New and Revised Courses
New and revised courses approved by faculty during the 2022-2023 academic year will be displayed here.
New and Revised Courses and Programs approved by the Scripps College faculty during the 2022-2023 academic year will be within the Course Descriptions and Programs of Study sections of the 2023-2024 catalog, and are presented here to highlight them as additions/revisions to the College’s curriculum this year.
Approved by Scripps Faculty in October 2022
AMST113 SC: Asian/American Geographies
Description: What is the relationship between Asian and Asian/American racialization, space, and
place? This course brings together questions and texts from Asian American studies, geography, and
critical ethnic studies to examine the spatialization of race across multiple scales ranging from the local to
the global (e.g., colony, territory, “Chinatown”) as well as placemaking, activism, and place-based
worldviews. Specific areas of inquiry and discussion will include: Asian/American engagements with
critical Asian and diaspora studies, relationships to Indigeneity and settler colonialism, U.S. militarism
and empire, and questions of cultural and place-based memory.
ANTH022P SC: Urban East Asia
Description: Contemporary mega cities in East Asia have undergone increasingly intense
socioeconomic and spatial reconstruction in recent decades. These cities not only show the various
processes of modernization, urbanization, and globalization in locally specific contexts, but also have
become new models of urbanism themselves. Drawing on various ethnographies, films, and theoretical
perspectives, the course highlights the lived experiences of diverse groups and the spatial forms that
produce the dynamic landscape of the cities.
ARHI136JT SC: North American Borderlands
Description: This course introduces students to art of North American borderlands from the nineteenth
century to the present. Students will explore how the borders between Mexico, United States, and Canada
have been represented in painting, sculpture, and photography, as well as in works of conceptual,
performance, social practice, material culture, and activist art. Central to this course are issues of
indigeneity, race, class, gender, and migration, as well the contested ground of Chicanx and Latinx
identities. North Americanborderlands will also be a starting point for global and comparative analysis of
transnational art histories.
ASAM179K SC: Asian American Women on Screen
Description: This course will examine historical representations of Asian/American women in
movies, TV, and new media in American culture. We will start by theorizing hypersexuality and
Asian women on screen by thinking about the role militarism plays in constructing gendered and
racialized stereotypes. We will continue thinking about ongoing representational practices of
Asian/American women by watching films, TV shows, comedy specials, news clips, and social
media. We will consider how engaging and analyzing representation as a site of contestation and
possibilty might create opportunities for rethinking the political power of Asian American media.
ASAM179L SC:Contemporary Asian American Lit.
Description: This course will explore post-1965 Asian American literature by close-reading
novels, autoethnography, poetry, comics, short stories, and critical theory. In particular we will
focus on Asian American cultural production as a site of contestation and possibility for thinking
about the historical racialization of Asian Americans. The course will think about how Asian
American literature is tied to the politics of Asian American experiences. Writers may include:
Thi Bui, Mohsin Hamid, Larissa Lai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chanel Miller, Celeste Ng, Janice Lobo
Sapigao, Ocean Vuong, Jung Yun, and Michelle Zauner, among others.
BIOL119 KS: Introduction to R in Science
Description: This quarter credit class will Introduce use of R and Rstudio for quantitative and
computational work in the sciences. The class is intended to prepare students with no previous experience
for upper-division science labs taught in R. Topics may vary across offerings, but generally will include
basic data management and visualization tools and some programming skills, such as creating loops and
functions.
BIOL136L KS: Population Genomics
Description: Population Genomics applies large-scale genomic technologies in natural populations
towards understanding evolution, demography, and health. With the advent of next-generation sequencing
technologies, entire genomes can be sequenced with ease. The size of these datasets presents new
opportunities for richer analyses of biological phenomena. However, the sheer volume of the datasets
requires an understanding of data science to perform even simple analyses. Students will gain an in-depth
introduction to concepts in population genomics, as well as apply analytical and statistical methods
towards problem-solving in population genomics. Population Genomics will have lectures, as well as
computational labs conducted in R. This course is an upper-level biology lab course that counts towards
the biology major and/or can serve as a data science capstone course.
BIOL187T KS: Special Topics in Biology: Mycology and Global Change
Description: This course is an introduction to fungi through exploring how a diversity of fungi behave
in natural and extreme habitats across scales of biological organization. We will discuss fungal evolution,
diversity, ecology, and physiology, and how they differ across the fungal functional groups and
throughout the fungal tree of life. We will relate fungal processes to their response to global change
drivers emphasizing natural disasters and pollution. Additionally, we will explore how to leverage fungal
physiological processes to determine what effect fungi have in both natural and human systems.
