WRPR 101A 01,02 Finding A Voice: Identity, Environment, and Intellectual Inquiry
N. Lavda
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.

WRPR 102A001, 002 The Internet and Participatory Culture
A. Hartman
This course aims to introduce first year students to the challenges and rewards of academic writing, and to develop the self-awareness that is necessary in order to navigate and participate in academic discourse. Through a variety of course materials, assignments and in-class exercises, you will sharpen your annotation and critical thinking skills, recognize the elements of a rhetorical situation and explore the best methods with which to present well-constructed arguments to your audience. This semester, we will read and write, critically and purposefully, on what is considered the new public sphere: the internet. We will do this by investigating three major areas of internet culture: Cancel or Call-Out Culture, Meme Culture and the Culture of Web Activism (sometimes referred to as Slacktivism). As we progress through the materials, you will see that all of these categories tend to overlap and push a larger conversation as to how we negotiate the new participatory nature and culture of the internet. Through informal writing assignments, we will reflect and track how our attitudes and opinions on a given topic or idea have developed and evolved over the time we have spent with it. We will also explore critical/creative thinking strategies, database research, and ways of writing your ideas with which you might be less familiar. For instance, you will learn and practice persuasive strategies, descriptive writing, and methods for engaging an audience all of which are crucial to a well-written and effective argument. In addition, you will develop an understanding of just what it takes to present your ideas authoritatively, to accept accountability for your positions, and to face up to your ethical responsibility to an audience.

WRPR 1XXA001, 002. Feminism Before Suffrage
J. Libow

Long before they secured the right to vote, women in the United States were actively engaged in an array of political and social debates from abolition and labor reform to marriage and Indigenous sovereignty. In this course we’ll explore this history of American feminist expression by tracing the ways in which women writers from 1776-1920 contested and asserted ideas about sex, race, class, and citizenship. Our readings will range widely from letters, speeches, and essays to autobiography, fiction, and drama. Questions of intersectionality will be central to our analysis throughout the semester as we examine how a diverse set of women used their writing to challenge national narratives and transform the American body politic. Along the way, we’ll reflect on the experience of reading these texts in our own historical moment. What insights and energies do these works impart for later writers and activists? What injuries and exclusions do they enact? How might we define the category of “feminist writing”? Where might we place our readings within its history? [Counts towards the minor/concentration in Gender & Sexuality Studies.]

WRPR 1XXB001, 002. The Politics of Self-Care
J. Libow

We all know the quote: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” But what exactly did the Black feminist writer Audre Lorde mean when she wrote this now famous sentence while living with cancer in 1988? Self-care is, as Lorde suggests, a mode of critique – an insistence that existing infrastructures aren’t meeting one’s needs. But it also can and has been adopted to far less radical ends. In this course, we’ll interrogate the relationships between self-care; politics; and physical, mental, and spiritual health by turning to three distinct moments in the history of American self-care. We’ll begin by examining nineteenth-century “self-reliance” as articulated by transcendentalist writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau who sought to distance themselves from dominant religious institutions and economic structures. From there, we’ll consider Lorde’s historical moment – the late-twentieth-century, when activist groups including the Black Panther Party, the Boston Women’s Health Collective, and ACT UP created community forms of healthcare as alternatives to discriminatory medical systems. Finally, we’ll examine how these histories have shaped our contemporary understandings of self-care, including self-improvement discourses such as wellness and the perspectives of those living with chronic illnesses. [Counts towards the minor in Health Studies.]

