Course Atlas - Spring 2008

IDS 213WR: Politics of Identity

Cauvin, TTH, 4:00pm - 5:15pm
Horacek, TTH, 2:30pm - 3:45pm
Montoya, MWF, 9:35am - 10:25am
Ramachandran, MWF, 2:00pm - 2:50pm
Vandenberg, MWF, 9:35am - 10:25am

MAX: 18

Content: Personal identities are constructed and altered through complex historical, cultural, and psychological processes and experiences. Through the study of a variety of texts from cultures other than those of the US, we will explore some of the forces that appear to shape identity and mark it in familiar terms: gender, race, nationality, religion, class, colonialism, ethnicity, space and place. The course has three intertwined themes: 1) Individual coming of age and identity formation, 2) Global forces and the shaping of identity, and 3) Forging communities and collective identities.

IDS 216WR: Visual Culture

Grimshaw, TTH, 8:30am - 9:45am
Hughes, MWF, 12:50 pm - 1:40pm
Alexander, TTH, 8:30am - 9:45am

MAX: 18

Content: This course introduces students to the treatment of vision and visual media in the humanities and the interpretive social sciences. We will explore the cultural construction of vision, visual representation, and "visuality" in diverse societies, with particular attention to the ideological dimensions of photography and cinema. We will also critically examine how anthropologists and others have used visual methods-- especially photography and ethnographic film-- to represent and interpret human societies and cultures.

IDS 371: Voodoo

Bay, TTH, 1:00pm - 2:15pm

MAX: 18

Content: An inquiry into the world’s most maligned religious and cultural system, more properly called vodou and vodun, this three-part multidisciplinary course begins with the study of vodou religious practice in Brooklyn , NY. It then moves to the cultures of vodou in the Caribbean and particularly in Haiti. Issues considered include the character of selected deities or lwa, altars and sacred paraphernalia, healing traditions, possession and sacrifice, magic and sorcery, and the so-called syncretism of African and Catholic spirits. The second portion of the course explores the African roots and relatives of vodou, with special attention to the Fon/Yoruba and Kongo cultural areas. The final third of the course considers the history of interaction between American and Haitian cultures, including the representation of vodou in American popular culture.

Texts: Readings are drawn from the work of anthropologists, folklorists, historians, novelists, art historians, dancers, and religious specialists. Several of the major authors read are Karen McCarthy Brown, Maya Deren, Edwidge Danticat, Linda Heywood, John Thornton, Joan Dayan, and Donald Cosentino.

IDS 385R/ILA 790: Diagnosis

Gilman, W, 3:00pm - 5:30pm

MAX: 5 (IDS 5/ILA 5)

Content: “Diagnosis” precedes everything.  To be understood as a disease, the signs and symptoms must point towards some pattern that can be labeled.  From the Greeks to the present, the act of diagnosing defines the Health Sciences.  This initial course in the Emory Health Sciences Humanities will interrogate the cultural meaning of “diagnosis.”  Yet every epoch, each health culture, each professional school as well as the humanities and the social sciences think about “diagnosis” in specific and often contradictory ways.  One must diagnose:  but what does this really mean?

The course will have two components, a small, select seminar and a public lecture series. Students from the College, the Graduate School, the Medical School, Public Health, and Nursing are eligible to apply to take part in this course and will be given credit for it within their own curriculum.  The public element will feature both local and invited speakers to highlight and elaborate upon specific elements in the seminar.  With lectures on “Diagnosis and Greek Thought,” “Seeing Madness,” “What is mental illness in the twenty-first century,” “AIDS and diagnosis,” “Music and Diagnosis,” “Sherlock Holmes as Diagnostician,” and “House:  How does the Media Imagine Diagnosis,” this course will present a set of problems to be discussed and debated.  These lectures will also be recorded for archiving and public dissemination. 

