First-Year Seminars

Instructor(s): Ty Blakeney

Description:

Although heterosexuality is often thought of as a natural phenomenon, historians of sexuality have demonstrated that modern heterosexual identity is a recent invention which postdates the invention of its opposite, homosexuality. In this course, we will think about the ways that heterosexuality has been socially constructed since its invention, drawing on a range of films from France and North America. We will address questions like: how does the construction of heterosexuality interact with the oppression of women? How does the definition of heterosexuality depend on queer others? How does the history of heterosexuality relate to the history of whiteness and racism?

After reflecting on the history of heterosexuality, students will be asked at the course's conclusion to present and analyze an artifact of heterosexuality from their own experience. Students will learn the basics of film analysis and write analytical papers.

Instructor(s): Jacob Brown

Description:

Black writing matters, and in this course, students will gain a global perspective on the African diaspora through a focus on Afro-Brazilian literature. 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 thus profoundly shaped Brazilian intellectual thought as well as virtually every aspect of Brazilian culture. Students will take a critical look at Brazilian history, culture, and society through the lens of Afro-Brazilian fiction, poetry, testimony, feminist theory, graphic novels, documentary, music, and more.

By the end of the course, students will be able to name several of the most prominent Afro-Brazilian authors and make meaningful connections between their rich and multifaceted works. Students will also be able to write and talk about how Black authors in Brazil have challenged racism and intersecting structures of oppression 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): Charles Yarnoff

Description:

At college graduation ceremonies last spring, speakers touting the bright future of AI were roundly booed by students. The reality of this AI backlash is confirmed by recent surveys that show that students--even those who regularly use chatbots--are increasingly angry and anxious about what AI means for society and for themselves personally. They are concerned about how it will impact their abilities to think, to write, and to pursue their chosen career. In this seminar, we will explore whether it is possible to use AI in ways that promote those abilities.

We will also examine the issues raised by AI use in regard to ethics, privacy, and personal relationships as well as questions about the existential risks that AI poses. Each student will have the opportunity to pursue a research project on an AI-related question that interests them and to share the results of that research with their fellow students.

Instructor(s): Abigail Iturra

Description:

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that asks some of the most fundamental questions about reality and existence. What does it mean for something to exist? What is reality as a whole? How can something remain the same while changing over time? Is the world we experience real, or could it be an illusion? Why does anything exist at all rather than nothing?

Many of these questions lead to a central debate in metaphysics: the relationship between Being and Becoming and which counts as ‘true reality.’ Being has often been thought as what is real, lasting, or unchanging, while Becoming has been thought of as its opposite, referring to the world of change, growth, and passing away. Throughout the history of Western philosophy, thinkers have disagreed about how we should understand this relationship. Some have argued that what is truly real must be permanent and unchanging, such as an eternal idea, God, or an underlying essence. From this perspective, the changing world we experience may seem less real or less fundamental. Other philosophers have challenged this view, arguing that change is not something separate from reality but is part of what reality itself is.

In this course we will study this age-old debate by considering some of its central figures and their various arguments. Readings will include selections from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Due to the immensity of this historical debate, we can only survey some of the key turns that have profoundly shaped the tradition.Throughout the course, we will also ask a broader question: How might our understanding of reality shape the way we live? In other words, what difference would it make to our lives if we accepted one philosopher’s account of what is truly real over another’s?

Instructor(s): June Shou Li

Description:

So you just hopped off a plane at LAX with a dream and a cardigan…now what? What do you imagine you will find, and what will your journey look like? Los Angeles has a special place in the American psyche as a city where dreams are invented and come true. Yet, representations of Los Angeles in the media swerve wildly from Hollywood glamour and beachside luxury to wildfire and political crisis. This course will introduce students to the multi-dimensional City of Angels as it is portrayed in contemporary literature. We will study texts that creatively engage with the idea of Los Angeles as a place that is brimming with potential. Whether that potential is for power, stardom, or total destruction, however, is up to us to figure out.