CHST183 CH: Latina Lit: Feminism & Brown Bod
Description:The purpose of this course is to consider the experience of what Chandra Talpade Mohanty called ?Feminism without Borders,?
a feminist theory and politics defined by the simultaneous oppressions of race, class, gender and sexuality in the developing world.
By considering Latina literature in particular and its engagement with multiple feminisms, we will see a landscape marked by contradictions and conflict with First World
feminism and determined from within by culture, colonialism, history, and geography. Our attention to literary renderings of the feminist experience will be informed by a
recurrent emphasis on representations of history and issues of gender, terms that can be understood culturally, historically, economically, racially, and geographically.
From Old World Lit to Chica Lit, we will ask ourselves how the models of womanhood and female liberation andautonomy presented in these texts align themselves
and/or challenge U.S. American, Latin American, European and Latina feminisms to date. We will question whether the shifting constructions of sexuality, gender roles,
and family/inter-generational tiescombined with the experience of immigration, transmigration, hybridity and border culture fashion a new Latina subject emerging
within the realities of consumerism and globalization.
CHST187 CH: Revolution & Romace: Latinx Lit.
Description: This course considers the Romance of Revolution in the Caribbean, and more specificallythe role that US interventions into the Caribbean had in shaping our
understandings of 19th and 20th Century Caribbean revolutions from a Stateside perspective. Students will come to deconstructmythologies around the concept of rebellion
andread revolution narratives that offer a more nuanced way to romanticize notions of self-determination, independence, and pride.
CLAS116 SC: Race and Ethnicity in the Greco-Roman Worlds
Description: In this course students will explore the categories of race and ethnicity in the ancient
Greco-Roman worlds, concepts that will illuminate much about these ancient civilizations as well as
prompt students to reflect on issues of vital contemporary relevance. Through the study of ancient literary
and material sources and modern responses to them, students will investigate ancient theories of race and
ethnicity, representations of various peoples of the ancient world, and how these theories and
representations have influenced modern discussions of race and ethnicity. Students will come away from
this course not only with greater appreciation of the human diversity of the ancient Greek and Roman
worlds, but also better prepared to engage with issues that are of paramount political importance today.
ECON136 SC: Financial Economics
Description: This is an advanced undergraduate elective that focuses on financial economics which
concerns the use and distribution of resources in markets in which decisions are made under uncertainty.
The course places a special emphasis on asset pricing and the valuation of risky cash flows. We begin by
modeling consumer decision-making under uncertainty, then use that general framework as a basis for
understanding both equilibrium and no-arbitrage theories of securities pricing. This includes modern
portfolio theory, the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), Arrow-Debreu theories of asset pricing,
martingale pricing methods, the arbitrage pricing theory (APT), and the consumption capital asset pricing
model (CCAPM).
ENGL174 SC:Writing From the Middle of Nowhere
Description: Nowhere is not a place. However, particular landscapes (the desert, the jungle, the forest),
geographies (sub-Saharan Africa, Appalachia, the Pacific Islands), and locations (rural America, and
much of the Global South) are often construed as empty or cultureless. In this course we will study the
factors that construct a social and cultural hierarchy of place, and how and why various global
“nowheres” occupy a subordinate position to Western urban centers. We will focus primarily on writing
about and from the Anglophone/postcolonial world, and we will query how narrating colonized places as
empty, backward, or undeveloped served as part of the political project of colonization itself. We will also
consider how domestic spaces are a sort of “nowhere”—where labor is repeated, invisible, and
disappearing—and will query how gender contributes to visibility of place. Students will study novels,
poetry, and films alongside criticism that engages urban/rural studies and postcolonial theory.
ENGL197P SC: Politics & Art: Fiction Workshop
Description: In this workshop, we will explore the role of the fiction writer in making art that is both political andbeautiful. How do we tell an indelible
story and also inscribe politics in the work? What are the ways in which a writer?s political convictions show up in their craft choices,
while still allowing theircharacters to be fully, wonderfully human? Students will share their writing and offer feedback on peer work in
a supportive, intellectually rigorous workshop setting. This course is also listed as WRIT197P SC.
FGSS188E SC:Crip Futures
Description: In disability justice communities, the word “crip” has come to be a radical reclamation of
the pejoratively used term, “crippled” as well as a critical political and aesthetic orientation to disability.
