Summer classes will run from June 1 to July 17. Please contact the Center for class days and times.

Sympathy for the Devil: Creating and Developing Memorable Characters in Fiction

Carolyn Ferrell

When we create our stories, how do we write memorable characters? In which ways can we shape our characters to allow the reader to identify with them? How much should “real life” experience influence what we do on the page? Through weekly reading and writing assignments, we will try to answer questions like these. Our focus on certain elements of craft (such as point of view, dramatic tension, and transformation) will hopefully bring us to a greater understanding of our characters. In this way, the possibilities for our stories will unfold before us.

Disturbed Terrain: Environmental Design in the 21st Century

Charles Zerner

This course investigates emerging technologies, philosophies, and practices of environmental design and management in the early 21st century, from the level of cells to the level of regional landscapes. What ideas govern the ways in which boundaries are drawn between nature and culture? What values, visions, and assumptions animate contemporary debates over innovations in environmental design? What forms of technological know-how and knowledge production practices underlie contemporary developments in the design of life?

The course begins with an introduction to debates on the nature of nature during the late 1990’s. We then turn to contemporary developments in environmental design in several domains, including landscape architecture; cyborg technology; simulation, mediation, and virtual environments; and agriculture and biotechnology/bio-warfare. We examine the work of bio-artists and engineers, genetic engineers working for private industry and the government, as well as the work of environmental artists and scholars. Developments in contemporary environmental design, including food, fashion, green roofs, nature in the city, and environmental monitoring technologies, at scales ranging from the width of blood vessels to entire planets, form part of this itinerary. On the battlefield as well as at peace, the nature of design is rapidly changing. Monarch butterflies, funded by the Department of Defense, are being redesigned as cyber-creatures, capable of flying to “hot zones” and conveying information to human screeners a half-world away from the actual battle scene. What does it mean to be human in this disturbed terrain? What states of nature are being dreamed, designed, and lived in?

A Life in Time: Biography as History

Jim Cullen

This course explores the lives of people and the ways their times are — and are not — like ours. We will undertake a series of case studies focusing on key questions in human experience, among them how to grapple with historical figures about whom there is much controversy, or not much is known, or whose values are much different from ours. There are obviously multiple possible answers to such questions; being able to answer them for yourself —and to explain those answers to others — goes to the heart of the educational enterprise we’re undertaking here. We will study well-known figures such as Jesus Christ and Elvis Presley, and perhaps Julius Ceasar and Genghis Khan, along with more obscure ones like Mary Prince, a Caribbean slave, and Martha Ballard, a midwife in 18th-century Maine.

Living History

Priscilla Murolo

This seminar explores U.S. history through the lens of autobiography, memoir, and autobiographical fiction. Authors include Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, Maxine Hong Kingston, and others whose narratives take us inside epic events and movements as well as everyday life. Like our texts, class discussions will probe the ways in which people make history, history makes people, and both processes shape the stories we tell ourselves and tell others about ourselves. In conference, students may choose to study autobiographical writing or produce their own.