MDVL 180A/ENG180M and MDVL 280C/ENG 280N Bridget Whearty
Bridget Whearty
One of the things that unites us as humans is how we tell stories and make records,
preserving who we are and what we love. Books carry these stories–which we can learn
by reading the words on their pages and also by studying them as artifacts, looking
for evidence of the people who made them (and how, and why), who read and cared for
them in all the years that separate us from their creators, and who preserve and share
them today. This course introduces students to the unique stories that books have
to tell and the field of study known as “the history of the book,” as we explore texts
from the earliest forms of writing to the newest digital media. Students in this course
will work closely with librarians and archivists, learning how to do original research
on under-studied rare books and medieval manuscripts using Binghamton University Libraries’
Special Collections as our course “lab.”
In the fall, students will undertake an experiential learning module, building their
own book. You will begin by making your own “DIY-medieval manuscript,” using the techniques
we study, and then copy it into print, and finally remake it in a new digital form.
This hands-on learning will help you study “from the inside out” different technologies
and tools that people have used to make books throughout history. Students will also
get to work, hands-ons, with two special “case study” rare books:
a real medieval manuscript made in the midst of the first wave of the Black Plague,
and our copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle, a gorgeous and giant book created in the
first decades after the invention of movable type print in western Europe.
Working together, we will uncover these books’ secrets and tell their stories. Then,
in the spring semester, you will get to choose a rare book as the center of your own
study, applying what you learned in your deep dive into book history to uncover and
tell its unique history.
Students in this course sequence will gain knowledge of research methods in the humanities,
including specialized training in how to do hands-on research in special collections,
museums, and archives. You will also learn tools for digital and information literacy;
as well as ways to communicate your findings–writing, revision, and public speaking
for different audiences. This course will be of particular interest to students considering
majors across the humanities, fine arts, and social sciences, including Art History,
Digital & Data Sciences, English, History, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Romance
Languages, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, as well as any students considering
careers in education and/or libraries. Special Collections Librarian Jeremy Dibbell
will be contributing to the course activities and bringing students into the world
of curation of rare books in the library setting.
The sequence will likely fulfill Oral Communication (O) general education requirements
in the fall and Composition (C) and Information Literacy (I) in the spring.
Bridget Whearty (she/her) is an Associate Professor at Binghamton University in the
English Department and the Medieval Studies Program who works at the intersection
of literary, medieval, manuscript, and information studies. She was previously a Mellon-funded
Council on Libraries and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow in Data
Curation for Medieval Studies, at Stanford University Libraries. She holds a PhD from
Stanford University and a BA from the University of Montana. She researches and teaches
courses about medieval literatures and cultures, as well as text technologies from
medieval manuscripts to digitization and the rise of the internet.
The New Authoritarianism
Matthew Cole
Matthew Cole
When an upset victory in the 2016 Election brought Donald Trump to the White House,
many observers sounded the alarm that America was lurching toward authoritarianism.
Four turbulent years later, Trump refused to concede defeat in the 2020 Election and
his supporters laid siege to the US Capitol in hopes of overturning the results, a
moment of crisis for American democracy unlike anything since the Civil War. But Americans
were hardly facing this crisis alone: in the last decade, many of the world’s democracies
have seen demagogues and would-be dictators ascend to power. It’s not just that Russia’s
Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping wield nearly unchallenged power in their respective
nations, or that they increasingly exert that power on the world stage. In nations
with long histories of democracy, emergent leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Brazil’s
Jair Bolsonaro, India’s Narendra Modi, Italy’s Georgia Meloni, and Argentina’s Javier
Milei have brought authoritarian politics crashing into the mainstream. Like Trump,
many of these leaders have stoked resentment toward minorities, especially immigrants,
while undermining or ignoring checks on power, threatening their opposition, mainstreaming
conspiracy theories, and establishing cults of personality.
In this course, we seek to understand the movements and leaders behind the authoritarian
turn, and we’ll do so by drawing on perspectives from political science and political
philosophy, psychology and sociology, history and journalism, art and literature.
How do today’s authoritarians rise to power? What tactics do they use to solidify
control and suppress opposition? What leads ordinary people to support authoritarian
movements? What strategies can be used to resist authoritarianism and defend democracy?
What are the implications of authoritarianism for global issues such as immigration
and the climate crisis? Can the history of dictatorships and totalitarian regimes
provide us with any insight into the workings of authoritarianism today? Our wide-ranging
course materials will range from the classics of the twentieth century to the cutting
edge of contemporary research, as we reckon with the rise of authoritarianism in America
and the world.
The fall semester introduces students to a range of key concepts, theories, and research
questions reflecting a range of disciplinary perspectives. Students engage closely
with both foundational and cutting-edge work in the social sciences and humanities,
discussing and responding to works addressing the historical parallels between twentieth
century totalitarianism and modern authoritarianism, the social psychology of authoritarian
movements, the political science and strategy of civil resistance, and the policy
implications of authoritarianism for human rights, among other topics.
In the spring semester, students develop and pursue a unique research agenda extending
from their work. After learning the fundamentals of database research, they take an
important first step from reader to researcher by assembling an annotated bibliography
and critical literature review on the topic of their choice. From there, they have
the opportunity to try out a variety of qualitative and interpretive research methods,
and to learn key scholarly maneuvers such as testing a theory, constructing a case
study, and intervening in a debate. In addition to generating an original piece of
scholarship, students get to explore methods for sharing research with broad audiences
in engaging multimedia formats: curating a digital exhibit, creating a podcast or
explainer video, or exploring other creative applications of their research.
Climate Justice
Matthew Cole
For decades now, we have understood that climate change is caused by human carbon
emissions and that it poses a threat to the lives, livelihoods, and basic human rights
of every person on earth, with the most severe and rapidly escalating consequences
for the inhabitants of the world’s poorest nations. Experts agree that a total elimination
of carbon emissions by 2050 is necessary to prevent devastating and irreparable damage
to the planet and the human communities that depend on it. The pathway to a secure
and livable future is narrowing, and realizing it poses considerable challenges: for
scientific and technological research, economic and industrial policy, democratic
politics and international cooperation.
It also raises numerous problems of justice. The ongoing effects of climate change
exacerbate existing problems of poverty and inequality and compound legacies of colonial
exploitation as well as long-standing disparities of race, gender, and class. Even
as it multiplies real injustices, climate change raises novel challenges to our ideas
about justice and to related ideas about responsibility, rights, and government. It
forces us to grapple with obligations that extend around the globe, forward in time,
and across a multitude of human and non-human beings – obligations that neither our
conventional wisdom nor our extant institutions are well-equipped to fulfill.
In this course, we explore the fraught politics of the climate crisis with an emphasis
on issues of justice. We examine the political and ideological forces that have entrenched
climate injustice, campaigns of resistance from vulnerable frontline communities,
and possibilities for a just transition advanced by activists and policymakers around
the world. Our course materials weave together the past, present, and future of life
on earth, highlighting the connections between climate justice and the regeneration
of democratic institutions, the repair of historical injustices, the rebuilding of
international solidarity, and the reimagination of global governance. Though our course
will be grounded in political theory and related social science disciplines, we also
converse with scientists, journalists, policymakers, activists, and artists who have
engaged the public to imagine the stakes of the crisis and the possible alternatives.
The fall semester introduces students to a range of key concepts, theories, and research
questions reflecting a range of disciplinary perspectives. Students engage closely
with both foundational and cutting-edge work in the social sciences and humanities,
discussing and responding to works addressing the social psychology of climate change
denial, policy designs for a just transition, the historical connections between colonialism
and the climate crisis, the philosophical case for climate reparations, and more.
In the spring semester, students develop and pursue a unique research agenda extending
from their work. After learning the fundamentals of database research, they take an
important first step from reader to researcher by assembling an annotated bibliography
and critical literature review on the topic of their choice. From there, they have
the opportunity to try out a variety of qualitative and interpretive research methods,
and to learn key scholarly maneuvers such as testing a theory, constructing a case
study, and intervening in a debate. In addition to generating an original piece of
scholarship, students get to explore methods for sharing research with broad audiences
in engaging multimedia formats: curating a digital exhibit, creating a podcast or
explainer video, or exploring other creative applications of their research.
Matthew Cole is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences.
He received his PhD in Political Science from Duke University and his BA in Political
Science from Carleton College. Before joining Binghamton, he taught at Harvard University,
Emerson College, and Duke University, where his classes covered topics in political
science, history, ethics, interdisciplinary studies, and expository writing. His research
and writing in political theory address the question: how do visions of the future
shape the terrain of political thought and action? This question informs his forthcoming
book, Fear the Future: Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century, as well as his work on topics such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, climate fiction, technocracy, “smart democracy,” and the Green New Deal.
Debating Basic Income
PHIL 180A/ENG 180N/ECON 181A and PHIL 280A/ENG 280N/ECON 181B Will Glovinsky
Will Glovinsky
In the past decade, the idea that governments should give people regular, unconditional
cash payments has become an unexpectedly mainstream policy proposal. From Switzerland
to Stockton to Kenya, pilot programs and campaigns for universal basic income have
made headlines at a time of mounting uncertainty about the future of work in an age
of automation and artificial intelligence. What is less well known is that the idea
of basic income has been robustly debated for 250 years. In this research stream,
students will approach the concept of “income for all” from philosophical, economic,
literary, historical, and public policy perspectives. Our premise will be that we
cannot rigorously evaluate the potential effects of this compelling yet controversial
idea without understanding where it comes from, how it has been argued for, and why
it has repeatedly captured imaginations over centuries.
