A&H - Arts and Humanities

AHS1000 Foundations of Critical Inquiry   
(Formerly AHS Foundation)  
4 Credits  

The Arts and Humanities / History and Society Foundation (AHS) engages a combination of perspectives, including aesthetic, ethical, historical and societal, to explore a particular topic or theme. Exploring a topic such as nature, justice, or memory, for example, through a rich array of perspectives aims to develop the ability to see that all interpretations are impacted by the context, values, and attitudes of the interpreter—including, of course, our own. We use course materials from a range of media and genres to explore the topic and learn to use complexity and ambiguity to enrich and deepen our inquiry. This theme-based course aims to establish a foundation of skills that anticipate the more disciplinary and interdisciplinary analytical skills that are introduced at the Intermediate Level of the Liberal Arts Curriculum.  A more detailed description of each theme can be found at http://www.babson.edu/Academics/undergraduate/core-experiences/Pages/home.aspx 

Prerequisites: None

ARB2200 Introduction to Arabic
4 Free Elective Credits

This course is an introduction to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and the Levantine dialect. It introduces students to Arabic sounds and alphabet, basic reading and writing, and essentials for everyday conversations. It is built on an interactive methodology using a variety of authentic materials such as news, film, songs, art, food and cooking. It emphasizes the active participation of students in the learning process. Project-based learning is the main instructional approach, and classes are designed to teach language through engaging projects set around specific cultural topics. Students will cook and taste food, virtually visit Arab cities and museums, research Arab artists, watch movie clips and music videos, and even learn and sing Arabic songs! Arabic 2200 is the initial course in the Arabic language sequence at Babson.

Students are precluded from taking more advanced courses in the sequence (Arabic 4610, 4640, 4650) prior to this course unless permitted by the instructor.

ARB4610 Arabic II: Culture, Cuisine and Communication
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

Get ready for a culinary journey around the Arab world!

Arabic 4610 is designed to learn Arabic language and culture through food. It will help you enhance your linguistic and communicative skills by exploring food, traditions and cultural values. It will incorporate hands-on cooking projects and discussions about the significance of food in Arab culture. These projects aim to introduce you to the diverse dialects and rich cultures of the Arab World. They will also help you develop vocabulary, reading and writing, and enhance the spoken skills necessary for a variety of daily life activities such as sharing meals, talking about ethnic foods and favorite cuisines, buying grocery, inviting family and friends for a meal, and ordering at a restaurant. By exploring practices around food, you will observe Arab society and culture while using your senses and curiosity.

Projects might include: cooking at the Foundry, learning recipes, visit a local market, visit local Arab restaurants and/or cafés, learning about the history of Arab cuisine, researching the link between food and festivals, and much more.

Prerequisite: you may sign-up for this class if you have successfully completed ARB2200 or its equivalent, or you are a heritage speaker who can understand Arabic minimally.

Prerequisites: ARB2200

ARB4640 Arab Cinema and Culture

(Formerly ARB4600)
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This course is designed as an advanced-level conversation class, with a strong cultural component. It explores Arab cinema from the colonial period to the present, and provides an in-depth exploration of “cultural identity” and “politics” in the Arab World. Although Egypt is considered the biggest film producer in the Arab world, the course aspires to represent various cinemas across the region, from Morocco and Algeria to Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Palestine, introducing students to notable moments and phenomena in the history of these cinemas. The course will be taught in Arabic and all films will be in Arabic with English subtitle. In addition to film viewings, students will be required to read critical and theoretical articles that pertain to class discussion. These films and readings serve as the basis for debate, discussion and written analysis of issues relevant to the history, culture and politics of the Arab world and the Middle East. Films will be on reserve at Horn Library, and screenings will be scheduled.

Prerequisites: Students need to be at least at a high intermediate level
This course is open to advanced and heritage speakers of Arabic

ARB4650 Arab Culture for Business

(Formerly Business Arabic)

4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This course aims to help students acquire cultural intelligence and develop the tools necessary to learn about business culture of the Arab world and be aware of local traditions and sensitivities. It provides an understanding of Arab business etiquette and culture, and discusses related topics such as travel, dress codes, Islam and business, communication and negotiation styles, attitudes, and hierarchy in the workplace. Students survey countries like UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia …etc. They use diverse forms of authentic and recent media and examine materials from different Arabic newspapers and media sources such as Al-Hayat, Al- Ahram and Al-Jazeera to comprehend practical business issues, cultural values and social etiquette in the Arab world and the Middle East. 

The course is taught in English. No prior knowledge of Arabic is needed.

ART1171 Mixed Media Drawing
4 General Credits

This is an introductory course designed to engage observational and experimental approaches to drawing. Employing a broad range of materials, from charcoal and pastels to ink and found materials, students will study and synthesize fundamentals such as perspective, mark making, line quality, value, and figure-ground relationships. Guided observational exercises will aid in deconstructing objects and translating spatial relationships. In addition to these techniques, the course will engage found imagery and printmaking strategies to explore drawing’s vast possibilities as a methodology, a record, and a problem-solving tool. Critiques will provide an opportunity to collectively assess, interpret, and reflect upon students’ work. A selection of artists’ writings, interviews, and videos will complement the drawing prompts, investigating drawing as an evolving, contemporary practice.

Prerequisites: None

ART1172 Introduction to Sculpture
4 General Credits

This is an introductory level studio art course designed to engage you with basic sculptural concepts and processes through the creation of your own sculpture. Working with basic material such as plasticene, plaster, wood, and wire, we will learn carving, modeling, and other methods of construction as we explore assignments that parallel historical approaches and processes. As a means of developing a full range of approaches towards making sculpture, we will examine paleo-lithic sculpture; Egyptian, Greek, and Renaissance bas-relief sculpture; abstract, kinetic and minimal sculpture; and installation and conceptual art. Students will be asked to keep a sketchbook for the development and critique of visual ideas. Through visualization, drawing, design, construction, and critique of sculpture, students will expand their skills of observation, critical analysis, and creative problem solving.

Prerequisites: None

ART1175 Beginning Painting Watercolor and Acrylic
4 General Credits

This is an introductory level course designed to bring students through basic aspects of drawing in a wide range of media. No previous experience is required. Issues such as line, tone, mark making, gesture form, light sources, figure/ground relationships, and perspective to overall compositions will be addressed separately and in the many ways that they relate to one another in a drawing. Students will draw observationally from life and from their own drawings, learning how to use each of these concepts as tools in order to draw and see more analytically. We will work with a wide range of materials from basic graphite pencils and charcoal to ink washes, conte crayon on gesso treated paper, silverpoint, collage, and printmaking. Slides of various artists' work will be discussed in relation to concepts and processes explored in class. Student work will be discussed in group critiques with full class participation. Students should be committed to expanding their skills and can expect project deadlines. There will be some expense for materials.

Prerequisites: None

ART1200 Painting Through Poetry

4 Free Credits

Artists have long produced work in conversation with others in their communities. This exchange is particularly vital and enduring among painters and poets. In this course, we will trace the relationships of contemporary and historical practitioners. With poems as our prompts, we will explore painting as a visual language that is fundamentally relational. Through a series of visual experiments, from painting to collage, we will interrogate the relationship between parts and wholes, representation and abstraction, text and image. We will consider moments in which language constrains meaning while painting expands it and vice versa. Together, through making, we will uncover questions, generate ideas, and apply the specificity of poetry to the space of painting.

Prerequisites: None

ART1201 Introduction to Digital Arts and Design

4 Free Elective Credits

Students develop technical, conceptual, and aesthetic experience pertaining to the creation of two-dimensional digital artworks as well as artworks that engage with the fourth dimension of art: space and time. Students gain an introductory knowledge of several art and design software programs. Included topics in the course are digital drawing, designing digital collages, and time-based digital media. Note: Babson Photography program has digital and lenses to check out but only a limited number of digital fully manual cameras are on reserve.

Prerequisites: None

ART4602 The Origins of Modern Art
(Formerly VSA4602 19th Century European Art)
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

Examines the social, economic and political changes in 19th century Europe that led to the creation of Impressionism and early modern art. Explores the meaning of modern art by examining the contexts (social, economic, and artistic) in which pioneering artists lived. The class will look briefly at Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Realism to understand their contributions to Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Art Nouveau and Expressivism with special focus on major artists, sculptors, and architects such as Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Munch, Rodin, Claudel, Garnier, and Eiffel who shaped what we now call Modern Art. We will visit local museums with early modern art collections as part of the course in order to see and discuss art “in person”.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

ART 4605: Art in the Age of Enlightenment

4 advanced liberal arts credits

This class examines the history of art during the Age of Enlightenment (1600-1800), a time marked by revolutions in science, industry, philosophy, and the declaration of human rights. Students will learn about artists who grappled with the image of a changing world, picturing what was before inconceivable: a surgeon publicly dissecting a human body, a former slave turned politician, etcetera.  Throughout the semester, students will critically assess how art shaped the founding ideologies of our modern world.

Prerequisites: Any combinations of 2 intermediate liberal arts (HSS, LTA, CSP)

ART4610 Arts of the Renaissance: Patrons, Politics and Piety  
(Formerly VSA4610)  
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits  

This is an advanced level course in the area of Literature and the Visual Arts. This course examines some of the major paintings and sculptures and architecture from Italy and Northern Europe that shaped modern culture. The Renaissance was a period of discoveries. New concepts of the self, new markets, new technologies, new devotions changed the shape of Europe. Works of art document many of the transformations that occurred between the Black Death and the Protestant Reformation. It will develop skills in interpreting visual images and build competence in creative thinking. Class lectures and discussions will be based primarily on slide presentations.  This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Spring or Fall  

Prerequisites: 3 Intermediate liberal arts courses (CVA, LVA, HSS, CSP, LTA in any combination)

ART4615 Racing Towards the Future: Early 20th Century Art
(Formerly VSA4615)
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

Between 1900 -1938, young artists grappled with enormous political, scientific, technological, and social disruptions that threw them headlong into the modern world. Styles such as Symbolism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressivism, Dada and Surrealism were their responses to changes in established ways of thinking and being that marked the beginning of the 20th century. Visits to The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Davies Museum of Wellesley College and the Fogg Museum of Harvard University, which have very strong collections from this period, will offer students the opportunity to directly experience this art.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

CHN2200 Chinese I
4 General Credits

An introduction to practical and functional knowledge of modern Mandarin Chinese. Emphasis on developing proficiency in fundamental language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing, using basic expressions and sentence patterns. Computer programs for pronunciation, listening comprehension, grammar and writing Chinese characters will be used extensively.

Prerequisites: None

CHN4610 Chinese II
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

A continuation of the fall semester, an introduction to practical and functional knowledge of modern Mandarin Chinese. Emphasis on developing proficiency in fundamental language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing, using basic expressions and sentence patterns. Computer programs for pronunciation, listening comprehension, grammar and writing Chinese characters will be used extensively.

Prerequisites: CHN1210 or CHN2200

CSP2001 Introduction to Ethics

(Formerly CVA2001)
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

Discussions relate morality to the life and circumstances of contemporary society by offering a solid grounding in the major concepts of ethical theory and in the basic skills for analyzing ethical issues and making sound moral judgments.

This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Fall and Spring

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

CSP 2006: Critical Philosophy of Race

4 advanced liberal arts credit

This course will survey the history of philosophy and race and critical philosophies of race. The first half of the course will begin with a study of the use of Aristotle’s Politics as it was taken up by 15th and 16th century theologians in the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the context of the colonization of the Americas. We will then look at early modern philosophy and the shift away from theologically based hierarchies to “scientific” analyses of race as they were developed alongside the Enlightenment political values of individual freedom and republicanism as promised in social contract theory. The first half of the course will end with a case study of the international abolitionist movement. The second half of the course will look specifically at the philosophies of race within the United States as a settler colonial nation. We will look at the social construction of “whiteness” as it coalesced around specific labor and property relations, the prison industrial complex, and contemporary decolonial and abolitionist political philosophy.

