WRPR H101  FINDING A VOICE: IDENTITY, ENVIRONMENT, AND INTELLECTUAL INQUIRY  (1.0 Credit)

Nimisha Ladva

Division: First Year Writing

This course considers students fluid relationship to identities that they examine, explore, and take on through course materials. We begin by examining how difference is perceived/obscured/challenged and/or bridged in constructions of identity. We then consider how identities exist in the physical environment and how environment affects these identities. The different positions that experts have taken serves as a model, finally, for students to enter another scholarly debate within an area of interest in a possible prospective major. Open only to members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Fall 2024)

WRPR H102  THE INTERNET & PARTICIPATORY CULTURE  (1.0 Credit)

Division: First Year Writing

This semester, we will read and write, critically and purposefully, on what is considered the new public sphere: the internet. We will do this by investigating three major areas of internet culture: Cancel or Call-Out Culture, Meme Culture and the Culture of Web Activism (sometimes referred to as Slacktivism). Pre-requisite(s): Placement by Director of College Writing. Lottery Preference: Only open to first year students as placed by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H103  YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT: FOOD STUDIES AND IDENTITY  (1.0 Credit)

Elizabeth Jones-Minsinger

Division: First Year Writing

This course is designed to introduce students to concepts in the interdisciplinary field of food studies with a particular emphasis on food’s role in shaping identity. Some topics they may consider include the role of food in constructing national, racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic identities; the importance of cultural exchange in creating cuisine; and food as a repository for memory and method of cultural preservation. Pre-requisite(s): Placement by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H105  THE POLITICS OF SELF-CARE  (1.0 Credit)

Jess Libow

Division: First Year Writing

In this course, we’ll interrogate the relationships between self-care; politics; and physical, mental, and spiritual health by turning to three distinct moments in the history of American self-care: “self-reliance” in the 19th c. as articulated by Emerson and Thoreau; late 20th c activist groups including the Black Panther Party, the Boston Women’s Health Collective, and ACT UP; and contemporary understandings of self-care discourses such as wellness and the perspectives of those living with chronic illnesses. Pre-requisite(s): Placement by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H106  FEMINISM BEFORE SUFFRAGE  (1.0 Credit)

Jess Libow

Division: First Year Writing

Long before they secured the right to vote, women in the United States were actively engaged in an array of political and social debates from abolition and labor reform to marriage and Indigenous sovereignty. In this course we’ll explore this history of American feminist expression by tracing the ways in which women writers from 1776-1920 contested and asserted ideas about sex, race, class, and citizenship. Pre-requisite(s): Placement by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H107  COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY: CLOSE READING MYTH FROM AROUND THE GLOBE  (1.0 Credit)

Adam DePaul

Division: First Year Writing

This course will examine mythological literature from across the globe, with an emphasis on narratives of creation, destruction, and emergence. We will encounter well-treated myths such as those of Greek, Norse, and Judaic origin, as well as less oft-discussed myths from African, Japanese, and Native American origin, among others. We will take a comparative approach to these narratives, employing close reading to identify and examine themes such as symbolism, cultural knowledge, gender commentary, and environmentalism. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. Lottery Preference: First year students.

(Offered: Fall 2024)

WRPR H108  REAL WORK & DREAM JOBS: VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS AND THEORIES OF WORK  (1.0 Credit)

Shannan Hayes

Division: First Year Writing

An entry into theories of work, thinking critically and historically about the role of work in society, the promise of art as an ideal form of work, and the structural persistence of gendered, classed, and racial divisions of labor. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H111  POWER, PLACE, AND FILM  (1.0 Credit)

Nimisha Ladva

Division: First Year Writing

This writing seminar introduces students to film analysis through the themes of power and place and covers topics such as colonialism and imperialism, immigration, inequality, etc. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Spring 2025)

WRPR H112  GLOBAL SOLIDARITY AND LOCAL ACTIONS: INTERDEPENDENCE, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND HAVERFORD  (1.0 Credit)

Eric Hartman

Division: First Year Writing

This course embraces global interdependence while considering how individual identities relate to appropriate local civic actions. Participants review ideas and methods relevant for co-creating more just, inclusive, sustainable communities, advancing inquiry in dialogue with community-based partners of Haverford College.

