Choosing a First-Year Seminar
Spring 2023 First-Year Seminars
The following seminars will be offered in Spring Quarter 2023. Click on the ">" in front of a title to read the course description. Please confirm class days and times in Caesar as there may be some changes.
Title | Day | Time |
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Instructor(s): Lily Stewart Description: Humans for thousands of years have documented their visions of other worlds and afterlives. Whether informed by religious revelation, collective trauma, or individual creativity, these visions provide important vantage points for assessing cultural values and experiences. In this class we will explore religious models of “The Afterlife” while also analyzing afterlives constructed in fiction, film, art, and other forms of popular media. We will ask how envisioning other worlds can help us to alternately articulate and blur the boundaries between life and death, trauma and healing, past and present, and reality and fiction. We will also explore what it means to “live after” major ruptures in individual and collective experience. For instance, how do we envision life after pandemic? After climate change? Revolution? Immigration? Utopia? Through speculative fiction, how to we envision the afterlives of humanity as we assess the potential for a post-human world? Sources will include ghost stories from around the world, medieval visions of hell, purgatory, and heaven, videos of dead celebrities resurrected as holograms, episodes of Upload, The Good Place, and Star Trek, contemporary news releases, and short speculative fiction. Students will develop skills in analytical writing, creative thinking, and classroom collaboration. Teaching Method: Seminar, Readings, Group work, Class participation, Writing assignments, Films / videos, Presentations, Discussion Evaluation Method: Class participation, Papers, Final project, Readings, Writing assignments Class Materials (Required): Course Materials tbd | MW | 2pm-3:20pm |
Instructor(s): Alissa Chung Description: | MW | 9:30am-10:50am |
Instructor(s): Sera Young Description: | TTh | 9:30am-10:50am |
Instructor(s): Isaac Miller Description: New Media Black Aesthetics This course will examine the many ways Black artists, writers, and cultural workers have responded to the aesthetics and politics of the internet age. Over the quarter, we will address the question: how have Black art and aesthetics changed (and what continuities remain) over the past three decades of vast technological, economic, political, and cultural transformations? This class will examine how the internet/new media has shaped Black artistic production across a range of fields: literature, film, visual art, theater and performance, music, and comedy. Additionally, we will study how social media platforms can themselves be understood as artistic/aesthetic forms (i.e. the meme, the GIF, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, #BlackTwitter). Particular attention will be paid to the relationship between contemporary Black art/popular culture and social movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, Black feminism, abolitionism, internationalism, and #RhodesMustFall. | TTh | 3:30pm-4:50pm |
Instructor(s): Antawan Byrd Description: | TTh | 9:30am-10:50am |
Instructor(s): Nicole Spigner Description: Thanks to the 1980s and 90s, Black women writers have become well known in popular US culture. Specifically, Toni Morrison’s historical Nobel Prize in Literature (1993), the adaptations of novels by Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and Zora Neale Hurston into film, and the advent of Oprah Winfrey’s book club mark moments where Black women’s fiction moved out of the margins of popular reading culture. Moreover, while these works became best known at the end of the twentieth century, there is a much longer literary history attributed to Black women writing very layered, intriguing, and beautifully-written fiction, both short and long. In January 2020, Time said this of Zora Neale Hurston’s short fiction, most of which was written in the 1940s: “Hurston’s short fiction is ripe with imagery and narratives that blend the real and the idyllic, the whimsical and the serious, the natural and the cultural.” Known best for her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston also produced several short stories. This course will explore the long tradition of Black women’s fiction, beginning in the nineteenth century and ending in the present moment, primarily through the short story genre. In this class, we will survey a wide range of Anglophone Black Diaspora women authors and primarily concentrate on those from the US. We will interrogate themes, symbols, and forms in short fiction works that extend across the Black Femme/Feminine Literary tradition. We will ask how these authors similarly and differently explore Black feminine identity as it intersects at the juncture of unique social, economic, and sexual contexts. What are the unique issues of Black womanhood that they explore? Of what do they attend, outside of Black womanhood? Our authors will include at least Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Edwidge Danticat. Assignments will include, at least: regular online discussions, in-class discussion leading, and an individual final project. Students will be evaluated on their performance in these assignments as well as class attendance and participation. This seminar depends on discussion and participation of every member of the class. Come to class ready to enthusiastically address issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality. | MW | 11am-12:20pm |
Instructor(s): Sergey Ivanov Description: | MW | 11am-12:20pm |