Prerequisite: WRT1001 and FCI1000

CSP2007 Introduction to Philosophy

(Formerly CVA2007)
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

Introduction to Philosophy treats the most basic and pervasive human questions: Does God exist? What is the nature of the self? What is the relationship between our mind and our body? Do human beings have an immortal soul? Do we have free will? What is the difference between a human being and a computer? How can value judgments be justified? What is the proper relationship between the individual and the community? What is the best kind of human life?

CSP2025 Introduction to LGBTQ Cultural Studies

(Formerly CVA2025)
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

Cultural Studies borrows from history, political science, psychology, literature, sociology, anthropology, film studies, media studies, and other disciplines to dismantle and thereby understand the cultural forces and variables which work together to construct meaning. In this course, we will look specifically at how LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning) identities and meanings have been and continue to be constructed, primarily but not exclusively in U.S. culture. We will actively consider how we, as human beings and agents of construction ourselves, contribute to or resist cultural meanings of LGBTQ. In our course of study, we will read theory, study film and other visual media, and interrogate texts, such as television shows, from popular culture. Each student will have an opportunity to develop a short individual project tailored to his or her interests.

This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Spring

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

CSP2030 Black American Music
(Formerly CVA2030 African American Music in the U.S.)
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

This course surveys music created by and about African Americans from the 19th century to the present, including spirituals, gospel, ragtime, blues, jazz, classical, R&B, rock and roll, soul, funk, disco, and rap. The course will emphasize: (1) African origins, and the historical and sociocultural contexts in which African American musical styles developed; (2) nontechnical musical analysis of the works studied; (3) the reciprocal relationships between African American music and other American music; and (4) the ways in which music participates in and shapes our national perceptions of and debates over race. No musical background required.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

CSP2057 Narratives of Sustainability
(Formerly CVA2057 Imagining Sustainability)
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

The primary focus of this course is on the exploration of the concept of sustainability as a juncture of economic, environmental and social concerns. With the rapid expansion of globalization, and the attenuating crises that accompany it, with regard to these concerns, future business and public policy leaders will need to be in the vanguard at determining how best to effect solutions. To that end, this course will examine a variety of sources in the consideration both of what allows for the implementation of sustainability and what prohibits it--from business case study to philosophical/economic analysis to literary memoir. Within this context, students will be invited to examine what we mean when we talk about _justice,_ _ethics,_ _profit,_ _growth,_ and _community._ In sum, we will explore how concepts that contribute to our understanding of individual and communal responsibility might be revisited and redefined in the effort to create a world that offers sustainable economic opportunity for all, ensured within a vital commitment to environmental stewardship.

This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Spring or Summer

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

CVA2032 Appreciating Classical Music: The Art of Listening  
4 Credit Intermediate Liberal Arts  

Classical music can seem daunting to inexperienced listeners. How do you make sense of instrumental music that has no lyrics to guide you? What instruments are you hearing? How do you make sense of an opera in a language you don’t understand? How can you tell the difference between one orchestra and another? Why are some works typically performed in a church, others in a theater, others in a concert hall, and still others in intimate spaces? Why do we still revere composers like J.S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner? Why can’t most people name a female composer? This courses answers these questions, and more, through a thematic introduction to the classical music tradition of Western Europe and the United States.  Foundation AHS and RHT

CVA2058  After the Dictator 
(Intermediate Liberal Arts) 

In this course, we will look at artistic and other cultural responses (film, narrative, art, music, popular culture) that reflect and inform the experience of dictatorship and the transition from authoritarianism to the promise of a more open form of governance. Through films and texts that explore questions of history and the representation of national and individual identities, we will consider cultural responses to the consequences of dictatorship and the new political, economic, and social realities that have emerged. Scholars, policymakers, and business leaders are among those interested in addressing the causes, character, and possibilities of these transformations. The democratic transition in Spain, which began with the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, provides a valuable point of comparison to our examination of various other country examples. What are the differing strategies used to come to terms with the past and the legacy of dictatorship? How successful have these political transitions been? What elements remain unresolved, and how do they continue to play out or find expression in the culture and society?  This course may be offered Fall or Spring semester.

Prerequisites: RHT and Foundation H&S and A&H  

CVA2058 After the Dictator 
(Intermediate Liberal Arts) 

In this course, we will look at artistic and other cultural responses (film, narrative, art, music, popular culture) that reflect and inform the experience of dictatorship and the transition from authoritarianism to the promise of a more open form of governance. Through films and texts that explore questions of history and the representation of national and individual identities, we will consider cultural responses to the consequences of dictatorship and the new political, economic, and social realities that have emerged. Scholars, policymakers, and business leaders are among those interested in addressing the causes, character, and possibilities of these transformations. The democratic transition in Spain, which began with the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, provides a valuable point of comparison to our examination of various other country examples. What are the differing strategies used to come to terms with the past and the legacy of dictatorship? How successful have these political transitions been? What elements remain unresolved, and how do they continue to play out or find expression in the culture and society? This course may be offered Fall or Spring semester.

Prerequisites: RHT and Foundation H&S and A&H  

ENG4604 Writing Poetry
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

A poet is a maker, an architect of words, spaces, and ideas and seeks expression through the use of various poetic techniques. This course challenges students to make original poetry through the study of contemporary American poetry and poetics. In addition to exploring the creative process through the crafting of poems, students read the poetry and essays of a wide variety of modern poets, work collaboratively to respond to peers' poems, attend poetry readings, and pursue independent study in an area of their own choice.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

ENG4605 Writing Fiction
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

Short-story writer Flannery O'Connor believes that there is _a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once._ This class develops and nurtures close attention to the art and craft of making short stories. We will read excellent practitioners of the short story form in order to understand the elements of fiction: character, dialogue, place/setting, plot, and so on, and we will look for pleasure in our reading. Throughout the semester you will write short stories of varying length, aiming for authority over language, characterization, plot, and more. Your fiction will be received and read by your peers and professor. You will be a willing, open and active participant, prepared to discuss the work of others, and to reflect on responses to your own work. Short-story writer Tobias Wolff suggests that “in the short-story form you sense… that perfection is attainable. That’s an amazing invitation to have: here, at last, is something I can control.”

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

ENG4615 Expository Writing

2 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This advanced writing course has two main goals. One: reviewing the fundamentals of grammar, style, and voice will help you face future writing situations in the professional world with greater confidence. Two: expanding your repertoire of expressive choices will help you articulate ideas more clearly and will connect you more effectively with intended audiences.
This is an "expository," not a "creative" writing course, with a focus on the tasks of explanation and persuasion, and on the genre of the essay. But it will also push generic boundaries and examine the role of creativity and imagination in non-fiction prose.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

ENG4620 Writing Creative Non-Fiction
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

In this class, you will have the chance to write about moments in your life, and passionate interests, you wish to deeply explore. You will “read like a writer” to learn the elements and forms of creative nonfiction, including memoir, contemplative, nature, and travel essays.  We will read creative nonfiction by such writers as Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace, and consider both what the writers say and how they say it.  You will write your own personal essays, developing your facility with such elements as conflict, persona, and character development, and, by sharing your work with peers, you will gain a critical understanding of your own writing.  You will find, like creative nonfiction writer Dinty Moore, that “the happy by-product” of exploring, expressing the previously unspoken, “is that one has a richer life.” 

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

FLM4671 Comic Form in Film
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This course explores the history and theory of comic form as it applies to movies from the silent film era to the present. Beginning with silent comedies and progressing to more recent films, we will consider such topics as comedy’s roots in ancient ritual; recurring comic character types and genre conventions; irony, satire, anarchy, and surrealism as comic principles; and dark comedy. Course readings will introduce students to narrative theories, aesthetic and philosophical questions, and analytical models that address the purposes and strategies of comic form.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

FRN2200 Elementary French for Business Professionals
4 Free Elective Credits

FRN 2200 is a fast-paced beginner course that emphasizes real-world applications of the French language. Through a variety of authentic materials and in-class activities, students develop their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. Students will explore aspects of French society, such as the fashion industry, the stock exchange, and the country’s beloved soccer culture. A project-based class, students will develop business skills in French related to networking, interviewing, marketing, and trading through creating a portfolio that will grow in sequential semesters.

No previous experience with French is needed. This course is not open to native speakers of French. 

Prerequisites: None

FRN4610 French II
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

FRN4610 French II is a fast-paced course that builds on the knowledge gained in FRN2200 French I. Students will continue to expand their vocabulary and communication skills as they gain confidence in their abilities to communicate in spoken and written French. Conversation and listening activities in class will be supplemented by a variety of readings and written assignments. In addition, discussions of authentic texts, short films, and cultural experiences will help students gain a deeper appreciation for French and Francophone people and cultures.

Not open to native speakers

Prerequisites: FRN2200 French I, or similar proficiency as indicated by a placement test

FRN4615 French Cinema and Conversation

(Formerly Social Justice in France)
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits 

This course is designed as a conversation class, with a strong cultural component. The major course materials are contemporary French & Francophone language films and short readings. Through the lens of ethical questions and concerns that surface in these films, students will study issues relevant to the history, culture, and politics of the French-Speaking World. Films and readings serve as the basis for debate, discussion, and written analysis. This course aims to ease the path towards greater fluency through improvements in accuracy and more spontaneous communication.

Open to students with an Intermediate level of French, or higher.

Prerequisites: FRN4620, or equivalent proficiency as demonstrated through a placement test.

Placement test: https://www.babson.edu/academics/academic-divisions/arts-and-humanities/languages-and-global-cultures/language-placement-test/ 

FRN4620 French III
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits 

FRN 4620 is an intermediate language and culture course aimed at improving students’ comprehension and expression in French. We will continue to reinforce language skills acquired at the beginning levels (French I and II) and work towards building fluency in the language. Students will learn about topics such as immigration, the French school system, the auto industry, and globalization through short texts, films, debates, presentations, and news articles from contemporary French and Francophone sources. A project-based class, students will develop business skills in French related to negotiating, persuading, advising, and forecasting.  

Prerequisites: FRN2200 and/or FRN4610 or equivalent proficiency as demonstrated through a placement test or by instructor's permission. Not open to fluent speakers of French.

FRN4640 French Cinema and Culture 
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits 

This course is designed as an advanced-level conversation class, with a strong cultural component. The major course materials are French films and supplementary readings. These films and readings serve as the basis for debate, discussion and written analysis of issues relevant to the history, culture and politics of France and the francophone world of North Africa and the Caribbean, with a focus on global issues of social concern. This course is designed for students who have mastered the grammatical structures of French, although there will be review of grammar as needed. 

Not open to native speakers 

Prerequisites: FRN FRN4620, or equivalent proficiency as demonstrated through a required placement test

HUM 1000: The Art of the Self

3 Credits course for Humanities and Entrepreneurship Certificate Students Only

The first in a four-course sequence offered by Babson College that results in a Certificate in Entrepreneurial Leadership from the Babson Social Innovation Institute, The Art of the Self precedes and grounds the following courses: Transformation Through Entrepreneurial Leadership, Self As Global Citizen, and Leading Your Startup.

In The Art of the Self, students explore “the self” as an idea through philosophy, literature, history, and film. What is “the self,” and how can you connect with yours? What are historical and philosophical constructions of “the self,” and how is “the self” impacted by environments and social contexts? How can “the self” evolve over time? What is “the entrepreneurial self,” and how does one cultivate it?

Using a narrative approach, this course engages students through a range of readings and reflections, as well as an ongoing written narrative, the “Story of Self” project (Marshall Ganz), in the work of identifying, understanding, connecting with, and building creative, confident, credible selves—all while identifying potential opportunities to think and act entrepreneurially, now and in the future.