This course introduces students to key concepts in disability studies and the critical interventions of crip
theory, arts and activism. Readings will bridge queer, feminist, and crip-of-color knowledges regarding
disability and illness, bodily norms and ableism, eugenics and medical racism, mental health and trauma,
criminalization and pathologization, capitalism and labor, crip temporalities, intimacy and community,
healing and care. This course will also consider materials of crip cultural production such as poetry and
speculative fiction, art and film, performance and auto-history, as we collectively ask what it means for
the future to live in our bodies and for us to make the present and futures otherwise in which no life is
disposable and all might thrive in interdependent relationships.
FREN187A SC: Environmental (In)justice in the Francophone World
Description: This course explores environmental justice in the Francophone world through a variety of
mediums and genres. Studying material across France, Polynesia, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa,
students will investigate the environmental issues facing French-speaking and colonized populations in
the 20th and 21st centuries. Topics studied will include the relationship to nature and the animal world,
the toxicity of weapons of war and consumer products, and the environmental impact of colonialism. In
the second half of the course, students will think through a variety of political, economic, and
philosophical approaches to solving these problems. This course will broaden students’ knowledge of the
Francophone world and contemporary environmental issues, and develop students’ fluency in discussing
complex social and political topics in French.
GERM031 SC: Intermediate German Conversation
Description: This intermediate conversation class explores a variety of topics in Austrian, German and
Swiss culture, politics, history, film, art, literature, pop culture and much more. Participants practice using
German in real-life conversations and discussions. Conversations are led by the German Language
Assistant.
GERM041 SC: Advanced German Conversation
Description: This advanced conversation class explores a variety of topics in Austrian, German and
Swiss culture, politics, history, film, art, literature, pop culture and much more. Participants practice using
German in real-life conversations and discussions. Conversations are led by the German Language
Assistant.
HIST112 SC: The Tragic History of the Sea: Portuguese Empire and the Early Modern World
Description: How do we account for the timing, pace, and geography of European imperialism?
Histories of colonialism tend to privilege the enterprises of Spain, England, and France. Yet in the long
sixteenth century, the small kingdom of Portugal was one of the preeminent colonial powers, with
extensive if dispersed conquests in Africa and Asia, and a burgeoning plantation-colony in Brazil. This
course examines Portugal, the Portuguese Empire, and the trans-imperial borderlands as an entrée into
thinking about the First Age of Globalization, c. 1500-1800. We look at the genesis of the Portuguese
Empire; relations between colony and metropole; the involvement of other Europeans in the imperial
project; and the experience of Portuguese missionaries both within and beyond the borders of the empire.
The course concludes by considering the legacies of the Portuguese imperial moment. Particular focus
will be on contrasting the imperial experiences in Asia, Africa, and South America. Sources include
poems, novels, travel narratives, contemporary histories, archival documents, and a range of secondary
literature.
HIST137 SC: Eating and Drinking in the Time of Totalitarianism
Description: Between the 1920s and 1950s, a number of Europe’s fledgling democracies disintegrated
into totalitarian dictatorships. During the past thirty or so years, scholars of modern Europe have begun to
question the degree to which these regimes really were “totalitarian” in their expression of power. This
seminar, therefore, is designed to explore the political and cultural histories of twentieth century Europe’s
totalitarian regimes, including Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and others via the analytical
lenses of various types of foodstuffs and beverages. Ranging in topics from the production of geneticallymodified
strains of wheat to the politics of women’s labor and consumption (public/private
responsibilities, shopping and cooking, resistance and non-compliance via eating and drinking, etc.) to,
finally, the regulation and enjoyment of alcoholic beverages, we will explore these societies “from above”
and “from below” by evaluating the degree to which everyday eating and drinking impacted both the
construction of these notorious dictatorships and the on-the-ground realities of everyday, quotidian
experience.
HIST149 SC: Themes and Methods in African History
Description: In this history seminar, we will examine methods, themes, concepts, and debates in
African history. We will investigate early Black diasporic approaches to studying Africa’s past, as well as
the construction of Africa as a field—its professional foundations in both the Cold War and student
protest. We will then explore works that draw on the range of methodologies used in writing African
History, including archaeology, linguistics, oral history, ecology, anthropology, and area studies. Topics
will span Africa’s early past (the Sudanic empires of West Africa, Bantu migration, trans-Saharan trade);
Atlantic and Indian Ocean slavery and the slave trade; race and racialization in African studies; twentiethcentury
transnational movements and anticolonial politics; and the ethics of speculation in post-colonial
histories. Equipped with familiarity in both foundational and newly published works, students will be
encouraged to think as historians across disciplines, to read academic texts for both argument and method,
and to think expansively about what archives can be.
