Fall 2016

Syrian Christianity, From Jesus to Refugees

CLC 3510

Scott Johnson, Department of Classics and Letters

This course will introduce students to the long history of Christianity in Syria. We will study their history from a number of angles and using the whole humanistic toolkit: language, literature, art, theology, politics, colonialism, and identity. We will endeavor to understand Syrian Christianity on its own terms while also relating it to the history of Christianity in the region more generally and to the development of medieval and modern Islam. The course will also examine how minorities have found themselves persecuted, sometimes unexpectedly, in the 20th–21st centuries and what appeals to the West have been able to accomplish. Each of the scholars invited to campus will bring research expertise on a different period or theme in Syrian Christian history. All of them have also had experience with modern Syrian churches and have participated in inter-faith dialogues with Muslims.

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Nuclear Legacies

HIST 3573-003/AHI 4970-001

Elyssa Faison, Department of History
Alison Fields, Department of Art History

This interdisciplinary course explores the American deployment of atomic bombs in Japan during World War II, ensuing nuclear energy initiatives and anti-nuclear peace movements, and the global impact of nuclear testing. Taught by an historian of visual culture of the American West and an historian of modern Japan, it interweaves historical narratives, public memorialization, testimony, photography, art, and film that demonstrate engagement with ongoing nuclear legacies in North America, Japan, the islands of the Pacific, and beyond.

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Bodies That (Don't) Matter

WGS 4120/EDAH 5970

Lupe Davidson, Women's and Gender Studies Program
Kirsten Edwards, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Renisha McBride ... for some these names signify disturbances in our national psyche ... they are outliers and disruptions ... their deaths do not represent what is fundamentally a fair justice system. To others, these names signify a society founded on anti-Black racism ... where Trayvon, Michael, Eric, Renisha, Zella (the others) ... paid the ultimate penalty for their blackness, their gayness, their femaleness-death. In an effort to understand opposing positions on the deaths of Black, Brown, cis and trans bodies, this course will contextualize these (and other) deaths along with the recent rise in student of color activism on campuses across the US in terms of "mattering."

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