MCIF students will be supported in their learning by Babson students, with whom they will engage in a Book Club and who will serve as peer mentors for final projects in at least three class visits over the course of the semester.

Prerequiste: Course is for Humanities and Entrepreneurship students only

HUM 1001: Self as Global Citizen

3 Credits course for Humanities and Entrepreneurship Certificate Students Only

Building on the first two courses in the Babson College program in Entrepreneurial Leadership, Self as Global Citizen explores the self in social context and in relation to a set of 21st century issues and problems. We begin with an exploration of the notion of citizenship, focusing especially on philosophies of nationalism v. cosmopolitanism as well as contexts such as gender, race, and identity, and then expand our previous work on trauma and the self to explore the broader cultural transmission and political implications of trauma, including intergenerational trauma. From there, we examine crucial issues that face each one of us as global citizens: climate crisis, toxic cultures, forced migration, technology and artificial intelligence, mental health and the future of medicine.

Students will analyze and synthesize material in weekly close reading and writing assignments. The major course project is an individual case study and presentation for an idea to address one of the issues we have studied. This work will be undertaken with the mentorship of Babson College seniors who have studied Entrepreneurship extensively and are currently taking an advanced course in human rights.

Prerequiste: Course is for Humanities and Entrepreneurship students only

HUM4601 Place, Space, Occasion: Public Discourse in Theory and Practice
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

We are living in a moment of great social, cultural, and political unrest. To examine, understand, and, most importantly, solve society’s most pressing problems requires vigorous and inclusive civic deliberation and dialogue. Our focus this semester will be on discovering what makes for logical, nuanced, productive, and exciting argumentation while also creating our own. We will study rhetorical principles, from antiquity to the present day, and consider various strategies for speaking in public forums. You will have the opportunity to experiment with these principles and strategies as you craft original oratory and speeches for specific audiences and contexts as well as practice with theatrical and performance methods for vocal variation and body language. Theory-driven and practice-oriented, this course offers you a space to both explore how any public discourse reflects its historical and social context and to engage in the public sphere as a speaker, audience member, and citizen-scholar.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

HUM4602 Future Studies: Theories of the World to Come

4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This course provides a captivating looking glass into the most fascinating debates surrounding the future. We will trace those radical transformations and cutting-edge paradigms that are emerging to forever alter our experience of time and space, body and mind, objects and images, reality and illusion, human and machine. To achieve this task, our course will follow an interdisciplinary, multicultural, and multimedia approach that explores provocative new dimensions in the areas of literature, philosophy, society, culture, politics, media, architecture, design, biogenetics, ecology, film, art, and technology. Together, these speculative fragments will come together to offer crucial insight into our era’s experiments with speed, virtuality, artificiality, and utopia, allowing us to test the outer boundaries of the unknown worlds to come.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

HUM4603 Future Worlds: Revolutions of the Humans and Post-Humans

4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This course provides radical exposure to the most astonishing trends of the next age as students interface with leading futuristic thinkers from around the world. Students will have the rare occasion to engage with fifteen renowned professors, reading their writings closely a, as we move across multiple intellectual surfaces to ask the most provocative questions facing our time and beyond. Each scholarly figure will present a series of speculative theories and visionary examples from the fields of sociology, architecture, economy, design, political science, cultural studies, media studies, literature, philosophy, film, medical science, virtual reality, visual art, artificial intelligence, and environmental studies. Moreover, students themselves will not only directly encounter this network of vital futurist scholars in their weekly sessions but will also have the occasion to undertake strikingly original research that tracks obscure, secretive, post-human, and unfathomable innovations transpiring in every arena of human experience. In this way, the seminar will trace a sequence of worlds not yet arrived, interpreting horizons of global and even extra-planetary scope as they test out riddles for the coming centuries.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

HUM4604: Feminish, Gender and Philosophies of Liberation

4 Advanced Liberal Arts credits

This course will overview the history of modern feminist philosophy from the seventeenth century to the present. We will focus on the emergence of feminism within in the context of colonialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the development of the modern nation state, and various revolutions. While much of the course will look at international examples and texts, we will also look at the specificities of the feminist movement in the United States from within indigenous struggles for sovereignty, the abolitionist movement, and feminist work specific to Boston. We will also study the emergence of LGBT movements in conversation with feminist struggles, as well as the emergence of transfeminism. The course is broken up into three units: Unit 1 will focus on the history of feminist philosophy and activism; Unit 2 looks at the modern racial and colonial history of gender; and Unit 3 focuses on contemporary abolitionist and decolonial forms of feminism as philosophies of liberation. There will be an in-class mid-term before spring break after we finish Unit 1, and the course will conclude with a final research paper.

Prerequsites: Any Combinations of 2 Intermediate Liberal Arts (HSS, CSP, LTA)

HUM4605 The Nature, Culture and Future of Work
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This interdisciplinary course examines work from the standpoints of cultural history and organizational behavior. We will explore work as a marker of identity, work as a cultural construct, and work as an ideological and structural apparatus. The course will be organized around weekly film viewings and readings. The films will frame our exploration of work and serve both as cultural artifacts that represent American ideologies and case studies of particular work situations and perspectives. The readings will offer a range of theoretical and historical views from a variety of disciplines: cultural and film history, organizational behavior, economics, management theory, sociology, and others.

Among the questions the course will address are:
• To what extent does what we do professionally define who we are?
• What, if anything, do we expect of our jobs beyond a paycheck?
• What, if anything, do our jobs expect of us beyond our skill and time?
• What is the difference between work as a job, a career and a calling?
• How do American ideologies conflate professional achievement with success?
• In what ways are some organizational structures more conducive than others to contentment at work?
• What does it mean to opt out of or strive not to work?
• What is the past, present and future of work in America?

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

HUM4606 What Does it Mean to Live a Good Life?

4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This advanced liberal arts elective investigates what it might mean to live a ‘good life’, and how these interpretations might contribute to your own discoveries and thinking as you head out into the ‘real world’ beyond Babson. Rather than a philosophy or psychology or self-help course (although all of this is intertwined), this course is based around how writers and filmmakers and other creative thinkers have tried to explore this enduring focus of human inquiry. Through a wide range of literature, film, podcasts, and other media, we will examine differing efforts to perceive and live out a ‘good life.’ How can we define and measure happiness, and whether that should even be our ultimate goal? How important are extrinsic rewards like achievement and money compared to more internal ones like relationships and human connection? How do we avoid being overwhelmed by the news of the world and instead to create stories that matter and move us to positive action? Where can we find value in odysseys and unexpected detours? What is the meaning of work and its relationship to play? How can we better approach mortality and loss? And how can we grasp the simultaneous individuality and immensity of the human condition in ways that strive to make ourselves and the world better? Together, we will wrangle with these and other ongoing life questions.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

HUM4607: Trauma, Culture, Transformation

4 Advanced Liberal Arts credits

What is trauma and how does it impact individuals and societies? The word comes to us from the Greek “wound,” and so it has come to mean a lasting injury made by a violent or startling event that penetrates a person’s psychic boundary system. The difference between a wound and a traumatic wound is that the latter does not heal; rather, it results in post-traumatic stress, which in turn creates cycles of repetition of uncannily similar events until the event has been “worked through.” While the term is largely attributed to Sigmund Freud’s 19th and early 20th century work, in fact many of his sources came from classical Greek texts, meaning the concept and experience of trauma have been around for centuries.

In the past, knowledge about trauma came predominantly from psychoanalysis; to a lesser extent, literary theory has explored how cultural texts reflect phenomena related to trauma such as repetition, disruptions of time and temporality, and fragmented points of view. Post-Traumatic Stress was a chronic, cyclical dis-ease with devastating consequences. In the past decade, however, neuroscientists have exponentially advanced our understanding of trauma and its relation to our bodies, not just our minds, and theorists have shown how trauma is also a cultural phenomenon, transmitted from one generation to the next. Most importantly, this new research also shows proven pathways to transformation and healing—pathways that also correspond to collective movements for healing our world.

Starting with Freud’s foundational work and the classical texts that inspired him, we will study how cultural texts have represented both traumatic stress and methods for its healing. From there, we move quickly to study new developments in the understanding of trauma and post-traumatic stress, including methods of healing and transcending traumatic repetition that have gained traction in broader change-making contexts. We will conclude our study by exploring the concept of Transformational Literacy operating at the MIT Presencing Institute, and how the notion of collective trauma invites collective healing responses as together we bring “the emergent future” into being.

Prerequisites: Any Combination of 2 Intermediate liberal arts (HSS, LTA, CSP)

HUM 4608: Philosophy, Race and Revolution in the Euro-Modern World

4 advanced liberal arts credits

This course will explore efforts by philosophers to respond to the contradictions of Euro-modern society, the political phenomenon of race being primary among them. Doing so will require an examination of how some human beings have sought to reform unjust social and political milieus. Though we will also ask whether such efforts are sufficient. Such questioning demands, among other things, study of more radical efforts at social change, including those of revolutionary political activity. In addition to philosophers’ contributions to such projects, our course will also examine how writers, artists, and even scientists have responded to the ongoing colonization of our knowledge, political sphere, and civil society, particularly by forces seeking to profit from the transformation of some human beings into the damned of the earth. Our goal as a class will be to reflect on how we might conceptualize and take up our responsibilities in such a world.

Prerequisites: Any combinations of 2 intermediate liberal arts (HSS, LTA, CSP)

HUM4612 Rome: Origins of Democracy, Imperialism and Human Rights

4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

At a moment when democracy is contested around the globe, why not return to the source?

This course invites students to revisit the origins of democracy through interdisciplinary study—philosophy, political theory, history, literature—in Rome, one of the places where it all started (at least for the western world). Significantly, this city/state was also one of the first empires, meaning that the Romans explored, conquered or colonized, and ruled and exploited other geographic territories. This course studies the original principles, processes, and representations of democracy from 1st century Rome, while also considering its role as an empire and linking both to human rights in their modern form.

If democracy aspires to equality and freedom, imperialism is its foil, a centuries-long program of conquest, racial and cultural superiority, and ongoing economic exploitation. Some might argue that the tension between them is precisely responsible for current global social, political, and economic challenges. Paradoxically—or not?—the two are deeply intertwined, and both inform the language and practice of contemporary human rights (for the better and for the worse, alas). Examining their earliest aspirations and most significant historical failures where they actually happened will help us to address the current problem of migration and asylum seeking in Europe as a limit to the “human” envisioned by human rights.

Consider this: We’ll climb the Palatine Hill, site of the founding of Rome, while reading Virgil's account of that event in The Aeneid; study Shakespeare's Julius Caesar while visiting the Curia of Pompey, site of the Roman Senate (and, so they say, of Caesar’s death); and experience the Vatican and St. Peter's Basilica while learning about how the Catholic Church fueled the Roman Empire—and vice versa. We will visit ancient ruins and markers of cultures meditating on what they meant to those who made them, and to us, now, and we will relax along the banks of the Tiber listening to music in the evenings.

All along, we will address the profound questions of power, ideology, law, freedom, obligation, hospitality, cultural contact, and human rights that arise with our journeying. Perhaps most significantly, we will visit sites devoted to the lives and futures of migrants and refugees in Rome, one of Europe’s key points of entry, as well as meeting members of non-governmental organizations working on human rights issues stemming from migration and other crises.

While experiencing the city and understanding its shifting identity as historical/tourist site and migration center, we will negotiate its spaces as ones where we can most powerfully witness and test ideas of democracy and rights for ourselves.
 

