New or Changed Courses - Spring

THE FOLLOWING ARE DESCRIPTIONS FOR SPRING 2012 COURSES THAT ARE NEW OR CHANGED SINCE THE LATEST VERSION OF THE PRINTED CATALOG, OR THAT ARE ONE OF THE FOLLOWING:

• New Courses
• Course Change
• Topic Courses
• One Time Only Courses
• One Time Only Courses with MOI Designation
• One Time Only Courses with Writing-Centered Designation
• One Time Only Topics Courses

New Courses

ARTH 112 (IT) Introduction to South Asian Art History (1)

This course is intended to introduce major protagonists, monuments and themes of South Asian art, architecture and visual culture, focusing on India. The chronological scope is vast, from prehistory to the present, and it is therefore a selective survey focusing on particular artistic traditions in depth, chosen from the major periods of South Asian history. Examples include prehistoric art, The Harappan Civilization, Early Buddhist sculpture and architecture at the Great Stupas, Hindu temple architecture, Chola bronze sculpture, Islamic architecture, painting of the Mughal court and Rajput kingdoms, and Modern and Contemporary art in South Asia. The creation, reception and diffusion of selected art forms over time will be examined and interpreted using various analytical perspectives (such as formal, functional, iconographic, and expressive) in order to better appreciate their significance in a South Asian culture context, and in relation to the history of Western interaction with South Asian art.

ARTH 247 (TH) 18th & 19th Century Art (1)

A survey of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and architecture in Europe and the United States, with consideration of influence from other cultures and nationalities such as Japan and Northern Africa in appropriate period contexts. Discussions commence with transformations in art and visual culture in France and the United States during the revolutionary era, and shift to detail the rise of Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism and other relevant movements. Further topics include the impact of imperialism, colonialism and slavery, the establishment of a bourgeois art market, new media developments such as photography and phantasmagoric spectacles, and the increasingly prominent role of professional female artists.

ARTH 376 (W) History of Photography (1)

A seminar-style course that investigates significant moments from the invention and development of the medium of photography in Europe and the United States, from its inception in the first half of the nineteenth century to its digital manifestations in the late-twentieth century. Historical debates surrounding photography as both an art and a commercial enterprise ground discussions in issues of popular culture as well as aesthetics. Technical approaches to the medium are analyzed in conjunction with theoretical texts and documents of period reception. Emphasis on writing (including a final research paper) as well as discussion and presentation skills.

ERTH 125 Natural Disasters (1)

Natural disasters occur every day and affect the lives of millions of people each year.  Disasters occur where and when Earth’s natural processes concentrate energy and then release it.  The course will integrate principles of geology, hydrology, meteorology, climatology, oceanography, soil science, ecology, and solar system astronomy.  It will discuss each hazardous process as both a natural occurrence and a human hazard.  The most obvious and well-known natural hazards such as volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides, hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods will be covered, as well as additional hazards, such as tsunami, ice storms, wildfires and impacts with space objects.  Methods include lectures, student presentations and discussions of recent news events, and films.

ERTH 361 Global Climate Change (1)

This course will use an interdisciplinary approach to examine the issue of global climate change.  The class will have three main units.  The first will focus on the science of climate change including prehistoric and historic temperature records, prehistoric and historic greenhouse gas concentrations, and observed changes in natural systems due to recent warming.  The second will look at the implications of climate change for society resulting from disruption of natural systems.  Finally, the third unit will look to the future and discuss possible problems, solutions, and opportunities presented by climate change.  The course will place a particular emphasis on integrating the most current information from fields that span the natural and social sciences when investigating the causes and implications of global climate change.

ENVR 347 Quaternary Paleoenvironments (1)

 This course will examine the environmental conditions during the Quaternary, the geologic period spanning the last 2 million years of Earth history.  Special emphasis will be placed on natural archives of paleoenvironmental information including records from marine and lake sediment cores, ice cores, and tree rings, which are essential to placing modern environmental changes in context.  Records of human-environmental interactions will also be discussed.  The laboratory component will provide opportunities to collect and interpret paleoenvironmental data.

HIST 341 Latin American Environmental History (1)

This course will use the tools, methodologies, and theoretical approaches of environmental history to explore the history of Latin America from the pre-Columbian era to the present.  Our regions of study will include the pastoral and agricultural lands of Mexico, the Atlantic forest of Brazil, and the banana plantations of Honduras, but our subjects of study—disease, deforestation, conservation, consumption, and labor, to name a few—are relevant to many other places throughout Latin America.   The course has one basic premise: that environmental history allows us to tell different stories about the past.  These stories are rooted in the very soil on which humans act, soil—and trees and insects and water and animals—that also act on humans.  By studying this interaction between human culture and the nonhuman natural world, we gain new insights into the past.  In this course, we will see how environmental historians have approached Latin American history, and apply those lessons to our own stories about the Latin American past.

Prerequisite: 1 history course or instructor consent.

