In this course, we reflect on the realities and representations of Africa's pre-colonial past before the advent of European political domination around 1880. We consider how Africans, Europeans, and the African diaspora have attributed meaning to the place called Africa. We examine how power, trade, and production have intersected with human lives on a global stage. We discuss how humans have tried to make sense of their life situations in relation to Africa and how the diverse peoples of the continent have communicated their particular contexts.

*Offered on Durham Campus

This interdisciplinary course ranges from the ancient civilizations and foundational ethical structures of East Asia to the Mongol invasions and their aftermath. Drawing from the fields of archaeology, history, literature, and cultural studies, students trace the development of early China, Japan, and Korea. Students examine texts from early religious and literary traditions, including Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Shinto. Texts may include Buddhist sutras, Confucius' Analects, Laozi's Dao de Jing, T'ang poetry, Lady Shonagon's Pillow Book, Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Lady Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji, and the Tale of the Heike. The class consists of a creative mix of lectures, discussions, and verbal and written analyses of moving and still images. Students continue to develop their writing skills by writing academic and interpretive essays on interdisciplinary topics as well as creative works that emulate East Asian genres. Students also collaborate on projects in which they produce their own artwork (such as digital and terrestrial gardens, curated museum exhibits, and revisions and additions to literary masterpieces) to demonstrate their understanding of East Asian cultures and accomplishments.

*Offered on Durham Campus

Asian American and Pacific Islander people are playing an ever-increasing role in shaping American society. These diverse peoples are complexly connected to more than fifty cultures and societies, including but not limited to the Pacific Islands and South, Southeast, Western, and East Asia. This interdisciplinary course addresses key themes in Asian American history and considers many different kinds of Asian American texts, including novels, poetry, plays, short stories, film, pop culture, primary historical texts, and interdisciplinary scholarship. Through these texts and more, students will explore how Asian Americans navigate the challenges, privileges, and possibilities that they experience at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, indigeneity, and new forms of belonging and identity in a global age. In the face of stereotypes, racism, violence, militarization, and multiple forms of colonialism and empire, how do Asian Americans nevertheless affirm their identities, enjoy their lives, and act with integrity and agency?

*Offered on Durham Campus

This course explores Latin American literature and culture in the 20th and 21st centuries through short stories, novels, essays, poetry, music, and film. Much of the cultural production from this time period blurs the borders of reality in response to societal fears and tensions related to political violence, racism, and misogyny. We will use this framing to explore genres and techniques such as magical realism, the gothic, the fantastic, science fiction, and the supernatural as we work our way through Latin American modernism, the “Boom” of the 1960s and 70s, the post-boom, and the contemporary literary landscape. We will also pay particular attention to how writers are experimenting with language to develop new forms. In addition to movies such as Argentina, 1985 and Roma and music by artists such as Rita Indiana, Selena, and Calle 13, authors of study may include Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Rosario Castellanos, Julio Cortázar, Ámparo Dávila, Julián Delgado Lopera, Mariana Enriquez, Gabriel García Márquez, Rita Indiana, Wingston González, Clarice Lispector, Valeria Luiselli, Fernanda Melchor, Mónica Ojeda, and Mayra Santos Febres. Much of the literature we read in this class is highly original and experimental, sometimes wildly so. Developing the skills and confidence required to read, think about, discuss, and make sense of complex and rich texts is a central concern of this course.

