UCOR Section Descriptions

Course Description

Drawing on the work of U.S. writers, this course engages a range of historically divisive questions: what, for example, makes the U.S. unique and what--if anything--makes it great? Such questions animate a long history of American politics, but this course will explore the ways in which U.S. literature offers more nuanced lines of inquiry, interrogating definitions of and assumptions about national identity.

Course Description

Well-aware of the scrutiny to which women's bodies are subjected in modern culture, this course turns its attention to the medieval attitudes towards women as bodies and bodies as female. We consider what- and when -medieval peoples thought about the female body through a close examination of laws, artwork, medical texts, and other sources, in order to examine the gendering of the body in many different facets of medieval society and culture.

Course Description

How did alternative medicines come to be separate from the mainstream, and why do they draw so much on Asian traditions? This course explores the history of herbal medicine in Europe, Asia, and America in order to understand the roles that race, gender, and colonial thinking have played in defining modern medicine. We focus on the medieval origins of this topic while keeping an eye on its modern realities.

Course Description

Hollywood films play an outsize role in shaping how Americans encounter the past. In this inquiry seminar we will examine genres of films that have a heightened relationship with the past: the Civil War film and the war movie, the western, the civil rights movement on screen, the immigrant’s tale, among others. Our project will be both to assess historical accuracy and to understand how a particular cinematic vision of the past speaks directly to the time period that produced it.

Course Description

This course uses the idea of a coup to discuss and study political legitimacy, the transfer of power, and the relation between state, citizen and political change. The course gives an overview of coups through history before examining the theoretical underpinnings of coups (what makes a coup a coup and when is the concept used incorrectly). Students will research and examine various coups across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Course Description

This course will focus on an intellectual history of three of the primary critics of modern Western culture: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. We will be seeking to understand both the economic-social, philosophical and psychoanalytic critiques they developed of modern European culture and the historical contexts out of which these critiques emerged and to which they were responding.

Course Description

The course studies myths and art of ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman Cultures from a historical perspective. Students in this course learn about concepts and aspects of myths and their depictions in art. The course involves studying mythical topics and includes a comparison between ancient Egyptian and Graeco-roman cultures. It teaches students how to assess similarities and differences between ancient cultures and evaluate inherited legacies that have affected modern cultures and societies.

Course Description

Through an examination of the travel accounts of select individuals this course will explore the impact of technology on global encounters in the modern world. It will explore the way that developments in travel technology shaped cross-cultural encounters and understandings in the modern world. It will address the central question: how do changes in travel technology change not only the way people travel around the world but the way people understand the world?

Course Description

A thematic course that addresses a topic or period of Art History outside of modern Europe or the West.This writing intensive course provides the opportunity for students to approach issues of global citizenship and the study of art through a cross-cultural lens. This particular iteration of the course analyzes the treatment of the Baroque style in South America, particularly Brazil. Students will become familiar with South American painting, sculpture and architecture largely from the 17th and 18th centuries. In addition, this course will examine how crosscultural issues such as colonialism, race, and slavery affected art.

Course Description

This course is about the historical role of the artist in society. We look at two moments in history when the identity of artists changed to learn how historical context helps us understand works of art. We ask why Renaissance artists argued that they were intellectuals rather than artisans and why Modem artists attacked the intellectual traditions of art to demand social change and radically question the purpose of visual art. To address these issues we explore themes such as Renaissance self-portraiture, 19th century paintings of labor, symbols of the liberal arts in the Renaissance, and German Dada artists' responses to the trauma of the First World War.