On Topics Courses
By Amy Vandervelde ’21
Hello, readers of The Words! I hope that you all are doing well during this tumultuous time. Prior to spring break and the transition off campus, I had the chance to check in with a few professors about their past, upcoming, and in-development topics courses. I hope that you will find something you’re interested in by reading the interview snippets below and know there are many more topics courses that I couldn’t cover for this issue.
First, I met with Professor Matt Burgess to discuss the planning that goes into topics courses.
What sorts of topics courses have you taught in the past?
I’m gonna look that up. That’s a very good question. Visual Storytelling, which is short stories, comic books, and short films; International Storytelling (Fall 2019); Mystery Narratives; Creative Writing through New Media — Look at how many I’ve taught! — How to be a person in the world; Comic and Graphic Storytelling; Crime, Horror, and Science Fiction Writing; Creative Writing through Louise Erdrich; Autobiographical and Speculative Fiction
Oh my goodness, you have taught a lot of them. How far back did you go?
That went probably back to 2011.
Do you know what guides your decision in choosing to teach a topics course, or is it kind of just whatever comes to mind?
With some of them it may be related to stuff I’m personally interested in or the project I’m working on. Like I was probably writing a mystery novel, and I was like I should teach mystery narratives so that my research and thinking about the novel can be benefitted by student interaction about this topic.
I guess there’s three things: what am I interested in, what I wish students were more interested in so an example of that would be Creative Writing Through Louise Erdrich or the Homer class. And then the third pole is what do students want, what do they tell me they want to see more of. So that would be like international storytelling, where students are like ‘I’m hungry for classes that address a wider range of writers.’ So I’m like, ‘oh that does make sense.’ Let’s think about and do that. And so it’s stuff I’m interested in for my creative work, stuff that I think students would benefit from, and then stuff that students are asking for. Those three things. Ideally though, it’s a little bit of all of them.
Are you teaching any topics courses for the 2020-2021 academic year?
Next year, I’m teaching visual storytelling, which is where [students] write a short story, and turn that into a comic book, and turn that into a short film.
And is it going to be in the Fall or in the Spring or to be determined?
In the Fall.
Thanks, Professor Burgess! Visual storytelling sounds like it’ll be a unique course that combines the written and visual arts.
The next day, I met with Professor Jim Dawes to discuss his upcoming gaming course.
What sorts of topics courses have you taught in the past?
It’s been a range. Often topics courses evolve into regular courses. Both of my now regular offerings — Science Fiction & Literature and Human Rights — began as topics courses. In the very earliest incarnations, the lit. and human rights course was a course called trauma. It was trauma studies. And then it morphed into a course called justice… then it eventually morphed into the lit. and human rights course. And Sci Fi was the same way. It’s hard to remember when they were topics because now they’re staples.
I know that you’re working on creating a gaming course of some kind. Could you talk a little bit about what exactly it’s going to be or how you got the idea in the first place even?
I’m going to co-teach it with [Assistant Professor] Bret [Jackson] from Computer Science. He does work on VR [virtual reality]. Many years ago a group of students came to us and asked us to create a game design concentration, and they put together this big proposal and floated it and it didn’t really catch.
And it’s always occurred to me that games are a version of art and that we do ourselves a disservice to treat them as something else. Shakespeare in his time was pop culture. The novel when it was invented as a form was seen as sort of low-class, bad-for-you entertainment. Same can be said for television and film now. This high-class, low-class distinction always fails in the end, and we eventually decide ‘oh, those were actual art forms.’ Shakespeare’s good. Film can be good. Novels are good. But I think much the same is happening now with video games because they primarily are experienced as certain mass commodities for children. People tend to think that they’re junk culture. When in fact, like all those other forms, I think that they’re deeply aesthetically interesting.
I was interested in supporting the students when they brought [their proposal] up many years ago, but the college wasn’t yet able to do that. And then talking to Bret, it seemed like it could be really great if we could do it together and have kind of a comprehensive look at games kind of structurally, aesthetically, and intellectually. And it’d be nice to unite the divisions, which I think is the point of a college like this.
So is it planned to happen next year officially?
It’s happening next fall.
Thanks, Professor Dawes! It’ll be really cool to see a course that makes the rare connection between English and Computer Science.
In continuing with interdisciplinary courses in the works, I reached out to Political Science Professor Andrew Latham after he mentioned a dystopian novel course that he’s thinking about designing in the future.