*Offered on Morganton Campus

This course begins with the idea of the individual as it emerges in the literature, philosophy religion, and art of Ancient Greece, Rome, and Late Antiquity. It continues with ideas about identity in medieval Christendom, and traces the emergence of national literatures, new forms of architecture, and the first nation-states in the High Middle Ages and early Renaissance. It ends with Dante’s Inferno and with Petrarch, the poet whose preoccupation with his own celebrity points the way to the humanism of the Renaissance and the concept of self-fashioning that is the hallmark of modernity. We see the Greeks invent history as an entity distinct from both myth and chronicle, and learn how ideas about history evolve along with ideas about the self, that mysterious and vexing entity that is still our preoccupation today. Throughout the term, we read forward and backward in the Western tradition, exploring both contemporary and historical debates about the nature of history, personal identity, and the uses of literature and art, not only in ancient and medieval writers, but in modern thinkers from Marx to Nietzsche, Adorno, Althusser, and Deleuze. We delve into Homer’s epic accounts of the Trojan War and its aftermath. We see the epic transformed by the Roman poet Virgil, and the metamorphosis of the epic into an individual drama of salvation in Dante. We read tragedies by Euripides where individuals engineer disasters from which no recovery is possible, and we discuss Plato's quest for the ideal education, ideal love, and the ideal society. In political theory, we read Aristotle's analysis of political communities and the good life, and Marsilius of Padua’s medieval treatise on the direct descent of political power from God to human beings. In history, we not only read Thucydides' tragic history of the fate of the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War, we also encounter the Enlightenment ideal of writing scientific history and those who question whether that is possible or even desirable. We look at the cityscapes of Alexander’s empire, and we see how they became the model for Rome and its imitators. We read the first autobiography, written by St. Augustine in the fourth century, and the first Christian theory of history, which is also by Augustine. Throughout the course, we ask questions about the uniqueness of Western man's continuing fascination with the life of the mind and reason, and we think about why the idea of the alienated individual develops as it does in the West. In the process, we make connections between long-vanished worlds and our time. Grades are based on a series of essays, as students discuss and write their way to knowledge.

*Offered on Durham Campus

This is a course for students who get excited about language, who feel compelled to copy down poems and song lyrics in the pages of their journal, who find language the most natural form of expression. In this introduction to the composition and reading of creative writing, students will build a solid foundation for the craft of writing in multiple genres. To learn about the current field, students discuss a wide range of contemporary creative writing by “reading like a writer”—gleaning writing lessons from mentor texts and practicing those lessons in their own work. In addition to reading creative works, students ponder theoretical and historical questions of creative writing: How does cultural bias impact what readers consider ‘good writing’? How do genre conventions evolve, and what does it mean to work outside traditional genres? Students work individually on assignments, discuss readings as a class, and collaborate with peers in workshops where burgeoning writers encounter an affirming and constructive audience for their work. Assignments focus on developing the tools for writing in many genres and styles, along with developing the habits to enable the generation of ideas, the ability to trust intuition, the construction of narrative and image, and the process of revision. To give back to the writer’s community, students may also write book reviews or conduct interviews with authors. A final project, either a portfolio or longer work, is accompanied by a critical reflection that asks students to identify their influences and aesthetics. By the end of this course, students will have both a polished portfolio of their best work and the skills to engage deeply in a creative process that results in powerful writing.

*Offered on Morganton Campus & Online

In 2011, Ken Warren declared that "African-American literature" was dead, arguing that its usefulness only extended as a response to Jim Crow and was, for all intents and purposes, no longer necessary. This course in contemporary African-American literature, inherently a diasporic study, explores this question as an exclusive study of African-American literature and literary critique. This body of literature, marked by the first Black presidency as well as the Black Lives Matter movement, offers a rich canon of texts that grapple with the meaning of Black life and Black artistic production in the late 20th- and 21st-century context. The course asks students to participate in literary analyses and engage with major theoretical frameworks including, but not limited to, Black Feminism, Neo-Colonialism, and Afro-Futurism. In addition, students consider the historical, social, and political processes that impact the literature they read. Activities include in-class presentations, video essays, and analytical writing assignments.