THR 011X (CA): Atypical Performance? 1 credit

This class focuses workshopping new plays for theater while giving the students insights into working professionally in this field. The first half of the class will include a trip to PDX’s fertile ground festival and meetings with theater professionals and the second part of the class will be to workshop student written plays. The plays will be presented as staged readings on 4/30 and 5/1 as part of a new writing festival together with the English Department.

Playwrights will be expected to be students in the class. The directors, actors, dramaturgs etc. will also be class participants. We will work as a company developing new plays. There will be a guest director, Gemma Whelan, who will be in residence in our class for the second half of the semester. She will be specifically mentoring the directors and actors on putting the new play workshops together.

The cost of hotel, transportation, and theater tickets will all be covered by a grant from the Eli Lilly Foundation. Students will be expected to cover food costs in Portland, but the hotel has a kitchenette.

HOW DO I GET INTO THE CLASS?

You e-mail me, astolowi@willamette.edu, and send me a one paragraph explanation of which roles (playwright, actor, director, stage manager, design consultant) you would want to take in the class and why you want to participate in this class. I will select students in an effort to make sure we have enough playwrights, actors, etc. If you wish to do more than one role please indicate it. If you are a playwright and already have the text of your play, please attach it. If you are currently writing it or will write it by the end of the semester indicate that as well.

"Course Change"

RUSS 320:  The 19th Century Russian Novel  1 Credit

This course considers the development of some of the greatest longer works of nineteenth-century Russian literature, including novels, by Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy.  It examines, the development of these works in terms of literary contexts, social changes and ideas giving special attention to such topics as love, justice, fate, free will, and Russian national identity.  Alternate years in fall. Conliffe.

RUSS 345: Twentieth-Century Russian Literature: Delightful Demons and Terrific Tyrants  1 Credit

This course will examine centralRussian texts of the twentieth century, a period which encompasses pre-revolutionary decadence, the heady experimentation of the 1920s, Stalin's repressions, and the freedoms of the thaw period (1950s and 60s) and perestroika (1980s and 90s).  Texts will be approached both as independent artworks and as representative artifacts of twentieth-century Russian culture.  The course does not require a background in Russian history or culture; only a curiosity and desire to explore new literary worlds.  This course is conducted in English. 

Topic Courses

ARTH 345W Advanced Topics in Art History:  Dada and Surrealism

This seminar-style course undertakes a detailed survey of two of the key movements of the European avant-garde, Dada and Surrealism, in an international and multimedia context between 1915 and 1935. Surveying chronologically from the first stirrings of the Dada revolution in Zurich during World War I, discussions pursue this movement through its permutations in Germany, France and the United States. Following on the heels ofDada and the Great War, the first decade of Surrealism receives close attention from a variety of perspectives including theory, literature, politics, popular culture and psychology through a reading of both primary and secondary texts. Larger questions concerning the discourse of the avant-garde are also addressed. Emphasis on writing (including a final research paper) as well as discussion and presentation skills.

English 116W-01:  Peculiar Intimacies (1)

 Contemporary American society often insists on viewing its national past in black or white despite the fact that significant interpersonal relationships existed across racial, class, and gender divides from the earliest period of American history onward. Using texts from the mid 19^th through the current century, we will investigate how American writers have creatively represented intimate, often non-reproductive relationships between enslaved and free people (property owners and human “property”) amidst the so-called peculiar institution of American chattel slavery. The range of our texts—slave narratives to contemporary historical fiction and visual art—will allow us to track changes over time between these portrayals and to interpret the myriad ways in which growing knowledge of history, gender, sexuality, class, and racial identities has helped shape various depictions of the nation’s past. We will also consider how these recent depictions help to recover otherwise hidden or undocumented histories

English 116W-02:  American Transcendentalism (1)

American Transcendentalism, a social and literary movement centered in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts, flourished between 1830 and 1860.  In this course we will study its founding and most famous figures, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; their feminist colleague, Margaret Fuller; the embodiment of Emerson's conception of the poet, Walt Whitman; and an exemplar of Emersonian self-reliance and resistance to oppression, Frederick Douglass. We will also read reactions to and critiques of Transcendentalism by more skeptical contemporaries, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Louisa May Alcott.

English 116W- 03    Inventing America  (1)

What makes the United States of America unique in the community of nations? What constitutes an American? Does our nation have a specific purpose or destiny? These questions have been asked and answered by every generation, and one could certainly argue that America is still a nation in the process of inventing itself. In this course, we will read some of the key literary texts which have shaped American identity, and we will examine the assumptions, ideals, hopes, and fears that have thus far guided our national experiment.

English 117W-01:  Figuring Faith in British Lit (1)

We will investigate the concept of “faith” as it was realized by major British authors and discuss how faith is represented materially in their writings. Our exploration will focus, though not exclusively, on the following texts and authors: the King James Bible, medieval mysticism, Renaissance poets John Donne and John Milton, Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and modern novelist Graham Greene. As we read these authors we will ask ourselves: what constitutes “faith”?  How is faith concerned with both practice and belief? How is it both sacred and secular? Put differently, how does faith exist outside a religious context, and how does that possibility complicate a conventional sense of faith as something sacred?