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

HUM4614 Postmodernism: Future Culture
4 Advanced Liberal Arts (Elective Abroad) Credits

This course explores postmodern culture as a strange obsession with the future. Thus, we will use the captivating cityscape of Dubai—its unparalleled architecture, its accelerated movement and fragmented spatial organization, the provocative visual design behind its many tourist sites—in order to track crucial ideas of simulation, virtuality, and the spectacle in our postmodern era. Moreover, we will navigate contemporary works of literature, philosophy, film, and architecture while making several excursions into Dubai as a constructed cultural zone of the Middle East. Ultimately, this rare immersion in perhaps the most futuristic place on earth will provide us a dynamic outlook on how postmodern culture blurs the boundaries of reality itself.

Prerequisites: 3 Intermediate liberal arts courses (CVA, LVA, HSS, CSP, LTA in any combination) and admission into the course

HUM4620 Constructing and Performing the Self
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

In Constructing and Performing the Self students will examine and attempt to answer the most fundamental of questions: Who am I? A question this significant cannot be adequately answered by any one approach, thus the course brings together two very different approaches to guide the investigation. Psychological studies of identity marshal the tools and methods of science to develop and test theories that describe and explain the self. Theater studies bring interpretative and aesthetic perspectives to represent and reveal identity. In this course, these two approaches will be purposely inter-mingled: the questions asked and the answers derived will be informed equally by psychology and theater. Students will see, on a daily basis, how each field informs, supports, and speaks to the other. While there are some class sessions and assignments explicitly grounded in only one field to build students’ fluency, the major activities of the semester will require both.

Given how personally applicable both psychology and theater are, students’ own sense of identity will be the central text in this course. Like Tom in The Glass Menagerie, students are both the main character in their own life stories and also the narrator of them. This course aims for true interdisciplinary integration, and students will be called upon to use and apply the theoretical work as they build and create an original solo performance about a key moment in their lives. Our hope is that by semester’s end students will have taken a concrete step forward in understanding and articulating their sense of self and feel comfortable and confident in their ability to perform for a live, public audience.

Students are asked to alternate between four roles in this course: scholar, writer, actor, and critic.
• Scholars consume information in analytical ways and produce new knowledge that is deeply grounded in their foundational knowledge.
• Writers produce new works, both analytical and creative, that take a novel position and support it.
• Actors give life to both old and new characters, conveying their shifting objectives over time to impact an audience.
• Critics evaluate texts (in our case, performances) with a constructive, thoughtful, and respectful approach that brings new insights.
Some days students will only adopt one role, other students will be asked to oscillate between the
them.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

HUM4640 Contagious Cultures: Narrative, Film, Society
(Formerly Literature and Film of Contagion)
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits 

Wherever you live in the world, it is almost certain that your life has been affected if not profoundly transformed over the past two years. The experience of living through such a vast contagion prompted me to think not about illness (I think we’re exhausted by that), but about the spreadability and transmission of all sorts of infectious content. In this course, we will look very little at narratives of actual physical contagions. Instead, we will study contagion-as-metaphor for the expansion of a wide range of ideas and movements that propagate, spread, go viral, catch on, etcetera. Through narrative and film, discussion and debate, we will consider such overt topics as humor, laughter, and fear, but also beliefs, environmental contagion, cheating, social media, scapegoating and cancel culture, hair and fashion styles, protest, hope, and happiness, among other possibilities. Why and how do we aspire to some concepts going “viral,” while striving to contain others? How is the speed and profusion of transmission of things other than disease both a positive and a negative aspect of our contemporary world?

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

JPN2200 Japanese I
4 Credits

An introduction to a practical and functional knowledge of Japanese as it is used in contemporary society. Students will learn the fundamental use of the Japanese language by exercising all four language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Two basic writing systems, hiragana and katakana and some kanji, are taught to promote literacy in Japanese environments. An introduction to Japanese culture, which is inseparable from learning the language, is provided through demonstrations, videos, and films. Students are required to do at least two projects which introduce some aspect of Japanese culture.

Prerequisites: None

JPN4610 Elementary Japanese II
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

A continuation of the Fall semester, this course develops more advanced language skills as well as explores social and culture aspect of Japanese society. The course includes visits to local places, such as Japan Society of Boston, where students try their language skills in real-world settings. Students will engage in hands-on participation in Japanese cultural activities. They will also explore some Japanese business protocol. In addition, they will learn approximately 150 Kanji writing symbols and use hiragana and katakana extensively in the classroom and with computer word processing.

LIT4600 Modern Drama
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This is a survey of Western drama from the late nineteenth century to the present day. We'll study representative works of major dramatists of this period such as Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Brecht, O'Neill, Pirandello, Beckett, O'Casey, Soyinka, Churchill, Wilson, Stoppard, Mamet, Kushner, and Parks. You'll research and report on theatre movements such as symbolism, expressionism, realism, naturalism, epic theatre, and theatre of the absurd. We'll consider the play as both text and performance, making use of theatre reviews, director's notes, interviews, photographs, videos, and, when possible, live performances. Grades will be determined by two papers, a midterm and a final exam, a group performance project, and a thoroughly researched oral presentation.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

LIT 4601: Reading the City, Writing the Self: James Joyce's Dublin

4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

In this exploration of James Joyce’s literary Dublin, we study Joyce’s works as a springboard for your own creative non-fiction writing. This course combines expressive writing and literary analysis-and includes a week in Dublin itself!

The Irish writer James Joyce is a towering figure in world literature, a writer who pushed boundaries of both form and content. In his stirring bildungsroman Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his sympathetic yet clear-eyed view of his hometown in the short story collection Dubliners, and his experimental and controversial epic Ulysses, Joyce captured ordinary lives in an extraordinary fashion. In this course you will read selections from all three works, exploring such themes as politics, love, and religion while simultaneously tracing the trajectory of Joyce’s innovative style. Furthermore, and drawing inspiration from Joyce’s narratives, you will pursue your own creative writing, as you will write personal essays remembering and reflecting upon your experiences and relationships. Finally, in the first week of the course, Dublin itself will be our classroom as we range from its museums to its pubs and traverse the same streets and parks and shores that Joyce and his characters inhabited, gaining all the while a rich and vibrant sense of the city’s culture and history.

LIT4604 Documentary Poetry: Engaging Reality
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

How do contemporary poets engage their work with what’s real in the world? How can poetry describe, define, explain, and/or challenge the information, the facts, the multitude of voices that surround and at times overwhelm us? Documentary poetry, an increasingly popular poetic form, engages as its subject matter real events from history, and may apply data from a range of realms: science, economics, literature, politics, psychology, current events, personal life. While documentary poets use this form as a way to think, research, explore, and satisfy curiosity, they are also potentially engaged in modes of inquiry, even skepticism. Thus documentary poems may result in the discovery of alternative approaches to meaning, new ways of understanding and telling stories, even sites of social change and activism. In addition, documentary poets tend to go beyond the traditionally poetic by applying to their poems mixed genres and media, including direct quotations, letters, diaries, court transcripts, medical records, images, testimonials, even embedded graphics. In this course, we will examine the origins of this form and study pivotal poems and poets in its development using work from a recent anthology of documentary poems as well as from several single-author poetry collections by poets Patricia Smith, Claudia Rankine, Tarfia Faizullah, Maggie Nelson, C.D. Wright, and Martha Collins. Students will write short analytical responses and an essay, but they will also craft and share their own original documentary poems as a way of understanding the form and its potential in their own lives for inquiry and discovery.
 

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

LIT4605 Contemporary World Literature: The Writing of the Unreal
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

Students who have taken VA2036 are not permitted to take LIT4605

This course examines contemporary world literature through the specific prism of _the unreal_. Writers from Latin America, the Caribbean, East Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East will be examined in their rich experiments with surrealism, anti-realism, and hyper-realism. Moreover, this course will explore the enigmatic conceptual territories of the dream, the nightmare, the fantasy, the illusion, the hallucination, the mirage, the vision, and the simulation as breakaway zones of the global literary imagination. To achieve this task, we will evaluate authors as diverse as Franz Kafka, Ghada Samman, Haruki Murakami, Clarice Lispector, Jose Saramago, Naguib Mahfouz, Kobo Abe, Juan Rulfo, Vi Khi Nao, and Reinaldo Arenas, interrogating their different approaches to the creation of phantasmatic, strange, and unknown spaces.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

LIT4607 Sports and Literature
2 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits
Blended Learning Format

The Ancient Greek lyric poet Pindar wrote victory odes for winners in the Olympian Games, whose “prizes [were] won in trials of strength.” In doing so he forged a powerful connection between writing and sporting achievement. Long after Pindar, many writers have been drawn to sport, and many sports have rich and extensive literatures surrounding them. This course examines the varied representations that fiction writers, poets, memoirists, and essayists have made of individual and team sports and their players. This course also pursues theoretical examinations of sport and its place in culture, including Theodor Adorno’s assertion that “sport is the imageless counterpart to practical life”. We work within such areas as race, class, gender, politics, and aesthetics. Delivered online, this class includes multimodal assignment delivery, blending students’ written texts with audio-visual methods of communicating meaning. We also host visiting writers from the field of sports and literature.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

LIT4608 American Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This course is a deep dive into literary works representing three major movements in American literature: Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism. Romanticism is thematically concerned with nature and the common man, the frontier and immigration. Our study may include Thoreau, Whitman, and Morrison, as well as the genres of the gothic story and the slave narrative. Realism and Naturalism are often understood as reactions to Romanticism and are thematically concerned with man-made reality, objectivity and Darwinian ideas. Our study may include Wharton, Dreiser, and contemporary U.S. fiction.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

LIT4609 Shakespearean Bodies
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

What kinds of bodies are represented in Shakespeare? Which bodies “matter,” to whom, and on what terms? How are embodied meanings forged and contested on the Shakespearean stage, and how are such meanings informed by differences of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, religion, and bodily ability? In this course, we will consider how Shakespeare helps us think about bodies in their various material, political, textual, and historical dimensions. To do so, we will read six major plays: Antony & Cleopatra, The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, Pericles, Richard III, and Titus Andronicus. Drawn from across the Shakespearean canon, these works will allow us to consider how differences of genre enable and constrain certain kinds of bodily thinking, as well as how issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and violence intersect with bodily meanings, both in that era and our own. To enhance our appreciation of these works, we will routinely consider modern, cinematic adaptions of the plays we read, as well as relevant works of literary criticism. Throughout, we will discuss the relevance of these works to our understanding of bodies today; consider how modern conceptual categories can inform and inhibit our understanding of bodies past; and explore how stage drama, as a representational medium which privileges the performed body, allows us to think about the various processes through which human bodies assume cultural meanings.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

LIT4610 Performing Social Class
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This 4-credit course employs gamified pedagogy to explore the multifarious ways that social class functions. Students will read texts that explore the issues of class consciousness, class performance, classism, and cross-class communication; act in in-class simulations of events that reveal the ways that social class operates; and write character biographies, scripts and analytical reflections. Simulations will include school events, job interviews, holiday celebrations, and more. Readings will be drawn from both nonfiction (from fields such as sociology, economics and cultural studies) and fiction (primarily short stories and excerpts from novels and plays). The overarching objective will be for students to become aware of the often-invisible ways that social class operates in daily life. In a global society that is marked by increasing socioeconomic disparity, it is especially important for students to become critical thinkers about social class.
 

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

LIT4611 East and West: Writings of Trespass 
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits 

This course explores the captivating and dangerous ways in which writers construct foreign worlds of “East” and “West”—i.e. how they trespass, distort, and dream the border between themselves and other civilizations. From the Argentinian Borges’ depictions of Arabian labyrinths to the Syrian Adonis’ depictions of New York City alleyways, from the French Baudelaire’s meditations on Oriental opium-dens to the Persian Hedayat’s meditations on the madmen of Paris, from Camus’ staging of the apocalypse in Algeria to Darwish’s staging of the apocalypse in the migration of Palestinian refugees to European capitals, we will see how such authors represent unknown and outsider cultures. Ultimately, then, the course will interrogate the experience of radical otherness and its use as a complex force of creativity, consciousness, and imagination. 

