Weinberg College
of Arts & Sciences

Instructor(s): Jacob Brown

Description: Black writing matters, and Afro-Brazilian authors have made indispensable contributions to the literature of the African diaspora. Brazil has the largest Afrodescendant population outside of Africa. It was the last nation in the Western hemisphere to officially abolish slavery in 1888, and it imported more enslaved human beings from the transatlantic slave trade than any other country in the world. Africans and their descendants have shaped virtually every aspect of Brazilian culture, including its literary and intellectual production. Students will thus take a critical look at Brazilian history, and society through the lens of Afro-Brazilian fiction, poetry, testimony, Black feminist theory, graphic novels, documentary, and song lyrics. By the end of the course, students will be able to name some of the most influential Afro-Brazilian authors and make meaningful connections and comparisons between their rich and multifaceted works. Students will also be able to write and talk about how Black authors have challenged racism and intersecting structures of oppression in a global context from the 19th century to the present. Students will leave the class with an appreciation for how Afro-Brazilian literature can help us not only critique society but also collectively imagine a more equitable and inclusive future for all in Brazil and beyond.

Instructor(s): Elizabeth Hurd

Description: This course is a study of American borders, past and present. We read widely in politics, history, religious and cultural studies, anthropology, and border studies. We watch several documentary films, listen to music, and learn from engaging with guest speakers. Central themes include the history of US borders with Mexico, Indigenous communities, protest movements, law and the border, sanctuary and sovereignty, legal exceptionalism, the history of the passport, religious politics of borders, and environmental politics of the borderlands. Border issues are considered from multiple perspectives, including but also going well beyond issues of surveillance and enforcement. As a first-year seminar, this course also emphasizes critical research and writing skills to prepare students for college-level research and writing. We will discuss academic integrity and get tips from a librarian on how to make the most of the University Library’s resources during your time at Northwestern.

Instructor(s): Fay Rosner

Description: What do poetry, music and painting have in common? Can a painting be musical? Can music paint a scene? In this seminar, we will immerse ourselves in the works and criticism of several influential figures of modernity whose artistic visions often overlapped. Through close readings, we will take our time enjoying the works of artists from these different genres, as we seek to understand how these writers, painters and musicians echo, support, and challenge one another in their work and criticism. As we examine the turbulent social and political contexts in which these works emerged, we will also explore how and why the works of these artists caused such moral and critical outrage in audiences of the time. NOTE: One trip to the Art Institute will be required.

Instructor(s): Mark Lockwood

Description:

On October 11th, 2005, E. Patrick Johnson and Mae Henderson’s seminal anthology Black Queer Studies was published by Duke University Press. The anthology brought together essays by scholars to assess the strengths and weaknesses of prior work on race and sexuality, highlighting the theoretical and political issues at stake in the nascent field of black queer studies. Following up with his groundbreaking edited collection, Johnson published No Tea, No Shade in 2016. Building on the foundations laid out in Black Queer Studies, No Tea, No Shade spoke new truths about the black queer people, and the black queer experience, whose radical imagination insist on always recalibrating blackness, its embodiment, and performance in an ever-changing political economy.

The goal of this course is to problematize the terms “queer,” “gender” and “sexuality,” with efforts to question assumptions that attend the usage and deployment of these terms in discourse. This course primarily centers three groundbreaking black queer films – Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (2016), Dee Ree’s Pariah (2009), and Kristen Lovell’s The Stroll (2023) – as critical, popular, and accessible expressions of black queer theory. We will closely analyze each film alongside other popular culture forms – television shows, performance art, and other visual media – to think about how these texts are in conversation with one another and uncover topics related to black queer genders, sexual practices, vulnerability, queer cultural invisibility, sex work and survival, and LGBTQ kinship.

This class will offer students an introduction into black queer theories, analytics, knowledge, and activism that emerge from LGBTQ people of color who examine the intersections of, primarily, race, class, gender, and sexuality, and other vectors of powers and categories of social life. Likewise, this course will expose students to black queer film and media and challenge us, within the academy, to close the gap between popular and academic meditations on black queer life.

