The following is a list of classes being offered in Spring 2022 that go along with the Cultures without Borders theme. Occasionally there will be public events with these courses. Information about such events will be made available on the Calendar of Events.
| Course number | Course title | Instructor | Description | Times/Dates/Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MCL 270-001 | Introduction to Folklore and Mythology | Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby | Tattoos, Handmade dulcimers, Campus ghosts, Mothman, and BBQ, all in one course. Learn more about folklore and how it affects how we think, act, and believe. Satisfies the UK Course Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities or Intellectual Inquiry in the Social Sciences requirement. | TR 11am-12:15pm, LAW 399 |
| LIN 317-001 | Language & Society: Native Languages of the United States and Canada | Rusty Barrett | There are over 300 distinct languages recorded among Native American/First Nations communities. The first part of the course will present outlines of the histories and grammatical typologies of different language families, including Algonkian, Iroquoian, Na-Dene/Athabaskan, Siouan, Salishan, Mukogean, Kiowa-Tanoan, and Yupik-Aleut-Inuit. We will also look at the grammar of Hawaiian. The remainder of the course will look at sociocultural aspects of language, including forms of verbal art, literature, language variation, interactional styles, contact varieties, language loss, and language revitalization. | TR 2-3:15pm, CB 241 |
| ANT 536-001 | Global Appalachia | Ann Kingsolver | Appalachia has always had strong global connections, environmentally, economically, and culturally. Current cultural and political economic issues in the region will be examined in comparative perspective through studying related histories and challenges of communities in Appalachia and other mountain regions, including social and economic marginalization within nation-states, resource extraction, low-wage work, and unsustainable infrastructure. We will also learn about the global contributions of mountain regions through migration, water sources, and activism for social, economic, and environmental justice. Students will have the opportunity to learn through connecting with another classroom globally and discussions with authors of class readings. |
T 3:30-6pm, LH 213 |
| ENG 570-001 | Selected Topics for Advanced Studies in Literature: Anticolonial Writing and Thought | Peter Kalliney | This course looks at the traditions of anticolonial thought from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Comparing movements for national liberation, realignment, and literary self-determination from across the world, we'll consider the shifting claims of the British, American, French, Spanish, and Russian empires, and the colonial subjects, postcolonial frameworks, and decolonial movements that sought to contest these formations from Chile to Alcatraz, India to Ireland, and Azerbaijan to Martinique. Our focus will most often be on the manifestos and essays in which anticolonial writers outlines their literary and political programs, but we may also look at a few poems, stories, and films. From Vicente Huidobro's fantasies of a secret international society to end British Imperialism to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's call to abolish the English Department, how did the radical claims of anticolonial political thought take share in literary writing? This course will be taught in conjunction with parallel courses offered by Professor Leah Feldman at the University of Chicago and Professor Harris Feinsod at Northwestern University. We anticipate building opportunities for cross-campus research among students as part of an ongoing, large-scale collaboration. | TR 11am-12:15pm, CB 213 |
The following is a list of classes being offered in Fall 2021 that go along with the Cultures without Borders theme. Occasionally there will be public events with these courses. Information about such events will be made available on the Calendar of Events.
