Fall Quarter 2026
- For day, time, room, and TA information, see our:
PDF Schedule or Schedule Builder - For all courses not described here, see:
Catalog Descriptions
HUM 002A International Crime Fiction | Carlee Arnett
International crime fiction depicts murders, sex trafficking, drug smuggling, government and police corruption, dysfunctional families and international spies. These crimes are solved by protagonists who are flawed as well as outside of the mainstream culture. The crimes depicted in the novels are used as a vehicle to provide a social critique of the country where they are set. The search for truth, rather than justice or social harmony, pits the detective against his peers and the political structure. In this course, we will read the Scandinavian novel that brought the genre to the international stage, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. An early adopter of the Noir genre outside of Scandinavia was Qiu Xialong with Inspector Chen with the break-out novel Death of a Red Heroine. The last novel, A Beautiful Place to Die, is set in 1950’s South Africa and features a detective traumatized by fighting in Europe in the Second World War contending with the onset of Apartheid. In this course, we will use humanistic methods of inquiry, such as close reading and discussion, to analyze identities within cultures, deviance from social norms, and issues in translation and cross-cultural interpretation.
The blues is a uniquely American musical genre. Relive African American history from the rural South to the industrialized north through the music of blues artists like Robert Johnson, B. B. King, and Muddy Waters and gain a better understanding of American popular music, from rock ’n’ roll, to R&B, and rap.
HUM 015 Language & Identity | Eric Russell
In this course, we will explore language and different communicative acts that are deemed inappropriate, offensive, or otherwise taboo. Through this, you will come to better understand how these language activities reflect our complex identities, as well as how our attitudes about our own and others' language acts reflects hidden (and sometimes not-so-hidden) power structures. Working together and guided by readings, we will peel back several layers of what may go by unnoticed in day-to-day life, confront some of our own preconceptions about our own and other's language, and begin to understand the ways that language shapes and is shaped by forces such as race, class, gender, and sexuality.
