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Humanities Signature Courses

Signature Humanities Courses are faculty-taught courses in the Humanities or humanistic Social Sciences that afford students unique and memorable learning experiences, exemplary of humanistic enquiry. Designed as lecture courses, they allow students to sample the best that the various humanistic disciplines and fields take to offer. While open to majors and minors, they are aimed at students across the College and are ideal as full general electives.

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Winter 2022 Signature Courses

Instructor:James Osborne

Description:Why are so many societies - including our own - obsessed with building monumental things like pyramids and palaces? What do we learn about cultures past and present from the monuments they built? This course explores famous monuments from around the world to respond these questions through the lens of archaeology, architecture, and art history.

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Instructor:Hervé Reculeau

Clarification:This course offers a disquisitional introduction to the study of the relationship between human societies and their environs, with a specific focus on situations of rapid climatic change (RCC) in early historical periods. Students will exist invited to reflect on discourses about climate and its influence on homo societies from Herodotus to the IPCC; on notions such as ecology or social determinism, possibilism and reductionism, societal collapse and resilience; and on recent academic trends at the crossroads of Humanities, Social Sciences and Ecology Studies. Alternate lectures (Tu) and discussion sessions (Th), the first half of the quarter introduces the notion of "climate," from its origins in Classical Hellenic republic to the nowadays, and how this concept has been (and still is) used to ascertain human groups and their history; it too offers an overview of the theories and methods that shape our current understanding of climate change and its effect on societies (by and nowadays). The second half of the quarter is devoted to case studies, with a specific focus on the Aboriginal Near Eastward (from prehistory to the first millennium BCE). Students will be asked to present the readings and participate in classroom discussions; write an article summary; and conduct a personal research (midterm annotated bibliography and research proposal; terminal essay) on a topic of their choice, which needs non be limited to the Ancient Near East.

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Teacher:Jason Riggle

Clarification:In this course we volition examine the linguistic communication of deception and humor from a diversity of perspectives: historical, developmental, neurological, and cross-cultural and in a variety of contexts: fiction, advertising, politics, courtship, and everyday conversation. We will focus on the (linguistic) noesis and skills that underlie the use of humour and charade and on what sorts of things they are used to communicate.

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Instructor:Thomas Christensen

Description:The history of the American Musical in the 20th century is paradoxical.   While the genre is one often denigrated as staging lyric utopias of romance and adventure allowing audiences to escape depressing quotidian realities, many musicals did seek to appoint some of the most pressing social issues of their day.  In this course, we will look at—and heed closely to--4 differing musicals, studying their creative origins, while also analyzing their circuitous social meanings and reception as revealed through the story, music, lyrics, staging, dance, and film adaptations. Musicals to be covered:Oklahoma! (1943),West Side Story(1957),Follies(1971), andHamilton (2016).   We will nourish a live operation of the new Broadway production ofOklahoma!  at the CBIC Theater on January 18.

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Teacher:Martha Roth

Clarification:Ancient Mesopotamia--the home of the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians who wrote in cuneiform script on durable clay tablets--was the locus of many of history's firsts. No development, nonetheless, may be equally important equally the formations of legal systems and legal principles revealed in contracts, trial records, and law collections (codes), amidst which The Laws of Hammurabi (r. 1792-1750 BC) stands as virtually important for understanding the subsequent legal practice and thought of Mesopotamia's cultural heirs in the Middle E and Europe until today. This course volition explore the rich source materials of the Laws and relevant judicial and administration documents (all in English translations) to investigate topics of legal, social, and economic practise, including family formation and dissolution, crime and penalization (sympathetic or talionic center for an centre, pecuniary, corporal), and process (contracts, trials, ordeals).

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Instructor:David Wellbery

Description:This form is conceived equally a pathway to the Humanities and an introduction to the piece of work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). A range of Nietzsche's piece of work will be considered, only the focus will be on three themes to which Nietzsche recurred throughout his writing career: Civilization: Nietzsche's thought on the anthropological roots and the expressive forms of man meaning-making: Apollo/Dionysus; Gesture; Music; Metaphor Critique: the vacuous character of mod civilization; romanticism, decadence, nihilism. Self-Transcendence: private self-realization and freedom. The selection of these themes is motivated by the fact that they may be considered as fundamental dimensions of humanistic inquiry. Students will develop a sound understanding of a writer whose intellectual influence continues to grow, but at the same time they will get acquainted with such core concepts of humanistic/interpretive research as grade, expression, ideology, genealogy, soapbox, self-fashioning, individuality, and value.

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Instructor:Richard Rosengarten

Description:The decision of a person to present in written form the story of her or his life - and through that, what they accept to be their selfhood - has spawned a literary tradition with an constant and distinctive presence in religion. This course explores the phenomena of specifically religious autobiography every bit variations on the form of "confession," tracing its roots in early Christianity (Paul and Augustine), and juxtaposing these expressions with readings in a range of authors who adapt the classic articulations of "confession" to their specific selves and contexts: examples volition include Teresa of Avila'due south "mystical" confession, the "confession" of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Frederick Douglass' "(anti) slave religion," Mahatma Gandhi's "non-violent resistance," and Maggie Nelson'southward "transition". The form will conclude past studying the adoption of the confessional mode in the graphic novel, which introduces explicitly visual representations of selfhood and carries forward the genre's full general spirit of exceptionalism and overt non-conformity.

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Teacher:John Muse

Description:This class is a transhistorical study of changing ideas about representation, explored through the lens of early on modern and twentieth-century plays that foreground theatrical form. Every play frames time and infinite and in the process singles out a portion of life for consideration. The plays nosotros'll consider this term phone call conspicuous attention to the frame itself, to the materials and capacities of theater. What happens when plays comment on their own activity? Why might they exercise so? Why has theatrical self-consciousness emerged more strongly in particular historical periods? What might such plays teach the states near the nature of art, and about the nature of life? To what extent tin can we distinguish between art and life? We'll explore these and other questions through plays by Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Pirandello, Beckett, Genet, Stoppard, Nwandu, and Immature Jean Lee; and through theoretical piece of work past Puchner, Hornby, Sofer, Fuchs, and others.

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Instructor:Benjamin Saltzman

Description:Seeing hell for oneself, watching the torture of a saint, looking at illustrations of violence: these profoundly terrible experiences, narrated and drawn, shaped the manner medieval readers took in the world around them, its violence, its suffering, its preponderance of evils. But how exactly does literature allow readers to witness and process such horrors? How is the ascertainment of violence transformed past fine art? What is unique nigh the medieval feel of these creative and literary forms of mediation? What can they teach us virtually our own contemporary cultural encounters with the sights and stories of barbarism? By exploring questions like these, this course will consider the didactic, religious, and epistemological functions of witnessing in a diversity of early on medieval texts such as illustrated copies of Prudentius'due south Psychomachia (in which the Virtues engage in a gruesome boxing confronting the Vices), the Apocalypse of Paul (in which Paul sees hell and lives to tell most it), early medieval police codes, the Life of St. Margaret, the Onetime English Genesis, and the heroic verse form Judith. These medieval texts will exist read alongside thinkers similar Giorgio Agamben, Due west.J.T. Mitchell, and Susan Sontag, whose work on images of atrocity in the mod world will both inform our critical exam of the Middle Ages while opening up the possibility for rethinking literature and art in relation to contemporary experiences of violence.

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Source: https://college.uchicago.edu/academics/humanities-signature-courses

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