Course Catalog
Courses Primarily for Undergraduate Students
HUM 105-0 – The Humanities Plunge
FIVE CONSECUTIVE DAYS OF EXPERIENTIAL HUMANITIES IN CHICAGO
Music • Theatre • Dance • Architecture • History • Neighborhood Cultures • Art
Immerse yourself in Chicago’s rich cultural landscape with five days of theatre, art, music, architecture, and history, guided by expert scholars and artists! Peek behind the scenes at major cultural institutions! Sample new foods in new neighborhoods! Discover plays, museums, performances, and walking tours! This serious humanities course will be seriously FUN as you encounter the broad range of institutions and activities available just next door by exploring Chicago’s neighborhoods and cultural scene.
HUM 205 – The World of Homer
What do we know of the world inhabited by the heroes of Homer’s epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey? Do the poems describe a largely imaginary realm created by their author, or do they reflect a particular period of ancient Greek history—and if so, which one? This course explores the society, economy, and culture of Iron Age Greece with special emphasis on the Geometric and early Archaic periods, emphasizing what scholars have learned through archaeological discoveries along with study of the poems themselves. Topics include the excavations at Troy, Athens, and other sites; contacts with Egypt and the Near East and colonization in the Mediterranean world; trade, exchange, and the technology of travel; literacy and oral tradition; political communities and warfare; religion, burial practices, and the art of ritual and commemoration.HUM 225-0-20 – Media Theory: An Introduction
How do media impact our sense of such fundamental concepts as personhood, social life, and time and space? How do new technologies transform sensory experience at different moments in history? This course provides an introduction to the field of theoretical writings within the humanities addressing the nature of media and the role of technology in twentieth- and twenty-first century culture. We will pay close attention to the work of key media theorists, including (but not limited to) Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, and Donna Haraway. We will also analyze works of art, sound, film, and literature in order to catalyze, test, and expand our sense of how media matter.HUM 260-0-20 – Economics and the Humanities: Understanding Choice in the Past, Present, and Future
Co-listed with SLAVIC 396-0-20.
This course offers a cross-disciplinary approach to the concept of alternatives and choices. At any given moment, how many alternatives are possible? Is there really such a thing as chance or choice? On what basis do we choose? How does our understanding of the past affect the future? Can we predict the future? With Professor Schapiro, President of Northwestern and a labor economist, and Professor Morson, a specialist in literature, you will examine approaches to these questions and learn how to evaluate assumptions, evidence, moral questions, and possibilities across disciplines.
HUM 325-6-20 – Information Overload! From the Printing Press to the Smartphone
Co-listed with ENGLISH 385-0-20.
This course explores the anxiety, exhaustion, and unease brought on by information technologies. We will trace emotional responses to technological change, from the shock of the printing press to the malaise of the present "information economy." How did new text technologies reshape language and society? Who is permitted access to certain kinds of information and why? We will take a hands-on approach to these questions by pairing literature that addresses the anxieties of technology, like the scifi linguistics of Arrival and the postapocalyptic Shakespeare of Station Eleven, with book history and digital humanities techniques designed to manage information. Students will learn how books are made, how search algorithms work, and how to analyze text with code.
HUM 325-4-20 – Abolition & Equality: 19th Century Black Activism in the Midwest
Co-listed with HISTORY 395-0-24.
This digital humanities course has two areas of focus, one historical and one technological: 1) We will research and write about how African Americans in the Midwest, particularly in Illinois, mobilized for freedom and equality in the 1840s and. Many of the historical themes we’ll examine—including forms of racial inequality in a post-slavery society, African Americans’ strategies for social and political mobilization, and Black activists’ relationships with white allies—are enduring topics in U.S. history and resonate with present-day questions and challenges. 2) We will participate in a major collaborative digital humanities enterprise, the Colored Conventions Project. This means exploring practices of digital history, conducting basic work with digitized documents, and designing a web-based exhibit. Prior experience in digital humanities is not required, but patience and curiosity are essential!