In the fall, students will explore primary sources related to the origins and development
of basic income. We will begin by immersing ourselves in the circle of late-eighteenth-century
English ultra radicals led by Thomas Spence, who first proposed an economic system
in which individuals will rent land from parish governments rather than private landlords,
with the rental income then distributed equally to all residents, male and female,
as a regular cash dividend. Students will examine Spence’s philosophical milieu as
well as the strikingly literary quality of his writings, which include a sequel to
Robinson Crusoe where the islanders implement a basic income and ballads sung in taverns
to spread his views among the London working class. Since these radical ideas were
inspired by colonial accounts of Indigenous resource sharing, students will then turn
to Lahontan’s 1703 Dialogue with a Savage (adapted from conversations with the Wyandot
diplomat Kandiaronk) to trace the transatlantic intellectual exchanges that contributed
to Enlightenment egalitarianism. Later units will focus on documents relating to the
Jamaican abolitionist Robert Wedderburn, Henry George’s “single tax” movement, Martin
Luther King, Jr.’s writings on guaranteed income, Juliet Rhys-Williams and Milton
Friedman’s “negative income tax”, and the Canadian “Mincome'' experiment run during
the 1970s. Over the semester, students will gain skills in using close textual analysis
to ask questions about historical documents while also locating individual works within
broader intellectual genealogies. Our guiding questions will examine how the divergent
philosophical premises—ranging from socialism to neoliberalism—underlying basic income
proposals have shaped their structures, justifications, and popular receptions. Is
basic income a political entitlement or something owed to people as a natural right?
How would it be funded, and who would be eligible? What would be its effects on labor,
family, and the environment?
In the spring, students will select a subset of disciplinary methods and formulate
a research project that explores one chapter in the history of basic income. A series
of workshops will introduce students to both archival resources and digital databases,
and they will present their works-in-progress throughout the semester. As part of
their final projects, students will publish from their findings by curating an entry
in a multimedia digital timeline providing accessible histories and analyses of basic
income’s sources.
The sequence will likely fulfill Humanities (H), Information Literacy (I), Critical
Thinking and Reasoning (T), and Harpur College Writing (W) general education requirements
in the fall and Oral Communication (O) and Harpur College Writing (W) in the spring.
Empathy, Ethics, and Narrative
PHIL 180B/ENG 180O and PHIL 280B/ENG 280O Will Glovinsky
From #empath TikTok to social justice movements, claims about the powers and perils
of empathy are ubiquitous in contemporary life. The ability to share someone else’s
feelings and see the world from their perspective can, according to various authorities,
make us better partners, friends, doctors, managers, and citizens. Yet the valorization
of empathy has also been blamed for licensing cultures of voyeurism in war reporting
and social media, flattering the egos of privileged spectators, and inflaming social
tensions with misguided conceptions of other peoples’ cultures. Empathy is hailed
as a defining human trait, yet bonobos may match us at it. This Source Project research
stream will invite students to pull back the curtain on an everyday concept and consider
empathy's colorful history, its philosophical underpinnings, and its centrality to
literature, art, politics, psychology, and medicine. We will ask what empathy really
is (a matter of considerable debate), what role it plays in social change, and what
it can—and can’t—do for us.
The fall semester will introduce students to how empathy (and its related forerunner,
sympathy) has been understood in a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology,
literary theory, primatology, and the history of science. We will then delve into
a series of case studies to scrutinize empathy's real-world effects. After reading
Enlightenment theories of fellow-feeling and an early slave narrative, we'll consider
their relationship to the growth of abolitionism and the first boycotts on slave-produced
goods. Later units will examine how novelists sought to spotlight the suffering of
workers during the Industrial Revolution, how activists passed the first animal welfare
laws, and how conflict mediators and healthcare workers leverage perspective-taking
in their work today. Throughout, our goal will be to define empathy's uses and limitations,
and to describe the ways in which narratives may mobilize or mislead us ethically.
By the end of the fall semester, students will draw on the methodologies we have discussed
to identify a research agenda culminating in a capstone project. We will work in small
groups to narrow down topics and revise research questions and then meet over the
course of the spring to workshop ideas, set goals, and revise written work. Students
will present their projects in campus-wide poster sessions and other multimedia forums.
The sequence will likely fulfill Humanities (H), Information Literacy (I), Critical
Thinking and Reasoning (T), and Harpur College Writing (W) general education requirements
in the fall and Oral Communication (O) and Harpur College Writing (W) in the spring.
Will Glovinsky is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities. Before arriving at
Binghamton, he was a lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University,
where he received his Ph.D. A specialist in 19th-century British literature, he is
revising his first book on the regulation of feeling in realist novels and imperial
culture. His next project explores how the idea of universal basic income—or giving
cash regularly to everyone—emerged in 18th- and 19th-century tavern ballads, dialogues,
essays, and novels. In between, his essays and courses have explored topics such as
narrators who regret their treatment of villains, the role of liberation in the novel,
and the history of close reading.
Human Rights
HMRT 176 and HMRT 276 Alexandra Moore
Alexandra Moore
These courses take a two-fold approach to human rights research. First, we will discuss
the histories and concepts that constitute human rights. Are they best described as
legal instruments, social norms, cultural practices, discourses, political ideologies,
or institutions? What are some of the historical roots of the so-called “human rights
regime”? Is it a fatally flawed set of norms that should be abandoned in our contemporary
moment; or, do the recent attacks on those norms by the forces of xenophobia, racism,
and other forms of fear and hate demand that we re-double our efforts to promote human
rights? To help explore those questions with rigor and insight, we will consider how
different academic and professional disciplines approach human rights work and research.
We will read texts from History, Philosophy, Political Science, English/Literary Studies,
Law, International Relations, Visual Media Studies, and Anthropology, and we will
work with Binghamton professors who represent many of those departments. In considering
human rights from different perspectives, we will continually ask how different methodologies
and research questions shape one another. Because human rights is an inherently interdisciplinary
area of study, we will also consider the challenges and rewards that human rights
research demands. In the second semester, students will choose to join a current research
group in the Human Rights Institute to investigate topics such as incarceration, fascism,
indigenous rights, terrorism, women’s rights and more.
The sequence will likely fulfill the Global Interdependencies (G), Humanities (H),
Social Sciences (N), and/or Harpur Writing (W) general education requirements.
Alexandra Moore, professor of English and director of the Human Rights Institute,
publishes widely on representations of torture, enforced disappearance, incarceration,
gendered rights violations, child soldiers, humanitarian interventionism and related
topics in contemporary literature and film. She also works with torture survivors
and those fleeing political persecution.
Living in a Material World: The Stuff of Memory and the Pursuit of History
YIDD 180A/JUST 180C/HIST 180B and YIDD 280A/JUST 284A Gina Glasman
Gina Glasman
This class will be dedicated to a single question: how can we use the artifacts of
everyday life to better understand the history of a community? To explore this question,
we will focus on a particular cultural vehicle, museums—institutions rooted in the
notion that “objects” can speak! In the Spring semester, students will create their
own digital exhibit, using the themes, approaches and concepts we have explored together
in class. Students can choose to focus their research on any community.
To help us with this task, we will divide our study into several parts. We will begin
with the earliest efforts by historians—often Marxist inflected - to chart the lives
of “everyday people.” This approach was sometimes twinned with a new interest in the
material world. From there, we will take a look at recent histories of the immigrant
city, with a focus on Jewish, or Yiddish immigrant New York in the early twentieth
century. Here too, we will find a focus on ordinary things, as part of the investigation
of the urban landscape—from a discarded candy wrapper in the street, to the latest
cut in city fashion. Recorded memory - or oral history - is also key to this kind
of analysis, as a way to access the culture of everyday life. Finally, students will
research, design and mount a digital exhibit of their own creation, based on the questions
addressed in class. In preparation for this project, we will also consider the uses
of material culture in the work of social history museums, as well as comparable initiatives
in the fields of anthropology and public archaeology.
The sequence will likely fulfill Joint Composition and Oral Communication (J) and
Social Sciences (N) general education requirements in the fall and Joint Composition
and Oral Communication (J) in the spring.
Gina Glasman is a London born American immigrant, now resident in Binghamton, New
York. She has had a life-long interest in the study of Yiddish society and its urban
culture, that has roots in her own biography, as the grandchild of Yiddish speaking
immigrants to London. Her current work, both in the classroom and beyond, often seeks
to bind together forms of personal engagement with scholarly research and encourages
students to do the same—whether they are learning Yiddish language, or immersing themselves
in the long, rich and sometimes tragic story of this distinctive diasporic minority.
Mapping American Prejudice
HIST 180A and HIST 280A Wendy Wall
Wendy Wall
Racial and religious prejudice are expressed through both private actions and public
policies, and the targets of prejudice change across space and time. In the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, Jim Crow segregation spread across the South; the federal
government imposed a sweeping immigration ban targeting Chinese; and prominent intellectuals
in many parts of the country embraced a pseudo-scientific hierarchy of races that
placed "Nordics" above "Mediterraneans," and both above people of African and Asian
descent. In the 1920s, a revived Ku Klux Klan spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific
Coast, denouncing Catholics and Jews, as much as people of color. As housing tracts
multiplied over the next few decades, many homebuilders used "restrictive covenants"
to prevent the sale of homes to non-whites, "aliens," and occasionally groups like
Italians and Jews. Many European immigrants eventually made their way into the white
middle-class, and a burgeoning civil rights movement discredited the more virulent
forms of racism. At the same time, however, federal "redlining" policies, urban renewal
projects, and other public and private policies further entrenched structural racism.
How do the parameters of prejudice change over time? How do both private actions and
public policy embed discrimination in the landscape around us? Whose history gets
recognized in public space, and whose stories become the foundations of community
histories? Finally, how do both structural racism and what we know of the past continue
to shape lives, even as overt expressions of intolerance fade?
This course sequence explores such questions by focusing on Broome County, New York,
the home of Binghamton University, the birthplace of IBM, and an area long known as
the Valley of Opportunity. In the antebellum period, Binghamton and surrounding areas
were a major hub on the Underground Railroad. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
Southern and Eastern European immigrants flocked to the area's cigar and shoe factories,
and local corporations pioneered an approach known as "welfare capitalism." During
the Cold War, the area's concentration of electronics firms and defense manufacturers
drew high-tech workers. Yet such oft-retold stories of freedom and opportunity obscure
a more troubled past that is too easily forgotten. At the turn of the 21st century,
Broome County was 91% white, in part a reflection of this history. The last two decades
have seen an influx of immigrants and refugees from across the globe, and Americans
of all races have come to the area for a more affordable life. Still, the historic
politics of prejudice remain inscribed in various ways on the urban landscape.
