Humanities (HUMN-SHU)

This course is an introduction to Science and Technology Studies (STS), an interdisciplinary field treating science and technology as socially embedded enterprises. We will examine how social, political, cultural, and material conditions shape scientific and technological activity and how science and technology, in turn, shape society. You will become familiar with the basic concepts and methods developed by STS scholars in history, sociology, and anthropology and explore how the scope of the field has expanded to include a variety of empirical case studies, theoretical arguments, and scholarly debates. The kinds of questions we will explore include: What counts as scientific knowledge? How is it produced? How do scientists establish credibility? Can there be a scientific study of scientific inquiry? To what extent are science and technology shaped by historical context? Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: CORE STS; Humanities Foundations/Introductory course.

Human Geography is a field of study that takes into account the ways that social, cultural, economic, political and environmental dynamics shape our understandings of space, place, territory, borders and landscapes, as well as how geography influences social, cultural, economic, political and environmental dynamics in human societies. It conceives of geography not merely in geomorphic terms, but analyzes instead how geographies are always embedded within lived human experience and how humans engage, interact, and transform their geographies. This course will offer an introduction to the methods and theories that have shaped the field of Human Geography, both classics and cutting-edge scholarship. It will also provide students with background in basic research tools and techniques used by geographers. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Foundational course, Social Sciences Core

Phone in hand, questions loom in our head: is digital technology destroying memory, communication, and interpersonal relationships? Will our kids read and write cursive? Is print media disappearing? The notion of writing as a technology seems far removed from our fast-paced, digital world; but it was not so long ago that writing constituted a technological advance that permeated Western societies. This course examines key moments in writing’s history in order to understand its role in shaping the literary subject. We trace the shift from oral to written traditions in romance and courtly literature, then turn to the printing press, copyright and intellectual property, and conclude by examining how our relationship to writing in the past can inform our relationship to digital media in the present. Throughout the semester, students engage in an experiential learning project where they create a hero/ine whose story evolves from oral tradition, to written romance, to social media subject. Pre-requisite: None Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory course.

Considers the trajectory of changes in the production, circulation, and reception of Korean popular music from the turn of the twentieth century to the latest K-pop hits across successive political, social, and economic junctures, with regard for major themes such as nationalism, race, gender, technology, and globalization; and investigates music culture in relation to hybridity, authenticity, transculturation, cyber-culture, and fandom, among other subjects Prereq: None Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory Course (18-19 Topic Courses).

This course examines how ideas of gender and sexuality have shaped the production and consumption of visual culture from the late nineteenth century. We will examine a variety of visual and material texts that shape, criticize, and/or negotiate with contemporaneous gender and sexual norms. Focusing on these expressions’ cultural and historical specificities, the students will assess gender and sexuality—and as an extension, the notions of normality, healthfulness, and self—as ideas that continuously evolve in response to social discourses. The course proceeds roughly chronologically. It starts with the nineteenth-century Euro-American context, in which modern ideas of gender and sexuality began to circulate authoritatively in medical and legal terms. It then moves onto more globalized contemporary perspectives that critique and/or expand the pronouncedly “Western” conceptions of identity and identity categories. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory course.

The last decades of the 20th century witnessed great changes in East Asian media culture. To understand these changes and the impact that they have made on global media culture, this course introduces students to cross-border popular media currents and exchanges that have occurred throughout East Asia as well as the technological transitions that have facilitated them. This course will examine key regional trends and trans-Asian engagements in media production and distribution systems with a particular focus on the analysis of film, TV dramas, amine, webtoons, digital games, advertisements, and popular music. Prerequisite: Writing as Inquiry Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory course; IMB elective; Social Science Focus Enviornmental Studies 200 level.

Climate change is a global environmental challenge, but what does “global environment” mean and how has history shaped our understanding of this term? This introduction to global environmental history explores how the material environment shapes and has been shaped by human actions. It investigates the circulation of people, commodities, and ideas through (neo)imperial networks and considers the political, economic, and social forces that have shaped our contemporary shared understanding of the non-human world. This course also challenges students to recognize who is excluded from this process of making a global environment and what is lost from such exclusions. Throughout the course, students will read and analyze primary and secondary sources and present a group project that explores connections between humans and the environment at a global scale. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities introductory course.

Today, more than half of the planet's population resides in towns and cities of different sizes. This is expected to rise to sixty-six percent by 2050, also known as “planetary urbanism.” In this course we will consider different understandings of what cities are, how they come into being and why. We will collectively develop an understanding of what it means to be urban and what the urban should look like. We will explore Global cities vs world class cities, urban development and poverty, urban social movements, urban governance, urban margins in the North and the South, urban environmental justice, and urban violence. This course introduces the methods and theories that have shaped the field of Urban Geography - providing students with research tools and techniques used by geographers. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory course, Humanities minor requirement; Social Science focus Urban studies 200 level.

