Dean's Seminars for Freshmen

The Dean’s Seminars provide Columbian College students in their freshman year at The George Washington University with a focused intellectual challenge as they explore significant academic issues under the guidance of distinguished scholars and teachers. Students engage in directed critical inquiry, exploring the unique resources of the nation’s capital and the University. Students not only learn to evaluate the scholarship and traditions that have formed our world view, but also create their own scholarship of consequence.

Washington Sex Scandals
Professor Chad Heap
AMST 801.10  CRN: 33444
GCR: Humanities

Senator John Ensign’s affair with a campaign staffer, Senator Larry Craig’s visit to the men’s restroom at the Minneapolis airport, Senator David Vitter’s call to the Washington Madam’s escort service: these are a few of the sex scandals that have preoccupied Washington during the past few years. Yet, no matter how contemporary such topics might seem, they are but the latest in a long history of sexual controversies in Washington, dating back at least to the presidency of Thomas Jefferson. Focusing on several incidents in the recent and more distant past, this seminar will ask not only what the history of Washington’s sex scandals can tell us about Americans’ changing attitudes toward sexuality over the past two centuries but also how a careful examination of these scandals can provide new insights into broader historical transformations in American culture and politics. We will consider the shifting contours of American citizenship and the definition of the nation, the shaping of political ideologies and party warfare, the emergence of mass media and its effects on molding public opinion, and the reconfiguration of the boundary between public and private in American life. Students will be introduced to methods of cultural analysis and writing, as well as to research opportunities in local archives and libraries. 
Chad Heap is Associate Professor of American Studies. His research and teaching interests include the history of sexuality, lesbian and gay studies, and U.S. urban culture and spaces. He is the author of Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940 (Chicago, 2009) and has also published and curated a public exhibition on the Chicago School of Sociology’s pioneering early-20th-century studies of non-normative sexualities, including prostitution, interracial sex, and homosexuality.

Food in Washington, D.C.
Professor Phyllis Palmer
AMST 801.11  CRN: 34162
GCR: Humanities

This seminar will use an American Studies approach of cultural analysis to investigate the representations and realities of the current American food system. Inspired by Michael Pollan’s observation that health, environmental, and energy issues are all food issues, the course will ask how popular cultural images about farming, food, and eating sustain a harmful food system and how such images can be mobilized to transform the current system. Industry explanations from food, seed, and agribusiness companies will be matched with critiques and alternatives from food activists, sustainable farmers, and conscientious consumers through examination of websites, TV shows, films, ads, books, and public campaigns. The overarching questions are: How do Americans think about the food system we inhabit? How could we imagine a healthier and more sustainable system? How can each of us contribute to a cleaner, safer, more nutritious food environment? To better grasp these complex issues, we will examine arguments and representations in some focused debates. In the spirit of Julia Child and Jamie Oliver, we will also prepare and eat some real food. 

Phyllis Palmer is professor of American Studies. She has written about housework, housewives and domestic workers, and interracial connections during the Civil Rights Era. As a cook and granddaughter of people who grew and processed much of the food they ate, she has been amazed by the rise of factory-farmed, chemically-enhanced French fries and genetically-modified corn syrup added to many of the things we eat and drink. She is now reading and watching the new generation of “food politics” writers and filmmakers to think about how to salvage values of domestic economy and honor traditional food knowledge.

The Sixties
Professor Suleiman Osman
AMST 801.12  CRN: 36120
GCR: Humanities

The seminar will offer a cultural, social and political historical overview of the Sixties. As a course in American Studies, the seminar will also examine the cultural memory of this contentious decade. In a unit on the Vietnam War, for example, the seminar will provide students with a chronological history both of the war and the emerging anti-war movement. Students will read primary accounts of Vietnam soldiers and anti-war protesters, as well as selections from the most significant secondary works about the war and its critics. The class will also analyze the representation and memory of the Vietnam War in post-Vietnam American culture, ranging from movies like “The Green Berets” and “The Deer Hunter” to contemporary debates about the war in Iraq. As the site of the March on Washington, the May Day anti-war protest, and the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Washington, D.C., played a particularly strong role in the Sixties. In a walking tour of important sites, the seminar will push students to make connections between readings in class and the city that surrounds campus.