How might public-facing history begin to redress both individual prejudice and structural
racism by sparking civic dialogue? In the fall, students will explore these issues
through a combination of reading, historical research, and community engagement. We
will peruse newspapers and pamphlets produced by the KKK in the early 1920s, when
Binghamton was the Klan's New York State headquarters. We will work with deeds, locating
and mapping racial covenants in Broome County. Finally, we will examine federal "redlining"
maps and photographs and documents charting the path of urban renewal. Students will
also learn digital and other techniques for disseminating their findings to a broader
public. In the spring, students will conduct research projects of their design and
disseminate their findings during campus Research Days and through other appropriate
outlets.
The sequence will likely fulfill Community Engaged Learning (CEL), Information Literacy
(I), Social Sciences (N), Critical Thinking and Reasoning (T), and Harpur College
Writing (W) general education requirements in the fall and Information Literacy (I),
Social Sciences (N), Critical Thinking and Reasoning (T), and Harpur College Writing
(W) in the spring.
Wendy Wall is a historian of U.S. political culture and director of the Institute
for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Her prize-winning book Inventing the "American Way": The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil
Rights Movement and numerous essays explore the intertwined issues of race, ethnicity, religion,
citizenship and politics in the 20th century. A former journalist whose work has
been cited in publications ranging from the New York Times to The American Prospect,
she is committed to fostering conversation between those within and beyond university
walls. She hopes that a deeper public understanding of history will inform and shape
future policy debates.
Migrations and Diasporas in Upstate New York
ANTH Şule Can
Şule Can
This course devotes two successive semesters to understanding migration in/from the
Middle East and North Africa through a historical and anthropological lens in collaboration
with the American Civic Association. The course will engage with a range of theoretical
debates, issues and concepts surrounding the phenomenon of migration; provide the
historical background and context for the waves of displacements and dispossessions,
which made the Middle East a producer of forced migrants in the 20th century and onwards.
It will focus on refugee resettlement processes and immigration into the US from the
Middle East. In doing so, the course is designed to study and assist in the work of
the American Civic Association (ACA). The ACA is a local non-profit community organization
that has assisted individuals and families with immigration services and refugee resettlement
in New York’s Southern Tier since 1939. The first semester introduces students to
the work of the ACA, including local, national, and global immigration and refugee
issues and needs. A particular focus will be on developing interdisciplinary knowledge
base, critical thinking and research skills related to immigration and refugees within
New York and the United States more generally. Additionally, students will work under
the direction of the course instructor to help process, preserve, and organize the
ACA’s extensive archive of case files, material culture, documents, programming, and
photographs related to local immigrant and refugee communities. During the 2nd semester
and under the continued guidance of the course instructor, students will continue
working with the ACA and develop research projects based upon the archival materials
and ethnographic knowledge about immigrant and refugee communities in Upstate New
York. The end goal is to complete their projects and present their findings to the
broader Binghamton and university communities.
The sequence will likely fulfill Social Sciences (N), Community Engaged Learning (CEL),
and Joint Composition and Oral Communication (J).
Şule Can is a socio-cultural anthropologist who currently works as an Outreach Coordinator
and a Lecturer at the Center for Middle East and North Africa at Binghamton University.
Before startıng at Binghamton in Fall 2023, Şule worked as an Assistant Professor
of Urban Studies at Adana Science and Technology University, Turkey. She completed
her post-doctoral research on politics of solidarity among the Syrian women in Turkey
at the department of Anthropology, University of Waterloo, Canada in 2019. She obtained
her PhD in 2018 from the Department of Anthropology at Binghamton University with
a Fulbright scholarship, and her MA from Istanbul Bilgi University, Cultural Studies.
Şule’s research interests are anthropology of migration, cultural memory, displacement,
borders, ethno-religious boundaries, gender politics, anthropology of the Middle East.
She is the author of Refugee Encounters at the Turkish-Syrian Border: Antakya at the Crossroads, published in 2019 by Routledge.
People, Politics and the Environment
PLSC 180A and PLSC 180B Robert A. Holahan
Robert A. Holahan
Societies emerge and develop to take advantage of the natural and engineered environments
that define their landscapes. This can be a local process but is also inescapably
tied to global dynamics in which social, ecological, economic, and environmental interact
to create new understandings of what it means to be a person living in a place at
a time. We will develop an approach to studying the place you are as a new college
student—Binghamton—as an example of the broader processes at work in local social-ecological
systems. You will practice a variety of research methods from the social sciences
and environmental science to demonstrate the need to integrate perspectives and approaches
when studying the relationship among people, places, and the environment.
The sequence will likely fulfill Social Sciences (N) and Critical Thinking and Reasoning
(T) in the fall and Community Engaged Learning (CEL) and Joint Composition and Oral
Communication (J) in the spring.
Robert Holahan is an associate professor of environmental studies and political science
and director of the Dickinson Research Team (DiRT). DiRT is a residential community-based
research program that is the first of its kind in the United States. DiRT is open
to students who are interested in research, regardless of major and prior research
experience. His current research projects include developing a property-rights framework
for the study of unconventional oil and gas production, an investigation into the
public goods (or public bads) nature of global environmental threats, and the political-economy
of urban sustainability.
One of the things that unites us as humans is how we tell stories and make records,
preserving who we are and what we love. Books carry these stories–which we can learn
by reading the words on their pages and also by studying them as artifacts, looking
for evidence of the people who made them (and how, and why), who read and cared for
them in all the years that separate us from their creators, and who preserve and share
them today. This course introduces students to the unique stories that books have
to tell and the field of study known as “the history of the book,” as we explore texts
from the earliest forms of writing to the newest digital media. Students in this course
will work closely with librarians and archivists, learning how to do original research
on under-studied rare books and medieval manuscripts using Binghamton University Libraries’
Special Collections as our course “lab.”
In the fall, students will undertake an experiential learning module, building their
own book. You will begin by making your own “DIY-medieval manuscript,” using the techniques
we study, and then copy it into print, and finally remake it in a new digital form.
This hands-on learning will help you study “from the inside out” different technologies
and tools that people have used to make books throughout history. Students will also
get to work, hands-ons, with two special “case study” rare books:
a real medieval manuscript made in the midst of the first wave of the Black Plague,
and
our copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle, a gorgeous and giant book created in the first
decades after the invention of movable type print in western Europe.
Working together, we will uncover these books’ secrets and tell their stories. Then,
in the spring semester, you will get to choose a rare book as the center of your own
study, applying what you learned in your deep dive into book history to uncover and
tell its unique history.
Students in this course sequence will gain knowledge of research methods in the humanities,
including specialized training in how to do hands-on research in special collections,
museums, and archives. You will also learn tools for digital and information literacy;
as well as ways to communicate your findings–writing, revision, and public speaking
for different audiences. This course will be of particular interest to students considering
majors across the humanities, fine arts, and social sciences, including Art History,
Digital & Data Sciences, English, History, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Romance
Languages, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, as well as any students considering
careers in education and/or libraries. Special Collections Librarian Jeremy Dibbell
will be contributing to the course activities and bringing students into the world
of curation of rare books in the library setting.
The sequence will fulfill Oral Communication (O) general education requirements in
the fall and Composition (C) and Information Literacy (I) in the spring.
Bridget Whearty is an Assistant Professor at Binghamton University, in the English
Department and the Medieval Studies Program. She was previously a Mellon-funded Council
on Libraries and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation
for Medieval Studies, at Stanford University Libraries. She holds a PhD from Stanford
University and a BA from the University of Montana. She researches and teaches courses
about medieval literatures and cultures, as well as text technologies from medieval
manuscripts to digitization and the rise of the internet.
Mapping American Prejudice
HIST 180A and HIST 280A Wendy Wall
Racial and religious prejudice are expressed through both private actions and public
policies, and the targets of prejudice change across space and time. In the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, Jim Crow segregation spread across the South; the federal
government imposed a sweeping immigration ban targeting Chinese; and prominent intellectuals
in many parts of the country embraced a pseudo-scientific hierarchy of races that
placed "Nordics" above "Mediterraneans," and both above people of African and Asian
descent. In the 1920s, a revived Ku Klux Klan spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific
Coast, denouncing Catholics and Jews, as much as people of color. As housing tracts
multiplied over the next few decades, many homebuilders used "restrictive covenants"
to prevent the sale of homes to non-whites, "aliens," and occasionally groups like
Italians and Jews. Many European immigrants eventually made their way into the white
middle-class, and a burgeoning civil rights movement discredited the more virulent
forms of racism. At the same time, however, federal "redlining" policies, urban renewal
projects, and other public and private policies further entrenched structural racism.
How do the parameters of prejudice change over time? How do both private actions and
public policy embed discrimination in the landscape around us? And how does structural
racism continue to shape lives, even as overt expressions of intolerance fade?
This course sequence explores such questions by focusing on Broome County, New York,
the home of Binghamton University, the birthplace of IBM, and an area long known as
the Valley of Opportunity. In the antebellum period, Binghamton and surrounding areas
were a major hub on the Underground Railroad. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
Southern and Eastern European immigrants flocked to the area's cigar and shoe factories,
and local corporations pioneered an approach known as "welfare capitalism." During
the Cold War, the area's concentration of electronics firms and defense manufacturers
drew high-tech workers. Yet such oft-retold stories of freedom and opportunity obscure
a darker and more troubled past that is too easily forgotten. At the turn of the 21st
century, Broome County was more than 90% white, in part a reflection of this history.
The last two decades have seen an influx of immigrants and refugees from across the
globe, and Americans of all races have come to the area for a more affordable life.
Still, the historic politics of prejudice remain inscribed in various ways on the
urban landscape.
How might public-facing history begin to redress both individual prejudice and structural
racism by sparking civic dialogue? In the fall, students will explore these issues
through a combination of reading, historical research, and community engagement. We
will peruse newspapers and pamphlets produced by the KKK in the early 1920s, when
Binghamton was the Klan's New York State headquarters. We will work with newly digitized
deeds, locating and mapping racial covenants in Broome County. Finally, we will examine
federal "redlining" maps and photographs and documents charting the path of urban
renewal. Students will also learn digital and other techniques for disseminating their
findings to a broader public. In the spring, students will conduct an individual research
project of their design and disseminate their findings in a campus-wide poster session
and through other appropriate outlets.
The sequence will fulfill Community Engaged Learning (CEL), Information Literacy (I),
Social Sciences (N), Critical Thinking and Reasoning (T), and Harpur College Writing
(W) general education requirements in the fall and Information Literacy (I), Social
Sciences (N), Critical Thinking and Reasoning (T), and Harpur College Writing (W)
in the spring.