Prerequisites: 3 Intermediate liberal arts courses (CVA, LVA, HSS, CSP, LTA in any combination)

LIT4616 Shakespeare's Sex
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

Shakespeare’s works have long held a privileged position in the histories of sex, gender, and eroticism. In this course, we will consider how Shakespeare helps us “think sex” in its various bodily, psychological, political, textual, and historical dimensions. What counts as “sex” in Shakespeare’s world(s)? What desires, relations, and practices are rendered perceptible—and/or imaginable—through his poetry and plays? Which categories, identities, and emotions mattered when Shakespeare and his contemporaries imagined sex and its meanings, and how do these align with, and diverge from, those which inform our present lives and erotic relations? To explore these and related questions, we will read four major plays and two works of poetry: Romeo & Juliet, Othello, As You Like It, Cymbeline, The Rape of Lucrece, and selections from The Sonnets. Drawn from across the Shakespearean canon, such works will allow us to consider how differences of genre and literary form shape erotic possibilities, as well as how issues of race, gender, status, religion, reputation, and ethnicity intersect with sexual meanings, both in that era and our own. To enhance our appreciation of these works and their erotic possibilities, we will routinely consider modern, cinematic adaptions of the plays we read, as well as select screen biographies (Shakespeare in Love, All Is True). Finally, we will attend to the curious case of Shakespeare’s sex: not only what we know—and don’t know—about the playwright’s (sexual) biography, but why his erotic relations continue to arouse interest and speculation, some four hundred years after his death.
 

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

LIT4620 Literature and Philosophy of Madness
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This course engages the question of madness from a variety of angles. On the one hand, it considers the major theorists of insanity (Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze); and on the other, it considers the equally crucial works of supposedly “insane” writers themselves (Antonin Artaud, Unica Zurn, Vaslav Nijinsky). In doing so, we will trouble the many definitions and assumptions surrounding the category of madness and its problematic history of oppression. Ultimately, through this remarkable exchange across literary-philosophical frontiers, we will explore an immense world of visions and symptoms, including those of mania, schizophrenia, delusion, paranoia, melancholia, and obsession.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

LIT4661 American Autobiography
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

Autobiography, always popular, has reached new heights of acclaim in recent years - especially in the United States. Why do readers find it so attractive? Sensationalist, exhibitionist, self-serving, revelatory, probing: while it can be all of this and more, autobiography as a literary genre has its roots in a person's desire for expression and meaning. As its writers explain themselves to the world, they explain the world to themselves, imposing on it their views and causes. Autobiography can demonstrate how history is made in words, not found; how people make sense of their own lives. Reading a cross-section of such works written by authors living in what is now the United States compels us to question simplistic notions of what _America_ stands for, and to rediscover its promises and its meanings in its variety and conflict.

This is an upper-level liberal arts course. Readings range from Benjamin Franklin to the present.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

LIT 4673: Unruly Ghosts: Modern Irish Literature & Culture

4 advanced liberal arts credits

Ireland is haunted by its history as a colony and by the traumatic experiences of famine, emigration, and language loss. Yet at her 1990 inauguration President Mary Robinson spoke not of postcolonial ghosts but of “a new Ireland, open, tolerant, inclusive [....] a new pluralist Ireland…," reflective of optimistic post-independence conditions. The mid-1990s to the late 2000s were a period of rapid economic growth—the ‘Celtic Tiger,’ the ‘Boom,’ the ‘Economic Miracle’—transforming Ireland into one of the wealthiest countries in Europe and spurring seismic social and cultural change. That accelerated, unchecked economic growth has now expressed itself in early 21st century discontents and reckonings. In cultural specters, so to speak. The critical questions raised by Irish Studies are not confined to Irishness and Irish identity; they are ethical, global questions. Our class will study how modern Irish fiction, drama, and film tackle some of the most pressing issues of our time. Our topics will include late capitalist volatility; economic precarity; institutional abuses; immigration, displacement and belonging; language dispossession; and climate crisis.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

LIT4676 Imagining Nature, Imagining Ourselves 
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits 

This upper-level liberal arts course investigates some of the ways in which the American literary imagination has dealt with _nature,” both as a physical environment and as a concept, and how we are currently imagining our future in the face of urgent threats to the health of the planet. How is _nature_ experienced and represented? How have humans defined themselves in relationship to the _natural_ world? How are we responding to current changes in our natural environment? These and other questions will be studied through a variety of texts (fiction; poetry; reflective and theoretical essays) by American writers since the mid-19th century. A substantial portion of the course is devoted to our own time and its specific challenges. Each student will have an opportunity to develop a guided research project on a topic, writer, or text of her or his own interest, to be presented to the class. Over the semester and on a daily basis, we will also create an archive of texts, issues, and questions related to the course. 

Prerequisites: 3 Intermediate liberal arts courses (CVA, LVA, HSS, CSP, LTA in any combination)

LIT4682 In the Extreme: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Human Rights
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

The philosophy of basic human rights originates with the earliest records of humans, and humans have struggled to define and defend these most basic tenets of ethical human conduct and rights ever since. This course will focus upon grave human rights abuses such as torture, genocide, and rape, and will consider the increasingly blurred line between “peacetime” and “wartime” violations. We will begin with philosophical, political, and legal definitions of human rights, then move quickly to specific cases related to the impacts and legacies of imperialism and the resurgence of nationalism and white supremacy. In this context, we will examine challenges to international human rights law from military and technological developments, mass migration, and climate change, paying special attention to the role of art, literature, and film in addressing these challenges.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

LIT4689 Poetic Elegy: Shaping Cultural and Personal Loss
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

An elegy is a poem of mourning, a lament that can express both private and public grief. Reading elegies offers insight into cultural attitudes towards life and death while featuring the resilience of poetic form. From antiquity to the present, poets have used this shaping form to memorialize, describe, reflect, critique, and witness. In this course we will examine the origins of the form and study pivotal poems and poets in its development. We will also explore the contemporary elegy-certainly in the shadows of 9/11 and the war in Iraq-both as a private expression of feeling and as a public need for decorum and custom. Texts may include poetry by John Milton, Anne Bradstreet, Thomas Gray, Thomas Hardy, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich, Yusef Komonyakaa, Carolyn Forché, Mark Doty, Marie Howe, and Brian Turner, as well as lyrical prose elegies by Joan Didion and Philip Roth.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

LIT4693 Play, Performance, Politics: The London Stage
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

Program fee is paid to Glavin Office – program fee includes accommodations, breakfast, tube pass in London, airport transport, theatre tickets, program planned meals, and cultural excursions. Not included: tuition, international flight, visa costs, additional meals and personal expenses.

The course aims to develop an appreciation for and deeper understanding of the theatre as an art form through an immersive experience of play-text study, play attendance, performance workshops, and class discussion. While we will see a variety of types of plays on a variety of subjects, our approach to these plays will particularly emphasize the social and political context and issues raised implicitly or explicitly by the plays we read and see. We will also place the issues raised in a number of the plays into a wider discussion of social and political issues occurring in the world today – be they around matters of inequality at local, national and global levels, the role of government, the meaning of freedom in daily life and as a legal and political concept, and the effort of people to shape their collective futures through political action and argument. Success in this class is dependent upon students’ ability and willingness to participate fully in all class discussions as well as work outside of class, both individually and in teams, and to contribute their independent insights and observations to the learning community of the class. Participation is imperative.

The course will involve a combination of close reading of the play-texts and contextual readings, careful and critical analysis of the performances, and engaged participation in acting workshops, tours, and class discussions.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

LTA2001 Staging Immigration
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

Migration, immigration, assimilation: these complex, charged, and multifaceted ideas are debated in political spheres, examined in scholarly discourse, and are featured daily in various media outlets and publications. These ideas however, have also long captured the imaginations of artists and audiences alike, and the stories of those who have moved their families, their lives, and themselves to another country or continent have been central in the theatre, particularly in the United States, a nation of immigrants.

In this course, we will attempt to understand both the captivating power and the political potential of performance focused on immigrants and the immigrant experience. We will study a variety of theatrical productions, from plays, to musicals, to contemporary stand-up comedy and solo performance and examine the ways theatre artists consider and understand identity, prejudice, familial ties and loyalties, and notions of the American Dream. We will connect the interests and goals of theatre artists staging immigration 100 years ago to those artists working in 2020. Finally, we will create and perform original theatre pieces, inspired by the artists we study, focused on a pressing societal problem. The scholarly and experiential elements in this course will, hopefully, shift our notions of the profound journeys and undertakings by immigrants and illuminate new and crucial understandings of the immigrant experience unfolding in our world today.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2003 Dramatizing the American Dream (LIT)
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

The American Dream is an indispensable, ubiquitous, and driving notion in this country. Its lure has brought millions of immigrants to our shores, given authors fodder for stories and novels, and allowed advertisers to sell the bigger car, the grander home, the better wardrobe. But what exactly is the American Dream? What are its tenets? Who gets to enjoy it? This course will examine how both male and female playwrights such as Susan Glaspell, Clifford Odets, Lorraine Hansberry, Sam Shepard, and Wendy Wasserstein have answered these questions in their dramatizations of the American Dream. As we study and watch various performances of the American Dream, we will take into account the voice telling the story and question the authority, privilege, and experience of that voice. We will evaluate how the plays speak to the American Dream, to each other, and to us. This course will require two papers, a mid-term and final exam.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2004 Love, Sex and the Family in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Literature
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

_First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage_. This childhood ditty seems to inculcate the _right_ order of things in the act of family-making in America. But lives played out in times of cultural transition aren't always as neat as nursery rhymes. Mid-twentieth-century America was characterized by changing gender roles and definitions, geographic and demographic shifts, war, and burgeoning technology, among other things. This course looks at fiction and drama to see how great American authors such as Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor and Richard Yates portrayed and, perhaps, shaped the mid-century American understanding of love, sex, and family. We will supplement literary readings with relevant non-fiction from the time period. Students will propose, research, and develop a major essay about an author and/or a concept related to the course materials. Students will also formally present their ideas to the class.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA 2005: The Visual Languages of Art
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

This course is designed to introduce you to the realm of visual communication - how it's done, how it works and how cultural and personal experiences shape your reactions to it. Fine arts (painting, sculpture, architecture), industrial arts (graphic and product design) and everyday objects will be presented as the workings of visual communication, the role of art and artists in a variety of times and places, the nature of good and bad art and design are explored.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA 2006: Art in Latin America

4 intermediate liberal arts credits

This course presents a panorama of art and culture in Latin America from ancient times to the present. Topics include Pre-Columbian Empires; Spanish Colonial Cities; Revolution, Reform and Modernism; Indigeneity, African diasporas, and Nationalism.  Looking through the lens of art and architecture, the course pays special consideration to Latin America’s enduring legacies and dynamic processes of change.  This is an introductory survey intended for students of all academic and professional interests: no previous art history courses or experience with Latin America necessary.

Prerequisites: (AHS 1000 or FCI 1000) and (RHT1000 or WRT1001)

LTA 2007: Out of the Mouths of...Children Narrators

4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

Children’s minds work differently from those of adults; it’s the way they make sense of the world, the way a child’s own small world is the whole world and, at the same time, an ever-evolving concept, as they learn and grow and change. They understand and react instinctively. This can result in thoughts and actions that are both naïve and profound, innocent and wise, non-sensical and brilliant. And even when they don’t (or can’t) understand sophisticated issues, they remain keen observers. At Babson, there’s a great deal of emphasis in thinking about your future self, the person you will be in five years or in twenty years. Clearly, that has value. But this course asks if there is also benefit in looking to the past. Through our texts and discussions, we will look at the ways we look at the world as children, the ways our perceptions change as we grow older, and the ways in which that evolution is both positive and negative.  

