Courses

Column one has the course number and section. Other columns show the course title, days offered, instructor's name, room number, if the course is cross-referenced with another program, and a option to view additional course information in a pop-up window.

FYS: Heart Matters
AS.001.108 (01)

To the human imagination, the heart is more than a muscle and thumping pump keeping us alive. From the Renaissance to the present, writers have helped us make sense of our bodies, in health and in illness or pain. The history of the heart, meanwhile, starts in Antiquity, where it shapes our beliefs about life. One of our aims will be to trace the historical, cultural, and subjective meanings our minds have given to this “sublime engine.” The other will be to discover how our scientifically inquisitive minds, backed up with technical skills and technological devices such as the stethoscope, have found new ways to take care of this volatile organ. Our materials will involve a constellation of texts in medical history, modern fiction in the form of poems and short-stories, and recent scientific prose on such topics as heart transplants, heart-monitoring implants, xenotransplants as well as heartbreaks.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
  • Days/Times: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
  • Instructor: Ender, Evelyne
  • Room: Jenkins 122
  • Status: Waitlist Only
  • Seats Available: 0/12
  • PosTag(s): n/a

FYS: Literature of the Everyday: The Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel
AS.001.116 (01)

The ordinary, the common, the everyday: why does literary realism consider the experiences of the average individual to be worthy of serious contemplation? In this First-Year Seminar, we will read closely a set of novels by Flaubert, Mann, Dickens, Zola, and Tolstoy from the period in which the development of realism reaches its climax. These novels transform the conventions for the representation of lives of lower and middle class subjects, revealing such lives as capable of prompting reflection upon deep and serious questions of human existence.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
  • Days/Times: MW 10:30AM - 11:45AM
  • Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
  • Room: Gilman 208
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 10/12
  • PosTag(s): n/a

FYS: Wired to Read: the Science and the Art
AS.001.123 (01)

Trying to make sense of words I have written. But how do we do we do it? How do mere shapes and lines on the page suddenly begin to mean something? Is our brain wired for reading? Apart from our eyes, are other parts of the body involved? When did humans start to write and read? These are the kinds of questions we’ll pursue. This First-Year Seminar will explore two distinctive perspectives: one literary, the other is scientific. We'll divide our attention between the study of chapters and articles that present scientific findings about how we read and a practical exploration of a novel. Literary works tax our brains in multiple ways and our example will show why and how. Maylis de Kerangal's medical fiction The Heart will serve as our case study. The book and scenes from its adaptation for the screen will enable us to experience the power of fiction as it transports us into an enhanced reality made of images and words. We'll see how written words are able to redirect our attention in ways that make us more perceptive about a "real" world of human interactions. Slowed down and staged in the book, the life-stories, fateful accidents, and heroic gestures that make up a medical universe can paradoxically bring us closer the life and death decisions that begin in the ER.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
  • Days/Times: MW 10:30AM - 11:45AM
  • Instructor: Ender, Evelyne
  • Room: Gilman 277
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 6/12
  • PosTag(s): n/a

Contemporary Performance Art
AS.010.255 (01)

Performance art is provocative and often controversial because it troubles, without dissolving, the distinction between art and life. Not just a matter of activating bodies, engaging viewers, or spurring participation, performance art asks what it means to perform, and what kinds of actions count, in contemporary culture. As such, performance art allows us to rethink established art historical concerns with form, perspective, and materiality, while offering critical insight into everyday life. We will explore how performance art addresses ingrained assumptions about action and passivity, success and failure, embodiment and mediation, “good” and “bad” feelings, emancipation and dependency. The study of performance art invites transdisciplinary approaches. Students from across the university are welcome. Our attention to a diverse array of artists and practices will be supplemented by readings in art history and criticism, as well as in feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and political thought.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
  • Days/Times: TTh 4:30PM - 5:45PM
  • Instructor: Schopp, Caroline Lillian
  • Room: Gilman 35
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 4/10
  • PosTag(s): HART-MODERN

Labor in Theory, Literature, and Art
AS.211.307 (01)

