Using Blade Runner, Steampunk short stories, Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, Romantic poetry, and a Victorian fairy tale, this course will analyze poetry, new media, novels, short stories, and films inspired by nature, biology, robotics, physics, space, and more. Themes will include the politics of science and technology, technological determinism, the relationship between popular and technical Continue Reading »
From Christine Filippone: Science, Technology and Utopias: Women Artists and Cold War America This innovative book offers the first focused examination of women artists’ response to the preeminent status of science and technology during the Cold War, a period that saw the rise of “big science”, the space race and cybernetics as well as the Continue Reading »
From Bruce Clarke: Meaning Systems publishes books communicating bodies of systemic knowledge in relation to the materialities of corporeal and technological mediations. It offers a dedicated venue for both established and rising thinkers bringing the discourse of systems to a new level of cultural productiveness.
From Thalia Field: In her forthcoming novel, Experimental Animals: A Reality Fiction, Brown professor Thalia Field accomplishes several remarkable things. Experimental Animals is, partly, the story of Claude Bernard, a 19th-century French physiologist and vivisectionist who introduced the scientific method to medicine, and his disastrous marriage to Fanny Martin, an animal rights activist avant la Continue Reading »
Cosplay is the art/culture/act of dressing up in costumes, usually for a specific subcultural scene or event. Cosplay is a complex physical craft, involving lots of technical knowledge, as well as lots of creativity and vision. We will build cosplay costumes and wear in them in multiple contexts. We will also investigate cosplay as a Continue Reading »
This senior seminar touches on many intersections of science and literature while focusing on the stories we tell about human biology. What can fictional and nonfictional narratives tell us about the impact of biotechnology? How is genomic science changing conceptions of personhood and the relative influence of inheritance and environment? Conversely, how are new forms Continue Reading »
Study of contemporary American fiction, poetry, non-fiction, drama, and film, emphasizing recent formal and thematic trends. This course considers emerging directions in early twenty-first-century US literature and film and pressing questions about the future of “nature.” We will look especially at the problems of climate change and the ways in which various publics have responded Continue Reading »
Although species, sex, and race have been key categories for classifying living beings, they are highly problematic terms. Their boundaries and meanings have been continually contested and reinvented both across and within historical periods. This course investigates constructions of biological difference—and the political uses they are made to serve—through case studies of literature contextualized with Continue Reading »
Can we tell stories that span 1,000 or 10,000 years? Can an individual’s affect be contextualized not only by her immediate environment but by the epoch in which she lives? What formal techniques—time lapse, montage, allegory—can be used to convey that our creaturely fragility is shared not only with species contemporaneous to us, but with Continue Reading »
In FMS 321 we will study the cultural significance of videogames from a number of critical perspectives. As products of a complicated network of social, economic, and technological forces, videogames are dense objects, deeply layered with multiple meanings and hidden histories. Whether we consider early arcade games like Pac-Man or the latest blockbusters like No Continue Reading »
