WRPR 101A 01,02 Finding A Voice: Identity, Environment, and Intellectual Inquiry
N. Lavda
MW 11:15-12:45, 12:45-2:15
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. Prerequisite: Open only to members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR 167A Globalization and Culture in the 21st Century
B. Hall
MW 2:30-4:00
The primary goal of this course is to challenge students as academic readers, writers and thinkers while providing support for continuous growth. We will define and explore global interconnectedness from multiple disciplinary perspectives - political, economic, etc. - but will focus primarily on various complex social and cultural dimensions of globalization including local/global tensions, Westernization, cultural borrowing, cultural imperialism, cultural exploitation, tourism, and pop culture (music, movies, etc.), as analyzed in ethnographies set in various locations around the world. Most of these locations will be outside the US, and we will include a particular case study of Japan. We will consider questions like: Is there a global village? How does the nation-state matter both more and less in a globalized world? How does globalization impact existing socioeconomic inequalities? Who benefits from increasing global interdependence and who does not, and why? This is a first-semester course with individual tutorials that prepares students for a second-semester writing seminar. Prerequisite: Open only to members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR 185A Language, Power and Justice
B. Hall
TTH 2:30-4:00

This seminar explores a variety of controversies involving the use of the English language in social and cultural context. Across the course, we will emphasize the experiences and consequences of linguistic diversity for variously positioned speakers and writers.  Our inquiry will engage the following questions while surely provoking new ones.  How is language related to power?  How does language use express or indicate a speaker’s identity?  What kinds of language are stigmatized and what kinds are deemed “correct” or socially powerful, and why?  What are the consequences of using standard forms in speaking and writing, and what are the consequences of using non-standard forms?  How and why might speakers and writers “code-switch”, and with what social effects?  In what ways is language inherently political – i.e. embedded within and constituent of unequal power relations – and how might we choose to navigate the implications of our language use?  How can changes in language use both reflect and create social or political change?  How might language be a tool for inclusion or empowerment for marginalized communities, or a tool for seeking social justice? (May count towards the concentration in Peace, Justice and Human Rights.)

WRPR 118A Portraits of Disability and Difference
K. Lindgren
TTH 2:30-4:00

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. Prerequisite: Open only to first year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. [Counts towards the minor in Health Studies and the minor in Visual Studies.]

WRPR 150A001 Introduction to Literary Analysis: Narration and Self-Knowledge.
S. Finley
TTH 10:00-11:30

Paul Ricoeur’s essay on “Narrative Time” serves as a guidepost and timeline for this version of the course, as we consider the interwoven fabric of time, being, fate, and story. Ricoeur asks: Does not narrativity, by breaking away from the obsession of a struggle in the face of death, open any meditation on time to another horizon than that of death to the problem of communication, that is, not just among the living but between the living and the dead? What is essential to the transmission of a human story between generations? How do we communicate tradition in such a way as for it to become something other than a traumatic haunting, a perpetual ghost story of our lost origins, or of our original experience of being lost? We will begin with Homer’s Odyssey and read through a series of subsequent works in English, including Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a selection of poems from Wordsworth, Keats, and Emily Dickinson, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Small group writing tutorials will be an important component of the course. [Carries credit towards the English major.]

WRPR 150A002  Introduction 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 150A-03 Introduction to Literary Analysis: Accidental Tourists and Passionate Exiles
R. Mohan
TTH 10:00-11:30

Travel and as exile give full play to the desire for change, the need to escape the constraints of the familiar, the yearning for home, the pursuit of adventure, the quest for life’s meanings and, always, the interminable project of self-definition.  According to the writer Roland Barthes, the vicissitudes of travel “have the function of conferring on the world a sort of elastic state, making its limits more distant, then closer, blithely playing with cosmic distances, and mischievously testing the power of man over space and schedules.” This elasticity is a prominent feature of the texts we will be reading for the course, and our concern will be to track its different effects.  How much does a text’s historical and political context shape its representation of the world?  What are the possibilities opened up by travel for self-fashioning—as an individual, as a member of a community, as man or woman, as a desiring and sexual subject?  Are there particular obsessions that the role of traveler or exile brings to the narrator or protagonist? In what ways does travel writing throw into relief questions of narrative design and closure?  Can we identify conventions or traditions of representing travel?  And what happens to them when they show up in different genres such as epic, lyric poetry, and first person narrative? Can the traveler, who is constantly trying to come to terms with new places and unfamiliar experiences, be taken as a model or stand-in for the reader?  In class meetings and small group tutorials we will address these questions in conversation and writing, and in the process undertake our own projects of self-fashioning as critical, alert readers and discerning, skillful writers. Our work will be based on the following texts: Homer, The Odyssey (trans.  Fitzgerald); William Shakespeare, The Tempest; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Derek Walcott, Omeros; and Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe. [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 for the English major.]

