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New Interdisciplinary Courses Offered Spring 2015

October 15, 2014

New Interdisciplinary Courses Offered Spring 2015

The College of Arts and Sciences is offering two new, interdisciplinary courses for undergraduates spring semester 2015. The courses are two of five proposals awarded team-teaching grants in 2013 by ASC Executive Dean and Vice Provost David C. Manderscheid.

HIV: FROM MICROBIOLOGY TO MACROHISTORY
(History 3704; Microbiology 3704)

Unlocking the virological secrets of HIV/AIDs has been one of the grand scientific challenges of the last three decades, and the disease remains one of the world's most serious challenges to human health and development.

How did this virus and this global pandemic come to be?

This course traces the evolution of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) at both the molecular level and within its global historical context.

Team taught by History Professor Thomas McDow and Microbiology Professor Jesse Kwiek, this course, cross-listed in history and microbiology, is one of a limited number of new, cross-disciplinary courses sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences.

This course offers students the unique opportunity to consider scientific processes and the effects of disease in historical context; connect diverse fields, participate in intellectual risk-taking and probe the complexity of real-world problems.

This course uses African and world historical approaches to provide framing for the emergence of HIV, first as an endemic disease in central Africa and eventually as a global pandemic. This approach, in conjunction with a virologist perspective, will highlight the way that history plays an important role in understanding the context of scientific discovery, infectious diseases and their consequences.

MODERNIST THOUGHT AND CULTURE, 1880-1945
(English, 3273; History 3273)

This course surveys one of the most dynamic spans of Western cultural history, which witnessed a spectrum of revolutionary developments in physics, philosophy, psychiatry, visual art, architecture, music, dance, cinema and literature.

Team taught by English Professor Brian McHale and History Professor Stephen Kern, this course will provide students with the opportunity to approach modernist ideas and forms of expression from the perspectives of intellectual history as well as literature and fine-arts criticism. They will acquire valuable experience not only in reading, thinking, talking and writing about great works of modernist culture, but also in hearing, seeing and experiencing them.

Rigorously thought-provoking and intellectually fun, short on easy answers but long on intriguing questions, Modernist Thought and Culture is the course for students looking for multiple perspectives and challenging, cross-disciplinary dialogue.