rachel Yoder’s 2020 novel Nightbitch and Lady Gaga, Mother Monster herself.
Angels, Prostitutes and Chicas Modernas: Women in Latin American History
Women have been active players in the construction of Latin American nations. In the last two decades, leading scholars in the field have taken up the challenge of documenting women's participation. This research explosion has produced fruitful results to allow for the development of specialized courses. This course looks at the nation building process through the lens of Latin American women. Students will examine the expectations, responsibilities and limitations women confronted in their varied roles from the Wars of Independence to the social revolutions and dictatorial regimes of the twentieth century. Besides looking at their political and economic lives, students will explore the changing gender roles and relations within marriage and the family, as well as the changing sexual and maternal mores.
Beijing and the Forbidden City
The Forbidden City has been the heart of Beijing for nearly six hundred years, and continues to influence both China and its capital today. Through art, architecture, and urban design, this seminar examines the intertwined relationship of the palace and its surrounding city: their origins and constructions, the coded symbolisms of their plans, their most influential characters, their modern identities as the backdrops to major political events, and their roles in contemporary art and the Olympics. This discussion-based seminar also aims to help students develop their skills in writing and critical analysis as a foundation for future classes. No previous experience with Art History or Asian Studies required.
China and the World After Mao
What happened to China and the world after Mao? This seminar examines the transformation of the People’s Republic from the final years of Maoism to the present through situating it within a global context of economic liberalization, rampant globalization, and more recently, an authoritarian turn. Using a variety of sources, from television and film to oral histories, memoirs, and documentaries, we will explore some of the major transformations in China since the 1970s: debates over economic reform, the one-child policy, the Tiananmen protests, China’s integration into global capitalism, the rise of Xi Jinping, and questions of ethnicity and territorial sovereignty. Grounding our conversations in both global entanglements and the lived experiences of the people, we will ask what “reform” meant, who benefited from it, who lost, and how China’s transformation reshaped the entire world in the past fifty years.
Global Histories of Science and Knowledge
What makes a scientist a scientist? What is science? What are the social and cultural processes that have rendered science its meaning? This first-year seminar is an introduction to the global histories of science and knowledge, focusing especially on modern science's dynamic relationship with colonial rule, decolonization, indigenous or local knowledge traditions, and Cold War scientific internationalism. The course examines a wide range of historical, sociological, and anthropological materials and methods in order to trace the everyday workings of different scientific disciplines within a "living laboratory," which are a series of spaces and sites that produce knowledge. These also happen to be spaces that are conventionally not viewed as normative scientific spaces, but spaces where cross-cultural contact produced knowledge (i.e., early modern philosophical, brokered and subaltern, cartographic, mechanical, astral, environmental knowledge). We will trace the uneven and "indetermined" progression of this knowledge across the Global South to understand how these ideas were made, circulated, resisted, and changed over time not just in Europe, but in Africa, East Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia. Given the interconnected nature of world history, students will also acquire tools to understand themes such as colonization, modernization, democracy, and social change critically engaged with categories of race, gender, and class.
Graphic Narratives from Funny Papers to Superheroes to Memoir
In this course, we'll learn about the artform of comics. For a long time, many people would not use the word "art" in that sentence, but such people confuse the form of comics, which is a way to communicate, with individual pieces of content, which can range in quality. What are comics, then? To start defining them, we'll have to separate them from comic books, and look at their long, worldwide history. What's the difference between comics and comic books? Once we've established what comics are, we can analyze how they work, which is the major content of the class. We'll see how comics make sense by relying on our most fundamental perceptions, like how we experience time, process empathy, and organize visual information. We'll see these rules at work in a handful of historically remote (read: old) comics, before we quickly jump to the early-twentieth century and the advent of the funny pages. From there, we'll move on to comic books, and while we'll spend some time on superheroes from various eras, we'll see that comic books aren't all superpowers and spandex (not that there's anything wrong with that!). They're also a useful form for memoir and storytelling about race, sexuality, politics, and everyday life. The course textbook will be Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics.