WRPR 150B002  Introduction to Literary Analysis:  Animate Objects
L. Reckson
TTH 10:00-11:30

From the flesh of Pygmalion's statue to the circuits of artificial intelligence, this course examines the literature of animation, or things coming to life. How can we understand the complex, often amorous relationships between persons and things, and what is the role of literature in helping us to imagine, navigate, and reconstruct those relationships? Working with classical and modern texts in a variety of genres, well explore historically specific constructions of personhood, analyzing how language shapes and reshapes the boundaries between subjects and objects, the living and the dead, the still and moving. Well examine the role of race and gender in configuring relations of power, objectification, and commodification. And well ponder our own role as writers in bringing ideas and concepts to life, attending carefully to the pleasure and responsibility this work entails. Beginning with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, well explore the work of animation in William Shakespeare’s The Winters Tale, Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, and Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2. Selected short critical readings from Sigmund Freud, Barbara Johnson, Jaron Lanier, and Karl Marx will help us approach humans and things through questions of desire, production, technological transformation, enslavement, and mourning. [Carries credit towards the English major.]

WRPR 150B003 Introduction to Literary Analysis: On Melancholy
B. Parris
TTH 11:30-1:00 

This course investigates Melancholy’s ambivalent status as creative sign and bodily symptom in literature, philosophy and film. We’ll begin by considering ancient Aristotelian and Galenic perspectives on melancholy as both a mark of inspired genius and a harmful bodily surplus of black bile. Our course will then track images of melancholia in drama, poetry and prose that respond to perennial questions raised by this strange condition: by what means does the body affect the soul or the mind? Does aesthetic insight arise from suffering? How do historical understandings of medicine and psychology shape genres of literature, and what is melancholy’s contemporary inheritance? Works of literature include Seneca’s Hercules Furens, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, John Milton’s Samson Agonistes, John Keats’ “Ode on Melancholy”, Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and “Adonais”, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. We’ll also read Sigmund Freud’s study, “Mourning and Melancholia” and Eric Wilson’s In Praise of Melancholy for theoretical orientations. The course concludes with a viewing of Lars Von Trier’s recent film, Melancholia. [Carries credit towards the English major.]

WRPR 155B 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 156A Good Guys and Gals? Quaker Imagery in Fiction
E. Lapsansky
TTH 10:00-11:30 

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 162B 01, 02 Immigration and Representation
N. Lavda
MW 11:30-1:00, 1:00-2:30

What does it mean to be an immigrant? What is lost and what is gained in the move from over there to over here? Who decides? In examining the questions raised by acts of migration across borders or countries, we will examine the assumptions that create community and conflict in the immigrant experience both in the US and abroad. We will read essays, short stories, and a novel or two that help showcase the rich diversity of the immigrant experience. To help ground our exploration, we will read theoretical texts that examine how identities are formed and policed across and within communities. The goals of developing critical thinking and writing skills are central to the course. Reading critically presents many perspectives, which may or may not be like our own. This course seeks to facilitate each class members discovery of their own awareness and relationship to the various perspectives presented explicitly and implicitly in the course materials and activities; the ability to interpret the worldsomething that reading and writing critically calls us to dois a crucial skill both inside and outside the classroom. Success in todays local and global living and working environments depends in large measure on ones ability to interpret, understand, and proactively integrate and negotiate the various aspects of diversity inherent in the human person. Possible readings: The Absolute True Diary of a Part-time Indian, Sherman Alexie; Borderlands/La Frontera, selections, Gloria Anzaldua; Twlight Los Angeles, Anna Deveare Smith; Mother Tongue, by Amy Tan; Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston; Notes of a Native Speaker, Eric Liu; Nelson Mandela, Black Man in a White Court; Nadine Gordimer, Where Do Whites Fit In?; Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie (selection); Black Skin/White Masks, Franz Fanon (selection); Representation, Stuart Hall, et al., (selection); essays on writing, to be selected. . Prerequisite: Open only to first year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR 167B Globalization and Culture in the 21st Century
B. Hall
MW 1:00-2:30

