Liberal Studies Seminars
Each year, Duke GLS offers a wide array of Liberal Studies (LS) Seminars developed exclusively for its students, including the GLS core course. Students in the program also can take graduate courses (500-level and higher) from across campus. For further details about course grades and requirements, see the Registration, Degree Requirements or Academic Policies pages.
Please note that graduate student enrollment in this course is capped at five.
This course will introduce students to the history and evolution of the National Park system in the United States. Beginning with 19th century parks (Yellowstone, Yosemite), it will explore the emergence of the park idea, evolving notions of conservation, indigenous displacement, establishment of the National Park Service in 1916, and the 20th and 21st-century expansion of the National Park system to include both scenic or “natural” and cultural and historical parks. Our focus will be on the entire National Park system, which as of 2024 includes 430 sites. Our lens will be that of a historian, rather than primarily of a scientist or outdoor recreation enthusiast.
The course will consider the relationship of the parks to American historical narratives; to tourism and recreation initiatives; to regional economic development; and to environmental movements and science. Instead of presenting the National Parks only as “America’s Best Idea,” the course will invite students to consider the costs and benefits involved in park creation, the constituencies best served and those excluded. It will also examine the Park Service as an agency with particular historical configurations, racial and gender biases, and organizational priorities that have shaped the park system in certain ways. It will touch upon the ways in which public historians work within the Park Service.
Students will have the opportunity to investigate the history of one park of their choosing.
Course Goals and Objectives
Students completing this course will:
- Encounter the breadth of the entire U.S. national park system, including 430 sites encompassing vast natural, historic, and cultural resources.
- Understand the National Parks and the National Park Service as historical creations that have been shaped by political and social conflicts and processes, and that have, in turn, have shaped particular visions of American self-understanding.
- Learn to use the history of the National Parks as a laboratory for exploring historical and contemporary issues in public policy, environmental conservation, informal public education, and historic preservation.
- Explore the work of public historians in and with the National Park Service.
- Explore the historical research resources (government research reports, data, “gray literature”) and analytical and presentation techniques used for history work within the Park Service.
- Apply the lines of analysis and research approaches presented in the course to a park site of their choosing.
Instructor: Pikuei Tu, Visiting Associate Professor, The John Hope Franklin Institute for Interdisciplinary & International Studies
This seminar explores how out of the box thinking and ideas have brought creativity to problem solving and changed the way people live, interact, and contribute to the society. The class draws inspiration from different types of trailblazers and disruptors in a variety of fields and disciplines--from politics and policy to business, environment, and social movement. We examine the relevant factors and courage that have helped innovators and disruptors bring their ideas to life as well as the work executed to overcome obstacles they have encountered along the way. The course aims to provide students the learning opportunities to identify, analyze, and develop paradigm-shifting ideas that would make meaningful impacts for the society and our lives.
Dr. Pikuei Tu is a faculty member at the Interdisciplinary & International Studies and Markets & Management Studies. Her teaching and research center around management strategy, organizational leadership, innovation, health policy, and global health. Professor Tu has extensive experience in designing custom programs and working directly with international dignitaries, and health and human services leaders domestically and globally. She develops and leads cross-sector projects and advises research institutes, foundations, public agencies, and NGOs. Professor Tu holds a doctorate in educational leadership with a concentration on organizational behavior from UNC-Chapel Hill, a master’s degree in international development policy and a graduate certificate in Latin American studies from Duke University, and an MBA from Santa Clara University. She enjoys brisk walking, traveling, and learning languages.
Students will be introduced to strategies for conducting documentary fieldwork and archival research with a variety of tools and mediums, including photography, film/video, audio, narrative writing, and poetry. A major focus will be on identifying and analyzing the ethical and aesthetic considerations related to representing and exhibiting the lives and stories of others, and/or ourselves.
We will plumb the depths and range of documentary expression with assigned materials that include thought pieces (reflections written by practitioners on process, context, dilemmas, and/or mistakes), reviews/critiques, as well as actual documentaries. All assigned materials—readings and links to podcasts and videos—will be made available online for students.
We will begin our exploration by considering why documentary stories are important, what makes a compelling story, and how various media forms are employed by documentary artists. Subsequently, our discussions will address questions fundamental to any documentary form concerning issues such as point of view, representation, reciprocity, truth, editing, and ethics. Hands- on activities, interspersed throughout the semester, will allow students to engage with documentary forms and questions.
Students will propose, research, and carry-out a creative documentary project for the course, which will be work-shopped during class sessions. Possible outcomes could include a podcast, photo series, video piece, drawings, or narrative non-fiction essay.
Equipment is not provided, but students will be advised about a range of readily-available tools (smart phones and apps) and low or no-cost approaches that could be used. No previous experience or technical skills required; project formats are flexible.
The following are major pedagogical goals for the course:
• Identify and address the complexities involved in representing others.
• Contextualize documentary work historically and comparatively.
• Understand the present-day call from BIPOC documentarians for accountability and culture shift in the documentary field
• Learn about documentary studies at Duke University.
• Engage with a variety of genres of documentary work.