WRPR 1XXB001 You Are What You Eat: Food Studies and Identity
Elizabeth Jones-Minsinger

This course is designed to introduce students to concepts in the interdisciplinary field of food studies with a particular emphasis on food’s role in shaping identity. Students will perform close readings of primary and secondary sources pertaining to food studies, identify and pose interesting and meaningful questions about foodways and food history, and develop those questions into well-supported arguments in their writing. While the field of food studies is too vast to adequately explore in a single semester, this course will examine many ways people around the globe create meaning through food. Students will be introduced to methodologies from history, anthropology, material culture studies, folklore studies, and related disciplines. Some topics they may consider include the role of food in constructing national, racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic identities; the importance of cultural exchange in creating cuisine; and food as a repository for memory and method of cultural preservation. To gain expertise in thinking and writing about food studies topics, students will complete short weekly writing assignments, brief essarys, an oral presentation, an annotated bibliography, and a research paper. Students will have frequent opportunities to work collaboratively with their peers to discuss ideas, construct arguments, and revise their writing.

WRPR 108B001, 002 Real Work and Dream Jobs: Theories and Visual Representations of Work
S. Hayes

This introductory course offers an entry into theories of work. It will help participants think critically and historically about the role of work in society, the promise of the so-called creative industries as idealized or un-alienated forms of work, and the structural persistence of gendered, classed, and racial divisions of labor. Participants will be asked to read and discuss a range of interdisciplinary cultural theory texts that will help us establish key terms while analyzing specific forms of work. Such terms will include: “alienation,” “primitive accumulation,” “post- fordism,” “neoliberalism,” “emotional” or “affective labor,” “flexiblization,” “precarity,” “debt,” “automation,” “work-life balance,” and “post-work.” In doing so, the class will focus on thinkers who consider work in relation to gender, race, globalization, justice, and major moments of historical change. Alongside critical readings we will also watch filmic representation of work. We will focus primarily, though not exclusively, on US-based popular films in order to practice thinking critically about the stories we tell ourselves, or are told, about work. Writing assignments for this class will be designed to help students apply critical concepts about work to their own formal and ideological analyses of film. Assignments include: film journals; a glossary of key terms; argumentative essays; comparative essays; peer reader responses; film review annotations; theses, outlines, and abstracts. [Counts toward the concentration/minor in Gender & Sexuality Studies, etc.]

WRPR 111B001 Power, Place and Film
N. Ladva

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 118A001 Portraits of Disability and Difference
K. Lindgren

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 120A001 Evolutionary Arguments
C. Schilling

From the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century to the present, scientists, ethicists, disability activists, and others have argued about the uses of increasingly sophisticated technologies for preventing certain inherited traits and enhancing others. We will track representative arguments in ethics, the court, social movements, and popular culture. How do these medical technologies intersect with cultural values and beliefs? How do they influence who will be included in the human community? [Counts towards the minor in Health Studies]

WRPR 125A001, 002 On Higher Ed: Introduction to Critical University Studies
S. Hayes

Welcome to college!
Wait. Why are you here?

Throughout your college experience, you will likely confront the weight of this question. It may come in the form of needing to declare a major, the feeling of “imposter syndrome” in class or while writing, or the struggle of deciding how to balance your extracurricular activities with your curricular interests and responsibilities. The idea that college is a place where you choose what to study and do may feel like a newfound personal freedom! It may also feel like a newfound personal burden. What if I choose the “wrong” thing, you may ask yourself. What if I waste my chance, my time, my energy, my money? What even is the point of college? And should I even be here? While these feelings and negotiations will resonate as deeply personal throughout your college experience, they also speak to a number of structural and historical conditions that define higher education. This seminar offers an opportunity to explore such conditions by asking what college is as a historical, political, economic, and cultural institution. We will think about the way that college shapes individual experiences, subjectivities, desires, hopes, and dreams. We will read about higher education as a space of changing cultural practices and values. We will historicize the impact of political-economics structures on higher education. We will critique different methods of teaching and learning (i.e. pedagogies). We will analyze the way that knowledges are produced and divided throughout the academy (i.e. methods and disciplines). And finally, we will take the time to reflect on how different structural conditions appear within our own personal experiences during this first-semester transition into higher education. Through such reflection we aim to become more intentional, less self-critical, and more joyful agents in these years of our lives called “college.” Writing assignments for this course will include: critical reflection journals; critical reading summaries; argumentative essays; comparative essays; cultural object analyses; peer reader responses; theses, outlines, and abstracts.