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2010 African American Literature
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

This course will introduce students to the African American literary tradition starting with the slave narrative and concluding with contemporary literary production. Along the way, we will consider the move from oral to written literatures, the aesthetic forms created and adapted by African American writers, and the role of African American letters in chronicling and shaping the experience of African American people. Our study will be informed by major historical moments —slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration from south to north, the Civil Rights and post-Civil rights eras—and we will read work by writers such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2013 Global Cinema

4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

Global Cinema provides an overview of the history and aesthetics of films from Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. Students will analyze films as cultural artifacts and will consider the interrelationship among various national film movements and aesthetic approaches. Weekly film viewings will be complemented by readings in the history and practice of several national cinemas and of post-colonial, transnational cinemas. Films are in their original language with English subtitles.

This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Fall

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2014 Money and Literature
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

This course looks at money and economic thinking in literature. We will examine works from a wide range of periods and genres, with a strong grounding in fiction and drama from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Aesthetic genres such as naturalism, modernism, post-modernism, and expressionism will be considered in terms of how they inform and are informed by thinking about money. There will also be contextual/theoretical readings from Marx, Benjamin, Simmel, Freud, Lacan, and others.
 

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2016 Violence: Theories of Cruelty, Evil, and the Inhuman
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

This course will investigate the idea of violence across an extensive spectrum of authors, texts, films, and literary-philosophical perspectives from the East and the West. We seek not merely to engage in a conventional critique but to exceed the boundaries of our embedded understanding by also contemplating this concept's fascinating potential as a form of literary imagination and intellectual expression. Topics will therefore include cruelty, vulnerability, power, betrayal, destruction, vengeance, anger, terror, defacement, pain, disaster, and inhumanity. From the poetics of torture to the damaged writings of war, from theoretical works on catastrophe to cinematic and artistic pieces on the nature of evil, the intent is to explore the many narratives that have emerged across the global horizon in the face of an often violent experience of the modern world.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2022 The Speculative Genres: Horror, Sci-Fi and Fantasy Literature and Film
4 credit intermediate liberal arts

In this class, we examine the speculative genres, stories containing science fictional, gothic/horror, or fantastic qualities that are particularly invested in socio-political questions. Rather than resolutely celebrating a techno-scientific future, these stories engage audiences in difficult ethical and philosophical discussions: What does it mean to be human? What is the cost of progress? What does it take to imagine (and then create) a more equitable world? We discuss a range of texts, including essays by J. R. R. Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin; novels by Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, Karen Tei Yamashita, Cormac McCarthy, and Margaret Atwood; short fiction by Keri Hulme, Carmen Maria Machado, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ted Chiang; films such as Get Out, The Hunger Games, Black Panther, and Blade Runner; and tv such as Station 11 and The Rings of Power

Prerequisites: (AHS1000 or FCI1000) and (WRT1001 or RHT1000)

LTA2029 Literatures of Empire and Beyond
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

Empires have been built and toppled all over the world since the beginning of recorded history, and literature has served both in the building and in the toppling. This course begins by examining 19th century imperialism with a focus on European colonization of territories in Africa and South Asia; moves through the nationalist movements that arguably brought political but not economic independence or prosperity to these places; and concludes by examining the shape of the global landscape today with its “remote control” empires that work through markets and information channels rather than territory and raw resources. We will explore these great geopolitical shifts by studying literature and film from European, African, and South Asian perspectives that can reveal the many perspectives on the impacts of cultural, political, and economic contact through imperialism.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2030 Reading Place and Landscape in American Literature
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

This course investigates the ways American writers use place and landscape in their art. Reading fiction, essays, and poetry beginning in the 19th century and moving to contemporary works, we will explore the nature of place and landscape as physical, social, and intellectual and consider what it suggests about American culture and ideas. We will also look at several theoretical texts by cultural geographers, ecologists, and scholars of landscape architecture and regional planning. Ultimately, we will consider how place and landscape, both real and imagined, influence selected American writers' use of theme, imagery, character, and style, and reflect as well on how these concerns influence our own lives as readers, writers, thinkers, and dreamers.

Reading Place and Landscape in American Literature is an intermediate level course and part of the Literary and Visual Arts category of the Liberal Arts Curriculum. Courses in this category focus on frameworks for understanding and appreciating the practice of representation, the creative process, and diverse modes of aesthetic expression. They also consider individual, historical, cultural, and formal factors in artistic creation and make manifest the multiple vantage points from which art can be interpreted.

This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Fall or Spring

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2031 Top Performers: Business in American Drama
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

Ever since Willy Loman walked on stage with his sample cases in Arthur Miller's 1949 masterpiece Death of a Salesman, it has been thought axiomatic that American playwrights have painted a bleak portrait of sales professionals in particular and businesspeople generally. But a close look at American dramatic treatments of business shows something more complicated. Over the past century American playwrights have located in the world of business and the world of drama a shared preoccupation with the sometimes tricky distinctions between word and act, authenticity and performance, the _real_ and the symbolic. This course will look at a selection of American plays from the early twentieth century to the present, focusing on those plays' treatment of business and economic life. In addition to close scrutiny of dramatic texts and theatrical performances, we will also explore the role of performance in business. In other words, we'll look at both business in American drama and drama in American business. Your performance will be assessed through two papers, a mid-term and a final exam.

This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Fall

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2032 Foundations of Western Art

4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

This course is designed to introduce students to painting, architecture, and sculpture from the
Renaissance to the early 20th century and to give students an understanding of the general principles governing the visual arts. Topics such as the role of the artist, the functions of art in society, and the nature of visual language, among others, will be discussed as major artists and their works are presented in this survey of Western art. Class lectures and discussions are based on the presentation of slides.

This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Spring or Fall

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2035 Ghost Stories and the Grotesque in Literature
Intermediate Liberal Arts

Because a “ghost" is a haunting by political history, personal choices, and social expectations, they do exist. Therefore, this course will look at the genre of the ghost story (and esthetic considerations of the grotesque) in relation to both the eighteenth-century gothic (from which it emerged) and the horror story (from which it needs to differentiate itself).  Class discussion will focus on how the ghost story explores ideas of identity, both national and personal. Mostly comprised of short stories and films, the narratives we will enjoy can teach us about what haunts us as humans and why. Authors included are Morrison, Poe, Kubrick, James, and the HBO series “LoveCraft Country”, among others. 

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2039 Curiosity in Literature
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

Curiosity contains within it a contradiction; it is our drive to know battling against our fear of the unknown, and it has played a major role in literature for a very long time. In this course, we will read texts that span several continents and centuries as we study curiosity and ask ourselves myriad questions. Why did the definition of curiosity change from negative to positive in the 14th century? Is curiosity hubristic tinkering or social responsibility? How is curiosity valued? Is the valuation of curiosity dependent on what is being sought? Is curiosity linked to gender? Who is rewarded for possessing it? Who is punished? If curiosity killed the cat, why? We will study Greek Myths and Fairy Tales as well as the following authors: John Milton, Christopher Marlowe, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Sigmund Freud, Agatha Christie, Anne Sexton, and Patricia Highsmith. We will also view Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo.

This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Spring

Prerequisites: RHT and AHS

LTA2045 Modernism and the Making of the New
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

The British novelist Virginia Woolf declared that human nature underwent a fundamental change _on or about December 1910.The first few decades of the twentieth century are characterized by a fervent desire to break with the past and to reject traditions that seemed outmoded and too genteel to suit an era of psychological and technological breakthroughs and violence on a grand scale. This class will look at works that reflect ideas of experimentation, in both form and content, and that engaged new understandings of time, space, and human subjectivity. We will read writers such as Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, E.M. Forster, Djuna Barnes, and Katherine Mansfield, as well as the theories of Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein (this is a tentative list). Be prepared; there is a lot of reading. These are difficult and challenging texts that do not rely on straightforward plot and narrative; they require careful analysis and critical engagement.

This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Spring or Fall

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2049 Seeking Enrichment: Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in Literature

4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

The novelist Joyce Carol Oates has said, _To be an American is to be a kind of pilgrim ... a seeker after truth. The pilgrim is our deepest and purest self. In this course we'll explore the character of the pilgrim in selected fiction, essays, and poems, using questions such as: What inspires someone to take and retake pilgrimages: long, often difficult journeys far from home? What friendships and other communities form along the way and why? What besides self-enrichment do pilgrims hope to find, or possibly lose? Through close reading, discussion, and written analyses, we'll study how writers use setting, plot, and theme to consider these questions. There will also be one field trip, which will serve as a local pilgrimage. Course texts may include contemporary works by Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula Le Guin, and Curtis Sittenfeld, as well as selections from Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer, Basho, and Thoreau.

This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Spring

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2050 LIT & VIS ART INTRM

4 Credits

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2061 Tales of the City: Exploring Urban Literature
Intermediate Liberal Arts

This course will focus on the changing and diverse portrayals of cities and urban life in western literature from the earliest days of industrialization to the present. Inspired by Plato's observation, _this City is what it is because our citizens are what they are. We will explore the mutually-constructed relationship between a city and its citizens, asking such questions as: What does it mean to be an urban dweller? How does a city shape its residents' identity, and how do its residents influence a city's development? What are the delights and dangers of urban life? Where does one's sense of community/neighborhood overlap with - and diverge from - living in a particular city? We will read novels, short stories, poems, and essays, focusing primarily on London, but also likely including Dublin and New York City. To what extent can the concerns of a community within a city diverge from the concerns of the city as a whole?

Prerequisites: RHT & Foundation A&H and H&S

LTA2062 Suburban America in Literature and Culture
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

American suburbs are simultaneously reviled as physical spaces comprised of little boxes made of ticky tacky, churning out homogeneous values and people, and revered as mythically perfect imagined spaces in television sitcoms and advertising. This class aims to examine the American suburbs as constructed through popular texts, classic literature, and contemporary art. We will consider how the tension between utopia and dystopia is imagined and re-imagined over time and across genres and texts, reading and analyzing works such as the poetry of Anne Sexton, Richard Yates' novel Revolutionary Road, and the short stories of John Cheever. We will also examine representations of the suburbs in science fiction and film.

This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Fall

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2069 Utopia and Dystopia: Literary and Cultural Expressions
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

This course will examine the difference between ideas of absolute societal perfection and absolute societal imperfection as expressed in literary and cultural texts. Topics of study through such texts will include the ways we govern, the ways we create order, the ways we progress, and the ways we treat others. Over the course of the semester, students will be confronted with a number of questions. What are the elements of a utopia or dystopia? If one is complete perfection and the other complete imperfection – both by definition unattainable – then why are the concepts even worth talking about, and why have they persisted throughout history and across cultures? And maybe most interestingly, is there much of a real difference between the two? We will read works by Jose Saramago, Cormac McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ursula LeGuin, and Margaret Atwood.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2072 Detective Fiction, Noir, and Social Criticism
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

This course explores the uses and genre development of detective fiction and film noir and their functions as social commentary, applying examples from different times and places - in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. What do these works have in common, and what separates them? How do they reflect or interrogate the cultures that produced them? Why has detective fiction (in its various incarnations) remained so popular? We consider revisions of the genre in the so-called “hardboiled” or serial “pulp fiction” of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as its representation in film noir. We analyze later versions of the genre through films such as Chinatown and Blade Runner, and recent alterations in neo-noir films, evaluating them in relation to contemporary culture. Short works by canonical Latin American authors such as Borges and García Márquez, among others, provide an introduction to Latin American crime fiction. Through the works of current and popular writers and filmmakers we consider the legacies of dictatorship in Spain and Latin America, and the genre’s use in investigating and exposing a conflictive past (or fear of what one might find). We will look at the female detective in varied works. How is she different (if she is?) from her male counterparts? And we examine how detective fiction can function to parody or subvert the possibility of an ordered solution, or the completion of justice.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2073 Middle Eastern Literature
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

This course explores the most provocative literary movements of the contemporary Middle East, including authors from the Iranian, Arab, Turkish, Armenian, and North African areas of the region. From the experimental novels of Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk to the prison poetry of Ahmad Shamlu, from such legendary voices of exile as Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish to the dark sensual narratives of Joyce Mansour and Forugh Farrokhzad, we will cover a range of creative experiments with romanticism, mysticism, surrealism, existentialism, and post-modernism. As such, this will also allow us to unravel the many intricate concepts (those of desire, violence, time, space, power, revolution, and catastrophe) that form the Middle Eastern cultural imagination.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2074 Literature of Witness
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

The film Ararat, by Atom Egoyan, contains testimony from a woman who has witnessed a massacre of young brides. She asks, “Now that I have seen this event, how shall I dig out these eyes of mine?”

