Courses which will be taught exclusively online are identified as ONLINE next to the class meeting times.

WRPR 101A 01,02 Finding A Voice: Identity, Environment, and Intellectual Inquiry
N. Lavda
MW 12:45-2:15; 2:15-3:45
This course considers students fluid relationship to identities that they examine, explore, and take on through course materials. We begin by examining how difference is perceived/obscured/challenged and/or bridged in constructions of identity. We then consider how identities exist in the physical environment and how environment affects these identities. In particular, we will look closely at the debate concerning hydraulic gas fracturing, or fracking. Haverford Colleges location in Pennsylvania, home of the Marcellus Shale and location of many fracking sites, makes this topic especially relevant. The different positions that experts have taken in the debate about fracking serve as a model, finally, for students to enter another scholarly debate within an area of interest in a possible prospective major. In this later stage of the course, students try on the identity of a major and examine how to think and write like someone in that prospective major. This course involves significant reading, writing, and research. You will learn how to move between several different kinds of writing: from writing to express yourself to writing to communicate with an audience, to take a position on a written text, to create arguments and counter-arguments, to learn scholarly research skills, to learn interview and presentation skills, and to develop your own voice through your writing and speaking in order to participate more fully in the work of intellectual inquiry. This is a first-semester course with individual tutorials that prepares students for a second semester writing seminar.

115A001 Literacy: How and Why We Read and Write
G. Solis
TTH 2:30-4:00 (ONLINE)
This course is a Writing Intensive Seminar (WSI) that seeks to prepare students for the spring Writing Seminar. Specifically, the primary goal of this course is to build and develop students’ skills as academic writers, readers, thinkers, and speakers. At the end of this course, students should feel confidently primed to meet the rigors of college-level reading and writing. These skills include analyzing academic texts, composing academic essays, and engaging in academic inquiry. To facilitate these learning objectives, this course will focus on the field of literacy studies. Literacy studies focus on the study of how people read, write, and generally interact with the written word. Throughout the course, we will explore how literacy isn’t as simple as being able to read and write: there are many different types of reading and writing, and many types of situations in which people communicate with language. We will read, write and talk about major threshold concepts in literacy studies to enrich your ideas about reading and writing, and hopefully help you discover and embrace your own literacy background and practices. The creation of new technology in our century has had an especially new and profound impact on how we communicate, and we will also consider the ways in which literacy continues to change (and change us , as Walter Ong argues in “Literacy is a Technology that Restructures Human Thought”).

Courses which will be taught exclusively online are identified as ONLINE next to the class meeting times.

WRPR 1XXA001 Corruption, Conversion, Change: Fictions and Philosophies of Transformation
A. Shirazi
MW 2:15-3:45 (ONLINE)

Today we live in a culture with no shortage of self-help books. But can we really change (for the better or for worse)? How can writing offer us the promise of transformation? Of Conversion? In the age of the memoir, how does one publish his or herself? Can biographical works reveal the truth about the self: the “how I really became who I am”? Can they inspire others to become real “selves”? This course will examine modern notions of change and transformation through the fiction and philosophy of the past. Already in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, Athenians were confronting the charges of corruption made against Socrates, a “philosopher” who set out to transform himself and others in hopes of living a good and happy life. At the same time, ancient dramatists were constantly evoking the challenge and danger of change. Later, the writers of the Roman empire would also dwell on the magical potentials of transformation. St. Augustine, moreover, would then write what is regarded as the first autobiography of the west: the Confessions. Each week, we will confront issues of transformation and change through ancient texts while asking broader questions such as: can literature and philosophy help us examine and change ourselves? Are literary genres viable models for how to live a life? What do we gain from engaging with the characters and lives of antiquity? What is the “self” in the first place? Can our narratives fail or succeed? While texts from antiquity will ground our discussions of change and transformation, weekly readings on modern theories of the self, narrative, and the relationship between philosophy and literature will urge us to seriously consider how we enact fictive and philosophical narratives of change in our own daily lives. [Counts towards the major or minor in Classical Culture and Society]

WRPR 111B001 Power, Place and Film
N. Ladva
MW 12:45-2:15

This course will take a thematic approach to the introduction of film by exploring the intersections of power and place and considering the impact of forces like immigration, colonialism, and racism. By considering how places—communities, cities, countries—are changed by the people in them, perceptions others have of them, and the distribution of power across them, we will study film’s unique role in both the generation and representation of power and place. In addition to critical and theoretical readings, readings will include Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Deveare Smith’s Twilight Los Angeles; films will include Hugo, Black Panther, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Argo and My Name is Khan. [Counts towards the minor in Visual Studies]

