First-Year Seminars
Social Justice & Spirituality
The Power of One: Acting Justly in Unjust Times
Ethical choices may be challenging in the best of times. In times of war and social upheaval, making ethical choices can call on our deepest reserves of courage. This course explores such historical moments, examines the ethical dilemmas faced by leaders, and explores their ethical choices too.
Performing Activism
How can performance serve as a tool of social justice? How have artists, politicians, community activists, and even nations used “performance” as a tool of propaganda, coercion, and dissent? The course examines the intersection of theatre, performance, and activism on a global scale.
Protest and Pop Music
Social protest has often found expression in popular music, from early English ballds to Mississippi Delta blues, 1960s Rock & Roll, and today’s ‘gangsta” rap. Through readings and musical texts, the course examines the intersection between music and protest in America.
Humor and Prejudice
Humor is a universal human phenomenon that often serves as an instrument of prejudice and power. It effects vary from light-hearted laughter to derision that ostracizes. It can be subversive, and it can reinforce the status quo. This course focuses on the social and political functions of humor with an emphasis on the role it plays in prejudice, marginalization, and social injustice.
What Does the Bible Really Say?
The public arena is rife with religious concepts, opinions, and beliefs, many of which have little to do with the real message of the Bible. This course focuses on popular misconceptions about the Bible and helps students develop a healthy skepticism about popular religious discourse. Emphasizing critical thinking approaches, the course helps students learn what the Bible actually teaches and says.
American Identity
Becoming American, Becoming Latino
What does it mean to be Latino in the United States? How has Latino immigration shaped American identity and experience? Through readings, films, performances, and service-learning projects, this course explores common myths about Latinos in America as well as issues of cultural identity, belonging, and difference in the American Latino community.
Diversity in America
As Americans, we pride ourselves on the diversity of our nation. But what do we really mean? With our commitment to diversity as an ideal, how do we reconcile the inequities around us? This course challenges students to think critically about how diversity shapes our identities, our beliefs, and our daily lives.
American Heroes
What constitutes an American hero? What roles have they played in American history and in the shaping of our national identity? This course examines these questions and explores why we need heroes to survive and progress as a people.
Cowboys and Indians? The Construction of Indigenous Identities in the Americas
What does it mean to be an indigenous person in the Americas? As Europeans poured into the Americas in the 16th century—and seized political and economic power— the inhabitants were marginalized as savage “others.” The course examines how the very notion of “indigenous” depends on construction by outsiders, how it is stigmatized, and how it has steered global cultural perceptions for centuries.
Violent Crime and American Media
A few days of watching tv would make the average American believe that we are all “sitting ducks” in a nation of violent crime. But is this a media fabrication ? Has violent crime become rampant in America or merely a powerful archetype of our media narratives? This course compares violent content across a variety of media to actual crime rates, dispelling common myths, and cultivating a habit of critical thinking with regard to media consumption.
Living New Orleans
The Crescent City in the American Imagination
New Orleans has been richly mythologized throughout its history. Before Katrina, New Orleanians were often bemused by some of the wilder representations of their peculiar culture. After the storm, such conceptions were potentially harmful to the city’s recovery. Beginning with journalistic accounts from the aftermath of Katrina, the course moves backwards to trace a genealogy of the myth of New Orleans in American culture.
Food, Ethnicity, and Community in New Orleans
Despite the issues that divide New Orleanians, they share a proud culinary tradition rooted in great ethnic diversity. Coming together over signature dishes, from muffaletas to shrimp creole, from rice calas to Bahn Pho, is a treasured cultural ritual that forges communal bonds. This course explores the ethnic, environmental, and historical forces that have made food a source of community in the Crescent City.
New Orleans Religions: Before and After Katrina
New Orleans’ religious landscape is colorful and complex, blending the Catholic churches of its European founders with the Jewish synagogues, Hindu temples, Muslim mosques, and Voodoo gatherings of those who later populated the city. Through readings, projects, and field trips, this course explores New Orleans’ uniquely rich religious culture, how it changed after Katrina, and what endured.
New Orleans: Home of the Muse
New Orleans has long fascinated writers and drawn many into its bohemian orbit. Some have been captured by its dark romanticism. Others have celebrated its unique human comedy. Still others have mourned its recent devastation. Through readings, films, and conversations with local writers, the course explores New Orleans as literary muse.
Crescent City People
Crescent City People explores the rich culture of New Orleans from a historical perspective. The course investigates the cultures, heritage, and accomplishments of the people who made New Orleans, starting with the Atlantic perspective of the early 18th century and following through to the changes wrought by Katrina.
Creole Crossroads
New Orleans music, food, literature, religious practices, and Carnival reflect the unique mixture of the city’s African, Caribbean, and European roots. The seminar traces the historical threads that converged in this cultural crossroads to create a city like no other.
