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 2023)

WRPR H102  THE INTERNET & PARTICIPATORY CULTURE  (1.0 Credit)

Ana Hartman

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.

(Offered: Fall 2023)

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.

(Offered: Fall 2023)

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.

(Offered: Spring 2024)

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 2024)

WRPR H112  INTERACTION RITUAL: THE NOVEL AND SOCIOLOGY  (1.0 Credit)

Division: First Year Writing

In this course, we will read a range of texts devoted to dissecting the interaction in British and American society and culture. These texts explore how the social interaction functions when it goes smoothly—and how it can go wrong. Prerequisite(s): First-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H116  BLACK PHILADELPHIA  (1.0 Credit)

Division: First Year Writing

This course will engage cultural products by Black writers, artists and activists who explore the racial and spatial politics of Black life in Philadelphia since the dawn of the 20th century. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

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 2023)

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 2023)

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.

(Offered: Fall 2023)

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

Staff

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 H127  READING JAZZ  (1.0 Credit)

Richard Freedman

A study of jazz and its many meanings, from Louis Armstrong to John Coltrane, and from Charles Mingus to Sun Ra. We’ll explore the music itself, of course. But our main focus will be on the stories that its creators tell about themselves, and the stories that various eye (and ear) witnesses and critics tell about why jazz matters. Together, we will discuss, question, and write about topics such as art and entertainment, difference and race, ownership and authenticity, discrimination and community.

WRPR H128  READING SACRED TEXT: RELIGION, RACE AND SEXUALITY  (1.0 Credit)

Naomi Koltun-Fromm

Division: Humanities
Domain(s): A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts)

An academic introduction to reading race, sexuality and religion in/and out of sacred texts [primarily the Bible and Quran]. This course will explore how various sacred texts come to support a variety of views (often contradictory) on race, sexuality and religion.

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

(Offered: Spring 2024)

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 2024)

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)

Jess Libow

Division: First Year Writing

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 2024)

WRPR H136  BLACK ECOLOGIES  (1.0 Credit)

Staff

This course engages writings and cultural works about Black eco-literary and ecological traditions. Black Ecologies focuses on the multiple ecological and spatial conditions that have over-determined Black life and relationships to nature including the middle passage, slavery, racial segregation, food apartheid, gentrification and even incarceration. All these phenomena have produced unequal access to natural resources, space, food and land through systems that racialize, gender and commodify space. By exploring Black cultural and land based worker’s literary, cultural, and community responses to anti-Black environmental conditions, we will consider how Black communities reclaim spatial autonomy through creative modes of collective liberation. Student's critical and creative writing will be based on course texts and outdoor experiences of observation and laboring collectively at Haverfarm. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. Crosslisted: AFST,ENVS.

WRPR H137  CLEOPATRA: THE WOMAN, THE QUEEN, THE ICON  (1.0 Credit)

Division: First Year Writing

This seminar will guide students through recovering the historical figure of Cleopatra, as well as applying feminist theory to investigate how her image has been manipulated to suit the purposes of moralists, artists, and scholars. Students will read several pieces of modern scholarship that argue for different interpretations of her racial and ethnic identity, and consider why Cleopatra’s racial and ethnic identity is (or is not) an important question for us as modern students. Pre-requisite(s): Placement by the Director of College Writing. Lottery Preference: First year students through the writing placement.

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.

(Offered: Spring 2024)

WRPR H142  PASSING, MIXING, (RE)PRODUCING: 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 2023)

WRPR H145  RUSSIAN LIT IN RUSSIAN HISTORY  (1.0 Credit)

Linda Gerstein

Division: First Year Writing

Continuity and change in Russian and Soviet society since the 1890s. Major topics: the revolutionary period, the cultural ferment of the 1920s, Stalinism, the Thaw, the culture of dissent, and the collapse of the system. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

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

Charles Kuper

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.

(Offered: Fall 2023)

WRPR H150  APPROACHES TO LITERARY ANALYSIS  (1.0 Credit)

Alexander Millen, Danielle Allor, Joshua Kopin

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 2024)

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

Ryan Warwick

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 2023, Spring 2024)

WRPR H154  HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE STATE  (1.0 Credit)

Patricia Kennedy

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.

(Offered: Fall 2023)

WRPR H155  ORIGIN STORIES: NARRATING ASIAN AMERICA  (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 2024)

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.

WRPR H158  HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE AGE OF TERROR  (1.0 Credit)

Patricia Kennedy

Division: First Year Writing

This course examines the effect of terrorist attacks on the targeted population (or government) and strategies behind the recruitment and proliferation of such violence. While explicit rules govern behavior in the face of a terrorist attack, terrorism often makes a state vulnerable to bending laws and violating rights. Texts include the rules of interrogation from the Counterinsurgency Field Manual and legal memoranda from after 9/11 that narrowed the definition of torture in the Geneva Conventions. Lottery Preference: First year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Spring 2024)

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.

WRPR H164  MATERIALITY AND SPECTACLE IN NINETEENTH CENTURY UNITED STATES  (1.0 Credit)

Terry Snyder

Division: First Year Writing

Spectacles reflect, influence, and change cultural experiences, meaning, and understanding. This course will consider the materiality of spectacular nineteenth century US events through critical examination of historical accounts, primary research, and close readings of objects. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

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 2023)

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 H191  CONSTRUCTIONS OF RACE AND ETHNICITY IN THE CLASSICAL WORLD  (1.0 Credit)

Staff

Division: First Year Writing

Constructions of ideas of race and ethnicity in classical literature with attention to critical race theory. Prerequisite(s): 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.

WRPR H199  CHILDHOOD AND CHILDREN’S LITERATURE  (1.0 Credit)

Staff

Division: First Year Writing

Reading children’s literature as well as toys, games, and dolls from the eighteenth century to the present, this first-year writing seminar considers how ideas of childhood have evolved over time in American and British culture. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.