HIST197J SC: (Un)freedom: Carcerality and Community in the Early American North
Description: Conventional historical understandings of the early United States frequently place the
northern and southern regions of the emergent nation in firmly oppositional terms, chiefly, the Free North
vs. the Slave South. This course asks us to reconsider the easiness of this binary and explore the ways in
which the powers of American North also sought to exert considerable control over those it deemed
“undesireable.” This quest for order resulted in a plethora of new policies, institutions, and experiences
characterized by degrees of (un)freedom. This course draws upon a variety of academic and creative
sources to explore how other scholars have discussed these phenomena, as well as a diverse array of
primary texts, including records of sale, almshouse ledgers, newspapers, and prison memoirs that unearth
the daily lives of ordinary folks caught in the cross hairs of state control. Such analyses not only
complicate depictions of the American North as a bastion of progress and reform, but also highlight the
ways in which distinctions between freedom and (un)freedom were equally murky during this early
period. By turning our gaze to the structures that shaped early American incarceration, we create an
opportunity to begin deciphering the significant similarities and differences between the past and our own
contemporary moment of carceral crisis.
ITAL197B SC: The Ferrante Effect
Description: More than a pseudonym masking a secret identity, the name Elena Ferrante has become a
force that has traversed geographical borders and challenged literary and social norms. Ferrante, not of
immediate success in Italy where her works were originally published, quickly gained international
readership with the translation of her tetralogy, L’amica geniale. The effect of Ferrante’s international
success has resulted in what scholars are coining “the Ferrante effect,” an increased attention to works by
women writers. In the first half of this course, we will read narratives by and about Elena Ferrante, as well
as watch cinematic and serialized adaptations of her work. In the second half of the course, we will
explore “the Ferrante effect,” reading authors, such as Anna Maria Ortese, Igiaba Scego, and Claudia
Durastanti, who have gained or regained recognition through republication or translation as part of “the
Ferrante effect.” In reading these works, we will question what they have to offer a global audience, what
it means to be a “woman writer,” and if we can consider “the Ferrante effect” a trans-national feminist
movement.
NEUR103KS: Neurobiology of Motivation, Reward & Addiction
Description: What are the neural mechanisms that motivate you to get out of bed? What’s in that
morning cup of coffee that stimulates your brain? Why are some individuals more susceptible to addiction
than others? These are some of the questions we will explore throughout this course while focusing on the
neurobiology of motivation, reward and addiction. We will examine the neurotransmitters, cells, genes,
and circuits that drive motivation and reward with a focus on how these pathways intersect with the
complex and treatable brain disorder known as addiction. Students in this course will build a strong
foundational understanding of several neurobiological concepts and be introduced to current research
techniques used to study the brain.
POLI148 SC: Study and Struggle: From Prison Education to Prisoner Solidarity
Description: Study and Struggle is a community engagement course in which “outside” students
collaborate with aligned community partner organizations to facilitate and participate in
correspondence-based inside/outside study groups with incarcerated students. While imprisoned
people typically lack access to the materials, resources, and programming necessary to support
transformative education, Angela Davis reminds us that collective study can “create lines of
communication between prisoners and [outside] students” that are crucial for developing agency
and self-determination in a context marked by extreme isolation and oppressive social control.
Study and Struggle thus joins in a long tradition of collective study as prisoner solidarity work.
POLI187Q SC: Poetry & Politics
Description: What role does poetry play in challenging the status quo and provoking social
transformation? How has it been used as a method and medium of protest, social documentation,
reportage, bearing witness, activism, and growing a counter-historical archive against the dominant
narratives of history? What potential does it hold for addressing systemic forms of political and
environmental violence while shifting collective imaginaries regarding race, class, gender, sexuality,
culture, and imperialism? This course will consider global poetries as a form creative knowledge
production that speaks truth to power and shapes practices of self-making, relationship, being, place, and
political life.