HUM 325-6-20 – Ancient Rome in Chicago
Ancient Rome is visible in Chicago—walk the city and learn to “read” the streets, buildings, and monuments that showcase Chicago’s engagement with the classical past! You’ll gain digital mapping and video editing skills as you collaborate on a virtual walking tour mapping Chicago’s ongoing dialogue with antiquity. With a combination of experiential learning and rigorous research methodologies, you’ll explore architecture, history, visual arts, and urban topography in this quintessential modern American city.HUM 325-6-22 – Shakespeare: Global, Local, Digital
Performance, Imitation, Interpretation, Adaptation. What happens when Shakespeare’s plays time travel, migrate across the globe, mutate into new forms, and reach audiences through new media? From Renaissance London to 21st century India, from apartheid South Africa to modern China, readers have remade Shakespeare’s plays to address their own local issues. In this class we will reflect on the adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare in cultures of the world across various scales, from the local to the global, and through a range of media—from the latest digital platforms to traditional forms like print, theater, and film. Like Shakespeare’s plays, our conversations will take place in multiple venues and from multiple perspectives, from the traditional classroom to the digital media lab, from the rare books room of the Newberry Library to the stages of Chicago’s theaters. We will consider how Othello, Macbeth, and The Merchant of Venice have been continually reinvented across the globe in many media, exploring texts like Shishir Kurup’s Merchant on Venice, Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, Msomi’s uMabatha, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, the teen film O, and scenes from films including Throne of Blood and Tangata Whai Rawa o Weniti, Te (the Maori Merchant of Venice). Our exploration will culminate with students collaborating to build a digital curation of Shakespeare's works.HUM 370-3-20 – City of Women: Race/Class/Sexuality in American Women's Lives
Co-listed with ANTHRO 390-0-27
This seminar, which plays on Federico Fellini’s film of the same title, and the famous 13th century Italian feminist poem “The Treasure of the City of Ladies,” explores the variations across positionality, time, and space in women’s American urban experiences. We will establish some basic urban-studies concepts and, with a special focus on Chicago, will then read together literary work, historical and social science studies, and contemporary journalism in order to consider misogyny/racism/xenophobia/classism and their effects on women’s lives, and issues of women’s employment, reproductive rights, sexuality, and violence against women. And, of course, women’s own agency in attempting to live their urban lives, pursue their goals, and claim their equal rights and pleasures. We will also consider common representations—and misrepresentations--of varying women’s urban lives.
American women live in cities, work in cities, but have had to wage a fight that is by no means over to be accommodated in the urban world. From hostile built environments (e.g., lack of sufficient public women’s bathrooms), ongoing lower salaries than men’s, to the lack of subsidized childcare, to omnipresent harassment and sexual violence at work, at home, and in the public world, American cities are far more challenging environments for women than for men.
We are living in a strange new cultural and political-economic arena, in which daily horrific racist/misogynist attacks and policies, from the White House down, jostle up against vibrant, active backlash and organizing by grassroots and other feminist and antiracist movements. I encourage students who are interested in unpacking the present to choose some element of the current national conjuncture and gender to research as your topic.
HUM 370-3-20 – Fire and Blood: Resources, Energy and Society
Climate crisis, directly linked to CO2 emissions from centuries of burning fossil fuels, has brought energy resources to the center of public attention. This course will survey works of anthropology, history, and geography as well as films and novels to understand how various resources and energy systems relate to sociocultural practices and politics throughout the world. Focusing on one energy resource each week, Fire and Blood will examine how uranium, wind, coal, light, oil, water, and other materials are made into sources of power—both physical and political. It will trace the movement of resources from the subsoil, atmosphere, or riverbeds to pipelines, power plants, dams, turbines, or other kinds of energy infrastructures; and finally, to the electrified streets of urban Mumbai, the wastelands of Navajo County; or the melting ice sheets of the Arctic. After discussing the toxic legacies of fossil fuels and nuclear things, we will end the course by reading texts on “energy transition” and post-carbon futures. By the end of the course, each student will have produced a research paper on an existing, past, or planned energy resource project of their choice from anywhere in the world.HUM 370-4-21 – Archaeology and Nationalism
Co-listed with ANTHRO 390-0-28 and MENA 390-4-21.