| Course number | Course title | Instructor | Description | Times/Dates/Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WRD 401-003 | Comics and Conflict in Israel/Palestine | Jan Fernheimer | Though Israel/Palestine, peace, conflict, and the Middle East appear frequently in the daily news, people often don’t understand what all the fuss is about, and why the conflict(s) appear so seemingly unsolvable. This course will offer a unique opportunityto gain a deeper understanding of the many conflicts within and between Israeli and Palestinian societies by looking at them through the lens of graphic narratives. We’ll read a number of graphic novels/ autobiographies/journalistic texts including but notlimited to Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, Harvey Pekar’s and J.T. Waldman’s Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me, Joe Sacco’s famous serial Palestine,Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi, as well as a variety of other texts to see how words and images have shaped and limited the ways the Israeli/Palestinian conflicts and potential solutions to them are represented. We’ll analyze key concepts: homeland, settlements, Zionism, diaspora, occupied territories, refugees, citizenship, and cease-fire, from Israeli, Palestinian, and other perspectives to better understand how they shape narratives about memory, history, and identity, both national and individual. Since the graphic genre is a relatively new literary development, we will pay careful attention to how it offers new affordances and limitations for representing these complex relationships. As this will be a writing intensive course, we will explore these issues as a means of sharpening your critical thinking, reading, and writing skills. Students may have additional opportunities to interact with authors/artists through Zoom-facilitated guest lectures. | TR 2:00-3:15pm, BH 306 |
| ENG 171-001 | GLOBAL LITERATURE IN ENGLISH | Jap-Nanak Makkar | This course focuses on several canonical texts of postcolonial and global literature, analyzing them through the lenses of morality and crime, law and lawlessness, right and wrong. You will explore literature’s potential to shape moral principles, taking as a case study the special relationship between morality and the novel. You’ll learn that because novels ask us to sympathize with the main character, they were helpful in establishing the following moral principles and laws: bans on violence, physical abuse and torture; beliefs in the sanctity of the human body; beliefs in the ability of each individual to determine their own life; and the notion that suffering in a fellow human is a reason for empathy. But you’ll also learn that the novel’s account of right and wrong is tied up with a single individual’s perspective—usually the narrator’s or the main character’s perspective. That is, the reader gets only “one side” of the story, not the “full” or objective story. (Think of heist or crime novels: usually, you want the criminals to get away with their crime, don’t you?). Given that this is the case, we’ll ask: what if our sympathy with the main character leads us to inadvertently condone a heinous crime? How can we be sure that we have been told the truth in a novel, or that characters are as right as they seem? Each of the novels or poems we read will include a crime of some sort: the crime of colonialism, perhaps, or the crimes committed in order to win independence. A central issue for the class will be to discuss whether we should sympathize with the crime or condemn it, and how to decide either way. UK Core: Global Dynamics | MW 3:00-4:15pm, CB 215 |
| ENG 491G-001 | STUDIES IN THEORY: Postcolonial and Global Theory | Jap-Nanak Makkar | Through this reading-intensive seminar students gain a foundation in postcolonial and global theory, an area of “theory” that explores topics of racial difference, colonial domination and capitalist expansion. We read in order to survey the field—taking in everything from early essays in postcolonial studies to cutting-edge accounts of globalization—but as we do, we attend with particular interest to the methodological commitments of our theorists. Guided by three unit divisions, the first called “Jacques Derrida,” the second “Michel Foucault” and the last “Fredric Jameson,” we ask what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha gained from notable texts of deconstruction, such as Writing and Difference or “White Mythologies”? How did a book such as Foucault’s Madness and Civilization guide Edward Said when the latter proposed to study orientalism as a “discourse”? And, finally, to what extent have Fredric Jameson’s theories of “a singular modernity” helped to move postcolonialism toward a more robust confrontation with uneven development? This course will appeal to anyone with interests in studying British, American or postcolonial literature in a transnational frame. Readings divided in three units: Jacques Derrida (Derrida, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Mrinalini Chakravorty), Michel Foucault (Foucault, Edward Said, Gauri Viswanathan, Jenny Sharpe) and Fredric Jameson (Jameson, WReC, Pascale Cassanova, Ian Baucom, Peter Kalliney). Literary works by Mahasweta Devi, Joseph Conrad and Ousmane Sembène. | TR 4:30-5:45pm, OB 3 |
| LIN 317-002 | Language & Society: Language and Borders | Mark Lauersdorf | This course examines the interaction of language and borders - geophysical borders, political borders, socio-cultural borders, psychological borders - and what happens to languages and communities of speakers, and how we view those languages and speakers, when we create borders, remove borders, change borders, and cross borders. | TR 3:30-4:45pm, TPC 113 |
| UKC 193-001 | International Village, Then and Now | Marro Inoue | This course will explore the formation and transformation of the “international village,” defined as a network of connections and communications, as well as tensions and conflicts, that has stretched across continents and countries over the past 100+ years. We will accomplish this task by examining a number of specific phenomena or events of global significance, such as war, new media, pandemics, Olympic games, popular culture (with focus on issues of race, gender, and class), the United Nations, religion, political economy (with emphasis on environmental issues), and technology (such as AI and biomedical engineering). In the process, we will also explore specific forms the international village has taken on the UK campus by conducting life history interviews among classmates. | MW 3:00-4:15pm, PH 218 |
