Self-Service will consume your attention at 7:30 AM this week (image from college website)
Choosing classes for the next semester is always an intimidating process: that blue packet of classes is much desired but overly confusing, meeting with your adviser is a whirlwind twenty minute appointment, and for some reason, the course offerings in the spring always involve more words like “ecofeminism” and “supernatural.” Based on this overwhelming number of compelling classes to take next semester, the Voice did a little bit of detective work to figure out what is behind such titles as “Ethnomusicology” and “Flowers from the Volcano.” We hope that this guide to next semester’s most intriguing classes will interest all majors, prospective majors, and interested parties alike.
Jeffrey Cole, Worlds of Food (ANT 350)
Cole’s goal for the class is to “change the way students think about food.” The course fits into the anthropology department through a focus on the role food plays in different cultures, as food “addresses a key component of every human society.” Cole said he became interested in the meeting of food and anthropology while writing his dissertation in Sicily, where he “was struck by the centrality of food to Sicily life. Most Sicilians still tend or have access to property, and many of my friends [were] proud to serve up olive oil and wine from their own land.” This connection of food, where it comes from, and how we think about eating is one that is being debated all over the world, and next semester it will be debated twice a week in this class.
Julia Kushigian, “Flowers from the Volcano”: Imperial Discourse, Ecofeminism, and Resistance in the Americas (SPA 305)
“The Spanish conquest forever changed America and created a ‘new world.’ Imperial discourses collided with resistance movements and the emerging voices of oppressed indigenous peoples, women, and mestizos,” said Kushigian. “This course traces the tensions between their discourses from the colonial period to the present, interrogating related struggles for land and self.” The course is also cross-listed with the Gender and Women’s Studies department, as it will look at “what it means to characterize women as sacred custodians of the earth, and how this role limits or empowers women today.”
Gretchen Heefner, Americans in the World: Trade, Travel and Diplomacy since the 1890s (HIS 265)
Heefner said that some readings in the class will include “memoirs from people who have traveled to/from the US, including radical anarchist Emma Goldman, poet Langston Hughes, and the contemporary handbook for Americans going to study abroad.” A potential assignment for the class will be for the students to “craft (in words, video or pictures) a contemporary portrait of the ‘ugly American.’” In a time where our nation’s reputation is improving, but still looked at particularly unfavorably in some parts of the world, it would be incredibly interesting to find out what exactly shapes our identity in this country as well as around the globe.
Tennyson Wellman, Supernatural in American Pop Culture (REL 219)
While this class may seem most appropriate for Twilight or True Blood fans, the class addresses much bigger issues than simply the popularity of the books. Wellman describes one theme of the class as “what you can tell about our culture from reading/watching programs that deal with the supernatural, like the ways that modern vampire erotica gives folks the chance to vicariously work out issues about sex, gender roles, and violence.” The course does not only tackle the popularity of vampires in our culture, but also werewolves, zombies, supernatural beings, and much of the undead.
Eugene Gallagher, Cults and Conversion in Modern America (REL 346)
Gallagher says his interest in this subject came from developments in the 1970s and early 1980s, where “prominent groups included the Unification Church, People’s Temple (most of whom perished at Jonestown in 1978) and the Church of Scientology.” He wanted to develop a course that examined those contemporary trends and took the new groups as examples for the general study of religion. The course has evolved over the years to include new religious phenomena, especially such controversial topics as “conversion, inter-religious conflict, and social reactions to minority religious groups.” This course is a chance to learn the real story behind cults, not what over dramatized television specials have taught us.
Lina Wilder, Shakespeare’s Brain, Shakespeare’s Body (ENG 494Y)
Wilder’s idea behind the course is to insert Shakespeare’s plays into a historical context of science and medicine. “Ideas about both brain and body from this period are deeply weird,” she said. “For example, most physiologists in Shakespeare’s time agree that thought takes place in a fluid medium called the ‘animal spirits,’ a substance distilled out of the blood that is then further distilled to become semen.” In comparison to other courses on Shakespeare, Prof. Wilder believes the course will answer “what it means, on Shakespeare’s stage, to be a thinker with a body.”