Instructor(s): Emma Cohen

Description:

Course Description: In Pumping Iron, a young Arnold Schwarzenegger describes his body as a living artwork: “good bodybuilders have the same mind in terms of sculpting that a sculptor has. You look in the mirror and say, ‘Okay, I need a little more deltoid to get the proportion right.’ So you exercise and put those deltoids on, whereas an artist would just slap on some clay.” In an age of Instagram Face and mail-order Ozempic, it’s not unusual to think of our physical form as fundamentally malleable. But what are the stakes of understanding our bodies to be constructed and changeable objects? Should we celebrate what philosopher Paul Preciado calls “bioempowerment,” using our bodies to derail familiar gender norms? Does embracing bodily flexibility align us uncomfortably with an economy that demands ever more energy, availability, and agility from its workers? And where do the bodily norms against which we sculpt ourselves come from, anyway? Roving from the Renaissance anatomy theater to drive-through plastic surgery clinics, this course will explore some of the discourses, political structures, and material practices that shape our bodies, both physically and figuratively. Alongside theoretical texts, such as writing by Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, we will look at poems that dissect the bodies of their beloved, fiction by authors ranging from Mary Shelley to Jamil Jan Kochai, journalistic investigations into fatphobia, and films, dances, and visual artworks that use prosthesis and collage to rearrange familiar forms. In doing so, you will get the chance to think through how these texts are constructed, and investigate the ways that literary, visual, and physical forms influence one another. You will also practice examining and developing the mechanics of your own writing, gaining facility in posing effective questions, amassing and wielding evidence, constructing compelling arguments, and crafting your writerly voice with greater clarity.

Teaching Method: Discussion

Method of Evaluation: Writing assignments, participation, self-assessment Number Of Writing Assignments And Their Lengths: Two 3-4 page papers, one 6-7 page final paper, and intermittent short reflections

Reading List: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; other readings and films will be available on Canvas

Instructor(s): Lance Rips

Description: Infinity is a central property of most number systems. The natural numbers, integers, rationals, reals, and complex numbers all include an infinite number of elements. People’s concepts of these systems would be confused if they failed to grasp the fact that there is no end to these numbers. However, most people have great difficulty understanding infinite sets like these. Are there more positive integers than positive even integers? Are there more rational numbers than natural numbers? Are there more real numbers than rational numbers? You might be surprised at the correct answers to some of these questions. To set the stage, we’ll look (informally) at some of the math background on infinity, as developed by Georg Cantor and others in the 19th Century. Then we’ll examine some reasons why thinking and reasoning about infinity is so difficult. We’ll read some cognitive psychology experiments that address how children first learn about the infinity of the positive integers, how they learn about infinite divisibility, and how older students (NU undergrads) think about number systems in general.

Instructor(s): Robert Gordon

Description: World War II was clearly the most important single event of the twentieth century. However, the seeds for World War II were laid in World War I, making it necessary to study both wars. We will study both why these wars occurred and why they turned out the way they did. In asking why wars turned out the way they did, we will emphasize the size and performance of the economies involved, and such issues as why the U.S. and Soviet Union produced so much while Germany produced so little. In the last part of the course, students will have a chance to do independent research on any aspect of World War II which interests them, economic, political or military.

Instructor(s): Morgan Thompson

Description:

The course will focus on questions about the nature of discrimination in society. We will discuss responses to questions like: What distinguishes discrimination from other social ills like domination and exploitation? Can thoughts and ideas be discriminatory? How should we identify cases of discrimination in legal settings or in social science? Do algorithms discriminate? What should we do about the effects of discrimination? We will read a variety of texts from legal fields, sociology, and philosophy, as well as public-oriented news and opinion pieces.

This course will be focused on improving your written work and your writing process. It aims to build skills necessary for writing essays, such as clarity of prose, critical thinking, creativity, and editing.

Instructor(s): Kathleen Carmichael

Description:

We are all familiar with public discourse about environmental concerns: Descriptions of a future where familiar landscapes have been transformed into alien vistas, newly dangerous and hostile to human life. Recent eco-fiction, however, challenges that familiar narrative, proposing ways that we humans may find ourselves transfigured along with the world around us. In this class we will engage with accounts of such human metamorphosis, considering the children’s stories of Dr. Seuss, the hyper-empathy of Octavia Butler, the "new weird" landscapes of Jeff Vandermeer's Area X and a selection of other short works. Film viewings will include Pixar's 2008 Wall-E and other films (TBA).