Instructor(s): Amy Partridge Description: In this seminar, we explore several 1970s-era projects in Chicago and beyond that exemplify a coalitional feminist politics and consider the usefulness of this history in an increasingly polarized present. We will read histories of this period and memoirs by movement participants, but our focus will be on engaging in collective archival research and, ultimately curating collections of (8-10) documents that aid us in recuperating these instances of successful coalition building across anti-war, women’s and gay liberation, and black power/ethnic nationalist movements, as well as the intersectional politics that informed these collaborative projects. The seminar will meet in Special Collections and will introduce students to the practice of archival research as well as the remarkable range of archival materials housed in Special Collections, which might form the basis for research projects during your four years at Northwestern. Our final class project will be to collectively curate an exhibition of our findings that will be exhibited in the Main Library at the end of Spring Quarter. Over the course of the quarter, we may host a class visitor and, if covid protocols allow, go on a field trip to the Chicago Women’s Health Center (established in 1975 and still going strong!) to explore current coalitions and projects that build on this legacy. Cases: Anti-Vietnam war movement; Gay and lesbian/feminist liberation movements in Chicago and at Northwestern; Chicago’s first “Rainbow Coalition” (which included the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, and Young Patriots and Rising Up Angry); Chicago’s free clinic movement; and reproductive rights/justice projects in Chicago. | MW | 12:30pm-1:50pm |
Instructor(s): Paul Ramirez Description: | TTh | 3:30pm-4:50pm |
Instructor(s): Anna Zalokostas Description: | MW | 2pm-3:20pm |
Instructor(s): Elisabeth Elliott Description: In this course, we will have a main objective: effective written communication on our specific theme of language and politics. We will explore some of the sociolinguistic issues (that is connections between language and society) in various Slavic speaking countries and areas and Central Europe (the Russian Federation, the former Soviet Union, the former Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, etc.). In addition to some topics of important in these regions, we will also look at contemporary issues in Russia and the Ukraine as these relate to sociolinguistic issues and how such issues have increased since the War started in Feb. 2022, and the question of fascism particularly with respect to the annexation of the Crimea and the current War. Issues to be examined include: language and identity, language discrimination, language vs. dialect, and language and nationalism. In this seminar, students gain skills in: communicating effectively, both orally and in writing (focusing on our seminar’s topic); consciously working with the writing process and discovering what yours is, how you may want to improve it, all with the goal hopefully of improving your writing. beginning to understand basic sociolinguistics/linguistic anthropology; starting to understand how language is used to discriminate and erase identities; and starting to understand language’s role in DEIJ (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice). As the final paper for this course, students will themselves choose to write on any geopolitical area in the world and examine the sociolinguistic issues particular to that region or linguistic variety. Some previous papers, for example, have looked at: the role of Japanese in Korea; Koreans in Japan and language discrimination issues; the languages of South Africa; the status of African-American English (or African-American Vernacular English, or Black English) in the US and the controversy surrounding it in the 1990s in the Oakland, CA school district; US language change and the Internet and social media; Celtic in Ireland; the successful revival of a dead language, e.g., Hebrew, as the official language of Israel; the successful revival of a dying language, e.g., Native American/Amerindian languages, Hawai’ian, etc.; language rights in the EU; American Indian/Amerindian languages; bilingualism in the US or Canada; ASL (American Sign Language); Kurdish language discrimination in Turkey; and other topics. | TTh | 12:30pm-1:50pm |
Instructor(s): Jessica Ramirez Description: How does a minority group fight for recognition in New York City? This course addresses questions of visibility within the Puerto Rican enclave of New York. We will have the opportunity to discuss movie clips from West Side Story to oral performances of poetry. In Luis Rafael Sánchez’s poem “La guagua aérea,” the following exchange depicts the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico: “Which town in Puerto Rico do you come from? With striking ordinariness…she replied – De Nueva York.” We can compare these lines to the famous West Side Story song that exclaims, “Nobody knows in America/Puerto Rico’s in America!” Whether asserting that New York is located in Puerto Rico, or that Puerto Rico is in fact in “America,” one thing is certain: the boundary between the United States and Puerto Rico is extremely blurry, malleable and, one may even argue, subjective. Through poetry, memoirs, and short stories, Nuyorican/Puerto Rican literature represents an in-betweenness via references to, and often nostalgia for, the Island. This course will explore the violence and rehabilitation of Down These Mean Streets, the crying out of Nuyorican poetry and the impact of the memoir as a genre. We will consider how interracial dynamics and border theory influence Latinx literature, including Nuyorican slam poetry, and we will analyze how the past affects contemporary literature, which speaks out against stereotypes of poverty, welfare, and social status. TEACHING METHOD: Discussion METHOD OF EVALUATION: This course requires you to write and completely revise three papers by the end of the quarter. With regard to the first two formal papers, you are expected to complete a first draft, final draft, and peer review. In relation to the final paper, you are required to complete a first and final draft. The formal paper assignments include: | TTh | 12:30pm-1:50pm |
