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 RegistrationDegree Requirements or Academic Policies pages.  

LS 780-01
Summer 2024
Wednesdays, 6-8:30 PM
GLS House Room 0101
Show Details

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.

LS 760-01
Summer 2024
Tuesdays, 5-7:30 PM
GLS House Room 010
Show Details

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:
Kent Wicker
770-02
Summer 1 Extended 2023
Wednesdays, 6-9 PM
GLS House, 2114 Campus Drive
Show Details

Click here to watch a course preview video.

Satire is all around us, from internet memes and fake websites to sketch comedy, political cartoons and movies.  Rewriting our social or political realities from a different angle can – if done well – be wickedly funny.  It is a real pleasure to see truths punctured and assumptions set askew.

In this class, we will explore what satire is and how it works.  This will include asking questions such as:

  • How does satire work in your personal value system?  Is anything beyond the pale?  Who and what are proper targets for satire?  
  • Satire can be seen as the “spoonful of sugar” that lowers our resistance to the “medicine” of social or political critique.  But in making that critique more palatable, does satire end up functioning as a sort of pressure release valve that undermines any real social change?
  • What is satire’s relationship to truth?  During the era of Trump, behaviors previously seen as deplorable have been normalized. How can satire compete with reality in an age of postmodern “truthiness”?

In this class we will try to answer such questions by exploring both classic (e.g. Dickens, Twain) and contemporary works of satire (e.g. Get Out, Parks & Rec, The Daily Show, SNL, Ask a Slave). Exactly how that works we will figure out as we go along.  A good deal of the course material will be student-generated, as students share and discuss their own favorite examples of satire – with the option of creating and sharing satire of your own as well.  

About Kent Wicker
Graduate Liberal Studies

Kent Wicker's academic interests include 1) issues of class, gender and region in American and post-colonial literatures; 2) narrative theory and the historical development of the novel; and 3) literary representation, realism, satire and fantasy.  He is also interested in embodiment, religious and intellectual history, and the history of everyday life.   With Donna Zapf, he created the GLS Core Course in interdisciplinary studies and now serves as assistant director of the GLS program.

Instructor:
Amanda Starling Gould
780-02
Summer 1 Extended 2023
Fridays, 2-5 PM
GLS House, 2114 Campus Drive
HYBRID
Show Details

Click here to view a course preview video.

In this course we’ll explore how digital technologies are altering climate and acting toward its preservation. We’ll look at human-earth-technology relations and possible planetary futures. If the earth, the human, and technology are no longer separable, or even thinkable in isolation, we need models for reflecting critically about our physically-entangled global ecological systems. 

The culminating assignment will be an interdisciplinary research project that integrates course readings and outside research to meaningfully reflect on the interrelation of climate, technology, and culture. Research and expertise come in many shapes in this class, so we’ll read across fields and formats. Projects can be individual or collaborative and can include such elements as community eco-partnerships, global social activism, multimedia reflections, speculative design projects, land-based art or performance, written reports, graphic narratives, manifestos, collective action, or digital products.

About Amanda Starling Gould
Graduate Liberal Studies

GLS Advisory Committee Term: 2022-2025

Amanda Starling Gould, PhD, is a technology scholar with a particular interest in the environmental effects of digital technologies and questions the ways technologies of connection can cause disconnect, bias, and harm. She thinks, for example, about how our technologies design us, and about how the unequal distribution of power and access are designed into the system. In her current appointment with Duke’s Graduate Liberal Studies program, she seeks to enable students to interrogate these issues and pursue critical interdisciplinary research projects of their own.

She teaches undergraduate, graduate, and adult learners on topics related to critical digital studies, public and digital humanities, designing equitable futures, and for many years taught a class called Learning to Fail for the Innovation & Entrepreneurship department at Duke.

Instructor:
Jonathan Shaw
Paul Manos
LS 760-01
Spring 2024
Thursdays, 6-9 PM
GLS House, 2114 Campus Drive
Study Away
Show Details

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.

About Jonathan Shaw
Biology

GLS Advisory Committee Term: 2021-2024

Jonathan Shaw is a Professor in the Department of Biology. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 from the University of Michigan. Dr. Shaw's research is on the systematics, population genetics, and evolution of bryophytes (mosses). Some of his research interests have included the taxonomy and classification of particular groups of mosses, developmental anatomy, and genetic relationships among populations of very rare species. A current focus in the lab is the evolution of peatmosses (Sphagnum) and Dr. Shaw's field work tends to be in polar and high altitude environments. He has published some 200 scientific papers and has edited two books, one on the evolution of tolerance in plants to toxic metals in the environment, and one on the biology of bryophytes. Dr. Shaw taught for eight years at a liberal arts college (Ithaca College) before coming to Duke in 1996.

