Identity: Purpose and the Self

Instructor(s)

Bryce Berkowitz

Course Description

In this course, the focus will be a lack of focus. Instead of one marathon topic, we’ll cover a smattering: from image-based poetry to indie movies; voice-driven fiction to edgy memoirs; redefining work culture to social justice movements; the perils of social media to inspirational Ted Talks; and…what else? A random journey toward collective growth and awareness by asking big questions about some of life’s many topics.

Instructor(s)

Angela Hofstetter

Course Description

This two-semester course featuring authors from Butler’s acclaimed Vivan Delbrook Visiting Writer’s Series dynamically engages with the art (film, poetry, podcasts, novels, television shows, short stories, etc.) of the 21s century in conversation with the rich history that precedes it. Our interdisciplinary, international, and intertextual approach will help you hone your writing, research, and speaking skills as well as your appreciation of the vital tradition the humanities play in making meaning out of the mystery, magic, and madness of the human condition.

Instructor(s)

Charles Allen
Brent Hege

Course Description

Through reading and critical discussion around theological, philosophical, and sacred texts, students will be able to explore the meaning of faith, doubt, and reason and ask big implicated questions, such as: what is faith, how do you know what you know, can divinity be proven, and what is the relationship of science to faith? The first semester of Faith, Doubt, and Reason focuses on developing writing skills. The second semester of Faith, Doubt, and Reason will provide an opportunity for students to write and present on issues in need of action in our world.

Instructor(s)

Jeana Jorgensen

Course Description

Often trivialized as “just for kids,” fairy tales have a centuries-long global history as wonder tales told by and for adults striving to articulate the complexities of power relations within social life: identity, gender roles, sexuality, and more. In this class, we will engage with fairy tales from oral and literary traditions, as well as retold fairy tales in the forms of short stories, novels, and films. Our goals are to learn about the messages fairy tales convey about self and society, as well as understand how narrative structure and story appeal apply to both scholarly writing and real life. In other words, we’ll study why the fairy tale is a classic template for coming-of-age experiences as well as more sophisticated political commentaries. Disney will provide only the briefest starting point on this journey.

Instructor(s)

Brian Day

Course Description

In this class, students will be exposed to the field of Human Factors Psychology, which, broadly defined, examines the relationship between human beings and technology in an attempt to make human-technology interactions safe, effective, and efficient. Students will be presented with background on human factors and various real-world applications before transitioning to thinking about taking what has been learned to design their own life in accordance with human factors principles. For instance, students will be asked to reassess their study routines, sleeping habits, and daily technology usage. Students will also be tasked with making changes in their lives which will impact things like their happiness and state of mind. The goal of this class is for students to learn about the field of human factors psychology, and to take what is being learned and make intentional changes to how they live their lives. 

Instructor(s)

Jules Grable

Course Description

Whether they are fighting mythical creatures or battling internal demons, main characters across literature, television, and film face seemingly insurmountable odds and persevere. What are the foundational aspects of this Main Character Energy that inspires such resilience? How do they build the relationships that ultimately help them succeed? What happens to the hero once the battle is won? In this course, students will explore how they can implement the lessons learned from The Hero’s Journey to build up their own abilities to take on the challenges of life and manage those IRL plot twists through self-knowledge, healthy coping strategies, strong relationships, and resilience.

Instructor(s)

Alessandra Lynch

Course Description

In this course we will be reading texts from various genres (personal essay, memoir, graphic “novel,” and poetry), each focusing on some aspect of the Self– self-image, self and community, self and culture. We will discuss how self-expression manifests itself in each genre–how each genre reveals or clarifies insights about the self. Many of our writings will be personal in nature. The class will be discussion-based, but students will keep a journal, respond to a variety of writing prompts, and write essays triggered by the readings.

Instructor(s)

Deb Saxon

Course Description

This course is based on the understanding that humans are shaped by multiple, intersecting social contexts and therefore do not come to issues from a purely objective point of view. Rather than attempting to demonstrate a completely neutral perspective, you will be asked to reflect on your own background and how your ethical or religious commitments—interacting with language, culture, ethnicity, gender, class, and other variables—shape your points of view. Since this is an ICR, you will also have the opportunity to make meaningful connections through service.

