This seminar course examines how mass media reflect and resist norms of adulthood and aging. Frequently defined as an endpoint – a biological inevitability, a completion of development, an achievement of maturity – adulthood is neither simple nor static. Media for children and adolescents, for example, often depict adulthood as a paradox: both exciting and boring; free of oversight and burdened by responsibility; the beginning of real life and a kind of death. Students will learn interdisciplinary and multimodal humanistic methods for understanding the mediated history of adulthood. Topics include the emergence of young adulthood as a life stage, a key demographic in consumer culture, and a popular genre; fantasies of nonlinear aging like intergenerational body-swaps, aging backward, and agelessness; quarter-life, midlife, and end-of-life crises; infantilization and other discriminatory exclusions from adulthood; gender and rhetorics of proper aging; and failures and refusals to age appropriately, from the man-child to the Golden Girls.

This seminar explores how death has shaped and been shaped by modern communication, healthcare, and the arts. We’ll examine the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of mortality in film, television, journalism, digital media, and literature. Our methodological approach will build on insights from media studies and medical humanities. Topics may include the emergence of the “end-of-life” as a life stage in popular culture and medical care; protest, activism, and other political movements against deadly injustice; and the creation of knowledge, media, and art in the wake of mourning and loss.

This seminar considers productive collaborations and exchanges between literature and the sciences since the middle of the 20th century. Through readings in science fiction (broadly conceived), popular science writing, and the history and philosophy of science, we explore strategies and theories for thinking and writing across the “two cultures.” Topics include the science of writing and the writing of science; the mediating narratives of Enlightenment science; scientific biography; the narrative science of probability; feminist biology; Afrofuturism; and quantification. Scientists, writers, historians, engineers, literary scholars, and others are all welcome.

Why is physical pain so difficult to communicate? What kinds of pain—and which bodies in pain—tend to receive priority over others? Given the challenges of perceiving the suffering of other beings, how can we hold ourselves and others responsible for the pain we inflict, witness, and experience? This course will investigate philosophical, political, visual, literary, and bioethical strategies for expressing and responding to physical pain, with a focus on race, gender, disability, and justice. We begin with theoretical readings on the challenges that the experience of pain poses for linguistic, visual, and auditory communication. Pain is universal but not uniform, and we consider how race, gender, and species shape political recognition and responsiveness to pain. Turning to contemporary medical ethics and public health, we explore dilemmas of pain management, and their applications to chronic pain, disease, euthanasia, and end-of-life care. Authors, artists, and theorists considered may include: Virginia Woolf, Elaine Scarry, Susan Sontag, Frank Jackson, John Durham Peters, Bob Flanagan, Titus Kaphar, Claudia Rankine, Eric Hayot, Elizabeth Alexander, Peter Singer, and Keith Wailoo.

Why is physical pain so difficult to communicate? What kinds of pain—and which bodies in pain—tend to receive priority over others? Given the challenges of perceiving the suffering of other beings, how can we hold ourselves and others responsible for the pain we inflict, witness, and experience? This course will investigate philosophical, political, visual, literary, and bioethical strategies for expressing and responding to physical pain, with a focus on race, gender, disability, and justice. We begin with theoretical readings on the challenges that the experience of pain poses for linguistic, visual, and auditory communication. Pain is universal but not uniform, and we consider how race, gender, and species shape political recognition and responsiveness to pain. Turning to contemporary medical ethics and public health, we explore dilemmas of pain management, and their applications to chronic pain, disease, euthanasia, and end-of-life care. Authors, artists, and theorists considered may include: Virginia Woolf, Elaine Scarry, Susan Sontag, Frank Jackson, John Durham Peters, Bob Flanagan, Titus Kaphar, Claudia Rankine, Eric Hayot, Elizabeth Alexander, Peter Singer, and Keith Wailoo.

A study of Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies, focusing on attentive reading of the play texts and consideration of the theatrical, literary, intellectual, political, and social worlds in which the plays were written, performed, and experienced.

Discussion of fundamental and theoretical questions regarding media, culture, and society; the consequences of a computerized age; what is new in new media; and digital media from both philosophical and historical perspective, with focus on the past five decades. Topics include animals, democracy, environment, gender, globalization, mental illness, obscenity, piracy, privacy, the public sphere, race, religion, social media, terrorism, and war.