KNOW 27013: Being Corporate
Corporations suffuse our lives. We study with them, work with them, consume their products—even become part of them through the purchase of stock. But what, exactly, is a corporation? In this course, we will trace the evolution of the US corporation from its historical roots through the present day. Our focus will be twofold: the evolving rights and responsibilities of the corporate person in law, and the ways that individual humans both inside and outside the corporate structure have imagined that person in a wider social context. Texts will include US court cases, legal treatises, historical analyses, novels, and cultural ephemera. By the end of the course, students will have a deeper understanding of the persistent and evolving problems of corporate personhood and corporate social responsibility, both from a business and a consumer perspective.
KNOW 40305: The Archive of Early English Literature: Manuscripts, Books, and Canon
This course will introduce students to early English literature through manuscript studies and book history. Throughout the course we will reflect on archival research as a critical practice: how do the material histories of early texts invite us to rethink the fundamental categories that organize literary history, like authorship or canonicity? The course will be both a practicum (teaching the basics of paleography, codicology, and textual editing) and an ongoing conversation about the archives of literary history, as sites of interpretation, memory, and erasure.
We will meet in the Special Collections Research Center, and use the collections of the University of Chicago. We will first focus on the archives of Chicago’s Chaucer Research Project and its principals, John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert, who tried to establish an authoritative text of the Canterbury Tales in the early twentieth century. The second half of the course will focus on print culture and reading practice, with a focus on Chicago’s collection of early modern commonplace books. Students will propose and pursue a research project in the U of C or Newberry Library collections, on a topic of their choosing. Students will produce a piece of scholarship that reflects both careful research in those collections and thoughtfulness about the place of that research in critical practice.
This course fulfills part of the KNOW Core Seminar requirement to be eligible to apply for the SIFK Dissertation Research Fellowship. No instructor consent is required, but registration is not final until after the 1st week in order to give Ph.D. students priority.
KNOW 27012: Reading the Known World: Medieval Travel Genres
This course will consider how medieval English readers came to knowledge of their world, and imagined a place within it, through genres of travel narrative such as the pilgrim’s itinerary, the merchant manual, and the saint’s life. We will reflect on genre as concept en route: how did generic conventions and strategies organize this knowledge of unknown lands, other peoples, and distant marvels? We will read medieval texts like Book of Margery Kempe, Mandeville’s Travels, and the Digby play of Mary Magdalene, along with medieval and modern literary theory, to survey how vernacular literature presented a picture of the world and charted paths across it. Students will leave the class proficient in reading Middle English (the precursor of modern English). No previous experience with the language is required, and an optional weekly reading group will meet to work through passages in this half-new language.
KNOW 29970: XCAP: The Experimental Capstone: Experiencing the Real - Nature, Culture, Society
An essential – if little remarked-upon – aspect of our work as scholars and students within an academic community is that we are concerned with that which is real. We read about things that are real. We write about things that are real. We attempt to prove the realities of our theories and we theorize the real. But what is it like to take “the real” as a question not simply of text or theory, but of experience? In this course, we will immerse ourselves in some of the many ways in which we (human beings living in an industrialized society in the early twenty-first century) have come to know that which is real, and to distinguish it from that which is unreal, ambiguous, or even fake. Equal parts ethnography, history, reportage, philosophy, and fabrication, this course takes action and embodiment as its key elements – particularly action and embodiment as manifested through the sometimes-twinned, sometimes-conflicting pursuits of science and art. In considering the nature of the real, we will consider our own embodiment and cognition in conjunction with the material and technological worlds of our own late modern moment as principle elements of the ways in which we come to know the real.
This course is one of three offered in The Experimental Capstone (XCAP) in the 2018-19 academic year. Enrollment in this course is by application only. Only students graduating in the 2018-19 academic year will be considered for enrollment. For more information about XCAP, visit https://sifk.uchicago.edu/courses/xcap/
KNOW 29940: XCAP: The Experimental Capstone: Knowledge Claims - Theory/Praxis
This course incorporates the practice and theory of various knowledge systems. Each week will feature a different expert, and we will cover (albeit not deeply) a historical, topical, and geographical range of readings and experiments. Our explorations will be in chemistry, medicine, textile knowledge, museum collections, conspiracy theories: we examine knowledge claims throughout, with our investigations crossing over the traditional boundaries between science, social science, medicine, and humanities.