Archaeology and nationalism have been closely intertwined at least since the idea of the nation-state emerged following the French Revolution. Archaeology offers nationalist agendas the possibility of filling in national historical records and extending the past far into prehistory. Its results can be displayed in museums, occupy entire sites, and be readily accessible online —thus potentially reaching many new audiences beyond traditional print media. In turn, nationalism has contributed significantly to the development of archaeology as a modern discipline.
Drawing on new critical approaches and examples selected from a wide geographical range, this course explores the role of archaeology in the creation and elaboration of national identities from the eighteenth century to the present day. Issues include the institutionalization of archaeology; the development of museums and practices of display and interpretation; the creation of archaeological sites as national monuments and tourist destinations; cultural property legislation and repatriation of artifacts; and archaeology and monuments under totalitarian regimes.
HUM 370-4-20 – Islam and the Global Renaissance
This course will introduce students to various aspects of Islamic cultural and intellectual history that contributed to Renaissance thought, and to early modern "Western Civilization" generally. In modern times, of course, the Islamic world has gotten a pretty bad rap for (allegedly) lacking the things that made the modern west "modern:" a spirit of rational philosophical and scientific inquiry, a commitment to religious tolerance, a humanistic respect for intellectual freedom and curiosity, a historical consciousness, and so on. But as we will see, Muslim scholars, intellectuals, and literati throughout history have not only espoused such values, many were pioneering thinkers whose works had a profound influence on the development of early modern European intellectual culture. It is a feature of our shared intellectual past that has largely been forgotten in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But recuperating such global genealogies of modern thought—and specifically, the modern humanities—is perhaps more urgent than ever today, in our own era of resurgent ethnic, nationalist, and sectarian chauvinism around the world.HUM 370-4-21 – Race in the American Midwest
This seminar explores the role of race and Indigeneity in histories of the American Midwest. Despite popular narratives of the Midwest as purely a heartland of white homogeneity and normativity, racialized communities of color have long shaped politics, culture, and society in the region. This course emphasizes the fluid nature of ideas about race, and their interplay with the construction of place in a settler colonial society. The course materials cover a wide range of topics that are crucial for understanding both Midwestern and U.S. history writ large. From the multi-ethnic world of the fur trade, to contemporary housing inequalities, this course highlights the making of a U.S. region, and confronts mythologies of the Midwest in the American imagination.HUM 370-4-20 – Race and the American Presidency
How did Lyndon B. Johnson, a product of the Jim Crow South, become the standard bearer of presidential liberalism? In this study of the man and his times, students will thus trace the arc of Lyndon Johnson’s political career through the lens of American race relations. This course takes as its starting point Johnson’s modest Texas origins and continues in a study of his political labors, after he assumed the presidency, which resulted in the passage of historic civil rights legislation and produced the Great Society program that was designed to address the problem of poverty. In the final weeks of the semester, we will consider Johnson’s fall, in the wake of Vietnam, and consider his political legacy and his relevance to the contemporary electoral cycle.HUM 370-4-20 – Red Power: Indigenous Resistance in the U.S. and Canada, 1887-present
Co-listed with HISTORY 300-0-30.
In 2016, thousands of Indigenous water protectors and their non-Native allies camped at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in an effort to block the construction of the DakotaAccess Pipeline. That movement is part of a long history of Native activism. In this course, we will examine the individual and collective ways in which Indigenous people have resisted colonial domination in the U.S. and Canada since 1887. In addition to focusing on North America, we will also turn our attention to Hawai‘i and the U.S. territories. This course will highlight religious movements, inter-tribal organizations, key intellectual figures, student movements, armed standoffs, non-violent protest, and a variety of visions for Indigenous community self-determination.
