Colloquia are interdisciplinary courses not affiliated with a department. Whether colloquia are accepted for a major credit by individual departments is determined for each colloquium separately; students should consult their major departments.
This course will examine the emergence of the “New Woman” as a category of social theory, political action, and literary representation at the turn of the twentieth century. Early readings will trace the origins of the New Woman as a response to nineteenth-century notions of “True Womanhood.” Discussions will situate literary representations of women in larger cultural events taking place during the Progressive Era–debates over suffrage as well as their relationship to issues of citizenship, immigration, Jim Crow segregation, urbanization, and nativism. The course will focus on texts, written by a diverse group of women, which present multiple and, at times, conflicting images of the New Woman. Close attention will be paid to the manner in which these women writers constructed their fictions, particularly to issues of language, style, and form. Readings will include texts by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Pauline Hopkins, Anzia Yezierska, and Sui Sin Far.
This is a writing intensive course. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 12 students. Fall semester. Lecturer Bergoffen.
2023-24: Not offered“Plague” has multiple origins, so the etymologists tell us. It is associated with stroke, wound, illness, interpreted as divine punishment. “Pandemic,” a word of more recent vintage, relates to “a disease: epidemic over a very large area; affecting a large proportion of a population.” This colloquium will inquire into the current crisis by undertaking a critical history of plagues and pandemics and how they relate to governance and the state. How did we arrive at this moment? How does studying past plagues enable us to better understand the various valences of the present pandemic moment? How does the pandemic implicate the state, and can it be thought outside of state governance? Can any political system “manage” a pandemic, and at what costs? What are the narrative or representational modes that would be proper to capturing this moment? And what kind of explanation and mode of historical understanding would our answers to such questions indicate about ourselves and our scholarly disciplines?
We will read and engage a wide range of texts (ancient texts such as Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian Wars and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the contemporary theories of Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown, Pierre Bourdieu, Hannah Arendt, and others, alongside contemporary cultural explorations of plague and pandemic in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries such as the Spanish flu, HIV/AIDS, and coronavirus). Sections taught by Professor Umphrey and Associate Professor Kunichika will combine lectures (some of which may be made available to the Amherst community via Zoom) with an in-class discussion format and tutorial model that will allow students to pursue independent work. Professor Sitze will teach an online only section.
Limited to 18 students. Fall semester. Professor Umphrey, Professor Sitze and Associate Professor Kunichika.
2023-24: Not offeredThe sonic and social dynamics of people singing together are, surprisingly, an under-developed and under-theorized field in music studies and voice studies. In the time of COVID-19, managing the significant risks of singing together amplifies these dynamics through the impossibility of physical co-presence and the possibilities of technologically enabled participation at a distance. This is an extraordinary time to think and write about what it means to sing together. Work on the voice tends toward an almost exclusive focus on individual voices, despite the human commonplace of group singing, choric chanting, and joint speech. In this research tutorial, we will take stock of how group singing is treated as either a sonic or a social phenomenon—as unisonance (the appearance of ideological coherence in mass singing) or multisonance (the sonic textures of thickness and weight in mass singing); as collective singing (voicing something in common) or collected singing (voices curated according to a sonic ideal). We will then be positioned to move beyond the sonic/social divide in understanding how people sing together, and what its effects and affects are. Our research will be historical, comparative, ethnographic (engaging with choirs and singing communities navigating the limits and possibilities of functioning during COVID-19), and keyed to the physical and sonic particulars of group singing. A major part of our project will be to model a decolonized approach to group singing while leveraging the critical and comparative possibilities that traditions of choir and choral singing afford us. In the six-week summer research period, we will collaborate in writing a scholarly article based on our work to be submitted to a major journal. Although students need not be singers themselves, the Amherst College Choral Society and student-led singing groups will serve as important resources for our work.
This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Admission with consent of the instructor. Spring Semester. Professor Engelhardt. Hyflex format with as much face-to-face learning as possible. Online elements of the course will be conducted via Zoom and the course website.
