HUMN STUDENTS: If you run into ANY problems enrolling for classes please contact napodano@colorado.edustating your full name, the class in which you are trying to enroll and the error message you are receiving. If you are enrolling in a lecture class that also has a recitation, please include the applicable recitation section number.
If you get a message that a class is full even though there appears to be spaces in the recitation you want, this is a known systems issue. Please go ahead, waitlist yourself for the class and email napodano@colorado.edu. We are actively monitoring this and will move you into the lecture/recitation if there is space.
Download Full Course List Here
HUMN 1001 Forms of Narrative: An Introduction to Humanities
Introduces students to forms of narrative from different historical, geographical, and cultural contexts in different media in order to explore how narrative, as cognitive tool and form of representation, functions as a means of understanding human experience. Students learn to analyze and interpret narratives and improve critical thinking, the practice of close reading, and written and verbal communication. Serves to introduce students to the types of questions and methods of interpretation encountered in Humanities.
HUMN 1002 Visualizing Culture: An Introduction to Humanities
How do we see, what do we consider worth looking at, how does this shape culture? What do visual media do to/for us and how do we endow them with meaning? This class probes such questions using a range of visual media including visual art, film, music videos, and social media. With the help of theoretical, scholarly, and popular sources, students analyze examples of visual culture and articulate their responses to the issues raised.
HUMN 1003 Conflicts in History: Civilization and Culture: An Introduction to Humanities
Introduces students to concepts of culture, history, and civilization as sites of conflict across different historical times and geographical locations. Course materials address political and artistic questions that intersect across different ages through their different histories and guiding concepts. Students will learn to read and understand critical, historical, political, and artistic works. Emphasis will be placed on developing critical thinking, close reading, and the ability to articulate and develop issues in writing and verbally.
HUMN 3092 Studies: Capturing Sound
Matthew Peattie
This course examines how musicians and writers have attempted to describe the sonic, aesthetic, and affective aspects of sound, with an emphasis on notation, writing, and visual representations of sound. We will consider how musical sound has been translated into images, signs, and symbols, as well as how music and its effects have been described in literary and theoretical texts. Examples will range from the earliest records of music writing in the Western tradition through to graphic notations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The course will also consider literary, theoretical, and scientific texts from Ovid and Augustine through to the present day, focusing on how organized sound is captured in language.
HUMN 3500 Literatures of Consciousness
Annje Wiese
This course is an interdisciplinary study of human consciousness and its representation. We will analyze a variety of works, including literature, film, cognitive theory, philosophy, and scientific studies in order to see what we can learn by synthesizing the different perspectives each has to offer. More specifically, we will analyze the representation of thought in fiction (both literature and film) alongside the information more theoretical and scientific approaches bring to bear on the following key questions: What is consciousness? How do we think and perceive? What does it mean to be “neurotypical” or, by contrast, to be cognitively impaired? And what does all of this have to do with who we are? Our goal is to see how such an interdisciplinary approach can facilitate a complex and productive understanding of consciousness and its implications.
HUMN 3600 Avatars
Andy Gilbert
This course seeks to introduce students to the analysis of posthuman thought via the concept of the avatar within our digital cultures. Through an interdisciplinary approach to theory, art, and culture, students will become familiar with the discourse of both humanism and posthumanism as it relates to games, virtual spaces, and digital embodiments. Students will read selected theories on defining avatars and posthumanism and engage with these texts in a critical fashion in order to develop skills in close-reading, critical thinking, and analytical writing. Our primary creative texts will span different modes and genres of media from video games to poetry from around the world. The final grade will be assessed based on tests, papers, quizzes, and participation. It is my desire that students gain a foundational knowledge of human complexity. These skills will be integral to the further study of cultural texts that shape society within any given class or within your everyday reality where the borders of the human self are measured or tested.
HUMN 3660 The Postmodern
David Ferris
This course will examine the event of the Postmodern and its effect within literature, film, architecture, culture, and critical theory. Beginning with works that signal and examine the onset of modernity, the consequences of postmodernity for our understanding of the modern as a sign of our intellectual, cultural, and social progress will be presented. Once defined in relation to the modern, our attention will turn to the problems and issues posed by the postmodern with respect to history, perception, and the concept of an era that is also our present. We will also examine various recent attempts to think beyond the postmodern. The course will include a broad selection of works from architectural theory to performance art.
HUMN 4070 Making Meaning: Language, Myths, and Dreams
Audrey Burba
How is meaning produced? How does it circulate? How is it consumed and interiorized? “Making meaning: Language, Myths, and Dreams” will consider how meaning works, how it configures our experience of the world, and our understanding of the self. As students are introduced to various theories concerned with signification, communication, and meaning, they will discover by what processes our chaotic world remains intelligible, and inhabitable.
The course will focus on the legacy of Ferdinand de Saussure’s study of the sign, known as semiology or semiotics. We will examine how Saussure’s insights have been put to work in a variety of intellectual contexts from literary analysis, to cultural anthropology, and psychoanalysis. Key readings will include Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, Barthes’ Mythologies, Levi-Strauss’ Myth and Meaning, and Freud’s On Dreams. With each theoretical introduction, we will analyze and interpret texts, myths, and images from fine arts to popular culture.
HUMN 4092 Studies: Musical Origins
Matthew Peattie
This class will examine musical practices from Antiquity through the Renaissance, relying on the witness of primary sources such as manuscripts and early prints of music, as well as the written records of theologians, poets, philosophers, and music theorists. A central theme of the course is how to ask (and answer) questions using a fragmentary and often decontextualized historical record. The class will examine numerous primary sources in facsimile, as well as examples of Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and early prints in the CU Rare and Distinctive Collections library. A background in music is not required, but a willingness to listen to ancient music and poetry, and to examine primary sources in unfamiliar languages and scripts is essential.
HUMN 4170 Fiction and Reality
Annje Wiese
Fake news, reality television, meta-fiction, virtual reality, fantasy, documentary, propaganda, autobiography, testimonial, digital manipulation of images, robotics—all are popular today for their ability to question and explore the line between fiction and reality. This issue is not a new phenomenon; throughout history humans have tried to understand the distinction between fiction and reality. But our contemporary culture seems particularly interested in (maybe obsessed with?) the relationship between the two concepts. In this course we will explore the consequences of the assumption that a recognizable distinction between reality and fiction exists. We will also consider the increasing sense that there is no tangible way to distinguish the two. Over the course of the semester, we will analyze a diverse selection of sources in order to see how they define reality and fiction and what the consequences of these definitions are.
HUMN 4811 Seeds of Revolt
V. Grove
Description to come.