Improving Student Success Through Psychological Interventions
One of the most exciting transformations in the social sciences in recent years is the finding that brief psychological exercises can improve important student outcomes for months and years, such as raising school achievement and reducing inequality. These interventions help individuals flourish and help our society live up to its ideals. They address critical psychological questions that people have, like the following: Do people like me belong in this school? Can I learn math? When will I ever use what I am learning in class? In this seminar, we will learn about psychological interventions in education; how they work; how they can cause lasting benefits; their intellectual lineage; how they can be used, adapted, and scaled to address contemporary problems; and challenges and mistakes that can arise in doing so. In addition to learning from classic and contemporary research, students will design their very own intervention and workshop others' efforts. When students have completed this seminar, they will more fully understand the psychological aspect of educational problems and how this can be addressed through rigorous research.
Italy's Invention of the Modern Museum
This course traces the development in Italy of what we know as the modern museum. Unfolding chronologically from the Renaissance to the current day, the course will examine the origins and rise of art, natural history, science, and national museums across the peninsula from Rome to Venice, Florence to Naples. We will study the establishment of the early public art museums epitomized by the Vatican Museums, the Uffizi Gallery, and the Capitoline Museums. We will examine the impact on national and cultural identity of Fascist propaganda museums instituted under Mussolini's regime, and we will conclude with an examination of extraordinary new museums in Italy, such as the interactive MUSME (Museum of Medicine) in Padua, and the MEIS (National Italian Judaism and Shoah Museum) in Ferrara. Art Curators, and Museum directors will visit our course.
The Linguistics of Constructed Languages
What's "wrong" with English, or French, or Chinese, or any one of the 6,000+ languages spoken natively by humans today? Why invent a language like Esperanto to be a common tongue among all people, or invent a "calculus of thought" to "perfectly" express pure meaning? Why is it hard to sound romantic while speaking Klingon? What are the benefits of Lojban's attempt to rid the world of confusion and ambiguity? This course explores the design of and motivation for constructed languages from a modern linguistic point of view. Constructed languages are those that are the result of some conscious and deliberate design rather than ones occurring naturally. We will explore the different motivations for language construction, from the desire to create a "perfect language", to fictional world building, to fostering global harmony. In characterizing the different types of invented languages, students will develop familiarity with the basic tools of linguistic theory, focusing on phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Languages analyzed in detail include Klingon, Esperanto, Heptapod B, Lojban, Dothraki, Valyrian, Elvish, and various philosophical languages.
Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: James Bond in Film, Literature and Popular Culture
Originally a character in Cold War spy literature, James Bond has emerged as an international pop culture phenomenon. In this course, we will explore the evolution of James Bond from Ian Fleming to the spy parodies in international cinema. We will read several of Fleming's novels and short stories, including Casino Royale (1953), Octopussy (1966) and The Property of a Lady (1967), and discuss these texts in light of post-war spy literature. We will screen numerous Bond films, and compare and contrast James Bond the literary and cinematic character, how Bond emerged as a franchise hero through the vision of producers Harry Saltzman and Albert Cubby Broccoli, and critical aspects of the film franchise, including its storytelling roots in Hollywood serials, its use of gadgets and special effects, and the role of stardom in their marketing (Sean Connery, Ursula Andress, Roger Moore, Madonna, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig). Finally, we will explore the re-envisioning of Bond in various media and art forms in global popular culture, including music, DC and Marvel Comics, games, children's television and in Asian cinema (Stephen Chow's 1994 From Beijing with Love). Required Screenings.