• Identify biases within—as well as voices and themes traditionally missing from—the documentary field.
• Synthesize knowledge from readings, screenings, and speakers.
• Reflect on how documentary practices inform and inspire social change.
• Imagine new uses and forms of documentary work based on an understanding of the evolution of documentary forms.
• Understand major ethical dilemmas involved in doing and exhibiting documentary work.
Note: the Fall 2024 course offering will include a special module — connected to the observance of Duke’s Centennial — on creating oral history interviews and related material with Duke-connected veterans of US military engagements abroad from 2001 to the present day.
Instructor: Saskia Cornes
How might we effectively ground the enormity of climate crisis in the places that we live and the people that we are? How might we start to relate to place and to the non-human world differently in the context of climate change? This environmental humanities seminar posits that we might start with understanding the cultural legacies of local landscapes, and by learning to read landscapes themselves. We will read works of literature and criticism with a focus on the American South. We will also spend some time at the Duke Campus Farm, where the Farm’s soils, plants, and landscapes will be our archives and storytellers, and embodied practice will become one way of making meaning from these “texts.” No prior farm experience is required or expected, but participants must be comfortable being and learning outside.
Instructor: Dr. Lauren M Sanford
This course will teach students how to safely examine, handle, and understand objects from hands-on experiences. Students will gain the skills necessary to approach art from a practical perspective and valuable real-world art experiences. We will employ resources at surrounding museums, galleries, auction houses, artist studios, art conservation studios, and frame shops to enhance approachability and broaden conversations about art. In addition to classroom learning, we will visit these galleries, auction houses, etc when possible.
Readings:
Readings throughout the semester will relate to the week’s topic and activity. For example, one class will teach students how to identify prints, and the professor will bring in real prints for examination under magnification. A reading from Bamber Gascoigne’s How to Identify Prints will explain what to look for in preparation for class.
Other topics and readings include:
- The art market and auctions (Simon de Pury, The Auctioneer: Adventures in the Art Trade)
- Museum theory and practice (Stephen E. Weil, Making Museums Matter)
- How to read and understand an artist’s catalogue raisonné. We will use artist Salvador Dalí’s catalogue compiled by Albert Field as an example (Albert Field, The Official Catalogue of the Graphic Works of Salvador Dalí)
- History of exhibitions and installation, specifically the establishment of the Royal Academy in England (David Solkin, Art on the Line)
Assignments:
Throughout the semester: Short assignments include writing a museum object label for an artwork of choice, either as part of an exhibition or permanent collection installation. Another short assignment will be writing a catalogue entry for an object offered through an auction house.
Final project:
Students’ final project will be a more comprehensive version of the shorter assignments. Students will curate their own digital museum exhibition OR build a digital auction. They can chose from unlimited objects found online and/ or found in person.
Instructor: Courtnea Rainey
Data visualization is the transformation of raw, quantitative data into tables, charts, animations, or other visual mediums to reveal insights and trends. Examples of visual communication with data are everywhere: the star-rating system for online reviews, progress rings on fitness trackers/watches, and public dashboards, to name a few. The Visual Communication of Data course will explore topics related to the effective interpretation and communication of visualized data.
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:
- Discuss key issues in data ethics.
- Evaluate data presented in real-world contexts.
- Organize data to better identify trends or new opportunities for inquiry.
- Create data visualizations of quantitative data (such as pie-charts, bar graphs, line graphs, maps, etc.)
- Communicate data visually using infographics.
Major course deliverables:
- A data-based infographic on the student’s choice of topic
- A 15-minute, data-based presentation (on the same topic as the infographic)
- An online dissemination of the communicated data (e.g. blog, webpage, linked from Duke Scholars page, social media)
This course is appropriate for any graduate student interested in engaging with data in a real-world context. No previous experience with data or computer software is required to take this rigorous, student-friendly course. Graduate Liberal Studies students may find the data skills developed in this course especially useful as they complete their Master’s Project.
Norse mythology proliferates in the modern cultural and political imagination, from modern revivals of pagan religions to Marvel movies and comics featuring the Norse Gods. Uniquely among Western cultures, Norse mythology has come down to us in medieval sources that were compiled and written on Iceland in Old Norse in the thirteenth century. Archaeological evidence from Scandinavia and dating from the centuries before the wide adoption of Christianity in the North, which took place from ca. 970 to 1050 C.E., provides tantalizing glimpses of belief systems about the supernatural and its place in the human life world and about the nature of heroism that differ markedly from our own. Throughout the course, we also consider modern and contemporary uses and abuses of Norse mythology and ponder what it is about these stories that allows them to persistently resonate across time. We will consider whether the virtue-focussed explanations of heroism and mythology that are characteristic of our times find any purchase in the medieval texts. We will use Norse mythology as a gateway for examining contemporary assumptions about cultural concepts such as religion and writing, and we will explore theoretical models that help us make sense of the persistence of myths and legends across time and space.