How do you make the decision to teach a topics course and figure out what that course will entail?
Since you posed it in your email, I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit, so there’s a couple of questions embedded in the big question, one of which is the initial inspiration. I’ve read all of those novels either as an undergraduate or another time. And they changed my life, and I just don’t have confidence that — and this is not criticism of the English department they’ve got enough literature globally to deal with — but I’m not sure that we’re doing that. Now, I’m going to contact the chair and ask if there are any courses offered by the English department that do this kind of thing. At which point I would say okay, that’s your stuff, if you want me to come in and do a guest lecture I’m happy to do it. But I’m not interested in poaching on your turf.
So the initial inspiration was that it just gave me a world of good. I love those novels, and I think there is a politics to them. Obviously, they’re all about politics, and it just struck me as something that would be useful in the context of the liberal arts education. If somebody is doing that, an English professor is going to handle these novels differently than a political scientist. But I’m mindful of not encroaching on other people’s territory. And then, once we’ve cleared that hurdle, I’ve got to circulate it within the department too. We teach five courses a year — two in one semester, three in the other. And I’ve probably got 10 courses that I could teach. Some I have to teach once a year, such as International Security, Regional Conflict, and increasingly Liberal and Conservative Political Thought because people are interested. But I’ve got courses on medieval politics, and I’ve got courses on religion and world politics. There comes a point at which a student might go through their entire four years and not be able to take that course because I’m only offering it every five years. So that’s a conversation that takes place within the department. The other consideration too is that topics courses are meant to be experimental and then become part of the curriculum. So it’s not just I fancy teaching this one year, it’s I’m going to try this for one year or two years but with an eye to teaching it regularly going forward. So you get to experiment a little bit but it’s meant to be a longer term project.
Could you describe what the dystopian course that you have in mind sort of looks like?
In my mind it would be chronological in terms of publication date of these various novels and off the top of my head it is Brave New World, Animal Farm, 1984, Arthur Cursler’s Darkness at Noon, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road — which is a post-apocalyptic kind of story. And here’s the difference though: I want students to read these novels, but I want them to read a political secondary literature that addresses the ‘why did this author write that particular book?’ What are the politics? What’s going on in the world?
And I loved my courses in the English department where I was an undergraduate, but it was partly about politics and partly about style and partly about the craft of writing and partly about a lot of things. I think that’s changed an awful lot. I think most English departments now in America focus on politics. But I’m a political scientist. I think I can bring something to bear that’s maybe different from what would go on in not just the English department but philosophy as well. There’s a lot of philosophical weight to these pieces of work.
And you know, I haven’t thought through things like what the assignments would be yet. My initial instinct is what’s the takeaway from these novels in terms of your life as a political agent. It’s a liberal arts objective. It’s not just yes I’ve read these pieces, yes I can claim that I know this author and that author. It is how if at all is engaging with this literature going to shape and form me as a free human being in the early 21st century. It’s a pretty grandiose objective, but that’s what I’m hoping for.
Is there anything else you’d want to share about topics courses?
Topics courses keep us fresh. So there are certain courses that I have been teaching for 23 years. International Security, it changes a little bit here and there, but it’s basically how the field has evolved. But every three or four years, and I’m just guessing that that’s the frequency, I propose and then offer a topics course. It forces one to go beyond, to do more reading, and that helps keep us fresh, and then there are just a whole bunch of issues that arise. So sometimes topics courses are driven by real world events, but other times, and I think even more importantly, professors are curious and they pursue their curiosity and then they share that with their students. The way I think about them is it’s an opportunity for me to continue to grow as a scholar and a teacher and then to share that with my students.
Thanks, Professor Latham! It’s exciting to see how more classes are approaching the liberal arts across departments and academic divisions.
There are many more topics courses that are happening next year and in the works. For example, if you attended the most recent Pop Talk “Dark Fairy Tales,” you might be interested in looking at Professor Penelope Geng’s upcoming Fall course entitled “Once Upon a Crime,” which dives further into fairy tales.
Thank you again to Professors Burgess, Dawes, and Latham for your time and for sharing information about topics courses past, present, and future! I’ve found in my three years at Mac that topics courses are a great way to find new areas of interest or take a random course that is super intriguing and thought-provoking to you. I hope that you enjoyed these insights and look closer into these courses happening next year and in progress for the future. Stay well, and stay virtually connected!