The Persian Gulf/Arabian Peninsula
The Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula are a central yet understudied region of the modern Middle East. In recent decades, cities like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha have emerged as hubs for investment, tourism, and international events—from the World Cup to branch campuses of Western universities—transforming global perceptions of the region. This course traces these transformations through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, exploring how global circulations of labor, capital, and culture have shaped the Gulf and its societies. We will examine the politics, history, and economy of the Gulf and its neighbors—including Iran, Iraq, and Yemen—focusing on capitalism, oil, migration, urbanism, war, and political movements. The course combines lectures and discussions, and is designed for students without prior background in Middle East history. It emphasizes critical reading of academic texts, analytical writing, as well as fiction and film, synthesizing ideas across disciplines such as political economy, geography, history, and international relations. Students are expected to complete readings in advance, engage actively in discussions, and develop skills to navigate and critically assess the interconnected dynamics of the modern Gulf.
Storytelling Through Sound
This course explores the art of storytelling as an acoustic experience. In addition to reading critical texts on listening, sound, and voice, we examine a variety of kinds of aural art - from live performances (music, spoken word, literary readings) to recordings (podcasts, audiobooks, radio dramas, sound art), and study how sound is transposed into and combined with literature and the visual arts. Our inquiries into sound will also attend to the relationship between sound and power, silence, and deafness. Students will have the opportunity to visit arts institutions in the St. Louis area and to craft their own creative audio project at the end of the semester. This course is designed for First Year Students - no special background is required.
Strange and Speculative Fiction in a Global Context
A fascination with the strange, the uncanny, and the magical transcends geographical and cultural boundaries. Authors across the globe embrace the strange by narrating tales of monsters and other fantastical creatures, crafting surreal and dreamlike narratives that blend the lines between reality and fantasy, and producing bizarrely written or structured books that just feel strange. In this course, we will explore all these approaches to the strange, which often overlap, by reading novels and short stories from around the world that incorporate elements of science fiction, surrealism, fantasy, or horror. We will encounter time-traveling aliens, a man whose perfect memory proves to be a curse, and a plethora of other oddities as we traverse the United States, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Through this literary journey, we will discover how authors around the world use the strange as a window for political, social, and cultural commentary. Despite their rejection of realism, these surreal and fantastical books explore broader themes of race, colonialism, gender, sexuality, war, religion, and environmentalism in a global context. Readings will include works by authors such as Virginia Woolf, Kurt Vonnegut, Octavia E. Butler, Franz Kafka, Jamaica Kincaid, Jorge Luis Borges, and Junji Ito.
Water in a Changing World
Water sustains life, shapes landscapes, and underpins civilizations. This first year seminar explores Earth's shifting water resources from both scientific and societal perspectives. Students first build a foundation in the properties, movement, and ecosystems of water, then examine how humans interact with it through engineering, policy, public health, and economics. Through discussions, hands-on activities, data exploration, and a final project, students gain a multidisciplinary understanding of freshwater systems and the essential role they play in sustaining societies, economies, and environments. No prior earth science background is required. This course is open to all first-year students who wish to learn about the science of water and its connection to society. The course includes one optional field trip.
We are the Curriculum: Teaching the Whole Human
What if education was designed not merely to produce workers, test scores, and credentials, but to help human beings discover their genius, cultivate purpose, build meaningful relationships, and contribute to the well-being of their communities and the world? This seminar examines the relationship among schooling, society, identity, and human potential. Central to the course is the understanding that education is never neutral. Schools both reflect and shape broader social realities related to race, class, gender, language, culture, disability, and power. At the same time, education can serve as a site of healing, agency, creativity, critical consciousness, and transformation. Students will engage academic scholarship alongside personal reflection, dialogue, collaborative learning, and creative exploration as they analyze educational systems while considering their own educational journeys and emerging sense of purpose. Together, we will wrestle with one central question: If we are the curriculum, what does it mean to create educational spaces where people do not have to hide parts of themselves in order to learn, belong, and thrive?
Fall 2026
A Star Is Born: Literature And Celebrity
It's easy to imagine literature as a hermetically-sealed art form, functioning outside, above, or beyond the petty, gossipy flows of popular culture. But the culture of celebrity has long been both a subject and spark for literary writers. This course tracks the long, intertwined history of fame and literary production from the eighteenth century to the present, Lord Byron to Kim Kardashian. We'll read novels and poems about celebrity, learn about literary celebrities both immortal and forgotten, and study the ways in which the emergence of various media (from print to photography to film and television and social media) have forced literary writers to reckon with the type of visibility that fame bestows on the famous.