First, we will explore the cultures and histories of Los Angeles’ ethnic neighborhoods by reading Salvador Plascencia’s experimental novel The People of Paper, which is set in the predominantly Latinx East Side. Then, Ryka Aoki’s genre-bending novel Light from Uncommon Stars will take us on a trip from the majority-Asian San Gabriel Valley into outer space, and Claire Vaye Watkins’ novel Gold Fame Citrus will invite us to a futuristic Los Angeles that has become a drought-ridden desert. Along the way, we will think about Los Angeles as a place that manages to appear apocalyptic and optimistic at the same time, by examining news coverage of the wildfires, listening to song lyrics about California Dreamin’, and examining excerpts from Joan Didion’s essays.

Instructor(s): Michele Zugnoni

Description:

Recent fantasy novels and films have captivated audiences with immersive worlds, high emotional stakes, and a new take on heroism. In this course, we will explore how contemporary blockbusters build believable universes, stage heroic quests, and grapple with questions of power, identity, and belonging. We will examine how these stories rethink the “chosen one” narrative, craft morally complex heroes, and use relationships and stakes to captivate readers and viewers.

Questions for discussion will include: What qualities make a hero? When does survival turn into resistance? When does it turn into betrayal? What forms does rebellion take, and who gets to lead? Through creative “labs” in worldbuilding, character development, and trope inversion, students will illuminate the craft of these stories and translate their insights into analytical and argumentative essays.

Instructor(s): Yen-Chyi Liu

Description:

Are you interested in the field of neuroscience? Have you ever wondered what it's like to work in a lab conducting scientific research? Are you thinking of joining a lab or declaring neuroscience as your major? This course will provide an opportunity for you dive into the life of a neuroscientist. As a small group, you will choose a lab you are interested in, investigate the research and personnel, design interview questions, shadow and interview the members of the lab, record and edit video, and write a profile of the lab.

You will gain first hand access to a lab and have the opportunity to learn the ins and outs of what it is like to perform research at the university level. You will be guided through the process of how to conduct background research, design a successful interview, and write an article for a target audience. Your ultimate goal will be to produce a multimedia profile of a neuroscience research lab for online publication.

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): 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 characteristics of environmental fiction for children, 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 Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (1997) and Pixar's Wall-E (2008).

Instructor(s): Edward Sargent

Description:

Electricity demand in the US and globally has entered into a new regime of growth, powered by rapid scaling of data centers in light of AI, combined with reshoring and electrification of manufacturing. Abundant compute has become a prerequisite for progress across science and industry, and abundant compute rests in turn on abundant energy and on abundant materials: the metals, chemicals, and manufactured components from which generation, storage, transmission, and the chips themselves are built.

This considerable demand growth will need to be fulfilled rapidly; with firm guarantees re: the dependability of the electricity; and affordably. More and more of this energy will have to be lower in its CO2 intensity than has been legacy energy production. The same applies on the materials side, where supply chains for critical minerals, and for bulk industrial materials such as steel, cement, and silicon, will need to grow quickly, securely, and at lower carbon intensity.

This will entail rapid progress in solar and wind with storage; geothermal; nuclear; and blue power. Looking more broadly across sectors, it will require innovative sustainable fuels and chemicals to power transportation, to feed the needs of industry, and to fulfill the growing energy requirements of individuals, including in high-growth emerging economies. It will also require new materials, and new routes to making and recycling familiar ones, since materials constraints bind as tightly as do energy constraints.

We will explore issues of a scientific and engineering nature; as well as of systems, economics, and policy; relating to achieving the needed growth in energy, materials, and compute across the course of the energy transition. We will study the global potential, as well as the realistic technical capacity, of the major current and future contributors to the energy mix, together with the materials and data-center buildout that these depend on; look at areas of science and technology that require advances to enable sustainable growth and maintain global competitiveness; and consider the links to national and international economics and politics.

Instructor(s): Nicolette Bruner

Description:

In both academic writing and the practice of law, evidence makes the argument. In turn, the standards by which evidence is assessed vary based on the type of claim being made and the venue. Sometimes, we must just show that our interpretation is more than likely true; when more is on the line, our evidence must be stronger, ready to overwhelm any reasonable doubt. Focusing on “reason,” in turn, reminds us that when we make an argument, what matters most is not how we feel or what we think should happen, but rather what conclusions logic can draw from the evidence at hand.

