Professor explaining concepts to two students in a classroom
Liberal Arts

Curriculum & Courses

Learning Outcomes

  • LA_SLG1) Ways of Knowing Students: Students will demonstrate awareness and appreciation of multiple ways of knowing, as reflected in the fields of study and areas of expertise within the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.

    LA_SLG2) Cultural Breadth and Global Awareness: Students will demonstrate familiarity with a range of cultural, social, and intellectual traditions in the context of a changing, globalized world.

    LA_SLG3) Critical and Analytical Thinking: Students will be able to analyze, evaluate, and construct arguments, engaging with ideas, evidence, and artifacts.

    LA_SLG4) Effective Communication Skills: Students will be able to speak and write effectively, communicating with precision, clarity, and rhetorical force.

  • HUM_SLG 1) Students will study and question how crucial ideas about human and non-human nature, knowledge, experience, and value have been developed, supported, and/or expressed in major areas of the humanities, such as philosophy, religion, literature (including poetry and the dramatic arts), and music in various cultures and time periods.

    HUM_SLO1.1) Students will demonstrate understanding of the methods used in the humanities, such as argumentation and interpretation.

    HUM_SLO1.2) Students will demonstrate understanding of the crucial ideas in the humanities as they have been explored in different cultures and times, and/or in connection to issues that currently affect individuals and societies across the globe.

    HUM_SLO1.3) Students will evaluate claims and the evidence and/or reasons given in support of these claims, as found in primary and secondary sources.

    HUM_SLO1.4) Students will construct their own claims and defend them in written and/or oral forms, and using proper methods of documentation (e.g. citation and bibliography).

  • SCI_SLG1) Students will increase their knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of the natural world, science, and mathematics.

    SCI_SLO1.1) Students will demonstrate knowledge of the nature of science and/or mathematics as a knowledge making process. 

    SCI_SLO1.2) Students will develop and evaluate claims that involve a scientific or mathematical component.

    SCI_SLO1.3) Students will display curiosity about nature, natural science, and/or mathematics.

    SCI_SLO1.4) Students will confidently attempt reasoning tasks that involve a scientific or mathematical component.

    SCI_SLO1.5) Students will demonstrate appreciation for the role of science and/or mathematics both in everyday life and in contemporary issues.

  • FYS_SLG1) Students will learn to embrace the writing process and establish writerly habits, while developing guided critical reading, thinking, and writing skills necessary for their success in upper-level course work. Students will learn to collaborate and to take their work, and the work of their peers seriously, thereby establishing best practices of critique.

    FYS_SLO1.1) Students will formulate inquiries emerging from readings of texts.

    FYS_SLO1.2) Students will establish research methods.

    FYS_SLO1.3) Students will analyze and synthesize multiple texts and cite evidence. 

    FYS_SLO1.4) Students will construct a complex claim and an argument.

    FYS_SLO1.5) Students will practice the writerly process (i.e. revision, reflection, and peer review).

  • SOSCI_SLG 1) Students will question and explore how human behavior, societal arrangements, and cultural practices vary across time and space.

    SOSCI_SLO1.1) Students will demonstrate understanding of the investigative methods used in the social sciences. 

    SOSCI_SLO1.2) Students will evaluate and develop claims based on primary and secondary sources. 

    SOSCI_SLO1.3) Students will communicate clearly in written and oral forms.

    SOSCI_SLO1.4) Students will write citations and bibliographies in accordance with one or more social science disciplines.

Courses

Title Catalog Instructor Schedule

Description

Why are we fascinated with con artists¿both real and imagined? In this online writing intensive course, we will deepen the skills of argument-driven composition as we explore the sometimes tenuous boundary between authenticity and duplicity. We will examine the con artist as the both the protagonist and antagonist in fictional works, as well as the subject of ¿true crime¿ books and documentaries. These materials will inform multiple argument-driven essays which students will draft and revise over the course of the semester. Students should expect to write 15-20 pages of formal, revisable writing, in addition to homework exercises and in-class writing. By providing guided experience in college-level writing, this course forms the necessary foundation for FYS II and upper level Liberal Arts classes.

