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. Professor Umphrey, Professor Sitze and Associate Professor Kunichika.
2023-24: Not offeredWorld War I posed the most significant challenge to American industrial mobilization since the Civil War. This course will delve deeply into the role of firearms makers (in particular, Winchester Repeating Arms) on the political, economic, and social mobilization of the US before, during, and after the Great War. It will offer students a chance to explore the ways in which gun makers reorganized their labor forces, production and sales techniques, and product lines to meet the needs of the US government and its allies. We will also examine how these efforts co-evolved with the growth of the National Rifle Administration (NRA) and other “patriotic” proto-gun rights organizations in the first decades of the twentieth century. Course research will involve a wide variety of techniques, including primary source analysis, case studies, dataset compilation, and potentially even social network analysis and Geographical Information Systems. It will also provide interested students with an opportunity to collaborate on a research article.
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.
Limited to 7 students. Open to Sophomores and Juniors. Omitted 2023-24. Professor Obert.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as COLQ 234 and LJST 334, Research Seminar) The 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 2025In 2013, Amherst College acquired one of the most comprehensive collections of Native American writing in the world – nearly 1,500 books ranging from contemporary fiction and poetry to sermons, political tracts and tribal histories from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is a living collection; it has since grown to over 3,000 volumes. This seminar offers the opportunity to actively engage the literature of this dynamic collection and contribute original research for a Digital Atlas of Native American Intellectual Traditions, an interface that will enable users to visualize books in the KWE Collection within a network of Native authors and communities, mapped across time and space. This course also offers immersion in Indigenous studies methodologies, for those new to the field and for those who already have significant experience or coursework. Participants will build and develop research skills in collaboration, working closely with scholars and librarians as they engage in archival and digital research, print history, land-based learning, and community-based learning, including faculty-led field trips to local tribal nations. In working on collaborative projects, we will also consider ethical questions regarding the distribution of knowledge, the curation of materials, access to the collections, and community-engaged research.
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. Limited to 6 students. Spring Semester. Professor Brooks.
2023-24: Not offeredWorking with rare Dakota-language texts, like the newspaper “Iapi Oaye,” in the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection as well as books by Dakota authors Charles Eastman and Ella Cara Deloria that were printed in English, this class enables students to do original research that uncovers the links between language (iapi), nation (oyate), and the strategies of survival Dakota people have used to resist colonial efforts to remove and erase them. By drawing on interdisciplinary tools from Native American and Indigenous studies students will also build connections between history, literature, linguistics, and ethnography to deepen their understandings of Dakota language and culture from the past to the present. Our approach to research will begin with Shaun Wilson’s book Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods and will look for models in historical studies, such as, Dakota in Exile by Linda Clemmons and Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862, and the award-winning Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhota Oyate by Chris Pexa, which brings together the literary works and oral histories of Dakota intellectuals. We will collaborate in producing our own translations of material from “Iapi Oaye” by looking at examples of Dakota-language translations like The Dakota Prisoners of War Letters: Dakota Kaskapi Okicize Wowapi by Clifford Canku and Michael Simon. Students will also work with texts by Deloria and Eastman to discover how these authors incorporated Dakota epistemologies in their writings for non-Native audiences. During the summer, students will have the opportunity to dive more deeply into various archived materials in the KWE Collection, written in both Dakota and English, and take an immersive (online and free) Dakota language course, so they can breathe life into the language themselves by speaking it. This summer work will also involve generating content that will be shared in a public website to make this history and these texts more widely accessible and available.
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.
Limited to seven students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Omitted 2023-24. Professor Vigil.
2023-24: Not offeredJust like other primates, humans fight most wars to control territory. But humans seem to be the only primates that intentionally destroy their enemy’s territory as a war strategy. So what brings humans to destroy the very territory over which they started a war? To answer this question, this research seminar will leverage insights from a diverse set of disciplines across several fields of study. It will draw from theories of primates’ territorial control in biology, but also theories of emotions and short versus long-term biases in psychology, as well as insights from history on the memorialization of conflict, international law understandings of environmental destruction, and theories of the causes and consequences of wars from political science and economics. The seminar will explore empirical and theoretical research in the social sciences: identifying a question, composing a literature review, collecting data, and testing hypotheses. For this seminar, students will each develop a prospectus for a research project on the topic of environmental destruction.