Particulars: PERMISSION ONLY

IDS 385RWR/ILA 790R: Creative Writing and Health Sciences

Grimsley, W, 3:00pm - 5:00pm

MAX: 1 (IDS 1/ILA 1)

Content: This workshop offers an introduction to the use of creative writing in prose as a technique for exploring and consolidating learning in the health sciences, including the School of Nursing, the School of Medicine, the School of Public Health, and Emory College. Students will employ the writing of prose fiction, essays, and formal journal writing to explore scenarios that have arisen in their studies in the health sciences and related fields and to consolidate learning about the human dimension of these fields. Short stories offer an opportunity to explore human interactions in a hypothetical realm that can result in extraordinary narratives of instruction and catharsis. Essays can offer a space in which a health science student can organize the personal aspect of knowledge that he or she is studying; a personal essay or journalistic study of a topic in this field can help a student to formulate his or her stance to a particular area of study. Journal writing can offer a place for reflection on the changes that the study of health sciences can bring about in students, and can help them cope with the need to preserve a rich inner life in arenas that can be depersonalizing. In addition, all areas of health sciences can benefit from students with an understanding of clear writing. The course will emphasize all of these areas of study. Students will be required to engage their study of the health sciences directly in their writing; it is expected that this will lead to substantial writing that explains science in clear, understandable prose.

Particulars: PERMISSION ONLY

IDS 385/NBB 470S: Madness, The Brain and Culture

Kushner, T, 2:00pm - 5:00pm

MAX: 21 (IDS 7/NBB 7)

Content: This interdisciplinary seminar will explore mental illness in psychological, neurobiological, historical and cultural perspective. Conditions to be examined include hysteria, schizophrenia, depression, post traumatic stress disorder, multiple personality disorder, eating disorders, attention deficit, Tourette syndrome, and addiction.  Care will be paid to consider the impact of race, class, and gender on the construction of, explanations for, and interventions developed to treat mental illnesses. All these syndromes will also be viewed in the context of an increasing public health concern with mental health and mental illness.  Attention will be paid to the putative neurobiological and psychiatric mechanisms associated with these disorders.

IDS 385/PHIL 480WR/CPLT 389: Plato and the Platonic Tradition

Wakefield/Corrigan, TTH 10:00am - 11:15am

MAX: 11 (IDS 5/PHIL 3/CPLT 3)

Content: This course, team taught by Kevin Corrigan and Peter Wakefield, both of the ILA, will give students a thorough grounding in core dialogues of the vast Platonic corpus (nine dialogues will be studied closely), situating the discussion of the Platonic philosophic and literary achievement in the broader context of Greek and ancient Mediterranean literature, culture, and history (readings include Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Heraclitus). Special focus will be given to literary antecedents and influences on Plato¹s thought and to the Platonic tradition after Plato, especially Plotinus and early Christian writers. Students with strong literary interests beyond philosophy, students in religious, mathematical or other disciplines influenced by Platonic thought, and philosophy students will benefit from this course, which complements offerings from the Philosophy Department.

IDS 385/CL 329WR/HIST 385WR: Byzantine Literature

Ekonomou, M, 5:00pm - 8:00pm

MAX: 16 (IDS 6/CL 4/HIST 6)

Content: The world of Byzantium, or the Eastern Roman Empire which was centered on Constantinople, offers a rich variety of writings in prose and verse. In it’s more than a thousand years of existence the Byzantine Empire drew on its heritage from the classical world of Greece and Rome, blended it with the developing Christian tradition, and produced a unique culture to whose literature this course is intended to be an introduction.

The course will begin with a general introduction to the Byzantine Empire outlining the empire’s history from its foundation by Constantine the Great in the fourth century to its conquest by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. We will then turn to a reading, analysis, and discussion of prose and poetry texts that will include a wide range of secular histories and chronicles stretching from the Age of Justinian to the fall of Constantinople, saints’ lives, monastic foundation documents, legal documents, religious poems and hymns, theological and canonical texts, secular poetry including medieval Greek romances and epic poetry, the Byzantine novel, fables, bestiaries, ekphraseis (rhetorical description) and a variety of satire, epigrams, and letters.

Prose authors will include the historians Procopius, Michael Psellos, Anna Comnena, Niketas Choniates, and George Sphrantzes. Verse to be studied covers a wide range of styles from the hymns of Romanos Melodos and the nun Kassiane to the poems of Theodore Prodromos and Theodore Metochites. Readings on the lives of holy men and women will range from Egyptian ascetics such as St. Mary of Egypt to the pillar saint Lazaros of Galesion. Letters will include the correspondence of emperors, princesses, bishops, and scholars from the pagan aesthete Libanius to Manuel II Paleologos.