HUM 370-5-22 – Integrity and the Politics of Corruption
If seasoned politicians in a fragile democracy are implicated in wide-scale corruption, but the country faces an acute economic crisis requiring experience at the helm, what should be done about the corrupt, and who should decide? What compromises, if any, are morally appropriate when dealing with dictators who threaten to unleash violence unless they are guaranteed amnesty by the democratic forces trying to replace them? We’ll delve into such fraught problems of corruption and abuse of political power, examining in detail two ideas related to “the people:” the sovereign people as the owner of public property (often stolen by corrupt politicians) and the people as an agent with its own moral integrity (one that might bear on policy dilemmas surrounding the proper response to corruption). Students will acquire familiarity with prominent philosophical treatments of integrity, property, and public policy.HUM 370-5-20 – Race/Gender/Sex and Science: Making Identities and Differences
How do scientific claims and technological developmentshelp transform cultural understandings of race, gender, and sexuality? Conversely, how do cultural beliefs about race, gender, and sexuality influence scientific knowledge and medical practice? This class will take
up a series of controversies from the recent past and present to explore the dynamic interplay between expert findings, social identities, and political arguments. NOTE: This course was previously offered as HUM 395.
HUM 370-5-21 – Why College?
This seminar will give undergraduates the opportunity to reflect critically, thoughtfully, and together with peers, on the question: why go to college? There are many expectations that parents and society place on the college experience. Now that we are in college, how shall we think about it? Is it an experience or is it an education? Is it a ticket to a job or is it the pursuit of knowledge? What do professors do? How is contemporary culture reflected in the university? We address various facets of college life, such as diversity and justice; sex and sexism; the “party pathway”; technology; the value of the humanities; the role that wealth plays in admissions; and we relate our present experience to the history of the university.HUM 370-6-23 – The Animated Documentary
Co-listed with RTVF 377-0-20.
Animation and non-fiction filmmaking seem contrary to one another, though relationships between animation and documentary practices date all the way back to the origins of cinema. This course will trace the history of that interplay, focusing on aesthetic interventions in animated documentaries, especially over the last twenty years (Waltz with Bashir, Persepolis). Parallel examples of non-fiction themes in comic art and video games will also be considered. These forms will be considered alongside readings that explore the rhetoric of design, aesthetics, semiotics, and anthropology. Through these readings, screenings, writing assignments and class discussions, students will explore the contours of this emerging genre.
HUM 370-6-21 – Arabian Nights
We will study the history of the story collection known in English as The Arabian Nights or The Thousand and One Nights, from its medieval Arabic sources, its global circulation, to its contemporary interpretations in modern literature, art, film, and dance. We will consider how the Nights has been used as a source of narrative techniques, literary themes, political allegories, and feminist debates across languages. Reading these later works next to their original Arabic versions, we will consider how the collection serves as a privileged site of interaction--for good or ill--between the Middle East and the West.HUM 370-6-21 – Contemporary Middle Eastern Performance
This seminar examines shifts and transformations in embodied cultural practices across the Middle East and North Africa, with particular attention to music, dance, theater, and popular culture. Spanning the late nineteenth century to the Arab Spring, students will better understand a cultural history of the region, its role in shaping global modernity, and the politics of gender, sexuality, and ethnoreligious difference. In addition to class discussion and written assignments, students will be asked to develop a creative project to be designed in consultation with the instructor.HUM 370-6 – The Crime Centered Documentary
Fulfills Distro 6 (Literature and Fine Arts)
Co-listed with LEGAL_ST 376-0-20 and RTVF 377-0-20.
In this course, we will view non-fiction and hybrid films that revolve around crime, criminal justice, and criminal court cases. Our emphasis will be on cases that are either mired in controversy and/or emblematic of wider social concerns. Readings will accompany viewings and experts will weigh in with legal, philosophical or scientific perspectives: What is accurately depicted? What is omitted? What is misrepresented? Concurrently, we will investigate the films aesthetically: How is the film structured and why? What choices are being made by the filmmaker in terms of camera, sound and editing and how do these choices affect viewers? Throughout the course, we will consider the ethics of depicting real people and traumatic events. We will also look at specific films in regard to their legal or societal impact. Assignments will include a series of short response papers and a substantial final project, which can take the form of either (up to the student) a final 12-15 page paper or an 8-12 minute film or podcast. The final should center upon a legal topic. Ideas include, but are not limited to: A comparison of two films depicting the same criminal case, a polished/edited interview with a person somehow connected to a crime, an investigation of a local court or legal advocacy center. Group projects (two people max) will be allowed.
Please note: For students who have not completed RTVF 190, if you choose to make a film or podcast for your final project, you may either use your own gear, or, pending availability, you may reserve equipment from the Northwestern Library: http://libguides.northwestern.edu/circulatingequipment/summary. Technical skills such as lighting, camera, sound, and editing will not be taught in this class.