This class uses evidentiary standards in American civil and criminal law to structure exercises in academic argumentation. Students will practice identifying strong evidence in context; moving from evidence to argument; crafting a robust thesis statement; deploying points in a logical order; and expressing themselves in Academic Standard English. No knowledge of U.S. law is required.

Instructor(s): Melville Ulmer

Description:

We will discuss a book in class, with one discussion leader assigned to each meeting, which will be held twice a week. The book is written for non-experts interested in the topic of cosmology. The book approaches cosmology from a historical perspective and demonstrates how, time after time, previously accepted worldviews were proven incorrect. Today, on the one hand, cosmologists have developed a model that fits together beautifully. On the other hand, its agreement with observations depends on invoking Dark Energy and Dark Matter, neither of which has been verified in a laboratory. The book asks the question: “Based on history, are we sure we have the correct model now?”

The alternative theory proposed by the author is too complex for this course and is therefore replaced with a set of recent articles written for non-experts. These additional articles challenge the book's theme that astronomers today have completely accepted the so-called concordance model of cosmology, which includes Dark Energy and Dark Matter. In addition to being a useful resource for learning basic astronomy and cosmology, the book demonstrates, by example, how to analyze cosmological models and is therefore an excellent resource for developing critical-thinking skills.

The book is: Facts and Speculations in Cosmology by Jayant Narlikar.

Instructor(s): Martha Biondi

Description: This first year seminar introduces students to apartheid, the system of white supremacy in South Africa that relegated the nation’s Black majority to isolated homelands, deprived them of political and civil rights, forcibly extracted their labor and denied them free mobility. A worldwide anti-apartheid movement from the 1940s to the 1990s helped to isolate and bring down the regime. Americans played an important role, including a Black Chicagoan named Prexy Nesbitt whose leadership and organizing anchor some of the seminar.

Instructor(s): Alexandra Peters

Description:

Medieval men and women journeyed astonishing distances by foot, pack animals, and boat for trade, religion, diplomacy, and the love of exploration. In the tenth century, a Muslim traveler from Baghdad journeyed up the Volga and brought news of the Vikings back home. Centuries later, the Venetian Marco Polo wrote about, and also likely lied about, traveling Asia and his time at the court of Kublai Khan. Ethiopian merchants traveled to the courts of Italy searching for Christian relics to bring back to Africa, and Eurocentric maps and travelogues imagined distant spaces as peopled with so-called monstrous races, like the cynocephali (dog-headed people).

For many medieval peoples, marvelous beasts, terrifying sea monsters, and fantastic mines of gems dotted the edges of their maps, and similar ideas about what was familiar and what was exotic deeply informed premodern notions of race and empire. This class investigates a wealth of travel writings and artifacts like these by enigmatic authors from all Abrahamic faiths—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—in order to consider what happens when people from distinct cultures meet for the first time.

By following in the footsteps of such intrepid explorers, we witness how medieval people crafted narratives that strategically shaped understandings of the unknown, and the way their writings informed broader histories of race-making, religion, empire, and borders.

Instructor(s): Edward Muir

Description: In recent years historians have developed a new technique called microhistory for capturing the lives of the people who have been lost to history—peasants, religious heretics, poor women, gays, ethnic minorities, criminals, spies, and con-conformists of all sorts. These were people whose histories remained hidden to traditional research. Microhistory relies on policing and judicial methods but also on those of spies, especially as developed by former professors recruited to serve in intelligence for the US and Britain during World War II.

Instructor(s): KB Dennis-Meade

Description:

In this seminar students will explore constructions of race, religion, and belonging in the U.S. through popular films and television. This course will center representations of Black religions and spirituality as case studies. Along with written sources, students will “read” moving images as texts that consists of an argument, evidence, and analysis.

Through close reading and exploratory exercises students will develop analytical essays that follow the writing process — from brainstorming and outlining, to drafting and revision. Students will also learn how to conduct peer reviews and translate their work into multimedia project.

