Haverford Moodle

This course explores the intersections of death, politics, and the environment across literature, philosophy, political theory, and cultural studies. Students will examine how societies reckon with mortality, how death shapes political life, and how ecological crises reframe our relationship with extinction and regeneration. The course also engages with the paradoxical possibilities of death, both as loss and as a condition of renewal, especially in the face of climate change and environmental degradation. Combining seminar-style discussion with occasional short lectures to situate texts historically and theoretically, students will be encouraged to make connections between classical traditions, modern political theory, and contemporary ecological challenges. Special emphasis will be placed on interdisciplinary dialogue across literature, philosophy, and environmental humanities.

This course is an investigation of the function, origin, and evolutionary history of photosynthesis, from the biochemistry of marine microbes to the diversity of present-day land plants.

Emphasis will be placed on plant structure, physiology, and adaptation.

Senior thesis research in the Wilson Lab.

Sex, gender, and sexuality affect just about every aspect of our lives. From the moment a doctor announces “girl” or “boy,” the sexes we’re assigned and the genders we perform influence everything from the clothes we are expected to wear to the relationships we pursue to the spaces we’re allowed to enter. Of course, in practice everyone deviants in some way from the demands built into binary categories like male/female, cis/trans, or straight/queer, and the failure to conform to these ideal types can carry heavy penalties, leading many people to resist, refuse, or attempt to redefine them. Moreover, gender and sexuality always intersect with other social power systems – including but not limited to race, religion, class, ability, ethnicity, nationality, and so on – so that nobody experiences sex, gender, or sexuality in precisely the same way as anyone else.

This course explores the historical constitution of modern categories of gender and sexuality and the ways that these unbalanced social power systems shape everything from global geopolitics to the intimate spaces of our households. You do not need to have a background in Gender and Sexuality Studies to succeed in this class. We will be learning about core concepts, such as power and difference, alongside different theoretical approaches to gender and sexuality. The approach we take in the course will be a ‘history of the present,’ meaning that, in order to contextualize our contemporary categories, concepts, and debates, much of the material we engage will comprise historically or genealogically significant (that is, old) texts associated with the fields of feminist and gender studies. But, understanding that the meaning of ideas is not static, we will make every effort not only to understand the historical circumstances that produced these ideas, but also their relevance to our lives today.

By the end of this course, you should be able to mobilize multiple conceptual tools to discuss how gendered power systems shape historical narratives, cultural representations, and our everyday lives in generally unequal but context-dependent ways.

This course satisfies Humanities, A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts) and B: Analysis of the Social World.