Spring 2008 Courses

Seminars for First-Year Students
(First-year students must take one of HNR 175 or 131)

HNR 175: Humanities and Love
Professor Shawn Tucker (Fine Arts)
Meeting time: Monday-Wednesday, 1:40-3:20

General Studies Distribution: Expression

This course will begin with an overview of Humanities, an overview that will include traditional methods, periodization, and key "monuments." Students will learn about the different theoretical approaches used in the Humanities through explanations, samples, and by trying their own hand at using them. They will examine the theme of love in various works of art and contexts. Finally, they will do a project using two approaches and one aspect of love on a work of their choosing.

HNR 131: We the People: Self and Society in the Modern United States
Professor Tom Henricks (Sociology)
Meeting time: Tuesday-Thursday, 10:30-12:10

General Studies Distribution: Society

C. Wright Mills argued that the task of the “sociological imagination” is to demonstrate how the seemingly private lives of persons are connected to the wider society in which they live.  This seminar will take up Mills’s challenge to understand how and why visions of selfhood have changed during the last century in the United States.  In particular, the course will consider the nature of individualism; reflect upon the varieties of self-experience, especially as influenced by such factors as age, gender, ethnicity, class, region, and sexual orientation; and consider whether the different segments of American society – economics, politics, religion, sport, media, education, and so forth – encourage somewhat different visions of selfhood.  The class will work together to develop portraits of diverse American selves.

Team-Taught Courses for Second-Year Students

HNR 278: Who's Leading Whom? Press, Politics and the Public During the Cold War
Professors Laura Roselle (Political Science) and
Harlen Makemson (Communications)
Meeting time: Tuesday-Thursday, 10:30-12:10 

General Studies Distribution: Civilization or Society

Fears of Communism and the nuclear bomb, questions about America's role as the free world's lone superpower, and concerns about changing social mores were shaped and filtered during the Cold War by an increasingly omnipresent mass media. The advent of television brought about unprecedented opportunities to inform an increasingly uneasy public, but also proved to be an effective vehicle for manipulation by savvy politicians and media consultants through news events and campaign advertising.  At the same time, new media voices appeared in the alternative press that emboldened citizens to question the status quo. This course will explore the interrelationship among the press, the political system, and public opinion during the Cold War era and seek to understand how each influenced the others.

HNR 277 Civil Rights Movement in Memory and Literature
Professors Janet Warman (English) and
Jim Bissett (History)
Meeting time: Monday-Wednesday, 1:40-3:20

General Studies Distribution: Civilization or Expression (can count for literature)

This course will focus on the Civil Rights Movement, when black and white activists used the tactics of direct, nonviolent action to end the system of segregation in the United States. By immersing ourselves in literary and autobiographical accounts of this fascinating historical development - thereby studying it from an explicitly more personal and human perspective than in more traditional scholarly texts - we hope to gain an appreciation for the complexity and ambiguity of this important development in the history of our nation.