African Experiences in the Second World War
Most conventional histories of the Second World War pay scant attention to Africa, thereby creating the misconception that the war had little impact on the peoples of the African continent. This introductory seminar restores the experiences of ordinary African women and men to the larger historical narratives of both Africa and World War II.
Arab Cinema
This course offers a critical and chronological exploration of Arab cinema(s), examining the diverse films and filmmaking traditions of Southwest Asia and North Africa. Moving beyond a simple geographical or linguistic label, we will critically engage with the very concept of "Arab Cinema" as a fluid category shaped by shared cultural and political histories. We will analyze the evolution of filmmaking from the silent era to the present, studying key genres, including early melodramas and musicals, influential social realism, and the rise of contemporary commercial and independent cinema. Through this journey, we will encounter the work of major filmmakers and explore how cinematic movements and genres reflect and respond to the region's most pressing intellectual and political questions.
Art in the Golden Age of Venice
The art and architecture of Venice are inextricably linked to the city's distinct socio-political structure, cultural past and geography. Exploring the influence of the Myth of Venice, we will examine the styles of painting, sculpture and architecture that were specific to Venice—and very different from contemporaneous developments in Rome or Florence. We will also study the unique physical characteristics of Venice, its economy and society, its political and religious life and cultural culture. We'll also learn about its food and music while we study the magnificent works of its most celebrated artists, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, to name a few.
Beethoven and van Gogh: Myths of Creativity, Genius and Madness
This course draws into dialogue the creative ambitions, artistic production, critical reception and the historical construction of personae and oeuvres of two exceptionally productive and iconic artists who worked in different media: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) in music and Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) in painting. We will introduce students to methods of musical and art historical analysis, and then build on those skills to examine the historical contexts within which these artists worked, as well as the ways in which their reputations were established. This course will also consider how Beethoven and Van Gogh became exemplars of creativity and genius for later audiences and artists, leading us to explore fundamental and provocative questions in the humanities. Students will have the opportunity to participate in trips to the St. Louis Art Museum and to live concerts on and off campus.
Chinatown: Migration, Identity, and Space
“Chinatown” is more than a neighborhood—it is a cultural symbol that tells stories about migration, community, and identity around the world. In this seminar, we will explore Chinatowns in the United States as well as in other countries through the lens of lived experiences, examining how Chinatown communities have transformed over time. In many cases, we will see how early immigrant neighborhoods evolved into vibrant spaces of business, food, and cultural expression. Students will learn how Chinatowns reflect the history of global Chinese migration, the politics of race and belonging, and the ways in which identity is expressed and negotiated across generations. We will also examine how diasporic Chinese communities adapt, reinvent, or celebrate culture, from small family-run restaurants to suburban communities, and from local markets to transnational franchises.
College, Inequality, and Society
Universities are experiencing significant change and are the focus of intense debates. Some see college as an important equalizer that helps students reach their full potential and live more rewarding lives. Others see colleges as reinforcing inequalities and favoring students who are already privileged. Meanwhile, significant changes are underway include rising costs, greater competition, growing diversity, new technologies, and calls for greater accountability and oversight. We will read and reflect broadly on college and how higher education is changing ,and we will conduct sociological research on three major themes.
Conquest Cultures: Colonialism, Violence, and Memory in Latin America
In 1519, Hernán Cortés landed on the coast of Mexico with a small army and an interpreter named Malintzin. Within two years, the Aztec empire had fallen. How? This seminar takes that question seriously, moving beyond the familiar story of a handful of bold Europeans to examine the full cast of actors who made the Spanish Conquest possible — Indigenous allies and enemies, African soldiers, native chroniclers, and missionary priests. We investigate the conquest in all its dimensions: the alliances and betrayals that determined its outcome, the violent imposition of Christianity, and the catastrophic spread of epidemic disease. Through primary documents, art, film, and scholarly debate, we explore how the conquest was experienced, justified, resisted, and remembered by those who lived through it.