Instructor(s): German 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): 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:

Language is one of the main ways we are perceived, categorized, and even assessed for opportunities. Ideas about what language “should be” shape how we are understood in classrooms, workplaces, media, and everyday interactions. These ideas influence whose knowledge is valued, whose voices are heard, and whose ways of speaking and writing are labeled “professional,” “intelligent,” or “correct.” Yet few people and institutions ever stop to ask why this is or how we might do things differently.

This seminar takes those questions as its starting point! We’ll examine how language reflects and reproduces social hierarchies while also exploring strategies for resistance and change. We’ll focus on language as a social practice rather than a fixed object or set of rules. This focus will allow us to question dominant narratives about language, consider how institutions (including universities) uphold or challenge those narratives, and explore language diversity as a source of belonging, equity, access, and justice.

As a first-year writing seminar, our course will focus on developing core academic skills such as framing questions, analyzing evidence, engaging with and synthesizing sources, writing for different audiences, and revising in response to feedback. Our readings will come from scholarly sources as well as popular non-fiction. Throughout our writing projects and class discussions, you’ll get to pursue your own curiosities and concerns about language and power.

Instructor(s): Robert Orsi

Description:

References to the end of time—to the end of the times we live in and to the end of time itself—have become so ubiquitous nowadays and so casual as to be almost banal. Yet they point towards something real. Suddenly, we are living in the subjunctive. Allusions to the future are hedged with contingency and uncertainty.

The question for this course is not how ought people live in this time, but how are they living. How are humans in their relations with each other and with non-humans making their way through a such a deeply disturbing and dangerous period in human history, when the horizon of the future itself seems to be vanishing? How does living in this time shape decisions? What becomes of memory and hope? How are humans to live responsibly and lovingly in this context?

We ask these questions in relation to the climate crisis; the development of AI; the decline of democracies and rise of religious authoritarianism around the globe, and other challenges. At the very end of the course, we will think critically and deeply about the possibilities for hope.

As a course in the humanities, we will be concerned with the questions traditionally taken up by the disciplines organized under this heading. How do we read in this time? How do we create? What becomes of the human imagination when the horizon of the future is so clouded?

Instructor(s): Agam Balooni

Description:

How do music and poetry express emotions that ordinary language cannot? And why do ecstatic, embarrassing, obsessive, pleasurable, painful, and unrequited experiences of love inspire so much art? In this class we will study expressions of erotic desire in a variety of poetic and musical genres from across the globe, from Beyoncé to Billie Eilish to ghazal singer Begum Akhtar to the Kamasutra. We will listen to and analyze American pop, blues ballads, Indian music, epic and romantic poetry, and contemporary writing about intimacy, longing, pleasure, and shame.

The course will allow students to develop analytical writing skills, first by honing our skills of close reading and close listening, and then by arriving at refining claims and arguments through class discussions and short assignments. (No background in music required!) Students will complete a final, argument-based critical essay or creative piece developed in stages over the course of the quarter, beginning with a “Table of Contents” and short essay, a class presentation, and moving to a midterm essay before the final submission. By the end of the course, students will have a deeper understanding of how love and desire are shaped by culture, history, sound, and art—and why stories about love continue to matter so much to us.

Instructor(s): Bo Zhang

Description:

Geospatial technologies have revolutionized the ways we observe, analyze, and represent our world. This seminar introduces students to how maps and spatial data shape our understanding of places, environments, and societies, from everyday navigation to global decision-making. Students will explore topics such as map design, spatial and satellite data, and the social dimensions of mapping.

Through analytical, reflective, and research-based writing, students will learn to interpret visual information, evaluate spatial arguments, and communicate insights clearly. This seminar emphasizes both spatial literacy and the development of strong academic writing skills.

Instructor(s): Thomas O'Hare

Description:

What do we imagine when we think of mathematics and how does that compare with the experiences of those who practice it? Mathematics has been celebrated as a source of beauty, truth, and progress, while simultaneously being seen as inaccessible, intimidating, and useless. Where do these perceptions come from and how to they shape its place in society?