WRPR H113  WOMEN AND WAR  (1.0 Credit)

Katheryn Whitcomb

Division: First Year Writing

Women have traditionally been viewed as passive actors in the male-dominated field of war. They serve as catalysts for war, as in the case of Helen of Troy, or spoils of conquest. In this course, we will explore both the well-known traditional martial roles assigned to women in the Classical world, as well as the less-discussed, and perhaps more surprising, roles: warrior, spy, aggressor, as well as reflecting on women's roles in modern wars. Lottery Preference: First year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2025)

WRPR H118  PORTRAITS OF DISABILITY AND DIFFERENCE  (1.0 Credit)

Kristin Lindgren

Division: First Year Writing

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes that "staring is an interrogative gesture that asks whats going on and demands the story. The eyes hang on, working to recognize what seems illegible, order what seems unruly, know what seems strange." In this seminar we will explore visual and literary portraits and self-portraits of bodies marked by difference, bodies that often elicit stares. We will ask: What kinds of stories are told about these bodies? How do memoirs and self-portraits by people with disabilities draw on and challenge traditions of life writing and portraiture? How does this work enlarge cultural and aesthetic views of embodiment, disability, and difference? Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College writing.

(Offered: Fall 2024)

WRPR H119  BROWN V. BOARD AT 70: UNFULFILLED PROMISES & UNFINISHED ACTIVISMS FOR EDUCATIONAL EQUITY  (1.0 Credit)

Christopher Rogers

Division: First Year Writing

The landmark victory of Brown v. Board (1954) was popularly understood to symbolize the ability of all students, particularly Black students, to have access to high-quality schooling and shatter the grip of segregation in our schools and public institutions. We will explore perspectives emerging from Black-led education organizing at the 70th Anniversary of the Brown v. Board decision to inform how we understand the purpose of education in our own lives and as social anchor.

(Offered: Fall 2024)

WRPR H120  EVOLUTIONARY ARGUMENTS  (1.0 Credit)

Carol Schilling

Division: First Year Writing

From the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century to the present, scientists, ethicists, disability activists, and others have argued about the uses of increasingly sophisticated technologies for preventing certain inherited traits and enhancing others. We will track representative arguments in ethics, the court, social movements, and popular culture. How do these medical technologies intersect with cultural values and beliefs? How do they influence who will be included in the human community? Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2025)

WRPR H121  LITERACY AND SOCIETY  (1.0 Credit)

Marigold Stratford

Division: First Year Writing

Literacy studies is the study of reading, writing, and written text in a social and cultural context. As we discuss the major themes of this field, we will ask questions like, Where did literacy come from, and how is it different from orality (speaking and listening)? How do communities of individuals engage with literacy? How can literacy be a tool for coercion as well as empowerment? and What does the future of literacy look like? Lottery Preference: First year students as assigned by the Director of the Writing Program.

(Offered: Fall 2024)

WRPR H121A  LITERACY AND SOCIETY  (1.0 Credit)

Marigold Stratford

Division: First Year Writing

Literacy studies is the study of reading, writing, and written text in a social and cultural context. As we discuss the major themes of this field, we will ask questions like, Where did literacy come from, and how is it different from orality (speaking and listening)? How do communities of individuals engage with literacy? How can literacy be a tool for coercion as well as empowerment? and What does the future of literacy look like? Lottery Preference: First year students as assigned by the Director of the Writing Program.

(Offered: Fall 2024)

WRPR H125  ON HIGHER ED: INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL UNIVERSITY STUDIES  (1.0 Credit)

Shannan Hayes

Division: First Year Writing

A number of structural and historical conditions define higher education. This seminar offers an opportunity to explore such conditions by asking what college is as a historical, political-economic, and cultural institution. Pre-requisite(s): Placement by the Director of College Writing. Lottery Preference: Limited to first year students.