2023-24: Not offeredThe United States, almost alone among constitutional democracies, retains death as a criminal punishment. It does so in the face of growing international pressure for abolition and of evidence that the system for deciding who lives and who dies is fraught with error. This seminar is designed to expose students to America's death penalty as a researchable subject. It will be organized to help students understand how research is framed in this area, analyze theories and approaches of death penalty researchers, and identify open questions and most promising lines of future research. It will focus on the following dimensions of America's death penalty: its history, current status, public support/opposition, the processing of capital cases in the criminal justice system, race and capital punishment, and its impact and efficacy. During the seminar, each student will develop a prospectus for a research project on America's death penalty. This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Spring semester. Professor Sarat.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2025This course takes Los Angeles and New York as case studies for tracing different histories related to Native Americans, urbanism, and entertainment. So students can engage a range of interdisciplinary strategies for studying Native American migration in the twentieth century we will draw on materials from the Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection to practice developing researchable questions. Students will also assist in conducting primary research and data gathering related to Native American actors and entertainers to shed light on the lives they led off-screen and off-stage while they worked in Los Angeles and New York City. To ground our discussions and approach to research students will read secondary sources about the history of Native performance in the United States, especially in relation to cinema. There may be some ethnographic work as well and an introduction to methods from oral history. The main aim of this research tutorial is to have students focus on the ways in which Native people have participated in the film industry as laborers and shapers of culture, and since there are no “official” archives left to us by Native entertainers much of what students will learn is how to conduct research based on clues from a diverse array of sources. For example, by examining articles from Variety, catalogs from the American Film Institute, and papers from social reform institutions, like the L.A. Indian Center and the American Indian Community House (AICH) in New York City, students will begin to piece together a meaningful understanding of Native people as actors and activists during the twentieth century. Students who can be in residence for part of the summer following the tutorial will visit archives in New York related to the AICH—a non-profit organization that has served the health, social service, and cultural needs of Native Americans in the city since 1969. Additional work over the summer will involve visualization tools from the Digital Humanities, like Gephi, so students can demonstrate what they have learned about the many Native entertainment and activist networks that existed in L.A. and NYC.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 6 students. Omitted 20-21. Professor Vigil.
2023-24: Not offeredHow can an archive tell the story of a cultural practice that resists the very idea of being archived? If performance, in Peggy Phelan’s formulation, “becomes itself through disappearance,” what might it mean to document this endless disappearance? And what can we learn about the relationship between performance as an artistic project, theater as a cultural institution, and the everyday, intimate existence of those who made performances happen from examining such an archive? We will examine these questions through the lens of the Alma Law Soviet Theater Collection at the Amherst Center of Russian Culture. Over the course of nearly thirty years, Alma Law (1927-2003), the best-informed American scholar of Russian and Soviet theater in her generation, amassed a treasure trove of materials that chronicle the theater scene of the late-Soviet period. Hundreds of interviews with actors, directors, designers, playwrights, critics, and scholars working in Soviet theater at the time, which Law conducted during her frequent research trips to the USSR, are complemented by video and audio recordings of live rehearsals and performances, thousands of photos and over a hundred reels of microfilm. They give us access to very rare testimony about the “backstage” existence of a crucial cultural institution. What kinds of things can we actually learn from these diverse pieces of evidence? The tutorial will begin by exploring key methodological insights from the fields of performance studies and cultural history, which will help us formulate the research questions that we will pursue, individually and in pairs, as we examine Law’s notebooks (diaries and drafts), and card catalogs. These materials were originally created in English, so no knowledge of the Russian language (or Soviet culture or theater studies) is required. Students who are able to read Russian are highly encouraged to participate and will receive research assignments that allow them to employ their proficiency. This tutorial builds on the work, in the spring and summer of 2018, of the pioneering group of Amherst undergraduates who produced a comprehensive inventory of Alma Law’s diaries from one key period of her travels (the early 1990s, when she was working closely with the legendary theater maker Yuri Lyubimov) and an inventory of the hundreds of personalities, on both sides of the ocean, with whom she worked on her Soviet theater-related projects. The research conducted by that group makes it possible to take several important new steps in conceptualizing the material and shaping the first scholarly study of the archive and the world it captures. This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Wolfson.