WRPR 126A001, 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 Africana and African Studies and in Gender & Sexuality Studies.]

136B001, 002 Black Ecologies

T. Ebram

This course engages writings and cultural works about Black eco-literary and ecological traditions. Black Ecologies focuses on the multiple ecological and spatial conditions that have over-determined Black life and relationships to nature including the middle passage, slavery, racial segregation, food apartheid, gentrification and even incarceration. All these phenomena have produced unequal access to natural resources, space, food and land through systems that racialize, gender and commodify space. By exploring Black cultural and land based worker’s literary, cultural, and community responses to anti-Black environmental conditions, we will consider how Black communities reclaim spatial autonomy through creative modes of collective liberation. Student's critical and creative writing will be based on course texts and outdoor experiences of observation and laboring collectively at Haverfarm. [Counts towards the concentration in African and Africana Studies and the major/minor in Environmental Studies.]

WRPR 150A001 Approaches to Literary Analysis: Marvelous and Monstrous Passions of the West—From Homer to the Holocaust
K. Benston

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. [Counts towards the major in English.]

WRPR 150A002 Approaches to Literary Analysis: Hubris and Humanity
E. Kim

Hubris is defined as an excessive sense of pride or self-confidence. This concept is closely tied to the term nemesis, which means “to give what is due.” Whether we recognize it as the Icarus Complex, the Dunning-Kruger Effect, or megalomania, literary representations of hubris demonstrate that humans are prone to over-inflated estimations of themselves, which often result in tragedy. This course will explore the theme of hubris across various periods and genres of literature—from Roman mythology, Elizabethan theatre, English Gothic, Anglophone fiction, graphic novel, to contemporary poetry—to consider its relationship to power, identity, and fate. We will examine prototypical hubristic figures such as Narcissus and Icarus in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, titular characters in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, some modern counterparts such as the status-hungry Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the perpetually blame-shifting Ben Tanaka in Shortcomings, as well as the lyric speaker of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. Through close reading and critical analysis, we will consider: What do these narratives of hubris teach readers about humanity? In what ways does hubris manifest in both individuals and ideals? What are its causes and consequences? [Carries credit towards the English major.]

WRPR 150A003; WRPR 150B003 Approaches to Literary Analysis: Writing the Weather, Reading the Climate
D. Allor

How does literature help us understand the relationship between humans and our changing ecosystems? This course will explore literary depictions of how people understand their environments through representations of the weather and the climate in several periods and genres of literature. How do writers depict the weather—as an act of a higher power, as the result of more-or-less predictable meteorological processes, as influenced by humans through anthropogenic climate change, or not as “real” weather at all but as a literary trope that echoes the feelings and moods of the characters? Is the weather something that can be predicted, controlled, and managed, or something frightening, dangerous, and wild? How do representations of the weather communicate larger concerns about human agency, the human relationship with nature, the stress and uncertainty of living in unpredictable environments, and the responsibilities of living in the Anthropocene? We will approach these questions through texts including Homer’s Odyssey, William Shakespeare’s King Lear, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, among others. This course will involve reading carefully, thinking critically, and writing and revising short analytic essays. In addition to reading about the effects of the weather on humans, we will also pay attention to our own embodied writing practices and how they are inflected by the environments where we write. [Counts towards the major in English.]

WRPR 150B001 Introduction to Literary Analysis: Memory: The Use(s) of the Past
D. Sherman

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 literary works, 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 technik 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; the artwork and photography of Yinka Shonibare, Shimon Zttie, James Whitten, and Dawood Bey; and selected critical essays, 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 Introduction to Literary Analysis: Encountering the Unknown
G. Stadler

This is a course in the critical reading of literary narrative. Reading texts from Homers Odyssey to a contemporary novel, we will concentrate on the structural mechanics of narratives as they encounter different sorts of chaos, turmoil, indecipherability, and strangeness both psychological and social, individual and cultural. While developing an effective toolbox of critical concepts, we will persistently discuss questions concerning literary languages resources as a social force and in transmitting history. [Counts towards the major in English.]