[Topics in Humanities: French Cinema: The Birth of the Seventh Art] In 1895, when Auguste and Louis Lumière held their first private film screening in Paris, they could not have foreseen the pervasive role that cinema would one day play in our homes and our hearts. This introduction to French cinema traces the seventh art from its inception to the present day, focusing on pioneers of French cinema, surrealist film, the influential New Wave movement, and contemporary filmmakers. In addition to the films that you will watch in and out of class, you will explore a variety of theoretical approaches to cinema and develop skills in film analysis through readings and class discussions. Films will be screened in French with English subtitles. Coursework will include several short writing assignments and film analysis projects. [Topics in Humanities: American History Makers You Probably Never Heard of] In this course we will explore the significance of ordinary and underappreciated individuals in major movements, developments, and events in United States and Chinese history. The assigned readings focus upon American, Chinese, and Chinese American individuals, moving back and forth across the Pacific and beyond. At the end of the course you will have completed a 1300-word (minimum) research essay, or an essay that synthesizes and reflects upon several of the assigned readings and explains the strengths and weaknesses of the texts and identifies opportunities for new scholarship. Along the way you will also present an analysis to your classmates of two primary sources that you will use in your essay, and provide constructive criticism on your fellow students’ Draft essays. When we think of people who “make” history, we usually think about the high and the mighty, important political officials or intellectuals, prominent military or diplomatic leaders. But when we look at the past, the great changes that take place are often made possible by men and women who are not rich and famous, who don’t occupy places of power – who in fact come from humble roots, from minority populations, who struggle for influence, and who were vital to helping create the world that elites envisioned, or fought for another vision entirely, or helped reshape the globe by merely pursuing their own self-interest. This course will explore some of these history makers, few of whom you’ve probably ever heard of, from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. Each day we will focus on one or more history makers. We will read about them, read their texts, and learn about the role they played in history as well as the legacies they may leave for us. The history of the individual in the US, and of Americans in China, and of Chinese in America, will hopefully look different by the end of the semester. In this course you will critically analyze both primary and secondary sources of biographical writing and social history. You will study the genres, purposes of biographies, and how we should understand them. We will explore themes of national identity, race, diplomacy, gender, slavery, and sexuality, and you will explore how these concepts and approaches have been articulated differently by historical actors and historians writing for different purposes and audiences. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: French Cinema: Humanities Introductory course. History Makers: Humanities Introductory course.

This course will serve as an introduction to literary approaches to the Bible. Using religious and critical approaches to the Bible as a backdrop, this course will explore what can be gained from focusing instead on what makes the Bible a great work of literature. Through close reading of biblical texts such as Genesis, Leviticus, Samuel, Esther, the Gospels, and poetic texts we will examine how a variety of modern literary theories can be used to explain the richness of the biblical text as a work of literature rather than a historical, religious, or sacred text. Some of the methodologies and topics that will be explored are Mythology, Formalism/Structuralism, Gender and Sexuality, Translation, and Law as Literature. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory course (18-19: topic).

In this advanced humanities course students will acquire a geographical foundation of the mundane public policies established by the urban bureaucracies as responsible for giving material and symbolic form to the power of the modern state. There has been an influx of digital platforms, such as ArcGIS in the realm of city management, which are set to alter the vulnerabilities among marginalized populations governed by the state. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques, we will interrogate the ways in which technologies of government have influenced urban policy making in metropolitan regions of the world. The final projects of this class will require students to build on ethnographic engagement with “fields” of their choosing, and use a visualization technology of their choosing to begin to rethink the neoliberal city. Prerequisite: At least one courses in HUMN-SHU, SOCS-SHU, or HIST-SHU Fulfillment: Humanities Advanced Interdisciplinary course or other Advanced course; Social Science Focus Urban studies/Anthropology 300 level course.

Study of major themes in European intellectual history from the end of the Enlightenment to the last decades of the 19th century, considered in the light of the social and political contexts in which they arose and the cultural backgrounds that helped shape them. Topics include romanticism, liberal and radical social theory, aestheticism, the late 19th-century crisis of values, and the rise of modern social science. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Advanced course (18-19: topic).

This course introduces students to the basic concepts and methods in film studies by focusing on a select number of eminent auteurs in Asian cinemas. Our objectives are many: first, we situate within their particular socio-historical contexts the masterworks by master-directors like Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, Zhang Yimou, John Woo, Wong Kar-wai, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Mani Ratnam, and Deepa Mehta. In doing so, we learn the divergent developments between and within Japanese, Chinese, and South Asian film industries. We then analyze how these directors make various stylistic choices to address issues of kinship, nation, gender, historical memory, modernity, and globalization. Against the background of 20th century cross-cultural encounters, we also study the contributions of these auteurs to world cinemas and the cross-fertilization in style between these film masters. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: CORE HPC; GCS Chinese Media, Arts, and Literature; Humanities Introductory course.

