Course Description: A seminal work of Medieval literature, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales has attracted a wide range of praise and critiques over the centuries for its presentation of love and sex. From mind-bendingly dutiful wives to loose and lusty wenches, the varied tales that comprise this classic of English Literature often intimately tie its conceptions of femininity and masculinity into sexuality in the most ribald of ways. Be it barely concealed extramarital affairs occurring in trees or accidental analingus out a window, Chaucer’s taste for the provocative often places his characters in the most #problematic of places. This duality of The Canterbury Tales – being often humorous and horrifying at the same time – deeply troubles and complicates our understanding of consent, sexual violence, and gender in the medieval world, presenting a vision of the Middle Ages that is both impossibly foreign and eerily prescient to our contemporary moment. In this course, we’ll dive into the controversies and debates surrounding Chaucer, and attempt to unravel the enigmatic visions of sex, gender, and love presented by the wide cast of characters. Along the way, you will learn to read Middle English, get hands-on practice working with digital manuscripts and archives, and develop a greater appreciation for these queer resonances across time that emerge from Chaucer’s magnum opus. This course will meet in person.

Welcome to Engl 1012

“Consider how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed…”

Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill”

This course is centered around how we understand disease, illness and disability. How do writers conceptualize and articulate experiences of disease and/or disability, and what does this reveal about our culture, our bodies and ourselves? We will explore, interrogate and challenge what it means to be “healthy/sick,” a “doctor/patient,” “normal/abnormal” in a variety of texts across time, from nineteenth-century letters, to twentieth-century essays to contemporary graphic memoirs. I encourage you to consider how literary representations of the body intersect with historical, cultural and contemporary conceptions of medicine, science, race, religion, class, gender and/or sexuality.

In this course, you will be asked to sharpen your ability to question and analyze a text, to argue a legitimate claim thoughtfully, and to perform focused research. This class demands several hours of academic reading per week and a significant amount of formal and informal writing, both of which contribute to at least one-third of your final grade. The course is designed to challenge you so that you can not only improve with the mechanics of writing, but so that you push yourself to articulate your opinions with more specificity and complexity. Over this next semester, this class will help give you the tools you need to hone your reading, researching, analytical, and writing skills so that you may emerge a better and more confident writer and thinker than you were at the beginning of the semester. Most importantly, you will enhance your ability to write, think, and speak clearly by crafting a research-based project from which you will develop and defend your own argument about a topic that interests you.

We go to college not just to study something but to learn how to do something – something that those who don’t earn a degree normally do. What is our earned expertise? What is that extra something that college gives us the opportunity and support to pursue?

One answer is that college allows us to learn how to do research. Research involves the creation of questions worth asking, it involves gathering the materials that we need to address these questions, and it involves synthesizing our findings with our questions to come up with credible answers.

In our ENGL 1012 seminar, we will learn how to use the research methods practiced in literary studies. Within this discipline, researchers explore questions of identity, politics, history and aesthetics, among many others, by studying representations of people, places and events in literature. To guide our understanding of research through literature, we will be focusing on the kinds of questions that emerge from the study of early African American culture. We will read narratives of enslavement and resistance from the late 1700s through to the mid 1800s, and we will also read scholarly texts that help understand the historical and political context within which these early African American narratives were first written and read. The readings will serve as an inspiration and evidentiary base to pose questions such as – what is the use of personal narratives and fictional stories in society? How does reading literature change the way in which people think? When we talk about history, are we discussing the past or is our focus on understanding the present? How do race, class, and gender affect the lives and experiences of oppressed people? What strategies have the oppressed used to fight back and change the circumstances of their marginalization?

The written assignments for our seminar will teach us how to address such questions by doing research, and they will encourage us to come up with questions of our own. We will learn how the process of writing allows us to construct answers to our questions and express the value of our opinions. By moving through a series of written exercises that feed into each other, all the students in this course will produce a final research paper that draws on the general theme of the course and makes judicious use of the resources at the library to ask and answer a question of their own design. Possible topics for research can include food, fashion, celebration, medicine, religion, science, among many others. The research paper is a curiosity-driven project where students have the freedom to pursue their interests, within the specific context of early African American culture.