This seminar explores the interplay between mathematical culture and the wider world. We will consider what mathematical work involves, how mathematics influences society, how the surrounding culture shapes developments in mathematics, and how public perceptions of mathematics compare with the experiences of mathematicians. Class meetings will center on discussion of the readings, providing opportunities to examine authors' arguments and develop our own responses.

This course has no mathematics prerequisites. Rather than studying mathematics directly, we will focus on a skill essential both within and beyond mathematics: communicating ideas clearly through writing.

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): Samuel Aftel

Description:

Love is a central dilemma of the human experience––and literature and film. This course investigates love as a major theme and dilemma of some of the most influential novels and films in recent memory. We will pay particular attention to how race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and nationality impact people’s ability to find love and people’s very understanding of the concept. In that spirit, we will explore love across a diverse archive of texts, contemplating how love orients, and disorients, the norms of contemporary prose fiction and narrative filmmaking. This course will interrogate how love expands, bends, and complicates (predominately) American genre conventions and the social contexts that produce these conventions in the first place. We will think of love as both an agent of chaos and a source of profound existential significance in our literary and political imaginations.

We will examine racism’s effects on love and the broader complexities of interracial romance in James Baldwin’s "Come Out the Wilderness" (1965). We will analyze the power of queer love in Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story “Brokeback Mountain” and Ang Lee’s 2005 film adaptation. We will reflect on the line between friendship and love in the romcom classic When Harry Met Sally (1989), directed by Rob Reiner. And we will dissect the fraught nature of modern dating culture in Kristen Roupenian's viral "Cat Person" (2017).

Hopefully, by the end of our time together, we will all gain a more complete sense of love’s importance by developing the writing, reading, and analytical skills required to excavate love’s meaning.

Instructor(s): Teri Odom

Description:

Nanotechnology involves the creation and use of small structures at the nanometer scale. This length is around a thousand times less than the diameter of a human hair, with DNA widths 1-2 nm. For 25 years, Northwestern University has been a global leader in nanoscience research spanning the basics and applications of nanomaterials in medicine, electronic and photonic devices, and photovoltaics. Our university also houses state-of-the-art instruments and tools to carry out research at the nanoscale.

This seminar will cover all aspects of nanoscience and nanotechnology, with an emphasis on the groundbreaking work at Northwestern so that students can be exposed to current research. Students will have opportunities to explain an idea in nanoscience to a general audience and assess nanotechnology concerns raised in media reports.

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 Becerra

Description:

In the Republic, Plato uses the "Kallipolis”—the beautiful city—as a hypothetical arrangement to explore questions of justice, the soul, governance, the family, education, art, and more. This course will explore such questions as: What is a city? How should a city be governed? What does it mean to be a "city person"? How does living in a city shape our identities, habits, attitudes, and virtues/vices? How does the city influence our relationship to bodies—our own, and those of others? What is the relationship between the city and autonomy, creativity, democracy, and diversity? We will explore these questions by progressing through ways the city was conceived within the history of philosophy (eg, Plato) move into more modern conceptions (eg, Hannah Arendt) and eventually engage with philosophically-oriented analyses of current issues such as gentrification, tourism, sanctuary cities, and sustainability.

Students will have occasion to discuss these readings alongside their experiences living in different kinds of political and spatial arrangements. Throughout the course, we will focus on how to become effective writers by transitioning from oral discussions and shorter, informal reflections into more formal, sophisticated written work.

Instructor(s): Laurel Harbridge-Yong

Description:

How polarized is the American public? 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 spillover of polarization into our social lives. Through our substantive exploration of these topics, students will learn strategies for reading and engaging with academic literature, writing clearly and convincingly, and conveying information to multiple audiences.

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): Christine Helmer

Description:

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was one of the most important writers and thinkers of his time. His innovations include the organization of the modern research university, his theory of the self, and his understanding of religion. We focus our attention in this course to his work from 1799, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, as we discuss how this foundational text in the study of religion is also a literary treasure, a model for the relation of religion to the state, and how religion is central to both self and community.

Please purchase required text, translated by Richard Crouter with ISBN 978-0521479752, published by Cambridge University Press 1996 ($56) well in advance of the first day of class.