We will define and explore global interconnectedness from multiple disciplinary perspectives - political, economic, etc. - but will focus primarily on various complex social and cultural dimensions of globalization including local/global tensions, Westernization, cultural borrowing, cultural imperialism, cultural exploitation, tourism, and pop culture (music, movies, etc.), as analyzed in ethnographies set in various locations around the world. Most of these locations will be outside the US, and we will include a particular case study of Japan. We will consider questions like: Is there a global village? How does the nation-state matter both more and less in a globalized world? How does globalization impact existing socioeconomic inequalities? Who benefits from increasing global interdependence and who does not, and why. Prerequisite: Open only to members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR 176A 01, 02 Are You What You Eat?  Eating and Identity
E. Blake
TTH 10:00-11:30; 1:00-2:30

“You are what you eat” may be a misquotation, but it is an apt one. Whether you’re rhapsodizing about a juice fast or instagramming Taco Bell’s latest monstrosity, telling people what you’re eating is a way of telling people who you are. Beginning with the writings of the French gourmand Brillat-Savarin, where we will clarify the quip above, we will investigate the complex relationship between food and identity. Reading novels, poems, literary criticism, and recipes, we will consider the way food practices can unite families, consolidate ethnic identity, reinforce class boundaries, and express gender. Reading The Futurist Cookbook against the Slow Food Manifesto, we will think about how food can be a way of asserting contemporaneity or materializing nostalgia for an idealized agrarian past. We conclude by collaborating on a cookbook, combining recipes with memoir in the style of Alice B. Toklas. [Counts towards the concentration in Gender & Sexulity Studies and the minor in Health Studies.]

WRPR 178A  Beasts, Monsters and Giants:  Confronting Monsters from the Past
H. Silverblank
TTH10:00-11:30

This seminar looks at the figure of the monster in different literary and artistic traditions, from ancient Greek literature to Gothic fiction and horror cinema. We will consider the shifting role of the monster, sometimes a source of horror, of reverence, of disgust, of humor, and sometimes even a source of endearment. We will ask: How do monsters function differently when they appear in different genres and different environments? How do monsters engage with questions surrounding the processes of artistic and creative production? What is the relationship between ancient myths of monstrosity and modern ones? To answer these questions we will survey a wide range of sources, including selections from Homer's Odyssey, Hesiod's Theogony, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Horace's Ars Poetica, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: The Postmodern Prometheus, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Tod Browning’s Freaks, Ridley Scott’s Alien, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. [Counts towards the major in Classical Culture and Society.]

WRPR 179B 01, 02  Time After Time:  Queer Pasts, Presents, and Futures
E. Blake
TTH 10:00-11:30; TTH 1:00-2:30

If “having a gay old time” used to simply mean “celebrating,” what might it mean now to have a queer time, to live in queer times, or to experience time queerly? And is it still fun? This course introduces students to the many ways queer lives and theories challenge normative conceptions of linear time. We will encounter queers feeling backward, growing sideways, and refusing normative futurity as we travel through the centuries with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, explore the post-apocalyptic world of Torrey Peters’s Infect Your friends and Loved Ones, and locate the classical past within the contemporary poetics of Anne Carson. Reading theorists such as Lee Edelman, Kathryn Bond Stockton, and José Esteban Muñoz, and considering topics including the chemically delayed onset of puberty among trans youth, the queer time of disability, and the “temporal drag” that Elizabeth Freeman locates in lesbian kitsch, we will also engage with film and television, case studies, and, in our discussion of kitsch, thrift store finds of our own. [Counts towards the concentration and minor in Gender and Sexuality Studies.]