HUM 370-6-20 – Cultures of Information: Neoliberalism, Affect, Global Media
What does the information age feel like? This course follows the rise of hyper-modernized cultures of information that developed in Japan and the Western world in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It does so not only by attending to the advent of new technologies that defined this period, but also through the rise of “neoliberalism:” an economic and political paradigm prizing the creation of new markets and a focus on the productivity and care of the self. Evolving unevenly in different contexts, neoliberalism values market exchange, according to David Harvey, as “an ethic in itself,” which has come to shape contemporary forms of politics and art. In this course we will attend to a variety of aesthetic texts that will allow us to follow the history of neoliberalism in its global, national, and aesthetic contexts.We first trace the development of concepts central to the information age—such as cybernetics, feedback, and system—and how they came to inform works of literature, film, and other media in the 1960s and 1970s. We then move to aesthetic works that reflect and articulate the shift from forms of industrial to “post-industrial” labor. Finally, we will focus on how, in the neoliberal context, capital has come to dominate nearly every aspect of human life, producing a range of aesthetic affective responses from depression to distraction, and angst to the minor adjustment of moods.
HUM 370-6-20 – Postcolonial Noir
Crime fiction is where questions of law, justice, and community are investigated, but only rarely resolved.This course will explore this problem in a transnational context, to expose the fundamental issues of power and difference that have underlain the classic detective novel, and then work our way through texts produced in colonial and postcolonial settings in the Middle East and North Africa. Surveying over 150 years of detection, we will use these texts to understand the relationship between criminal investigation and literary interpretation, between history and the present, and between literary style and political authority.
HUM 370-6-22 – What’s “love” got to do with it? Desire and Power Between Shakespeare’s Characters
This course will focus on five plays by William Shakespeare: As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Winter’s Tale to explore a recurring theme across Shakespeare’s works: how desire, power and control intersect in “romantic” relationships. Through close reading, we will examine the strategies Shakespeare created to represent “love” as a crossroad where eroticism, obsession, politics, economics, gender hierarchies, racism, and anti-Semitism meet. Amongst these strategies: cross-dressing, gender switching, interracial marriage, and pivotal roles for female characters with agency to impact the outcome of the plots set in motion in each play.HUM 370-3-21 – Earth Politics and Poetics: Knowing, Shaping, and Imagining the Planet
Co-listed with ANTHRO 390-0-29 and ENVR_POL 390-0-22, and approved for credit in the Science in Human Culture major/minor
“Planet Earth” has a political and social history. The Copernican turn and geological notions of deep time, for example, radically shifted understandings of the Earth, time, and humans’ relationship to them. Whole Earth images first generated by the Apollo Space missions in the late 1960s and 1970s have been the characteristic form of planetary imagination during the late twentieth century. Earthrise and The Blue Marble images enabled humans to imagine the planet as an interconnected whole against the backdrop of the Cold War and environmental disasters. They have been crucial to the emergence of a “global consciousness” and became famous icons of the global environmental movement, depicting the planet as the common home of humans as one species. The power of these images has not decreased, yet other forms of representation and imagination have emerged as well. The development of Google Earth or advanced climate modeling systems, for example, mark a different notion of Earth, characterized by dynamic, heterogeneous, and open systems. This course examines such shifting notions of the Earth by tracing how practices and discourses of geopolitics, political theory, cartography, population studies, climate modeling, deep ocean sensing, outer space exploration and mining, and science fiction literature, have come to sense, know, represent, and imagine the planet since the 18th century. In doing so, this course also surveys shifting socio-political currents, from the intersection of the military-industrial complex and technoscience to how climate crisis, Anthropocene debates, and Earth Systems analysis reflect further shifts in the ways the planet is understood today. Tracing these shifts in planetary representation and imagination is also crucial to understanding how core concepts such as “humanity” and “species” are made and unmade. Understanding the deeply mediated processes behind planetary depictions is not only central to making sense of contemporary politics and policies that propose to shape the future, but also to imagining alternative worlds and futures beyond our grim ecological predicament.