Instructor(s): Brian Odom

Description: The scientific enterprise, over the centuries, has often interacted with human spirituality and religion. This interaction has at times been synergistic and at times antagonistic. This course will focus on recent developments. We will look at relevant writings of influential scientists, including mystics, believers, agnostics, and atheists. At students' discretion, we might also touch at times on science related to spirituality and spiritual experience. In-class discussion will at all times be respectful, to allow productive dialogue on these deeply personal topics.

Instructor(s): Katherine Hoffman

Description:

Stories can communicate information or entertain, but they also connect, persuade, and mobilize people. This seminar explores storytelling as communicative practice, individual creation, and anthropological subject. We will look at diverse oral traditions in the US and abroad and personal narratives. Just as importantly, we will study how organizations, governments, and activists use stories to raise awareness, inspire action, shape public opinion, and mislead. Along the way, we'll ask how stories are shaped by power and resistance to it and what stories reveal about identity and community.

Students will experiment with crafting their own personal narratives, analyzing those of others, and discovering how narrative connects people across time and space.

Instructor(s): Maria Cornejo

Description:

Tropical beaches, all-inclusive resorts, coconut water. As Chicago gets cold, we might see escapist advertisements for tropical settings, turquoise oceans, palm trees, and maybe Bad Bunny playing in the background. But does “paradise” have a history? Where is it located, what does it look like, and why is it pleasurable? Is “paradise” real? In this first-year seminar, students explore how the idea of tropical paradise has been imagined, produced, and contested from the early colonial period to the present. Through European, US, and Caribbean literature, we will trace how paradise emerges not as a neutral fantasy, but as a concept deeply shaped by empire, labor, tourism, and inequality.

We begin 1492, by reading Christopher Columbus’s Diaries as he arrives in the Caribbean believing he has reached India, and move to the Indian Ocean in The Lusiads by Luis Vaz de Camoes (1572), where the goddess Aphrodite creates a tropical island as a reward for Portuguese explorers. From there, we will jump to the contemporary world, examining how colonial histories of the tropics are reworked—and challenged—under modern tourism.

Readings include Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988), an enraged critique of tourism and underdevelopment in Antigua; David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997), a sardonic account of a cruise through the Caribbean; and Bad Bunny’s latest album Debí Tirar Más Fotos (I Should Have Taken More Photos, 2025), which reflects on reggaeton, pleasure, and the neocolonial realities of Puerto Rico.

Students will develop their own writing as they question what paradise means, how it has been crafted, and reimagine how a true paradise would look like.

Instructor(s): Sophia Elzie

Description:

A mother who murders her children. A young woman condemned to death by her future father-in-law for burying her brother. Displaced by war, women gather to learn their fates. These are not newspaper headlines: they are the plots of Greek tragedies, dating back to Athens in the fifth century BCE. But what happens to these stories when they are retold by contemporary playwrights, authors, and filmmakers? How do they redefine tragedy in the 21st century?

In this course, you will develop your writing skills through a wide-ranging exploration of what we mean when we classify a work of literature as a "tragedy."

Instructor(s): Bruce Greenhow Carruthers

Description:

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): Jillana Enteen

Description:

Who gets to feel at home in the student center? Who is visible, who is overlooked, and who feels entitled to occupy its spaces? In this first-year seminar, students will use the Norris student center as a site for exploring the politics of public space through the interdisciplinary lens of gender and sexuality studies. Throughout the course, we will study the student center as a social, cultural, and political space. We will examine how its architecture, layout, signage, furniture, policies, programming, and everyday patterns of use shape who gathers there, how people interact, and who feels that they belong.

Paying particular attention to gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and other forms of social difference, we will pair readings and observations to ask how apparently neutral spaces can reproduce inequalities—and how students themselves can challenge or transform them. Students will conduct close observations of the student center and engage with scholarship in gender studies and related fields. We will consider questions of privacy and visibility, safety and surveillance, accessibility, labor and service work, protest and expression, socializing and exclusion. We will also investigate how different bodies move through and experience the space, and whose needs and perspectives are reflected in its design.