Wendy Wall is a historian of U.S. political culture and director of the Institute
for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Her prize-winning book Inventing the "American Way": The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil
Rights Movement and numerous essays explore the intertwined issues of race, ethnicity, religion,
citizenship and politics in the 20th century. A former journalist whose work has
been cited in publications ranging from the New York Times to The American Prospect,
she is committed to fostering conversation between those within and beyond university
walls. She hopes that a deeper public understanding of history will inform and shape
future policy debates.
Gender & Sexuality in Antiquity
AMS 180S/WGSS 283K and AMS 280S/WGSS 280F Tina Chronopoulos
Our modern lives (in the North American context) are heavily gendered and sexualized.
Think of the proliferation of gender reveal parties or the policing of bathrooms or
how children’s toys are increasingly marketed to either girls or boys. You might also
consider the saying “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” (the title of a book
published in 1992): it implies that women are complex beings, driven by emotions and
that men are practical thinkers who are driven by biology. When it comes to sexuality,
most of us tend to assume that it is a natural force that can either be liberated
or repressed. Yet the kinds of sexual behaviors we get to read, see, or hear about
in the mainstream tend to be quite limited. Overall, the sexual norms that bind us
and the sexual practices we engage in can and often do lie unexamined, not to mention
that we usually give little thought to why and how gendered spheres or activities
have come to exist.
What is and is not deemed socially acceptable in terms of gender expression and identity,
and sexual practices varies according to where and when you look. In the ancient Mediterranean,
for example, extramarital sex between a man and a (subordinate) woman is widely attested,
yet women’s sexual activities were tightly controlled: on the one hand, this was an
issue because of the legitimacy of heirs (in the case of families who held property
or wealth), and on the other hand, this was about control in a world in which women
were thought to be inferior to men. Many ancient Mediterranean funerary inscriptions
praise women for their appearance and their personal qualities, yet when it comes
to men, they focus almost entirely on their accomplishments. In general, women lacked
political rights across the board, making exceptional figures such as Cleopatra, who
famously had romantic and sexual relationships with two powerful Roman men (Julius
Caesar and Mark Antony), all the more intriguing.
This course will give students a chance to explore how gender and sexuality were defined,
controlled, constructed, and lived out in the past, specifically in the Ancient Mediterranean
context.
During the first semester, students will encounter a number of key sources (texts,
material objects) that will allow them to frame and understand historical perspectives
on gender and sexuality in the ancient world. We will consider evidence from areas
such as the Ancient Near East, North Africa (e.g. Carthage, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nubia),
Greece and Asia Minor, and Italy and its colonies (e.g. Britain, France, Germany,
Spain). During the second semester of the course, students will identify and pursue
their own research projects related to gender and sexuality in an ancient culture
that is of interest to them (either in the areas covered in the course or in other
areas from around the globe). Students will also have a chance to collaborate on putting
together an exhibition to be displayed in the Bartle Library lobby using holdings
from the University Library.
The sequence will fulfill Global Interdependencies (G), Humanities (H), Information
Literacy (I), and Oral Communication (O) general education requirements in the fall
and Global Interdependencies (G), Humanities (H), and Composition (C) in the spring.
Tina Chronopoulos is a British-infused Greco-German transplant whose research and
teaching interests range all over the Mediterranean and span more than a millennium,
from Greco-Roman antiquity to the medieval period and beyond. Trained by old-school
philologists, she enjoys deep dives into libraries and archives, as well as close
readings of texts, contexts, and medieval manuscripts. In the classroom, she gets
excited about speaking in Latin as much as possible and encouraging her students to
read both the past and the present contextually whilst wearing the lenses of race,
class, and gender.
People, Politics and the Environment
PLSC 180A and PLSC 180B Robert A. Holahan
Societies emerge and develop to take advantage of the natural and engineered environments
that define their landscapes. This can be a local process but is also inescapably
tied to global dynamics in which social, ecological, economic, and environmental interact
to create new understandings of what it means to be a person living in a place in
a time. We will develop an approach to studying the place you are as a new college
student—Binghamton—as an example of the broader processes at work in local social-ecological
systems. You will practice a variety of research methods from the social sciences
and environmental science to demonstrate the need to integrate perspectives and approaches
when studying the relationship among people, places, and the environment.
The sequence will fulfill Social Sciences (N) and Critical Thinking and Reasoning
(T) in the fall and Community Engaged Learning (CEL) and Joint Composition and Oral
Communication (J) in the spring.
Robert Holahan is an associate professor of environmental studies and political science
and director of the Dickinson Research Team (DiRT). DiRT is a residential community-based
research program that is the first of its kind in the United States. DiRT is open
to students who are interested in research, regardless of major and prior research
experience.
Living in a Material World: The Stuff of Memory and the Pursuit of History
(Previously titled The Stuff of Memory: History, the City and Everyday Things)
YIDD 180A/JUST 180C/HIST 180B and YIDD 280A/JUST 284A Gina Glasman
This class will be dedicated to a single question: how can we use the artefacts of
everyday life to better understand the history of an immigrant metropolis? To explore
this question, we will focus on a specific city—New York—and a particular cultural
vehicle, museums—institutions rooted in the notion that “objects” can speak! In the
Spring semester, students will create their own digital exhibit, using the themes,
approaches and concepts we have explored together in class. Students can choose to
focus their research on any community within the complex urban fabric of either past
or present-day New York City.
To help us with this task, we will divide our study into several parts. We will begin
with the earliest efforts by historians—often Marxist inflected - to chart the lives
of “everyday people.” This approach was sometimes twinned with a new interest in the
material world. From there, we will take a look at recent histories of the immigrant
city, with a focus on Jewish, or Yiddish immigrant New York in the early twentieth
century. Here too, we will find a focus on ordinary things, as part of the investigation
of the urban landscape—from a discarded candy wrapper in the street, to the latest
cut in city fashion. Recorded memory - or oral history - is also key to this kind
of analysis, as a way to access the culture of everyday life. Finally, students will
research, design and mount a digital exhibit of their own creation, based on the questions
addressed in class. In preparation for this project, we will also consider the uses
of material culture in the work of social history museums, as well as comparable initiatives
in the fields of anthropology and public archaeology.
The sequence will fulfill Joint Composition and Oral Communication (J) and Social
Sciences (N) general education requirements in the fall and Joint Composition and
Oral Communication (J) in the spring.
Gina Glasman is a London born American immigrant, now resident in Binghamton, New
York. She has had a life-long interest in the study of Yiddish society and its urban
culture, that has roots in her own biography, as the grandchild of Yiddish speaking
immigrants to London. Her current work, both in the classroom and beyond, often seeks
to bind together forms of personal engagement with scholarly research and encourages
students to do the same—whether they are learning Yiddish language, or immersing themselves
in the long, rich and sometimes tragic story of this distinctive diasporic minority.
Debating Basic Income
PHIL 180A/ENG 180N/ECON 181A and PHIL 280A/ENG 280N/ECON 181B Will Glovinsky
In the past decade, the idea that governments should give people regular, unconditional
cash payments has become an unexpectedly mainstream policy proposal. From Switzerland
to Stockton to Kenya, pilot programs and campaigns for universal basic income have
made headlines at a time of mounting uncertainty about the future of work in an age
of automation and artificial intelligence. What is less well known is that the idea
of basic income has been robustly debated for 250 years. In this research stream,
students will approach the concept of “income for all” from philosophical, economic,
literary, historical, and public policy perspectives. Our premise will be that we
cannot rigorously evaluate the potential effects of this compelling yet controversial
idea without understanding where it comes from, how it has been argued for, and why
it has repeatedly captured imaginations over centuries.
In the fall, students will explore primary sources related to the origins and development
of basic income. We will begin by immersing ourselves in the circle of late-eighteenth-century
English ultraradicals led by Thomas Spence, who first proposed an economic system
in which individuals will rent land from parish governments rather than private landlords,
with the rental income then distributed equally to all residents, male and female,
as a regular cash dividend. Students will examine Spence’s philosophical milieu as
well as the strikingly literary quality of his writings, which include a sequel to
Robinson Crusoe where the islanders implement a basic income and ballads sung in taverns
to spread his views among the London working class. Since these radical ideas were
inspired by colonial accounts of Indigenous resource sharing, students will then turn
to Lahontan’s 1703 Dialogue with a Savage (adapted from conversations with the Wyandot
diplomat Kandiaronk) to trace the transatlantic intellectual exchanges that contributed
to Enlightenment egalitarianism. Later units will focus on documents relating to the
Jamaican abolitionist Robert Wedderburn, Henry George’s “single tax” movement, Martin
Luther King, Jr.’s writings on guaranteed income, Juliet Rhys-Williams and Milton
Friedman’s “negative income tax”, and the Canadian “Mincome” experiment run during
the 1970s. Over the semester, students will gain skills in using close textual analysis
to ask questions about historical documents while also locating individual works within
broader intellectual genealogies. Our guiding questions will examine how the divergent
philosophical premises—ranging from socialism to neoliberalism—underlying basic income
proposals have shaped their structures, justifications, and popular receptions. Is
basic income a political entitlement or something owed to people as a natural right?
How would it be funded, and who would be eligible? What would be its effects on labor,
family, and the environment?
In the spring, students will select a subset of disciplinary methods and formulate
a research project that explores one chapter in the history of basic income. A series
of workshops will introduce students to both archival resources and digital databases,
and they will present their works-in-progress throughout the semester. As part of
their final projects, students will publish from their findings by curating an entry
in a multimedia digital timeline providing accessible histories and analyses of basic
income’s sources.
The sequence will fulfill Humanities (H), Information Literacy (I), Critical Thinking
and Reasoning (T), and Harpur College Writing (W) general education requirements in
the fall and Oral Communication (O) and Harpur College Writing (W) in the spring.