WRIT146 SC: Academic vs Creative Non/Fiction
Description: In this course, students will have the opportunity to investigate the techniques and
properties of academic and creative non/fiction writing while also assessing which forms and outlets best
suit informed readerships and target audiences. Students will engage independent research on topical
issues of personal or political interest, seek out the best outlets for these, then write (and workshop)
academic and creative pieces related to their research. The objective of the course is to have students
engage in and distinguish between forms of writing, gain confidence in them, and to pliably move
between them as they seek to connect their interests with appropriate reading audiences. What
distinguishes research from academic as opposed to creative non/fiction pieces? Where can autobiography
or personal experience intersect in such writing? What rhetorical strategies work best in sustained
academic or creative non/fiction intended for informed audiences and invested publics?
WRIT153 SC: Introduction to Podcasting
Description: In this course, to ground us in the foundations of today’s rapid rise in audiobooks and
podcasts, we begin with tradition of oral storytelling in ancient Greece and in African and
African‐American traditions. We will then examine a range of approaches to podcasting and the ways in
which these approaches connect with and disrupt other forms of argument‐driven writing. Students will
select a podcast and analyze the way it presents and tells a story about a specific topic, considering both
the text and accompanying audio content and sounds. Students will then create and deliver their own
podcast episode.
WRIT197P SC: Politics & Art: Fiction Workshop
Description: In this workshop, we will explore the role of the fiction writer in making art that is both political andbeautiful. How do we tell an indelible story and also inscribe politics
in the work? What are the ways in which a writer?s political convictions show up in their craft choices, while still allowing theircharacters to be fully, wonderfully human?
Students will share their writing and offer feedback on peer work in a supportive, intellectually rigorous workshop setting. This course is also listed as ENGL197P SC.
Revised Courses in October 2022
ART126A SC: (change in course number) Expanded Ceramics: Making a Feminist Life
Change in Title: Special Topics in Ceramics: Making a Feminist Life
Change in Description: This course brings the critical insights and questions of Sara Ahmed’s writing
into direct conversation with ceramics studio practice. Students will examine their artistic methodologies,
identify openings for feminist art practice, and expand their work into that space. Class time includes
group discussion and studio work. No previous experience in ceramics is required, but an interest in the
topic and frameworks of the course is required. Class time includes discussion, and both individual and
collaborative studio work.
ART126B SC: (change in course number )Expanded Ceramics: Building Historical Memory
Change in Title:Special Topics in Ceramics: Building Historical Memory
Change in Description: This course examines the ways hegemonic historical memory is represented in
this country, and how contemporary artists are engaging with, subverting, or inverting this construction.
From this examination, students will articulate and investigate strategies for building critical historical
memory through sculptural engagement in private and public spaces (and spaces that shift in-between).
Focus is on local subjects, with an emphasis on historical and contemporary student activism and action.
No previous experience in ceramics is required, but an interest in the topic and frameworks of the course
is required. Class time includes discussion, and both individual and collaborative studio work.
ART151 SC: Inside the Artist’s Studio
Change in Description: In this course, we will conduct studio visits both in person and via Zoom with
local and international artists. These visits will consist of discussions about works in progress as well as
the artist’s practices at large. Guest artists will assign readings and activities related to their
methodologies, and we will utilize additional class time to make works, discuss reading and critique
assignments.
ART181G SC: Topics in Art Theory: Beauty or Abject: Race, Gender & Whiteness in Art
Change in Title: Theory Seminar in Art: Abjection, Beauty, and Difference
BIOL187F KS: Special Topics in Biology: Advanced Genetics
Change in Title:Special Topics in Biology: Unsolved Problems in Genetics
CHEM121 KS: Principles of Physical Chemistry
Change in title: Principles of Physical Chemistry: Thermochemistry
CHEM122 KS: Principles of Physical Chemistry
Change in Title: Principles of Physical Chemistry: Quantum Chemistry
ECON144 SC: Economic Development
Change in Description: While extreme poverty has been declining over the years due to development
policies pursued by low and middle-income countries, a significant percentage of the world’s population
continues to live on less than $2 a day. In this class, we will try to understand the economic lives of the
poor by focusing on some quantifiable dimensions that characterize poverty. We will use theory to
analyze factors that keep people trapped in poverty and identify how policies have impacted outcomes.
This course will introduce students to some of the leading journal articles that concentrate on issues of
education, health, gender inequality, lack of credit markets, migration, conflict, agricultural
transformation, the role of market, and political participation by minorities.
