Please refer to the USEM course listings within SIS for course meeting times.

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Death, Dying and Bereavement

USEM 1570-001
Richard Steeves

You should take this University Seminar if you are interested in exploring death, dying, grief and bereavement from a number of points of view.

This course is an exploration of thinking about dying, death and bereavement. Although western culture and American culture in particular has a reputation for being death denying, we do in fact confront images of and talk about death on almost a daily basis. This course will not be a study about death and dying in the news and popular media, rather it will about those who have thought about our mortality seriously and extensively.

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Post-Soviet Political Challenges

USEM 1570-002
Yuri Urbanovich

You should take this University Seminar if you want to analyze and discuss the origins of nationalism, separatism, secessions, and irredentist claims.

The end of the Cold War coincided with a wave of national revivals that spread across Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and became one of the notable consequences of the collapse of communist regimes. This course will focus specifically on the origins of nationalism, separatism, secessions, and irredentist claims in the Russian Federation and other former Soviet republics.

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Great Historical Speeches

USEM 1570-003
Robert Patterson

You should take this University Seminar because speeches provide a unique platform for understanding history.

The focus of the seminar will be on great speeches in times of both peace and war from 19th and 20th century U.S. and world history. Working in research pairs or teams, students will explore these speeches as pieces of artful discourse, as cultural artifacts, and as apertures to understanding history. Through such exploration the learner may anticipate deriving insights into the speakers, audiences, and the cultures involved. A survey of “great speeches” admittedly is an inconclusive and incomplete study of history, but it is driven by a deep consideration of language, and of “words” in their primary source forms, functioning within the context of the epoch in which they were written, uttered, and received by audiences. The term “great,” and who has traditionally defined the term, can take on multiple meanings. These ideas will be explored as well.

The seminar is designed to have students appreciate both the artistry and implications of great speeches in shaping history, current cultural values and conventions, and the future. Students will read original speech texts, explore the historical epoch when they were delivered, assess the audiences receiving these messages, consider the speeches short and long term implications, and eventually use a rhetorical method (i.e. classical methods, historical methods, metaphoric method, etc.) to critique speeches so that we may interpret the speech text within its original and current cultural contexts

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Educating Girls and Young Women

USEM 1570-004
Eleanor Wilson

You should take this University Seminar to become familiar with background issues influencing the education of girls and women today.

This class is designed to explore a variety of issues affecting girls and young women in education today. The course will include an introduction to the history of girls’ education in America, then continue with examining the impact of pivotal research on educational policies and practices related to gender differences in schools today. It concludes with observations of an all-girls middle school and regular classrooms locally. The course applies a theoretically grounded and practical approach to examine the role gender plays in elementary and secondary classrooms and beyond.

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The Art of Medicine

USEM 1570-005
Dr. Diane Pappas

You should take this University Seminar if you are interested in learning about medicine, art, or history.

The Art of Medicine is a seminar designed to explore milestones in the history of medicine through works of art and related writings. The course will include one paper and one oral presentation on a medical topic of the student's choice. Class time will be provided for feedback and discussion in preparation for these assignments. Guest speakers on research and public speaking will provide additional support. In addition to understanding medical history through art, students will also develop skills in research and communication (written and oral), active reading, the ability to provide constructive criticism, and the ability to assess works of art and written materials.

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Nurses, Disasters, & Epidemics

USEM 1570-006
Barbara Wall

You should take this University Seminar if you are interested in how epidemics challenged and transformed us in the past and continue to do so today.

Using a global, historical perspective, this course introduces students to nurses’ and other health care workers’ responses at the local, national, and international levels to select natural and man-made disasters and epidemics that occurred from the late 19th century to the present. It addresses issues such as how disasters and epidemics started, how people coped, the disparate impact on populations, questions about blame, the quest for memory, the tensions between science and politics, and the role of the government and quarantine. The course will analyze nurses’ roles as part of collaborative medical and public health responses, situating the responses in both the contexts of race, class, and gender as well as larger social, political, and economic ones. The course also introduces students to the use of primary source data in historical research.

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Blurred Line: Documenting Truth in Info & Media

USEM 1570-007
Bethany Mickel, Josh Thorud

You should take this University Seminar if you are interested in evaluating truth in information and media, especially in relation to documentary films.

In our current age of blurred lines surrounding truth, evidence, and the ambiguity between disinformation and misinformation, it requires rigor, perseverance, and foundational knowledge for students to become effective evaluators as well as disseminators of information. This is a dynamic and interactive course that looks not just at the traditional paradigm of information construction but also surfacing media as a form of empowerment and expression. Threads of equality, underrepresented voices, and ethics of access and distribution are woven into this course through readings, discussions, and project goals. We will investigate traditional information and media but ultimately focus on the documentary as a case study for these ideas. The course will culminate in the creation of a documentary video that takes on an issue surrounding misinformation.

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Bodies & Books: Literature of Health (In)Equity

USEM 1570-008
Dr. Irene Mathieu, Dr. Benjamin Martin

You should take this University Seminar if you want to learn more about health disparities and social determinants of health, and you are interested in literature and creative writing.

Health disparities and health equity are increasingly being discussed in the media, particularly in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This course will provide an interdisciplinary introduction to health disparities, a major social problem, by exploring social determinants of health through the critical analysis of literature, predominantly poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, but also podcasts, film, and more. Students will learn about concepts of health equity, including embodied history, structural violence, intergenerational trauma, power dynamics in the patient-provider relationship, cross-cultural care, and the role of stories in experiences of illness and health. We will also examine resilience as a key aspect of marginalized peoples’ narratives.

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Making Digital & Physical Art, Animations & Music

USEM 1570-009
Glen Bull, Rich Nguyen

You should take this University Seminar if you would like to use technology to create art and music.