With an emphasis on close reading, English 220 is intended to develop in students the analytical and interpretive skills necessary for both written and verbal critical response to literature that is firmly grounded in the text. It also establishes a common knowledge base, however minimal, in literature in English, and it equips students with the vocabulary and techniques for describing and analyzing literary works, with an emphasis on developing critical writing skills specific to literary analysis. In addition, the course develops in students an appreciation and understanding of the aesthetic qualities of literature, as well as an awareness that literature is part of a larger ongoing cultural, social, and historical dialogue that informs, influences, and inspires our experience.

As important, English 220 introduces students to discipline specific academic writing, with an emphasis on thesis driven analytical and interpretive essays, including a substantial research paper. While each academic discipline has its own writing and research requirements, style, and conventions, 220 students will gain an understanding of the basic components of academic writing: thesis creation and development, argumentation, analytical reasoning, evidence, and the engagement of both primary and secondary sources. Students will be able to use the academic writing skills learned in this class across the disciplines, adapting them to the specific field of study they pursue.

The main goal of this Environmental Science 99 Laboratory course is for you to think about how we interact with the environment, our impacts and the results of these, not just in our immediate vicinity but globally. We will focus on three main topics; sustainability, pollution and climate change.

An additional goal is to gain knowledge of the fundamental scientific basis of major environmental issues facing society, including climate change, air, soil and water quality, food production for a growing population, sustainable energy resources and biodiversity. We also consider these problems in the context of the current social, economic, & political environment. In addition to discussing these environmental challenges, we will address potential solutions and management practices that have been or could be implemented to mitigate the negative impacts of the current environmental issues facing our neighborhoods, cities, countries and planet.

Part of LaGuardia’s First Year Experience, this course is designed to assist incoming students majoring in Psychology to make a successful transition to their major and college life. This course is based on open educational resources that are zero-cost to all. The First Year Seminar for Psychology introduces psychology and ways to think about different theoretical approaches and research that are relevant to student success, such as learning, identity, and motivation, and research methods. This course addresses issues related to navigating personal development and academic achievement in psychology.

Everyone eats. In this sense, the experience of food is common to us all. Yet the meanings we attach to food—as individuals with complex personal histories and needs, as members of particular cultures, communities, and belief systems—are remarkably diverse and powerful. In this course, we engage works by scholars, poets, and other writers to explore the significance of food as the source of inspiration and debate. This exploration will serve as a basis for our own writing. Our written responses will explore food as it relates to identity, social justice, and the environment—showing how far inquiry into one topic can stretch.

Course: ENG 110: Food as Philosophy, System, Controversy
Instructor: Nicole Cote
This project was first developed during the Open Pedagogy Fellowship (Winter 2021), through the Mina Rees Library at The Graduate Center.

Read more about this project: Cultivating Resources for the Future by Nicole Cote
https://gclibrary.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2021/04/22/cultivating-resources-for-the-future/

This course will provide an introduction to the most important theoretical systems of psychotherapy and their technical applications for the treatment of individuals with a variety of psychological problems (calling for modification of behaviors, cognitions, and/or emotions).

By the end of this class, students will be to:

Name 3 schools of thought in psychotherapy
Identify internal obstacles to psychotherapy from the therapist’s and patient’s sides
Cite the 3 important changes or movements in the history of psychotherapy
Cite the main elements of the methods in individual, couple, and family therapy
Utilize the appropriate vocabulary linked with the field of psychotherapy.

Chemistry is a challenging and often abstract science, but as you progress through this course we
hope you will discover that chemistry is also exciting and that many of the key concepts in chemistry
are both important and relevant to life on earth. Throughout this semester we will provide you with
the basic skills and knowledge to think and feel like a chemist. You will learn that chemistry is
exciting!