Change in Prerequisite: Econ 101, Econ 120, Math 30
POLI187K JT: Race, Nation, and Baseball
Change in course number: POLI187K SC
New Core Courses offered in Spring 2023
CORE002 SC: Dance and Social Justice
Description: This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of dance as a vehicle for social
change. Dance has long served as a locus for social change work in the United States in times past and is
increasingly the case locally, nationally, and globally. This course will bring together students with an
interest in investigating and investing in social change work through dance and cross-disciplinary
scholarship. Students will engage in discussion, reflection, written work, and strategic choreography
based on readings, video viewings, lecture, and from interactions with local choreographers and leaders of
social justice movements.
CORE002 SC: Art and Activism
Description: Contemporary art that aims to confront some of humankind’s most urgent social and
environmental issues today has become part of the artistic mainstream. This relatively new expectation of
artistic practice is not free of controversy though, and raises many aesthetic and ethical questions. This
course critically examines the role art and, more broadly, imagination can play in plotting alternative
approaches or even mitigating pressing societal issues. To this end, the course will familiarize students
with such existing artistic interventions, focus on research-based practice and the “thought experiment” as
strategy, and culminate in individual and collaborative projects.
CORE002 SC: Good Intentions
Description: What does it mean to do good for others? Do good intentions necessarily lead to good
effects? This course focuses on two models of “doing good” – humanitarianism and development - that
have become dominant global forces. We critically examine these globalized forms of intervention,
highlighting how projects undertaken in the name of doing good can have complex, unanticipated, and
harmful effects. We delve into the political and material conditions of aid work, as well as the experiences
of aid recipients. While this course largely centers a critical analysis, we also address debates around
alternate possibilities for global solidarity and justice.
CORE0002 SC:Christianity, Conquest, and Colonialism
Description: This course examines imperial and colonial ideologies as they developed against religious
“others” (including Orthodox Christians) first in the Mediterranean and the Iberian Peninsula and later in
the Americas. In the first half of the course, we will consider the discursive practices that legitimated the
conquest, enslavement, and exploitation of peoples and territories not subject to the Pope of Rome during
the medieval period. In the second half of the course, we will shift our attention to the Spanish conquest
and colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Our texts will include
chronicles of the Crusades, confessional writings, early Spanish and Indigenous writings on the conquest
of Mexico, and testimonies.
Approved by Scripps Faculty March 2023
ANTH109 SC: Anthropology of Development
Description: The term development is often used by international funding agencies like the World Bank, governing bodies, and non-governmental organizations, as well as religious organizations, to indicate progress, both economic as well as cultural. Aspirational narratives of economic development as a civilizational end-goal are deployed as justification for instituting billion-dollar infrastructure projects and poverty alleviation programs. Often these narratives of progress overshadow the lived experiences of people on the ground. This course introduces students to the historical and political underpinnings that have led us to understand development as economic growth. Using anthropological critiques of the idea of development, this course helps students to challenge the meanings ascribed to development by foregrounding the experiences of communities (often marginalized by virtue of their status as low-income or indigenous, or because of their gender, race and ethnicity) whose lives are impacted by development projects. This course sheds light on the need to view development with a critical lens and the pressing need to think of alternatives to dominant models of development as economic growth.
ART122B SC: Expanded Ceramics: Making, Performing, Documenting
Description: This course is an introduction to working with unfired clay as a material for contemporary artistic discourse and expression. Students will consider the impact of time in their work by exploring performance, site specific installations, and the use of clay to document change. Classes will consist of technical demonstrations, lectures, slides, work time, and critiques.Although the completion of ART121 is recommended prior to enrollment, this course can be completed successfully without previous ceramics experience.
ART126C SC: Special Topics in Ceramics: Feeling Brown
Description: This course coincides with the creation of the January 2024 Scripps Ceramic Annual, “the idea of feeling brown.” Students will study the work of José Esteban Muñoz and apply his theories to their sculptural process and practice. No previous experience in ceramics is required. An interest in the specific topic and frameworks of the course is required. Class time includes group discussion and studio work. This class will include collaboration with Scripps Ceramic Annual artists.
CHST144CH : Latina/o Religions and Culture
Description: This course surveys and examines the role of religion in the development of U.S. Latina/o identities, identities forged in the expansive borderlands of North America (including the U.S, the northernmost “country” of Latin America). Though narratives of Christian history will figure prominently, the course is not strictly about Christianity in itself, but rather Christianity in dialectical contact with its Other. The study of the complexity of contact between Christian and non-Christian (indigenous, African, etc.) traditions and practices will lead us to a consideration of the diversity of expression and thought within Latino/a and Latin American religious life.
