Winter 2023 Humanities Courses
- For day, time, room, and TA information, see our PDF SCHEDULE or see the course search tool https://registrar-apps.ucdavis.edu/courses/search/index.cfm.
- For all courses not described below, please refer to the General Catalog course descriptions: https://catalog.ucdavis.edu/courses-subject-code/hum/
HUM 002A: Global Humanities
Section 001 - Consent
Prof. Grace Delmolino
The presence of consent is what distinguishes sex from rape, democracy from dictatorship, surgery from assault, employment from slavery. We think of consent as a free and active choice, but it’s more complicated than that. Apps on your phone collect data about your lifestyle, browsing habits, health, and contacts—you agreed to this by default when you installed the app, but did you really consent? In the Middle Ages, a father could consent to marriage on behalf of his 13-year-old daughter or son—is that truly consent? What if you agreed to participate in a medical study on your life-threatening illness, but partway through the study, a cure was discovered and the researchers withheld it from you—did you freely consent to that? For millennia, people have attempted to define consent in philosophy, literature, and theory; we will examine those definitions in this course, using a humanistic approach as we study what makes for valid consent in the domains of data privacy, medicine, voting, sex, and more.
Tuesday/Thursday 1:40-3:00pm, Veihmeyer 212
GE credit AH, WC, WE
Section 002 - Global Comics
Prof. Toby Warner
Comics have long been distrusted for their ability to circulate and manipulate stereotypes, their ambiguous relationship to realism, and the possibility that they offer ‘too much’ pleasure to be taken seriously. In this class we will turn these suspicions on their head by examining how comics artists use an in-between medium – between words and images, between high and popular culture – to engage deeply with the concerns of their times. In readings and lectures, we will explore the history of comics and examine how comics emerged from a long tradition of graphic narratives. We will discover how comics work as a medium and learn to identify and appreciate their formal properties. We will study the social, political, and cultural contexts of familiar comics icons such as Superman, Tintin and Wonder Woman and trace how the medium of comics has been reinvented around the world. Throughout the quarter, we will consider how comics have been used to investigate questions of identity, power, sexuality, and history. In studying comics as humanists, we will discover the kinds of questions humanist critics ask and explore some of the different methodologies humanists employ in order to think critically about cultural objects.
HUM 001D: Issues in Humanities
Prof. Claire Goldstein
HUM 013: Witches: Myth & Reality
Prof. Elisabeth Krimmer