Empathy, Ethics, and Society
PHIL 180B/ENG 180O and PHIL 280B/ENG 280O
Will Glovinsky
From empaths and “highly sensitive person” TikTok to social justice movements and
studies in psychology and moral philosophy, claims about the powers and perils of
empathy are ubiquitous in contemporary life. The ability to share someone else’s feelings
and see the world from their perspective can, according to various authorities, make
us better partners, friends, doctors, managers, and citizens. Yet the valorization
of empathy has also been blamed for licensing cultures of voyeurism in war reporting
and social media, flattering the egos of privileged spectators, and inflaming social
tensions with misguided conceptions of other peoples’ cultures. Empathy is hailed
as a defining human trait, yet bonobos may beat us at it. This research stream will
invite students to pull back the curtain on an everyday concept and consider it through
the disciplinary insights of moral philosophy, literature, psychology, neuroscience,
evolutionary biology, the medical humanities, and journalism. We will ask what empathy
really is (a matter of considerable debate), what its psychological basis involves,
and what it can—and can’t—do for us.
The fall semester will introduce students to how empathy has been understood and applied
across a variety of disciplines. We will begin with primatologist Frans de Waal’s
writings on empathy in animals and then survey what evolutionary psychology and studies
of our brains’ “mirror neurons” can tell us about feeling with and for others. Next,
we will delve into historical accounts of empathy (and its related forerunner, sympathy).
After reading Enlightenment theories of fellow-feeling by Adam Smith and David Hume,
we will consider the case study of nineteenth-century US slave narratives, which consciously
deployed sentimental scenes to mobilize white readers—a tactic whose ramifications
have been scrutinized by contemporary scholars. We will then explore the emergence
of the German aesthetic concept of Einfühlung, which was imported into English as
“empathy” around 1910 by the literary theorist and ghost-story writer Vernon Lee.
The last two units will focus on empathy’s uses and abuses. First, we will analyze
Martha Nussbaum’s brief for the political utility of empathy, while readings in narrative
medicine, bioethics, and business will introduce students to the growing role of empathy
in medical training and management. Finally, we will consider two complex critiques
of empathy: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, a chilling work of speculative
fiction about empathy without limits, and Susan Sontag’s criticism of conflict photography’s
claims to raise consciousness of current events.
By the end of the fall semester, students will use one of the methodologies we have
discussed to design a research agenda culminating in a capstone project. We will work
in small groups to narrow down topics and revise research questions and then meet
over the course of the spring to workshop ideas, set goals, and revise written work.
Students will present their projects in campus-wide poster sessions and other multimedia
forums.
The sequence will fulfill Humanities (H), Information Literacy (I), Critical Thinking
and Reasoning (T), and Harpur College Writing (W) general education requirements in
the fall and Oral Communication (O) and Harpur College Writing (W) in the spring.
Will Glovinsky is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities. Before arriving at
Binghamton, he was a lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University,
where he received his PhD. A specialist in 19th-century British literature, he is
revising his first book on the regulation of feeling in realist novels and imperial
culture. His next project explores how the idea of universal basic income—or giving
cash regularly to everyone—emerged in 18th- and 19th-century tavern ballads, dialogues,
essays, and novels. In between, his essays and courses have explored topics such as
narrators who regret their treatment of villains, the role of liberation in the novel,
and the history of close reading.
This course introduces students to a comparative history of medicine and public health,
with a focus on the experiences of, and efforts to address, disease and debility in
Asia and the Americas. While COVID-19 is a novel virus with an unprecedented global
spread, our responses to the virus as a public health concern reflect over two hundred
years of global public health thinking. Key ideas like quarantines, vaccines, high-risk
populations, health inequities, and governmental involvement in public health have
long histories that shape our present. This course proposes that one of the best ways
to understand our present is through a better understanding of this past.
In the fall, we begin with conceptual definitions and emerging global public health
practices at the turn of the twentieth century. Students will examine a variety of
sources and use digital storytelling methods as they explore diseases as biological
processes, lived human experiences, and social phenomena, connected to broader political,
intellectual, and material changes on local, regional, and global scales. In the spring,
they will research a global public health topic of their choice and submit a portfolio
that includes dissemination of their findings through appropriate outlets. Students
will also have the opportunity to turn their research into a publication or other
media such as an exhibit, podcast, or mini-documentary.
This course will be of particular interest to students considering a major in History,
Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, Global Public Health, Asian and Asian
American Studies, or Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, or a future profession
in public health, human rights, medicine, nursing, or related field.
The annual sequence will fulfill Harpur Writing (W), Composition (C), Oral Communication
(O), Social Science (N), and Global Interdependencies (G) general education requirements.
It may also be applied toward requirements of the History of Science, Technology,
and Medicine minor.
Sonja M. Kim is Associate Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies with a courtesy
title in the Department of History. The author of Imperatives of Care: Women and Medicine
in Colonial Korea (2019) and co-editor of Future Yet to Come: Sociotechnical Imaginaries
in Modern Korea (2021), she holds research and teaching interests on gender, health,
and welfare in Asia and its diasporic communities.
Disinformation and Naiveté
RUSS 180 and 280B Sidney Dement
A significant lack of knowledge about the culture and history of other nations plays
a pivotal role in many different areas of our lives: the news, film, literature, tourism,
pedagogy, international relations, arms proliferation, NATO expansion, disinformation,
approaches to medical practice, and internet policy. This course will model an approach
to studying international issues through intensive methodological and contextual analysis
of Russian projections of disinformation and naiveté. In this two-course series, students
develop and practice research skills to conceptualize how gaps in knowledge shape
disciplinary discourses while also searching for productive and feasible ways to fill
those gaps. During the first semester, students discuss and respond to readings about
the roles that innocence, ignorance, and naiveté play in discourses about Russia and
our world. Coming to grips with how little the average educated person knows about
Russia helps the critical thinker develop research questions about how innocence and
ignorance shape public discourse and policy. Students gain insight not only into the
negative dimensions of what we don’t know, but into the power that naiveté, when observed,
can unlock. During the second semester, students design and pursue a research project
that grapples with the many-faceted ways in which our world is shaped by innocence
and ignorance. Students may continue an avenue of interest they have found in Russian
Studies, or they may transfer their experience of our study of Russia to a different
culture or set of cultures. Over the course of this second semester, students will
workshop, research, and complete projects that operationalize concepts of innocence
and naiveté to test the boundaries of what we know.
Students will have the opportunity to collaborate with Professor Dement on the approach
taken in this course in an article about what it means to turn the thing that seems
like a weakness—lack of knowledge of a topic—into a strength. How can we as researchers
recognize how much we don’t know in a way that empowers us to find compelling answers
to incisive questions? Students will also have the opportunity to publish their research
in the Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal or to turn their work into other
media, such as a mini-documentary or podcast.
This annual sequence will fulfill Composition (C), Humanities (H), or Oral Communication
(O) general education requirements.
Professor Dement has spent the last twenty years studying, researching, or teaching
Russian language and culture. The idea for this Source Project stream grows out of
Dement's recent book, a cultural history of Russia's first and most important monument
to Alexander Pushkin.
History & Capitalism
JUST 180B and 280G Michael J. Kelly
In this year-long course sequence, students will learn a primary skill, the interpretive
analysis of historical, literary or philosophical texts. This skill is fundamental
for investigating any subject, including oneself, and, as such, this course is intended
to establish a foundation for any major or minor course of study. We will exercise
these basic skills by studying capitalism, the core ideology of our lives in America,
and much of the world. Many aspects of our lives are dictated or significantly impacted
by capitalism. Students will be able to choose case-studies in a specific field of
interest to investigate more fully throughout the course.
In the Fall, we will read primary texts reaching back to the Bible and other early
religious texts (such as the Mishnah and Talmud), as well as those of the ancient
Greeks and Romans and medieval thinkers, before moving into modern thinking on history
and into contemporary historical theory. This course will be discussion intensive.
Participation will involve presenting ideas and responding to others in the class.
In the Spring, we will employ the ideas and methods that we have learned from the
Fall in an extended engagement with the theories and histories of capitalism. We will
start by reading 18th-19th century authors on capital and economy, working our way
into the texts of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Naomi Klein, Alenka Zupancic, and Slavoj
Zizek.
The Spring will culminate with an international gathering of students and scholars
working on projects related to history and capitalism with the series The Spring will
culminate with an international gathering of students and scholars working on projects
related to history and capitalism with the series “Capitalism’s Past.” Students’ presentations will showcase the research skills gained and how they are
applied to specific topics. Students will have the opportunity to publish work in
a book series dedicated to the Source Project and other undergraduate and graduate
student research as a printed and open-access digital book by Gracchi Books, an imprint
of Punctum Books. This annual sequence fulfills Harpur Writing (W), Composition (C), Humanities (H),
Global Interdependencies (G), or Oral Communication (O) general education requirements.
Michael J. Kelly is Visiting Assistant Professor in Judaic Studies at Binghamton University
(SUNY), General Editor of Gracchi Books, and Director of Networks and Neighbours.
His teaching and research focus on the relationship between literature and history,
critical theory, and the philosophy of history. His recent publications include Isidore
of Seville and the “Liber Iudiciorum”: The Struggle for the Past in the Visigothic
Kingdom, The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World 80 (Boston/Leiden: Brill, forthcoming),
Theories of History: History Read Across the Humanities (London: Bloomsbury, 2018)
edited with Arthur Rose, and, with Dominique Bauer, The Imagery of Interior Spaces
(NY: Punctum Books, 2019). He also is adapting two novels for the stage, with their
author, Ariana Harwicz.
Human Rights
HMRT 176 and HMRT 276 Alexandra Moore
These courses take a two-fold approach to human rights research. First, we will discuss
the histories and concepts that constitute human rights. Are they best described as
legal instruments, social norms, cultural practices, discourses, political ideologies,
or institutions? What are some of the historical roots of the so-called “human rights
regime”? Is it a fatally flawed set of norms that should be abandoned in our contemporary
moment; or, do the recent attacks on those norms by the forces of xenophobia, racism,
and other forms of fear and hate demand that we re-double our efforts to promote human
rights? To help explore those questions with rigor and insight, we will consider how
different academic and professional disciplines approach human rights work and research.
We will read texts from History, Philosophy, Political Science, English/Literary Studies,
Law, International Relations, Visual Media Studies, and Anthropology, and we will
work with Binghamton professors who represent many of those departments. In considering
human rights from different perspectives, we will continually ask how different methodologies
and research questions shape one another. Because human rights is an inherently interdisciplinary
area of study, we will also consider the challenges and rewards that human rights
research demands. In the second semester, students will choose to join a current research
group in the Human Rights Institute to investigate topics such as incarceration, fascism,
indigenous rights, terrorism, women’s rights and more.
