Program: Core Courses - Scripps College - Modern Campus Catalog™

Core I: Histories of the Present: Crossroads

The Core Curriculum in Interdisciplinary Humanities will be a central part of your experience at Scripps College. The Core is designed to introduce you via interdisciplinary study to some of the major debates and concepts that have shaped the modern world. The first semester of Core is a broad foundational course in which students and faculty examine contemporary issues and debates through a historical lens. Ultimately this course will serve as an introduction to contemporary humanistic practice.

The current iteration of Core I takes up this task through an examination of crossroads. It considers the constraints we face both collectively and individually. Often it may seem like we have no meaningful choices left to make, so powerful do these forces appear. One need only recall the political situation or global warming to feel an oppressive sense of helplessness; or, at a more individual level, we may languish under the imperatives of social media or anxiety about success in school (and, eventually, in a career). But are we truly without options? In addressing these concerns, we consider how institutions, categories such as race and gender, and other cultural frameworks influence our sense of possibility. This course considers crossroads in the sense of crisis but also of choice.

Core II: Histories of the Present

Core II continues—with sharper focus and through an array of course offerings—the interdisciplinary investigations begun in Core I. Core II courses are taught by a faculty member with interdisciplinary research interests and may be team-taught by faculty whose complementary research interests make for fresh interdisciplinary dialogue. Consult the Scripps Portal for CORE II offerings for the current semester. Core II offerings vary each year and may include:

The Aesthetics of Justice: Race, Space, Architecture and Music

The Art of Medicine, Medicine in the Arts: the body in Italian Literature

The Arts and Literature of Zen Buddhism

The Construction of Kinship

The Language of Music

The Question of the Animal, Ancient and Contemporary

Becoming Someone Else in American Culture

Cinema

Constructions of (Dis)Ability

Convergence: Women, Work and Alternative Media

Death

Discord and Dialog

Display, Desire and Domination

Early Modern Remakes

Gender, Science and Knowledge

Hunger

Incentives Matter: The Economics of Gender and Choice

Justice in Theory and Practice

Marginalized Communities

Making Sense of Power

Me and the Boys Come Back from Area 51

Metropolis: Imagining the City

Misrepresentation of Women in Society and Science

Nerds and Geeks

Poetry of the Revolution: The Manifesto

Riotous Americans: Los Angeles and the Poetics of Unrest

Scaped Subjects: Portraying the Self in Anthropocene

Shakespeare Then and Now

Subversive Selves

Terms of Modernity

Urban Nights: Gender, Work, and Experiences

Where We Live & What We Live For

Why Punish?

Core III: Histories of the Present

Core III courses are small seminars designed to foster innovation and collaboration among students and faculty. The seminars involve considerable student participation and afford the opportunity to do more individualized, self-directed scholarship in association with a single faculty member working in the area of expertise from an interdisciplinary perspective. The work of the seminars culminates in a self-designed project exploring a particular topic through the lens of “histories of the present.” Exceptional student work will be disseminated to the wider College community. Depending on instructor and subject matter, the Core III seminars involve research, internships with fieldwork, exhibits, performances, conferences, and multimedia projects. Consult the Scripps Portal for Core III offerings for the current semester. Core III course offerings vary each year and may include:

“America” in recent music & literature

Animal Rights and Speciesism

Antiracist and Transnational Feminist Coalitions

Art, Ecology, and Fieldwork

Bad Writing

Bodies in Motion: Representation and Simulation

Building Los Angeles

Capitalism/Anti-Capitalism

Caribbean Women’s Literature

Challenges from the global south - “America”

Children’s Literature

Collective Songwriting: Theory and Knowledge Production