Current Courses
Current Courses
Open Courses
Online
Summer 2021
Steve Smith
Tuesdays
10 AM - 12 PM (AZ Time)
Jun 1 to Jun 29
Plants represent an important and extraordinarily diverse group of organisms. Photosynthesis in plants and algae contributes the energy supporting life in nearly all of the Earth’s ecosystems. Oxygen, produced by photosynthesis, has also radically changed the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and all life dependent on it. We are most familiar with flowering plants, which now dominate most environments on land, but these species are relatively recent innovations in plant evolution. In this course, we will go back millions of years in time, and discuss early life on Earth, the emergence of...
Summer 2021
Patrick Baliani
Wednesdays
1 PM - 4 PM (AZ Time)
Jun 2 to Jun 30
Please Note: This course is one of two parts, however, neither part requires the other as a prerequisite. Students may enroll in both courses or select just one without missing materials needed to enjoy the course's content.
This course explores world renowned drama of the early and mid-twentieth century by recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature: George Bernard Shaw (1925), Luigi Pirandello (1934), Eugene O’Neill (1936), T.S. Eliot (1948), and Samuel Beckett (1969). Students will read one play a week prior to each class: Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Six Characters in Search of an Author,...
Summer 2021
Laura C. Berry
Thursdays
1 PM - 3 PM (AZ Time)
Jun 3 to Jul 1
When Charles Dickens published Bleak House in the early 1850’s, London was the world’s wealthiest and most powerful city. It was also among the most crowded, polluted, and poverty-stricken places on the planet, where rich and poor lived separate but intertwined lives very much next to one another. Bleak House, with its themes of disease, inheritance, and legal entanglement, offers ample evidence for the necessary – and often painful -- interdependence of urban life. Colum McCann’s 2009 novel, Let the Great World Spin, makes the same case for twentieth century New York City, with the World...
Summer 2021
Patrick Baliani
Wednesdays
1 PM - 4 PM
Jul 7 to Aug 4
Please Note: This course is one of two parts, however, neither part requires the other as a prerequisite. Students may enroll in both courses or select just one without missing materials needed to enjoy the course's content.
This course explores world renowned drama of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Wole Soyinka (1987), Dario Fo (1997), Gao Xingjian (2000), Elfriede Jelinek (2004), and Harold Pinter (2005). Students will read one play a week prior to each class: Death and the King’s Horsemen, Accidental Death of an Anarchist...
Summer 2021
Olivia Miller
Thursdays
10 AM - 12 PM
Jul 8 to Aug 5
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was both a beloved and rejected painter of the Baroque era. His paintings, which often included realistic figures, theatrical lighting, and dark, obscure settings activated a deep sense of spiritual contemplation for many. Yet he was also critiqued for depicting shocking subjects and eschewing traditional painting standards. Much has been made of his dramatic biography, which includes a lengthy arrest record, a murder, and a death in exile. Throughout this course we will examine Caravaggio’s development and working methods in the context of his...
Summer 2021
Ken McAllister
Thursdays
1 PM - 3 PM
Jul 8 to Aug 5
"Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life,” quipped George Bernard Shaw. To be sure there is truth in this observation, but it’s hardly the whole story. For millennia, human beings have been fermenting and distilling spirits and putting them to the widest possible range of uses, from topical antiseptics and poison ivy curatives to insect repellents and toothache remedies. Most enduring, however, are booze’s cultural achievements, which often come to be associated with producers and imbibers alike. This Humanities Seminars Program course will introduce students to a...
Summer 2021
Charles Scruggs
Wednesdays
10 AM - 12 PM
Aug 4 to Sep 1
Hemingway is one of the great American writers of the Twentieth Century, famous for his innovative prose style as well as his insights into the human condition. A problem arises in any study of Hemingway because the popular myths surrounding him too often obscure the importance of his writing. Hemingway the big game hunter, Hemingway the hard drinking macho man, Hemingway the avid fan of the violent “sport” of bullfighting–these are things that keep people from reading him. And yet there is perhaps no other American writer who has had a greater influence on his contemporaries. And for good...
Closed Courses
Summer 2021
In Session
Courtney Friesen
Wednesdays
1 PM - 3 PM (AZ Time)
May 5 to May 26
The Christian religion is inextricably bound up with contemporary culture not only in America but also around the globe. Yet, even after centuries of scholarly inquiry, numerous questions regarding its historical origins remain contested and unanswered. The Christian movement developed into a religion about Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God. From a historical perspective, however, Jesus himself did not invent this religion. Rather, the most influential figure in establishing the Christian church as an institution is the Apostle Paul. This course will undertake an historical...