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 1XXA, B001 Through the Looking Glass: Ancient Sexuality and Modern Queer Politics
R. Warwick

In this course, we will examine the influence of Greco-Roman antiquity on the way that we talk about sex and sexuality today, with a particular view to how queer people have used the Classics to define their own identities. In reviewing the building blocks of queer theory and queer historiography alongside the primary source texts from the ancient world that inspired them, we will ask a series of questions: What is at stake when we see ourselves in the past? What does it mean to identify an ancient person as queer? In forming these histories, which elements are emphasized, and which are left out? [Counts towards the minor in Classical Culture and the concentration in Gender & Sexuality Studies]

WRPR 1XXA001, 002 Passing, Mixing, (Re-)Producing: Race & Intimacy in American Discourse
C. McNair

In this course, students will close-read narrative and filmic depictions of transcending, transgressing, and violating racial borders, thinking about what these narratives reflect and what they produce when it comes to understandings of race, gender and sexuality. We’ll look at the effects of both transgressive and progressive figurations of “racial mixture” and mixed race individuals, considering what functions these discourses play in larger schemas of American politics, ideologies and affects. This course centers the black-white “mixture” and its prohibition and celebration as a nexus of American and globalized notions of race and gender. We’ll think about how definitions of blackness and whiteness spring from representations of these boundaries’ transgressions, both in cases where blackness and whiteness come together through violation, and when they come together through the will to bridge or transcend the confines of race. We’ll hone in on the ways in which antiblackness and white supremacy are reproduced through transgressive and progressive reproduction across the borders of black and white, asking, if race has been debunked as a biological/ scientific fiction, how does it persist as a set of categories that can be “mixed”? Students will have the opportunity to think about “discursively constituted material reality,” liminality, subjectivity, blackness, whiteness, the relationship between race and gender, trauma, intimacy and desire. Texts include Gayle Jones, Corregidora (1970), Nelle Larsen, Passing (1929); Heidi Durrow, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (2011). [Counts towards the concentrations in African and Africana Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies]

WRPR 1XXB001, 002 Does Representation Matter?
C. McNair

In this course, students will explore theories of representation, along with critical race studies, structuralism and poststructuralism, global feminisms and neoliberalism, to think through contemporary discourses (like #Oscarssowhite and Girlboss Feminism) that claim representation matters when it comes to racial and gender justice. How does representation actually work, and what does it do? This is a study with urgent implications, as the call for and appreciation of representation as a measure of progress comprises a primary focus of current racial and gender justice movements. We’ll be looking at representation with a critical lens, asking how folks of various races and gender identities are represented, what they are called to represent, in whose interest their representations are figured and when they are conspicuously absent. [Counts towards the concentrations in African and Africana Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies]

WRPR 1XXB001, 002. Health and the Humanities
J. Libow

Over the last few decades, “medical humanities” and “health humanities” programs have been popping up in health professional schools across the country. In these courses, students study works of art, literature, history, and philosophy in the hopes that these endeavors will help them become better healthcare providers. But what exactly are “the humanities”? How do they differ from “the arts” or “humanity” itself? And how does a humanistic education benefit healthcare providers and their patients? In this seminar, we will examine poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama, and film that invites us to reconsider health through a humanistic lens. Throughout the semester, we will pay particular attention to the ways in which race, gender, and class shape experiences of health, illness, and healthcare. Texts include Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom; Margaret Edson, Wit; Steven Sonderbergh, Contagion; Lulu Wang, The Farewell and other seleted short stories, films and poetry. [Counts towards the minor in Health Studies].

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 106A001, 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 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 132B001. Beethovan Then and Now
R. Freedman

An exploration of Beethoven's life and works, considered in the context of changing aesthetic and cultural values of the last two centuries. Students will listen to Beethoven's music, study his letters and conversation books, and read some of the many responses his art has engendered. In their written responses to all of this material, students will think in new ways about Beethoven's music, his artistic personality, about the ideas and assumptions that have guided the critical reception of art and life. They will learn to cultivate their skills as readers and listeners while improving their craft as writers. [Cross-listed as MUSC 132B001]

WRPR 133B001 The American West in Fact and Fiction
E. Lapsansky

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 146A001. Narratives of Ethical Leadership: Soldier, Sage, Statesman, Saint
C. Kuper

Four larger-than-life and endlessly fascinating individuals from the pastAlexander the Great, Socrates, Cicero, and St Anthonyprovide powerful (and contradictory) models of leadership in its many facets. Alexander, for example, was arguably the most successful and resourceful military commander in history, but his erratic impulses are infamous (he murdered one of his close friends in a drunken rage). Socrates refusal to escape from his unjust condemnation, Ciceros defense of the Republic, and Anthonys public displays of civil disobedience are all fruitful examples of different modes of leadership. This course will be broadly structured around these four persons and the time periods in which they lived, allowing students to view leadership from a variety of thematic and temporal perspectives. By reading the narrative texts associated with these figures, as well as the philosophical, rhetorical, and historical literature that help contextualize them, we will explore the many problems associated with successful leadership and the modern act of evaluating leaders from the past: Is it permissible to perform a small evil to achieve a greater good? Should politicians lie to their constituents if they believe deception will benefit society? Is it better for a leader to be loved or feared? Can someone who committed such terrible atrocities be remembered as the Great? By what standards should we judge persons from antiquity and how should we remember them? Why are the four prominent leaders in this class all men? This course hopes to give students the opportunity to answer these and other questions for themselves. [Counts towards Classical Culture and Society.]

WRPR 150A001 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 150A, B002 Approaches to Literary Analysis: Locating Identity
A. Millan

Beginning with one of the great epics of the Western Tradition and culminating with a twenty-first-century memoir, this course explores how literary texts depict, theorize, and otherwise meditate on questions of location, identity, and community. Through a wide range of readings that include Odysseus’s treacherous homecoming, the dramatic appeal of disguise and deception in Shakespearean comedy, the industrial transformation of England’s green and pleasant lands, racial passing in 1920s Harlem, a bottled-up English butler, and an intimate family memoir, we will investigate how literary texts construct the spaces, styles, and plots essential for the making of shared meanings. By what imaginative means do writers help us think about race, class, and gender? How do texts conceal and reveal social logics of belonging and exclusion? Tracking a course through epic poetry, drama, lyric poetry, novels, and memoir, we will combine close stylistic analysis with historical and theoretical accounts. This course introduces students to a range of writing styles and forms (and collaborative work) necessary for flourishing within the English major. [Counts towards the major in English]

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 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 182A001  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 186B001  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]