WRPR 112A 001, 002 Interaction Ritual: The Novel and Sociology
R. Young
TTH 10:00-11:30; TTH 2:30-4:00 (ONLINE)

How do we define a social interaction? How do we know the difference between a good conversation and a bad one? In this course, we will read a range of texts devoted to dissecting the interaction in British and American society and culture. These texts explore how the social interaction functions when it goes smoothly—and how it can go wrong. We will read sociology from Emile Durkheim, Erving Goffman, W.E.B. Du Bois, Georg Simmel, George Herbert Mead, and Pierre Bourdieu, among others, in order to consider how the rituals of interaction are established in the first place and how their participants continually enforce their established codes. In conversation with these thinkers, we will consider not only the social interaction as a ritual, but examine how these customary scripts intersect with issues of class, race, and gender. To begin our discussion, we will start with two introductory documents: Dickens’s “Mr. Minns and His Cousin,” a short story about the breakdown of a social visit, and the introduction to Erving Goffman’s Interaction Ritual, from which this course takes its title and which outlines a sociology of the encounter. Then, alongside additional social theory, we will begin reading novels that center on the interaction ritual, moving from the nineteenth-century to the present. We will begin with Austen and James in the hopes that the archaic-seeming interaction rituals detailed in their novels will productively defamiliarize the more recognizable codes of conduct in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature.

WRPR 114A 001, 002 Gender and Writing
S. Watson
TTH 10:00-11:30; TTH 2:30-4:00 (ONLINE)

This course explores how gender shapes the creation and reception of texts. Beginning with Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own,” we will consider the historic marginalization of women writers and explore the various strategies that women use to make their voices heard. Alongside women writers, we will consider male writers and non-binary writers and explore how gender identity shapes textual production. Building on our discussion of gender and writing, we will analyze how gender intersects with other vectors of identity such as race and class and consider how this combination in turn shapes the character and visibility of an individual’s writing. Readings will include poetry, short stories, one short novel, magazine articles, critical essays, and visual representations of gendered writing and reading. [Counts towards the concentration in Gender & Sexuality Studies]

WRPR 116A001, 002 Black Philadelphia
T. Ebram

This course will engage cultural products by Black writers, artists and activists who explore the racial and spatial politics of Black life in Philadelphia since the dawn of the 20th century. Philadelphia remains a site of precarious Black freedom, due to its early ‘emancipation’ of slaves but enduring presence as a city rife with punitive institutions, segregation, forced labor and police violence. In the early 20th century, Philadelphia’s proximity to northern and southern states made it a troubled site of both freedom and unfreedom. We will examine how literary and cultural texts, including film, nonfiction and visual art, can inform how we understand, theorize and inhabit Philadelphia’s urban landscape. Key issues will include displacement, incarceration, deindustrialization and Black resistance. We will consider how social movements have shaped the social, political and spatial determinants of Black life in the city. This course will begin with W.E.B Du Bois’ famous sociological study, The Philadelphia Negro, and will span the works of prison writer Mumia Abu-Jamal and literary works by contemporary writers like Asali Solomon. Questions for this course include: What constitutes Black urban space? How does literature represent and transform space? Where can we locate spaces of freedom? What are the boundaries of home and community? How are black people and communities constituted in this city? This course will help students learn to write critical argumentative scholarly essays about literature alongside mediums such as non-fiction and visual mediums. Students will engage critically with secondary sources focused on literary criticism, local history, urban studies, feminism and cultural geography in order to develop their own unique final essays. In addition to short essays, pre-writing and research assignments, writing exercises will include digital mapping and walking tours of the city’s historical markers and sites. [Counts towards the concentration in Africana and African Studies]

WRPR 118A001 Portraits of Disability and Difference
K. Lindgren
TTH 2:30-4:00 (ONLINE)

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes: "staring is an interrogative gesture that asks what’s going on and demands the story. The eyes hang on, working to recognize what seems illegible, order what seems unruly, know what seems strange." In this seminar we will explore visual and literary portraits and self-portraits of bodies marked by difference, bodies that often elicit stares. We will ask: What kinds of stories are told about these bodies? How do memoirs and self-portraits by people with disabilities draw on and challenge traditions of life writing and portraiture? How does this work enlarge cultural, aesthetic, and bioethical views of embodiment, disability, and difference? How do portraits of disability engage differences of gender, race, and class? Our seminar will host a visiting artist who will guide us through a digital self-portraiture project. Through close readings of essays, memoirs, paintings, and photographs, students will hone their descriptive and interpretive skills and develop their ability to craft clear and persuasive arguments. [Counts towards the minors in Visual Studies and in Health Studies]

