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2023 - 2024
Bookmaking: From Stone Tablets to E-Readers
MDVL 180A/ENG180M and MDVL 280C/ENG 280N
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.
Read more about Dr. Whearty's research in BingUNews.
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 WallRacial 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 ChronopoulosOur 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. HolahanSocieties 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 GlasmanThis 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 GlovinskyIn 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.
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2022 - 2023
Pandemic!
AAAS 180P and 280Q
Sonja KimThis 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 DementA 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. KellyIn 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 MooreThese 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 SimpsonHow 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 CummingsPeople 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.
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2021 - 2022
Pandemic!
(AAAS 180P and 280Q)
Sonja Kim
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.
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2020 - 2021
HMRT 176: Human Rights
HMRT 276: Research in Human RightsAlexandra 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 NatureKathleen 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 IIValerie 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 IIAmber 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.
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2019 - 2020
Human Nature
ANTH 150Tuesday and Thursday 1:15 p.m. - 2:40 p.m.
Zurack High Technology Collaboration Center LN 1302CProject 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 105Tuesday and Thursday 2:50 p.m. - 4:15 p.m.
Learning Studio, LN 1324Project 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 176Tuesday and Thursday 11:40 a.m. - 1:05 p.m.
Zurack High-Technology Collaboration Center, LN 1302CProject 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.