CLAS135 SC: Transgression, Punishment, and Public Safety in the Greco-Roman Worlds
Description: In this course we will explore categories of transgression, punishment, and public safety in the ancient Greco-Roman worlds. Through study of ancient literary and material sources, and modern responses to them, we will ask such questions as: What are the rationales and social objectives of punishment? How does punishment factor into the public safety of a community? The course will be organized into three principal units: punishment and the divine; punishment and politics; punishment in extra-political contexts. It will examine how social order and power were constructed and maintained in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, and it will draw connections to similar issues of paramount political importance today.
ENGL113S SC: Weird Shakespeare
Description: 2023 marks four centuries since the publication of the First Folio, the book that memorialized Shakespeare as the “soul of the age.” This course seeks to expand students’ sense of the Shakespeare canon by ranging beyond his most famous works. We will read lyric and narrative poetry that was not included in the Folio as well as plays from each of the major genres, while acknowledging that genre was itself an unstable category for Shakespeare as well as his editors and critics. Our discussions will consider plots and characters that we—or the characters themselves—might define as “weird” or “wayward,” and examine how Shakespeare shapes and upsets our normative assumptions. We will situate the plays amidst the complexity of early modern print culture, and explore their surprising transformations under different editorial hands. We will also study a selection of Shakespeare’s literary and historical sources, and consider how more recent scholars and artists have revisited his work in new and provocative ways.
ENGL195 SC: Fiction Workshop: Magic and Metaphor
Description: In this fiction workshop, we’ll explore how short stories use figurative language to imbue both real and speculative worlds with a sense of magic. Throughout the course, we’ll focus on how metaphors come alive on the page – sometimes very literally, in works of magical realism and speculative fiction, and at other times through the ways that images and motifs shift our perceptions of the everyday. As we do so, students will apply what we study to their own writing – first through short exercises that ask them to try out a variety of figurative and speculative techniques, then in two short stories, which students will workshop with the class and revise.
FREN045 SC: Advanced Oral French
Description: This project-based course emphasizes oral production through a series of adaptation exercises that involve both translation and performance. The course offers students an opportunity to: review French grammar and vocabulary through translation projects; to perfect their French pronunciation and to improve their oral and aural proficiency in both formal and informal French. Students will perform English-to-French translations of dramatic scenes; learn and employ the International Phonetic Alphabet; perform dramatic scenes, in French, before a live audience. Prerequisite: Lab work required.
GERM114 SC: Dada : Art or Anti-Art
Description: This conversation class explores the history, theory, and practice of the Dada movement in Europe, Japan, Brazil, and the United States from 1916 through 1925. We will discuss Dada’s reordering of aesthetic conventions and its profound challenge to traditional notions of all different kinds of visual art and literature. Topics include design, poetry, installation, film, performance, manifesto writing, montage, ready-mades, and political activism; Dada’s many connections to other movements such as Expressionism, the Bauhaus, and Surrealism; as well as Dada as a precursor of punk and other, current protest movements. Taught in German
GERM114B SC:Dada: Art or Anti-Art? (Writing Module)
Description: This module may only be taken in addition to GERM 114 SC: Dada. The module will focus on the essentials of German academic writing—asking good research questions, conducting research, structuring a paragraph, a paper, and an argument. Additional focus will be given to some of the idiosyncrasies of German grammar and to idiomatic vocabulary. Detailed feedback will be provided on scaffolded writing assignments corresponding with the readings and artworks discussed in GERM 114SC. Place and time will be arranged according to participants’ schedules.
NEUR086L KS: Hormones and Behavior
Description: This course will examine the reciprocal ways that hormones regulate behavior and behavior regulates hormones in human and non-human animals. To do this, we will focus on interactions among hormones, the nervous system, animal behavior, and the environment. Topics in class and the laboratory can include sex determination and differentiation, biological rhythms, reproductive behavior, parenting, social interactions, stress, environmental endocrine disruptors, and affective disorders. This course is for non-science majors. Science majors require permission of instructor.
PSYC113 SC: Human Development in Context
Description: Human development occurs through dynamic interactions between the individual and the contexts of family, schools, local communities, sociocultural settings, and historical events. These contexts increasingly involve an interconnected and multicultural world shaped largely by migration and economically-driven social change. This course examines human development from cultural and global perspectives. We will examine the diverse experience of children, adolescents, and their families using theories and empirical evidence in psychological science. Topics include family dynamics, parent-child relationships, socioeconomic status, migration, social change, and globalization.