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 Mattiacci.
(Offered as COLQ 310 and BLST 310) Giving takes many forms and is known by many names - philanthropy, altruism, humanitarianism, benevolence, welfare, mutual aid, development etc. As a result of this diversity, giving is a rich site of social production and contestation that sheds light on dimensions of much larger social, cultural, and economic issues:. How and why do inequality and poverty persist? How and why are subjects such as the deserving and undeserving poor produced? Why do certain issues or crises elicit charitable outpouring while others do not? What is the relationship between philanthropy and democracy? The course examines four responses to these issues. The first considers religious concepts and practices of giving and charity, including the prosperity gospel. The second looks at international aid such as the response to the 2010 Haitian earthquake and select development initiatives in African countries. The third focuses on the ideology and practices of big philanthropy including Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth and the Gates and Ford foundations. The fourth unit explores the American welfare state, the treatment of its recipients, the attack on “entitlements,” and the privatization of services. Students will be exposed to a variety of perspectives from which to grapple with these issues, including primary sources, scholarly work across several disciplines, fiction, non-fiction, and film.
Fall semester. Limited to 18 students. Professor Cobham-Sander and Michael Stein.
Pending Faculty Approval
Other years: Offered in Spring 2020, Fall 2023How might we understand ecosystems as kinship networks in which we are embedded? Both
eastern coyotes and beavers have been described as “keystone species.” What happens when we
think about them in relationship, not as separate species but as keystone kin? In this research
seminar, we will pay close attention to eastern coyotes, usually described as newcomers, and to
beavers, who were “exterminated” from New England then returned. We will track coyotes in
wetlands created by beavers, from the Wildlife Sanctuary to Quabbin Reservoir. We will watch
how beavers transform waterways. We will map the migration trails that coyotes took as they
traveled east, through railroad beds, reservoirs and beaver ponds. We will read Ben Goldfarb’s
Eager and Dan Flores’s Coyote America, authors who suggest that if we want to learn about
adaptation to climate change, it “might be wise” to “keep our eye on” beavers and coyotes.
This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Seminar participants will work on collaborative projects, with the opportunity to continue this work as paid interns during the summer.
Open to sophomores and juniors. Limited to 6 students. Spring Semester. Professor Brooks.
Social Norms, Social Change
(Offered as COLQ 339 and PSYC 339) Social norms, the unwritten rules that shape our behavior, influence virtually all aspects of our lives, from the clothes we wear to the car we drive to whether and how we vote. Although people follow these norms to fit in with their social group, they can also make crucial errors in their perception, which can lead to substantial consequences. This seminar is designed to help students examine the power of social norms, the factors that lead people to misperceive norms, and the consequences of such misperceptions. We’ll then turn to examining real-world interventions designed to shift social norms to change various types of behavior, from reducing bullying or binge drinking to increasing energy conservation and voting. Students enrolled in this course will stay on campus for six weeks during the summer of 2024 to assist with designing and conducting research on police culture (and will receive guaranteed funding as well as free room and board). This work will include reviewing empirical literature on active bystandership training programs, designing appropriate qualitative and quantitative measures for collecting data on police culture, traveling to police departments in the Northeast to conduct in-person interviews and administer surveys, coding interview transcripts, and conducting statistical analyses. Students will also have the opportunity to present this research at a national conference and to co-author a paper for a peer-reviewed journal.
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. Limited to 6 students. Omitted 2023-24. Professor Sanderson.
2023-24: Not offeredOffered as COLQ 345. Meets the following History major requirements as a related course [EU/TC/TE/TR/TS].