Class Number

1287

Credits

3

Department

Liberal Arts

Location

Online

Description

FYS II are theme-based writing courses designed for first-year students, with an emphasis on further developing the foundational writing skills students learned in FYS I. Students will continue to hone the intellectual skills of reading critically, and writing responsively, which forms the basis of each student's career at the School. While faculty have autonomy in determining course theme, the theme is an accessory to the writing; the balance in these classes is weighed toward explicit writing instruction and workshopping of student writing, not content. This course provides guided experience in writing college-level essays of various kinds, which may include critical, analytical and argumentative essays, and must include the research paper. It is a policy of the department that at least one essay be a research paper which may involve searching for sources in a library or online, learning to make citations, and preparing an annotated bibliography. A significant amount of time is devoted to the craft of writing, and more sophisticated methods of argumentation and use of evidence and developing independent claims and ideas are explored. Students should expect to write 20-25 pages of formal, revisable writing across the course of the semester. A significant amount of time may be devoted to re-writing essays, so as to develop first drafts into final versions. In-class writing, short homework exercises, and workshopping of student work may be included. Individual meetings to discuss each student's papers should be expected.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: ENGLISH 1001.

Class Number

1250

Credits

3

Department

Liberal Arts

Location

Lakeview - 1427

Description

This course draws on the analytic tools of gender and sexuality to examine the construction of power, society, and race in colonial contexts. Drawing on feminist and postcolonial theory, we will look at a broad range of case studies to explore themes in colonial history, such as ?discovery? and conquest, power and resistance, the construction of imperial and gender ideologies, the regulation of intimacy and the creation of race-based hierarchies, the disciplining, regulating, and improvement of colonial bodies, and the multiple intersections and conflicting definitions of gendered or racialized categories and identities. Readings include primary and secondary texts as well as art, images, and film. Evaluation will be based on discussion, writing assignments, and an independent presentation.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

Class Number

1221

Credits

3

Department

Liberal Arts

Area of Study

Gender and Sexuality

Location

Online

Description

This course will serve as a rigorous, systematic introduction to the concept of narrative. By analyzing a variety of narrative forms (especially short fiction, film, and comics) students will learn what virtually all narratives have in common. Students will gain an understanding of narrative as a particular mode for both creating and conveying meaning. Our primary texts will include short stories by Jumpha Lahiri and David Means, the film The Third Man, and Alison Bechdel's autobiographical comic Fun Home. In addition to our primary sources, students will read key works on narrative theory.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

Class Number

1230

Credits

3

Department

Liberal Arts

Location

Online

Description

There are fantastic books by Asian American writers but often they are not taught in school, or part of pop culture, or included in the literary canon. Who decides which writers and books are worthy of reading? In this discussion based course, we will critically read, think, and write about texts by contemporary Asian American authors. We will analyze multiple factors that have influenced the creation of the texts and that are explored within them, such as race, diaspora, memory, family, politics, community, and identifying oneself and one¿s artwork. The readings will be across genre: novels, poetry, non-fiction, and graphic novels. Readings often include works by Victoria Chang, Mira Jacob, Alexander Chee, Jenny Xie, Ocean Vuong, Ted Chiang, and Cathy Park Hong among others. We will freewrite, formulate conceptual questions for the readings, write responses, and compose 2 essays based on individual inquiry and analysis.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

Class Number

1231

Credits

3

Department

Liberal Arts

Location

Online

Description

In this course we explore how some of the best poets through the centuries have invented, mastered, stretched, challenged, rejected, and reinvented poetic forms. We investigate origins of the haiku, ghazal, sonnet, villanelle, pantoum, blues poem, sestina, ballad, prose poem, concrete poem, and a few other original forms, and we question how modern and contemporary examples both honor and deny the traditions these forms have aroused. Our intentions for this course are not merely to revere formal structures and marvel at how poets have succeeded in meeting verse requirements. More significantly, our aim is to tease open the workings of really good poems to see if we might understand how they mean and perhaps even why they affect us. 'Form is nothing more than a transubstantiation of content,' the poet Charles Wright tells us. If this is true, and if poetic form still holds some of the sweat of its makers, then in looking hard at form we have a chance of uncovering what has mattered-and perhaps still matters-most in human experience.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