WRPR 180B  Humanitarianism in Theory and Practice
A. Janco
TTH 11:30-1:00

We all feel the desire to help, reach out and care for others in need.  At the same time, service is not an easy task.  How do you know that your actions will have the desired effect?  How can you help in ways that are sustainable, ethical and participatory? Do your actions directly address systemic problems or are they short-term acts that make a small, but tangible difference?  In this course, we will study the ideas, practices, and politics of humanitarian action. We’ll begin with the origins of humanitarian values in various religious and philosophical traditions.  What is the value of human life? What is human dignity?  We’ll then turn to changing attitudes towards violence, torture and slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries.  Why and how did these changes occur? We’ll study key texts, figures and organizations, including the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) as well the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and Near East Relief.  In dialogue with these philosophical and historical experiences, we will study current humanitarian crises.  What challenges do these crises present and what new ideas and technologies are being employed to address them? By the end of the semester, students should have a critically-informed introduction to the key problems facing humanitarian action as well as current efforts to provide effective and responsible care for those in need.  [May count towards the concentration in Peace, Justice and Human Rights.]

WRPR 181B  The Genius of Mozart
M. Gray
TTH 11:30-1:00

What is (a) genius? A person or an attribute? Human or divine? Does the artist control it or does it control the artist? When did this concept emerge, and how has it evolved? This writing seminar considers such questions in connection with the life and works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. We probe his biographies and letters for insights into the man, and we investigate what makes his music tick. All the while we cast a critical eye on the mythology of Mozart’s genius, a rich tradition of anecdote, intrigue, and speculation that can be hard to separate from fact. We ask how Mozart—real and imaginary—has reflected and shaped ideas of genius, considering his representation in literature and film. Students hone their writing skills in a series of collaboratively revised short essays.

WRPR 182B  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?). 

WRPR 184A Queer Contemporary Art 
Natasha Bissonauth
TTH 10:00-11:30; 1:00-2:30

This course examines a global range of contemporary artists who resist dominant modes of visual representation by investigating what it means to produce a queer aesthetic. How does a visual object enact queerness? How is this visual logic indebted to feminist, postcolonial, and critical race theories while also inflecting them anew? And what is the role of the image in inciting social change? Through formal analysis and in-depth discussion of readings by key art historians and theorists this course explores, defines, and reassesses terms and various historical, political, and social developments around sexuality, gender, desire, HIV/AIDS, heteronormativity, homonormativity, and homonationalism, animating our visual literacy around what constitutes a queer gaze. By summarizing, analyzing, and synthesizing connections in assigned readings and learning how to read visual culture as text, students will develop the skills to write critically and think independently about art and representation through a queer lens. (Counts towards the concentration or minor in Gender & Sexuality Studies and the minor in Visual Studies.)

WRPR 187B Seeing Through Diaspora
Natasha Bissonauth
TTH 10:00-11:30; 1:00-2:30

This course treats migration as a political condition and considers the role of the visual in enacting and translating such realities to a larger audience. Students will assess theories of diaspora and transnationalism alongside experiences of human mobility (such as immigration but also indenture, dispossession, exilehood, and trafficking) to examine how the formal elements of artworks from the 20th and 21st centuries narrate and reshape these positionalities anew. This course will focus on themes of (un)belonging, nostalgia, resistance, collectivity, hybridity, critical utopianism, and people of color solidarity. The work of various scholars will be examined including Margo Machida, Gayatri Gopinath, José Muñoz, Cheryl Finley, Jennifer Gonzalez, Joan Kee, Huey Copeland, Courtney Martin, Rasheed Araeen, Alice Yang, Alpesh Patel, and Jane Chin Davidson.  (Counts towards the minor in Visual Studies.)

WRPR 186B  Reinventing Quakerism:  Rufus Jones, Henry Cadbury and the Rise of Quaker Liberalism
D. Watt
TTH 1:00-2:30

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.)

WRPR 188A01, 02 Epidemics and Society
E. Anders
TTH 11:30-1:00; 2:30-4:00

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 11:30-1:00; 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.]