Chemistry is a challenging and often abstract science, but as you progress through this course we hope you will discover that chemistry is also exciting and that many of the key concepts in chemistry are both important and relevant to life on earth. Throughout this semester we will provide you with the basic skills and knowledge to think and feel like a chemist. You will learn that chemistry is exciting!

This course was created as part of the Open Pedagogy Fellowship, through the Mina Rees Library at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Read more about the process of course design here: https://gclibrary.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2021/04/29/oer-in-science-catching-up-in-stem/

In this course you get the opportunity to research a gentrifying neighborhood in NYC and develop a mini case study that examines housing and urban restructuring through a critical lens. Drawing on various methods (including field observations), weekly assignments, and discussions with your peers; you’ll build toward completing your case study over the 6-week period. During this time you will also learn:

how gentrification impacts affordable housing
why gentrification is a form of racial capitalism
what forms of local resistance exist
theories that attempt to explain how gentrification operates, and
methods for studying urban space

What do we mean by “modernity” or the “modern world”? In this course, we will define modernity by examining global changes in politics, economy, culture, and society since 1500. We will approach these changes with a particular focus on the themes of capitalist development, imperialism, race, gender, and class. In doing so, we will engage with and challenge Eurocentric notions of modernity, and consider alternative ways of understanding global history.

This course surveys the history of Europe from the French Revolution to the present. This covers the traditional periodization of the “modern” era and will focus on the key events, episodes, and transitions that mark this timeframe. Readings, lectures, and discussions will engage with all aspects of European politics and society during this period but will be guided by the central problem of the pursuit of power as the key theme. “Power” in this sense refers not only to the way individuals sought political power in the domestic sphere or territorial control in the international realm, but also, more diffuse notions of power as they appear in daily life, culture, gender relations, race, and social conflict. This focus on power is largely a result of a particular understanding of “modernity” as ultimately an idea that pushed Europeans to develop new ideas about how to best control and order society and the globe. To be modern, in short, meant harnessing the technologies, populations, and institutions of the nation-state to create a more ordered, productive society.

Beginning with the French Revolution, Europeans in the modern era have sought to combine the pursuit of power with the mobilization and participation of mass society, in varying forms. The unleashing of popular sovereignty and the response of the various “isms” of the 19th century (e.g. liberalism, socialism, nationalism) reveal to us the extent to which politics became a question of who should have the power, and how that power ought to be used for the benefit of European societies. Europeans did not only struggle for power in this domestic sense, but also sought to use power abroad and expand the grip of European empire. The modern period, particularly during the “Age of Catastrophe” of the early 20th century, was one marked by warfare that reshaped how violence was conceived. Ultimately, the quest for power led to totalitarian states, the most infamous being Nazi Germany, which sought to control their societies in ways previous unheard of and use extreme forms of violence in doing so. The great cataclysm that was the two world wars destroyed the belief that the use of brute force was the most preferred means of exerting power at home and abroad, and the changes this brought about are evident in the way Europeans conceive and utilize power in today’s world.

Harmonizing with current approaches, this course also seeks to provide a “multi-perspective” overview of Modern Europe, working at different levels of society and engaging with perspectives from larger and smaller European nations. Ultimately, it strives to develop students’ understanding of Europe at large and the changes experienced there over the course of roughly two centuries.

Hello and welcome to our course site for HIU348: The History of New York City and State.

In this online, writing-intensive course, we will explore several key moments in the political, cultural, and social development of New York City and State. We will focus particularly on New York City’s growth from a small colonial outpost to the metropolis of the United States and the challenges this growth presented.

This course is required for students with a major in History and a minor in Education. By the end of the class, students in this course should:

have a good understanding of events in the history of New York, especially New York City, and how historians have interpreted these events
explore the contemporary city and state and understand how current developments relate to the past
improve writing skills and engage with course material by completing a series of informal and formal writing assignments
sharpen analytical skills by engaging with primary and secondary sources

Course Topics: Elementary set theory, functions, relations, and Boolean algebra. Switching circuits, gating networks. Definition and analysis of algorithms. Applications of graph theory to computer science. Related algorithms. Introduction to combinatorial computing and counting arguments. Introduction to error analysis.