*Offered on Durham & Morganton Campuses

Science fiction doesn’t predict the future, but it can help shape it. Good science fiction, in the words of Philip K. Dick, takes a new idea and makes it “intellectually stimulating to the reader. . . . It unlocks the reader’s mind so that that mind, like the author’s, begins to create. Thus science fiction is creative and it inspires creativity.” In this course, we will follow a series of writers and filmmakers as they attempt to unlock our minds and open them to the potentialities and problems of artificial general intelligence. As scientists around the world work to enhance machine learning capabilities and as figures ranging from Elon Musk to Henry Kissinger warn of the dangers of AI, this course will look to science fiction as a laboratory of ideas, one in which creative minds ask us to consider a number of different ways that AI is and could transform our society. Students will thus be asked, and generate their own answers to, a variety of questions that will accompany the development of general intelligence. Such questions include: How will researchers know when they have actually created a general intelligence? Will it be sentient? If so, what rules and laws should govern our treatment of AI, or AI’s treatment of humanity? What’s the difference between a human and algorithm trained to perfectly mimic that human’s speech patterns? Can AI make art? And do androids dream of electric sheep? In this class, we will explore the answers our most imaginative artists have come up with to those questions.

*Offered on Durham Campus

This course explores selected works from Britain’s rich literary history, including works by Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantic poets, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett (among other visual artists, filmmakers, and musicians). These readings will allow us to think about how changing perceptions of the self, history, truth, women, sexuality, politics, social existence, and the natural world are registered in artworks spanning from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Our course begins with an emphasis on Shakespeare’s major comedies and tragedies, and from here we consider how Shakespeare’s innovative approach for representing human nature was adapted and transformed by the artists who succeeded him. We pay special attention throughout the course to selected historical and social developments throughout British history and how they influenced (and were influenced by) the arts: the development of Renaissance humanism, the rise of Enlightenment rationalism, and the transformation of Britain into a modern, industrialized nation are a few of the trends that we study in parallel with the arts.

*Offered on Durham Campus

The creation of the world. The rise of Zeus. The birth of Athena. The abduction of Persephone. The fall of Troy. The wanderings and homecoming of Odysseus. For nearly three thousand years, these stories of gods and mortals have gripped the imaginations of listeners and readers. In this course, we explore major myths of the ancient Greeks and Romans, with a special emphasis on how these oral tales were committed to writing in epic poems and tragic plays. Throughout the course, we seek to understand these myths in the geographical, historical, and cultural contexts in which they were created. We read ancient Greek and Roman texts in English translation, including works by Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Vergil, and Ovid. Ancient works of art and architecture, including vase paintings and sculpture, form a rich complement to these written sources. We also explore major theories of myth interpretation—from approaches taken by the ancient Greeks themselves to those developed by modern-day theorists—and apply these theories to the myths we encounter. Finally, we explore how later artists, writers, and filmmakers have appropriated, interpreted, and transformed these ancient stories into new forms—often for very different purposes than those served by the myths in the ancient world. Although most of the assessments are essay-based, we also take these ancient myths into our own imaginations in a deep and powerful way and transform them into our own original creations—poems, narratives, dramatic scenes, visual art, and other forms. Our journey together culminates in a public performance of these metamorphoses.

*Offered on Durham Campus

Beginning with experimental novels of the late nineteenth-century and focusing on French, Spanish, German, Czech, English, American, Cuban, Colombian, African, and Japanese writers, this comparative literature course examines the extraordinary flowering of twentieth-century fiction—with its open-ended form and experimental styles—against a backdrop of what Stephen Kern has called a transformed “culture of time and space.” In our effort to understand this rich body of literature, we explore the relationships between movements in philosophy and the visual arts—including photography and film—and the changing shapes of fiction. Readings may include short stories by Jorge Luis Borges and Michel Tournier; novels such as Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Miguel de Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, Mártir, Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gide's The Immoralist, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Donna Tartt's Secret History. Through a series of analytical essays, students explore questions about authors and their audiences and the relationship between literary texts and contexts. In the process, students strengthen their own voices and explore the connections between literary and cultural identity.*