This seminar examines some of the ways we define, represent, and think about the concept of labor in capitalism. We will analyze and compare a wide variety of texts (literary, visual, and theoretical) that embody different, often contradictory, notions of the work we do, why we do it, and how it affects us. As we investigate different types of work—productive and unproductive, physical & intellectual, factory & office—a few of the questions we will ask are: What methods have writers and artists used to depict labor in the 20th and 21st centuries? How is labor stratified along racial and gender lines? Is it possible to imagine a post-work society? The course curates a range of cultural artifacts (short stories, manifestos, novel excerpts, visual art, and film) that employ aesthetic strategies like irony, humor, absurdity, and duration to represent the dynamics of labor in capitalism. Theoretical texts then provide varied conceptual viewpoints from which to compare, contrast, and synthesize our impressions and interpretations of art and literary works. By the end of the semester, we will have traced a trajectory of labor in capitalism from the early 20th century to our own strange and precarious present.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
  • Days/Times: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
  • Instructor: Todarello, Josh Joshua
  • Room: Gilman 414
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 13/15
  • PosTag(s): MLL-GERM, MLL-ENGL, INST-GLOBAL

Museums and Identity
AS.211.329 (01)

The museum boom of the last half-century has centered largely around museums dedicated to the culture and history of identity groups, including national, ethnic, religious, and minority groups. In this course we will examine such museums and consider their long history through a comparison of the theory and practice of Jewish museums with other identity museums. We will study the various museological traditions that engage identity, including the collection of art and antiquities, ethnographic exhibitions, history museums, heritage museums, art museums, and other museums of culture. Some of the questions we will ask include: what are museums for and who are they for? how do museums shape identity? and how do the various types of museums relate to one another? Our primary work will be to examine a variety of contemporary examples around the world with visits to local museums including the Jewish Museum of Maryland, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
  • Days/Times: MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM
  • Instructor: Spinner, Samuel Jacob
  • Room: Hodson 305
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 3/15
  • PosTag(s): INST-GLOBAL, ARCH-RELATE

Existentialism in Literature and Philosophy
AS.213.374 (01)

What does it mean to exist, and to be able to reflect on this fact? What is it mean to be a self? This course explores the themes of existentialism in literature and philosophy, including the meaning of existence, the nature of the self, authenticity and inauthenticity, the inescapability of death, the experience of time, anxiety, absurdity, freedom and responsibility to others. It will be examined why these philosophical ideas often seem to demand literary expression or bear a close relation to literary works. Readings may include writings by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Rilke, Kafka, Simmel, Jaspers, Buber, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, and Daoud.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
  • Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
  • Instructor: Gosetti, Jennifer Anna
  • Room: Smokler Center 213
  • Status: Waitlist Only
  • Seats Available: 0/20
  • PosTag(s): MLL-GERM, MLL-ENGL

Existentialism in Literature and Philosophy
AS.213.374 (02)

What does it mean to exist, and to be able to reflect on this fact? What is it mean to be a self? This course explores the themes of existentialism in literature and philosophy, including the meaning of existence, the nature of the self, authenticity and inauthenticity, the inescapability of death, the experience of time, anxiety, absurdity, freedom and responsibility to others. It will be examined why these philosophical ideas often seem to demand literary expression or bear a close relation to literary works. Readings may include writings by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Rilke, Kafka, Simmel, Jaspers, Buber, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, and Daoud.

  • Credits: 4.00
  • Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
  • Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
  • Instructor: Gosetti, Jennifer Anna
  • Room: Smokler Center 213
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 2/5
  • PosTag(s): MLL-GERM, MLL-ENGL

Novelist Intellectuals
AS.215.406 (01)

What does a novelist’s op-ed about economics have to do with her literary writing? In what ways does a fiction writer’s essays on the environment inform how we read her novels? What happens when we find the political opinions of a writer objectionable? This undergraduate seminar will consider what the Spanish writer Francisco Ayala termed “novelist intellectuals,” that is, literary writers who actively participate in a society’s public sphere. Considering writers from Madrid to New York, from London to Buenos Aires, we will ask how one should hold a novelist’s fictional and non-fictional writings in the balance and explore ways of reading that allow us to consider the public intellectual side and the aesthetic side of a novelist together.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
  • Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
  • Instructor: Seguin, Becquer D
  • Room: Krieger Laverty
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 5/18
  • PosTag(s): n/a

The American Literature of the Movies
AS.300.207 (01)

This course brings the question of film's status as art into historical focus by approaching it through the various forms of writing that cinema inspired. Following a brief historical and philosophical preamble, each of the three sections will present a literary vantage point on the movies: "inside," "outside," and "alongside." The "alongside" section centers on poets who incorporated film into an adjacent art form, the "inside" section centers on those within the moviemaking industry who wrote about it in their fiction, and "outside" on those who criticized and theorized it. Films that exemplify the issues at hand will accompany each section. Relevant scholarly and theoretical texts elucidate the topics, texts, and films of concern. Students will have the opportunity to read works by H.D., Hart Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Agee, and other notable writers from the first half of the 20th century.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
  • Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
  • Instructor: McCabe, Nate
  • Room: Gilman 208
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 6/12
  • PosTag(s): n/a