Instructor(s): Douglas O'Hara Description: Whether you come from a small town or rural area, or have always lived in Chicago or some other large city, you likely have heard cities both praised and scorned. Great restaurants and violent crime, economic opportunity and political corruption, music festivals and homelessness, cities seem to embody all of the prevailing social divisions and contradictions. In this course, we will think critically about cities by examining how they are represented in fiction and film. What is the city’s relationship to the surrounding area? What types of thoughts and behaviors does it seem to call for? What kinds of encounters are typical? In short, what happens when we treat cities more as “characters” than “settings,” when we think of Las Vegas as a party animal (What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas), or New York as a cultured gadabout (The city that never sleeps), or Detroit as pugnacious and defiant (Detroit vs. everybody)? We will begin with two cities that are sharply defined by internal divisions, those in the television series Derry Girls and the film Blade Runner 2049. From there, we will compare two representations of Las Vegas (The Hangover and Fear and Loathing), and ask what kind of freedom is on offer and what is the cost of such freedom? Finally, we will visit post-Katrina New Orleans (Treme) and the multicultural London of filmmaker Steve McQueen and author Zadie Smith (Small Axe and NW). Texts may include: Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Zadie Smith, NW Films/TV episodes: Derry Girls; Blade Runner 2049; The Hangover; Treme; Mangrove; Lovers Rock | MW | 2pm-3:20pm |
Instructor(s): Charles Yarnoff Description: | MWF | 1pm-1:50pm |
Instructor(s): Steven Epstein Description: | TTh | 9:30am-10:50am |
Instructor(s): Domenic DeSocio Description: This course offers a study of Berlin, Germany’s world-famous role as a major center of contemporary dance music (techno, house, disco) and nightclub culture. Beginning in the 1990s with the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Berlin, the city quickly became home to cutting-edge DJs, party planners, club owners, and dancers, including notorious clubs like Tresor and Berghain. Coming together, they pioneered new ways to express oneself and connect with one another through music and dance. This course examines many aspects of this culture, from the unique genres of music and how DJs create music to the technology of sound, the experience of clubs as spaces, and the politics of belonging, representation, and identity on the dancefloor, in particular its complicated exchanges with Black communities and music in Chicago and Detroit, the birthplaces of this music. We also will consider the social, cultural, and political implications of nightlife and dance music as a site of community-building, friendship, and love within contemporary Western society, especially for queer communities. As our course is a First-Year Seminar, we will discuss various aspects of college academic life. Moreover, our writing assignments will be the core of this course’s exploration of dance music and culture. Through our writing, we will learn how to interpret what others have said and made and how to make knowledge ourselves. Each week, we will practice and discuss a specific component of the writing process, from asking good questions to finding sources, synthesizing what others’ have said, and constructing arguments. We will hone our skills in crafting college-level writing through summative, comparative, analytic, and research writing assignments as well as practices of revision and editing. There will also be an experiential component to the course involving workshops with DJs in which you will engage in a hands-on approach to topics such as the work of DJing and making music and the politics and logistics of dance. | MWF | 10am-10:50am |
Instructor(s): Rebecca Seligman Description: In an age of unprecedented global distress, what is the role of media in shaping discourses, representations, and experiences of mental illness? Western psychiatric frameworks are increasingly defining mental health/illness around the world via multilateral health organizations that intervene across cultural contexts to treat mental distress, and are also circulated via Western media narratives that shape the meanings people associate with mental health and illness. What other narratives of mental health might be told? What experiences of distress and resilience are obscured by these dominant frameworks? In this course, students will learn about the ways in which cultural meanings and social structures shape mental distress and how it is expressed and experienced by people across time and context. We will critically examine dominant U.S. models of mental health and illness, and trace the global spread of these models. We will ask what underlying cultural assumptions and expectations about self, personhood, emotion, mind, body, well-being and success are embedded in these narratives and explore how representations in film and television serve to reflect, reinforce, or re-imagine such assumptions. Through a combination of engagement with scholarship on culture and mental health, media studies, and our own critical analyses of media objects from film and television, we will explore these questions and work to generate creative and collaborative ideas about how to rewrite media narratives in order to better reflect the broad spectrum of experience. | TTh | 12:30pm-1:50pm |
Instructor(s): Domietta Torlasco Description: | MW | 2:00pm–3:20pm |
Instructor(s): Enzo Enrique Vasquez Toral Description: | MW | 3:30pm-4:50pm |
Instructor(s): Corey Barnes Description: | TTh | 9:30am-10:50am |
Instructor(s): Mayda Velasco Description: | MW | 1pm-2:20 PM |