Course readings/viewing will include brief readings from literary criticism. We will also consider practical topics such as how University library resources and experts can help students locate and evaluate key sources and develop authoritative arguments. This course will use a traditional grading structure. Content warning: Some readings and viewings include references to sexual violence, self-harm, torture, and suicide.

Instructor(s): Germán Campos-Muñoz

Description:

The topic of exile—the forced abandonment of the place and world one calls home—captured the imagination of peoples across the ancient Mediterranean. The Greek Odyssey and Roman Aeneid, famous accounts of the predicaments of classical exile, were by no means isolated instances. These renowned poems were in conversation with narratives that circulated widely among neighboring Egyptian, Hebrew, Babylonian, Phoenician, and other ancient communities, in stories which not only produced echoes among themselves, but very likely borrowed from each other. In this seminar, we will read and discuss representative accounts of exile from the ancient Mediterranean world, highlighting their historical and geographical specificity but also reflecting on their treatment of common concerns and themes—such as homelessness and hospitality, longing and belonging, identity and otherness, hosts and guests, refugees and havens, pain and nostalgia, presence and absence, etc. While the seminar will highlight the historical and archaeological coordinates of those narratives, we will also reflect upon their relevance in discussing the very current reality of exilic life in today’s world.

As a first-year seminar, this course is meant to hone your abilities in the practice of academic writing. The activities for the seminar address this goal by implementing peer-review processes and exploring different writing techniques and sequences.

Instructor(s): Melville Ulmer

Description:

We'll discuss a book in class with 1 discussion leader per meeting which is twice a week. The book is for non-experts on the topic of cosmology. On one hand, cosmologists have made a story that fits together beautifully. On the other hand the fit is produced by evoking Dark Energy and Dark Matter, which have not been verified in the laboratory. The goal of this class is to discuss the pros and cons of our way forward to understand where we came from and where we are going. The book is: "Facts and Speculations in Cosmology" by Jayant Narlikar.

Evaluation Method Teams will be assigned to present their version as a skit for their description of the Big Bang after inflation, why astronomers evoke inflation, why astronomers evoke Dark Matter, and why astronomers evoke Dark Energy = 4 teams. Then 3 papers especially addressing aspects of what's good (1 paper) or bad (one paper) about our current model of Cosmology and one discussion related to that Cosmologists tell us dark matter must exist whereas Physicists have so far failed to find the dark matter particles.

Class Materials (Required) "Facts and Speculations in Cosmology" by Jayant Narlikar, ISBN-10: 0521865042

Instructor(s): Alexandra Ibarra

Description:

Our daily life is embroiled in food writing: from The New York Times restaurant reviews and Mary Berry’s cookbooks to TikTok recipes and viral food memoirs such as Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart. In this course, we will think with our stomachs as we explore food-writing genres such as recipes, short stories, memoirs, reviews, political pamphlets, and academic essays to learn how to evaluate and emulate effective prose across styles and disciplines. This course will feature texts by Michael W. Twitty, Anthony Bourdain, Michael Pollan, Ruth Ozeki, and bell hooks, among others. We will also analyze and respond to non-textual food media such as food documentaries, Studio Ghibli films, and cooking TikToks. As we read, write, and eat, we’ll consider such questions as: What is the relationship between the food and the writing that we consume? How have food texts and concepts such as celebrity chefs, cultural appropriation, and copyright transformed in the era of social media? How do historical and contemporary food struggles for sustainability and food sovereignty translate onto the written page?

Course assignments will develop flexible writing skills such as voice, argumentation, and research through adaptable assignments including the restaurant review, recipe narrative, and creative research project. This course is designed to use the many modes of food writing as a foundation for critical reading, writing, and research skills that will help you to thrive as a reader, writer, and consumer!

Instructor(s): Marth Biondi

Description:

Given the gains of the Black Freedom Struggle, what accounts for the rise of #BlackLivesMatter? In this seminar we will pay close attention to the role of policing in Black communities since the 1960s. We will explore how and why police became so central to US social policy and the factors that produced an extraordinary degree of incarceration in the United States. We will consider the degree to which electoral politics have been responsive to the struggles and challenges in poor Black communities. This seminar examines urban racial conditions since the 1960s and explores the analyses, remedies and solutions that young activists have been formulating to address the challenges of the 21st century.