Contextualizing Contemporary Africa
Africa is often depicted as a continent in perpetual turmoil in both the U.S. and international media. This seminar challenges this simplistic and pervasive myth by examining African community-driven innovations in a diverse range of fields, including technology, entrepreneurship, environmental conservation, the creative arts, and youth leadership. African agency will be demonstrated through case studies of grassroots technologies, financially inclusive mobile banking, the Green Belt Movement, which won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, Gen-Z and youth-led movements in Africa, artists as social change agents, and other comparable examples. Students will investigate how these initiatives developed within particular historical, social, and global contexts in each of these case studies. We will look into the effects of inequality in different contexts, including between the global north and south, within Africa, and between generations and genders, and how these disparities influence each case.
Detective Fiction From Poe To Doyle
An introductory survey of the pioneers of the modern detective story. Works will range from those by Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories from the close of the nineteenth century. In between we'll read works by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. The broader historical context for our readings include the urbanization and mechanization of society, technological transformations that seemed to both empower and confine, shifts in social norms regarding sexuality and gender, and a grave concern about the ability of alien, exotic or bestial agents to penetrate domestic space-what is often called 'the homeland' in the mass media of our day.
Environmental Justice and Public Health
Environmental justice has become a pervasive conversation topic as the effects of climate change become more and more prominent in daily life. Yet environmental justice has a longer history, one that is closely related to the global health developments. In this course, we will explore what environmental justice means, how it functions as a form of public health and health activism more broadly, and why the future of public health so heavily depends on it. Through these questions, students will further learn about how issues of environment and health are deeply intertwined with social, racial, and gendered inequities.
History of U.S. Foreign Relations
This course presents a historical assessment of U.S foreign relations from the founding of the country in 1776 through the War on Terror in the twenty-first century. Starting with the bold claim that foreign policy has played a central role in shaping American history, the course traces America’s evolution from a small colony to the world’s only hyperpower through sustained foreign policy to keep European powers at bay and then out of the Western Hemisphere, followed by continental expansion and outward expansion to reach the farthest corners of the globe.
Horror Across Media
In spite of—and because of—its propensity for terrifying readers and viewers, horror has proven to be one of the most resilient and popular genres across all forms of media. Why are audiences attracted to a genre that causes fear, revulsion, and distress? This course will consider the cultural, philosophical, and generic dimensions of horror and explore how it operates across an array of media platforms: film, literature, television, comics, and video games. We will read two literary masters of the genre, H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, and we will screen some of the most successful horror films of the last 50 years. We will also study horror through a variety of critical frameworks, including gender, stardom, special effects, transnationality, adaptation, transmedia storytelling, and interactivity.
Imagining and Creating Africa: Youth, Culture, and Change
The goal of this course is to provide a glimpse into how youth reshape African society. Whether in North Africa with the Arab Spring, in West Africa with university strikes, or in East Africa through a linguistic full bloom, youth have been shaping social responses to societies for a long period. In this course, we will study social structures, including churches, NGOs, developmental agencies as well as learn about examples of Muslim youth movements, and the global civil society. The course will also explore how youth impact cultural movements in Africa and how they influence the world. In particular, we will examine Hip-Hop movements, sports, and global youth culture developments that center on fashion, dress, dance, and new technologies.
The Interactive: Games We Play, Stories We Tell
Humanity plays. Humanity tells stories. What happens when the two collide? In mainstream culture, you might encounter this in the codified forms of video games, or the grand narratives around competitive sports. But writers, artists, and creators of all kinds have imagined modes of being and doing that ask their audiences to act upon the world—and each other—in new ways. In this course, we will explore the ways meaning and drama surround the act of play, and what happens when the “story” is not set in stone when it starts. Students will survey a range of interactive storytelling forms, including but not limited to: theme park attractions and escape rooms, experimental literature and theatre, media art and relational aesthetics, role-playing, hypertext fiction, “alternate reality games,” and gamification, along with new ways of looking at more traditional games and sports. Classes will feature reading and media discussions alongside play sessions and creative workshops.