2023-24: Not offeredWhat are our obligations to future generations of human beings? This question has pressing implications for everything from climate change policy to the accumulation of national debt. Perhaps we owe nothing to future people, since they don’t (yet) exist, or since their future identities depend upon our actions. But if we reject these lines of thought, as most of us do, then how exactly should we weigh the well-being of future people against the lives of those currently living? Should we apply some sort of “discount rate,” and if so, which one? Should we aim for a future population whose well-being is maximized, or should we apply some other standard, perhaps one that includes considerations of justice? Even more fundamentally: are we right to think that human life is, on balance, a positive thing, or are we under an “anti-natalist” obligation not to bring more people into this world? (And how should non-human animals and the environment-as-such figure into our thinking here?) Finally, how might a policy based on answers to such questions be weighed against other factors, such as our reproductive rights, or procedural and historical considerations?
These questions have been the subject of recent work by philosophers and social scientists in the emerging and fascinating field of population ethics. In this colloquium, we focus on several theoretical puzzles that lie at the heart of this area of inquiry. In conjunction with the professor’s own research on these issues, students will be introduced to the central puzzles of population ethics, and then guided through the process of developing their own research projects.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Moore.
2023-24: Not offeredIn the United States, a child’s address, more than any other factor, determines what kind of public education he or she will receive. A complex set of historical forces including local and federal housing policies, mortgage lending practices, highway construction, and school districting has channeled particular economic, racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups into particular neighborhoods, where many remain today. And because public schools are funded by local property taxes and influenced by neighborhood boundaries, they often become harnessed to a narrative of inequality. Yet recent Supreme Court rulings have severely circumscribed the strategies communities might employ to disrupt the linkage between residence and educational opportunity. This research seminar blends urban history with educational policy to explore how spatial relationships have shaped educational opportunity since World War II. It will investigate a range of historical, legal, and contemporary issues relevant to both the segregation and desegregation of American cities and their public schools in the twentieth century. Class meetings will alternate between seminar-style discussion and an intensive, hands-on study of one particular community—Cambridge, Massachusetts—noteworthy for the innovative strategies it has utilized to desegregate its public schools. This course involves a significant research component designed to expose students to a range of approaches, including archival analysis and oral interviews. In particular, students will learn to utilize geographic information systems (GIS) to visualize the spatial evolution of inequality in urban communities like Cambridge and to analyze past, present, and future strategies to equalize educational opportunity in American cities.
This course is part of a new model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to 6 students. Open to sophomores and juniors interested in developing a senior thesis project. Not offered in 2020-21. Professor Moss and Dr. Anderson.
2023-24: Not offeredA revolution in transgender rights in the United States is underway. Once marginalized and denigrated by mainstream society, the medical establishment, the legal system, and even the lesbian and gay rights movement, transgender people are increasingly gaining rights and recognition. This seminar will introduce students to transgender representations and experiences in the past as a researchable subject. Students will be introduced to the three dimensions of historic research: theory, method, and archives. The course will focus on the key theories of gender that have informed historic research for the past forty years, the methodological issues involved in conducting research of sexual and gender minority communities, and effective strategies for defining the parameters of a usable archive. Some questions to be engaged include: What is gender? What is transgender? What constitutes a transgender past? How does the historian determine correct terminology for writing? What role does history play in the present or future? Students will write their own prospectus for a research project in transgender history.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Not offered in 2020-21. Professor Manion.
2023-24: Not offeredAccents can be global and local, ethnic and national, cosmopolitan and provincial, unconscious and performative, racialized and gendered—often all at once. And yet, although everyone speaks with an accent, some accents are heard as “neutral” whereas others are heard as “accented.” These differences have serious implications: accent can be a passport for entry or grounds for discrimination, leading to the denial or approval of asylum claims and job or housing applications. Indeed, accent has become a lynchpin of the contemporary global economy, with complex industries devoted to the training, detection, neutralization, and monetization of particular accents. This seminar will introduce students to representations of accented speech and the experience of accented subjects as a researchable subject that teaches us much about the political economy of listening and the commodity-status of vocal sounds. The course will be organized into three units: theory, method, and site. During the first half of the course, we will encounter how accent has been theorized in a range of disciplines, including sociology, linguistics, sound studies, literary studies, and film studies. Diverse methods, from ethnography and case studies to close textual analysis and quantitative analysis, are employed in each of these fields. In the final unit of the class we will mobilize these competencies by studying various global sites that demand an approach that is intersectional, interdisciplinary, and methodologically nimble, including the offshore call center and cloud-based voice services. Students will then write their own prospectus for a research project on accent focused on a site that they will identify.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Rangan.
