Penn Humanities Forum: Courses

Penn Humanities Forum Courses | Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows' Courses

- Penn Humanities Forum Courses -
- 1999-2000 Academic Year -

Human Nature

Humanities 100 (English)
September 8 - December 8, 1999
Mondays and Wednesdays, 3:00-4:30pm
Logan Hall, Room 17
Instructors: Wendy Steiner, Director, Penn Humanities Forum, and Richard L. Fisher Professor of English; Mark Liberman, Trustee Professor of Phonetics and Director, Linguistic Data Consortium
Course Syllabus
Open to Penn undergraduate students for credit and to the general public for audit. For public inquiries, call the College of General Studies, Office of Special Programs, 215.898.6493. CGS registration deadline: September 8, 1999; Fee: $200.
In this course, leading experts in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, literature, art, music, psychology, philosophy, legal theory, and religion will pose the question: "What does it mean to be human?"
How do humans differ from other primates and from the Neanderthals? Is language or symbolic representation the crucial demarcator of the human, and what have humans sacrificed in order to acquire these virtuoso accomplishments? Are there universals of human culture: song, narrative, building, visual representation, ornament? How did such notions as "human rights" and "crimes against humanity" arise?

- Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows' Courses -

English 016.303: Love Among the Ruins: Denaturalizing the Marriage Plot
Instructor: Elizabeth Freeman
Examine love, the aspect of "human nature" assumed to produce the very basis for the social, and its institutional expression in marriage.

COML 010.301:Humanities and Their Discontents
Instructor: Jan Mieszkowski
Explore Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment accounts of humanity and the process of becoming human.

HSSC 050.301:Mental Illness in Historical Perspective
Instructor: James Moran
Learn to recognize the many ways in which health, illness, medicine and healing are viewed and experienced.

GRMN 510.001:Gender and Writing in the Middle Ages
Instructor: Sally Poor
Discover the writings of the extraordinary medieval female mystic Mechthild von Magdeburg as a unique way to learn about both medieval culture and its continued relevance today.

HIST 102.303:Human Nature in Modern European Thought
Instructor: Stuart Semmel
Learn how European philosophers, biologists, psychologists,political theorists, and anthropologists have disputed human naturefrom the Enlightenment to the twentieth century.