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.
Through conversation, practice, and engagement with technical tools and critical thinkers, we’ll investigate how AI tools are creating knowledge, producing relations, redefining the human, auto-generating evidence and artifacts, and building (and ruining?) worlds. We’ll look at how AI-augmented digital tools and techniques are situated within systems of oppression (racism, sexism, ableism), and how they might be designed toward liberation. We’ll interrogate how intelligently augmented tools are governing our actions and interactions - asking ourselves at what point we’ll wonder, Am I AI? - and how AI might be rewriting the past and automatically generating the future.
Instructor: Louis (Dean) Bruno, Academic Dean, Trinity College, History
While traditional North American history is often focused on the creation and maintenance of nation-states, the history of borderlands and borders allows scholars to analyze the various ways that people crossed, shaped, and openly defied boundaries (imaged or otherwise) in pursuit of their own individual and group objectives. This course examines key moments and claims of belonging/community from the height of the Mound Builders to the more modern era.
Major themes will include encounters, exchanges, conflicts, and agency within the broader context of power dynamics and differentials. This course will investigate how competition and control for land, natural resources, and trade goods transformed the physical places and cultural spaces of these regions and the people who called them home.
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.
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.
INSTRUCTOR: Dean Bruno
is seminar considers the complicated and entangled relationships between humans and the environment in the American South. From the period of early Native American habitation to the present time, we will investigate how humans have imagined, interacted with, and transformed the landscapes we inhabit. And, in turn, how the environment has influenced various groups of people who have made claims of belonging to these particular physical places and cultural spaces.
Through a broad range of primary sources and readings, this course considers the connections between history, public policy, and politics. Main topics will include agricultural production, industrialization, militarization, resource extraction, infrastructure development, conservation, preservation, social movements, and climate adaptation.
We will engage with the following key questions: What is environmental history? Why does environmental history matter in American history? Are humans a part of nature, or do we live apart from nature? What stories do we tell about our relationship with nature, and which narratives remain unvoiced?
In this seminar, students will read sections from Amy Laura Hall’s current manuscript project on masculinity and mainstream evangelicalism in the U.S. They will compose weekly close readings on relevant primary materials, from Hollywood movies to sermons to architectural plans to parachurch websites. The course will be reading intensive and require a significant amount of research. Please note that enrollment is limited to 10 students.
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.
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.
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:
- 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.
- Understand how the US child welfare system functions, under what authority, and the major provisions that guide and fund it.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.