Writing from Life: An Immersion into Experience
56:66:612:A1
Cross Listed with 56:200:571:90/50:989:390:90
Online
Instructor: Professor Grodstein

This course is designed to allow students to plumb their own lives for subject matter for short stories or essays. The four subjects we’ll tackle are childhood, travel, grief, and work, but these subjects are broad enough that they welcome other topics into their scope. For instance, when considering travel, we might think about food, international norms, or the sad state of the airline industry; when we write about work, we might write about our houses, our hobbies, our loves.

Each unit contains a lecture, several mandatory readings, a few suggested readings and/or videos (which are designed to help inspire you to write your weekly submission), and a mandatory discussion forum, in which you must respond to the readings and to one another’s posts).

Graduate students are responsible for one six-nine page submission weekly, and undergraduates are responsible for four-seven page submissions.

Philosophy and Film
56:606:642:HP
Online
Instructor: Professor Young
This course will focus on interpretations of philosophical ideas as presented in film. Using films as representations of “thought experiments,” we will identify and evaluate which positions they implicitly or explicitly support regarding philosophical issues such as skepticism, relativism, personal identity, artificial intelligence, and determinism.

Health and Healing in Africa
56:606:681:BP COURSE HAS BEEN CANCELLED
Online
Instructor: Professor Nicholson

This class will use the concept of health and healing to examine larger social, economic and political trends in Africa. Focusing on diseases such as Ebola, HIV/AIDS and cholera, and by examining such topics as traditional healing, reproductive health and inoculations, this class will highlight changes and continuities that Africans experienced over the last two hundred years. A range of primary and secondary sources will be used to highlight African concerns , outside stereotypes, local responses to changing medical views and African agency with regard to health and healing. The class will link notions of health and healing with the colonial and postcolonial state and global changes. Students will be expected to post weekly forum responses, upload weekly small papers and develop an argumentative essay over the course of the class.