The narrow focus of Norse Mythology is on two books, each written—or written down—around eight hundred years ago in a language spoken or understood at the time by some 30,000 people living on a remote island in the North Sea, the outermost margin of the Christian European world towards which they faced. These two remarkable books are so utterly unique that they have a singular name: They are known as Eddas. We are going to read and discuss the Eddas together over twelve weeks so that we can encounter their world of story—a primal, violent, alien world of beginnings and endings, of gods, giants, and heroes, of force, struggle, and toil, but also of light, knowledge, and heroics—on its own terms. Not in Old Norse (those of you interested in learning this language, which was the ancestor tongue of modern Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish, please email your professor), but in the next best thing: in trustworthy, contemporary, and philologically sound English translations. We will be guided by academics whose scholarship has contributed to our store of knowledge illuminating the Eddas and the languages, beliefs, and values they represent; by the philologists who have rendered the Eddas expertly into reliable, trustworthy English translations; by the historians who have studied the imprint left by the Norse in the writings of those who encountered them; and by the archaeologists whose studies of the material remains of the Viking world can illuminate some small part of the deeper past represented in the Eddas.
INSTRUCTOR: Michelle Dove
CLICK HERE TO WATCH A COURSE PREVIEW VIDEO
The words—incredibly—are all we have, but a good story wilts without structure. Arriving at the knowledge that content dictates structure, this course will allow you to explore structural possibilities for your nonfiction, fiction or hybrid-genre writing.
One creative nonfiction form that increasingly renews itself and its staying power is the lyric essay, a moldable structure that draws from poetry, essay and memoir to distill a way of thinking onto the page. At peak form, lyric essays invite readers to engage in more nuanced and subtle arguments than traditional essays might, without sacrificing the freshness and musicality paramount to poetry. Under the lyrical spell, the reader turns activated thinker and participant in a context that you, as the writer, along with your content, establish. What the writer of the lyric essay leaves out is of equal concern to what the writer includes.
With lyric essays, essays on craft and short stories as our primary texts, this workshop and discussion-based course will examine the choices we make as writers at the sentence and structural-levels, with the goal of illuminating what makes a personal narrative or story satisfying or complete. Students in this course will read, write and workshop their own nonfiction, fiction or hybrid-genre work, investigating the dynamic among the story, the world outside the story, the reader and the author. Our analysis will focus on the recursion of language and structure to bring about what Gordon Lish calls the “swerve”—i.e. the inevitable yet surprising conclusion—for every work we encounter. Using David Foster Wallace’s lens to probe creative nonfiction, we will further investigate our motivations for writing personal narratives “other than sheer truthfulness,” allowing for simultaneous creative goals of informing, instructing, entertaining, persuading, edifying, amusing and intriguing our readers. Readings will include work by authors such as Claudia Rankine, Eileen Myles, Anne Boyer, Michelle Chan Brown, Mary Ruefle, Amy Hempel, Susan Steinberg, Lynne Tillman, Lyn Hejinian, Roxane Gay, Dorothy Allison, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion and Nathalie Leger.
MICHELLE DOVE is a multi-genre writer and musician. Since joining the staff of the Duke English Department in 2016, she has taught fiction, nonfiction and poetry writing at Duke and, more recently, at Night School Bar in Durham. She is the author of Radio Cacophony, a linked collection of short prose, and a co-owner and operator of SPINSTER, a radical feminist record label founded in 2018 that has released albums featured in The New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone. Since 2016, she has also served as an Associate Series Editor for the Wigleaf Top 50.
An exercise in exploring one’s life story in the context of human movement through time and space led by a veteran anthropologist and documentary fieldworker. We will delve into our own cultural geographies through mapping, interviewing, reading, and writing – memoir, creative nonfiction, poetry and even visual storytelling. Our goal will be to detail where we come from and where we’re headed, not just physically, but also in our vocation, avocation, and life in general.
We will acknowledge differences of origin and future possibilities based on power dynamics. We will place our personal travel and arrival (international, domestic, philosophical, and spiritual) in the context of privilege and constraints; open borders and closed; free choice and barriers, all the while endeavoring to take stock of where we are personally in a globalized world.
Participants can expect to end up with a narrative about themselves, having engaged in looking and listening with every encounter of persons and places new and old along the way. This GLS program is filled with adventurers. Everyone has a story of movement from somewhere. A major feature of the course will be to acknowledge those stories of fellow travelers and to join in a collective journey onward to somewhere, hopefully enriching and having been enriched by those around us.
Biodiversity is critical for a multitude of reasons: to maintain clean water, protect reliable and healthy food sources, stabilize global climate and environmental resilience, and facilitate mental health for current and future generations. This course will explore topics and questions that include: what is biodiversity, how do we measure it, why are some areas more biodiverse than others, and why does it matter to preserve biodiversity? The course will combine discussions AND hand-on experience with biodiversity through a series of field trips. Three (weekend) field trips will include visits to major ecological regions of the southeastern U.S. as represented in North Carolina – the Coastal Plain, Piedmont, and Appalachian Mountains. Two of the field trips (Piedmont, Mountains) will be day-trips, complemented by an overnight trip to the Coast where the class will stay at Duke’s Marine Lab in Beaufort NC. The remaining 6-7 class sessions will meet on campus for discussions.