WRPR 123B001 Old Age in the Modern Age
T. Snyder
TTH 10:00-11:30

What insight did Cicero have when offering the following view: “Old age will only be respected if it fights for itself, maintaining its rights, avoids dependence on anyone, and asserts control over its own to its last breath.” Whether presented in a 14th century psalter, a seventeenth century Dutch painting or well-known nineteenth century prints, the presentation of the life-cycle of men and women and their implicit thoughts on age remained consistent. How did these ideas emerge and what do we make of them? Do they perpetuate? In what ways? How have we as a culture diverged? This course provides a survey on the history of aging in the United States from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. The class will examine broad consideration of aging through lenses of historical, community, and care perspectives. It will begin with introductory context of age inventions regarding childhood and adolescence. We will look at shifting theories and attitudes on age. We will examine issues of demographics and poverty among the elderly, as well as health care and social assistance programs. Further investigation on the impact or roles of race, ethnicity and religion will be considered. We will explore the influence of industrialization, retirement, and experience in shaping ideas of age and the lived experience. Finally, we will examine these ideas on aging through a close reading of historical case studies of past and current Philadelphia CCRC’s (Continuing Care and Retirement Communities). We will interrogate primary sources throughout the semester. [Counts towards the minor in Health Studies.]

WRPR 126B001, 002 Radical Black Feminisms and the Carceral State
T. Ebram

With growing calls for the abolition of prisons and all systems of racial-sexual domination, this course will examine a long history of works by and about Black women political prisoners since the Black Power Era. We will read the works of writers and theorists including Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, Ericka Huggins, and Audre Lorde, as they illuminate violent injustices in prisons and in U.S. society. Engaging several genres and forms of Black cultural production including autobiography, poetry, fiction, and manifesto, we'll explore fundamental questions such as: What constitutes the literary? Or even the political? And what do black women's writings illuminate about issues of state violence, domesticity, community, censorship, or forms of resistance? The course is as much about the questions, theorizings and lived experiences of incarcerated Black women, as it is about modes and processes of writing from spaces of invisibility and confinement- hence the emphasis on material culture and the exploration of multiple genres for writing and printing revolutionary ideas. Students will engage in the kinds of writing and facility with secondary sources in order to develop sound argumentative scholarly papers. Guiding Questions: What is Black feminism? How does Black feminism intersect with Black carceral studies? What distinguishes radical forms of Black feminism? What is abolition? How do we analyze the literary and material aspects of radical and revolutionary praxis? [Counts towards the concentrations in Gender & Sexuality Studies and in Africana and African Studies]

WRPR 127B001 Reading Jazz
R. Freedman
TTH 10:00-11:30

A study of jazz and its many meanings, from Louis Armstrong to John Coltrane, and from Charles Mingus to Sun Ra. We’ll explore the music itself, of course. But our main focus will be on the stories that its creators tell about themselves, and the stories that various eye (and ear) witnesses and critics tell about why it matters, and what it means. Together, we will discuss, question, and write about topics such as art and entertainment, difference and race, ownership and authenticity, discrimination and community. [Counts towards the concentration in Africana and African Studies. Cross-listed as MUSC 127.]

WRPR 128B001 Reading Sacred Texts
K. Koltun-Fromm
TTH 1:00-2:30

An introduction to reading sacred texts in an academic setting. In this course we will apply a variety of methodological approaches--literary, historical, sociological, anthropological or philosophical--to the reading of religious texts, documents and materials. [Cross-listed as RELG 128.]

WRPR 133A001 The American West in Fact and Fiction
E. Lapsansky
TTH 1:00-2:30

An examination of the imagery of the American West. Using visual and verbal images, this course explores such diverse aspects of the West as cowboys, cartography, water rights, race and social class, technology, religion, prostitution, and landscape painting.