Readings include historical and contemporary studies. A major goal of this class is to sharpen your writing skills. We will balance reading assignments with short writing assignments.

Instructor(s): Yasmin Yoon

Description:

What can “k-beauty” (South Korean skincare) teach us about the history of American chemical warfare and medical experimentation on raced subjects? How do “Japanese minimalist cleaning tips” à la Marie Kondo emerge out of anxieties about globalized work in the 21st century? Drawing from literary texts and various “Asian” cultural exports to America, this course will explore questions of race and capital in today’s context of emerging Asian superpowers and the decline of US hegemony. Far from representing an unchanging ancient culture, the “Asianness” of each scene of example maps out military and economic histories—and futures—that stretch across the transpacific. Taking cues from Asian American writers such as Ed Park, Hsi Tseng Tsiang, and Esther Yi, we will work together to deconstruct the ways in which race becomes legible as a product of Asian/American encounters in the “Asian Century.”

The primary objective of this course is to help you become more critical and generous as a reader and interlocuter. As we approach writing as a process that is never complete nor perfect, this course will help you refine skills of argumentation, the incorporation of quotes, organization, and revision.

Instructor(s): Michele Zugnoni

Description: Prepare to delve into the hidden realms of ancient myths, mystical traditions, and historical narratives, where goddesses and heroines shaped the course of human history. Discover the captivating stories of women who have been obscured by time. In this course, we'll peel back the layers of history to uncover forgotten wisdom and examine heroic journeys, thus exploring the rich tapestry of the human experience. From forgotten figures of wisdom and empowerment like Inanna to modern historical leaders like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, our seminar will illuminate the multifaceted roles of women in shaping culture, spirituality, and societal norms across continents and eras. We’ll interrogate ancient myths, best-selling books and blockbuster movies, exploring themes of empowerment and resilience in both mythical and contemporary contexts. Along the way, we’ll develop skills essential to academic writing, reading, and success.

Instructor(s): Doron Shiffer-Sebba

Description: Who is "elite"? And what do elites do to stay on top? In an era of extreme economic inequality and populist politics in the United States, many point to elites as a group to rally against, but few explain what it takes to be elite. This writing seminar will explore cutting-edge social science on how to define this group, relying on timely evidence and centuries-old theoretical debates. The course will also examine how individuals go about maintaining their elite status and passing it on to their children. Through consecutive writing exercises, students will not only refine their understanding of contemporary elites in the United States, but also learn the central tenants of academic writing in the social sciences.

Instructor(s): Charles Yarnoff

Description: In this seminar, we will explore the question of what is and what might be the relationship between human and nonhuman animals. To guide us in that exploration, we'll read, discuss, and write about short stories, essays, and poems. These literary works powerfully dramatize the many ways in which we experience animals: as companions and as sources of food, in zoos and in nature, as objects of scientific study and as reflections of ourselves. The readings will offer us the opportunity to reflect on such questions as: Is it possible to know what an animal is thinking and feeling? Why are our pets so important to us? Are we justified in using animals for food and in laboratory experiments? Through class discussion and varied writing assignments, you'll articulate your answers to those and other questions to your colleagues in the seminar.

Instructor(s): Erin Leddon

Description: How do children achieve the remarkable feat of acquiring language - an accomplishment we often take for granted? Which aspects of the human capacity for language are best understood as biological, as species-wide and species-specific? How do families, schools, and communities help shape children's development as speakers and listeners, and eventually as readers and writers? How does learning a first language (or more than one language) interact with learning to think, learning to imagine, and developing a sense of identity? To explore these questions, we will consider studies of children's language development along with perspectives from social policy, medicine, education, business and marketing, the arts and publishing. Students will have regular opportunities to reflect on their own experience, and each student will be able to select a topic of individual interest for a final seminar project. All assigned reading will be available to students on Canvas.