The Human Rights course HMRT 176 fulfills the Global Interdependencies (G), Humanities
(H), Social Sciences (N), and/or Harpur Writing (W) general education requirements.
Alexandra Moore, professor of English and co-director of the Human Rights Institute,
will lead the program. Moore publishes widely in representations of torture, enforced
disappearance, incarceration, gendered rights violations, child soldiers, humanitarian
interventionism and related topics in contemporary literature and film. She also works
with torture survivors and those fleeing political persecution.
The Social Context of Learning
EDUC 111 and 112 Amber Simpson
How do students learn? What are students’ attitudes and beliefs regarding the teaching
and learning of a particular discipline? How do educators and parents effect students’
opportunities to learn? How do students’ social identities (e.g., gender, ethnicity,
sexual orientation, religion, etc.) affect their learning? How do students become
interested in literature and engineering? These are examples of questions that are
of interest to educational researchers in a range of disciplines. Likewise, these
questions are not limited to any particular age group or educational setting as these
questions are of concern in classroom settings, museums, libraries, after-school programs,
summer camps, and home environments to name a few. In the first semester, students
will be introduced to various research methods common in educational research studies.
They will also gain experience in collecting and analyzing data in the form of surveys,
observations and video recordings, interviews, photographs, and drawings. At the conclusion
of the first semester, students will have designed an initial research project based
on a topic of interest and gaps in the current literature base. In the second semester,
students will carry out their research study and disseminate findings through an appropriate
outlet.
This course can be taken to fulfill the Composition (C) and Oral Communication (O)
general education requirements.
Amber Simpson joined the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Educational Leadership
in 2017. She received her undergraduate degree in Mathematics, Secondary Education
from East Tennessee State University, and her Master's degree in Curriculum and Instruction
and Educational Specialist degree in Education Administration and Supervision from
Lincoln Memorial University. Simpson spent five years as a high school mathematics
teacher in Tennessee before returning to Clemson University to receive her PhD in
Curriculum and Instruction, Mathematics Education.
People, Politics, and the Environment
ENVI 105 and 205 Sean Cummings
People live in places and imprint meaning and function on the natural environment.
This can be a local, or even individual process, but is also inescapably tied to broader
political, economic and cultural dynamics. As people move from place to place for
any of life's reasons-whether to go to school, flee natural or political disasters
or to seek new economic opportunity -- they are faced with learning about and integrating
themselves into new places. How do we learn about a new place? How does our understanding
of the places in which we live shape our ability to sustain ourselves and our environment?
We will develop our own approach to studying the place you find yourself as a college
student--Binghamton--how it came to be settled at the confluence of two rivers, its
transition to a set of utopian, industrial communities with factory work that attracted
European immigrants, to then become the birthplace of modern computing and aviation.
We will consider this trajectory in the current post-industrial phase where flooding
linked to global climate change, revitalized downtown areas and out-migration are
major concerns.
Through field trips, discussions, and practice of various research methods, the first
semester will introduce students to the ways that scholars and people who live and
work in Binghamton define environmental issues. Students will have the chance to design
their own research projects with faculty who study sustainable communities in the
second semester to generate ideas about how to integrate social, environmental and
economic needs to better the places in which we live.
This annual sequence can be taken to fulfill the Social Sciences (N), Oral Communication
(O), and Composition (C) general education requirements. It can also fulfill the requirements
of ENVI 101 and 201 toward a major or minor in environmental studies.
Worldwide circulations of people, commodities, knowledge, and practices contributed
to the spread of disease epidemics as well as the means to fight them. COVID-19 is
a strong and present example of this process that has antecedents. Understanding how
health management historically reflects local conditions prepares us to address contemporary
health concerns. This course uses the idea of a pandemic to investigate global efforts
to address disease and debility. In the fall, we begin with conceptual definitions
and a brief history of disease and public health. We then examine case studies of
the nineteenth and early twentieth century in Asia and their diasporic communities
in North America. These cases allow for an investigation of the rise of health professionalization,
governing bodies, and religious and humanitarian agencies, as well as the politics
and economics that produce inequities in health and structures of care. Students will
explore different research methods and digital platforms as they develop research
projects on a global health crisis of their choice. Students will apply the knowledge
and skills they gained to illustrate how history may instructively inform health policies
and responses on a local and global scale. In the spring, students will conduct their
research and submit a portfolio that includes dissemination of their findings through
an appropriate outlet. This annual sequence will fulfill Composition (C), Humanities (H), or Oral Communication
(O) general education requirements.
Sonja M. Kim is Associate Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies with a courtesy
title in the Department of History. The author of Imperatives of Care: Women and Medicine
in Colonial Korea (University of Hawai’i Press, 2019) and co-editor of the forthcoming
volume Future Yet to Come: Sociotechnical Imaginaries in Modern Korea, she holds research
and teaching interests on gender, health, and welfare in Asia and its diasporic communities.
Disinformation and Naiveté
(RUSS 180 and 280B)
Sidney Dement
A significant lack of knowledge about the culture and history of other nations plays
a pivotal role in many different areas of our lives: the news, film, literature, tourism,
pedagogy, international relations, arms proliferation, NATO expansion, disinformation,
approaches to medical practice, and internet policy. This course will model an approach
to studying international issues through intensive methodological and contextual analysis
of Russian projections of disinformation and naiveté. In this two-course series, students
develop and practice research skills to conceptualize how gaps in knowledge shape
disciplinary discourses while also searching for productive and feasible ways to fill
those gaps. During the first semester, students discuss and respond to readings about
the roles that innocence, ignorance, and naiveté play in discourses about Russia and
our world. Coming to grips with how little the average educated person knows about
Russia helps the critical thinker develop research questions about how innocence and
ignorance shape public discourse and policy. Students gain insight not only into the
negative dimensions of what we don’t know, but into the power that naiveté, when observed,
can unlock. During the second semester, students design and pursue a research project
that grapples with the many-faceted ways in which our world is shaped by innocence
and ignorance. Students may continue an avenue of interest they have found in Russian
Studies, or they may transfer their experience of our study of Russia to a different
culture or set of cultures. Over the course of this second semester, students will
workshop, research, and complete projects that operationalize concepts of innocence
and naiveté to test the boundaries of what we know.
Students will have the opportunity to collaborate with Professor Dement on the approach
taken in this course in an article about what it means to turn the thing that seems
like a weakness—lack of knowledge of a topic—into a strength. How can we as researchers
recognize how much we don’t know in a way that empowers us to find compelling answers
to incisive questions? Students will also have the opportunity to publish their research
in the Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal or to turn their work into other
media, such as a mini-documentary or podcast. This annual sequence will fulfill Composition (C), Humanities (H), or Oral Communication
(O) general education requirements.
Professor Dement has spent the last twenty years studying, researching, or teaching
Russian language and culture. The idea for this Source Project stream grows out of
Dement's recent book, a cultural history of Russia's first and most important monument
to Alexander Pushkin.
History & Capitalism
(JUST 180B and 280G)
Michael J. Kelly
In this year-long course sequence, students will learn a primary skill, the interpretive
analysis of historical, literary or philosophical texts. This skill is fundamental
for investigating any subject, including oneself, and, as such, this course is intended
to establish a foundation for any major or minor course of study. We will exercise
these basic skills by studying capitalism, the core ideology of our lives in America,
and much of the world. Many aspects of our lives are dictated or significantly impacted
by capitalism. Students will be able to choose case-studies in a specific field of
interest to investigate more fully throughout the course.
In the Fall, we will read primary texts reaching back to the Bible and other early
religious texts (such as the Mishnah and Talmud), as well as those of the ancient
Greeks and Romans and medieval thinkers, before moving into modern thinking on history
and into contemporary historical theory. This course will be discussion intensive.
Participation will involve presenting ideas and responding to others in the class.
In the Spring, we will employ the ideas and methods that we have learned from the
Fall in an extended engagement with the theories and histories of capitalism. We will
start by reading 18th-19th century authors on capital and economy, working our way
into the texts of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Naomi Klein, Alenka Zupancic, and Slavoj
Zizek.
The Spring will culminate with an international gathering of students and scholars
working on projects related to history and capitalism with the series “Capitalism’s Past”. Students’ presentations will showcase the research skills gained and how they are
applied to specific topics. Students will have the opportunity to publish work in
a book series dedicated to the Source Project and other undergraduate and graduate
student research as a printed and open-access digital book by Gracchi Books, an imprint
of Punctum Books. This annual sequence fulfills Harpur Writing (W), Composition (C), Humanities (H),
Global Interdependencies (G), or Oral Communication (O) general education requirements.
Michael J. Kelly is Visiting Assistant Professor in Judaic Studies at Binghamton University
(SUNY), General Editor of Gracchi Books, and Director of Networks and Neighbours.
His teaching and research focus on the relationship between literature and history,
critical theory, and the philosophy of history. His recent publications include Isidore
of Seville and the “Liber Iudiciorum”: The Struggle for the Past in the Visigothic
Kingdom, The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World 80 (Boston/Leiden: Brill, forthcoming),
Theories of History: History Read Across the Humanities (London: Bloomsbury, 2018)
edited with Arthur Rose, and, with Dominique Bauer, The Imagery of Interior Spaces
(NY: Punctum Books, 2019). He also is adapting two novels for the stage, with their
author, Ariana Harwicz.
What is Human Nature?
(ANTH 150 and 250)
Kathleen Sterling
What does it mean to be human? How can the exploration of this question enable you
to understand current events in our dynamic world? Start your academic career by investigating
a fundamental question about life. Students in this course will learn to use the tools
and perspectives of multiple disciplines, such as anthropology, psychology, philosophy,
biology, and religion, and apply them to various facets of human life. We will consider
what is fundamentally human about gender, sexuality, health, violence, and cooperation.
We will evaluate the evidence used to make claims about humanity and look for what
is missing from these explanations and where biases exist. In the second term, students
will work on research projects that can help further our understanding of the possibilities
of human nature. This course can be taken to fulfill the Social Sciences (N), Oral Communication (O), Wellness (S), and/or Harpur Writing (W)
general education requirements.
