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Animal/Culture

 

 

About Humanities Core

Humanities Core is a year-long course that examines how people across time and culture have interpreted their experiences and understood what it is to be human. Through the study of literature, film, history, philosophy, popular culture, and visual art, students delve into how meaning is made and learn various forms of analysis to gain a greater understanding of social interaction and human creativity.

The theme of this cycle of Humanities Core is Animal/Culture. Lectures by nine prominent faculty will present for students a variety of cultural artifacts and modes of understanding human experience in relation to other species. In small seminars, students will engage closely with this complex material while developing visual, oral, electronic, and written communication skills that will serve them in every academic discipline and in public life.

By addressing a wide range of topics and approaches to humanistic inquiry, Core meets seven General Education requirements, in the categories of lower-division writing, arts and humanities, multicultural studies, and international/global issues.

Fall

We explore premodern ways of thinking about classification, sovereignty, religion, the environment, and interspecies cohabitation. How do concepts and practices such as metamorphosis, translation, and virtue work in cultural and biological spheres, in earlier periods and today? Students will read classics of world literature by Attar, Chaucer, Marie de France, Obeyd-i-Zakani, Ovid, and Shakespeare, among others, while investigating genres of wisdom literature, epic poetry, drama, and political satire. We will consider textual materiality, transmission, …

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Winter

We examine the relationship of non-human animals and people deemed “inhuman” in the contexts of colonization and imperialism. What can the use of animals for companionship, entertainment, sport, transportation, medicine, food, and as a source of biomass energy teach us about the dynamics of empire? Lectures will explore spaces that trouble the boundaries between humans and animals: the hunt, the confinement of the colonized peoples in “human zoos,” and the interspecies kinship of carceral …

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Spring

The final quarter of Animal/Culture investigates how humans are entangled with animals from beginning to end, from earliest childhood into the contemplation of environmental collapse. Students will be introduced to interpretive frameworks like ecological criticism and queer studies as lecturing faculty explore the role of animals in the …

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