Instructor(s): Lisa Del Torto

Description: Scholars of language and writing argue that language and its varieties, genres, modes, and rhetorical strategies are always shifting, flexible, and contested. Thus, sociolinguistic diversity—differences across and within languages and dialects—is inevitable. This seminar will explore how language difference is situated in current US and global discourses, considering language in written, spoken, and signed forms. We will disrupt monolingual ideologies that infiltrate those discourses, focusing on language diversity as an asset to individuals, cultures, and institutions. The course will consider college as one of those institutions and will explore language diversity and linguistic social justice as part of your first-year experience at Northwestern. Using scholarly readings from sociolinguistics and writing pedagogy along with popular non-fiction, the course will consider how we can sustain sociolinguistic diversity, how we can foster equity, access, and inclusion around language difference, and how our sociolinguistic diversity sustains us. You will formulate and explore your own questions about language diversity and linguistic justice in papers, presentations, and class discussions.

Instructor(s): Anna Parkinson

Description: Every culture produces artworks embodying the ambivalence specific to their historical moment or even concerning broader existential anxieties. Marvelous and monstrous beings can represent crucial cultural anxieties or imaginaries, such as deep social fears about change through secularization, modernization, and changing understandings of markers of modern identity such as gender, sexuality, race, and species or life-forms. Further, what do these fascinating figures reveal about the self, which is often perceived through the misrecognition of others and individual conflicting desires? Why do we continue to produce expressions of socio-political, psychological and historical ambiguity through representations of life forms perceived to be marvelous or monstrous?

Instructor(s): Christine Helmer

Description: With a focus on Max Weber’s famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, this course explores Max and Marianne Weber’s trip to America in 1904; Max Weber’s relationship with W.E.B. DuBois; Marianne Weber’s contributions to feminist theory; and the relation between religion and economics. 

Instructor(s): Bihter Esener

Description: Chariot-racing, archery, tennis, and jousting were just some sports enjoyed over the 1000 years (4th–15th centuries CE) known as the “Middle Ages.” Kings and queens, monks and nuns, and nobles and peasants engaged in these to gain athletic prowess, fame, status, wealth, love, sex, and fun. This course examines the powerful visual expressions of various sports and games developed, cultivated, and encouraged or discouraged over the medieval era in the Mediterranean world. The evidence includes athletic monuments, illustrated manuscripts, tapestries, and relatively unexpected objects such as mirrors and combs. Modern material, such as films and TV excerpts, shall also be used. Key issues explored are the spectacle and spectatorship of medieval sports; gender, class, and religion in the practice of sports; the body, fashion, and the spaces of sports (stadiums, arenas, etc.), and comparisons between their medieval and modern versions.

Instructor(s): Nick Davis

Description:

For good reason, we often discuss or internally experience our genders and sexualities within the terms, frames, and knowledges available to us now. When we admit that genders and sexualities are not just “inborn” or unchanging over time, many of the histories we excavate stretch back for centuries. Resisting both impulses, this course uses popular cinema in the US and around the world to assess just how much changes in our notions of gender identity and sexual desire even over short spans of time—25 years, to be exact, which is lengthy for those not yet born in 1999-2000 but just yesterday for those of us who were engaged in these conversations and self-discoveries as a new millennium started. Students will learn that all kinds of films, from studio blockbusters to tiny independents, took unusually overt interest in changing categories and expansive experiences of gender and sexuality around the Y2K moment: the era of The Matrix, All About My Mother, Fight Club, Ghost Dog, Boys Don’t Cry, But I’m a Cheerleader, Election, and many other enduring touchstones. We will also investigate how evolving fields like feminism and queer theory plus burgeoning scholarship in trans studies and masculinity studies were generating vocabularies, challenging assumptions, and entering into spirited debates in the same moment.

Through a combination of discussions and writing assignments, some collective and some self-determined, students will gain valuable skills (how to close-read a movie, how to engage a scholarly article) and also engage in a quarter-long, inquisitive, respectful, and hopefully surprising conversation about the recent past, fluid present, and possible futures of gender and sexuality, on and off screen.

Instructor(s): Pamela Bannos

Description:

This course will explore the history and nature of photographic imagery relating to its capacity for misrepresentation, with emphasis on context and photography as a contemporary art practice. From the work of 19th century photographers to conceptual artists of the 1980s; from optical lens distortion to post-production manipulation and recent AI applications, we will investigate the age-old issue of truth and its relationship to photography.

In addition to more extensive essays, students will write short responses to readings, and produce imagery related to discussion topics.

