Current Courses
Current Courses
All of our current courses are closed. Click the "upcoming" tab above to explore and register for next term's courses!
Closed Courses
In Session
Romanticism embraces love and sensuality, but it includes much more. The romantic movement powerfully affected all forms of literature and the arts, and even science. In this seminar we investigate several texts in historical, political, philosophical, literary, musical, artistic, and scientific contexts. A particularly interesting component of German romanticism is that women opened salons, which expanded the circulation of romantic ideals and practices in the public sphere. In music Schumann, Schubert, the later Beethoven, and Richard Wagner wrote powerful...
In Session
This course surveys theater and performance produced in apartheid South Africa between 1970 and 1994, an era commonly seen as one of intense cultural struggle and resistance. We will chronologically study the history, development, and aesthetics of South African theater and performance during the apartheid era. And we will examine the key aesthetic features as well as the social, interventionist, and activist nature of the theater of this period. We then analyze how theater, politics, and history interact with regard to race, gender, citizenship, nationality...
In Session
Pedro Almodóvar is now one of the world’s most highly regarded international directors. This course uses Women on the Verge (1998), his international breakthrough film, as the fulcrum to examine the before and after of his film making. The class will examine Women on the Verge and four other representative films from across the arc of the director’s career: What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984), All About My Mother (1999), Talk to Her (2002), and Volver (2006), and will refer to the other films the Spanish director has made. The...
In Session
This course is now sold out. Click here to join the course wait list.
If space opens up we will contact those on the wait list on a first come, first served basis.
Why are humans such a unique species on earth—or are we? We often think our intelligence (or more scientifically “cognition”) is special. But what does “intelligence” really mean? Why are we so good at solving some problems and yet fail at others? And how can our own brain size matter when insects can use...
In Session
What makes Russian literature so Russian? This course will take us through two of the best-known Russian classics—Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov—as well as Turgenev’s little-known Sportsman’s Sketches as we uncover the world of mid-to-late nineteenth-century Russia. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky tackled what is known as “the cursed questions” of God, death, morality, and how to live a good life. Turgenev’s book, with its very different focus, ushered in some of the most radical social changes Russia has ever witnessed. Our journey back...
In Session
Please Note: This course is located in the Dorothy Rubel Room on the Main UA Campus NOT in Oro Valley as was originally advertised.
The U.S.-Mexico borderlands have for over 400 years been the subject of numerous Spanish, Mexican, Mexican-American, Native-American, and Anglo-American writers and artists. From early accounts of exploration to more recent narratives, this course looks at this region’s diverse dimensions—culture, society, language, demography, and geopolitics. It mainly focuses on Mexican and Mexican...
In Session
This course is now sold out. Click here to join the course wait list.
If space opens up we will contact those on the wait list on a first come, first served basis.
This course moves beyond the cartoon-character stereotyping of Putin-period Russia to examine important continuities and changes in contemporary Russian politics and foreign policy. Three decades after the Soviet collapse, the broad outline and trajectory of Russia’s political, economic, and societal...
In Session
This course is now sold out. Click here to join the course wait list.
If space opens up we will contact those on the wait list on a first come, first served basis.
This course examines Supreme Court decisions and related social movements as historical case studies in our evolving sense of our civil rights and duties. We will review how African Americans and women organized themselves to press for equality, and we will consider how gay, lesbian, and transgender...
In Session
It is for good reason that China is often called a land of poetry. As the longest continuous form of creative writing in the country, poetry has been a defining feature in the life of China’s elite, from their participation in the civil service exams to their performance of rituals on official and leisure occasions. The ideas for poetry and its genre formation, however, have been a subject of constant debate throughout history, the most radical of which took place at the turn of the nineteenth century, when Chinese men of letters embarked on a journey toward modernity. In this seminar we...
In Session
Astronomy has seen tremendous progress in the past century. Large telescopes on the ground and in space now give us views of the universe across the electromagnetic spectrum. Powerful computers can handle exponentially increasing volumes of data, and they allow simulations of remote objects and extreme astrophysics. We know how stars work, how many galaxies there are, and how to find exoplanets. Yet there is much we don’t know and areas where our physical understanding is weak. This course is a report from the frontiers of astronomy and physics research on five aspects of the universe...