*Offered on Durham Campus

This course in Southern Studies introduces the literature, history, and culture of the American South up to the present day. The notion of “the South” has a peculiar function in the United States’s national literary and cultural traditions, from an identifier of some of the most important literary works of the 20th century to serving as the place par excellence to think questions of progress and backwardness, equality and injustice, good and evil. On our way to understanding what it is that makes a work “Southern” besides a map and a birth certificate, we investigate an array of aspects of Southern literature and culture, both “high culture” and “low culture.” Through a combination of study of the work of major Southern novelists, short-story writers, and poets (e.g., William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, Natasha Trethewey, Walker Percy, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Cormac McCarthy), as well as key cultural features that are taken to be crucial to the South (including memory, food, music, and religion), we discuss the ways place, race, class, gender, and sexuality refract our ideas of what it means for a person or a work to be “Southern.” We also address the questions of whether and how “the South” continues to be, if it ever was, a useful or coherent concept—particularly regarding claims of uniqueness.

*Offered on Morganton Campus

If “it's wanting to know that makes us matter,” as Tom Stoppard suggests in Arcadia, then it's little wonder that the endeavors of STEM fields to understand the mysteries of our universe have proven such fertile ground for dramatists. In this page-to-stage course, we examine how theatrical art wrestles with the implications and repercussions of STEM discoveries to explore larger questions of our humanity, purpose, and meaning. In addition to plays that include Life of Galileo, Copenhagen, and Arcadia, we consider a range of historical, literary, and scholarly texts that inform and contextualize these works. Through close reading, we strengthen our communication skills by analyzing and critiquing the way an author orients a lay audience to complex STEM concepts and connects them to larger thematic ideas. In a broader sense, our chief concern is to investigate how the efforts of science, mathematics, and the humanities to explain our world intersect, inform, and challenge one another—how in mapping the stars, we might also map our hearts and minds. Creative, stage-related projects and formal academic writing assignments provide substantial opportunities for students to experiment with their own ideas and demonstrate their learning throughout the course.

*Offered on Durham Campus

Research in Humanities encourages writing and reading that is at once critical and necessarily creative, for by these acts of interdisciplinary scholarship, students seek to construct new objects of knowledge—a knowledge commensurate with their experience of the world, informed and indeed altered by the works and words of others. This course is necessarily interdisciplinary, because it is, among other things, a critique of the division of labor within institutions of knowledge. In other words, even as it seeks to understand how disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science, economics, and literature constitute their objects of study (the human, the mind, society, etc.), it also attends carefully to the limits of disciplinary formation, to the ways in which the “human” or “nature” escape the classificatory systems within which they are defined and to which they are confined. Research in Humanities is organized around theories and practices of research in the humanities and the sciences. The study of theory is necessary because these researches should be critical and historical, interrogating both their subject’s conditions of possibility and the contemporary situation of their study. Each week, members of the seminar will consider different theoretical approaches to reading and writing about diverse texts. These approaches include, but are not limited to, political criticism, cultural and ethnic studies, feminism, gender and sexuality, historicism, and colonial and post-colonial critique. As for practice, students will learn how to conduct research and how to construct an effective thesis statement that will govern an argument developed and sustained throughout a paper of twenty- to twenty-five pages. The proper use of evidence, as well as considerations of evidentiary significance, will also be fundamental to the course’s concerns. Students will then transform their research into articles for scholarly publication, including Fifth World, NCSSM’s journal of interdisciplinary research in the humanities. They will serve on the editorial board for Fifth World, evaluating submissions, offering suggestions for revisions, and ensuring the timely delivery of the completed journal to the publisher.

*Offered on Durham & Morganton Campuses

The special function of the entrepreneur is to innovate. At the core of this course in entrepreneurship is an exploration of what it means to be innovative. Students will experience the search for “innovation opportunities” within a wide range of market spaces. Questions related to value generation, effective collaboration, design thinking, and leadership will be investigated. The element of risk will be front and center as student-entrepreneurs evaluate the complexities of moving from an idea to a sustainable and (we hope) profitable business model. Throughout the course, student teams will bring the themes and principles of entrepreneurship to life by building a business around an innovative product. Importantly, the course introduces students to successful entrepreneurs to learn from their knowledge, experience, and insights. As a culminating event, students will showcase their innovations during an entrepreneurial competition on campus. The course thus provides students with a platform for creative and innovative thinking.