Instructor(s): Claire Kirwin

Description: In this class, we will read Plato’s two masterpieces on erotic love: the Symposium and the Phaedrus. We will explore Plato’s treatment of the role of eros in human life, and consider the connection he draws between this phenomenon and the practice of philosophy. Our engagement with these texts will form the foundation for a series of structured writing assignments aimed at developing and refining your academic writing skills.

Instructor(s): Megan Geigner

Description: While print novel and magazine readership may be down, podcast listening is hugely popular. Podcasts are now where many people encounter news, pop culture, and stories. Good podcast creators—of both fiction and nonfiction podcasts—engage in the art of storytelling, making carefully crafted plots, characters, settings, and themes. This course will expose students to narrative theory and storytelling tools and then teach them to apply these concepts to podcasts. Just as they do with written texts in other courses, students in this course will learn to consider podcasts using close-"reading" techniques, rhetorical argumentation, and character, plot, and setting analyses. In addition to these more classical academic analyses of podcasts as literature, the course will also ask students to consider the serial and documentary genres. Furthermore, students will consider how technology affects storytelling. In the first half of the course, students will analyze existing podcasts and write academic papers on the podcasts of their choosing. In the second half of the class, students will make 2 podcasts themselves. One of the podcasts will be an original podcast of their choosing. The other podcast will be a class project wherein students make a podcast that gives other students tips and tricks to improve their writing processes.

Instructor(s): Matthew Davis

Description:

This course is intended to help you develop writing skills that will help you succeed while you are at Northwestern -- and also after you graduate. The theme for this section will be “points of view” in fiction. We will read short stories, and you will be introduced to eleven different “modes of narration,” or ways of telling a story. Many of the readings will be taken from an unusual collection of short stories, Points of View, edited by James Moffett and Kenneth R. McElheny, in which the stories are categorized according to the mode of narration used in the story. One section of the anthology contains “interior monologues,” in which we seem to be inside the main character’s head, overhearing his or her thoughts; another section contains “dramatic monologues,” in which we hear the narrator speaking aloud to another character; a third section contains “epistolary” stories (stories told in letters); a fourth contains stories that consist of diary entries; and so on. We will look at eleven modes of narration in all and read two examples of most modes

Students will write two academic essays and two short narratives. The academic essays will be drafted, workshopped, and revised to help students develop their essay-writing skills.

Instructor(s): Laurel Harbridge-Yong

Description: Is the American public polarized? What about our elected officials? What do we mean by party polarization and what does this phenomenon mean for issues of representation, government productivity, democratic norms, and civic engagement? This first year writing seminar explores these and other questions related to polarization in American politics, including timely topics related to the growing impact of the most ideological wings of the parties, gridlock in politics, echo chambers in the media and the ramifications of recent elections.

Instructor(s): Brett Gadsden

Description: On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States. The election of the first African American to the American Presidency marked an unprecedented moment in U.S. History. Obama’s presidency also signaled a new saliency about race in American political culture and spurred fantasies about a “post-racial” America. How did this come to be? Against the backdrop of Obama’s rise to national prominence, this course explores the seeming paradox.

Instructor(s): Kate Masur

Description:

Sometime during the fall of 1857, a young single woman from rural Vermont discovered she was pregnant. There seemed no possibility she could marry the man involved. What happened next involved multiple family members, train travel, and a legal and medical controversy that tore apart a community. This class will use a “microhistory” approach to explore how nineteenth-century Americans understood sex, pregnancy, contraception, and abortion, and how these issues reverberated in the arenas of law and medicine. Students will gain significant experience analyzing primary sources and piecing together historical narratives.

As this is a First-Year Writing Seminar, the class will also discuss practices of writing in college, and students will have ample opportunities to write and revise.