WRPR H126  RADICAL BLACK FEMINISMS AND THE CARCERAL STATE  (1.0 Credit)

Division: First Year Writing

With growing calls for the abolition of prisons and all systems of racial-sexual domination, this course will examine a long history of works by and about Black women political prisoners since the Black Power Era. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H130  B-SIDES + BLUES VISIONS: REVIEWING BLACK POPULAR CULTURE FOR SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION  (1.0 Credit)

Christopher Rogers

Division: First Year Writing

In a classic essay interrogating cultural organizing in the 21st Century, journalist Jeff Chang (2010) spoke to the critical and historical role of cultural production (especially hip-hop) for leveraging grassroots movements for progressive social change. In this writing seminar, we will investigate the relationship between cultural production arising from Black communities and its resonance within their visions/actions for social transformation.

(Offered: Spring 2025)

WRPR H132  BEETHOVEN THEN AND NOW  (1.0 Credit)

Richard Freedman

Division: First Year Writing

An exploration of Beethoven's life and works, considered in the context of changing aesthetic and cultural values of the last two centuries. Students will listen to Beethoven's music, study his letters and conversation books, and read some of the many responses his art has engendered. In their written responses to all of this material, students will think in new ways about Beethoven's music, his artistic personality, about the ideas and assumptions that have guided the critical reception of art and life. They will learn to cultivate their skills as readers and listeners while improving their craft as writers. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. Crosslisted: Music, Writing Program

WRPR H133  THE AMERICAN WEST IN FACT AND FICTION  (1.0 Credit)

Emma Lapsansky-Werner

Division: First Year Writing
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

An examination of the imagery of the American West. Using visual and verbal images, this course explores such diverse aspects of the West as cowboys, cartography, water rights, race and social class, technology, religion, prostitution, and landscape painting. Open only to member of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Spring 2025)

WRPR H134  CORRUPTION, CONVERSION, CHANGE: FICTIONS AND PHILOSOPHIES OF TRANSFORMATION  (1.0 Credit)

Ava Shirazi

Division: First Year Writing

This course will examine modern notions of change and transformation through the fiction and philosophy of the past. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H135  HEALTH AND HUMANITIES  (1.0 Credit)

Division: First Year Writing; Humanities

Over the last few decades, “medical humanities” and “health humanities” programs have been popping up in health professional schools across the country. In these courses, students study works of art, literature, history, and philosophy in the hopes that these endeavors will help them become better healthcare providers. But what exactly are “the humanities”? How do they differ from “the arts” or “humanity” itself? And how does a humanistic education benefit healthcare providers and their patients? Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Spring 2025)

WRPR H138  RACE AND GENDER IN AMERICAN HORROR FILM AND FICTION  (1.0 Credit)

Connie McNair

Division: First Year Writing

This course unravels various tropes that haunt the horror genre, exploring how horror film and fiction reflect the values, mores and fears of a collective unconscious, with special emphasis on the ways in which racial stereotyping and gender violence are often deployed as horror tropes. We look closely at portrayals of violence, shock, resistance and power, asking how race and gender play central roles in the production of fear, terror, monstrosity and its subversion. Pre-requisite(s): Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. Lottery Preference: Only first year students are eligible for these seminars.

(Offered: Spring 2025)

WRPR H139  DOES REPRESENTATION MATTER?  (1.0 Credit)

Connie McNair

Division: First Year Writing

In this course, students will explore theories of representation, along with critical race studies, structuralism and poststructuralism, global feminisms and neoliberalism, to think through contemporary discourses (like #Oscarssowhite and Girlboss Feminism) that claim representation matters when it comes to racial and gender justice. Lottery Preference: First year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H141  THE EAR AND ELECTRONIC SOUND  (1.0 Credit)

Division: First Year Writing

The 20th century marks a time of rapid transformation in the world’s conception of sound, music, listening, and communication. Technologies that electronically store, transmit, and generate sonic information have caused a fundamental shift in how and why we listen. Through research, discussion, and personal reflection students will deepen their experience of listening while investigating the illuminating history of audio technologies, electronic music, and our evolving relationship to the auditory.

