It’s that time of year again — the time when we all realize we are still students, floating along in some sort of academic miasma, once again subject to the horrors of preregistration. Thankfully, wilk and I have compiled our favorite course listings for next fall in case you still have some slots open in your list, like the following:
- Baby Got Back: Embodiment, Gender, and Sexuality in Black Music (SOC 308)
- Funny, You Don’t Look Jewish: Race, Gender, Sexuality and Judaism (RELI 308/FGSS 313/CJST 308)
- Van Gogh and the Myth of Genius (ARHA 140)
- From Tea to Connecticut Rolls: Defining Japanese Culture Through Food (CEAS 210) (wtf is a connecticut roll??)
- Delicious Movement: Time is Not Even, Space is Not Empty (CEAS/DANC 244), taught by Eiko Otake
- Utopian Planning from Plato’s Republic to UFO Cults (ENGL 155) (ah, the English department)
- The Simple Life (GRST/GELT 230)
See more see more:
“Temporality” is no longer a course buzzword, considering that the only course with the word in its title is Queer Times: Poetics and Politics of Temporality (ENGL 378/FGSS 326). However, you still have some chances to contemplate the Big Questions of the Universe. If you wanna get really existential:
- there’s the obvious choice, Existentialism (COL 253)
- Archaeology of Death (ANTH 372)
- Philosophy as a Way of Life (PHIL 221)
- “If there is no God, then everything is permitted?” Moral Life in a Secular World (HIST 395)
A lot of WesMaps for the fall is also considerably more vague and broad than it has been in the past. I was talking to one of my roommates about fall courses and they said, “WesMaps is kind of.. boring this year? Nothing is really that interesting.” IS NOTHING SACRED?
- Academic Skills (PSYC 400)
- Language (COL 108) (that’s it, that’s the whole title)
- Introduction to History: Twelve Medieval People (HIST 154)
- an obvious joke must be made about The Spanish Inquisition (COL 116)
- Microhistory and Macrohistory (HIST 315)
- Stem Cells: Basic Biology to Clinical Application (BIOL 325)
- Stochastic Biology: Randomness and Order in Gene Regulation (MB&B 334)
- Special Topics: Day Books, Diaries, Notebooks, Etc. (ENGL 347) inb4: the English dept. using “etc.” is hilarious
- Sleep and Psychosocial Functioning in Youth (PSYC 343) (THINK OF THE YOUTHS)
- It’s About Time (PHYS 162)
- The Gospels and Jesus (RELI 276)
- possibly my favorite, Britons and Other Life Forms (CHUM 304)
At the same time, though, we have your classic “Thing and Thing: Various Concepts in Some Particular Time or Field”:
- Pirates, Puritans, and Pequots: Literatures of the Renaissance Atlantic (ENGL 261)
- Repertory and Performance: Alexander von Humboldt And The Anthropocene (DANC 378) (obviously cool with a name like von Humboldt)
- Circulating Bodies: Commodities, Prostitutes, and Slaves in 18th-Century England (ENGL 314)
- TechnoPrisons: Corrections, Technology, and Society (SISP 125)
- Revolution Girl Style Now: Queer and Feminist Performance Strategies (AMST 276)
All this aside, although “temporality” is no longer everyone’s favorite word, I might venture that Fall 2016’s theme is SEX AND DEATH, based on the following:
- Writing Love: Myth-Making and Experience in the Literature of Amour (COL 117)
- Murder and Adultery: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and the 19th-Century Russian Novel (RUSS 205) (the Russian department strikes again, man)
- The Invention of Subjectivity: Erotic Discourse from Dante to Petrarca (ITAL 227)