Instructor(s): Sarah Nisenson

Description:

With his charmingly grumpy “Get outta my swamp!” Shrek is one of the most beloved swamp-dwelling creatures in popular culture. In contrast to the shiny castle of the villainous Lord Farquaad, Shrek’s cozy home inverts the swamp’s typical representation as a magical but potentially sinister space. This course takes Shrek’s order as a provocation: why must we leave? Is it dangerous to remain in the swamp, and for whom? In this course, we will explore swamps, bogs, and wetlands through a variety of mediums, including literary fiction (Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation); television episodes (“It’s a Swamp Thing” from Harley Quinn); and videogames (Dark Souls 3). Our class will also approach our own campus environment, the Great Lakes wetlands, with curiosity and care through site-specific activities outside of the classroom. The primary goals of this course are to improve your writing, hone your research skills, and refine your critical thinking strategies. To that end, we will approach writing as a process rather than a product; in addition to writing in multiple genres, you will work with your classmates in a peer-review process, providing and responding to substantial feedback. In venturing into the wetlands together, this class will help first-year students acclimate to Northwestern and improve their critical thinking and writing skills. 

Discussion Evaluation Method: Canvas posts, discussion, writing assignments

Reading List: Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation VanderMeer (ISBN: 9780374104092) All other materials will be available on Canvas

Instructor(s): John Mordacq

Description: We will study the alterations to the genome that are responsible for various human diseases. Students will learn about traditional and potential experimental targeted treatment (gene-editing) of the diseases. We will discuss the impact of these diseases on healthcare as well as their social implications. Discussions will center on scientific studies and literature. The course is structured to increase the basic understanding of human genetics.

Instructor(s): Farhad Zadeh

Description: This conceptual course focuses on the invisible universe covering topics related to the solar system, the Milky Way Galaxy and cosmology. Studying the invisible universe provides an awe in the diversity of phenomena that our universe offers. The realm of the invisible includes the components of the fascinating history of radio astronomy, and numerous discoveries over the last 90 years (e.g., pulsars, quasars, the Big Bang, organic molecules) and fundamental differences between the visible and invisible universe (parallel universe) co-existing with each other.

Instructor(s): Bruce Greenhow Carruthers

Description:

"The Past & Future of the Future: How We Think About Individual and Collective Futures" Individually and collectively, we think about what might happen. We consider the future over a range of time-horizons, from the immediate (what will happen in the next hour) to the distant (how will things look in a century). We worry about our own individual futures (will I have a job when I graduate from Northwestern?), we worry about other peoples’ futures (will my child get a job after they graduate from college?), and we worry about our collective futures (what will climate change do to our society over the next 50 years?). Frequently, we make plans for the future, either to create a future that we seek, or to avoid a future that is problematic. Public policy is often concerned with how to create better collective futures, and the tricky part is figuring out which alternatives are better than others, and for whom. Sometimes people make contingency plans, deciding what to do if something happens (for example, disaster planning). Such activity generally involves making two types of guesses: what will or could happen in the future, and what will our future preferences be about those various possibilities. In certain cases, the predictions we make are “self-fulfilling” in that the prediction helps to make itself come true (bank runs are a classic example).

In this course, we will work through a series of examples where people have thought about the future, sometimes focused on its very specific features. Prompted by weekly required readings, we will discuss these examples seminar-style in order to hone our own thinking about the future.

Instructor(s): Rachel Zuckert

Description:

In this course we will discuss philosophical questions about the nature of the self, raised and answered in readings from the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophical writings. Questions to be discussed may include: Is self-awareness necessary or sufficient for selfhood? What guarantees the continuity of personal identity over time? To what degree is the self constituted by its social context? Are there good or bad ways to be a self? How can one cultivate one’s self, or is it better to try to avoid being a self at all?

As with any first-year seminar, the course will also involve frequent writing assignments, including both informal exercises and formal argumentative papers.

Instructor(s): Shana Bernstein

Description:

In this course, we will examine the history of the U.S. West as both frontier and region, real and imagined. We will consider topics such as Indian Removal, wars of conquest, law, immigration and migration, race, gender, nationality, class, and environment, often with a focus on the various mythologies of the region. Students will consider the relationship between historical mythologies and historical facts. Course objectives include learning to interpret varied forms of historical evidence and fostering analytical, reading, writing, discussion, and synthetic skills that will help students think and communicate critically about historical and contemporary society and politics.

By the end of the quarter, students will be able to read and analyze primary sources carefully and accurately, with attention to the author’s perspective, position, and credibility, and to the source’s context; read, evaluate, summarize, and engage with scholarly works by others; and be able to analyze authors’ arguments for evidence, context, strength, and credibility. Because a primary goal of this class is to sharpen students' writing skills, we will learn through varied writing assignments to make clearly written and structured arguments that are well supported by primary and secondary sources.

