ALICE KAPLAN INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES

Co-listed with ENGLISH 200-0-20
Fulfills FD-LA / Distro 6,  Literature and Arts

What are the politics of driving a car? What social choices do we make when we charge our phones? Are there philosophical and historical undertones to productivity vlogs on youtube? Even as these day-to-day acts of consumption might seem unrelated to each other, they are all connected by one critical concept: Energy. This course explores the social, political, and literary valences of energy to unearth the term’s numerous and vastly divergent meanings. Over the quarter, we’ll read texts ranging from Victorian novels to present day science fiction, tracking different understandings of energy that blur the line between scientific and imaginative ways of thinking. In our class discussions we’ll enquire how literary authors use energy as a metaphor to name a variety of social dynamics like race, gender, class, empire, nature, and god. Reading literary texts alongside a social history of science, we’ll use short writing tasks and class presentations to ask: how does the science of energy make its way through literature into our imaginations about the world? We will spend time with literary artefacts and study them with the premise that energy is both a force materially vital to life on earth and a vast imaginative resource for the worlds and societies we seek to build.  Through a grading contract that rewards your labor and treats your energies as inherently valuable, we will focus on writing process, time management, and improvement over the course of the quarter.

Co-listed with HISTORY 393-0-22
Fulfills FD-HS / Distro 4, Historical Studies

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.

Co-listed with BLK_ST 380-0-23
Fulfills FD-LA / Distro 6, Literature and Fine Arts

How does pop music illuminate the structural violences of race, gender, and sexuality that we navigate on a daily basis? In mining the “problematic” in pop culture, as well as the resistive work of marginalized artists, this course will explore the lyrical, sonic, and visual worldmaking enacted by contemporary pop musicians in order to make sense of the myriad roles that pop culture and media play in the production, reproduction, and maintenance of power and social operations. Students can expect to engage the work of artists such as Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Frank Ocean, SZA, and Charli XCX (amongst others) alongside texts from a diverse range of fields including Black studies, performance studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Evaluation methods include discussion posts, a short written midterm assignment, and a final creative playlisting project.