WRPR 150A001 Approaches to Literary Analysis: In Times of Plague
M. McInerney
TTH 10:00-11:30 (ONLINE)

This course will introduce you to the discipline of English literature through the exploration of a variety of genres (epic, drama, lyric poetry, novel) and a variety of historical periods. Because of the extraordinary times we are living in, the subject of the course will be plagues: how do we experience pandemic and epidemic? How do we write and read through it or against it? How might art help us to survive it mentally and perhaps even physically? The course will engage issues related to sex, gender, race, disability, history and power, in texts from Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, in which plague is divine judgment, to Boccaccio's Decameron, in which people who flee the Black Death exchange stories, to Victorian poetry in response to tuberculosis to speculative fiction reimagining the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. In this class, you will learn how to read critically, how to pose productive questions, and how to write an academic essay. You will also have the opportunity to experiment with creative responses of various sorts: personal reflections, digital projects, etc. Carries credit towards the English major. [Counts towards the minor in Health Studies.]

WRPR 150A002 Approaches to Literary Analysis: Shadow Voices: Figures of Slave Difference and Resistance in the Text
R. Rajbanshi
TTH 11:30-1:00 (ONLINE)

The narrativization of slavery has often relied on an imaginary of difference and a disguise of resistance. Slaves in ancient Greece, for example, might be described as barbarians and in medieval India as kinless, and texts from both sites flash up subversive slave tactics. Spanning several period and place specific histories of bondage, this course examines the ways in which the figure of the critically differenced slave haunts texts seemingly presenting free societies and temporalities. How do such voices offer a counter-narrative to the surface narrative? What subtle and overt means did the enslaved use to defy their circumstances? How did the logic for enslavement overlap with ontoepistemologies of difference that were reproduced? Our course inquiries help clarify the ways in which the slave figure was not only crucial to delineating the narrative trajectory of free subjects but continues to shadow, post formal abolition, emergent narratives of inequity and resistance. Supplemented by select essays and writing exercises, we begin our readings with the adaptation Bacchides of a Greek New Comedy play and Shakespeare’s The Tempest; we move to R.E. Conrad’s documentary compilation on chattel slavery in Brazil and Mary Shelley’s science fiction classic Frankenstein; and we close with Amitav Ghosh’s cross-temporal, cross-genre work In an Antique Land. Course work focuses not only on close reading and writing exercises but traces genre effects in plotting such voices. [Carries credit towards the English major.]

WRPR 150A003 Approaches to Literary Analysis: Marvelous and Monstrous Passions of the West—From Homer to the Holocaust
K. Benston
TTH 10:00-11:30 (ONLINE)

Philosopher Walter Benjamin writes: There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. Western literature--extending from roots in Greek (Homeric) and Judeo-Christian (biblical) traditions--can be read as an extended exploration of Benjamins insight, unfolding as a debate about its own ability to fashion and transmit meaning in a world often governed by chance, cruelty, and confusion. Through stories pitting heroic energies against mysterious challenges--stories of traumatic violence and passionate restoration, of travel into the unknown and quest for sanctuary--bardic wordsmiths, priestly mythographers, epic poets, experimental novelists, and modern autobiographers have alike tested and transformed traditional values as a means of mastering experience. This course will explore how Western literary culture creates itself by confronting its own dreadful limits and creative possibilities, as each great text reworks its predecessors through a blend of inspiration and repudiation. Works studied will include: Homer's The Odyssey; Genesis; Milton's Paradise Lost; Shelley's Frankenstein; Douglass's Narrative of the Life of an American Slave; and Levi's Survival in Auschwitz. [Carries credit towards the English major.]

WRPR 150B001 Introduction to Literary Analysis: Memory: The Use(s) of the Past
D. Sherman
TTH 10:00-11:30

Frequently in his descent into the Inferno, Dante is accosted by those who ask of him but one thing: "[W]hen you return to earth's sweet light,/ Recall my memory there to the human world." What is memory that it should be so grievously lost? What are its uses? What is its value? Through different works across the curriculum, we will press the issue of narrative representation in terms of its capacities to revisit, to remember, to recollect and the subsequent revision of that memory into text. How does narrative "remember"? Is memory coterminous with self? And is memory only ever singular and individual or can it be multiple and plural--can there be a cultural practice of memory? We will pursue these questions through Virgil's retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to Milton's great elegy, "Lycidas"--both paradigms for memory--to Shakespeare's competing histories in The Tempest; Wordsworth's technic of memory in The Prelude; Woolf's elegy for her parents in To the Lighthouse ("I used to think of him & mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse, laid them in my mind"); T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland which remembers literature past; and selected critical essay, Freud, Caruth, etc. The focus of the course will be on close reading and critical analysis in short essays, revised and reworked in small group tutorials. [Carries credit towards the English major.]