Contemporary art can seem perplexing, yet when viewed as a progression of ideas and aesthetic strategies that respond to societal shifts, a certain logic emerges. This course traces movements in North American and European art from 1945 to the present through a study of primary and secondary texts, artwork examples, and socio-historic context. In lectures, discussions, and activities, we will investigate how artists went beyond primarily object-based works to explore expanded notions of what art can be and the interaction between the artwork and the viewer. At the end of this course, students should be able to identify contemporary art movements, key artists, and relevant artworks and create compelling arguments around these works. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory course (18-19: survey); IMA elective; IMB major IMA/IMB elective.

This course is a comparative study of the way a group of Black and Asian artists engaged with white western racism. As an advanced interdisciplinary seminar, this course is on the one hand intellectual, examining the historical subjugation of Black and Asian peoples to white peoples, and on the other hand practical, offering examples and exercises for artistic negotiation, resistance, and rebellion against racial hierarchies. Prereq: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Interdisciplinary/Advanced Courses (18-19 Topic Courses).

This course invites students to think about some of the most carefully controlled but also fervently sought-after questions since the time of Plato: what is the difference between gender and sex? What is the relationship between our gendered bodies, behaviors, and identities? How does sex, something we do, translate to the discourse of sexuality, something we talk about? What is the measurement of normality? If art indeed imitates and even changes life, in what ways do images of gender performance in literary and visual culture also reproduce and perhaps reshape our own experiences as gendered and sexed beings in a society? What can gender and sexuality tell us about the construction of culture, its boundaries, and its “outlaws”? Through the reading of philosophical, literary, historical, medical, and visual texts, and through discussions of case studies in mass media, we learn to see gender and sexuality as an evolving historical phenomenon rather than essentialist notions. We ask how the development of human interest in sexuality coincides with the burgeoning of governing techniques in modern times to police and promote sex simultaneously—as desirable and useful on the one hand, but also forbidden and harmful on the other. Lastly, as humanists, we ask how the boundary of our body (that is, our inside and outside in the most literal sense) is marked less by our blood cells, skin pores, or molecules than by our use of lan­­guage. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Interdisciplinary/Advanced Courses (18-19 Critical Concepts/Topic Courses).

Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Japan's Empire in Asia: Humanities Advanced course, 18-19: Topic. China and Global Feminism: Humanities 18-19 Critical Concepts.

An examination of major philosophical ideas and texts in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, from the scientific revolution to the beginning of German Idealism, including works by Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory course(18-19: topic).

The medieval world has long been a favorite setting for adaptation–from the mediums of literature, television, film, to theater, video games, historical reenactments, and more–the medieval provides seemingly limitless possibilities for representation and reimagination. But what is it about the medieval world that captivates our attention and leaves us always wanting more? How do artists’ recreations of the medieval world distort, but also shed new light on our view of the past, while simultaneously shaping our understanding of the present? In this course, students will explore these questions through in-depth analysis of popular medieval texts and modern film/television adaptations of enduring figures like King Arthur, Lancelot, Robin Hood, William Wallace, Frodo Baggins, Daenarys Targaryan, and more. Prerequisite: Any Humanities course. HIST-SHU, LIT-SHU, PHIL-SHU and HUM-SHU

This course provides an introduction to the history and culture of Shanghai through the eyes of fiction writers. We will read short stories (in English translation) by Chinese, British, American, Japanese, French, Polish, and South African writers who lived in the city between 1910 and 2010. Their stories will take us on an imaginary city tour through time and space: from businessmen, politicians, and prostitutes gathering in the nightclubs of the old Bund, to Jewish refugees struggling to find a home in the poor shikumen neighborhoods of Hongkou, to teachers and students fighting political battles at the university campuses during the Cultural Revolution, and young urban youth pursuing cosmopolitan lifestyles in the global city of today. The course also includes trips to various places featured in the stories and guest lectures by some of Shanghai’s most famous writers today. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: CORE HPC or IPC; GCS Chinese Media, Arts, and Literature; Humanities Major Interdisciplinary Course/Other Introductory Courses/ Other Advanced Courses.

Fall Semester - Part I: Students design and conduct an independent research project in their area of focus using the theories and methods with which they have become familiar over the course of completing the major. Prerequisite: Open only to Humanities majors in the senior year. Fulfillment: Humanities Major Capstone.

Students design and conduct an independent research project in their area of focus using the theories and methods with which they have become familiar over the course of completing the major. Prerequisite: Open only to Humanities majors in the senior year. Fulfillment: Humanities Major Capstone.

Students are permitted to work on an individual basis under the supervision of a full-time faculty member in the Humanities discipline if they have maintained an overall GPA of 3.0 and have a study proposal that is approved by a Humanities professor. Students are expected to spend about ten to twelve hours a week on their project for 4 credits. Fulfillment: Humanities Major Topic Course (18-19).