*Offered on Durham Campus & Online

Media Studies is an interdisciplinary cultural studies course in which students examine and interpret the ways various modes of media influence us. Students study media theory; they analyze cultural and historical contexts as well as aesthetics of a variety of formats; they examine how forms have shifted; they investigate the relationship between media and reality, ways that media influences and changes our culture, and how responses to media change over time. Students contemplate issues such as: technology, representations of reality, human meaning, identity politics, economics, gender/race/ethnicity, and community/belonging. Students demonstrate understanding by creating original media such as podcasts, videos, social media posts, and graphic narratives in addition to traditional, formal written assignments.

*Offered Online

The experiences of immigrants to this “nation of immigrants” have a profound influence on our nation’s history and on the development of what it means to be an American. Immigration patterns and policy play key roles in these experiences, However, the United States has a fraught relationship with its own immigration history and remains divided about immigration policy. In this course, we examine 20th and 21st-century public policy and how political decisions affect and reflect the realities faced by immigrants, particularly immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. In addition, by reading fiction by authors including Chimamanda Adichie, Fae Myenne Ng, Yuri Herrera, Valeria Luiselli, and Neel Patel, we examine how stories tell personal as well as political truths about the immigrant experience. By collecting oral histories from friends, family, and community members, students will contribute to current scholarship on immigration and will create work that can be contributed to the University of Minnesota immigration archive.

*Offered on Durham Campus 

This course introduces the interdisciplinary field of American Indian and Indigenous Studies and explores some of the diverse Native cultures, knowledge systems, histories, and research methods that make the field a dynamic and increasingly popular area of research. The course will explore the perspectives of Native peoples through literature, film, oral tradition, academic scholarship, and material culture. Using these expressions, students will analyze the significance of topics including land, community, sovereignty, treaty rights, self-determination, and environmental justice. Through research and reflection, students will leverage Native perspectives to unpack dominant historical narratives that facilitate settler colonialism and stereotypes of Native people that permeate popular portrayals. By the end of the course, students will apply interdisciplinary American Indian and Indigenous Studies research methods and analysis to examine a contemporary issue or topic that resonates with their interests.

*Offered on Morganton Campus 

This course explores the foundations and central tenets of Critical Legal Studies, including current applications, debates, and evolutions, with particular attention to its intersections with the fields of American Studies, Urban Studies, and Ethnic Studies. Course texts, organizing questions, and the discussions to which students are invited take for granted that the law is an organizing pillar of U.S. society, and that the law creates and is informed by discourses, practices, and systems of oppression including, but not limited to, systemic racism, gender inequity, heterosexism, and classism. This course will explore the nuances of how dispossession, disenfranchisement, wealth inequality, and more are embedded within our legal system. Critical Legal Studies’ objectives are in a way self-evident from the course title—the course invites its participants to review the law critically. The field provides a meaningful, practical, and evidence-based lens to engage in cultural productions of personhood and citizenship as they relate to the U.S. and to emerging concepts of global citizenship. This course allows students to explore diverse experiences and different understandings of belonging through legal studies and storytelling/narratives. By the end of the course, students will produce scholarship that demonstrates their expanded knowledge as they apply the framework of Critical Legal Studies to their lived experiences.

*Offered on Durham Campus 

In our rapidly changing world, technological and medical advances pose ongoing challenges to achieving public consensus while protecting diverse lifestyles, cultures, and beliefs. This course will use interdisciplinary approaches to explore controversial topics within the scope of bioethics, a growing academic field dedicated to studying ethical problems arising at the intersection of culture, science, medicine, law, public policy, and biotechnology. Our goals are to examine the philosophical underpinnings of ethical theories, as well as their applications by health professionals, courts, and legislators; analyze and construct bioethical arguments; and engage in constructive and respectful debates in order to formulate our own moral positions. We will engage with controversies in such areas as neuroethics, medical tourism, organ donation and transplantation, biohacking, reproductive and pediatric ethics, euthanasia, genetic engineering, synthetic body parts and transhumanism, genetic enhancement, CRISPR gene editing, mental health, and racial disparities in healthcare, among others. Course activities will include discussion boards, case studies, in-class debates, reading quizzes, and media critiques. Students will be expected to keep up with bioethics in the news, as well as prepare and present additional research, either individually or in teams.