English 117W-02: Strange Shakespeare (1)

In this class we will read Shakespeare’s sonnets and three of his plays (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, and Macbeth), with a particular focus on their strangeness. It is easy to see Shakespeare’s works as a stodgy and traditional relic of another time, but the closer we look at them, and the better we understand them, the more we notice how strange they remain, and how interesting. They evoke ideas about who we are, what we know, and what we do, which will always be “strange,” no matter how many times we read them.

English 117W-03: Modernity and Modernism  (1)

Virginia Woolf once asserted that "human character" itself had changed ''on or about December 1910." Walter Benjamin, thinking of the First World War, similarly observed that "a generation that had gone to school on horse-drawn streetcars now stood under the open sky in a landscape where nothing remained unchanged but the clouds and, beneath those clouds, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body."  The modern age brought with it mechanized war, mass production,  crowded cities, dazzling new commodities, and a whole set of new experiences both thrilling and shocking.  The generations of artists and authors who experienced the intoxicating excitements and intolerable miseries of the modern age broke with many old traditions and invented new ways of thinking, feeling, and seeing which were adapted to the realities of modern life. In this course, we will survey some of the most exciting and sophisticated literary works of the period.

English 118W-01: Scenarios of Encounter (1) and English 118W-02: Scenarios of Encounter (1)

In 1611 William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the story of Prospero’s shipwreck on Caliban’s island, was first performed.  In 1719 Daniel Defoe published the story of Robinson Crusoe’s shipwreck and his encounter with Friday.  These early modern imaginings have offered an influential script for Europe’s imperial project, and the repeatedly enacted scenario of encounter between civilized Europe and the savage native has played an important role in Europe’s understanding of itself and its colonies.  This course will begin with Defoe’s novel and Shakespeare’s play, reading them along with several postcolonial revisions of the shipwreck scenario.  We will then continue to look at a variety of ways that postcolonial texts have rewritten the colonial encounter, as they consider the continuing power of inherited cultural scripts and imagine the possibility for new forms of encounter in cultural contexts that have been so thoroughly scripted.  Texts will include William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest, Daniel Defoe’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,  J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, Derek Walcott’s Pantomime, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, and M. Nourbese Philip’s Looking for Livingstone.

HIST 131 History of the US West (1)

A seminar on the history of the western United States from the 19th century to the present. Topics include the definition of "The West," the intersection and confrontations of various cultures, natural resource management, radicalism, the role of the federal government in the West, and more.

Prerequisite: Limited to first- and second-year students.

"One Time Only" Courses

ENVR 349 Environmental Histroy of Zena Forrest (1)

This class reconstructs the past of the place now known as the Willamette University Forest at Zena.  To do so, the course focuses on the relationship between humans and the nonhuman natural world: how people have changed the Zena environment, and how that environment has changed them.  Students will investigate a wide range of topics, such as: how the Zena landscape has changed and by what nonhuman natural and human forces; different kinds of land use practices by different human populations (Kalapuya, Euro-American, etc.); and the meaning of this place to different people at different times.  Students will use a variety of methods and tools, including archival research and collection and analysis of scientific data, to narrate and interpret Zena’s environmental history.

Prerequisite: ENVR 105, ENVR 326, a course in history, or instructor consent.

Design thinking is a proven process for practically and creatively solving problems. It is an interdisciplinary field of study, communication and action that seeks to connect the diverse arts and sciences with each other and the purpose of enriching human life. The process of design thinking relies on being able to see the world around you differently from the way most people see it. This "seeing differently" is the way innovators spot where improvement can be made and the way they imagine and refine solutions (often in the form of products and services) that enable change. The course starts with students learning about their thinking styles and becoming members of teams that maximize thinking-style diversity. The teams then share their interests with each other and collectively choose an aspect of human life in which to find and solve a problem. Students are then coached in the design thinking process - a process that combines empathy (i.e., being in another's shoes), radical collaboration (a partnership between diverse thinkers, and co-production among traditional creators and users), creativity,  rationality, analytical thinking and integrative thinking (creatively combining ideas from many sources) to meet human needs and drive collective success.

"One Time Only" Topics Courses with MOI Designation

IDS 360 3D Virtual Sculpture (1) (CA)

This course combines traditional sculpture with 3D computer modeling. Students will explore fundamental principles of 3D design; principles and concepts of 3D computer graphics; linear, planar and volumetric forms and how they can evolve through repetition, deformation, and transformation.  Students will design and implement their own compositions through a series of hands-on labs that shift between the real and virtual worlds. Orr and Fourie

PHIL 245 Environmental Ethics (1) (AR)

A critical examination of the ethical status of non-human animals and natural systems within classical and contemporary thought.  Do humans have a special status as nature’s masters, exploiters, or protectors?  Does nature have an intrinsic value apart from human appreciation?  Do animals, plants, or ecosystems have rights? Should the preservation of wilderness ever take precedence over human development?  Particular attention will be given to the radical shift in environmental valuation seen in both popular and academic ethics over the past fifty years.  Offered one time only, Spring Semester.  Hibbard-Swanson

One Time Only Courses with Writing-Centered Designation

"One Time Only" Topics Courses