Eun Hee Kim, assistant professor of instruction, and Chin-Hung Chang, associate professor of instruction, both teach in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, and their Curriculum Enhancements will include "Chatbots for Korean and Chinese classes". Sarah Owsley Sood is a professor of instruction and associate chair for undergraduate education in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. Her teaching interests include introductory programming and artificial intelligence, and her Curriculum enhancement is "Raising Awareness in Computer Science Curriculum".
Jacob Smith, Professor, Radio-Television-Film Director, MA in Sound Arts and Industries
When we consider the subject of children’s media culture, we quickly discern a host of contradictory behaviors and attitudes: childhood is seen as a period of timeless wonder, but children are bombarded with all the latest fads and gadgets; we try to insulate children from the adult world, but provide them with media technologies that allow them easy access to it.
This class will explore contradictions such as these by exploring the history of children’s media. We will discuss film adaptations of fairy tales and classic children’s literature; children’s television; digital games; children’s music; and online video. Our case studies will allow us to engage with debates about contemporary media culture and the nature of childhood. Children are often understood to be a particularly vulnerable segment of the media audience, and children’s media has much to tell us about media regulation and censorship, theories about media influence, and the media’s role in education and marketing.
NOTE: This course includes suggested viewing material. Previewing is optional, but doing so will enhance your lecture experience. The list with links will be posted on our website OR you may search justwatch.com to find where each case study is currently available. If you are viewing the PDF of this brochure, you may click on the links below. Please bear in mind that titles constantly cycle in and out of every streaming service’s library. Check with your local library to see if it circulates the DVDs or offers free access to Kanopy.com
David Shyovitz, Associate Professor, History, Director, Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies
In modern political discourse, “anti-Semitism” is frequently invoked and infrequently defined. The imprecision with which the term is deployed leads to broad disagreements about the nature and scope of the phenomenon.
Is anti-Semitism a form of racism? Of xenophobia? Of anti-religious animus, akin to Islamophobia? Is it a conspiracy theory? Does anti-Semitism assume that Jews constitute a religion? A nationality? An ethnicity? A “race”? One reason these questions are so hotly contested is because they are usually discussed ahistorically, in isolation from the extensive academic scholarship on the origins and development of anti-Semitism—both the actual phenomenon and the descriptive term itself. This course traces the historical trajectory of anti-Jewish rhetoric, violence, and discrimination from antiquity through the present. We will pay particular attention to the analytical concepts that historians have developed and deployed—including, but not limited to anti-Semitism, antisemitism, anti-Judaism, and Judeophobia. Rather than seeking to isolate an overarching definition of what is and is not anti-Semitic, we will explore the specific contexts in which anti-Jewish animus and violence developed, and the constantly evolving role “Jews” (as individuals and as a category) have played at key historical junctures.
Michael Loriaux, Professor, Political Science, offers that the European Union is the most ambitious and successful experiment in international peace-making in history. At the core of that experiment is the commitment to push back on sovereignty claims as advanced in the name of the state and in the name of leaders of the state.
The EU’s counter-sovereigntist posture bears close examination. We live in an age of dramatic geopolitical, economic, and demographic change and even existential peril. Global challenges demand global responses. The assertion by nation states of their sovereign rights and by statesmen of their sovereign freedoms inhibits coordinated action on a global level. It is no accident that the region of the world, Europe, in which the claims to sovereignty are most restricted is also the region of the world that has enacted the most ambitious and effective policies to combat climate change. In this course we learn about the European Union, but we study it specifically because its counter-sovereigntism may prove useful as we try to address the coming and present crises.
Throughout human history, societies across the globe have been fragmented by strident rifts that result in long-standing religious, political, and socioeconomic consequences. Some of these conflicts derive from ideological differences, some are territorial, and other schisms are frequently based on cultural, ethnic, or racial grounds.
Such historical enmities often lead to repeated patterns of power struggles, civil unrest, and violence. Societies experiencing intense public divisions can be as small as local communities or as large as nation states. This eclectic nine-week lecture series will explore a range of societal strife, often reflecting on the past and the irrationalities of the human condition, as well as the continuation of seemingly irresolvable tensions in our current turbulent times.
