Category: Archive courses

Examines how Indonesia, the world’s fourth most-populous country, with the largest Islamic population, weaves together local practices and influence from India and Persia. Offers ways of understanding modern Indonesian performing arts, religion, and politics.

Petty fights. Bad blood. Dyke drama. Ideological warfare. Political impasses. This class explores how conflict has always bee central to feminist thinking, and to the disciplinary formations of feminism with the academy. We examine how fights – interpersonal, ideological, and the lines that blur the two – are often the mechanisms through which feminism’s political imaginations are configured. We pay particular attention to how feminist fights across the 20th and 21st centuries are laced with (over)determinations of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation that produce endlessly more fights.

Sense and Sensibility:
Ethics and Emotions in the 18th Century
German 590/ English 524
Ellwood Wiggins
The Age of Reason and the Age of Sentimentality find their latter-day representatives in Elinor and Marianne, two sisters in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811). In this course, we will trace the development of the “cult of feeling” from its Enlightenment roots to Austen’s wry skewering. This era saw a dramatic shift in conceptions of emotions, from the external showiness of Baroque passions to the internal expressiveness of sentimentalist feelings. Despite this shift toward interiority, emotions–even in their narrative representation–continue to be inflected through performative and theatrical categories.
We will explore the theory and practice of affect in the 18th century, reading philosophers of feeling (Moses Mendelssohn, Adam Smith, J.J. Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft) and purveyors of sentiment (G.E. Lessing, Laurence Sterne, Sophie de La Roche, J.M.R. Lenz, Hannah Foster, Jane Austen). How are emotions constructed in art and in moral philosophy? How do feelings manifest in bodies? Can feelings be shared? If morality has its foundation in the senses, what consequences does that have for art and for life? These and related questions are no less urgent today than they were in the 18th century. We will also read important recent scholarship in affect theory and the history of the emotions.
All readings available in translation. Discussion in English.

On the first day of class, we will finalize the syllabus together and discuss a variety of assignment possibilities (including a traditional seminar paper or the organization of a conference panel) in order to determine what fits best with student interests and needs.
The following texts will certainly feature in our readings for seminar discussions:
Moses Mendelssohn, Letters on the Sentiments (Briefe über die Empfindungen, 1755)
G.E. Lessing, Miss Sara Sampson (1755)
Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, sel.)
Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (1765)
Mary Wollstonecraft, Justification of the Rights of Women (1792)
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Depending on the trajectory chosen together with students on the first day of class, we will also read a couple of the following: Lessing, Mendelssohn, Nicolai, Correspondence on Tragedy (Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel, 1756-7); Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757); Denis Diderot, Le fils naturel (1757); J.J. Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761); Sophie de la Roche, Fräulein von Sternheim (1771); Goethe, lyric poems and/or The Sufferings of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werther, 1774); J.M.R. Lenz, The Tutor (Der Hofmeister, 1774) or The Hermit (Der Waldbruder, 1776); Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette (1797); Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria: or the Wrongs of Woman (1798); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818).
In conjunction with the primary texts, we will discuss recent scholarship in affect theory and literary studies by scholars such as Eve Sedgwick, Ruth Leys, Martha Nussbaum, and others.

In response to the University’s Race and Equity Initiative, the Graduate School has developed a non-sequential three quarter course series. This is the 3rd and final course in the series for graduate students.
More information.

The subdiscipline of animal studies or study of human-animal relations has emerged as an exciting new interdisciplinary line of inquiry within the greater context of the environmental humanities in the Anglo academic context but also in Germany. Most practitioners, however, come from disciplines like ethics, science studies, history of consciousness, critical theory, etc.—not from literature. We will familiarize ourselves with the main strands of arguments, the philosophical tradition leading up to arguments made in these contemporary manifestos, and critical reaction to these positions, mainly through expert reports. Students chose two books/topics ranging from philosophical works to critical writings and artistic traditions which they present to the group in a 15-minute oral report accompanied with a handout summarizing the main theses backed by quotes and followed by a few reflective comments on how we might integrate the material in our discussions.
The main emphasis of the seminar will be on the aesthetic strategies (literary and visual) employed in framing human-animal relations in German literature from Goethe to contemporary authors. Which genres and poetic devices are selected to represent the animal voice or the animal gaze and how are the genre conventions affirmed or critiqued? How are nonhuman actors rendered in literature? How is the agency of nature troped? A few secondary readings from German animal studies will accompany our analysis of the primary works in order to build a common vocabulary for the discussion of the literature, but reading and discussing the primary texts is our main goal. The main question in front of us is: in what ways does literature (and, to a minor extent, art and visual culture) work through strategies of concealment of what has been called the condition of human animality? How does literature (and art) configure a cultural sphere in which human-animal relations are part of a larger environmental crisis?