*Offered on Morganton Campus 

Filmmaker Orson Welles once said, “A film is a ribbon of dreams. The camera is much more than a recording apparatus; it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world that is not ours and that brings us to the heart of a great secret. Here magic begins.” In a culture that increasingly relies on visual information, a comprehension of how meaning grows out of the moving image is essential. This course is a historical and critical survey of the motion picture both as a developing art form and as a medium of mass communication. The course entails systematic analysis of how filmmakers use sound and image to tell stories on the screen. Students view selected films as case studies to understand the relationship between theory and practice in filmmaking. Through explorations of the historical, social, and political dimensions of filmmaking, students learn to read and write more effectively, to look at the world with a critical eye, and most importantly, to develop a critical audio-visual literacy. Students demonstrate what they have learned through analytical writing assignments. The course may also include individual or group projects, presentations, creative writing, or short exercises in filmmaking.

*Offered on Durham & Morganton Campuses

This course will examine the fundamental philosophical, economic, and political ideas that have shaped the modern world: subjectivity, capitalism, and liberalism. Other sources may include Plato, the Hebrew Bible, Augustine, Aquinas, Julian of Norwich, Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx. One of the key goals of the liberal arts is to prepare students to live in a free society. An important aspect of freedom is awareness of the forces shaping the world we live in. We will consider how these fundamental ideas developed; we will emphasize finding connections between ideas; we will examine how those ideas impact our own thinking; and we will develop analytical writing skills by responding to those ideas.

*Offered on Durham & Morganton Campuses

An interdisciplinary introduction to the field of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, this course explores feminist perspectives on intersecting inequalities. Topics include: work and labor; sexuality and sexual identity; gender relations; images of women and gender in literature, science and technology, religion, and art; family structures and domestic roles; and the history of feminist struggles. Course readings are drawn from the humanities and the social sciences. We will use discussion, lecture, film, reading, written texts, and popular culture to help students continue to develop their skills in reading, critical thinking, writing, presenting, and working collaboratively with their peers to answer questions such as: How do the experiences of women and other subordinated groups help us to understand gender norms, identity categories, and sexuality? How might one perform, analyze, interrogate, and challenge what has been constructed as “normal” in contemporary western culture? This class explores a multitude of feminist perspectives on the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, class, physical ability, nationality, age and other categories of identity. Students will interrogate these categories as socially-constructed while acknowledging that these constructions have real effects in subordinating groups, marking bodies and creating structural, intersectional inequalities.

*Offered on Durham Campus

This course offers students an opportunity for immersion in a fascinating discipline and in logical thinking. This immersive process involves an introduction to general economic theory and more specific microeconomic theory. Graphical analysis will play a major role in understanding the relationship between economic variables. The course will frequently consider international applications and scenarios while studying microeconomic topics related to income inequality, factor market dynamics, labor costs, and global entrepreneurship. Students pursue this topic through case studies or strategic problems involving pricing issues in product and factor markets, competition across various market structures, and industrial and social regulation within both historic and contemporary environments. Thus, the curriculum content and processes of analyses are organized around holistic, ill-structured, real-world "problems,” and case studies. These experiences are designed to be of an integrated and multi-layered nature and provide opportunities to discover and apply the microeconomics concepts from our readings and discussions. In taking this consciously constructivist approach, we integrate other disciplines into the study of microeconomics. Elements from the fields of psychology, history, political science, and mathematics all have roles to play as we propose resolutions to our microeconomic problems and case studies.

*Offered on Durham Campus