WRIT122 SC: Proposal and Application Writing
Description: This course will simultaneously provide the theoretical background of application essays as a genre of writing, with its own expectations and values, and share specific strategies and techniques to help students research, draft, and revise their application essays. As students work on their essays, and workshop them in class, they will reflect on the types of writing they are most familiar with and reflect on the ways that application essays differ from and align with other types of argument-driven writing. At the end of the term, students will submit final essays for their chosen opportunity, whether a fellowship or graduate school, and compose written reflections on their research and writing processes, to help prepare them for future writing regardless of genre.
Revised Courses in March 2023
ANTH142 SC :Culture and Politics in Latin America
Change in Title: State and Society in Latin America
Change in Description: In this class, we ethnographically examine how “the state” takes shape in Latin America across multiple scales and forms. Drawing from the field of political anthropology, this course approaches the state as a cultural and historical construct, made through social relations, practices, and norms. We begin the course by tracing connections with colonial histories and presents, examining racialized and gendered projects of nation-state building, and unsettling notions of sovereignty. In the middle part of the course, we look to the work of government in practice: the production of bureaucratic and policy documents, the provision of state services like health care, and forms of state policing and violence. Finally, we turn to civil society and social movement actors making claims on the state and transforming the nature of politics itself.
ART134 SC: Crossing Media: Moving Between Analog and Digital in Printmaking
Change in Title: Moving Between Media: Traditional and Digital Printmaking
NEUR133L KS: Introduction to Computational Neuroscience
Change in Description: In this course we study brains from two related perspectives: using computational tools to analyze complex data collected from brains, and considering how brains solve computationally challenging problems. Weekly group labs will build hands-on experience with concepts covered in lectures. Formerly BIOL133L KS.
Change in prerequisite: Prerequisite(s): MATH030 SC and programming experience (such as a CS or DS course in college, high school, or online), or permission of instructor. Students must have a personal computer with internet access. For students who do not have a personal computer, please email instructor for other options.
WRIT109 SC: Writing Studio
Change in repeatability: The revision here is that the course can be repeated once for credit.
WRIT113 SC : Prose Style and the Sentence
Change in course credit:The course description will remain the same. The only change will be that the class reverts from a half-credit to a full-credit.
New Core Courses offered in Fall 2023
CORE003: Social Change and Migration
Description: Urbanization and migration are two interrelated forms of social change that influence human development. Urbanization and concomitant sociodemographic shifts alter cultural values and adaptive norms; migration, which is commonly motivated by individuals’ hopes for enhanced life conditions, introduces new cultural values and norms. This course examines complex and dynamic ways in which social change, in the forms of urbanization and migration, interact with human development from a global perspective. We will explore stories and lives of individuals and families in changing sociocultural settings, drawing on personal narratives, empirical evidence, and theoretical frameworks across multiple disciplines including psychology, sociology, public policy, and international relations.
Revised Core Courses offered in Fall 2023
CORE003: “America” in Recent Music and Literature
Change in Description: This section of CORE 3 will examine the construction of diverse “American”–meaning U.S.–identities through selected music, film, poetry, and novels of the 20th and 21st centuries. What “America” do these artists and writers envision? What “America” do they fear? How do different “American” identities coexist? Building on the concepts studied through the semester, students will complete a final paper or project exploring an “American” identity or the intersection of identities.
CORE003: Home, Politics, and Activism in the 19th Century United States
Change in Title: Researching Home and Activism in the 19th-Century United States
Change in Description: This course explores how women activists conceptualized home as a space for transformative change in the 19th-century U.S. We’ll begin by studying how Native American activists past and present have drawn on both Native and settler notions of home in order to resist settler colonialism. We’ll then look at the ways that free and enslaved Black women reworked tropes of idealized motherhood and utilized trappings of domestic life such as crafting and interior decorating in order to assert claims to personhood and citizenship and to push back against stereotypes propagated by a white-dominated abolitionist movement. And we’ll close by examining how utopian movements and early women’s colleges reimagined home as part of their larger efforts to reimagine society. Throughout the course, we’ll learn about archival research into 19th-century home life and how historians, literary critics, and other scholars study forms of domestic activism that left traces not in published writing but rather in diaries, commonplace books, and material objects. And we’ll think critically about how the archival record is itself mediated by the structural forces these 19th-century activists resisted.
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