WRPR 150B002  Approaches to Literary Analysis:  Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination
C. Zwarg
TTH 10:00-11:30

The hallucination we call reality has captured the imagination of many authors, and this course explores that haunting register across a variety of literary forms. Beginning with a translation of Homers Odyssey, we will consider how theories of translation can inform our understanding of the realities with which writers contend. If we all live in language, what genres of living might emerge? How does a writer like Shakespeare help us to experience those props, especially when we need a dictionary and lots of footnotes to understand them? (Can a dictionary be read like a poem?) What is the reality at work in the novels of Jane Austen and why do people love losing themselves there? (What does it mean to lose yourself in reading?) Can the supreme fictions of Wallace Stevens help us out? Is an Emerson essay really a crazy salad? What ghosts from Homer and Shakespeare return when Derek Walcott stages the Odyssey through the haunting registers of Caribbean history? Emphasis on rereading and writing as pleasure zones for discoveries of thought. [Carries credit toward the English major.]

WRPR 150B003 Approaches to Literary Analysis: Crossing Borders
S. Watson
TTH 10:00-11:30

How do borders structure relationships between individuals, groups, and nations? In this course, we will explore geographic, linguistic, social, and racial border crossing. Beginning with Homer’s The Odyssey and ending with Refugee Tales (2016), we will examine the boundary between home and the foreign and consider the problems and opportunities that arise when people cross national and cultural borders. In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, we will study cross-dressing and gender performance, analyzing how characters negotiate the border between prescribed male and female behaviors and desires. Reading Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), we will examine the construction of racial boundaries and consider what happens when individuals cross these borders. Finally, turning to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), we will consider the borders between the living and the dead and the natural and the supernatural. Throughout the course we will also consider questions of translation and communication: What happens when a text is translated from one language into another or from verse into prose? How does an author communicate the experiences of a character to an audience? (Carries credit towards the English major.)

WRPR 155B001 Origin Stories: Initiations, Identities, and Indigenous Imaginations
T. Tensuan
TTH 11:30-1:00

In this course we will read a range of origin stories -- creation narratives, memoirs, alter/native accounts of settler colonialism, and trickster tales -- that delineate constructions of  identity and constitutions of community with a focus on the ways in which writers and artists represent ongoing “encounters” between indigenous and imperial cultures.  We will begin with a series of origin stories ranging from Eduardo Galeano’s compilation of  South and North American creation narratives to Hope Nicholson’s collection of contemporary cartoonists’ takes on trickster tales that delineate the ways in which individuals and communities contend with transformative change.  We will then move to a pair of memoirs – M. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain and Joy Harjo’s Crazy Brave  that delineate the interrelation between personal, familial, communal, and colonial histories.  We will finish the semester with Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Islands of Decolonial Love – both formally inventive work that play with genres ranging from the lyric to the epic to speculative fiction as a means of offering new ways of understanding history and imagining the future. Our discussions will be organized around a set of interrelated questions: what values, concerns, and cultural points of orientation are established in and through origin stories? What role do cultural productions play in framing cultural ideologies and creating sites for reflection, contestation, and/or change?  What is at stake in acts of reading, interpretation, analysis, and critical confrontation? How do we understand our own critical and material situation in these histories; what roles or responsibilities do we have as critical and creative agents?

WRPR 182A001  The American Family in Historical Perspective
E. Lapsansky
TTH 10:00-11:30

"The American family in historical perspective" will invite us to take look at a variety of family structures, behaviors, values, and stresses, as times, peoples, regions, and issues interface with our notions and realities of “family.” Including [but not limited to] Native American, Mexican, African American; Protestant, Jewish, Mormon and Catholic, North, South and West, over time, we will explore not only demographics, comparative rituals of birth, marriage, illness, disability; expectations of family/community "loyalty" vs. "individuation." While pursuing such critical concerns as immigration, migration, labor, and economy, we will also look at such topics as recreation and dietary norms, family-crisis management; "privilege" and lack thereof; and notions of education [e.g., who should get it,  what kind, and to what end?]. [Counts towards the minor in Health Studies.]