This seminar provides an introduction to design and fabrication at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds. Participants will gain knowledge and experience in the use of digital design to make physical objects. Each student will receive (at no additional cost) a Make to Learn Creativity Kit that includes the materials and tools needed to implement course projects, including a digital fabricator (i.e., a digital die cutter) and a digital microcontroller. No prior experience is required.

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Becoming Historical Detectives

USEM 1570-010
Brenda Gunn, Meg Kennedy

You should take this University Seminar if you’re curious, inquisitive and passionate about history, society, culture and information and want to develop your detective skills for evidence that forms the foundation for critical thinking, research and working with primary source materials.

This seminar was developed to introduce first year students from all backgrounds to historical research methods using both traditional and nontraditional sources. We will strategize ways to gather evidence to answer research questions by investigating different types of materials each week, including archives, manuscripts, rare books, printed material, photographs, archaeological artifacts, architecture, maps, fine art, and audiovisual collections—with many of these items coming from the Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library.

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Journeys through Hell

USEM 1580-001
Dariusz Tolczyk

You should take this University Seminar if you would like to step outside your cultural comfort zone and examine experiences of survivors of concentration camps, genocide and persecution. This course will help students better understand what motivates humans to remain human under extreme moral assaults.

Extreme experiences of evil and oppression (concentration camps, prisons, mass terror, slavery and other forms of victimization) have often been presented as opportunities for unusual personal growth and spiritual ascent. From archaic initiation rites of diverse cultures, to ancient Greece and Rome, Biblical wisdom, and many other literary traditions, the point has been stressed repeatedly that being exposed to suffering and oppression not only can make us better, stronger, and more enlightened human beings but, in fact, tends to be a necessary condition of such profound ennoblement.

Is this true? Survivors of modern extreme evil (including American slavery, the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, Communist prisons of Eastern Europe, and Chinese mind-reform camps) ask this question while describing their own ordeals. What can we learn from them about humanity, both in general and our own? In this seminar, we will explore and discuss cultural, religious and intellectual roots of the conviction that extreme oppression can ennoble us. We will confront these traditions with survivors' writings about modern systems of oppression. In our explorations, we will ask some profound questions: What motivates human beings under extreme conditions? Are human beings good by nature? How does mass-scale evil originate in history? How do diverse cultural backgrounds affect ways in which people react to these assaults against their humanity? Our discussions will allow us to explore human experiences not directly accessible for most of us, and confront our own assumptions with discoveries of those who lived through extreme experiences. Readings include short excerpts from the Bible, Plato, Juvenal and some more recent thinkers, as well as prison/camp/slavery memoirs by Frederick Douglas, Elie Wiesel, Aleksandr Solzhenistyn, Zhang Xianliang, Eugenia Ginzburg, Varlam Shalamov, Gustaw Herling, Tadeusz Borowski. Films "Korczak" (by Andrzej Wajda), "Life is Beautiful" (by Roberto Benigni), and "Interrogation" (by Ryszard Bugajski) will be viewed outside of class and discussed in class.

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Australia

USEM 1580-002
Mark Thomas

You should take this University Seminar if you are interested in learning about a unique part of the world with intersections, both productive and destructive, between different cultures— as well as if you would like to explore the methods that historians employ to understand a complex past.

This course will look at the history, culture and society of the land ‘down under.’ Australia is a land of opportunity and paradox. It began as a penal colony and became the richest country in the world within a hundred years. It is a country that has been independent of Britain for a century, yet still has the Queen as head of state. It is a vast continent of only 25 million inhabitants, yet has remarkable regional diversity. It has long been among the most urbanized of global societies, yet its cultural identity is largely shaped by rural idealism.

To understand contemporary Australia, one must understand its past, both as myth and reality. This course will look closely at some of the major events in Australian history, from the voyages of Captain Cook and the landing of the First Fleet at Botany Bay, through the excitements of the continental exploration and Ned Kelly, to the traumas of Gallipoli and the Great Depression. We will use both traditional and non-traditional means to understand these events, applying the realist perspective of the historian, the subjective perceptions of the diarist and novelist, and the powerful imagery of the artist and the film-maker. We will be careful to look both at white and black Australia. The course will end by asking how Australians view their own past, through the prism of centennial celebrations, and how these perceptions have changed over time.

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Literature and the Moral Imagination

USEM 1580-003
Michael Suarez

You should take this University Seminar if you want to experience how the power of stories, poems, and plays can help us think together about what it might mean to be an ethical person, and to form a more just community today.

“The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.... Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” These words of the great Victorian novelist George Eliot capture the spirit of this seminar. Literature opens for the reader a window to other worlds. Poems, stories, and plays help us to understand and identify with the experiences of people whose lives can be very different from our own. Reading literature can thrust us into situations that are unlike any we have encountered. Perhaps more than any other art form, literature cultivates the ethical imagination and helps us to perceive and understand the complexities of another’s situation.

In this seminar we will read works of literature, as well as excerpts from some classical philosophical works, to begin thinking and writing and talking with each other about how we can use literature (and other art forms too) to help us learn what it might mean to be an ethical person – and to form a more ethical and capacious community – in our world today. Along the way, we will learn about “the call of stories” and the ways they can enlarge our capacities for sympathy, empathy, justice and mercy, so helping to form the moral imagination. The American fiction writer Flannery O’Connor insists that “a story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way…. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.” The shared stories (in a variety of genres) in this seminar are by women and men who are Black, White, and Indigenous, and reflect a range of experiences and perspectives from ancient Greece and Nazi-occupied France to the ongoing monuments controversy in Charlottesville and the problems of a modern “Spokane Indian” trying to read her way to greater freedom. Invariably, there is no single answer to the problems and possibilities they present – and that is where our conversations will always begin.

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Fall 2020 Listing