In(tro)\ Visible St. Louis: People, Place, and Power in the Divided City
St. Louis has a hard-earned reputation as a divided city—one of the nation’s most starkly segregated and unequal urban communities. But the city is also characterized by vibrant civic and political action directed toward identifying and addressing the historic (and often ongoing) injustices that undergird those realities. Indeed, the long arc of activism, memory work, and other reparative community initiatives in and around St. Louis has long been distinctive and exceptional—from Dred Scott and Freedom Suits to the Ferguson Uprising and #BLM, the city has built a distinctive reputation, as a recent exhibit at the Missouri History Museum trumpeted, as “#1 in Civil Rights!” This course engages the history of the city and surrounding metro area you will be calling home over the next few years. It aims to connect you to various key aspects of its people and neighborhoods, adopting a sociological lens to emphasize the lines of power that have defined policies of segregation and inequity, as well as the challenges to those systems that have—and continue to—transform our surroundings and improve the life chances of the region’s residents.
Introduction to Environmental Humanities
In this environmental humanities course we will explore the human and ecosystem impacts resulting from Euro-American colonization and agricultural settlement of the U.S. Our reflection will include the social, political and economic factors which shape individual relationships with and experiences of nature in Indigenous, enslaved and newly-arrived immigrant communities. Topics will include: the fragmentation of the Sioux American Indian ecosystem and subsequently the dispersion of Sioux people into settled, disparate reservation lands; agrarian democracy, including plantation agriculture, improvement farming and Homestead farming on the Great Plains; and the Dust Bowl.
Introduction to Problem-Based Learning in Biology
In this course, students engage in inquiry-based learning while exploring cutting edge science through guided discussions and collaborations. Working in small groups of 8 to 10 students, students will investigate topics of biological and biomedical importance using research articles from scientific literature. Topics covered may include neurological disorders, infectious diseases, gene editing, cancer biology, and stem cell therapies. Learning to interpret and present research articles is emphasized.
Introduction to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
This course will provide an introduction to the foundational concepts, histories, and theories that form the interdisciplinary field of women, gender and sexuality studies. Topics may include the history of feminist movements, masculinity, intersectionality, intimate partner violence, and queer and trans identities and politics.
The Linguistics of Constructed Languages
What's "wrong" with English, or French, or Chinese, or any one of the 6,000+ languages spoken natively by humans today? Why invent a language like Esperanto to be a common tongue among all people, or invent a "calculus of thought" to "perfectly" express pure meaning? Why is it hard to sound romantic while speaking Klingon? What are the benefits of Lojban's attempt to rid the world of confusion and ambiguity? This course explores the design of and motivation for constructed languages from a modern linguistic point of view. Constructed languages are those that are the result of some conscious and deliberate design rather than ones occurring naturally. We will explore the different motivations for language construction. In characterizing the different types of invented languages, students will develop familiarity with the basic tools of linguistic theory, focusing on phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.
The Literary Life
This class approaches literature from many angles: the creative to the scholarly, the personal to the ethical, the edifying to the entertaining. At the heart of our study will be a survey of literary values such as invention, emotion, style, subversion, beauty, humor-those fundamental reasons readers come to literature in the first place. Through readings and discussion, we will consider the great variety of ways literature expresses these values, and will explore them ourselves via creative assignments. Along the way, we will learn about literary life today through discussions with nationally renowned writers who will visit the class, and through units on literary scholarship, book reviewing, and magazine and book publishing. In the midst of it all, you will write and workshop your own stories, poems, and non-fiction works.