This course is one of three offered in The Experimental Capstone (XCAP) in the 2018-19 academic year. Enrollment in this course is by application only. Only 3rd and 4th year students in the College will be considered for enrollment. For more information about XCAP, visit https://sifk.uchicago.edu/courses/xcap/
KNOW 29900: XCAP: The Experimental Capstone: The Body in Medicine and the Performing Arts
The Body in Medicine and the Performing Arts is a multidisciplinary course designed to explore the human body through the unique combination of medical science and the performing arts. Drawing broadly from medicine, anthropology, and the performing arts, this course seeks to understand the human body by comparing and contrasting the medicalized body with the animated or performing body. With an emphasis on experiential learning, the primary pedagogy will be interactive activities that allow students to learn about the human body through interactions with other bodies as well as their own. The medical sequence of the course will examine how medicine uses the body as an educational tool, examines the body with diagnostic intent, views the body through radiographic imaging, utilizes the dead body to make diagnoses, and endeavors to prolong life. In the performing arts sequence, students will use their own bodies as instruments of inquiry to explore the ways in which the body is animate, expressive and prone to transformation and signification.
This course is one of three offered in The Experimental Capstone (XCAP) in the 2018-19 academic year. Enrollment in this course is by application only. Only students graduating in the 2018-19 academic year will be considered for enrollment. For more information about XCAP, visit https://sifk.uchicago.edu/courses/xcap/
KNOW 40104: Battle in the Mind Fields
The goal of this course is to better understand both the ruptures and the continuity that we find in the development of linguistics, psychology, and philosophy over the period from early in the 19th century up until around 1960. Among the topics we will look at are the emergence of 19th century linguistics through the methods developed to reconstruct Proto Indo-European, and at the same time, the emergence of two wings of German psychology (exemplified by Brentano and by Wundt); the transplanting of both of these disciplines to the United States at the end of the 19th century; the rise of behaviorism in psychology and its interaction with Gestalt psychology as German scholars were forced to leave their homes in Europe in the years before World War II; the development of an American style of linguistics associated with the Linguistic Society of America; and the interactions after World War II of cybernetics, cognitively-oriented psychology, and a new style of linguistic theory development.
This course fulfills part of the KNOW Core Seminar requirement to be eligible to apply for the SIFK Dissertation Research Fellowship. No instructor consent is required, but registration is not final until after the 1st week in order to give Ph.D. students priority.
KNOW 27002: Foucault and the History of Sexuality
This course centers on a close reading of the first volume of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, with some attention to his writings on the history of ancient conceptualizations of sex. How should a history of sexuality take into account scientific theories, social relations of power, and different experiences of the self? We discuss the contrasting descriptions and conceptions of sexual behavior before and after the emergence of a science of sexuality. Other writers influenced by and critical of Foucault are also discussed.
Prerequisites: One prior philosophy course is strongly recommended. Students should opt in to the discussion section that fits their schedule.
KNOW 17403: Science, Culture, & Society in Western Civilization II: Early Modern Period
Section 1, offered by Robert J. Richards - “Renaissance & Enlightenment.” This lecture-discussion course examines the development science and scientific philosophy from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The considerations begin with the recovery of an ancient knowledge in the works of Leonardo, Vesalius, Harvey, and Copernicus. Thereafter the course will focus on Enlightenment science, as represented by Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Hume. The course will culminate with the work of Darwin, who utilized traditional concepts to inaugurate modern science. For each class, the instructor will provide a short introductory lecture on the texts, and then open discussion to pursue with students the unexpected accomplishments of the authors under scrutiny.
KNOW 17403: Science, Culture, & Society: Early Modern Period II
Section 2 - "Revolutions in Astronomy Anatomy." This course explores scientific developments in Western Europe from the sixteenth-century Scientific Revolution to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. During this period, European understandings of the natural world-and ways of achieving such understandings-underwent a series of radical and far-reaching transformations that are often called the Scientific Revolution.