SPRING 2025
ENC 4218, Visual Rhetoric: Space, Place and Human Rights
Tarez Samra Graban
T 3:05-6:05PM WMS 310
This course introduces you to the principles of visual rhetoric, especially as it is enacted across diverse media, shaped by multiple genres, and designed to achieve different goals with different audiences. You learn to analyze the rhetorical function of imagery, use images to respond to and organize arguments, and create images that operate rhetorically. In this particular class this semester, we will extend that work toward the spatial, investigating genres, sites, and problems where the visual and the spatial intersect. Taking our cues from rhetorical ecologists, political geographers, and visual and spatial theorists, we'll consider the socio-spatial dialectics of monuments, memorials, archives, urban planning maps, and other situated performances around human rights. We'll look closely at visual arguments made in and about defined spaces of both conflict and celebration, reading them not only for stated and hidden agendas, but also for imaginative possibilities of how those spaces could be read into the future.
IDS 3188-01: German Society Through Film: The Legacy of Nazi Crimes Against Humanity
Birgit Maier-Katkin
This course explores cinematic responses to Nazi crimes against humanity in German society. Drawing on the perspective of victims, perpetrators, bystanders, helpers, resisters, as well as preceding generations, the course investigates how cultural memory is created to reveal a multiplicity of voices and to reflect the indelible mark of the Nazi past in Germany. The course is taught in English.
REL 3145, Gender and Religion
Rosemary Kellison
Focusing on examples from Christianity and Islam, this course will analyze how gender has been interpreted in religious communities, both historically and in the contemporary world. We will study how gender appears in religious texts and practices as well as the lived experiences of Christians and Muslims. A major focus of the course will be how both communities both conserve and adapt their traditional understandings of gender in response to new personal, social, and scientific developments.
REL 4190/5195, Comparative Religious Ethics
Rosemary Kellison
Students in this course will gain a sophisticated understanding of the history and development of the field of religious ethics, as well as some of the contemporary trends and debates that shape the field today.