WRPR 155B001 Origin Stories: Narrating Asian America
T. Tensuan

Through works ranging from memoirs to graphic narratives to speculative fictions, this course foregrounds the complex individual, familial, communal, and national histories that have constituted “Asian American” as a political formation/formulation. Readings include Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660 and Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, memoirs that illuminate the ways in which U.S. national policies and international relations have shaped patterns of immigration, opened possibilities for mobility, and engendered traumas related to displacement in relation to ongoing practices of settler colonialism; Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!, G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica, and Mira Jacob’s Good Talk, graphic narratives that illustrate how racial identities are constructed in a matrix of economic, political, and interpersonal dynamics; Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown are novels that explore and explode the stereotypes that continue to inform popular culture. Our discussions will be organized around a set of interrelated questions: What role do cultural productions play in constituting individual and collective identities, in framing specific world views and in fostering possibilities for reflection, contestation, and/or change? What is at stake in acts of reading, interpretation, analysis, and creative imagination? 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 156A001. Good Guys and Gals? Quaker Imagery in Fact and Fiction
E. Lapsansky

What have been the literary uses of Quaker ideas and images in fiction? How have these changed over time? Fiction-writers often use codified images such as Biblical characters, landscapes, serpents or other animals, in order to promote a certain mood or sub-text in their readers' minds. And religion is often the overt or hidden agenda for fiction-writerswith the journey through life, its concomitant challenges, and the conquest of those challenges bringing the reader to a dramatic conclusion. But Quakers, so few in number (only a few hundred thousand of us in the entire world!) dont show up in fiction very often. This is partly because early Quakers banned the writing and reading of fiction. Yet, as early as 1810, Quakers DO appear in fictionboth as authors and characters. Here on the Haverford campus, with its Quaker heritage and traditions, is housed perhaps the largest collection of Quaker novels anywhere in the worldfiction by or about Quakers, often populated with characters whose Quakerliness is designed to evoke a certain mood, message, or subtext. For some authors, Quakers became stand-ins for virtue. For others, the Quaker image is of the troublemaker, the nay-sayer, the haughty, unbending zealot. In this course we will read excerpts from an array of Quaker fiction. Then, through class discussions, written essays, and through considering each others writing, students will explore how commentators have interpreted the meaning of "Quakerness" in literature." Though this is not a history course per se, students will emerge from the course with sharpened skills in historical inquiry and research.

WRPR 182B001  The American Family in Historical Perspective
E. Lapsansky

"The American family in historical perspective" will invite us to take a 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 186A001  Haverford College, Rufus Jones and the Invention of Quaker Liberalism
D. Watt

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 of 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 188A001, 002 Epidemics and Society
E. Anders

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 194B001 Astronomical Questions and Science Writing
K. Masters

In this seminar we will explore the biggest questions in the Universe, along with other recent developments in astrophysics via a series of writing assignments. Topics are likely to include black holes, dark matter, dark energy, the Big Bang, exoplanets and life in the Universe. As with all First Year Writing Seminars, you will have the opportunity to develop the reading, research and writing skills necessary for successful writing about any topic with clarity and appropriate conciseness. Our practice texts will relate to questions in astrophysics - as explained to a variety of audiences, and in a variety of writing styles. You cannot write about a topic without understanding it first. Class-time will be a mixture of discussion of the astrophysical content that you will need to understand in order to be able to articulate the questions, and a set of topics aimed at covering different aspects of the writing process. We will also cover some of the estimation techniques of scientists, which are so useful for gaining a basic physical understanding of objects in space.