Academics

• Sarah McMahon, History
• Fall 2008, first-year seminar

Your parents weren’t the original hippies after all. Americans have been dreaming of utopia and living in communes since the early days of the country. Learn about the proliferation of both religious and secular communal ventures between 1780 and 1920 as well as the counterculture communes of the 20th century. Readings include primary sources by members, such as letters and diaries, as well as utopian fiction and scholarly historical analyses.

• Mary Hunter, Music
• Fall 2008, fulfills a distribution requirement

You could be one singular sensation in this creative, project-oriented class. Students learn elementary tonal vocabulary through writing and performing their own songs. Skills developed include chord writing and analysis, bass-line construction, text-setting and keyboard basics. For students with some basic experience in music.

The thing I love about this course is the way it can teach theory through immediate and practical engagement with actually making music. Learning to make something that belongs in a familiar musical tradition can be very empowering. Some students play, some sing, and all write. The end product is a short concert in which everyone’s song gets performed, so everyone (including the teacher) gets to be a ham at some point! — Professor of Music Mary Hunter

• Craig McEwen, Sociology
• Fall 2008, 200-level course

Make a difference in the lives of real people in the local community. This hands-on course lets students design their own research project as part of a longer-term study on affordable housing, homelessness, hunger and economic insecurity in the Brunswick-Topsham area. A variety of research methodologies will be used, including quantitative analysis, in-depth interviewing, observation, and analysis of data and historical records. Findings from a previous class were presented to Maine’s congressional delegation.

These people wait far too long for assistance. We hope that our data will help convince lawmakers that more funding for Section 8 vouchers is necessary in order to improve the lives of low income families. – Amanda Wing ‘08

• Seth Ramus, psychology and neuroscience
• Fall 2008, first-year seminar

Could be one of your most memorable courses at Bowdoin – since it’s taught by an expert on the neurobiology of learning and memory. Prof. Ramus mixes historical text, primary literature and popular science for this general introduction to the science of psychology. Explore the mind-body connection within topics such as learning and memory, perception, stress, social behavior and personality. Reading includes works by Oliver Saks and V.S. Ramachandran.

“We think of our minds as registering exactly what we see, a camera lucida, but it’s not in fact how the brain functions. It actually works from the top down, meaning that it starts with what it thinks the world is, then amends it by what you see. We actually live in our own made-up world.” – Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Seth Ramus

• Jan Brunson, Anthropology
• Fall 2008, first-year seminar

There’s nothing like oxygen deprivation and a 29,029-foot ascent to bring together people of all nations. Learn about two divergent cultures that exist at the Himalayas, the highest mountains in the world – expedition climbers and their guides, the ethnic group referred to as Sherpas. How do extreme conditions create a shared culture? Who are the Sherpas and how has their interaction with climbers altered their identity? Reading includes “Tarzan Was an Eco-tourist” and “Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster.”

• Mary Agnes Edsall, English
• Fall 2008, first-year seminar

Check out early superheroes as Prof. Edsall brings alive the heroic and chivalric men of literature from Virgil to Chaucer. Special focus on the historical and social contexts helps make these pre-modern texts intelligible and offers a jumping off point for discussion of what it takes to be a good man in a particular society. Texts include Virgil’s Aeneid, Beowulf, The Song of Roland and The Knight of the Lion.

“These models of manhood are complicated, because we’re looking at texts that extol warrior masculinity, what it means to be a guy who deploys violence appropriately. At the same time there are other models of masculinity in those cultures: skill in speaking, knowing restraint, being able to judge other people and your own reactions, reading situations. If it’s just brute force, you’re the monster Grendel.” – Assistant Professor of English Mary Agnes Edsall

• Pamela Fletcher, Art History
• Fall 2008, 300-level senior seminar

From Manet’s Olympia to Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, from pastoral bathers to murdered prostitutes, the female nude was one of the most compelling subjects for the artists of the modernist canon. Why were these artists so fascinated with the female nude? Is it simply the logical outgrowth of centuries of identification between “High Art” and the image of the nude? Is it evidence of cultural misogyny or the expression of male sexual fantasies? How did the nude function as an emblem of “modernity” or of beauty? This course investigates the central role that images of the female nude played in the development of modernist art between 1860 and the 1920s – including interpretations by female artists.

”Our primary focus will be male artists representing the female nude, but I want to bring our examination closer to the present as well, to talk about ways that women artists and artists of color have pushed back or appropriated the nude. Sometimes they insert themselves into the character of the female nude, making themselves simultaneously subject and object. It can make for a very interesting kind of tension when a woman artist represents her own body.” – Associate Professor of Art History Pamela Fletcher

• Philip Camill, Environmental Studies
• Fall 2008, 300-level course

Never before has the landscape been so transformed by human activities. Learn about the changes that have altered biogeochemical cycles and moved whole species from one continent to another. Plant ecologist Prof. Philip Camill brings his expertise on the impacts of climate warming to this wide-ranging exploration of ecosystem degradation and climate change.