Instructor(s): Megan Geigner Description: | TTh | 11am-12:20pm |
Instructor(s): Kaitlin Browne Description: Professional writers and amateur internet users have explored identity through making use of monsters, beasts, and role-play. In this this course, we will explore gender and sexuality through the lens of monstrous creatures and spaces that allow for play and possibility—from the wilderness to virtual reality. We’ll ask what can octopuses, werewolves, and the Loch Ness Monster do that humans can’t? Why do we return to monsters and myths to inform, validate, explain, or investigate our identities? How does this “return to nature” intersect with technological innovations that challenge our concept of a fixed human identity? As transphobic and homophobic legislation is on the rise, what effect does the queer imaginary have on queer possibility? Texts and multimedia that we will study include Marie de France’s medieval werewolf tale “Bisclavret,” Black Mirror’s “Striking Vipers,” selections from Philosophy Tube, poems from Donika Kelly’s Bestiary and a variety of queer cryptid memes and etsy merchandise. TEACHING METHOD Discussion & Groupwork METHOD OF EVALUATION Participation & Attendance, Paper writing, Discussion Posts, Oral presentation. NUMBER OF WRITING ASSIGNMENTS AND THEIR LENGTHS 2-3 short papers. READING LIST TBD | MW | 12:30pm-1:50pm |
Instructor(s): Robert Ward Description: While the primary focus of this course will be to improve academic writing, we will do so by asking questions regarding our evolving relationship with technology and whether it alters the ways in which “race”, ethnicity, and culture are performed in society. The primary focus is on the ideology of “race” as a social construction, and how might technological advances in social media, virtual reality, Siri, and Alexa change the way we collectively think about the world and our relationships within it? Does the emphasis in late capitalism on technological design have the power level playing fields and guide us into a post-racial society? Should technological design be working in the “best interest” of humanity? Should a post-racial society even be a goal that we should be aspiring to? In this course, we will explore racial ideology as part and parcel of the broad American socio-cultural experience. We also aim to interweave experiences and research into a synthesis of the social construction of “race” as it evolves with modern technological advances. We will openly discuss and write about how technology affects the ways in which we think and interact with one another along these lines. | MW | 2pm-3:20pm |
Instructor(s): Thomas Gaubatz Description: How do video games tell stories, and what kind of stories do they tell? How do the formal elements of the game experience shape the stories that they tell and the meanings that they convey? What historical contexts make those stories meaningful, and what is the significance of historical shifts in game form? In this class, we answer these questions through a study of the Japanese Role-Playing Game—the JRPG. We approach the JRPG as a genre, under the premises that cultural genres represent the formal crystallization of a set of cultural meanings, that individual works express particular meanings through manipulation of the details of form, that the evolution of form reflects historical shifts in cultural meanings, and that interpretation of an individual work thus demands knowledge of genre conventions, careful attention to the nuances of form, and rich historical contextualization. To study this genre, we begin by building skills of formal description and analysis, with attention to how scholars in different disciplines have attempted to theorize various formal elements. We then situate this genre in its historical context—the social and cultural crises facing Japan at the end of the 20th century—and examine the evolution and permutation of the form as it has been adapted to different narrative concerns between the late 90s and the present day. Though our focus is on the JRPG, the skills and modes of thinking that we develop—formal description and analysis, historical contextualization and interpretation, theoretical framing, critical evaluation—form the basis of humanistic study at the college level. Evaluation Method: Attendance (10%), participation (10%), game journal (5%), online forum (10%), short essays (20%), group presentations (10%), final project proposal (5%), final project (30%) Course Materials Required: All reading materials provided in PDF form; games will be made available in the Kresge Media and Design Studio | TTh | 3:30pm-4:50pm |
Instructor(s): Stephanie Knezz Description: Biased interpretations of scientific results have been used to justify racial and gender oppression for centuries. It was often argued that people of different races and different genders were fundamentally different, and as such their roles in society should differ as well. Today, many people reject the claim that race and gender have substantial effect on a person's abilities or capacity, but how did we get here? More importantly, how did science help facilitate these claims in the first place? In this course, we will explore the role of science in historical oppression based on race and gender. We will identify key scientific studies and their subsequent legacy to reveal the precarious nature of scientific interpretation in the hands of biased individuals. We will discuss how power structures can infiltrate scientific integrity and propose safeguards to prevent this kind of infiltration in the future. | TTh | 11am-12:20pm |
Instructor(s): Laura MacKay Hansen Description: | MW | 11am-12:20pm |
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. | MW | 9:30am-10:50am |
Instructor(s): James Mahoney Description: | MW | 2pm-3:20pm |
Instructor(s): Vinzenz Unger Description: | TTh | 9:30am-10:50am |
Instructor(s): Abigail Barefoot Description: | MW | 3:30pm-4:50pm |