Open Enrollment

Past Courses

WRIT32204

Using art and short prompts, students can draw out characters and details to grow new work or nudge open areas where they are "stuck." The class will examine how other writers have used ekphrastic...

Collage of two movie posters. On the left: The Day the Earth Stood Still. On the right: The Thing from Another World.
BASC70172

What if we actually came into contact with beings from another planet?  How would we communicate? Would the aliens be friendly?  Would we?  What does imagining such an encounter tell us about the...

Movie posters from left to right: Metropolis (1927), Planet of the Apes (1968), and The Matrix (1999)
BASC70169

Where are we headed? Will our long history of short-sighted choices decimate the planet and leave the few who survive in a wasteland? Or will developments in technology bring about a near-mastery of...

Collage of four movie posters. On the top left: Blade Runner. Top right: The Stepford Wives (1975). Bottom left: Get Out. Bottom right: Ex Machina.
BASC70187

This quarter we will focus on movies centrally interested in new and strange ways of thinking about what a human being is.  How are we to understand the status of the android or of artificial...

Crowd outside the New York Stock Exchange on the day of the crash, October 29, 1929
HUAS90932

This three-quarter sequence will examine the world in the 20th Century, from 1900 through to 2001. The first course will focus on the world of European empires, leading to the crisis of the Great War...

A World War One-era painted image of a French soldier telling his lover to watch out for the blimps
HUAS90930

This three-quarter sequence will examine the world in the 20th Century, from 1900 through to 2001. The first course will focus on the world of European empires, leading to the crisis of the Great War...

HUAS90934

This third class of a three-quarter sequence will examine the world in the 20th Century, from 1968 to 2001, emphasizing the relation between politics and society, with contemporary reflection on the...

worlds of Jorge Luis Borges
BASC70230

An immersion in the short stories, poetry, and essays of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) can lead to a profound change in our understanding of the world – the world as we think we know...

Gravity's Rainbow
HUAS80039

In this monumental novel of 1973, heir to Moby-Dick, Ulysses, and To the Lighthouse, Pynchon envisions a world that has surrendered, in the late stages of the second world war, to eruptive cognitive...

HUAS80020

It is unlikely there has ever been a more original, beautifully written and complex set of travel writings than those composed by Evelyn Waugh. Here are travel writings closer to Gulliver's Travels...