WRPR 186B001  Haverford College, Rufus Jones and the Invention of Quaker Liberalism
R. Evans
MW 12:15-2:15

Quakerism isn’t stable.  It varies from generation to generation. The form of Quakerism that is mostly closely associated with Haverford College today is, for example, quite distinct from the sort of Quakerism that was connected to the college in 1970s.   That variety was Quakerism was, in turn, quite distinct from the one that was connected to Haverford a century earlier.  There is a real sense in which Quakerism was reinvented in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Students in the course will examine some of the changes that Quakerism underwent between the 1870s and the 1970s by examining the writings of two Haverfordians: Rufus Jones (1863-1948) and Henry Cadbury (1883-1974). Both men tried to reconcile Quaker traditions with modern life and thought, but they did so in different ways.  They reached markedly different conclusions about what Quakerism had been in the past and about what it should be in the future. [May count towards the concentration in Peace, Justice and Human Rights when the concentration is declared]

WRPR 188A01, 02 Epidemics and Society
E. Anders
TTH 10:00-11:30; 2:30-4:00 (ONLINE)

Epidemic diseases are often imagined as microscopic germs unleashing devastation as they traverse the globe. But epidemics are not merely biological phenomena; they are shaped by society, culture, and popular representation. As historian Charles Rosenberg has argued, epidemics often take on “the quality of pageant—mobilizing communities to act out propitiatory rituals that incorporate and reaffirm fundamental social values and modes of understanding.” How do individuals and the media construct narratives to make sense of epidemic outbreaks? How do cultural assumptions, political ideologies, and popular representations influence medical, social, and governmental responses to epidemics? This writing course examines cultural responses to epidemics, considering how ideas about race, class, gender, sexuality, and national identity inflect responses to disease outbreaks; the social and cultural implications of outbreak narratives; and the ways in which responses to epidemic disease both reflect and constitute the boundaries of political communities. Guided by these questions, students will develop their skills in close reading, clear writing, and crafting effective arguments. Readings will emphasize historical primary sources, and may include newspaper and other popular accounts, medical articles, and documentary films. [Counts towards the minor in Health Studies]

WRPR 189B01, 02  Health and the City
E. Anders
TTH 10:00-11:30; 2:30-4:00

This course examines the modern history of cities as sites of public health concern and intervention. Since the early nineteenth century, European and American cities have faced health challenges exacerbated by the epidemiological, ecological, and social consequences of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and social dislocation. City dwellers have been threatened by factors ranging from epidemic disease and poor sanitation to overcrowded slum housing and the prevalence of pests, problems that were complicated by social, political, and economic factors such as pervasive poverty, racial segregation, distrust of immigrant populations, and limited government resources. Students will be asked to think historically about a set of core questions and themes: how certain urban problems have attracted attention from health officials while others remain obscured or are seen as matters of private responsibility, how particular urban spaces come to be conceptualized as sites of medical concern while others remain invisible or neglected, how local social, political, and economic forces influence and shape public health interventions, and what it means to practice “public health” as a distinct domain of action, expertise, and authority. Guided by these questions, students will develop skills in close reading, clear writing, and crafting effective arguments. Readings will emphasize historical primary sources such as medical texts, public health reports and pamphlets, newspaper accounts, educational films, and legal documents. [Counts towards the minor in Health Studies]

WRPR 199B 01, 02 Childhood and Children’s Literature
R. Young
TTH 10:00-11:30, 2:30-4:00

In this course, we will focus on how British culture constructed childhood in the nineteenth century. We will trace how the books, games, and toys of the period portrayed childhood as just a prelude to a professional future. In doing so, these materials not only changed the cultural understanding of childhood, but also characterized modern professionalism itself, with its continual stages of advancement and growth, as an extension of youth. We will examine how this discourse assumes that the child is white, British, male, and middle-class, and study moments when children who do not fit this descriptor challenge this normative profile. We will begin by reading early entries in the children’s literature canon such as The History of Little Goody-Two Shoes, Thomas Day’s The History of Sanford and Merton, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life, and look at how these narratives, alongside board games and toys like The Game of Human Life, placed the child at the center of professional society. Then, we will consider how this ideology spoke to girls, who were largely excluded from having professional futures of their own, by conditioning them to expect marriages to professional men. We will read Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and look at the plethora of fortune-telling toys that focused on “predicting” girls’ future husbands. Lastly, we will examine how, by the end of the century, children’s literature, games, and toys cast the British Empire as the new frontier for professional conquest, representing the people living in the Caribbean, India, the Middle East, and South America as merely challenges to be conquered in the future careers of British boys. [Counts towards the concentration in Gender & Sexuality Studies]