About Paul Manos
Biology

Paul Manos is a Professor in the Department of Biology.  He received his Ph.D. in 1993 from Cornell University.  Dr. Manos’s research is on the systematics and biogeography of the flowering plants.  His main research interest is the evolution of the oaks and their relatives, the hickories and walnuts.  He has published some 40 scientific papers spanning many different families of flowering plants, often with an emphasis on geography.  Dr. Manos has taught several plant biodiversity courses since coming to Duke in 1996.

Instructor:
Charles D Thompson
LS 780-01
Spring 2024
Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 PM
GLS House, 2114 Campus Drive
Show Details

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.

About Charles D Thompson
Cultural Anthropology

GLS Advisory Committee Term: 2022-2025

Charles D. Thompson, Jr. is Professor of the Practice of Cultural Anthropology and Documentary Studies at Duke University, and Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. He holds a Ph.D. in religion and culture from UNC-Chapel Hill, with concentrations in cultural studies and Latin American studies. He also holds an M.S. degree in Agricultural Education from NC A&T State University. A former farmer, Thompson remains concerned about issues affecting laborers within our food system. He has written about farmworkers, and he is an advisory board member of Student Action with Farmworkers, the Duke Campus Farm, and other Duke food and agriculture initiatives. 

Thompson is author or editor of seven books, including Going Over Home: A Search for Rural Justice in an Unsettled Land, Border Odyssey: Traveling the US/Mexico Divide (2015), Spirits of Just Men: Mountaineers, Liquor Bosses, and Lawmen in the Moonshine Capital of the World, and, with Melinda Wiggins, The Human Cost of Food: Farmworker Lives, Labor, and Advocacy. He is also the producer/director of seven documentary films, including Rock Castle Home,  Homeplace Under Fire, Border Crossing 101, Faces of Time, Brother Towns/ Pueblos Hermanos (2010), We Shall Not Be Moved (2008), and The Guestworker (2007). His current work includes a project hosted by Kenan Institute for Ethics entitled, “America’s Hallowed Ground.”

Instructor:
Rachael Murphey
LS 780-01
Fall 2023
Wednesdays, 6-9 PM
Rueben-Cooke Building 127 [new location]
Show Details

Instructor: Rachael Murphey, PhD

Course Description
The primary goal of this course is to unpack the dense intersection of race and the adoption and foster care systems in the United States. We will do this by studying the policies and practices of domestic transracial and international or inter country adoption and foster care. We will critically interrogate issues of power and privilege among and between individuals as well as sovereign nations and we will learn from all members of the adoption triad (birth/first parents, adoptees, and adopting parents). We will consider academic research, novels, documentaries and feature films. We will also have presentations from the Children’s Home Society of North Carolina, social workers, Guardian Ad Litems, adult transracial and intercountry adoptees, and adoptive parents from Orange and Durham county.

Additional goals for this course include sustained opportunities to engage in debate and discussion, as well as opportunities to research, write persuasively, and present your findings to a larger, non-academic audience.

Course Learning Objectives

After completing this course students will be able to:

  1. Identify and explain the historical and systematic factors that fuel adoption and foster care in the U.S. and abroad, including major events, leaders and legislation.
  2. Understand how the US child welfare system functions, under what authority, and the major provisions that guide and fund it.
  3. Identify and explain the ethical issues and conflicts in the history and current policies and practice of intercountry/transnational adoption between the U.S. and Africa, China, Latin America, and Russia.
  4. Identify and critically interrogate how concepts of race, adoption, and foster care are represented through popular culture (television, social media, movies, etc.) in the U.S. and abroad.
  5. Identify and explain how race is understood as a factor of analysis in foster care and adoption placement in Durham and Orange County, North Carolina.
About Rachael Murphey
Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

Rachael Murphey is Director of Program II and Dean for Trinity Transfer Students. She manages the Trinity Arts & Sciences Graduation with Distinction Program. Dr. Murphey earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where her research centered on the nature of the relationship between racial identity and academic culture and the extent to which such a relationship explains the critical political engagement (CPE) of African American intellectuals.

LS 770-01
Spring 2024
Wednesdays, 6-9 PM
GLS House, 2114 Campus Drive
Show Details

INSTRUCTOR: Michelle Dove

The lyric is a message in a bottle that, as Edward Hirsch says, “speaks out of a solitude to a solitude.” You write and, across space and time, someone else reads what you have written. In this way, a lyric poem or essay is also a two-way mirror that invites participation from the reader to create meaning from the language on the page.  