Instructor(s): Bradley Zykoski

Description: Of the various behaviors human beings engage in, doing mathematics is one of the strangest. With only a pencil and paper, we can predict when a falling object will land, compute the likelihood of a royal flush in poker, and discover facts like the Pythagorean Theorem that never become outdated. We talk about objects like "numbers" and "functions" that cannot be seen, heard, or felt, and yet are essential to our understanding of the natural world. The concept of infinity becomes, rather than an object of mystical wonderment, a tool for doing calculus. How is any of this possible? In this course, we will discuss the relationship between mathematics, knowledge, and nature. We will ask questions like "What is a number, really?" and "Can we know infinitely many things?" We will read a wide variety of texts, from Plato's "Meno" to Wigner's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences." These topics will be the whetstone on which we hone our skills of technical writing, persuasive writing, and even creative writing. It is not necessary to have any background in college-level mathematics in order to engage with these topics; this course has no math courses as prerequisites. If anything I have discussed here animates your curiosity, I would be delighted to see you in this course! 

Instructor(s): Brendan O'Kelly

Description: Recent controversies about "fake news" and disinformation would appear to suggest that contemporary mass media is newly unreliable. This course will explore how the distinction between truth and fiction in all media technologies has always been muddy. To do so, we will examine fiction that pretends to be true from 17th-19th century literature and philosophy to documentary-styled novels, films, and radio programs that span the 20th century. We will study the predominance of "found footage" films and digital media in the current millennium that parallel the rise of reality television, YouTube, and the smart phone. We will begin and end the quarter with considerations of "fake news," from founding father Benjamin Franklin's fabricated newspaper propaganda to contemporary digital media. We will also read selections from philosophy and critical theory that question the concept of truth and the construction of reality through media technologies.

Instructor(s): Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

Description: Using the current Russia-Ukraine war as a springboard, this course provides a historical and cultural backdrop of the conflict outlining Ukraine as a colonial addendum of Poland, Russian Empire, and the USSR. Students will focus on thirty-year long history of Ukraine after the 1991 collapse of the USSR against a broad historical, political, socio-economic, and cultural perspective. Students will discuss the formation of a modern post-colonial nation bringing together insights into art history, comparative literature, nationalities and imperial studies, social and political history, and genocide studies. We will use op-eds by the famous world poli sci pundits, journalism blogs of Ukrainians who write during air raids, video clips and movies filmed over last thirty years in the independent Ukraine, poems and novels reflecting the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Based on high level of interaction, this course will explain why Ukraine suddenly moved from a peripheral position in the new and minds of European scholars into the central place of the world politics.

Instructor(s): Ipek Yosmaoglu

Description: Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent coined the term genocide to describe the mass killings of Jews and other “undesirables” in axis-occupied Europe during the Second World War. Lemkin thought that this type of mass violence required a name to distinguish it from others and lobbied hard for the development of the Genocide Convention, which was approved by the United Nations in 1948. Lemkin’s principal motive was to establish an international legal framework to punish those responsible for this crime so that it wouldn’t be repeated. Despite its noble aims the Genocide Convention’s narrowly legal definition of the term and its identification with the Holocaust remain as important shortcomings which make the study and analysis of mass violence, historical or current, difficult. This course will introduce historical examples and theoretical underpinnings of the concept and encourage students to think critically about the terms and narratives we use to describe and analyze mass murders of civilians in different contexts. Please note that the subject matter requires the use of course materials that include graphic descriptions of violence.

Instructor(s): Abby Barefoot

Description: The United States is one of the few constitutional democracies that retains the death penalty. What ethical, legal, and sociological questions does the death penalty raise? How do various individuals experience and make sense of being on death row? What do people write while incarcerated and why? Students in this first-year seminar will engage with these questions through an exploration of the writings of incarcerated individuals on death row and socio-legal scholarship on incarceration more broadly. This course has a particular focus on the genre of prison writing, employing various types of writing, including autobiographies, poetry, letters, and podcasts. By examining these texts, students will explore the issues of capital punishment and mass incarceration more broadly. A primary goal of this class is to sharpen students' writing skills. We will balance reading assignments with various short writing assignments and three essays.