Texts: Materials will come from published texts, copies of texts provided by the instructor, and from materials available electronically

IDSWR 385/ENG 303/REL 387/HIST 385: Religious Traditions in the Literature of Late-Medieval England

Dzon, TTH, 2:30pm - 3:45pm

MAX: 20 (IDS 7/ENG 5/REL 5/HIST 3)

Content: A large quantity of religious literature was produced in late-medieval England, some of it by the best poets of the age. Great diversity exists among the texts that can be placed in this category, with respect to their genre and the particular religious viewpoints and practices they advocate. In this course, we will read saints’ lives, biblical plays, religious satire, devotional and didactic texts. We will attend to orthodox clerical voices as well as those of Christians not officially authorized to speak on religious matters or who represent a marginalized sector of society. Readings and discussions will expose students to a variety of religious discourses from the period and will give them the opportunity to consider the extent to which they opposed or reinforced one another. Students will also become familiarized with some of the major criticism in the field. While participants are encouraged to read the texts in the original Middle English, modern translations are available for almost all of them.

Texts: Chaucer, select Canterbury Tales; Langland, Piers Plowman; saint’s lives; Pearl-poet; biblical plays from the York Cycle; Margery Kempe; Julian of Norwich; Nicholas Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ; Wycliffite texts

IDS 385/ARTH 359/ITAL 376R: Making the Modern European Capital 1650-1800

Thomas, TTH, 8:30am - 9:45am

MAX: 15 (IDS 5/ARTH 5/ITAL 5)

Content: In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, royal governments embarked on ambitious plans of urban renewal to remake their capitals into models of power and progress. A vibrant cultural life, aid for the poor, public spaces, and strong commerce became important goals for all courts and monarchs. Opera houses, universities, poor houses, and palaces became the physical landmarks of these new or renewed capitals.

This course will trace the creation of these capitals through art, architecture, music, and learning. The specific cities we will examine include Rome, Paris, London, Turin, Naples, Vienna, Berlin, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, and Madrid. We will compare the city with its government to see if politics had a determining effect on urbanism. WE will analyze the claim that “Enlightened Despots” were at the vanguard of crafting a new type of capital. And we will see how the capitals of this period defined the idea of the European city for the following centuries.

Texts: Daniel Heartz, Music in the European Capitals; Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; Hilary Ballon, The Paris of Henri IV; Jesus Escobar, The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid; Martha Pollak, Turin 1564-1680; The Triumph of the Baroque, ed. Henry Millon (selected essays); Jeffrey Collins, Papacy and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Rome

Particulars: This class could be cross-listed with: Art History and History, and perhaps Music and Italian Studies

IDS 390: Interdisciplinary Studies Seminar

Wakefield, TTH, 1:00pm - 2:15pm

MAX: TBA

Content: TBA

IDS 485R: Internship for Interdisciplinary Studies

MAX: TBA
Faculty: Wakefield
Day and Times: TBA TPL

Written permission of Director of Undergraduate Studies required prior to registration. For more information, please contact: Administrative Assistant, The Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, S415 Callaway Ctr.

IDS 490R: Supervised Reading and Study

MAX: TBA
Faculty: Wakefield
Day and Times: TBA

Written permission from instructor required prior to registration. For more information, please contact: Administrative Assistant, The Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, S415 Callaway Ctr.

IDS 495R: Honors

MAX: TBA
Faculty: Wakefield
Day and Times: TBA

Written permission from instructor required prior to registration. For more information, please contact: Administrative Assistant, The Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, S415 Callaway Ctr.

IDS 499R: Senior Research

MAX: TBA
Faculty: Wakefield
Day and Times: TBA

Written permission from instructor required prior to registration. For more information, please contact: Administrative Assistant, The Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, S415 Callaway Ctr.

Tentative Schedule of Course Offerings for Spring 2008 The courses listed below are the required IDS courses. Other Special Topics courses will be announced prior to the beginning of the semester.

IDS 213, Politics of Identity or IDS 214, Making History
IDS 210, Culture of the University or IDS 216, Visual Culture
Any IDS 300-level course
IDS 390, Interdisciplinary Studies Tutorial
IDS 499, Senior Research

For more information please visit the additional pages listed to the left.
Any additional questions please contact: Undergraduate Secretary

OFFICE HOURS: 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST) , Monday - Friday