SPA 300 is an introduction to illustrative styles, movements, writers and cultural expressions in Latin America and Spain. It focuses on basic themes in twentieth and early twenty-first century Latin American fiction, especially the short story. Students will read and respond to issues related to twentieth and early twenty-first century Latin American fiction. Secondary sources will be consulted during class activities and as part of the written and oral assignments. There will be close reading of texts, and group discussions.

This course was created as part of the Open Pedagogy Fellowship, through the Mina Rees Library at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

The world is a curious place. As children, we wonder about it. To questions like: “Why is the sky blue?” and “How do microwaves work?” we get initially satisfactory answers. To questions like “Why should I do what my parents tell me to do?” and “How do you know for sure there aren’t aliens on Mars?”, we get less satisfactory answers. Questions, and their possible answers, are the currency of philosophy, and (as you will see) permeate every aspect of human life. This class will interrogate our philosophically imbued experiences of the world by exploring questions like: How can we distinguish what is real from what is not real? How is knowledge shaped or constrained by one’s location? Why is truth important? What is morally important and why? Is it time for the revolution? Where is the self located? Are there different ‘kinds’ of people? In what sense do race(s) and gender(s) exist? You will leave this class with an understanding of some philosophical issues found in three main branches of Western philosophy: epistemology, value theory, and metaphysics.

Content-Based Objectives

Acquire an understanding of philosophical issues found in the study of epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics.
Learn about central arguments and positions on said problems.

Skill-Based Objectives

Critically examine arguments (test consistency among claims, test limits, or test capacity to address a relevant issue or problem).
Practice active listening, including the skill of charitable interpretation.
Identify arguments, including premises and conclusions.
Interrogate the weaknesses of one’s own view and the strengths of alternative views.
Formulate original arguments and foresee strong objections.
Identify and explain how philosophical concepts inform discussions of real-world issues.
Cultivate critical writing and communication skills.
Develop a philosophical curiosity that will serve you outside of the classroom.

This course introduces students to the discipline of sociology. What is sociology? Why is it important? Over the course of the semester students will develop what C. W Mills called a “sociological imagination” that will allow them to see how individuals are shaped by social structures and institutions, and in turn how we as individuals recreate those institutions. We will discuss theoretical and methodological approaches, becoming aware of how sociologists make sense of this complex social world.

This survey course is designed to provide students with a thorough understanding and greater appreciation of the theatrical form. Readings and lectures will focus on the relationship between theatrical theory and practice, the various creative/production roles essential to theatre, as well as major artists and movements throughout theatrical history. Students will analyze major works of dramatic literature to offer context for course content, as well as attend a live theatrical performance on campus.

Learning Objectives:

Theatrical Theories & Terminology: Identify and apply the fundamental concepts, theories and roles associated with modern theatrical practice and professional theatrical production (i.e. suspension of disbelief, empathy, actor, designer, Broadway, Off-Broadway, etc.).
Theatre & Creativity: Examine and define the skills, considerations and tasks associated with the creation of theatre, both individually and as a collective whole.
Theatre & Society: Evaluate and articulate how theatre is a socially-responsive artform that creates meaning and fosters discussion, debate and community.
Theatre, History & Cultures: Analyze and define the central characteristics of the theatrical artform, both generally and in relation to the history of the United States and Global Cultures.
Oral Communication & Writing Skills for the Theatre: Analyze and evaluate the experience and the various components of live theatrical production, and articulate its value both verbally and in writing.

This course will introduce you to the various elements of the theatre with particular attention to the following inquiries: What is theatre? How is it created? What are the various occupations in the theatre? What is the position of theatre in society? How are theatre and history interconnected? My goal for this course is to give you the means to discuss theatrical experiences (either as theatre makers or spectators) as well as a great variety of theatrical traditions and provide a basis for your future endeavors with this art form. This will be based on lectures, readings, in-class discussions, and seeing theatrical productions.