This woman occupies the most direct position—the eyewitness—in relation to an extreme event; however, the question of witnessing also extends to all of us who encounter images and stories of atrocities in our everyday lives. We will trace the concept of witnessing in philosophical, legal, and human rights contexts before turning to novels and other literature of witness by international writers such as Pat Barker, Nadine Gordimer, Gunter Grass, Primo Levi, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Rigoberta Menchu, Toni Morrison, and Virginia Woolf in order to investigate the following questions: What kinds of events generate or require witnesses, and how does witnessing differ from simply seeing? What effects does the event have upon the witness, and vice versa? What does it mean for literature to act as a kind of witness? How can literature ethically represent or “witness” extreme events? What responsibilities do we have to serve as witnesses to extreme global events, and what do we do with the energy created by our witnessing of such events?

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2075 Design for Living
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

Explores how profoundly our lives are shaped by the designs of graphics we see, objects we use and buildings we move through every day. Students will gain increased understanding of the role good and bad design plays in affecting them and in shaping the world in which they live.
 

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2078 Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know: Rebels and Anti-Heroes
Intermediate Liberal Arts

When Lady Caroline Lamb described her former lover, the poet Lord Byron, as _mad, bad, and dangerous to know, she vividly captured a widespread fascination with figures who reject society's norms. Simultaneously alluring and threatening, rebels and anti-heroes unsettle the outer limit of acceptable behavior through their transgressions. This course will examine how rebels and anti-heroes shape a society's identity while living at - or beyond - its margins. We will also pay particular attention to questions of gender when considering these figures' own identities. We will read novels, plays, poetry, and cultural critique in order to trace the development of rebels and anti-heroes in western literature, as well as to understand them in their specific cultural and historical contexts.

This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Spring

Prerequisites: RHT and AHS

LTA2079 Theories of Love
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

What is love? Where does it come from, what does it ask of us, and how does it alter our minds, bodies, values, and relations? Are sex, friendship, and marriage necessary for love, or do they inhibit love’s fullest expression? In this course, we will examine how influential writers have conceived and contested love’s meanings across a range of cultural contexts. Focusing primarily on erotic love (erôs), we will consider how such meanings relate to notions of art, beauty, conjugality, legality, pleasure, sexuality, spirituality, and transgression, both in their original era and our own. Particular attention will be paid to differences of race, class, age, gender, and authority as incitements to, and/or impediments of, relations of love and eroticism.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2080 The Literature of Guilt: I'm Sorry for Apologizing so OftenN
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

This course will examine guilt and how it affects us, both personally and societally. Through both literary and cultural texts, we will study guilt in a number of settings including familial guilt, generational guilt, survival guilt, and societal guilt. Students will be challenged to look at guilt in both its helpful and harmful forms, investigating why we feel the emotion and the effects it can have on us. We will read works by Dante Alighieri, Joseph Conrad, J.M. Coetzee, and Jane Smiley, among others. We will also watch Beloved and We Need To Talk About Kevin as well as the first season of Rectify.
 

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2082 The Sexual Renaissance: Forms / Concepts / Cultures
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

This course offers a bifold introduction to the studies of sex and literature in the English Renaissance. Reading a diverse range of literary and cultural texts, we will explore how writers imagined sex and its meanings, as well as how differences of language, genre, and literary form help to shape erotic possibilities, both in that era and our own. Ranging from pastoral poems to prose narratives, allegorical dramas to personal essays, metaphysical conceits to English and Italian pornography, we will encounter not only a variety of representational forms but of erotic arrangements, scenarios, practices, and fantasies. Situating these works in their own historical and cultural contexts, we will examine the “sexual Renaissance” on its own terms; consider how modern conceptual categories may inform—and inhibit—our capacity to understand the sexual past; and, throughout, discuss the relevance of these works to our understanding of sex today. Readings will focus on primary texts. Assignments will include weekly written responses and quizzes, a group presentation, an exam, and a creative final project. Interested students will allowed to compose short essays in lieu of the exams. No prior experience or knowledge is necessary to enroll.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA2090 The Short Story
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

What gives a great short story its undeniable power? Some writers strive to make their stories pack a punch, while others create more reflective works, exploring interiors; in either approach, the impacts of a great story are both immediate and lasting.

In this course, you will read a range of forms, from early tales to modern experiments. You will compare the intentions and effects of short stories that create entire worlds and those that are more elliptical and fragmentary, though they hint at more. You will learn the formal elements of the short story, such as characterization and point-of-view, and also trace the development of literary theories, those critical lenses that will increase your understanding and enrich your appreciation. Reading writers from several continents – from the famous, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Alice Munro, to the lesser-known, like Lucia Berlin and Edward P. Jones – you will follow stories of a family murdered senselessly by the side of the road, a bishop languishing in his final illness, and many more; you will even encounter a talking cat who proves to be careless in spilling the family’s secrets.

This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Spring

LVA2446 Joy, Beauty, Justice: Literature of the Black Atlantic
Intermediate Liberal Arts

_The Black Atlantic_ is a term used to describe the deep cultural and artistic connections among people of African descent relocated by the slave trade throughout the Americas and Europe. While it often evokes the horrors of the Middle Passage, slavery, and ongoing racist legacies, literature produced by African peoples in Africa, Europe, and the Americas also constitutes an archive of strength, resistance, and even joy in the face of injustice and oppression. We will read literature from the Black Atlantic with this transformative potential in mind. Beginning with the slave narrative, the course will sample literary production from the three continents, noting shared formal and imaginative characteristics, and ending with the most vibrant work by contemporary literary artists of the African diaspora.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1000 or RHT1000)

LVA2001 Staging Immigration

4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

Migration, immigration, assimilation: these complex, charged, and multifaceted ideas are debated in political spheres, examined in scholarly discourse, and are featured daily in various media outlets and publications. These ideas, however, have also long captured the imaginations of artists and audiences alike, and the stories of those who have moved their families, their lives, and themselves to another country or continent have been central in the theatre, particularly in the United States, a nation of immigrants.

In this course, we will attempt to understand both the captivating power and the political potential of performance focused on immigrants and the immigrant experience. We will study a variety of theatrical productions, from plays, to musicals, to contemporary stand-up comedy and solo performance and examine the ways theatre artists consider and understand identity, prejudice, familial ties and loyalties, and notions of the American Dream. We will connect the interests and goals of theatre artists staging immigration 100 years ago to those artists working in 2020. Finally, we will create and perform original theatre pieces, inspired by the artists we study, focused on a pressing societal problem. The scholarly and experiential elements in this course will, hopefully, shift our notions of the profound journeys and undertakings by immigrants and illuminate new and crucial understandings of the immigrant experience unfolding in our world today.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LVA2009 American Film History 
4 credit (Intermediate Liberal Arts) 

American Film History offers an overview of the history and theory of Hollywood movies while exploring the basic cinematic techniques used by film directors to express their ideas and tell their stories. The course proceeds chronologically starting in the 1920s silent era. The goals of the course include introducing students to film history, theory, and terminology while simultaneously considering the relation between cultural values and popular culture forms. American Film History will equip students to view movies as points of intersection for artistic intent, cultural myth-making, individual and social identity formation, and ideology. Students will view one film per week, They will also be expected to read and learn terminology in preparation for each class. Other assignments include written work, quizzes, a midterm, and a final. American Film History is an intermediate course that fulfills the Literary and Visual Arts (LVA) requirement. 

Prerequisites: RHT1000 and RHT1001 and AHS1000 This course may be offered Fall or Spring semester.

LVA2050 LIT & VIS ART INTRM

4 Credits

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LVA2067 Film and the City 
(Intermediate Liberal Arts) 

The birth of cinema coincided with a period of urbanization and a new sense of life in the modern metropolis. From the beginnings of film history to the present, movies have come to grips with the complexities of the urban environment. They have shaped our sense of cities as symbolic sites signifying opportunity, progress, and the promise of social integration but also danger, alienation, and the collision of distinct cultures. Ranging from neon-lit wonderlands to post-apocalyptic wastelands, cinematic cities have mapped our cultural aspirations and anxieties. This course will explore how cities have been represented in movies from the silent era onward. Weekly film viewings will be complemented by readings in film and urban history. 

Prerequisites: RHT1000 and RHT1001 and AHS1000 This course may be offered Spring or Fall semester.

LVA2072 Detective Fiction, Noir, and Social Criticism
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits

This course explores the uses and genre development of detective fiction and film noir and their functions as social commentary, applying examples from different times and places - in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. What do these works have in common, and what separates them? How do they reflect or interrogate the cultures that produced them? Why has detective fiction (in its various incarnations) remained so popular? We consider revisions of the genre in the so-called “hardboiled” or serial “pulp fiction” of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as its representation in film noir. We analyze later versions of the genre through films such as Chinatown and Blade Runner, and recent alterations in neo-noir films, evaluating them in relation to contemporary culture. Short works by canonical Latin American authors such as Borges and García Márquez, among others, provide an introduction to Latin American crime fiction. Through the works of current and popular writers and filmmakers we consider the legacies of dictatorship in Spain and Latin America, and the genre’s use in investigating and exposing a conflictive past (or fear of what one might find). We will look at the female detective in varied works. How is she different (if she is?) from her male counterparts? And we examine how detective fiction can function to parody or subvert the possibility of an ordered solution, or the completion of justice.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

MDS4615: The Interview

4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

To interview means literally to see (view) each other (inter). As media from paintings to pixels have emerged and proliferated over the past decades & centuries, so too have the means by which we see/read/hear one another, giving rise to a whole range of transmedia interview genres: news interviews, celebrity interviews, athlete interviews, political interviews, press conferences, podcasts, talk shows, and storytelling interview methods like documentaries, mockumentaries, reality TV, etc. These stand shoulder-to-shoulder with more time-test interview genres, like surveys, polls, focus groups, job interviews, police interviews, court testimony, and so on. In this class, which merges media studies, genre studies, and professional communication, we will uncover what is essential to each of these interview genres and to them all by experiencing the many roles of the ‘interverse:’ we will participate as observers--readers, watchers, listeners--but also meanwhile as doers—interviewers, interviewees, microphone positioners, camera operators, stenographers, question designers, video editors, and so on. What we will find is that a conversation always involves more than speaking & listening, and that seeing and being seen often create pathways to new futures.

Prerequisite: Any combination of 2 Intermediate Liberal Arts Courses (HSS, LTA, CSP)

MDS4600 The Rhetoric of Social Media

4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

Drawing upon the reading, writing, speaking, and research skills developed in the Liberal Arts and Sciences Foundation and Intermediate Courses, in this intensive seminar students will turn a rhetorical eye towards the ever-evolving world of social media. While our personal uses of various social media platforms will be up for discussion, this course asks students to take a deeper look at the structures of power involved in everything from memes used to brighten someone’s day to large campaigns and avenues for cultural and social change.

