Search Results
Your search for courses · during 2025-26 · tagged with FREN XDept Elective · returned 7 results
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CCST 245 Meaning and Power: Introduction to Analytical Approaches in the Humanities 6 credits
How can it be that a single text means different things to different people at different times, and who or what controls those meanings? What is allowed to count as a “text” in the first place, and why? How might one understand texts differently, and can different forms of reading serve as resistance or activism within the social world? Together we will respond to these questions by developing skills in close reading and discussing diverse essays and ideas. We will also focus on advanced academic writing skills designed to prepare students for comps in their own humanities department.
- Winter 2026
- IS, International Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
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Student has completed any of the following course(s): One 200 or 300 Level course with a LA – Literary/Artistic Analysis course tag with a grade of C- or better.
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CCST 245.01 Winter 2026
- Faculty:Seth Peabody 🏫 👤
- Size:20
- M, WHasenstab 105 12:30pm-1:40pm
- FHasenstab 105 1:10pm-2:10pm
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HIST 137 Early Medieval Worlds in Transformation 6 credits
In this course we will explore a variety of distinct but interconnected worlds that existed between ca.300 and ca.1050. We will interrogate primary sources, especially written and visual materials, as they bear witness to people forming and transforming political, social, religious, and cultural values, ideas and structures. We will work to understand how communities adapt to new conditions and challenges while maintaining links with and repurposing the lifeways, ideas, and material cultures of the past. We will watch as new and different groups and institutions come to power, and how the existing peoples and structures respond and change. Projects in this course will build capacity to interpret difficult primary documents, formulate research questions, and build arguments that combine rigor and humane sympathy.
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HIST 137.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:William North 🏫 👤
- Size:35
- M, WLeighton 304 8:30am-9:40am
- FLeighton 304 8:30am-9:30am
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HIST 141 Europe in the Twentieth Century 6 credits
This course explores developments in European history in a global context from the final decade of the nineteenth century through to the present. We will focus on the impact of nationalism, war, and revolution on the everyday experiences of women and men, and also look more broadly on the chaotic economic, political, social, and cultural life of the period. Of particular interest will be the rise of fascism and communism, and the challenge to Western-style liberal democracy, followed by the Cold War and communism's collapse near the end of the century.
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HIST 141.01 Fall 2025
- Faculty:David Tompkins 🏫 👤
- Size:30
- M, WLeighton 304 9:50am-11:00am
- FLeighton 304 9:40am-10:40am
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HIST 244 The Enlightenment and Its Legacies 6 credits
The Enlightenment: praised for its role in promoting human rights, condemned for its role in underwriting colonialism; lauded for its cosmopolitanism, despised for its Eurocentrism… how should we understand the cultural and intellectual history of the Enlightenment, and what are its legacies? This course starts by examining essential Enlightenment texts by philosophes such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, and then the second half of the term focuses on unpacking the Enlightenment’s entanglements with modern ideas around topics such as religion, race, sex, gender, colonialism etc.
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HIST 244.01 Spring 2026
- Faculty:Susannah Ottaway 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 202 12:30pm-1:40pm
- FLeighton 202 1:10pm-2:10pm
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HIST 247 The First World War as Global Phenomenon 6 credits
This course will explore the global context for this cataclysmic event, which provides the hinge from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. We will spend considerable time on the build-up to and causes of the conflict, with particular emphasis on the new imperialism, race-based ideologies, and the complex international struggles for global power. In addition to the fighting, we will devote a significant portion of the course to the home front and changes in society and culture during and after the war. For History majors, the field will be determined by the student's research project.
- Spring 2026
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry IS, International Studies
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HIST 247.01 Spring 2026
- Faculty:David Tompkins 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 304 9:50am-11:00am
- FLeighton 304 9:40am-10:40am
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POSC 352 Political Theory of Alexis de Tocqueville 6 credits
This course will be devoted to close study of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which has plausibly been described as the best book ever written about democracy and the best book every written about America. Tocqueville uncovers the myriad ways in which equality, including especially the passion for equality, determines the character and the possibilities of modern humanity. Tocqueville thereby provides a political education that is also an education toward self-knowledge.
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POSC 352.01 Spring 2026
- Faculty:Laurence Cooper 🏫 👤
- Size:15
- T, THHasenstab 109 1:15pm-3:00pm
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SOAN 256 Africa: Representation and Conflict 6 credits
Pairing classics in Africanist anthropology with contemporary re-studies, we explore changes in African societies and in the questions anthropologists have posed about them. We address issues of representation and self-presentation in written ethnographies as well as in African portrait photography. We then turn from the visual to the invisible realm of African witchcraft. Initiation rituals, war, and migration place selfhood and belonging back in this-world contexts. In-depth case studies include, among others: the Cameroon Grassfields, the Bemba of Zambia, and the Nuer of South Sudan.
The department strongly recommends that Sociology/Anthropology 110 or 111 be taken prior to enrolling in courses numbered 200 or above.
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SOAN 256.01 Spring 2026
- Faculty:Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- T, THLeighton 236 10:10am-11:55am
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