This course is designed for graduate students seeking to build their knowledge and skills in effective teaching practices as a teaching assistant or independent instructor.  An introduction to evidence-based pedagogies and practices in higher education, this course is appropriate for all graduate students interested in college and university teaching.
Together, we will look at frameworks and models of learning, specific practices for implementing such frameworks, and the research that supports them. Our focus throughout the course will be on how students may apply their learning in their current or future teaching positions.  Some of the topics that we?ll address include: Course design models; informal and formal assessment; active learning strategies; teaching inclusively; arts-based teaching practices; and using technology effectively in teaching.
While this course is predominantly an interdisciplinary exploration of fundamental practices and pedagogies, students will complete at least one assignment exploring teaching in their own discipline and will be encouraged to follow their own interests throughout.
Student learning goals:
Become familiar with and engage the research on Teaching and Learning and identify sources for scholarly research on teaching in your discipline.
Be able to identify key differences across several frameworks and models of learning, specific practices that might be used to implement each framework, and the associated supporting research.
Build practical skills in planning and implementing active learning strategies, formal and informal assessment of student learning, and promoting an inclusive classroom for all students.
Become familiar with arts-based teaching practices that promote creative and critical thinking and considerations for teaching effectively with technology.
Reflect on and assess your own teaching and plan for your future development as a teacher.

This seminar will investigate the Anthropocene concept developed by Paul J. Crutzen in 2000 in terms of its impact on culture and develop a historical and critical perspective on the basis of readings of literary and cultural documents that feature the increasing impact of man’s influence on the earth and the collapse of the nature/culture divide. We will critically analyze the scientific narratives and visualizations of the concept of the Anthropocene and then look at specific examples where Anthropocene phenomena are configured in literature and culture including texts by Wilhelm Raabe, Georg Kaiser, Alfred Döblin, Christa Wolf, Dietmar Darth, Ilija Trojanow, Fatih Akin and others. Students will be responsible for all readings, lead group discussions, and prepare collaborative presentations/events as well as individual contributions to a communal digital project.

Want to make positive change in classroom and institutional climate so that all of our students thrive? In this cross-disciplinary course, students build practical skills in interactive social change theater to challenge institutional oppression and promote inclusive educational environments in classroom, institutional, and community contexts.
Culminates in public interactive theater performance and dialogue workshops.
Graduate students from all disciplines and UW campuses are welcome. Previous theater experience not required.
As educators and scholars, we all have the responsibility to create learning environments that promote student success. In this crossdisciplinary course, graduate students will learn to use the language and practice of theater to challenge institutional oppression, advance community dialogue and collective problem-solving, and promote inclusive educational environments in classroom, institutional, and community contexts. Graduate students from all disciplines and UW campuses are welcome. Students are not required to have previous theater or social action experience, but do need to be open to the process. The course culminates in a student-organized, public interactive theater performance and dialogue workshop.
Instructors Theresa Ronquillo (Center for Teaching & Learning) and Tikka Sears (Memory War Theater) co-direct the Interactive Theater as Pedagogy Project (ITPP).
Questions about the course? Email ctlitp@uw.edu
For more information about ITPP: http://www.washington.edu/teaching/innovation/itpp/
Co-Sponsored by the UW Certificate in Public Scholarship, a partnership of the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at UW Bothell, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and The Graduate School, and the Center for Teaching & Learning.

This graduate seminar proposes to introduce students to prominent critical idioms of the humanities in the 21st century, particularly as they pertain to the Anthropocene hypothesis. While the entanglement of industrial activity and planetary systems has been expressed within the geosciences in the informal designation of a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene—this term is also becoming an occasion to critically reexamine the place of the earth in the Humanities. Amidst the increasing recognition of the intervention of the anthropos into earth systems, this seminar draws on and extends the inroads that the geos has recently made into traditionally humanistic domains, including geophilosophy, geocriticism, geontology, geopoetics, and geopolitics. How is the legacy of 20th century critical thought and theory challenged by catastrophic climate change and ongoing ecocides? How can literature contend with new climate regimes?
Through readings in the German tradition and beyond, including Kleist, Hoffman, Grass, Frisch, Wolf, and Sebald, the seminar proposes to explore how writers in a geo-poetic tradition inform our current geologic self-understanding. Readings will be oriented around four principal environmental threats associated with the Anthropocene and corresponding aesthetic, political, and ethical questions: 1) pollution  2) extinction 3) terraforming and 4) climate change. Theoretical readings are drawn mostly from contemporary voices as they engage with 20th century paradigms, including Chakrabarty, Grosz, Povinelli, Yusoff, Parikka, Rigby, Colebrook, and Zylinska. The language of instruction is English.  Primary readings will be available in both German and English.

Builds skills in social change interactive theater to challenge institutional oppression, advance community dialogue, and promote inclusive educational environments. Emphasizes political education; storytelling; collaborative playwriting; rehearsal of plays and interventions; discussion; and self-reflection. Culminates in student-organized, public interactive theater performance and dialogue workshops. No previous acting experience required.