LTA2022 The Speculative Genres: Horror, Sci-Fi and Fantasy Literature and Film
4 credit intermediate liberal artsIn this class, we examine the speculative genres, stories containing science fictional, gothic/horror, or fantastic qualities that are particularly invested in socio-political questions. Rather than resolutely celebrating a techno-scientific future, these stories engage audiences in difficult ethical and philosophical discussions: What does it mean to be human? What is the cost of progress? What does it take to imagine (and then create) a more equitable world? We discuss a range of texts, including essays by J. R. R. Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin; novels by Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, Karen Tei Yamashita, Cormac McCarthy, and Margaret Atwood; short fiction by Keri Hulme, Carmen Maria Machado, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ted Chiang; films such as Get Out, The Hunger Games, Black Panther, and Blade Runner; and tv such as Station 11 and The Rings of Power

Prerequisites: (AHS1000 or FCI1000) and (WRT1001 or RHT1000)

EPS1210 The Ultimate Entrepreneurial Challenge
(Formerly EPS3510 and EPS3579)
4 Credits

This highly competitive course involves intense TEAM competition and problem-solving. Students will elect CEOs, negotiate to acquire team members, and compete for ten weeks to determine the ultimate winner. We have designed a learning experience that will develop and test your skills in strategy, marketing, negotiation, management, negotiations, and finance -- as well as creative, innovative, entrepreneurial out-of-the-box thinking.

Your learning experiences will primarily engage you in real-world business cases, including, when feasible, interactions with the entrepreneurs that are the subjects of the cases, or practitioners who have relevant experiences and insights to share. Our goal is to make this course one of the most challenging and rewarding learning experiences for you during your time at Babson.

Prerequisites: FME1001 or MOB1000

HSS2010 The US in the World in the 20th Century
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts CreditsThis course explores the role of the United States throughout the world from 1900 to the present. We will investigate the people, institutions, and processes that influenced American diplomatic and military engagements, and analyze the impact and effectiveness of America's role. We will begin by exploring the emergence of America as an empire, and how American power and influence evolved and changed over the course of the century to the present day. We will explore America's role in shaping the Cold War, in particular in Latin American and the wars in Vietnam, as well as more recent engagements in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

LTA 2005: The Visual Languages of Art
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts CreditsThis course is designed to introduce you to the realm of visual communication - how it's done, how it works and how cultural and personal experiences shape your reactions to it. Fine arts (painting, sculpture, architecture), industrial arts (graphic and product design) and everyday objects will be presented as the workings of visual communication, the role of art and artists in a variety of times and places, the nature of good and bad art and design are explored.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

PRF1120 Theater Production Workshop
2 Free Elective CreditsThis course will center on a major collaborative project undertaken jointly by all enrolled students (as well as some students involved in an extra-curricular capacity): the rehearsal and performance of a full-length play. In the professional theater world, every production is a considerable undertaking, requiring deep collaboration among a diverse ensemble, each bringing distinctive expertise to the project. Creating a theater production is not only a rigorous intellectual and aesthetic undertaking but also one that demands the development of leadership and collaboration skills. Whether you intend to pursue a career in the arts or not, the core skills developed through this experience will be highly relevant to any professional path.

Prerequisites: None

LTA2079 Theories of Love
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts CreditsWhat is love? Where does it come from, what does it ask of us, and how does it alter our minds, bodies, values, and relations? Are sex, friendship, and marriage necessary for love, or do they inhibit love's fullest expression? In this course, we will examine how influential writers have conceived and contested love's meanings across a range of cultural contexts. Focusing primarily on erotic love (erôs), we will consider how such meanings relate to notions of art, beauty, conjugality, legality, pleasure, sexuality, spirituality, and transgression, both in their original era and our own. Particular attention will be paid to differences of race, class, age, gender, and authority as incitements to, and/or impediments of, relations of love and eroticism.