Suleiman Osman is Assistant Professor of American Studies. His primary interests are in U.S. urban history, the built environment, U.S. cultural and social history, and the study of race and ethnicity. He is currently teaching courses on race and ethnicity in the American metropolis and American urban history. He did his doctoral work in the American Civilization Program at Harvard University. His dissertation, "The Birth of Postmodern New York: Gentrification, Postindustrialization, and Race in South Brooklyn, 1950-1980," analyzes the history of "gentrification" in brownstone Brooklyn.

D.C. Renaissance: Black Culture in the Nation’s Capital
Professor James Miller
AMST 801.13  CRN: 36121
GCR: Humanities

The “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920s has become firmly established as the lens through which many Americans have come to view the first flowering of African American creativity in the 20th century, but this view overlooks the centrality of Washington, D.C., as an important site of African American cultural production.  This seminar will explore the relationship of Washington, D.C., to 20th-century African American literature and culture through a close examination of works ranging from Alain Locke’s groundbreaking anthology The New Negro, Jean Toomer’s Cane, and the poetry of Langston Hughes, to the music of Marvin Gaye and D.C. Go-Go, to the contemporary fiction of George Pelecanos. We will visit some of the sites associated with the renaissance of the 1920s and conclude the seminar with a consideration of the renaissance presently occurring on and around U Street.

James A. Milleris Professor of English and American Studies. He teaches undergraduate courses on African American literature and culture. He is the editor of Harlem: the Vision of Morgan and Marvin Smith, and author of Moments of Scottsboro: the Scottsboro Case and American Culture. He has written and lectured on Washington, D.C.’s African-American community; his article “Black Washington and the New Negro Renaissance” appeared in Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities. In 2002 he was named the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching District of Columbia Professor of the Year.
           

Piracy, Copying, and Culture
Professor Alexander S. Dent
ANTH 801.10  CRN: 34577
GCR: Social and Behavioral Sciences

What exactly do Captain Jack Sparrow, the administrator of a peer-to-peer website, and a pharmaceutical company that takes plants from tribes in the Amazon have in common? This class will analyze actors to whom the term “pirate” is applied from an anthropological perspective. We will consider piracy in its historical and cultural contexts, starting in the 18th-century Caribbean, and stretching into current concerns over digital technology and mediation. Our comparative perspective will seek to distinguish piracy from other forms of extraction, and will consider the ways in which piracy often tries to establish utopian regimes for the re-distribution of wealth and power.
Alexander Sebastian Dent is Assistant Professor of Anthropology. His new project investigates illegal copying of CDs and DVDs in the state of São Paulo, focusing on NGOs, producers, consumers, and law enforcement. His recent book, River of Tears: Country Music, Memory, and Modernity in Brazil,(Duke University Press) is the first ethnography of Brazilian rural performance.

How to Read a Poem—With Pleasure
Professor Judith Plotz
ENGL 801.10  CRN: 36179           
GCR: Humanities

"How to Read a Poem—With Pleasure" is a course in the close reading of the genre which Samuel Taylor Coleridge described as "the best words in the best order." Focusing on fifty poems (one or two per class meeting) from different periods and cultures in different forms on various subjects, we will practice different critical and formal approaches to poetic beauty and meaning. Form, prosody, stylistics, genre, imagery, figurative language, and intertextuality will be important to us as well as issues of performance, reader response, and apologetics. Although the course is confined to poetry, it should be of value to students interested in literary analysis in general.
Judith Plotz is Professor of English. She regularly teaches courses in British Romanticism, Children's Literature, and Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures and Theory. The author of Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood, she has just completed a new edition of Kipling's Just So Stories and is working on a project on "Kipling as American Writer." Like Shelley, she believes that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