Literature of Addiction
This course investigates literary representations of addiction, from Thomas De Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) to Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018). We will study the development of familiar stages in narratives of substance abuse, i.e., experimentation, transcendence, downward spiral, "rock bottom," and recovery/sobriety-posing questions like: What symbolic and literal positions have people with addictions occupied in their societies?; How has the modern pharmaceutical industry and the War on Drugs impacted perceptions of "typical" drug use?; How do race, gender, age, class, and sexuality factor into the imagination and realities of chemical dependency?; To what non-narcotic substances—e.g., media, gambling, sex, adrenaline—do we consider people addicted?
Mapping the World: Introduction to Human Geography
What is human geography and why is it important? This course addresses this question by introducing students to the fundamentals of the discipline of geography. A geographic perspective emphasizes the spatial aspects of a variety of human and natural phenomena. This course first provides a broad understanding of the major concepts of human geography, including place, space, scale and landscape. It then utilizes these concepts to explore the distribution, diffusion and interaction of social and cultural processes across local, regional, national and global scales. Topics include language, religion, migration, population, natural resources, economic development, agriculture, and urbanization.
Medieval and Renaissance Venice
This course will introduce students to the unique culture and artistic achievements of the Venetian republic from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance. After establishing the governmental, social, and religious foundations of the republic and the economic basis of its fabulous wealth, we will look at the expression of its religious and historical identity in architecture, painting and sculpture, its response to the humanistic movement, its literature, the role of music in society and in the church, and the unique role of Carnival in Venetian life.
Metacognating Mario—Learning and Video Games
Although we often associate education with school-based activity, human beings learn in multiple environments beyond the formal classroom. Video games, while often dismissed as frivolous entertainment, provide one such example of a significant experiential learning context: individual players develop skills in the pursuit of goals, collaborate with each other to advance their theorizing about the game's mechanics, and display deep engagement and persistence in the face of frustration despite a lack of extrinsic rewards. Throughout the course, readings and activities will promote the rigorous critical analysis of both games and theories of learning.
Monumental Anti-Racism
As sources of national memory and identity, public monuments, place names, historical markers, and other elements of commemorative landscapes are potential sites of cultural violence (e.g., alienation, disrespect, and erasure) contributing to broader conflict and inequality; they are therefore important considerations in movements for equal opportunity and justice. This course examines the racial politics of commemorative objects and practices as well as commemorative intervention as a strategy of anti-racist activism. We begin with an historical survey of various ways that racism has been inscribed on the commemorative landscape, and readings in history, political theory, cultural studies, and other fields will be used to gain insight into these contested commemorative objects, their development, and social significance. We then turn to a critical assessment of efforts to remove and recontextualize commemorative objects and to erect new objects commemorating neglected figures and issues. We consider how these reparative efforts relate to what political theorists call remedies of recognition and specifically how they might aid in advancing equal opportunity and justice.
Remixed & Remade: Literature into Film
Adaptation is one of the most dynamic processes in storytelling, transforming literature into new visual, cultural, and narrative forms. This course explores adaptation as both a creative and critical practice, with a particular focus on the relationship between literature and film. We will engage with a range of compelling examples, from Romeo & Juliet and The Lord of the Rings to contemporary adaptations such as The Last of Us, Fallout, and Sherlock Holmes. As part of the course, we will also collaborate with the Teaching Gallery at the Kemper Museum, and students will have the opportunity to develop their own adaptive or interpretive projects.
Republic or Empire? Recreating Roman Politics of the Second Triumvirate
The complex legacy of ancient Rome endures to this day, continuing to provide often controversial models for contemporary political systems ranging from democracies to autocracies. This seminar explores the political, military, and social changes experienced during Rome’s transition from republic to principate(empire) during the second half of the first century BCE. The first third of the course will introduce students to the necessary historical background for this tumultuous period and to relevant topics in Roman political and social life. After this introduction, students will engage directly with the Second Triumviral period through a roleplay game (Memento Romane Regere) designed to simulate the decisions faced by individual Romans and important Roman allies during this period.