(Offered: Fall 2024)

WRPR H142  DEFINING BLACKNESS: RACE & INTIMACY IN AMERICAN DISCOURSE  (1.0 Credit)

Connie McNair

Division: First Year Writing

In this course, students will close-read narrative and filmic depictions of transcending, transgressing, and violating racial borders, thinking about what these narratives reflect and what they produce when it comes to understandings of race, gender and sexuality. We’ll look at the effects of both transgressive and progressive figurations of “racial mixture” and mixed race individuals, considering what functions these discourses play in larger schemas of American politics, ideologies and affects. Lottery Preference: First year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing

(Offered: Fall 2024)

WRPR H143  LENAPE STORIES: EXAMINING MYTHOLOGY, STORYTELLING, AND CULTURE THROUGH LENAPE LORE  (1.0 Credit)

Adam DePaul

Division: First Year Writing

This course will examine the cultural stories of the Lenape Native Americans. Students will experience Lenape stories through oral and written traditions, including cosmological and etiological myths, trickster tales, stories addressing settler contact and colonization, and wisdom anecdotes from Lenape elders. Through these stories, we will examine themes of myth theory, culture transmission, contact zones, adaptation & translation theory, colonization, oral vs. written tradition, and selection bias in “canonical” curriculum. Lottery Preference: First year students as placed by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Spring 2025)

WRPR H146  NARRATIVES OF ETHICAL LEADERSHIP: SOLDIER, SAGE, STATESMAN, SAINT  (1.0 Credit)

Is it better to be loved or feared? May we commit a small act of injustice to achieve a greater good for society? Should someone who committed terrible atrocities be remembered as "the Great?" This course explores the role and ethics of leadership through four figures from ancient history: Socrates, Alexander the Great, Cicero, and Anthony the Great. Guided by these questions, students will hone their abilities in reading critically, debating productively, and writing persuasively. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H150  APPROACHES TO LITERARY ANALYSIS  (1.0 Credit)

Alexander Millen, Danielle Allor

Division: First Year Writing

Intended like other sections of the Writing Program to advance students' critical reading and analytical writing skills, this course is geared specifically towards introducing students to the discipline that studies the literary traditions of the English language. One of its aims is to explore the broad range of thematic interests inherent in these traditions, sharing as they do common roots in the history of our language and its influences. The powers and limits of language; ideas of character and community, and the relation between person and place; heroic endeavor and the mystery of evil; loss and renovation these are among the themes to be tracked through various strategies of literary representation and interpretation in a variety of genres (epic, narrative, and poetry) and modes (realism, allegory, and romance), and across a range of historical periods. Our goal is to develop the vocabulary, skills, and knowledge necessary to understand not only how we decide what literary texts mean, but also how literary texts generate and contemplate meaning. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Spring 2025)

WRPR H151  THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: ANCIENT SEXUALITY AND MODERN QUEER POLITICS  (1.0 Credit)

Staff

Division: First Year Writing

In this course, we will examine the influence of Greco-Roman antiquity on the way that we talk about sex and sexuality today, in particular, how queer people have used the Classics to define their own identities. There follows a series of questions: What is at stake when we see ourselves in the past? What does it mean to identify an ancient person as queer? In these histories, which elements are emphasized, which are left out? Lottery Preference: First year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2025)

WRPR H154  HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE STATE  (1.0 Credit)