Through course readings, in-class discussion, and both primary and secondary research, students will critique the rhetorical functions and effectiveness of various issues in social media. We will review key terms from Babson’s foundational writing courses (see especially discourse communities, audience, conventions, ethics, circulation), deepen our understanding of how such terms developed, and make connections amongst what we’re seeing around us today (think: from Aristotle to Ariana Grande).

In order to achieve a deeper understanding of the rhetoric of social media, this course will be split into four units: (1) Social Media Histories; (2) Social Media Discourse Communities; (3) Social Media and [Fake] News; and (4) and Social Media Futures. Each unit will challenge students both analytically and creatively.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

MUS4620 Global Pop: Mass-Mediated Musics in a Transnational World
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

“Global pop” is music that results from contact between two or more cultures. Examples include rap français, flamenco, reggaetón, afrobeat, K-pop, and Bollywood film music, among many others. This course examines how global pop acquires ideological force and accrues historical layers as it circulates around the world. In scrutinizing the musical style, discourse, and business of global pop, we will focus on such issues as authenticity, hybridity, cultural imperialism, nationalism, personal identity, censorship, political protest, ownership, and appropriation – in short, all the ways in which music means. No previous musical knowledge necessary. 

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

PHL4607 Existentialism (Advanced Liberal Arts) 

Existentialism is a philosophical movement loosely held together by sensitivity to the paradoxes and ambiguities of human experience. With a common emphasis on the tension between freedom and the power of circumstance, existentialists tend to view life from the standpoint of the challenges facing the construction of individual and intersubjective identity. Some existentialists are deeply religious, while others are fervently atheistic. All, however, emphasize the significance of the situated nature of freedom, which translates into a philosophy of responsibility and engagement with the world. 
 

Prerequisites: Any combination of 3 Intermediate Liberal Arts Courses (CVA, LVA, HSS) This course may be offered Fall or Spring semester.

PHL4609 Technology, Nature and Values
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

Investigates the ways in which our increasing technological capabilities have influenced our values and the reciprocal influence of beliefs and conceptual systems upon technological progress.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

PHO1100 Photography

4 Free Elective Credits

Introduction to Digital & Darkroom Photography is an art course designed to explore visual ideas and concepts about photography as an expressive art medium. Content in a picture and its emotional and aesthetic value is of paramount importance and one of the most essential communicative tools of our era. This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of photography with an objective to master the manual camera operating modes, compositional elements, light, color, and black and white imaging. We will learn digital software editing applications and digital printing using Adobe Photoshop software programs. In addition, we will also learn the art and craft of the traditional darkroom using 35mm film cameras and wet-lab printing. Digital workflow terminology and digital printing will be explored in the first part of the term followed by darkroom techniques in the second segment of our class. This foundation course will form the basis of further studies within photography while emphasizing the rich cultural and historical vocabulary associated with this time and narrative based medium.

Note: Babson Photography program has 35mm film cameras and lenses to check out but only a limited number of digital fully manual cameras on reserve. Students are responsible for providing their own digital camera, film and printing papers. You will have 24/7 access to both the digital and darkroom labs.

Prerequisites: None

PRF1120 Theater Production Workshop
2 Free Elective Credits

This course will center on a major collaborative project undertaken jointly by all enrolled students (as well as some students involved in an extra-curricular capacity): the rehearsal and performance of a full-length play. In the professional theater world, every production is a considerable undertaking, requiring deep collaboration among a diverse ensemble, each bringing distinctive expertise to the project. Creating a theater production is not only a rigorous intellectual and aesthetic undertaking but also one that demands the development of leadership and collaboration skills. Whether you intend to pursue a career in the arts or not, the core skills developed through this experience will be highly relevant to any professional path.

Prerequisites: None

PRF1200: Acting Workshop

2 free elective credits

This course will introduce the methods and tools required for stage performance. Through various exercises, games, improvisation, and assignments you will create characters, gain an understanding of theatre terminology, and attempt to find not only meaning but also the performance potential of dramatic literature. Most importantly, you will develop the confidence to approach the craft of acting with the discipline and rigor required for compelling performance.

The art of acting not only requires you to call upon knowledge in history, languages, and literature but also to understand your capabilities physically and vocally. The lessons you will learn this semester in active listening, characterization, vocal capabilities (resonance, range, enunciation, and delivery), collaboration, and bodily awareness are some that you can use in any career and in any field.

Prerequisites: none

RHT1000: Foundations of Academic Writing I 
(Previously title Rhetoric I) 
4 credit 

Foundation course Develops students' abilities in reading, writing, speaking, and critical thinking, and promotes understanding of the dynamic relations among these processes. Students will learn approaches to understanding, analyzing, and responding to texts, both in writing and speech, and will learn to assess the nature and conventions of academic discourse. 
 

Prerequisite: NONE This course is typically offered in the Fall with some additional sections in the Spring.

RHT1001: Foundations Of Academic Writing II 
(Previously titled Rhetoric II) 

Foundation Liberal Arts Rhetoric II will continue to develop the same rhetorical abilities as Rhetoric I, but assignments will require more complex and sophisticated analysis, research, and argument. 

Prerequisite: RHT1000 This course is typically offered in the Spring with some additional sections in the Fall.

SPN2200 Spanish I

(Formerly SPN1200)
4 General Credits

This is a fast-paced introductory course that prepares students for further study of the language. Through engaging, meaningful activities, students will learn to accomplish real-world communicative tasks. The course incorporates a wide variety of interactive and authentic materials to put language into practice. As the course adopts an intensive and immersive approach, it is recommended for students with some previous exposure to language learning and/or the highly motivated rank beginner.

SPN4610 SPANISH II
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This is a fast-paced advanced beginner course. The course rapidly expands control of basic grammatical structures and vocabulary, with special attention to speaking and listening. Students consolidate their ability to communicate in Spanish through a wide range of highly communicative and interactive activities that encourage the development of real-world skills and abilities. Spanish II is the second course in the Proficiency Sequence, a program of study designed to bring students to proficiency in 4 semesters.

Prerequisites: SPN2200 Spanish I (formerly SPN1200), or equivalent proficiency as demonstrated through a required placement test. Not open to fluent speakers of Spanish.

SPN4615 Advanced Spanish in the Community 
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits 

SPN4615 Advanced Spanish in the Community is a service-learning course where students will explore issues of Latino identity in the U.S. Through direct engagement with a community partner in Boston, along with corresponding readings, films, podcasts, and class discussion, students will consider the diversity of the contemporary Latino experience and its representations in the media, popular culture, and politics. Class discussions will be supplemented with a review of advanced grammar topics designed to help students improve their proficiency and gain confidence in their language skills (speaking, listening, reading, and writing). As an integral part of this course, students will complete 12 hours of service learning (approximately 2 hours every other week) through a partnership with Sociedad Latina, a Boston-based organization whose stated mission is _to create the next generation of Latino leaders who are confident, competent, self-sustaining and proud of their cultural heritage._ Students will provide mentorship to high school students that are participating in a 10-week entrepreneurship curriculum as part of an after school program run by Sociedad Latina. Extensive journaling will allow students to reflect on their experiences and improve their writing in Spanish. Guided writing workshop sessions will help prepare students' written reflections to be published on a class blog. At the end of the semester, Babson students and their high school mentees will develop a joint presentation about their collaborative learning. 

Prerequisites: SPN4620 or higher, or similar proficiency as demonstrated by a required placement test. 

Heritage speakers may enroll upon permission of the instructor.

SPN4620 Spanish III
(Formerly Borderlands)
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This course will provide an in-depth review and expansion of Intermediate-level Spanish grammar and vocabulary through oral and written practice. Through the use of selected readings, films and music, students will continue to develop their ability to communicate proficiently in Spanish. Supplementary materials will provide a jumping off point for discussions of immigrant experiences in the U.S., Spain, and Latin America. The course will explore the factors that motivate migration, as well the implications (economic, political, artistic, musical, culinary, linguistic, etc.) of immigrant experiences and cultural exchanges throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

Prerequisites: SPN1200 or SPN2200 (Accelerated Elementary Spanish at Babson), or equivalent proficiency as demonstrated through a required placement test. Not open to fluent speakers of Spanish.

SPN4640 Spanish Cinema and Culture
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This course is designed as a conversation class, with a strong cultural component. The major course materials are contemporary Spanish language films and supplementary readings. Through the lens of ethical questions and concerns that surface in these films, students will study issues relevant to the history, culture, and politics of contemporary Latin America and Spain. Films and readings serve as the basis for debate, discussion, and written analysis. This course aims to ease the path towards greater fluency through improvements in accuracy and more spontaneous communication.

Open to students with an Intermediate level of Spanish, or higher.

Prerequisites: SPN4620, or equivalent proficiency as demonstrated through a placement test.

THR4600 Contemporary Acting Techniques for the Stage: Building a Character 
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits 

Effective theatrical performance and communication begins with focused concentration, a free and active imagination, physical poise, and a controlled voice. In this course students will hone these skills as they read, analyze, and experiment with contemporary acting strategies and methods. Students’ work on the stage will be guided and grounded by careful study and consideration of acting theory and history beginning with the work of Constantin Stanislavski and continuing with the methods of late 20th century and early 21st century practitioners and directors. By course’s end students will not only have an understanding of the discipline and rigor required for successful performance but will also have a theoretical understanding and tools to create compelling and viable characters for the stage and for a public audience. 
 

Prerequisites: 3 Intermediate liberal arts courses (CVA, LVA, HSS, CSP, LTA in any combination)

WRT1000 Intensive Rhetoric Writing Tutorial
Foundation Liberal Arts

Prerequisites: None

WRT1001 Writing Across Contexts
4 Foundation Liberal Arts Credits 

This course introduces students to key concepts in meaning-making and helps them develop rhetorically sophisticated approaches to reading, writing, and composing across contexts. Students refine and reflect on their own composing practices and processes past, present, and future as they read, analyze, and create texts for a wide variety of audiences, purposes, and media forms. At the end of the term and with the vocabulary developed in the course, each student articulates in an essay their own working theory of and approach to writing that they can mobilize and adapt for future academic and professional contexts.

WRT2000 Research Writing
4 Foundation Liberal Arts redits 

This course prompts students to put their theory of writing into practice through writing and composing in research-based genres for audiences in academic discourse communities. Students learn to recognize and adhere to the discursive and procedural conventions of particular communities of scholarly practice, and they examine and participate in modes of scholarly inquiry while learning about and engaging in best practices for finding, evaluating, and incorporating sources. Students produce scholarly arguments in essay form while exploring the roles that other textual forms can and do play in scholarship, and they continually reflect on how this work informs their theory and understanding of writing more generally.

Prerequisites: WRT1001

WRT 4601: Writing with Robots: Authenticity, Ethics, and AI

4 advanced liberal arts credits

This genre-based writing course takes students through the experience of writing different kinds of text with and without the use of AI tools while simultaneously looking at the ethical concerns related to each genre (e.g., one might feel differently about using AI to help write a LinkedIn post vs. a poem) as well as the larger ethical concerns of AI (e.g., data, bias, academic integrity, and so on).

Prerequisites: Any Combination of 2 intermediate liberal arts (HSS, LTA, CSP)

WRT4602 Practicum in Peer Consulting and Writing
Advanced Liberal Arts

Students learn to act as peer consultants in writing and work on improving their own writing, critical thinking, and interpersonal skills. They accomplish these objectives by addressing their writing problems; writing extensively; developing criteria to evaluate the writings of others; studying various writing processes and theories of composition; examining pedagogical approaches to teaching writing; reading extensively about, and becoming acquainted with, the dynamics of peer tutoring; and working in the Writing Center as peer consultant trainees.

This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Spring

Prerequisites: Instructor permission