The aim of this seminar is to provide graduating majors with a deep understanding of European cultures and histories within a global context, culminating in a capstone senior thesis. For this learning outcome, students will examine why and how universities on both sides of the Atlantic have been sites of activist scholarship and teaching since the Middle Ages. Readings will include, among others, Marsilius of Padua, Bertolt Brecht and Victor Papanek. Topics will range from Italian humanism and Enlightenment philosophy to 1968 and design activism. On the basis of transcultural European case studies of activist universities, students will have opportunities to reflect on student and faculty participation in anticolonial movements in Argentina, Peru, South Africa, the United States, and Vietnam.
The seminar will bring together the knowledge that graduating majors in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies have gained through their studies and apply it in new, collaborative, and research-based contexts. They will analyze, discuss, and interrogate historical, as well as aesthetic, modes of inquiry and demonstrate their proficiency in oral and writing skills, in areas of the experimental humanities (digital, environmental, medical and urban humanities as well as community engagement), and in the target languages. They will come from various majors in the department to study multilingual, transcultural, and international aspects of their studies through the lens of an activist university.
W 3-5:50 Pub Aff 1284