Inquiries, Stories, Histories
Professor Ormond Seavey
ENGL 801.11  CRN: 32457
GCR: Humanities

It is naively accepted by many that history, the record of solid factual events, and story, a constructed narrative of events which may or may not have happened, are opposed extremes. But both history and story derive from the same Greek word, a word meaning inquiries, the title of the pioneering work of history by Herodotus. This course considers various chapters in the complex interplay among fact, myth, story, history, and narrative in Western writing over nearly 3,000 years. Beginning with the story of the late years of King David and the perceived presence of the God of Israel in Jerusalem court politics, the course asks how a scrupulous witness can identify a divine hand. Herodotus, writing centuries later about the Persian War, believes in the Greek gods and collects evidence of history and culture in the ancient Mediterranean world. The story is continued in the centuries from 1600 to 1900 in story and history by Cervantes, Shakespeare, Cotton Mather, Henry Fielding, Francis Parkman, and Henry Adams.

Ormond Seavey is Professor of English. He teaches early American literature and comparative 18th-century literature. He has written about American literature in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. His interest in the Greek and Biblical origins of Western culture extends back to the beginnings of interdisciplinary humanities courses at GW.

The Art of the Diary
Professor Thomas Mallon
ENGL 801.12  CRN: 35194
GCR: Humanities

From its long-ago precursors (the ship captain’s log, the reader’s commonplace book) to its post-modern successors (the publicly intimate blog), the diary has been an art form unto itself. It has also been a source for our understanding of private lives and vivid personalities, as well as evidence of what goes into the making of literature, art and history. This seminar will consider the many uses to which diaries have been put: to chronicle the texture of everyday life; record travels; chart spiritual progress; brainstorm creative projects; confess and justify conduct; leave testaments from times of war and years in prison. We will read the diaries of such well-known figures as Samuel Pepys, Virginia Woolf and Anne Frank, as well as a disparate assortment of lesser-known ones. Students will write several short papers, take a midterm and a final examination, and, for a portion of the term, keep a diary.

Thomas Mallon, Professor of English, is the author of fourteen books, among them the novels Henry and Clara, Bandbox, and Fellow Travelers.  He has published a volume of literary essays (In Fact), as well as books on diaries (A Book of One’s Own), plagiarism (Stolen Words), the Kennedy assassination (Mrs. Paine’s Garage) and letters (the forthcoming Yours Ever). He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and has been the recipient of Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and other magazines. 

Jane Austen, Literary Icon
Professor Maria Frawley
ENGL 801.13  CRN: 34104
GCR: Humanities

This course focuses not simply on the literary achievements of England’s most influential woman writer, Jane Austen, but also on her appeal and continuing relevance to our own culture. Austen’s novels, childhood writing, and letters will combine to provide the basis for analysis of her distinctive style, techniques, and themes, and we will explore the fascinating ways her writing reflects and responds to social, political, and economic dimensions of late-18th and early-19th-century British culture. The many recent film adaptations of her novels, as well as recent literary works such as Bridget Jones’ Diary and The Jane Austen Book Club, will enable us to probe just why this particular writer inspires both scholars and devotees.

Maria Frawley is Associate Professor of English and the author of several books on 19th-century women writers and social history, including A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England, Anne Bronte, and, most recently, Invalidism and Identity in Victorian Britain. She is currently at work on a book titled Keywords of Jane Austen’s Fiction, and the bumper sticker on her car says, “I’d Rather Be Reading Jane Austen.”