Caroleen Sayej, Iraq War: Causes and Consequences (GOV 320)
Sayej’s background in the subject comes from a book she helped write with several of her colleagues on the Iraq War, specifically around the theme of “preemption.” Their research, now known as “The Iraq Papers,” was published in January. Her goals for this class are to “debate whether the Iraq War is a new kind of war – or whether it is in line with U.S. foreign policy over time.” This course, along with a multitude of other Government courses in Middle Eastern studies, is inspiring greater interest in the region among Conn students as well as being “part of a bigger college initiative to launch a program– the Islamic World Studies Program. We hope it will be an interdisciplinary center that will offer at least a minor in Middle Eastern Studies.”
Kamran Javadizadeh, 9/11 and Literature (ENG 112)
Javadizadeh’s fascination with the subject stems from his interest in “thinking about how literature and life each transform, and are in turn transformed by, the other.” Not all of the works of literature read in the class will be directly about September 11, but texts that are importantly influenced by this day in history. Javadizadeh plans to address “how does fiction structure the way we understand and even experience such an event? How does our self-positioning (geographically, historically, politically, etc.) condition the production and reception of those fictions? Another thing people liked to say in those days was that irony had died. Had it, even if only temporarily?” Prof. Javadizadeh’s class will also read works such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close or Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. This class will address many issues that have faced both American society and literature over the past ten years.
Michael James, Education and the Revolutionary Project in Latin America (EDU 350)
This course is currently being spearheaded in Oaxaca, Mexico, where James is spending the semester with the first SATA Oaxaca program. The course is based on the work of the “Brazilian radical educator Paulo Freire, [which provides] a theoretical template to assist us as we study schooling within the revolutions of Mexico, Cuba and Nicaragua.” Students studying in Oaxaca currently are creating “a film documentary of the teachers’ strike compiled from a series of interviews they are doing in the city and its surrounding pueblos which we hope to show when we return next semester.” The course is also cross-listed with Gender and Women’s Studies, American Studies, and the Comparative Race and Ethnicity.
Stephen Loomis, Tropical Biology (BIO 320)
This course, which has been taught in various forms since 1984, has a TRIP component – the students in this class will study in Belize during spring break. Because of this exciting field research opportunity, Loomis has divided the course into three parts, beginning with preparation for the trip through the study of tropical ecosystems. During the trip to Belize, students visit a rain forest site and then an island on the barrier reef. “After the trip, we study some of the interesting observations that we made while in Belize in more detail and the students write their research in a publishable format,” said Loomis.
Ruth Grahn, Drugs and Behavior (PSY 212)
Grahn stated that her interest in the course stemmed from her observations of “the impact of medications on people [she] knew who were experiencing depression or anxiety, and [she] was fascinated by how a chemical could change a person’s life so much.” She describes one of the most interesting aspects of the class: “Each person is unique in their response to a drug, both in how it affects their behavior, and how it alters their brain.”
James Wilson, Ethnomusicology (MUS 229)
This class will be supported by the Sherman Fairchild grant, which is currently funding several classes in the arts this semester. The class is designed to present the history and current state of ethnomusicology and conclude with a student-designed project that involves ethnomusicological field work: “Students conduct their own fieldwork project here in New London — some students have done projects about local bands, orchestras, or church/religious groups — everything from hand bells to rock bands.”
Maureen McCabe, Collage and Mixed Media (ART 229)
This art course allows students to use materials they never thought they would use to portray deeply emotional projects. McCabe says that the unit she learns the most from is the autobiographical unit: “The visual project results from this unit are often very moving – ranging in subject matter from anorexia, alcoholism in families, gender issues and cultural isolation.”