Instructor(s): Brendan O'Kelly

Description:

From viral podcasts to streaming documentaries, True Crime has become an increasingly popular genre of media in the 21st century. This course traces its evolution from 19th-century crime writing to modern investigative journalism, films, TV shows, podcasts, and online communities. We’ll explore how True Crime balances storytelling, ethics, and activism—sometimes sensationalizing crime, other times exposing flaws in the justice system.

Through critical academic and pop cultural readings, we will examine the genre’s legal, ethical, and social ramifications, questioning why True Crime captivates audiences and how it impacts our understanding of justice.

Instructor(s): Ginger Pennington

Description:

Can we trust what we see online? How do deepfakes, AI-generated text, and algorithmic echo chambers shape what we believe? This seminar examines psychological and social forces behind misinformation and focuses on sharpening students' skills in critical reading, research, and academic writing. We'll explore how human cognition makes us vulnerable to deception, why institutions have been losing credibility, and what individuals and societies can do about it.

Readings draw from psychology and related fields. Writing assignments progress from analyzing persuasive strategies to constructing evidence-based arguments, with opportunities for revision based on feedback. Students will learn to pose compelling questions, evaluate sources, build arguments, and write for different audiences. Topics include: cognitive biases, conspiracy theories, scientific expertise, fact-checking effectiveness, and AI's impact on truth.

Instructor(s): Raymond San Diego

Description:

In what ways do Asian/American students survive, negotiate, and resist external and internal pressures of success and excellence? What happens when “the dream” is achieved but happiness doesn’t follow? How do Asian/Americans begin to redefine success on their own terms?

Education, despite being touted as a great equalizer, is a highly contested site of struggle. It is a struggle to get in, a struggle to get through, and a struggle to figure out what happens after. Throughout each of these time periods academic and journalistic coverage of the Asian/American student experience argue that social, cultural, political, economic, and familial pressures converge and compound on this population leading to unfulfilling, unpleasant, and unbelievable outcomes.

Following that claim, this course explores three interlinked and overlapping themes for the quarter: 1) The persistence of the model minority myth and its impact on higher education policy, 2) parent and teacher expectations of Asian/American students in K-12 and university settings, and 3) Asian/American student mental health and well-being. In this course, students will have opportunities to formulate critical questions; evaluate, synthesize, and properly cite academic scholarship; develop and defend their own positions and arguments; and practice providing and receiving feedback.

Instructor(s): Cesar Hoyos Alvarez

Description:

This writing seminar examines the intersections between language, identity, race, and power through the lived experiences of Spanish-speaking communities in the United States. Drawing on sociolinguistic and critical perspectives, we will explore how historical, social, and political forces have shaped perceptions of Spanish and its speakers, and how language ideologies are (re)produced and challenged through everyday discourse and institutional practices. Topics include the sociohistorical context of Spanish in the U.S., bilingualism, linguistic discrimination, racialization, language and identity, and inequalities in education.

Throughout the quarter, students will engage critically with academic readings and multimodal materials, including videos, podcasts, and examples of public discourse. Class discussions and collaborative activities will encourage students to examine different scholarly perspectives, question taken-for-granted assumptions about language, and connect theoretical concepts to everyday experiences.

As a writing seminar, the course emphasizes critical literacy, evidence-based argumentation, and academic writing development. Students will complete two analytical essays: a linguistic autoethnography examining their own language histories and identities, and an argumentative essay investigating language ideologies within their academic fields. They will also collaborate on a linguistic landscape project to examine how languages are represented and valued in public spaces. Writing workshops, peer feedback, and revision will be integrated throughout the quarter to help students develop their analytical skills and academic voice.

Instructor(s): Ji-Yeon Yuh

Description: This course examines the consequences of war for women and children by examining three phenomena: 1) the militarized sexual exploitation of the Pacific War and the Korean War, 2) refugee migration caused by war and its links to gender violence; 3) the disproportionate civilian death toll from war. We will focus on the Pacific War and the wars in Korea and Vietnam, with some discussion of the various wars of the 21st century. Readings will include a wide array of materials: lawsuit briefs filed by “comfort women” survivors, survivor testimonies, media accounts, and scholarly writings.