Current Courses
Current Courses
Open Courses
The Spanish film Director Luis Buñuel played a decisive role in the development of modern cinema and contributed to richly to the development of national cinemas in Spain, his country of origin, Mexico and France. A surrealist from the beginning to the end of his long career, Buñuel's films remained deeply experimental and socially engaged simultaneously.
This five-week class will trace the arc of Buñuel's film making. It begins by assessing the essential tension between social responsibility and artistic innovation in the director's work by looking at La Age D'Or and ...
This seminar will explore some of the enduring questions Milton addresses in Paradise Lost: Does justice exist? What is the nature of evil? Can we know the truth? What are the limits to authority? Discussion will focus on the language and narrative structure of the text and will extend to its literary, philosophical, and historical contexts. The inquiry will reveal that rather than providing definitive answers, the poem is provisional and often skeptical. At the end, Adam and Eve are banished from Paradise and exiled into the world of history with all its suffering and...
Closed Courses
In Session
From our species’ earliest moments, we have played. Mancala. Tabula. Chess. Noughts and Crosses. Monopoly. Bridge. Cops & Robbers. Halo. Minecraft. Cards Against Humanity. The list of contrivances that different peoples, communities, and cultures have devised to entertain themselves is endless. But more than a distinct category of human activity—one that supplements but stands apart from, for instance, work and relationships—play is infinite in both its particular instances and its cultural pervasiveness. Indeed, renowned historian of play Johan Huizinga observed in the early 20th...
In Session
Constitutions serve as the basic blueprint for a government, as they provide the foundation and describe the structure for how a community will govern itself. The United States Constitution is often used as a model for creating a government, but it is only one of many possible ways to allocate government functions. In this course, we will use constitutions as a lens for examining how different communities have structured their government and governance structures. The primary focus will be on tribal governments, although we will also examine the constitutions of several state and...
In Session
Despite their breakup almost 50 years ago, The Beatles remain unquestionably relevant to today’s musicians. While this stems in part from their role in pop culture, it was their transformative music that secured this lasting influence. In this course, we will study The Beatles’ albums chronologically, focusing on the structure and ingenuity of the music itself. Through listening, reading, and live demonstration, we will learn how their songwriting evolved from such early hits as “Love Me Do” or “Can’t Buy Me Love,” to more complex works of art, including “Come Together,” “Here Comes the...