Master of Arts in Liberal Studies

British Romanticism and its Contexts

Th

0.5 units

Maureen Harkin, Professor of English and Humanities

Tuesdays, 5:40–7:10 p.m.

The French Revolution (c. 1770 – c. 1804)

Few events are as significant, or controversial, as the French Revolution of 1789. From one perspective, it marked the sudden, violent end of the ancien régime. Within a few years, revolutionaries eliminated the monarchy, aristocracy, guilds, and a corporate society rooted in legal privileges and traditional hierarchies. They also deprived the Catholic Church of much of its power and confiscated most of its property. In France’s lucrative Caribbean colonies, meanwhile, enslaved people and free people of color set in motion a chain of events that culminated with slavery’s abolition and the ultimate independence of Saint-Domingue (Haïti). From another perspective, the French Revolution can be seen as the beginning of the modern world. Its struggles were replayed across much of the world for a century or more. Concepts such as human rights, nationalism, mass democratic politics, and even our understanding of “Revolution” as a process of radical change can be traced to the events that unfolded in the wake of 1789.

 

This course will examine the history of the French Revolution as well as the ongoing debates surrounding its causes, trajectories, and consequences. Exploring competing Marxist, Revisionist, and Post-Revisionist interpretations of the Revolution we will also contrast the wide range of approaches historians have used to analyze how the Revolution happened and why it followed the course that it did.

0.5 units

Michael Breen, Professor of History and Humanities

Wednesdays, 5:40–7:10 p.m.

Science Education Research: Methods and Insights

What factors influence educators’ practices and students’ learning in the natural sciences? What role do discipline-specific characteristics of the natural sciences play? These are some of the questions investigated through discipline-based education research (DBER), which integrates disciplinary STEM knowledge and skills (e.g., from chemistry, biology, etc.) with social science research methods to study teaching and learning in STEM fields. In this course, we will examine how science education knowledge is generated and discuss insights about science teaching and learning. In this course, students will develop their ability to assess the alignment between research questions, theoretical frameworks, methods of data collection, and the analysis and interpretation of data. Through this process, students will evaluate scholarly claims about science education by considering the strengths and limitations of the evidence and reasoning associated with the claim.

0.5 units

Bible, Race, and Empire

This course explores the inherent connections between US expansionism, concepts of race/racialization, and biblical interpretation. We will analyze biblical texts and their reception in their historical and literary contexts, explore the contours of critical race theory, and consider the complex histories of American expansion “from below” (from the point of view of the marginalized). In short, we will seek to understand the confluence of various socio-political currents, delineating the ways in which biblical texts are redeployed as tools of oppression or instruments of liberation in the burgeoning American empire.

0.5 units

 

James Joyce

This class surveys the fiction of the writer often called the most influential and innovative novelist of the twentieth century. For all of its modernist difficulty, Joyce's fiction, when read in chronological progression, actually educates its readers in strategies of reading each of his successive new styles. Joyce's most accessible naturalistic stories from Dubliners, and then progresses to his experiments with stream of consciousness in a Portrait of a Young Man before tackling his mature explorations into changing rhetorical styles in Ulysses. We will also look at the contexts of popular, social, and political culture from early twentieth-century Ireland and Europe in which Joyce's in his fiction, as well as critical scholarship on the fiction.

0.5 units

 

Turning Down the Temperature: Climate Politics in America

0.5 units

Chris Koski, Daniel B. Greenberg Professor of Political Science and Environmental Studies

Tuesdays, 5:40–7:10 p.m.

Disinformation & Propaganda: A Cognitive Science Approach to the Art of Persuasion

Wh

 

Heidegger and Arendt at the Movies

Edmund Husserl called earth “the originary ark.” Martin Heidegger wrote that earth must not be associated with “the merely astronomical idea of a planet.” After the launch of Sputnik, Hannah Arendt called earth “the quintessence of the human condition,” a “free gift from nowhere” that we now wish to exchange for something we have made ourselves. All three were worried about the fate of the world once we left earth and ventured into space. This course takes up these anxieties from the perspective of our own world by placing them in conversation with science, art, and film. What “world picture” comes into focus through the lens of Earth System Science, contemporary climate modeling, and astrobiology? Primary texts are “The Age of the World Picture,” “The Origins of the Work of Art” and “The Question Concerning Technology,” the final chapter of The Human Condition, along with excerpts from Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Alexandre Koyré’s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Our contemporary archive includes images of the earth from space, the concepts of the Anthropocene and technosphere, the history of climate modeling and the future of geoengineering, the films Koyaanisqatsi and Gravity, and Yinka Shonibare’s Refugee Astronaut. No scientific or technical knowledge is required – only curiosity and a sense of wonder.

 

 

* Registration for Summer 2026 courses will open on April 20, 2026.