EVANSTON, Ill. --- Kathy Reichs, American crime writer, forensic anthropologist and academic, is the recipient of The Alumnae of Northwestern University’s 2023 Alumnae Award. The award, established in 1976, is presented annually to an outstanding alumna who has made significant contributions in her field and who has attained national recognition.
From teaching FBI agents how to detect and recover human remains, to separating and identifying commingled body parts in her Montreal lab, as a forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs has brought her own dramatic work experience to her mesmerizing forensic thrillers. For years she consulted with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina and the Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale for the province of Québec. Dr. Reichs has travelled to Rwanda to testify at the UN Tribunal on Genocide and helped exhume a mass grave in Guatemala. As part of her work at JPAC (Formerly CILHI) she aided in the identification of war dead from World War II, Korea, and Southeast Asia. Dr. Reichs also assisted in the recovery of remains at the World Trade Center following the 9/11 terrorist attacks....The Bone Hacker, her most recent novel, was released on August 1, 2023. In addition, she coauthored the Virals young adult series with her son, Brendan Reichs... Dr. Reichs was also a producer of the hit Fox TV series, Bones, which is based on her work and her novels.
Jeff Garrett is lecturing for The Alumnae's Course B on Tuesday afternoons in Fall Quarter 2023.
Course B: The Library in the West: A 5000-Year History
Jeff Garrett, Librarian emeritus, Northwestern University Tuesdays, 1:00 – 2:30 p.m. Norris University Center The oldest libraries were shamans and storytellers. With the invention of writing, libraries could be gatherings of writings on bark or baked cuneiform tablets stored in baskets. Then came scrolls, then the Graeco-Roman invention of the codex book. In this course, we will start at the very beginning, with the cognitive preconditions for libraries. Then we move through centuries and civilizations, stopping to remember Alexandria, Roman, and medieval libraries, and then the astonishing monastery libraries of the Baroque. We conclude with a consideration of modern research libraries - Northwestern’s will do! - and modern public libraries - why not Evanston’s?
Keith Mako Woodhouse is lecturing for The Alumnae's Course C on Thursday mornings in Fall Quarter 2023.
Course C: This Land and People: the American Environment in Historical Context
Keith Mako Woodhouse, Associate Professor, History Thursdays, 9:30 – 11:00 a.m. Norris University Center In this course we will examine “the environment,” not as a passive backdrop to human history but as an active participant in that history. We will look at the ways in which human culture has been at once sustained and bound by nonhuman nature. We will trace this mutual relationship across the last several centuries of the place that came to be known as the United States, considering the ways in which people fed and clothed themselves, valued and transformed animals and landscapes, and harnessed energy for heat and movement and manufacturing, as well as how nonhuman processes defined and limited all of this human activity. The course will touch very briefly on the tail-end of the Pleistocene and then jump to the colonial period, but it will focus primarily on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Melissa Foster lecturing for The Alumnae's Course D, Thursday afternoons, Fall Quarter 2023.
Course D: Hair to Hamilton: The History and Performance of Pop/Rock Musicals
Melissa Foster, Charles Deering McCormick Distinguished Professor of Instruction, Department of Theatre, School of Communication Thursdays, 1:00 – 2:30 p.m. Norris University Center To survive and excel in today’s performance industry, actors need to be increasingly multifaceted. The birth of the rock musical forever changed the landscape of the musical theatre stage, unleashing a theatrical vehicle of expression that mirrored, and continues to reflect the evolving landscape of history. The vocal demands of these shows are calling for extreme range, versatility, agility, and stamina. Singing in this genre is a specific skill set that needs practice and technical application. This course will explore how cultural and historical events influenced the sound of various genres of pop music in the USA and will discuss and examine the vocal styles/interpretations necessary for the performance of Pop/Rock Musicals in each genre. We’ll link these musical genres to the Broadway stage, noting their application to specific shows and scores. We also hope to include student performances and demonstrations, depending on availability.