Class Number

1233

Credits

3

Department

Liberal Arts

Location

Lakeview - 203

Description

Issac Newton is credited with creating mathematical models of the laws of classical physics as well as being an inventor of infinitesimal calculus, but is less well-know as an alchemist despite almost a tenth of his writing being dedicated to the subject. Far from being an isolated example, this is a surprisingly normal occurrence when considered against what we know of the history of mathematics. In this course we will examine the shared history and similar ontological and epistemological structure of mystical and mathematical practice Babylon in the early second millennium until now.
Some relevant topics that this class will investigate include: epistemology, ontology, access to knowledge, collective acceptance of new knowledge, what constitutes forbidden or obscene knowledge, the irrationality of the square root of 2, Cantor's project, occult mathematical practice in the second world war, basic algebraic geometry, the psychology of new religious movements and secret societies, recent history of mathematics and natural science, mathematical logic, what ¿is¿ truth, systems of inference, symbolic representation, combinatorics, chaos magic, aesthetics of mathematics, meditation and more.
Course work may vary, but will primarily consist of weekly reading and short quizzes in addition to less frequent writing assignments.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

Class Number

1239

Credits

3

Department

Liberal Arts

Area of Study

Art and Science

Location

Lakeview - 202

Description

How have Latinx authors addressed the representation of Latinidad in literature and other cultural forms? How does the study of these representations change or revitalize our understanding of literature more broadly? These classes offer students with the opportunity to undertake a detailed study of thematic material related to Latinx literature, including its connections to Latinx culture more broadly. Depending on the instructor, the period and works may vary.

Artists/Works/Screening/Reading/Content Area examples to be determined, based on the specific course being offered under this topic, but will include key texts and other cultural forms (i.e.films, television, and comics) by Latinx authors and artists.

This 3000-level Humanities course, including readings, reading responses, essays, mid-terms, and finals.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

Class Number

1234

Credits

3

Department

Liberal Arts

Area of Study

Class, Race, Ethnicity

Location

Online

Description

This is a course on music and cinema in the late-20th and early-21st centuries. The focus will be on original scores for full-length films made over the last forty years, with historical, contemporary, and animated subject matter. Students will learn about the history of film scoring and evaluate uses of music by featured composers in selected films. Topics include narrative underscoring, musical motives, diegetic and extradiegetic music, and sonic signifiers of time and place. Course objectives include building strong audio-visual listening skills and acquiring the vocabulary to speak and write about film music and its historical and cultural contexts effectively. Screenings and viewings will vary but typically include examples of feature-length films with original music by composers including Terence Blanchard, Wendy Carlos, Alexandre Desplat, Patrick Doyle, Danny Elfman, Michael Giacchino, Philip Glass, Hildur Gu?nadottir, Joe Hisaishi, James Horner, Quincy Jones, Dario Marianelli, Ennio Morricone, Rachel Portman, Howard Shore, Gabriel Yared, and Hans Zimmer. Readings will vary but typically include works by musicologists and film theorists such as Michel Chion, Rebecca Coyle, Dean Duncan, Julie Hubbert, Lawrence Kramer, Frank Lehman, Richard Leppert, and Laura Mulvey, as well as film critics and journalists. Students will write 15-20 double-spaced pages during the semester, including revisions based on instructor and peer feedback. Assignments may include discussion threads, a close listening essay, an original research paper, and an oral presentation.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

Class Number

1232

Credits

3

Department

Liberal Arts

Location

Online

Description

Most of us consider friendship an essential element of a happy and complete human existence. However, friendship is subject to contingencies that are mainly out of our control (e.g., loss of a friend through death). This endangers our chance for happiness. So by including friendship in our concept of a complete and happy life we seem to put our happiness in jeopardy. Why then insist on cultivating friendship and giving it an important role in happiness? In this course, we explore the role of friendship in Aristotelian, Kantian and utilitarian (Mill's) accounts of morality. While all three philosophers recognize the importance of friendship and its role in human happiness, friendship figures differently in their moral theories, a difference that can be partly explained by the differences in the larger questions each of these thinkers asks.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