Project Leader Kathleen Sterling is an associate professor of anthropology. Her research
is centered in the French Pyrenees where she is currently co-director of the Peyre
Blanque, an open-air late Paleolithic site. Her interests include lithic technology,
learning and identity, communities of practice, Paleolithic visual imagery, hunting
and gathering groups, gender and feminist science, Black feminist theory, landscape
archaeology and the sociopolitics of archaeology. The themes of her work are concerned
with dispelling myths about human ancestors as violent, primitive and limited. She
is also concerned with equal opportunity in anthropology and science in general, particularly
in the ways in which this has an impact on knowledge production.
Thinking Through Painting
(ARTH 180C and 180D)
Pamela Smart
This course is about investigating the effects that artists elicit through the materials
they use and their techniques of application. It will take an historical approach
to artists’ paints and painting techniques, paying particular attention to moments
of intense experimentation with new formulations and transformed studio practices
at specific historical junctures. How do specific artists mobilize paints, canvas,
varnish, and other materials to communicate with viewers? We will explore who the
artist imagines he or she is primarily engaging with and to what end, and how audiences
and their manner of engagement with paintings is shaped in specific historical and
cultural circumstances. Students will have hands-on experience with different kinds
of paints—including tempera, oil, watercolors, and acrylics—to gain some insight into
how they behave, along with techniques of application specific to particular paints
and artists. No artistic expertise is necessary nor expected! During the first semester
of the course, students will participate in the close analysis of several paintings
from differing historical periods. We will use a range of analytic techniques and
historical records to glean information concerning the pigments used, how they were
applied, and whether or not the paintings are what they claim to be. The second semester
of this two-course sequence will entail a guided research process whereby students
will each conduct an in-depth analysis of a painting of any time period in the collection
of the Binghamton University Art Museum and will together conceptualize and develop
an exhibition focusing on these works that will open in the museum in the last week
of the Spring semester. This annual sequence can be taken to fulfill the Aesthetics (A), Oral Communication
(O), and Composition (C) general education requirements.
Pamela Smart is engaged in a series of studies concerned with the crafting of affect.
The first, Sacred Modern: Faith, Activism, and Aesthetics in the Menil Collection
(2011), addressed the crafting of aesthetic sensibility in the exhibitionary practices
of an art museum. The second is concerned with the work of technical experts in sustaining
the Rothko Chapel's venerated "atmospheric pressure," as the site undergoes restoration.
It explores the technical challenge of calibrating prosaic exigencies of materials,
security, access and climate, with institutional commitments to experiential intensity.
The third study is interested in the visceral impact of materials, focusing on the
newly developed acrylic paints deployed experimentally by artists working in collaboration
with chemists in the mid-twentieth century. She is also interested in contemporary
experiments in the form and function of the art museum.
People, Politics, and the Environment
(ENVI 105 and 205)
Dr. Robert Holahan and Dr. Valerie Imbruce
People live in places and imprint meaning and function on the natural environment.
This can be a local, or even individual process, but is also inescapably tied to broader
political, economic and cultural dynamics. As people move from place to place for
any of life's reasons-whether to go to school, flee natural or political disasters
or to seek new economic opportunity -- they are faced with learning about and integrating
themselves into new places. How do we learn about a new place? How does our understanding
of the places in which we live shape our ability to sustain ourselves and our environment?
We will develop our own approach to studying the place you find yourself as a college
student--Binghamton--how it came to be settled at the confluence of two rivers, its
transition to a set of utopian, industrial communities with factory work that attracted
European immigrants, to then become the birthplace of modern computing and aviation.
We will consider this trajectory in the current post-industrial phase where flooding
linked to global climate change, revitalized downtown areas and out-migration are
major concerns.
Through field trips, discussions, and practice of various research methods, the first
semester will introduce students to the ways that scholars and people who live and
work in Binghamton define environmental issues. Students will have the chance to design
their own research projects with faculty who study sustainable communities in the
second semester to generate ideas about how to integrate social, environmental and
economic needs to better the places in which we live. This annual sequence can be taken to fulfill the Social Sciences (N), Oral Communication
(O), and Composition (C) general education requirements. It can also fulfill the requirements
of ENVI 101 and 201 toward a major or minor in environmental studies.
Robert Holahan is an associate professor of environmental studies and political science.
His primary area of research investigates environmental policy from a social-ecological
perspective that incorporates the biological, ecological and geological characteristics
of resource systems with the economics of human decision-making. His current research
projects include a property-rights examination of unconventional oil and gas production,
and a cross-national study on the vote choices of parliamentarians over environmental
policies.
Valerie Imbruce is director of the Undergraduate Research Center and a research associate
of Environmental Studies. Her research has focused on the influence of urban demands
on food supply networks and agricultural systems, particularly among Asian-American
communities in New York City. She has consulted on international agriculture development
projects as well as worked with grassroots food system organizations in the United
States. She is committed to fostering interdisciplinary research and education since
many of the world's problems do not fall into the disciplinary categories of higher
education and believes undergraduate research is one way to accomplish this goal.
HMRT 176: Human Rights HMRT 276: Research in Human Rights
Alexandra Moore
These courses take a two-fold approach to human rights research. First, we will discuss
the histories and concepts that constitute human rights. Are they best described as
legal instruments, social norms, cultural practices, discourses, political ideologies,
or institutions? What are some of the historical roots of the so-called “human rights
regime”? Is it a fatally flawed set of norms that should be abandoned in our contemporary
moment; or, do the recent attacks on those norms by the forces of xenophobia, racism,
and other forms of fear and hate demand that we re-double our efforts to promote human
rights? To help explore those questions with rigor and insight, we will consider how
different academic and professional disciplines approach human rights work and research.
We will read texts from History, Philosophy, Political Science, English/Literary Studies,
Law, International Relations, Visual Media Studies, and Anthropology, and we will
work with Binghamton professors who represent many of those departments. In considering
human rights from different perspectives, we will continually ask how different methodologies
and research questions shape one another. Because human rights is an inherently interdisciplinary
area of study, we will also consider the challenges and rewards that human rights
research demands. In the second semester, students will choose to join a current research
group in the Human Rights Institute to investigate topics such as incarceration, fascism,
indigenous rights, terrorism, women’s rights and more. The Human Rights course HMRT 176 fulfills the Global Interdependencies (G), Humanities
(H), Social Sciences (N), and/or Harpur Writing (W) general education requirements.
Alexandra Moore, professor of English and co-director of the Human Rights Institute,
will lead the program. Moore publishes widely in representations of torture, enforced
disappearance, incarceration, gendered rights violations, child soldiers, humanitarian
interventionism and related topics in contemporary literature and film. She also works
with torture survivors and those fleeing political persecution.
ANTH 150: What is Human Nature? ANTH 250: Beyond Human Nature
Kathleen Sterling
What does it mean to be human? How can the exploration of this question enable you
to understand current events in our dynamic world? Start your academic career by investigating
a fundamental question about life. Students in this course will learn to use the tools
and perspectives of multiple disciplines, such as anthropology, psychology, philosophy,
biology, and religion, and apply them to various facets of human life. We will consider
what is fundamentally human about gender, sexuality, health, violence, and cooperation.
We will evaluate the evidence used to make claims about humanity and look for what
is missing from these explanations and where biases exist. In the second term, students
will work on research projects that can help further our understanding of the possibilities
of human nature. This course can be taken to fulfill the Social Sciences (N), Oral Communication (O),
Wellness (S), and/or Harpur Writing (W) general education requirements.
Project Leader Kathleen Sterling is an associate professor of anthropology. Her research
is centered in the French Pyrenees where she is currently co-director of the Peyre
Blanque, an open-air late Paleolithic site. Her interests include lithic technology,
learning and identity, communities of practice, Paleolithic visual imagery, hunting
and gathering groups, gender and feminist science, Black feminist theory, landscape
archaeology and the sociopolitics of archaeology. The themes of her work are concerned
with dispelling myths about human ancestors as violent, primitive and limited. She
is also concerned with equal opportunity in anthropology and science in general, particularly
in the ways in which this has an impact on knowledge production.
ENVI 105: People, Politics, and the Environment I ENVI 205: People, Politics, and the Environment II
Valerie Imbruce
People live in places and imprint meaning and function on the natural environment.
This can be a local, or even individual process, but is also inescapably tied to broader
political, economic, and cultural dynamics. The U.S. population is characterized by
high mobility, and international migration is a growing phenomenon, with people frequently
leaving their places of birth for new ones. As people move from place to place for
any of life’s reasons--whether to go to school, flee natural or political disasters,
or to seek new economic opportunity--they are faced with learning about and integrating
themselves into new places. How do we learn about a new place? How does our understanding
of the places in which we live shape our ability to sustain ourselves and our environment?
We will develop our own approach to studying the place you find yourself as a college
student--Binghamton--how it came to be settled at the confluence of two rivers, its
transition to a set of utopian, industrial communities with factory work that attracted
European immigrants, to then become the birthplace of modern computing and aviation.
We will consider this trajectory in the current post-industrial phase where flooding
linked to global climate change, revitalized downtown areas, and out-migration are
major concerns. While we will focus on Binghamton, these courses will give you the
tools to study any place. You will practice a variety of research methods used broadly
within the field of environmental studies to demonstrate the need to integrate perspectives
and approaches when studying the relationship between people, places, and the natural
environment. In the second semester you will join an ongoing research project focused
on questions of sustainability or design your own project. This course will satisfy the Social Science (N) or Oral Communication (O) general
education requirement, and the Writing (W) requirement Harpur College. It also satisfies
the requirement for ENVI 101 towards an environmental studies major.
Valerie Imbruce is director of the Undergraduate Research Center and a research associate
of Environmental Studies. Her research has focused on the influence of urban demands
on food supply networks and agricultural systems, particularly among Asian-American
communities in New York City. She has consulted on international agriculture development
projects as well as worked with grassroots food system organizations in the United
States. She is committed to fostering interdisciplinary research and education since
many of the world's problems do not fall into the disciplinary categories of higher
education and believes undergraduate research is one way to accomplish this goal.