2023-24: Not offeredA thorough, experiential course on the ins and outs of book publishing that includes a history of how books became our preferred channel for the dissemination of knowledge and entertainment and as a tool for political, economic, and cultural change. We will discuss the past, present, and future of the book, how it has mutated from Gutenberg to the digital age, and the challenges book publishing faces in the twenty-first century, not only in the United States but in the global scene. The objective is to study book-making and distribution from a critical eye and to come up with new solutions for book publishing in emerging or postcapitalist economies and for disadvantaged audiences. Strategies for acquiring, editing, publishing, and marketing books in the United States and in the global market will be discussed. Topics include budgeting; foreign and domestic rights; corporate, nonprofit, and academic companies; and collaborations with literary agents, translators, librarians, and booksellers. There will be an assortment of guest speakers. Students will participate in ongoing projects at Restless Books, an independent nonprofit publisher in Brooklyn devoted to contemporary global literature for children and adults and the classics.
Limited to 10 students. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offeredOn October 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech at Amherst College in celebration of the Frost Library and in tribute to his friend, Poet Laureate Robert Frost (1874-1963), with whom he had a turbulent relationship. An inspiring meditation on the crossroads where politics and poetry meet, arguably the most important feature of the speech was Kennedy's call for public service, part of a mission that resulted, among other things, in the Peace Corps, established to create a better understanding between Americans and other nations. In what way is Kennedy's call to public service still suitable now? What are today’s young people’s prime concerns in improving our world? And how can politics and poetry work together to achieve these goals? A partnership between Amherst College, the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, and other institutions, this course explores the reverberations of Kennedy's speech in America and the world from the Civil Rights Era to the present, analyzing the bifurcating paths President Kennedy and Robert Frost took, and reflecting on other famous friendships between political leaders and poets from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare and onward to modern Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and, of course, the United States. This course will also have a public component. It will be the theme of a speakers’ series in which prominent politicians, poets, activists, journalists, and scholars from all sides of the ideological divide will be on campus and at the JFK Library to reflect, through public conversations, on how politics and poetry interact and the extent to which Kennedy's speech and his friendship with Frost defined their career and what the meaning of public service is in the twenty-first century. The PBS documentary on the topic will be featured as part of the series.
Limited to 30 students. Spring semster. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offeredSince the emergence of theater in early societies, the concept of character has always been at the core of this art form. The character’s identity was usually different than the actor’s. Since the rise of realism (and especially in recent decades), however, there is a very different approach: a clear call for the identity of the actor to match the identity of the character she plays.
This new phenomenon goes hand in hand with another major trend in recent decades, relating to the topics and stories of contemporary plays. More and more, plays bring stories of social groups and individuals that were rarely told in the past. This, along with the rise of identity politics, has led to an even greater demand that the identities of the actors, those who are cast to portray these stories on stage, will match the identities of their characters.
What are the implications of these new trends in playwriting, casting and production methods and values? If the actor’s identity should match the character’s, what room does it leave for the director’s interpretation of the play and of the characters? What aspects of identity are we looking at, besides race, gender and ethnicity? What about religion, body size, or age, for example? When does this “self-recruiting” theater, which promotes a specific political agenda, stop to be considered art and start to look more like propaganda?
This research tutorial would be an opportunity to engage with a very “hot topic” in contemporary theater. Inquiry will inevitably expand to explore other bodies of research, such as political science, culture and media studies, and art theory. In addition to more traditional research methods, students will also conduct interviews with artistic directors and actors, read plays and watch productions. This work is aimed at producing one or more articles that the group will publish academically.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Requisite: At least one of THDA 111, 112, 113, or 114. Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Eliraz.