Imagining Climate Change
AS.300.347 (01)

Climate change poses an existential threat to human civilization. Yet the attention and concern it receives in ordinary life and culture is nowhere near what science tells us is required. What are the causes of this mismatch between crisis and response? What accounts for our collective inability to imagine and grasp this new reality, and how can it be overcome? In pursuit of these questions, we will pair literary works and films with texts from politics, philosophy, literary theory, and religion, that frame climate change as a fundamental challenge to our ways of making sense of the human condition.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
  • Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
  • Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
  • Room: Gilman 208
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 2/12
  • PosTag(s): n/a

The Concept of Time
AS.300.351 (01)

The purpose of this course is to ask the most important questions concerning the concept of time. What is time? Does time exist? Is it a fundamental aspect of the cosmos or just an illusion of human perception? Do different cultures, historical periods, or individuals have unique conceptions of time? Or are there universal aspects of time that transcend our differences? Do animals perceive time or is the perception of time a uniquely human phenomenon? Is time travel possible? The history of philosophy, both Western and Eastern, provides an array of different answers to these and other fundamental questions related to time. Additionally, there is much contemporary research on the concept that is entirely original. In the past four decades, time has been a major interdisciplinary theme, often bringing together humanists and scientists fascinated by its paradoxes. The guiding concern of this course will be to diagnose those aspects of time that are most relevant to us. What can we add to what has been written about time? Does our unique place in time—post COVID-19 pandemic, on the verge of a possible Third World War—prepare us in any specific way to examine the concept? The syllabus for the course will juxtapose canonical philosophical texts by some of the greatest thinkers of time with contemporary writings about time. The readings will support a problem-centered approach, exploring different possibilities for understanding the concept of time and different possible solutions for its many difficulties.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
  • Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
  • Instructor: Souza Mendes, Paula
  • Room: Gilman 208
  • Status: Waitlist Only
  • Seats Available: 0/10
  • PosTag(s): n/a

Cinema and Philosophy
AS.300.399 (01)

What do films and philosophy have in common? Do films express, with their own means, philosophical problems that are relevant to our experience of ourselves and the world we live in? This term we will study such issues with a particular focus on questions of justice, truth, revenge, forgiveness, hope, hate, and fear.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
  • Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
  • Instructor: Marrati, Paola
  • Room: Gilman 208
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 5/25
  • PosTag(s): n/a

Feminist and Queer Theory: Women in Western Thought an Introduction
AS.363.302 (01)

Women in Western Thought is an introduction to (the history of) Western thought from the margins of the canon. The class introduces you to some key philosophical question, focusing on some highlights of women’s thought in Western thought, most of which are commonly and unjustly neglected. The seminar will be organized around a number of paradigmatic cases, such as the mind/body question in Early Modern Europe, the declaration of the rights of (wo)men during the French revolution, the impact of slavery on philosophical thought, the MeToo debate and others. By doing so, the course will cover a range of issues, such as the nature of God, contract theory, slavery, standpoint epistemology, and queer feminist politics. Students will engage with questions about what a canon is, and who has a say in that. In this sense, Women in Western Thought introduces you to some crucial philosophical and political problems and makes you acquainted with some women in the field. The long term objective of a class on women in Western thought must be to empower, to inspire independence, and to resist the sanctioned ignorance often times masked as universal knowledge and universal history. People of all genders tend to suffer from misinformation regarding the role of women and the gender of thought more generally. By introducing you to women who took it upon themselves to resist the obstacles of their time, I am hoping to provide role models for your individual intellectual and political development. By introducing you to the historical conditions of the exclusion and oppression of women (including trans and queer women as well as black women and women of color), I hope to enable you to generate the sensitivities that are required to navigate the particular social relations of the diverse world you currently inhabit. By introducing philosophical topics in this way, I hope to enable you to have a positive, diversifying influence on you future endeavours.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Upper Level Undergraduate
  • Days/Times: T 4:30PM - 7:00PM
  • Instructor: deLire, Luce Marcella
  • Room: Maryland 104
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 2/20
  • PosTag(s): INST-PT, MSCH-HUM

Introduction to Digital Photography
AS.371.152 (01)

