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2006-2007 Teachers as Scholars Seminars 1.
Decoding Ancient Manuscripts - THIS CLASS IS FULL The discovery of an ancient manuscript stirs popular and scholarly excitement, but media coverage of a spectacular recovery often fails to illuminate the deeper discoveries made by scholarly inquiry and investigation of the artifact. Taking the example of work now underway at the University of Washington on early Buddhist manuscripts discovered in Afghanistan, participants will get hands-on exposure to how specialists approach the task of decoding ancient manuscripts and what they learn in the process. Important discoveries from other parts of the world and other religious traditions—such as the Gospel of Judas from Egypt and the ongoing research on the Dead Sea Scrolls—will serve as comparative examples. Richard Salomon is Professor of Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Washington, where he co-directs the Early Buddhist Manuscript Project, a research collaboration with The British Library. He is author of numerous books and articles, including Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages (1998), considered the standard reference work on the subject. 2.
Black Radicals in the American Century - THIS CLASS IS FULL In 1940, when Native Son launched Richard Wright into international preeminence—a first for any African American writer—Wright belonged to the small but influential American Communist Party. Also drawn to the far left during the interwar years were celebrated black artists, writers, and organizers such as Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Bayard Rustin. Though Wright and many others later renounced their communist affiliations, allegations of communist conspiracy dogged the civil rights movement throughout its history. We will learn about what drew so many important mid-century black activists and intellectuals to communism and the far left, as well as why so many had second thoughts. We will investigate the impact communism and anti-communism had on the modern black freedom movement and discern how black struggles for civil rights are a critical—if forgotten—legacy of the American left. Nikhil Singh, Associate Professor in the University of Washington's Department of History, is the author of numerous essays and the multiple award-winning book, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. He is currently working on a book about fascism and post-WWII U.S. political culture and collaborating in UW in the High Schools' efforts to redevelop American History curricula. 3.
Loving/Hating/Reading: F. Scott Fitzgerald - THIS CLASS IS FULL F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby argues for the pleasures and dangers of reading other people's lives, just as his novel Tender Is the Night reads the gaudy lives of Americans abroad during the 1920s. We will discuss ideas of reading—personal, social, and thematic—as they appear in Fitzgerald's fiction. More broadly, we will discover the weird pleasures, wild emotions, and secret seductions of reading. How, exactly, do readers take in fiction? How much control does the author have over readers' responses? Do people read differently over time and across class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity? Do we identify with characters who seem to be our opposites? And can we love novels about things we hate? Carolyn Allen, Professor of English at the University of Washington, teaches courses on modern and contemporary writing. She is the author of Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss and numerous essays in twentieth-century studies and women's writing. A recipient of the University's Distinguished Teaching Award, she is immediate past editor of SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 4.
Shakespeare's Comedies - THIS CLASS IS FULL Brimming with puns and wordplay, mistaken identities, clever servants, laughter-provoking insults, twisted plots, and so much more, Shakespeare's thirteen comedies are unrivaled and irreplaceable in the theatrical repertoire. What makes Shakespeare's comedies so compelling? Is it just because they are funny, or do they touch us more deeply and powerfully than any joke? To explore these questions, we will focus on The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare's first comedy, and Twelfth Night, most likely his last. The Comedy of Errors celebrates comic simplicity, while Twelfth Night displays such complexity that one critic called it the comic equivalent of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Join colleagues in discussing how Shakespeare's comedies engage us and what makes them work. John Webster, Associate Professor of English at the University of Washington, teaches Renaissance literature, literary theory, expository writing, and pedagogy. He has published on Sidney, Spenser, Renaissance rhetoric and poetics, and the teaching of Renaissance poetry. In addition, he is College Director of Writing, directs the Puget Sound Writing Project, and has been a Carnegie Scholar since 1998. He leads the popular UW London Theatre Tour. 5.
Seattle's Struggles for Racial Equality - THIS CLASS IS FULL Americans often associate the terms segregation and civil rights movement with struggles in the South. But white supremacy and racial segregation also plagued Seattle and other Washington cities, where local resistance challenged these injustices. Seattle's civil rights history, born well before the celebrated struggles in the 1950s South, swept up not only whites and African Americans but also Asian Americans, Latinos, Jews, and Native Americans. We will examine civil rights issues by drawing upon studies of contemporary racial inequality and the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project—an online, multimedia resource based at UW which offers video oral histories, biographies, research reports, photographs, and other documents. Participants will work with lesson plans being developed for high-school and middle-school classrooms. James
Gregory, Professor of History at the University of Washington, teaches
courses in American history and labor studies and directs the Seattle
Civil Rights and Labor History Project. He is the author of numerous articles
and two books, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture
in California and The Southern Diaspora: How Black Southerners
and White Southerners Transformed 20th Century America. 6.
The Life and Paintings of Frida Kahlo - THIS CLASS IS FULL No Latin American woman artist has captured the American imagination like Frida Kahlo, the Mexican artist and political activist who painted exquisite, expressive, and often painful self-portraits. Although today she is regarded as a cult figure among feminists, Kahlo was overshadowed during her lifetime by her larger-than-life celebrity husband, Diego Rivera. Since the 1980s, though, both the art world and the public have embraced Kahlo's miniature portraits and dramatic life with as much enthusiasm as they have Rivera's monumental murals. Drawing upon a variety of sources and learning opportunities—including her paintings, her biography, and documentaries about her life—we will explore Kahlo's complex legacy. Cynthia
Steele is Acting Chair and Professor of Comparative Literature at
the University of Washington, where she teaches literature and cinema
of the Americas. She is author of Politics, Gender and the Mexican
Novel, 1968-1988: Beyond the Pyramid and numerous journal articles
on Mexican literature, film, and cultural studies. 7. Current Debates in Teaching Writing - THIS CLASS IS FULL Sat Feb 10 and 24, 9am-1pm U W Simpson Center State-mandated requirements and standardized testing increasingly drive K-12 writing instruction in Washington State and across the country. To what extent does current scholarship on the teaching of writing shape requirements? Participants will consider recent research and the pressing questions, issues, and debates that emerge. We will assess a standardizing approach to English in an increasingly globalized world and ask how writing teachers might deal better with language differences. We will analyze what students take with them from one writing context to another, and the resulting impact on how we teach writing. Process-based versus explicit approaches to teaching writing in Australia and the United States will further stimulate discussion. How do all of these debates challenge and potentially enrich teaching practices at every academic level? Anis
Bawarshi is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Expository
Writing Program at the University of Washington. He is author of Genre
and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention
in Composition and co-author of Scenes of Writing: Strategies for
Writing with Genres. He has published widely in the fields of rhetoric,
composition, and genre studies. 8.