ARTH 180C: Thinking Through Painting
Pamela Smart
This course is about investigating the effects that artists elicit through the materials
they use and their techniques of application. It will take an historical approach
to artists’ paints and painting techniques, paying particular attention to moments
of intense experimentation with new formulations and transformed studio practices
at specific historical junctures. How do specific artists mobilize paints, canvas,
varnish, and other materials to communicate with viewers? We will explore who the
artist imagines he or she is primarily engaging with and to what end, and how audiences
and their manner of engagement with paintings is shaped in specific historical and
cultural circumstances. Students will have hands-on experience with different kinds
of paints—including tempera, oil, watercolors, and acrylics—to gain some insight into
how they behave, along with techniques of application specific to particular paints
and artists. No artistic expertise is necessary nor expected! During the first semester
of the course, students will participate in the close analysis of several paintings
from differing historical periods. We will use a range of analytic techniques and
historical records to glean information concerning the pigments used, how they were
applied, and whether or not the paintings are what they claim to be. The second semester
of this two-course sequence will entail a guided research process whereby students
will each conduct an in-depth analysis of a painting of any time period in the collection
of the Binghamton University Art Museum and will together conceptualize and develop
an exhibition focusing on these works that will open in the museum in the last week
of the Spring semester. This course can be taken to fulfill the Aesthetics (A), Oral Communication (O), and
Composition (C) general education requirements.
Pamela Smart is engaged in a series of studies concerned with the crafting of affect.
The first, Sacred Modern: Faith, Activism, and Aesthetics in the Menil Collection
(2011), addressed the crafting of aesthetic sensibility in the exhibitionary practices
of an art museum. The second is concerned with the work of technical experts in sustaining
the Rothko Chapel's venerated "atmospheric pressure," as the site undergoes restoration.
It explores the technical challenge of calibrating prosaic exigencies of materials,
security, access and climate, with institutional commitments to experiential intensity.
The third study is interested in the visceral impact of materials, focusing on the
newly developed acrylic paints deployed experimentally by artists working in collaboration
with chemists in the mid-twentieth century. She is also interested in contemporary
experiments in the form and function of the art museum.
HIST 186A: Immigration and Refugee Resettlement
Kent Schull
This course devotes two successive semesters to studying and assisting in the work
of the American Civic Association (ACA). The ACA is a local non-profit community organization
that has assisted individuals and families with immigration services and refugee resettlement
in New York’s Southern Tier since 1939. The first semester introduces students to
the work of the ACA, including local, national, and global immigration and refugee
issues and needs. A particular focus will be on developing interdisciplinary knowledge
base, critical thinking and research skills related to immigration and refugees within
New York and the United States more generally. Additionally, students will work under
the direction of the course instructor to help process, preserve, and organize the
ACA’s extensive archive of case files, material culture, documents, programming, and
photographs related to local immigrant and refugee communities. During the 2nd semester
and under the continued guidance of the course instructor, students will continue
working with the ACA and develop research projects based upon the archival materials
about local immigrant and refugee communities. The end goal is to complete their projects
and present their findings to the broader Binghamton and university communities. This course will satisfy general education credits in Global Interdependencies (G),
Joint Oral and Composition (J), and Social Sciences (N).
Kent Schull was a twice Fulbright scholar to Turkey whose publications include Prisons
in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity (EUP, 2014), two co-edited volumes:
Living in the Ottoman Realm: Sultans, Subjects, and Elites (IUP, 2016) and Law and
Legitimacy in the Ottoman Empire & Republic of Turkey (IUP, 2016), as well as several
articles and book chapters. He is currently serving as the editor of the Journal of
the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (JOTSA) and the book series editor for
Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire. His research and teaching interests include
the social and cultural history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East, criminal
justice, Middle East Diaspora Studies, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, and the Middle
East Refugee Crisis.
EDUC 111: The Social Context of Learning I EDUC 112: The Social Context of Learning II
Amber Simpson
How do students learn? What are students’ attitudes and beliefs regarding the teaching
and learning of a particular discipline? How do educators and parents effect students’
opportunities to learn? How do students’ social identities (e.g., gender, ethnicity,
sexual orientation, religion, etc.) affect their learning? How do students become
interested in literature and engineering? These are examples of questions that are
of interest to educational researchers in a range of disciplines. Likewise, these
questions are not limited to any particular age group or educational setting as these
questions are of concern in classroom settings, museums, libraries, after-school programs,
summer camps, and home environments to name a few. In the first semester, students
will be introduced to various research methods common in educational research studies.
They will also gain experience in collecting and analyzing data in the form of surveys,
observations and video recordings, interviews, photographs, and drawings. At the conclusion
of the first semester, students will have designed an initial research project based
on a topic of interest and gaps in the current literature base. In the second semester,
students will carry out their research study and disseminate findings through an appropriate
outlet. This course can be taken to fulfill the Composition (C) and Oral Communication (O)
general education requirements.
Amber Simpson joined the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Educational Leadership
in 2017. She received her undergraduate degree in Mathematics, Secondary Education
from East Tennessee State University, and her Master's degree in Curriculum and Instruction
and Educational Specialist degree in Education Administration and Supervision from
Lincoln Memorial University. Simpson spent five years as a high school mathematics
teacher in Tennessee before returning to Clemson University to receive her PhD in
Curriculum and Instruction, Mathematics Education.
Tuesday and Thursday 1:15 p.m. - 2:40 p.m. Zurack High Technology Collaboration Center LN 1302C
Project Leader: Dr. Kathleen Sterling
What does it mean to be human? How can the exploration of this question enable you
to understand current events in our dynamic world? Start your academic career by investigating
a fundamental question about life. Students in this course will learn to use the tools
and perspectives of multiple disciplines, such as anthropology, psychology, philosophy,
biology, and religion, and apply them to various facets of human life. We will consider
what is fundamentally human about gender, sexuality, health, violence and cooperation.
We will evaluate the evidence used to make claims about humanity and look for what
is missing from these explanations and where biases exist. In the second term, students
will work on research projects that can help further our understanding of the possibilities
of human nature. This course can be taken for general education credits or as part
of the anthropology major.
Project Leader Kathleen Sterling is an associate professor of anthropology. Her research
is centered in the French Pyrenees where she is currently co-director of the Peyre
Blanque, an open-air late Paleolithic site. Her interests include lithic technology,
learning and identity, communities of practice, Paleolithic visual imagery, hunting
and gathering groups, gender and feminist science, Black feminist theory, landscape
archaeology and the sociopolitics of archaeology. The themes of her work are concerned
with dispelling myths about human ancestors as violent, primitive and limited. She
is also concerned with equal opportunity in anthropology and science in general, particularly
in the ways in which this has an impact on knowledge production.
Discovering Place: Binghamton as a Laboratory for Environmental Studies ENVI 105
Project Leaders: Dr. Robert Holahan and Dr. Valerie Imbruce
People live in places and imprint meaning and function on the natural environment.
This can be a local, or even individual process, but is also inescapably tied to broader
political, economic and cultural dynamics. As people move from place to place for
any of life's reasons-whether to go to school, flee natural or political disasters
or to seek new economic opportunity -- they are faced with learning about and integrating
themselves into new places. How do we learn about a new place? How does our understanding
of the places in which we live shape our ability to sustain ourselves and our environment?
We will develop our own approach to studying the place you find yourself as a college
student--Binghamton--how it came to be settled at the confluence of two rivers, its
transition to a set of utopian, industrial communities with factory work that attracted
European immigrants, to then become the birthplace of modern computing and aviation.
We will consider this trajectory in the current post-industrial phase where flooding
linked to global climate change, revitalized downtown areas and out-migration are
major concerns.
Through field trips, discussions, and practice of various research methods, the first
semester will introduce students to the ways that scholars and people who live and
work in Binghamton define environmental issues. Students will have the chance to design
their own research projects with faculty who study sustainable communities in the
second semester to generate ideas about how to integrate social, environmental and
economic needs to better the places in which we live. This course can be taken for
general education credits or as part of the environmental studies major.
Robert Holahan is an associate professor of environmental studies and political science.
His primary area of research investigates environmental policy from a social-ecological
perspective that incorporates the biological, ecological and geological characteristics
of resource systems with the economics of human decision-making. His current research
projects include a property-rights examination of unconventional oil and gas production,
and a cross-national study on the vote choices of parliamentarians over environmental
policies.
Valerie Imbruce is director of the Undergraduate Research Center and a research associate
of Environmental Studies. Her research has focused on the influence of urban demands
on food supply networks and agricultural systems, particularly among Asian-American
communities in New York City. She has consulted on international agriculture development
projects as well as worked with grassroots food system organizations in the United
States. She is committed to fostering interdisciplinary research and education since
many of the world's problems do not fall into the disciplinary categories of higher
education and believes undergraduate research is one way to accomplish this goal.
Human Rights HMRT 176
Tuesday and Thursday 11:40 a.m. - 1:05 p.m. Zurack High-Technology Collaboration Center, LN 1302C
Project Leader: Dr. Alexandra Moore
What are Human Rights and where do they come from? How can studying rights violations
help to build a better world? Start your academic career at Binghamton University
by developing your research skills in human rights and exploring majors with human
rights applications. This two-semester sequence will introduce first-year students
to foundational histories and concepts alongside research methodologies drawn from
social sciences and the humanities in human rights. We will look at the various ways
scholars and human rights workers define research questions about human rights past
and present and how research can be used to protect and promote human flourishing
in difficult times.
Our first semester course, HARP 176: Human Rights Concepts and Methods, will center
around case studies that ask us to bring different research methods together to address
specific violations. Students will conclude the semester by designing their own research
projects within the Human Rights Institute. In the second semester, students will
have the opportunity to work individually or in groups with faculty members in the
Human Rights Institute who are engaged in a wide range of human rights problem solving.
Not only will students participate directly in ongoing research projects, they will
also learn about different ways of disseminating and applying their research to reach
diverse audiences. The program's courses will also count toward the human rights minor.
This course fulfills the G (Global), H (humanities), N (social sciences), and/or Harpur
W (writing) general education requirements and is open to all freshmen without prerequisite.
Alexandra Moore, professor of English and co-director of the Human Rights Institute,
will lead the program. Moore publishes widely in representations of torture, enforced
disappearance, incarceration, gendered rights violations, child soldiers, humanitarian
interventionism and related topics in contemporary literature and film. She also works
with torture survivors and those fleeing political persecution.
