Global Arc

This seminar will explore methods in the sociology of literature and computational literary criticism--two methodologies that approach literary works as part of larger systems of relations between people, texts, technologies, and institutions. We'll look at the data of literary study--from colonial lending library records to course syllabi--and what such they can tell us about how cultural works are produced, consumed, consecrated, and distributed. We'll learn advanced techniques in computer-assisted reading and situate them within a longer genealogy that includes book history, critical archival studies, and Marxist literary theory.

Bioethics was named in 1970. Its etymology, however, is from the ancient Greek. We will put ancient and modern conceptions of human flourishing in conversation by exploring how naturalizing medicine has historically shaped the nature of birth, death, and mind. What is at stake in invoking the Greeks when constructing the ethics of modern medicine? How can reading ancient Greek texts in context help us think critically and imaginatively about ethical challenges in medicine today? We will examine how the formation of a medical tradition around the physical body creates persistent practical and philosophical questions in the clinic and beyond.

The momentous encounter of Europeans and Indigenous peoples had shattering consequences for the worldview and identity of both groups. The encounters raised a host of existential questions that seemed to demonstrate the inadequacy of each culture's traditional religious models of the world. This course explores the effects of contact from early 17th-centruy encounters in Canada and North America into the residential schools of the 19th and 20th centuries. The course explores the effects of contact: contrasting prescriptive Christian ideals of conversion with the descriptive reality of mutual change and influence.