Resurrecting the Past: Fictions, Adaptations, and History
Inside jokes, your favorite personal anecdotes, the most vibrant and vivid of your memories—as the years pass, how can you be certain what remains true and what has turned into fiction? What do you remember right, what do you remember wrong, and how would you even tell? This course dives headlong into these questions, exploring how we engage with and adapt our pasts both collectively and as individuals. As we study a wide selection of contemporary novels, musicals, TV shows, and video games that are set before the present-day, we will ask: what exactly is it that makes the past so interesting? Why are we so compelled to change in fiction the history that we know cannot be changed in our reality?
Saving Environments
Saving Environments examines how the historical, political, and cultural forces that have shaped people and environments across the Francophone world. From colonial extractivism to contemporary climate activism, the course analyzes how power, development, and resistance determine who is harmed, who benefits, and who is allowed to speak about environmental crises. Through case studies from West Africa, the Caribbean, Québec, and the Indian Ocean, students explore the entanglements between ecology, identity, aid, and sovereignty.
Superhero Media
This course will examine the superhero as American myth and media industry commodity. We will consider historical, cultural, and industrial aspects of the superhero genre across comic books, films, television series, and video games. Focusing on multiple media allows us to examine an array of medium-specific and cross-media issues (e.g., how criticism of superhero films as not cinema reflects a legacy of comics being perceived as juvenile). Our study will encompass a number of critical frameworks, including myth, adaptation, gender, race, and transmedia storytelling. Each course unit will focus on how different media have presented one or more superhero franchises (e.g., Superman, Batman, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Watchmen).
Urban Schools/City Schools
This introductory course examines public urban schools/city schools in twenty-first century America. What makes urban schools/city schools unique is the fact that they exist in heavily populated areas or regions of the country. Further, such schools are noted for a diversity of people where students and staff differ along multiple factors, including but not limited to religion, skin color, ethnic background, languages, nationality and socioeconomic circumstances. Urban schools/city schools have a richness of challenges in their assortment of students and well as a richness of challenges in imparting knowledge to them. This course examines the often-insurmountable tasks of public urban schools in the largest cities in the country: New York, Los Angeles and Chicago and how each city is attempting to meet such challenges. Topics will range from student performance and achievement, housing, health, teacher unions, student discipline, low morale, high poverty levels, low achieving schools amid magnet schools for the ‘talented,’ high violence, charter schools and insufficient funding. Understanding critical contextual factors inside and outside of the public-school environment will be discussed as well as the social determinants of health and well-being for the young, precursors necessary for human development, basic learning and lifelong achievement. Students come away with an understanding and appreciation that contextual factors and public policies often inhibit and retard basic urban school/city school functioning.
We are the Curriculum: Teaching the Whole Human
What if education was designed not merely to produce workers, test scores, and credentials, but to help human beings discover their genius, cultivate purpose, build meaningful relationships, and contribute to the well-being of their communities and the world? This seminar examines the relationship among schooling, society, identity, and human potential. Central to the course is the understanding that education is never neutral. Schools both reflect and shape broader social realities related to race, class, gender, language, culture, disability, and power. At the same time, education can serve as a site of healing, agency, creativity, critical consciousness, and transformation. Students will engage academic scholarship alongside personal reflection, dialogue, collaborative learning, and creative exploration as they analyze educational systems while considering their own educational journeys and emerging sense of purpose. Together, we will wrestle with one central question: If we are the curriculum, what does it mean to create educational spaces where people do not have to hide parts of themselves in order to learn, belong, and thrive?
Who Deserves to be at WashU? Meritocracy and Inequality in Schools and Society
In this seminar, we will use academic texts, mainstream media pieces, and the Netflix show 3% to dig deep on components of merit, like intelligence, possession of cultural capital, and performance on particular types of assessments, all in service of answering one question: who deserves to be at WashU (and similarly elite institutions and spaces)? Situating our constructions of merit in historical, cultural, and social context, we will assess our understandings of what merit is and reflect on how our understanding of merit affects how we understand the world and our place in it. This class will require students to be brave, imaginative, introspective, and willing to work through discomfort as we, individually and collectively, arrive at a deeper understanding of what merit is, what it could mean, and if we can build a truly just society around it.