College Courses, introduced in 1968-1969, are interdisciplinary in nature and are intended to appeal to students of widely differing backgrounds and interests. Courses scheduled to be offered from 2011 Fall through 2012 Summer are listed below; courses for later terms will be announced during 2012 winter term.
3. Constructing History:
12W: 2A
How do government buildings convey authority, security or virtue? What shapes our understanding of a religious or a domestic space? The visual world contains implicit and explicit messages. Inability to decode those messages creates a naïve consumer. Constructing History will impart the skills needed to unlock the ideology found in images, architecture and events. Using four case studies from Western history we will analyze how influential people co-opted or invented messages by manipulating visual culture. Dist: ART WCult: W Carroll, Heck
4. Dramatic Storytelling: A Playwriting/Screenwriting Workshop
11F: Mondays 6-9 PM (and an occasional one-hour meeting on Sundays, arranged)
Harold Pinter, John Patrick Shanley, David Mamet, Neil Labute, Susan-Lori Parks, Arthur Miller, Tom Stoppard – these are just a few of the significant playwrights of the latter half of the twentieth century (and the early part of the 21st) who have done significant work, in some cases their best, in film. This course is a workshop where the student will have the opportunity to tell the same story in both forms, as a play and a film script, and determine in which way the story is most effectively told. After starting the course with an exploration of the screenplay’s origins as the filmed version of the “well-made play,” and then traveling through to the modern day when the screenplay has developed its own form and structure, we will use what we’ve learned about the history and its master practitioners to develop and present story ideas, to make a choice of a specific story, and to write and present both first and final drafts of that same story as both a play and a screenplay. We will then have a public reading of one form or the other – the student will be given the opportunity to choose – in a final presentation at the end of the term. Dist: LIT. Phillips, Sutton.
5. Slave Societies
12S: 12
Although slavery has existed in virtually all cultures, scholars of comparative world slavery have identified only five societies in all of human history as “slave societies”: classical Athens, Rome, the American South, the Caribbean, and Brazil. This course examines slave systems in the ancient and modern worlds comparatively, focusing on Rome and Brazil. We will study how each slave society was legitimated, perpetuated—and ultimately challenged. Specific topics include: the construction of the slave and emergence of racializing discourse, slave trade and the commodification of the body, trickster narratives, modern theories of power and domination, resistance and rebellion, and the problem of freedom for previously dominated peoples.DIST: WCult: NW Stewart, Smolin (Jessica)
6. Networks:
12S: 2A
A course on how the social, technological, and natural worlds are connected, and how the study of networks sheds light on these connections. Topics include: how opinions, fads, and political movements spread through society; the robustness and fragility of food webs and financial markets; and thetechnology, economics, and politics of Web information and on-line communities. Fleischer
10. Paul Robeson and the Revolutionary Imagination:
12S: 10A
This course is an intensive study of Paul Robeson’s life, times, writing, art, and image. In addition to studying Robeson’s work and writing, we will also read critical studies about the author. By analyzing Robeson’s writing and perfor-mances and Robeson biographies, we will not only gain insight into what dis-tinguishes Robeson as an iconic U.S. American but also how black freedom movements developed, flourished, and met resistance in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Dist: SOC; WCult W. Colbert, Rickford
11. Book Arts Studio Seminar
11F: 3A
A studio-based seminar in which students explore the relationship between text, image, and form through letterpress relief printing techniques and the creation of book structures. Lectures and readings will familiarize students with historic and contemporary literature on the book form. Students will study exem-plars from the extensive holdings of Rauner Special Collections and the Sher-man Art Library in historical hand press and contemporary artist’s books. Lim-ited enrollment. Supplemental Course Fee. Dist. ART. Halasz, Hamlin, Borezo.
12. Reading Artifacts: The Material Culture of Science
12W: 10 A
Do the instruments available to scientists dictate the kind of questions they can ask? Are scientific instruments developed to answer specific questions? How might we understand instruments that, aside from their function, are objects of beauty? What can we glean from the instruments themselves about the society that made them and the way in which they were used?
This course will investigate such questions with tools from several disciplines. From Material Culture Studies, we will learn how to interrogate the cultural significance of individual objects by hands-on analysis. From Physics and Chemistry we will explore the scientific significance of selected historic scientific instruments. Drawing on Museum Studies, we will ask why and how “old stuff” gets preserved and then exhibited. By means of History and the History of Science, we shall review the growth of science at Dartmouth and more broadly in America. Dartmouth’s King Collection of Historic Scientific Instruments (the third largest such collection in North America) will provide the artifacts for the course. We will also visit Harvard’s collection of instruments and work with staff at the Hood Museum and Rauner Special Collections. Students will write research papers and the class as a whole will create and install an exhibit of instruments from the King Collection. Dist: TAS Kremer