In this writing course, you will read lyric poetry and essays to internalize the inherent musicality and playfulness of language and find the language that shocks us awake. You will learn some poetic inclinations that can help us ask the questions, “Is it a poem?” and “What makes it a good poem?” Doing so will empower you to form your own poetic truths that are, what Kenneth Koch calls, “sense of a new kind.” With musicality and poetic inclinations as our base, you’ll then write lyric poems and essays in ways that what you’re saying is inseparable from how it’s said. You’ll learn how to embrace poetic lying and how to harness fear as a catalyst. Poetry is not explanation, nor is it information. We’ll also explore how the negative capability of poetry can empower us to hone our poetic truths outside of philosophical certainty and investigate what poet Solmaz Sharif calls the “political and aesthetic objectives” of erasure.

Eileen Myles, Kate Greenstreet, Anne Boyer, Lyn Hejinian, Frank O’Hara, Kate Durbin, Sawako Nakayusa, Cathy Park Hong, Nuar Alsadir, Morgan Parker, Sarah Manguso, Michelle Chan Brown and Tommy Pico are some of the authors we will likely read.

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.

LS 770-45
Spring 2023
Wednesdays 6-9 PM
GLS House, 2114 Campus Drive
Show Details

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.

Instructor:
Robin Kirk
LS 780-32 - Human Rights Futures
Spring 2023
Tuesdays, 6-9 PM
CLASSROOM BUILDING ROOM 242 (EAST CAMPUS)
Show Details

Watch a course preview. 

This class will establish some of the foundations and histories of human rights, then take an in-depth look at the challenges that face us as a world community. This includes using a human rights lens to think about refugees and asylum-seekers; climate change; genetic engineering; privacy; the right to truth; and international humanitarian law. This class is interdisciplinary and discussion-based. We will be examining real-life cases from around the world and including the United States. Readings will include materials prepared by philosophers, historians, activists, lawyers, documentarians, anthropologists, and journalists, among others. 

Students will prepare one midterm paper and a final presentation on an issue chosen in consultation with the instructor. Since this is a seminar, attendance and participation are mandatory. 


The development and initial offering of this new course in the Fall of 2020 was supported through the generosity of GLS alumna Lottie Applewhite.


Robin Kirk is the Faculty Co-Chair of the Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute and is a founding member of the Pauli Murray Project, an initiative of the center that seeks to use the legacy of this Durham daughter to examine the region’s past of slavery, segregation and continuing economic inequality. An author and human rights advocate, Kirk is a lecturer in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and directs the Human Rights Certificate. Kirk has written three books, including More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs and America’s War in Colombia (Public Affairs) and The Monkey’s Paw: New Chronicles from Peru (University of Massachusetts Press). She is a co-editor of The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University) and co edits Duke University Press’s “World Readers” series. An essayist and award-winning poet, she has published widely on issues as diverse as the Andes, torture, the politics of memory, family life and pop culture. Her essay on Belfast, “City of Walls,” is included in the Best American Travel Writing anthology of 2012 (Mariner Books). Kirk authored, co-authored and edited over twelve reports for Human Rights Watch, all available on-line. In the 1980s, Kirk reported for U.S. media from Peru, where she covered the war between the government and the Shining Path. She continues to write for US media, and has been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Sojourners, The American Scholar, the Raleigh News and Observer, the Boston Globe, the Durham Herald Sun and other media.

About Robin Kirk
Cultural Anthropology

Robin Kirk is the Faculty Co-Chair of the Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute and is a founding member of the Pauli Murray Project, an initiative of the center that seeks to use the legacy of this Durham daughter to examine the region’s past of slavery, segregation and continuing economic inequality. An author and human rights advocate, Kirk is a lecturer in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and directs the Human Rights Certificate. Kirk has written three books, including More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs and America’s War in Colombia (Public Affairs) and The Monkey’s Paw: New Chronicles from Peru (University of Massachusetts Press). She is a co-editor of The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University) and co edits Duke University Press’s “World Readers” series. An essayist and award-winning poet, she has published widely on issues as diverse as the Andes, torture, the politics of memory, family life and pop culture. Her essay on Belfast, “City of Walls,” is included in the Best American Travel Writing anthology of 2012 (Mariner Books). Kirk authored, co-authored and edited over twelve reports for Human Rights Watch, all available on-line. In the 1980s, Kirk reported for U.S. media from Peru, where she covered the war between the government and the Shining Path. She continues to write for US media, and has been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Sojourners, The American Scholar, the Raleigh News and Observer, the Boston Globe, the Durham Herald Sun and other media.

Pages