Capital City: The History of Washington D.C.
Professor Christopher Klemek
HIST 801.10  CRN: 36134
GCR:  Humanities

Patterned on Rome and other European capitals, Washington is nonetheless a consummately American metropolis; sharing many characteristics with other U.S. cities, it is also entirely singular. Beyond the static icons found on postcards and currency, the District of Columbia is a living—and at times troubling—place, rife with seemingly irreconcilable conflicts and tensions. Through readings, exhibitions, and walking tours, our seminar will investigate how Washingtonians have come to reconcile a series of contradictions: a 19th-century urban plan accommodating 21st-century city life; a vast monumental core amidst a city of small-scale "urban villages"; a capital conceived for few permanent inhabitants which grew into an urbanized area with over five million residents; a highly unified employment base (sometimes jokingly called a "one-company town") occupying an extremely dispersed region; the unparalleled upward mobility of black Washingtonians with the persistence of a large African American underclass; basic rights of democracy that are denied to the community that houses the U.S. Constitution and all its political institutions; a fortress of security and surveillance experiencing terrible crime rates; some of the lowest public school attainments and the highest percentages of advanced degrees; homelessness just steps from the White House. By examining the history of Washington's development, we will seek explanations for these profound puzzles of American life that confront any visitor to the U.S. capital.

Christopher Klemek is Assistant Professor of History. His research traces the political and intellectual shifts affecting urban policy over the second half of the 20th century. He is currently completing his first book, which compares the fate of older industrial cities in Europe and North America, including Berlin, London, Toronto, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. In 2007, he co-curated a New York Municipal Art Society exhibition on Jane Jacobs, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1997, he co-founded Poor Richard's Walking Tours, a Philadelphia-based public history enterprise, and has since been featured as a guide to cities on radio, television, and in print media. 

Shakespeare’s England
Professor Linda Levy-Peck
HIST 801.11  CRN: 36315
GCR: Humanities

This interdisciplinary study of Shakespeare's England, its politics, economy, society, gender roles, mentality, and culture, allows us to understand the overlapping contexts in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked and English people lived. In our small seminar, we will work intensively together using primary sources, film, and theatre to deepen our understanding of life in 16th- and 17th-century England and the formation of a cultural icon. We will also seek to understand how and why Shakespeare continued to be central to American culture in the 19th century and 20th centuries. In addition to our class work, we will visit the Folger Shakespeare Library to view its treasures of English and continental literature and  re-creation of a 16th-century playhouse; we will attend performances of Shakespeare's plays at the Shakespeare Theatre; we will visit the National Gallery, and we will view films of Shakespeare's plays across a span of sixty years. Course requirements include: a research paper on a 17th-century tract chosen from a group provided to the class; vibrant class participation; and a final exam.

Linda Levy-Peck is Professor of History. Her teaching and research have focused on the history and culture of England, especially in the Early Modern period of the 15th through 17th centuries. Professor Levy-Peck was awarded a Columbian Research Fellowship for 2003-2004 to complete Consuming Splendor: Luxury Consumption and Cultural Borrowing in Seventeenth Century England. She also curated an exhibit at the Folger Library titled “Luxury Goods, Merchants, and Consumers in Seventeenth Century England.”

Spirituality and Service
Professor Peter Konwerski
HMSR 801.10  CRN: 32643
GCR: Social and Behavioral Science

At the intersection of many faith traditions lies spirituality and service. This course will explore how various spiritual groups reflect a commitment to service through their faith traditions. Using academic study and community service learning activities in Washington, D.C., students will have an opportunity to explore how faith is often expressed in social justice activities, as well as through the roots, traditions, and methods of various spiritual practices. By understanding our own spirituality, which can often be seen through a commitment to serving others, students will discover where spirituality and service converge through action and reflection.

Peter Konwerski is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Human Services, and  Associate Vice President for Administration. He has more than 15 years experience with D.C. area non-profit organizations and government agencies, including the Corporation for National Service.  His research focuses on collegiate service-learning, volunteer management and motivation, spirituality and service, and philanthropy.