Class Number

1235

Credits

3

Department

Liberal Arts

Location

Lakeview - 203

Description

A monolith manifests in orbit around Jupiter, emitting a signal. A beacon? A winter-bound planet¿s denizens are androgynous with powerful predictive powers. An aberration? Space travel is enabled by the ingestion of enormous quantities of a geriatric spice a messianic figure suddenly learns to manipulate. A drug trip?! Among popular genres, science fiction is the riskiest conceptually and among the trickiest to master. Because of its relative narrative freedom, science fiction has been a place for some of the wildest, most outlandish, yet frequently astute speculation on the experience of religion that can be found in all modern literature. In this course, you¿ll read some novels (by William Gibson, Frank Herbert, and Ursula K. LeGuin), short stories, (by Ted Chiang, Arthur C. Clarke, and Raccoona Sheldon), and view some films (2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, and Close Encounters), and study the work of some theorists of religion (Freud, Jung, Le¿vi-Strauss, and Eliade). Assignments vary, but they might include some or many of the following: weekly reading responses, quizzes, papers, and exams.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

Class Number

1236

Credits

3

Department

Liberal Arts

Location

Lakeview - 202

Description

Fungi are members of a kingdom of organisms that is distinct from plants and animals. They are exceptionally enigmatic, not just to everyday people, but to scientists as well. This course serves as a primer to the world of fungi, defining what fungi are and what they are not, and providing a conceptual understanding of these organisms. We explore the taxonomic diversity of fungi before considering their diversity from an ecological perspective. Students learn to identify different forms of fungi, grow them in the lab, and perform experiments to understand how they function. Finally, this course evaluates the importance of fungi from a practical human standpoint (food, medicine, art, spirituality), and discuss important questions to be addressed in the scientific field of mycology.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

Class Number

1227

Credits

3

Department

Liberal Arts

Location

Lakeview - 1503

Description

The Great Lakes watershed is home to ~34 million people across the United States and Canada, holding enough volume to submerge the United States under 10 feet of freshwater (Michigan Sea Grant). This course will explore the historical and contemporary Great Lakes utilizing principles in chemistry, oceanography and limnology (the study of lakes). We will identify the key ecosystem services that the Lakes provide to all communities around it and sustainability challenges that these communities face in stewarding such services. Reading material will span scientific journal publications, scholarly essays, regional news articles, book chapters and movies. Weekly topics will include carbon sequestration, algae blooms, pollutants transport, lake ice, and the spread of non-native species.
With tools in geology and chemistry, we will all become citizen scientists of the vast Great Lakes system. We will probe records of lake floor sediments to consider how these processes have changed through time in parallel with human development around the Lakes, conduct laboratory measurements to evaluate knowledge gained through classroom lectures, and create our own citizen science devices to collect and analyze environmental specimens first-hand. In addition, we will explore the role of women, gender minorities, and Indigenous people in knowledge and stewardship of the North American Great Lakes. Students will be evaluated by weekly lab assignments, a collaborative writing project (turned into a zine), and a final citizen science design project. Note that no prior experience in chemistry and math is required to take this course.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

Class Number

1229

Credits

3

Department

Liberal Arts

Area of Study

Art and Science

Location

Lakeview - 1503

Description

This course is an introductory seminar to the interdisciplinary study of science, medicine, and technology. We will ask questions such as: How is scientific knowledge made and how does it change? How does this knowledge come to shape our built environment, technologies, bodies, lived experiences, and social differences? Relatedly, what are the relationships between scientific knowledge and power? Finally, what do radical epistemological challenges to scientific knowledge formations (such as from feminist, constructivist, and decolonial perspectives) mean for science? Topics may include the politics of science in the public sphere, medicalization and biopolitics, climate science, and artificial intelligence. Foundational readings will include Knorr Cetina on epistemic cultures, Daston on the history of objectivity and scientific images, Benjamin on race and technology, Jasanoff on science and the state, Haraway on situated knowledge, Kuhn on scientific revolutions, and Latour on Actor-Network Theory.  We will also screen several documentaries. The course will involve at least one field trip, such as to a large research laboratory in Chicago (e.g. Argonne National Laboratory or FermiLab). Coursework will include writing exercises, group work in the form of a mock orals exam, one presentation, and a final paper that builds on both course readings and guided independent research.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