French Connections: New Orleans’ French Heritage and Identity
What does it mean to be “la Nouvelle-Orleans,” an American city with a French identity. What are our French connections and how do they define us? This course studies the French cultural heritage of New Orleans from its founding as a French colonial settlement to the present day through an examination of our history, architecture, art, music, food, celebrations, and language.
Technology and Culture
Crime and Punishment in the Surveillance Society
Society uses many mechanisms to identify, respond to, and control unwanted behavior. Today, more than ever, communities and prisons are part of a circular world where inside and outside are increasingly connected. This course studies how technologies of watching and being watched have evolved to create our modern ‘surveillance society’ and examines the sociological, political, philosophical byproducts of such surveillance.
Hypermedia and Hyperlearning
The fast-developing synthesis of graphics, audio, and video on the internet—known as ‘hypermedia’-- is changing the way we handle information and shaping the very processes by which we learn. This course examines theories of learning and human development and explores how emerging technologies aid (and sometimes hinder) cognitive processes.
Virtual Religion
We don’t often connect technology and religion but, in fact, technology has strongly influenced religious thought and practice throughout history, from the brick and printing press through radio, television, the internet and virtual spaces. This course, conducted largely within the 3D virtual platform of Second Life, explores the influence of technology on religious communities and practices.
War, Peace, and Politics
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
By an accident of history, nuclear fission was discovered eight months before Germany invaded Poland in 1939. By 1945, the Manhattan Project had built and detonated three nuclear weapons, one as a test in New Mexico, two on cities in Japan. This course looks at how the atomic bomb has shaped world politics and the enterprise of science through concepts in physics, literary and political texts, and films.
Politics & Reel Life
How does film shape our political attitudes? How does it perpetuate injustices via racial, religious, and gender representations ? This course examines the impact of film on people’s perception of politics and the way film both supports and challenges the political status quo.
The Pity of War
Why does our species regularly engage in orgies of collective violence and mass killing? Why, when the cost of war is so appalling, have we not discovered a better way? What have the great Western religions had to say about the morality of war? This course addresses these perennial questions against the background of wars in the history of the West, from tribal war in the ancient near east to today’s “war on terror.”
Political Shakespeare
Shakespeare was not only history’s greatest playwright. He was also a shrewd political thinker of continuing relevance. Through a discussion of several plays (both text and film versions), the course explores Shakespeare’s treatment of enduring moral issues and recurring political themes.
Love and War in Hollywood
Hollywood has shaped Americans’ ideas about love, romantic and sexual, and our sense of the rightness of our conflicts with other nations. Puritanism and Evangelicalism are at the core of our notions of love, and American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny are central to the reasons why we fight. This course examines the history of romantic and war films made in Hollywood, and teaches students to read films critically.
Exploring the Past
New Worlds, Imagined Worlds: From Columbus to Avatar
For Europeans, the ‘discovery’ of the New World was almost unimaginable—Columbus died thinking he had visited Asia on four trips across the Atlantic. Through readings and films, this course examines how Europeans interpreted discovery and conquest in the age of exploration and how these representations provide a cultural inheritance that continues to stimulate the imagination.
Who Owns the Past? Archaeology, Antiquities, and Cultural Heritage
In the 19th Century, archaeologists filled European and American museums with priceless artifacts excavated in the Middle East, opening a panorama of foreign cultures to millions in the West. Today, questions of ownership rage over these artifacts. This course explores the ethical issues surrounding the ownership of cultural treasures in the light of conflicts in the Middle East today.
Medieval Marvels
Medieval travelers imagined a world of marvels beyond their borders, and the stories they brought back often confirmed these imaginings. The course studies the stories of Europeans’ encounters with the fabled ‘others’ of America and Asia between the Norse ‘discovery’ of North America and Columbus’s voyages—through travelogues, maps, cookbooks, and other sources—to explore notions of identity, stereotyping, and justice.
Supernatural Encounters: Magic and Religion
Faith in magic is universal in human experience, explaining how the world works (why do we have earthquakes? Why does evil exist? How can we protect ourselves from forces beyond our control?). The course focuses on the ancient origins of magical belief, the transition from magic to Christianity, and the way magical beliefs have led to demonization throughout the ages and the world.
The Self and the Environment
Body Image and the Media
How does our societal view of “ideal” male and female bodies influence how we think about ourselves and others? How has the ideal changed over time? Through readings in psychology, health, communications, advertising, and history, this course examines how the media impact one’s body image and ultimately one’s concept of self.
Thinking Space
We inhabit multiple spaces every day—architectural and psychological, urban and “green,” personal and cultural–and the spaces of our lives play a prominent role in our identities and values. This seminar considers theories of space in architecture, ecology, philosophy, and literature to spur critical thinking about what humans make of space.
Spinning the Planet
The language we use to talk about the environment shapes our attitudes toward the science, social issues, and politics surrounding environmental questions. The importance of these questions demands that we distinguish responsible communications from “spin.” This course helps students think critically about environmental issues and the language in which they are discussed.
This listing is subject to change. Check for updates.