Instructor(s)

Hannah Sullivan-Brown
Julie Searcy
Grant Vecera

Course Description

In this course, students will explore the values, choices and goals that inform their decisions and guide their own lives. By reading carefully selected texts — from writers across the vast array of disciplines, students will seek answers to the following questions: how can I do both well and do good in the world? How do I know what I am meant to do, for work and for leisure? How can I find the path in life that is uniquely mine? What are the philosophical and practical goalposts that I should aim for? How do I live a meaningful life?

Instructor(s)

Darryl Pebbles

Course Description

This Modern American Memoir FYS involves the study of memoir, a category of the larger Life Writing genre. We will study modern lives through the prism of memoirs written by writers with unusual and fascinating backgrounds and stories. We begin with essays offering a history of memoir before reading essays describing the nature of memoir and the many issues that often arise—such as memory recall, memory fallibility, unintended misrepresentation and fabrication.

We read a variety of essay-length memoirs as well as excerpts from book-length memoirs before turning to Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and Tara Westover’s Educated. These writers ask interesting questions: What is truth in memoir? How do memoirs differ from fiction? Are memoirists fiction writers in disguise? At what point does embellishment of an event transform into fabrication? Finally, why do we enjoy telling nonfictional stories about ourselves and reading nonfictional stories about other lives?

Instructor(s)

Alexander Roehrkasse

Course Description

Many of our most salient watchwords— binging, multitasking, clickbait, doomscrolling—betray the pervasive feeling that attention in contemporary life is misused, even abused. By engaging with scientific, journalistic, and literary texts, this course investigates the nature of attention, mounting efforts to control and profit from attention through technology and design, and emerging movements to resist attentional exploitation. The course also explores attention-based practices such as mindfulness meditation to better align our attention with our goals and values and leverage it for vocational reflection. 

Instructor(s)

Sunny Romack
Tracy Jaffe

Course Description

“In this course, students will learn and practice civil discourse in a constructive community through study of women’s ongoing struggle for basic human rights in the US and around the world. By reading, viewing, or listening to feminist thinkers from across the globe, both historical and contemporary, students will reflect on the systemic nature of patriarchal oppression that, despite feminist progress on many fronts, continues to marginalize and dehumanize women even today. This course will ask: What are the limitations of white, Western liberal feminism for supporting women’s rights across lines of national origin, race, ethnicity, religious identity, disability status, socioeconomic standing or caste, sexual orientation, and gender identity? What can transnational, intersectional feminism teach us about the deep connections between patriarchal structures, capitalism, and imperialism, as well as how feminism can address the injustices inherent within all three? What role has collective feminist action played in furthering women’s basic human rights in the past? What role can it play today?

How do women’s rights relate to human rights more broadly? What are the benefits of a transnational, intersectional approach to feminism in countering patriarchal oppression of women and other marginalized groups?”

Instructor(s)

Betsy Redelman Diaz

Course Description

This discussion-based seminar will consider the intersections of queerness and disability with race, class, gender, capitalism, and colonialism. Utilizing the core ideas of queer of color critique and disability justice, together we will traverse topics such as the body, identity, drag, performance, futurity, failure, rest, and resistance. Course content will center sick/disabled QTBIPOC artists and scholars including Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Eli Claire, Radical Visibility Collective, Indira Allegra, Kinetic Light, Jina B. Kim, and Sami Schalk, among others. This course¿s focus is on inquiry and is open to students of all identities.

Instructor(s)

Chris Forhan

Course Description

The poet Wallace Stevens speaks of humans’ “blessed rage for order”: the imagination’s relentless habit of making its own meaning of experience. In this course, we will investigate how writers have depicted the mind’s methods of perceiving and making sense of the world. We will contemplate how forces such as memory, desire, art, and a culture’s shared conceptions of truth influence an individual’s subjective conceptions of reality. Among the possible authors we will read are Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bishop, and Annie Dillard. Along with this reading, the course will involve ongoing practice of composition strategies intended to prepare students for the writing they will be expected to do throughout college. One result of this intensive reading and writing will be that students will discover ways in which they might construct (or have already constructed) coherent forms of meaning that make a private sense of their own experience.

Instructor(s)

Nicholas Reading

Course Description

Throughout this process, students explore what it means to be happy, content, and centered. Our intention considers the inquiry, What does a peaceful life look like? A seemingly simple topic, we will investigate the social, economic, and personal complexities enmeshed in lifelong pursuits. I hope students read something they needed to hear and write something they didn’t know they needed to say.