Division: First Year Writing

This course explores the tension between the law's dual obligation to protect individual rights and uphold the states right to govern, especially during times of crisis. Students will first consider the question, where do rights originate? Students will then consider primary sources that examine important concepts related to human rights: equal protection in wartime (the internment camp cases), protest (Martin Luther King, Jr.), patriotism (Frederick Douglass), identity (Audre Lorde), and even, technology (Ruha Benjamin). Lottery Preference: First year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H155  ORIGIN STORIES: IN THE WAKE OF WAR  (1.0 Credit)

Theresa Tensuan

Division: First Year Writing

In this course we will read a range of origin stories--creation narratives, memoirs, alter/native accounts of settler colonialism, and trickster tales--that delineate constructions of identity and constitutions of community with a focus on the ways in which writers and artists represent ongoing “encounters” between indigenous and imperial cultures, examining inventive work that play with genres ranging from the lyric to the epic to speculative fiction as a means of offering new ways of understanding history and imagining the future. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Spring 2025)

WRPR H156  GOOD GUYS & GALS? QUAKER IMAGERY IN FICTION  (1.0 Credit)

Emma Lapsansky-Werner

Division: First Year Writing

What have been the literary uses of Quaker ideas and images in fiction? How have these changed over time? Here on the Haverford campus, with its Quaker heritage and traditions, is housed perhaps the largest collection of Quaker novels anywhere in the world, fiction by or about Quakers, often populated with characters whose Quakerliness is designed to evoke a certain mood, message, or subtext. For some authors, Quakers became stand-ins for virtue. For others, the Quaker image is of the troublemaker, the nay-sayer, the haughty, unbending zealot. In this course we will read excerpts from an array of Quaker fiction. Then, through class discussions, written essays, and through considering each others writing, students will explore how commentators have interpreted the meaning of "Quakerness" in literature." Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Spring 2025)

WRPR H159  GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN ISLAMIC TEXTS AND PRACTICES  (1.0 Credit)

Guangtian Ha

Division: First Year Writing

This course introduces students to the different views of gender and sexuality in Islamic thought, and situates these views within Muslim histories and societies. We will draw on primary sources, historiographical work, ethnographies of Muslim societies, fiction, poetry, and play. One major focus will be on homosexuality in Islam and Muslim societies. In the course of this examination we will also have a chance to question what “homosexuality” is and whether this term can be applied cross-culturally and cross-religiously. To think critically about homosexuality in Islam will thus compel us to reconsider homosexuality and Islam at once. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Spring 2025)

WRPR H182  THE AMERICAN FAMILY IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE  (1.0 Credit)

Emma Lapsansky-Werner

Division: First Year Writing

Explores values, and stresses, as interfaced with realities of “family," e.g.,Native American, Hispanic, African American; Protestant, Jewish, Mormon and Catholic, North, South and West, over time; rituals of birth, marriage, illness, disability; expectations of family "loyalty." Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Fall 2024)

WRPR H183  COMPUTING THE SELF: THE ART AND PHILOSOPHY OF DIGITAL CULTURE  (1.0 Credit)

James Draney

Division: First Year Writing

What does it feel like to live in data? To be tagged, tracked, followed, favorited, or rated? How has the datafication of everyday life shaped your social life, altering the way you relate to yourself and others? Students in this class will ask what it means to see and be seen as a data object, analyzing a variety of novels, stories, works of philosophy, psychology, and social science that have dramatized the questions posed above.

(Offered: Spring 2025)

WRPR H188  EPIDEMICS AND SOCIETY  (1.0 Credit)

Division: First Year Writing

An examination of the ways epidemics are shaped by society, culture, and popular representation, using historical sources to explore the politics of disease narratives and how class, race, and identity influence responses to epidemics. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H194  ASTRONOMICAL QUESTIONS AND SCIENCE WRITING  (1.0 Credit)

Karen Masters

Division: First Year Writing

In this seminar we will explore the biggest questions in the Universe, along with other recent developments in astrophysics via a series of writing assignments. Topics are likely to include black holes, dark matter, dark energy, the Big Bang, exoplanets and life in the Universe. Prerequisite(s): Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.