Undergraduate Humanities Courses Offered in Fall 2024

The following courses are being offered under the Humanities designation.  You can also SEARCH BY DEPARTMENT below to see other available humanities courses.


COLLOQUIUM IN THE HUMANITIES 
HUMN 101
W: 6:00-7:00
Hickner

A multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary introduction to the humanities, which explores the multiple possibilities for working across disciplinary boundaries. The course will include meetings with faculty from across the humanities at the university. Colloquium meetings will consist of discussion of prepared readings; an introduction to Baker-Nord Center programs, including Humanities@Work; an introduction to the cultural institutions of University Circle and Cleveland; and meetings with visiting speakers. Course open only to Baker-Nord Scholars in the Humanities.


CODING FOR THE HUMANITIES: PYTHON, NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING, AND MACHINE LEARNING
HUMN 305
F: 3:20-5:15
Saxton

An entry-level, humanities-oriented introduction to coding and natural language processing (NLP) with a focus on textual analysis. New technologies are radically transforming education and scholarship in the humanities, not to mention in higher education generally. In order to participate meaningfully in this changing landscape, humanities students and educators need to engage new forms of scholarship and teaching focused on technological experimentation and creative design. Such is the primary goal of this praxis-oriented course: to provide humanities students with hands-on access to emerging computational methods, to empower them to experiment, design, and build with them, and to foster critical reflection on issues and questions as they arise in that process. Offered as HUMN 305 and HUMN 405.


SKETCHES OF SPAIN: IMAGINING THE IBERIAN WORLD IN EARLY MODERNITY
HUMN 318
T/TH: 10:00-11:15
Benay

In 1764 the Indigenous artist Jose Manuel de la Cerda made a series of lacquerware trays (batea) depicting scenes from Virgil's Aeneid using a pre-Hispanic lacquer technique. Produced in west-central Mexico, these astounding objects--which combine Roman subject matter with distinctly Indigenous motifs and techniques--speak to the visual consequences of Mexico's status as both a colonial possession of Spain, and as a vital bastion of artistic innovation. This course uses objects like this one as a point of departure to investigate the art of the Iberian world--a world that extended far beyond the European continent during the 16th-18th centuries. In this course we will focus on the nexus of transpacific and transatlantic trade that facilitated the production of objects like the batea. We will explore the ways that maps, illustrated travelogues, frescos, paintings and prints worked alongside decorative objects such as feathered headdresses, weapons, and carved ivory statuettes in order to interrogate the place of material culture in the formation of knowledge. Readings will be drawn from art history, anthropology, and sociology and will highlight decolonial methodologies for understanding racial representation and the history of collecting. Themes will include Iberian conceptions of race, caste, limpieza de sangre (blood purity) and settler colonialism. Students will have the unique opportunity to work on the Public and Digital humanities publication Baroque Without Boundaries--a digital mapping intervention facilitated by the CWRU Freedman Center. Offered as ARTH 318 and ARTH 418 and HUMN 318 and HUMN 418.