Students learn to use their digital cameras through a variety of documentary, landscape and portrait projects, which will help them develop technical and creative skills. Critiques and slide lectures of historic photographs, which range from postmortem daguerreotypes to postmodern digital imagery, help students develop a personal vision. Students are provided digital SLR cameras and gain proficiency with one-on-one instruction in the field. Basics for print adjustment and output will be covered. Attendance at first class is mandatory.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
  • Days/Times: Th 10:00AM - 12:50PM
  • Instructor: Steck Jr., John
  • Room: The Centre 318
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 1/12
  • PosTag(s): n/a

Introduction to Digital Photography
AS.371.152 (02)

Students learn to use their digital cameras through a variety of documentary, landscape and portrait projects, which will help them develop technical and creative skills. Critiques and slide lectures of historic photographs, which range from postmortem daguerreotypes to postmodern digital imagery, help students develop a personal vision. Students are provided digital SLR cameras and gain proficiency with one-on-one instruction in the field. Basics for print adjustment and output will be covered. Attendance at first class is mandatory.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
  • Days/Times: Th 2:00PM - 4:50PM
  • Instructor: Steck Jr., John
  • Room: The Centre 318
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 2/12
  • PosTag(s): n/a

Introduction to Digital Photography
AS.371.152 (03)

Students learn to use their digital cameras through a variety of documentary, landscape and portrait projects, which will help them develop technical and creative skills. Critiques and slide lectures of historic photographs, which range from postmortem daguerreotypes to postmodern digital imagery, help students develop a personal vision. Students are provided digital SLR cameras and gain proficiency with one-on-one instruction in the field. Basics for print adjustment and output will be covered. Attendance at first class is mandatory.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Lower Level Undergraduate
  • Days/Times: W 2:00PM - 4:50PM
  • Instructor: San, Htet
  • Room: The Centre 318
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 1/12
  • PosTag(s): n/a

Course # (Section) Title Day/Times Instructor Room PosTag(s) Info
AS.001.108 (01)FYS: Heart MattersTTh 3:00PM - 4:15PMEnder, EvelyneJenkins 122
AS.001.116 (01)FYS: Literature of the Everyday: The Nineteenth-Century Realist NovelMW 10:30AM - 11:45AMOng, Yi-PingGilman 208
AS.001.123 (01)FYS: Wired to Read: the Science and the ArtMW 10:30AM - 11:45AMEnder, EvelyneGilman 277
AS.010.255 (01)Contemporary Performance ArtTTh 4:30PM - 5:45PMSchopp, Caroline LillianGilman 35HART-MODERN
AS.211.307 (01)Labor in Theory, Literature, and ArtTTh 3:00PM - 4:15PMTodarello, Josh JoshuaGilman 414MLL-GERM, MLL-ENGL, INST-GLOBAL
AS.211.329 (01)Museums and IdentityMW 3:00PM - 4:15PMSpinner, Samuel JacobHodson 305INST-GLOBAL, ARCH-RELATE
AS.213.374 (01)Existentialism in Literature and PhilosophyT 1:30PM - 4:00PMGosetti, Jennifer AnnaSmokler Center 213MLL-GERM, MLL-ENGL
AS.213.374 (02)Existentialism in Literature and PhilosophyT 1:30PM - 4:00PMGosetti, Jennifer AnnaSmokler Center 213MLL-GERM, MLL-ENGL
AS.215.406 (01)Novelist IntellectualsTTh 9:00AM - 10:15AMSeguin, Becquer DKrieger Laverty
AS.300.207 (01)The American Literature of the MoviesTTh 9:00AM - 10:15AMMcCabe, NateGilman 208
AS.300.347 (01)Imagining Climate ChangeTTh 10:30AM - 11:45AMLisi, LeonardoGilman 208
AS.300.351 (01)The Concept of TimeT 1:30PM - 4:00PMSouza Mendes, PaulaGilman 208
AS.300.399 (01)Cinema and PhilosophyMW 12:00PM - 1:15PMMarrati, PaolaGilman 208
AS.363.302 (01)Feminist and Queer Theory: Women in Western Thought an IntroductionT 4:30PM - 7:00PMdeLire, Luce MarcellaMaryland 104INST-PT, MSCH-HUM
AS.371.152 (01)Introduction to Digital PhotographyTh 10:00AM - 12:50PMSteck Jr., JohnThe Centre 318
AS.371.152 (02)Introduction to Digital PhotographyTh 2:00PM - 4:50PMSteck Jr., JohnThe Centre 318
AS.371.152 (03)Introduction to Digital PhotographyW 2:00PM - 4:50PMSan, HtetThe Centre 318