The Graphic Novel - THIS CLASS IS FULL Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus (1986) and two DC Comics collections—Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen (1987)—catapulted the graphic novel into mainstream consciousness. Statistics suggest they are now the most widely read and circulated global genre of storytelling. Yet the term graphic novel is inadequate and misleading. Most are an eclectic mix of autobiography, personal essay, travel narrative, journalism, and historiography. How can we account for the form and its relation to contemporary culture and politics? We will investigate how, if, and in what regard the graphic novel matters as a literary text. What is its relationship to dominant forms of visual media, most notably comics and "comix," but also photography, television, and film? What historical and cultural conditions made the graphic novel so popular in the late twentieth century? Caroline Simpson, Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Washington, teaches contemporary literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on histories of race in the United States and theories of visual culture. She is the author of An Absent Present: Japanese Americans and the Making of Postwar American Culture, 1945-1961. 9.
Performance, Difference, and Disability What can we learn from manifest differences in physical, cognitive, and emotional ability? As we seek to build inclusive communities in our classrooms and make public spaces accessible for all, we must consider how disability affects assumptions and identities as much as race, gender, and class. Examining disability helps deepen our understandings of difference and self-definition. The performing arts provide a particularly rich forum for expressing diverse experiences, and the disabled performer—communicating as a different body-in-motion—opens new spaces of sensory and perceptual exchange. For instance, incorporating sign language into deaf theater shows how such performances can teach alternative ways of seeing and hearing. As a result, these works support the development of new arts practices as well as social, cultural, and political empowerment. Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, a performance artist and scholar, teaches at the University of Washington, Bothell, in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Program. Her book, Hearing Difference: The Third Ear in Experimental, Deaf and Multicultural Theater, investigates performance and deafness. She is also lead editor for a forthcoming anthology on the Exquisite Corpse and director of Empty Suitcase Theater, a student-community theater company. 10.
The Jazz Age - THIS CLASS IS FULL The phrase Jazz Age evokes images of Prohibition and speakeasies; vibrant African American cultural expression; and widespread innovations in music, theater, visual arts, literature, fashion, dances, and social mores. No place was more central to the culture of the Jazz Age than New York, home of the famous Cotton Club and a focal point of this seminar. We will study 1920s and 1930s American music, society, and culture, with special concentration on music. We also will survey of the full array of styles and performers that the term jazz initially embraced—a much wider range than encompassed today. Why was this music considered so new, so important, and so influential? No previous training in music is required; participants will learn to listen knowledgeably to outstanding jazz artists from the period, from Louis Armstrong to Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton. Larry
Starr, Ruth Sutton Waters Endowed Professor of Music, has taught courses
on American music at the University of Washington for more than twenty-five
years. He has written and lectured extensively on topics ranging from
Gershwin to the Beach Boys. Starr is author of monographs on the music
of Charles Ives and Aaron Copland and a historical survey of American
popular music, co-authored with Christopher Waterman. 11.
The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict Comes Home The prolonged, bloody war between Palestinians and Israelis has spilled into everyday American life, touching off bitter controversies even in the seemingly insulated worlds of art, academia, and philanthropy. This seminar will take a historical look at the regional conflict as a background for recent scenes of contention played out in the United States: the heated reaction to the canceled New York production My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a play drawn from the journals of the young peace activist killed in Gaza; the stormy debate provoked by eminent scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who charged that pro-Israel interests have hijacked US foreign policy; and the 2003 furor sparked by the Ford Foundation's funding policies in relation to the 2001 U.N. World Conference against Racism, where Israel's policies were attacked. Such incidents will illuminate how events evolving elsewhere dramatically affect US institutions and public discourse. Joel S. Migdal is the Robert F. Philip Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington. Among his books are Palestinian Society and Politics, Through the Lens of Israel, and The Palestinian People: A History (with Baruch Kimmerling). He has been honored with the University of Washington's Distinguished Teaching Award, the Governor's Writers Award, and the Marsha L. Landolt Distinguished Mentor Award. 12.
Ethics, Power, and Global Health To understand and address illness in contemporary US society, we tend to look first to the body of the afflicted individual. Yet if we look instead to global patterns of power and inequality, we can see how injustice causes people to sicken, suffer, and die. Drawing upon ethical and anthropological studies of global health, this seminar will reveal how health relates to such global phenomena as poverty and structural violence, war and terror, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. We will consider provocative questions: What do we as citizens of a wealthy and powerful country, or as citizens of the world more generally, need to understand about the connections between power and health? What are our responsibilities? What difficulties arise when trying to implement solutions to global health disparities—and what are some examples of success? Janelle S. Taylor is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington. Her research and teaching focus on medical anthropology. She holds adjunct UW appointments in Women Studies and the Institute for Public Health Genetics and is co-director of a cross-disciplinary research project on Critical Medical Humanities.
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