In the decades following World War II, immigration into the U.K. from the decolonizing world transformed what had been a predominantly white nation into a multi-ethnic society. British immigration law initially welcomed these migrants of color as “Commonwealth Citizens.” As subjects of the British empire, they held full rights to live, work, vote, and receive welfare provision in the U.K. In spite of this formal political equality, Commonwealth Citizens experienced various forms of official and unofficial racism upon arrival in Britain. They were frequently – if erroneously – represented as “foreigners” who took jobs, housing, and benefits from white Britons. Changes in immigration law throughout the 1960s cemented this tendency to define Commonwealth Citizens as outsiders. By 1971, migrants to the U.K. needed to prove “patriality” (having a parent or grandparent born in the U.K.) to receive British citizenship, a shift that, in practice, severely restricted the entry of migrants of color into the country.This course explores the postwar experience of Commonwealth Citizens in Britain through the theme of risk. The act of migration itself entailed risks of various kinds, as Commonwealth Citizens left countries rendered politically and economically unstable by the forces of empire and decolonization to seek more secure lives in the U.K. Racism in housing, employment, policing, education, the media, and other realms amplified migrants’ experience of precarity. How did Commonwealth Citizens negotiate these risks? What individual, familial, or community-based strategies did they develop to limit risk and increase security? How did these strategies change migrant lives and communities, as well as British society more generally?This course is part of a tutorial series that engages sophomores and juniors in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Students enrolled in these courses are guaranteed funding for at least six weeks of work during the summer following the academic year in which they take the course. Working together, the six students in this course will conceive, research, write, and pursue publication of an original academic article on a topic related to the course theme. Two of the six weeks of summer work will be dedicated to archival research in the U.K. (Funding for the trip will be provided by Amherst.) Students seeking admission to the course must complete a short application and meet with the professor before receiving permission to enroll.
Limit: 6 students, instructor permission only. As a colloquium, enrollment is restricted to sophomores and juniors.
Not offered in 2023-24. Professor Boucher.
2023-24: Not offeredWhat does it mean to approach music and sound from the position of people listening together? Conventionally, research has centered on makers, performers, producers, and thinkers—the bodies, voices, instruments, and minds that make sound and shape discourse. When research does attend to listening, it is usually as an individual act of consumption, appreciation, spiritual encounter, or social exchange. But what about congregations, fandoms, juries, and networks of listeners? This colloquium orients music and sound studies around audiences and crowds—the spaces and moments of people listening together as intimate communities or assemblies of strangers. Audiences and crowds invite us to expand our thinking about listening as embodied participation and virtual communities and assemblies. In our work, we will encounter essential theoretical, historical, and ethnographic writings focused on individual listening to ground our work in relevant conversations. We will read and converse broadly to identify theoretical and methodological tools that can critically extend these conversations into case-study-based research on listening together. In a six-week summer research period, we will collaborate on writing a journal article. In addition to consulting with theorists and researchers over the course of the semester, we will workshop article drafts with experts in the fields of music and sound studies as we prepare to submit for publication.
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. Meets once weekly. Admission with consent of the instructor.
Limited to 6 students.Omitted 2023-24. Professor Engelhardt.
2023-24: Not offeredSports command a central role in American culture. The media intensively cover professional and amateur competitions and elevate star athletes to celebrity status. Municipalities offer generous financial incentives to attract professional sports franchises to their cities, and families devote significant resources to make their children into better athletes. American colleges and universities offer scholarships to prospective students based on athletic prowess, a practice uniquely widespread in the United States. Athletics are commonly touted by these and other institutions as a pathway to molding character and even an American identity. Scholars and media have increasingly criticized this outsized role of sport in American society. In this course we will examine recent scholarship on the domestic and global influence of American sport, including in relation to issues such as educational equity, race relations, gender identity, and colonialism. We will speak with sports studies scholars about their research. We also will work collaboratively with library and other instructional staff during the semester.
This course is part of a model of tutorials designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Therefore, we will pay close attention to research methodologies especially when conducting interdisciplinary research. Students will explore their own research topic and develop a research plan for pursuing the topic in-depth.
Limited to six students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Omitted 2023-24. Professor Hayashi
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.
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.
Limited to seven students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Omitted 2023-24. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offeredLearning 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.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Not open to first-year students. Fall semester. Professor Riondato.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023