Instructor(s)

Undraa Maamuujav

Course Description

Delving into the rhetoric of auto ethnography and other creative nonfiction genres, we will explore the many dimensions of our lived experiences: the complicated web of identities, actions, thoughts, feelings, memories, imaginations, and encounters that shape our sense of who we are and what our place in society is. We will examine written and multimodal texts of various genres, encompassing both creative nonfiction and fiction writing, to understand how self-expression manifests itself in these genres and how these genres illuminate insights about the interplay of self and society. Through creative remixing of multimodal elements and multiple genres(e.g, poetry, memoir, podcast, infographic, digital storytelling), we seek to understand how our personal identities and experiences are intricately and inextricably linked to the larger cultural, political, economic, historical, and social structures within which we live. This course will help students develop critical thinking, close reading, persuasive writing, academic research, and digital literacy skills while tapping into their creativity. 

Instructor(s)

Kjell Fostervold
Kyle Furlane

Course Description

What is the meaning of life? What does it mean to be happy? This course will explore historical and contemporary accounts of what gives life meaning and brings us happiness. Through philosophy, fiction, films, and graphic novels we will learn about a variety of perspectives on living a meaningful life. These accounts will include philosophical traditions, such as Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Existentialism; religious traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity; as well as explorations of current psychology on the nature of happiness. Along the way, we will investigate questions about the most important things in life: love, family, ethics, work, and play.

Instructor(s)

Andy Levy

Course Description

Fantasy literature is not just a ‘pop genre:’ it provides many opportunities for both readers and writers to look at the most tumultuous upheavals of world history with fresh lenses and a sense of possibility. This semester’s course provides a balanced chronological overview of the genre of fantasy, reaching back centuries, and with special emphasis on how recent authors (from the US but also worldwide) deploy the central tropes of the genre: from worldbuilding components like ‘portals,’ to the influence of myth and fairy tale and classic tropes like ‘dragons,’ to settings both historical and modern urban. The students in this course will both read and create in the genre, study examples from multiple media (novels, films, videogame) and explore how to better navigate their experience of fantasy in both public culture and as an instrument of personal empowerment and expression.

Instructor(s)

Tom Paradis

Course Description

Along with its roles in contemporary pop culture, Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games can be interpreted through numerous disciplinary perspectives. This FYS invites you to “unpack” numerous layers of meaning embedded within Collins’ original dystopian series (fall semester) and her recent prequels (spring semester). Students with any level of (in)experience are welcome, though some level of passion for exploring this world is a must. We will first examine this allegorical saga as a cultural and literary phenomenon before moving into connections with our own world. We will take our own academic tour of sorts, sampling a variety of perspectives including psychology, history, philosophy, English, gender studies, political science, communication, music history (the Covey!), and health science, among others. You will have the opportunity to explore any of these disciplinary connections within your own creative projects. This will all wrap around your professor’s focus on the human and urban geography of Panem, and especially the central Appalachian home of an unlikely heroine, Katniss Everdeen.

Instructor(s)

Felicia Williams

Course Description

I chose this topic because it is important to be cognizant of our individual process and habits. It is imperative that one knows how to articulate their voice and be comfortable doing so. I also think it is important that we seek to hear the voices of others. Listening to and thinking about others can be both educational and transformative on multiple levels.

Instructor(s)

Joseph Long

Course Description

Coming soon.

Instructor(s)

Natalie Carter

Course Description

This seminar introduces students to critical thinking and a discussion of values, and develops oral and written communication skills through an investigation of contemporary women’s literature written in a variety of global cultures. Through contemporary literary texts, the course will explore women’s perspectives on current issues influencing women’s sense of self, relationships, worldviews, opportunities, and challenges; we’ll consider the ways that sexual politics intersect with the politics of race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, nationality, and other markers of difference. By examining literary texts and other cultural materials, we’ll consider possibilities for understanding and changing the cultural, political, and social systems that define women in the world.

Instructor(s)

Chamara Moore

Course Description

Who are the people that we credit with the making of the Western world? How has this been shaped by the racialized histories of the Atlantic world? How have marginalized folks used writing and theorizing as tools to remake the world in their own image or into something else altogether? We’ll examine everything from short stories and graphic narratives by Adrienne Marie Brown, and Alan Moore to TV and Film like the Handmaid’s Tale, Star Trek, and Black Panther to explore these questions and more.