This course is an introduction to life and culture in German-speaking societies. It enables students to express ideas in German about everyday topics, including friends, relationships, weather, clothing, food, and daily routines. Through communicative activities, students learn to ask and answer questions, seek information and share opinions, navigate a variety of conversational settings, and develop sensitivity for cultural difference.
This course is an introduction to life and culture in German-speaking societies. It enables students to express ideas in German about everyday topics, including friends, relationships, weather, clothing, food, and daily routines. Through communicative activities, students learn to ask and answer questions, seek information and share opinions, navigate a variety of conversational settings, and develop sensitivity for cultural difference.
This intermediate-level course integrates German language learning with developing a deeper understanding of cultural production in German-speaking societies. Exploring the spatial and human diversity of German-speaking Europe, students study familiar and essential topics from German perspectives and make cross-cultural comparisons about topics such as cities, travel and the self, consumption and consumerism, historical transformations, the environment, and visions of the future.
This intermediate-level course integrates German language learning with developing a deeper understanding of cultural production in German-speaking societies. Exploring the spatial and human diversity of German-speaking Europe, students study familiar and essential topics from German perspectives and make cross-cultural comparisons about topics such as cities, travel and the self, consumption and consumerism, historical transformations, the environment, and visions of the future.
This course investigates identity and belonging in German-speaking countries. Students examine, research and evaluate narrative texts to understand how they are influenced by and in turn shape negotiations of nationality, identity, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Through this analysis, the course questions how memory, migration, colonialism, and cultural diversity form and inform national identity.
This course centers on key topics and concepts in the field of German Studies. Through readings of primary and secondary materials, the course develops students' critical and research skills. Each student completes a senior research project, which results in a substantial essay written in German. Topics may include an exploration of literary concepts, periods, and authors, or focus on cultural issues.
Global Citizenship
The course prepares students for study abroad experiences by introducing them to concepts of global citizenship, techniques for field investigation (borrowed mostly from anthropology), and, to a lesser degree, social processes of integration into a new host culture.
Students reflect on the study away experience, use storytelling techniques to consider and express the personal impact of study away, and undertake a project that puts into action the awareness, skills, and attitudes of global citizenship. Through topics including culture shock, identity development, and readjustment to social life in the US, students work to integrate their study away experience with their academic and co-curricular work at Sewanee and beyond.
Students reflect on the study away experience, use storytelling techniques to consider and express the personal impact of study away, and undertake a project that puts into action the awareness, skills, and attitudes of global citizenship. Through topics including culture shock, identity development, and readjustment to social life in the US, students work to integrate their study away experience with their academic and co-curricular work at Sewanee and beyond.
Students engage in an approved internship on an authorized study abroad or study away program. Students are expected to complete 45-67.5 hours of internship work per credit hour. Interning students will complete bi-weekly reflective exercises and an academic paper at the end of the internship.
Students engage in an approved internship on an authorized study abroad or study away program. Students are expected to complete 45-67.5 hours of internship work per credit hour. Interning students will complete bi-weekly reflective exercises and an academic paper at the end of the internship.
Greek
An intensive, introductory course in classical and koine Greek emphasizing forms and syntax and with extensive readings. Four class hours per week.
Portions of Herodotus are read.
History
This course examines women's participation in social and political movements throughout the world since the late eighteenth century in order to understand how gender (the set of beliefs each culture has regarding male and female difference) has affected women's involvement. The course explores a variety of gender-based arguments that women have used to bring social change, assessing whether these approaches are effective or ultimately limit women to a narrow range of issues. Some attention is paid to how gender affects men's involvement in social movements.
The course delves into the intellectual, social and cultural aspects of the Native American/European encounter in what came to be called Latin America in the first century after the arrival of Columbus. It examines such facets as the underlying religious and political legitimation of the Iberian conquests, indigenous responses, and the issue of "othering" and mutual perceptions. It also scrutinizes material and institutional factors such as Spanish imperial and Indian policy, forms of surplus extraction established by the Spanish, and political arrangements embracing native peoples and Europeans.
Sacred to three religions, the contested future capital of two nations, a place of longing for millions, Jerusalem is one of the world's great cities. This course looks at the history, geography, and religious significance of the Holy City, while also considering its place as a city of the imagination. In investigating the city's place in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, its historic importance for Muslim and European imperialists, its long status as a tourist and pilgrimage destination, and its significance in Israeli and Palestinian nationalism, the course asks whether the myriad understandings of the city can co-exist or is Jerusalem destined to always be "a golden bowl filled with scorpions."
This course examines some of the most significant conflicts and turning points in the history of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth in Europe and its Caribbean slave colonies from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. We approach women’s reproductive bodies as contested sites of political struggle over issues as diverse as slavery, colonialism, population growth and birth control, religious reform, midwifery, the medicalization of childbirth, and nation-building. Centering women’s voices and experiences of the birth process where the sources allow us, we study the cultures and communities that women of diverse racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds constructed around biological reproduction.
This course will examine the colonial legacies of museums while investigating current museum practices. Through critically engaging with the display and representation of Indigenous and African diasporic arts and history in the colonial, modern, and contemporary eras, students will address issues of interpretation, deaccessioning, and repatriation. The central questions considered in this course will include: How have the dual histories of settler colonialism and slavery influenced collection and exhibition practices? What are the future directions in contemporary museum practice? How have people resisted and shaped museum exhibitions connected to their history and culture?
This course is an introduction to the study of the Black diaspora. Built on a chronological and thematic basis, the course will focus on the history and culture of populations of African descent, particularly in Europe and the Americas. This course is divided into three parts. The first part will conceptualize the notion of Black diaspora. The second part will explore the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, in particular, we will discuss how this forced migration impacted societies in the Americas and Europe. The third section of this course will explore the post-emancipation period and the modern construction of race in western societies. Students will review both primary and secondary readings throughout the semester.
Citizenship has a complicated history in Indian country, one that long predates the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. While Native nations often rejected citizenship as a hollow promise and conduit of colonization, other Indigenous people within the United States actively sought citizenship to combat inequality and dispossession. Some achieved unique recognition of rights, while most navigated limited citizenship as a framework to remain in their homeland. Featuring readings on regional case studies of Native political rights, the course will cover early victories and defeats of Native citizenship in the early American republic, citizenship in the Civil War era on state, federal, and tribal levels, tensions between tribal sovereignty and citizenship through the allotment era, and the long history of Native suffrage.