2023-24: Not offeredThe “War in Translation” research tutorial aims to allow students the opportunity to identify, analyze and translate a work or body of work of literary and historical significance that has not been previously available in English. Focusing on the personal experiences of a war or conflict during the twentieth century, students will begin by identifying untranslated primary source material that is written in a foreign language in which they are highly proficient. This will entail working with the professor and library staff to identify databases and digitized texts that have not been previously translated. Students will be encouraged to focus on materials such as letters, essays, newspaper articles, speeches and short works of fiction relevant to a single twentieth-century conflict of particular interest to each student, such as the Spanish Civil War, World War II/the Holocaust, the Guatemalan Civil War, or the Argentine “Dirty War.” Students will work closely with the professor and with their classmates to produce a prospectus and sample annotated translation of their selected material, providing relevant literary and historical context. The ultimate goal is to produce a publishable work (online or in print) that will ultimately make this primary source not only available in English but also accessible to scholars and lay readers who may not be familiar with the historical period under scrutiny.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Brenneis.
2023-24: Not offeredThis research colloquium will explore the lawsuit alleging anti-Asian American admissions discrimination as a result of affirmative action policies currently pursued by Harvard College. Students will do background readings on the history of affirmative action and explore several of the major lawsuits that attempted to dismantle the policy. The focus of the semester will be on the current lawsuit: its background, principals, allegations, and directions. We will examine legal, political, intra- and inter-racial contexts, and potential outcomes in the near and long term futures as well as their broader societal implications.
This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Odo.
2023-24: Not offeredPacific Islander protagonists are conspicuously absent from nineteenth-century travel writing. Even so, myriad voyagers from Oceania journeyed to the furthest reaches of the planet in the 1800s, generating intercultural encounters and returning to their archipelagic homelands with news of the outside world. This research tutorial focuses on Indigenous Pacific Islander women and men who travelled to the United States, Europe, China, and Japan during the nineteenth century. Over the past decade, new searchable websites containing millions of pages of newspapers and other printed materials from Aotearoa (New Zealand), Fiji, Hawai‘i, Tahiti, and Tonga have come online. These vast clearinghouses for primary source materials offer possibilities for adding nuance, thick description, and multiple viewpoints to accounts of Pacific Islander journeys. Students in this tutorial will conduct research on these voyages, and we will publish our findings as part of an ongoing Pacific Islander history blog project.
This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 6 students. Spring semester. Professor Melillo.
Learning by doing represents a valuable educational experience for all students. This course provides an opportunity to reflect on an internship or other fieldwork experience and to integrate that experience with key learning outcomes expected in a student’s major. Through class meetings and short essays, students will document the work undertaken during the internship, how it relates to prior coursework, and its relationship to possible career paths; reflect on the positive and less good aspects of the internship experience; identify new skills and the personal growth that developed during the internship; and detail the workflow and process of one or more specific tasks or projects undertaken during the internship. The internship or other fieldwork experience must be done over the summer, with course enrollment and coursework completed the following fall. The Colloquium does not count toward major or college degree requirements. This course may be taken no more than twice during a student’s time at Amherst and cannot be taken until a student has declared a major.
Offered as a half course. Four class meetings per semester. Admisssion with consent of the instructor. Not open to first-year students. Fall Semester. Professor Riondato.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023The rise of populism worldwide today, personified by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, is a fierce reaction to globalism policies of the past few decades. Anti-immigration movements in Europe and the United States, assaults on free speech; racial profiling; polarized politics; intolerance for gender, economic, and linguistic diversity; the building of walls and the renegotiation of international trade treaties; the tension between rural and urban communities; and the questioning of the basic tenets of pluralism are some of the symptoms. Democracy itself might be at peril. This colloquium takes a balanced view of the debate, using the Socratic method to explore its pros and cons without prejudice. Focusing on different forms of oral and written expression, students will engage with works of Voltaire, Isaiah Berlin, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others, as well as films, travel writing, and poetry from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Sponsored by a generous gift of the Class of 1970, the course will feature a number of distinguished guests—activists, intellectuals, scientists, lawyers, journalists, and artists—from various origins and from both sides of the ideological divide.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2019-20. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offered