Immigration and Identity in Western Europe
Professor Kimberly Morgan
PSC 801.10  CRN: 35118
GCR: Social and Behavioral Sciences

                  
This seminar examines one of the most timely and pressing issues in Western Europe today: how countries are responding to the waves of immigration that have produced growing ethnic and religious diversity. This is hardly a new issue: by the 1980s and 1990s, far right political movements gained strength through xenophobic appeals. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., but especially following the 3/11 attacks in Madrid and foiled plots in England, the issue of immigrant incorporation has gained increased attention and focused more on religion. This seminar will explore the many issues surrounding immigration and integration in Western Europe with an emphasis on five countries: France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK. The course will start with a historical look at nation-building in these countries, which shaped founding myths about the ethnic and religious character of each country. A second section will explore the forces driving immigration (colonization and de-colonization; labor migration; asylum-seeking) and the political responses to it. A final section of the class will explore the situation post-9/11, looking at the growing attention to religious diversity and efforts to accommodate it.

Kimberly Morgan is Associate Professor of Political Science. Her research has focused on the politics of social policy in the United States and Western Europe. Her new research project concerns the integration of immigrant groups in Western Europe. Professor Morgan teaches undergraduate courses on comparative politics and comparative social policy.

Politics and Science Fiction
Professor Patricia Phalen
SMPA 801.10  CRN: 33152
GCR: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course will examine the evolution of the science fiction genre from a historical perspective. We will study the ways significant authors, screenwriters and producers have employed the conventions of science fiction to comment on political and social life, beginning with the writings of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and continuing through present-day examples such as Heroes and Battlestar Galactica. Along the way we will watch and analyze classics such as The Twilight Zone, Star Trek and The X Files. Some of the questions the class will consider: Why do authors use fiction, and specifically scientifically-based fiction as the vehicle for social critique? How is science fiction significant to the development of entertainment media? How do the themes in science fiction relate to political and social conditions of different historical time periods?

Patricia Phalen is Associate Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in Radio/Television/Film and an MBA. Her research focuses on the socio-economics of mass media organizations, particularly the relationship between media and audiences. She is co-author of The Mass Audience: Rediscovering the Dominant Model and Ratings Analysis: The Theory and Practice of Audience Research.

Documentary Film: Fact, Fiction, or Propaganda?
Professor Nina Seavey
SMPA 801.11  CRN: 35910
GCR: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course will be devoted to evaluating the messages and meaning of the documentary form. The central thrust of the course will be to deconstruct documentary film and evaluate its journalistic, persuasive, and artistic functions. Emphasis will be given to understanding the key elements of documentary construction, visual literacy, and the structure and form of non-fiction films. Specific topics will be: content development, story structure, interview techniques, camera composition and visual modes of expression, editing theory and its impact on the creation of meaning, and the impact of music and sound design on the audience responses to documentary messages.

This is a principles and methods course. As such, students will be responsible for viewing and analyzing non-fiction films across a variety of genres such as “Fog of War,” “March of the Penguins,” and “Fahrenheit 911” among others. The course will not only cover contemporary documentary film but will also take an historical approach, beginning with the seminal work by Robert Flaherty, “Nanook of the North.”

Nina Gilden Seavey is Director of the Documentary Center and Assistant Research Professor of History and Media and Public Affairs.  She is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and has been teaching the graduate-level Institute for Documentary Filmmaking for the past nineteen years. 

Evolution of the Human Mind
Professor Francys Subiaul
SPHR 801.10  CRN: 34771
GCR: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course will review the cognitive abilities of human and non-human primates in language and communication, social cognition, spatial and physical cognition, numerical competence and memory systems. Throughout the semester, students will be introduced to theories of cognitive evolution and the various methods used to explore cognition between species. Class discussions will be coordinated with activities in the National Zoo’s Think Tank, where researchers are actively exploring the cognitive abilities of orangutans and gorillas, as well as trips to the National Museum of Natural History, where students can gain insights from exhibits that highlight environmental and social variables that might have shaped early human cognition.

Francys Subiaul is Assistant Professor of Speech and Hearing. He has published extensively in the area of human cognition, and especially on “cognitive imitation” in primates and humans. In 2008, Dr. Subiaul was awarded a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development grant to study the evolution of cultural learning in great apes.