Class Number

1301

Credits

3

Department

Liberal Arts

Location

MacLean 707

Description

Since the early twentieth century, radio technology has shaped innovations in communication, news, and entertainment. This powerful medium has driven political influences, established cultural trends, generated communal listenership, and diminished spatial boundaries for the dissemination of information. Radio served as a precursor for later forms of mass media such as television, the Internet, and podcasts. This course will address the history, theory, and aesthetics of radio transmission in Europe and North America. Through lectures, discussion, listening, reading, and writing, students will explore radio?s influence on social habits, political dynamics, and artistic expression.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

Class Number

1220

Credits

3

Department

Liberal Arts

Location

Online

Description

Why do birds migrate? When do whales sing? What does a bee's dance mean? Animals have fascinating behaviors that have both puzzled and amazed observers. This class will explore current theories behind these actions. The lecture/discussion aspects of this course will focus on theories and concepts while the lab component will focus on collecting (Virtual zoo camera) observational data on local fauna and coming up with hypothesis to explain the observed behaviors. Student-collected original data will then be discussed and new or additional theories proposed. This course includes VIRTUAL Zoo camera data observations from any zoo around the world that has zoo cameras!

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

Class Number

1228

Credits

3

Department

Liberal Arts

Location

Online

Description

An investigation of group and social psychology, including the impact that groups have on individuals, the way individuals relate to groups to which they belong, and the nature of conscious and unconscious group processes.

A scholarly, critical examination of the scientific literature will serve as the foundation of our learning throughout the course, including how social psychological research is conducted. The course will typically include a selection of readings, lectures, discussion, videos, interactive group work, papers and/or exams to promote and assess student learning. Authors may include Wilfred Bion, Irvin Yalom, Steve Pinker, Daniel Kahneman and others.

In addition to completing papers or exams, students may, for example, lead or participate in group discussions or other activities and reflect on the process, or work on a data collection project.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

Class Number

1237

Credits

3

Department

Liberal Arts

Location

Online

Description

This course provides an introduction to social theories on tourism and travel activities. Drawing from anthropological and ethnographic research, students will explore the significance of tourism over the 20th century, developing alongside travel and information technologies well into present day tourism behavior and the global leisure industry. Media including travel photography, travelogue, home movies, or virtual reality - all provide sociomaterial examples of the significance of the tourist gaze and imaginary not only for personal recreation, but also influencing representation of the global south, in historically distorted and problematic ways. Course readings and films challenge students to consider these theories in the contexts of the varied sites and forms of tourism practiced around the world today. Learning content allows students to survey and examine mass tourism as well as tourism that makes an effort to get 'off the beaten track' in search of authenticity and adventure. Topics covered span from heritage, eco, and sex tourism, to ¿voluntourism,¿ dark and tragic tourism, including ¿staycations¿ and ¿holistays.¿ Students apply these insights during experiential learning activities of local tourist sites, commercialism, and cultural production of leisure settings in Chicagoland. Students engage in ethnographic exercises, submit a photo essay, and plan a dream excursion, implementing ethical considerations addressed in the course via travel design, and future tourism activities.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

Class Number

1238

Credits

3

Department

Liberal Arts

Location

Lakeview - 205

Description

Ritual treatment of the dead is both unique to humans and a human universal. This course is a global exploration of mortuary archaeology, extending from evidence through the first ritual burials (perhaps 300,000 years ago or more), through historic slave cemeteries. Using a biocultural approach, we will examine the information that archaeologists and bioarchaeologists glean from human remains, grave and cemetery architecture, and portable material culture, including ceramics, textiles, metalwork, and so on.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

Class Number

1286

Credits

3

Department

Liberal Arts

Location

Online