Prerequisites: (FCI1000 or AHS1000) and (WRT1001or RHT1000)

QTM3615 Time Series and Forecasting
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsThis course is about the analysis of time series data in the context of various real-life forecasting situations pertaining to business and non-business areas, such as sales, banking, healthcare, sports, and global warming. The objectives of the course are: to provide practical experience with time series data to predict future outcomes; to provide a framework for comparing alternative models in terms of predictive accuracy; to cultivate an appreciation of various types of times series modeling approaches; to provide advanced exposure and experience in programming to build, test, and apply time series models; and to develop skills at communicating results effectively. The software used throughout the course will be Excel and R/RStudio. Effective teamwork and professional presentation of analyses and recommendations will be required during this course.

Prerequisites: AQM2000 or permission from instructor

GDR4610: Topics in Women's Studies
4 Advanced Liberal ArtsThis course provides a forum to examine and discuss contemporary women's and girls' roles and positions. The course will address the following topics: first and second waves of feminism, sexuality, psycho-social influences on gender construction, paid work and structures of inequality, women and social protest and family configurations. At the beginning of the course, we will read some historic documents as background to the women's movement in the United States. Although the main focus will be on women and girls in the United States, we will also discuss women's positions in other countries as well. Because femininity and images of women are balanced, and often countered, by masculinity and images of men, we will spend time discussing men in relation to women. Integral to this course is recognition of how race, class, ethnicity and sexuality converge to influence how women negotiate their political, social and cultural roles. Finally, we will attempt to become _enlightened witnesses_ to the social construction of femininity and masculinity, and use our understanding to notice stereotypical portrayals as well as new, liberating images of women and men.

Prerequisites: 2 Intermediate Liberal Arts Courses (CSP, LTA, HSS)

EPS 1001: Transformation Through Entrepreneurial Leadership

3 Credits course for Humanities and Entrepreneurship Certificate Students Only

The Transformation Through Entrepreneurial Leadership course cultivates core career and life skills by helping students transform their self-perception and agency by developing an entrepreneurial mindset that supports their ability to overcome challenges and seize opportunities.

The course helps students understand how entrepreneurial thinking and acting can enable them to become an entrepreneurial leader while defining their unique strengths and capabilities based on their self-identified value systems.

The course is experientially-based, providing students with feedback and an opportunity to build and reflect on their individual entrepreneurial leadership skills. Students will engage in interactive sessions with Babson faculty and be supported by Babson students; work on an individual entrepreneurial leadership project; and discover how Babson's entrepreneurship methodology, Entrepreneurial Thought and Action (ET&A), applies to their individual entrepreneurial journey.

This course is offered over 12 weeks with classes held in person once a week for three hours. Students will discover that being an entrepreneur goes deeper than developing a business. In the first part of the course, they will build upon what they learned in "The Art of the Self" course as they further explore how they can cultivate their entrepreneurial abilities, passions, and strengths.

As they discover what inspires them, students will learn about the United Nations Global Goals and how those connect to their own lives and to opportunities in the market. They will strengthen their ability to solve problems through Babson's ET&A methodology and discover how these skills connect to opportunities they can secure once they venture out. Through support, they will learn how to create the story of self, seeing themselves as entrepreneurs with experience and expertise to address real world problems. The course concludes with students' final deliverable, a presentation of their transformed personal narrative as an entrepreneurial leader capable of creating social impact.

Prerequiste: Course is for Humanities and Entrepreneurship students only

HUM4607: Trauma, Culture, Transformation

4 Advanced Liberal Arts credits

What is trauma and how does it impact individuals and societies? The word comes to us from the Greek "wound," and so it has come to mean a lasting injury made by a violent or startling event that penetrates a person's psychic boundary system. The difference between a wound and a traumatic wound is that the latter does not heal; rather, it results in post-traumatic stress, which in turn creates cycles of repetition of uncannily similar events until the event has been "worked through." While the term is largely attributed to Sigmund Freud's 19th and early 20th century work, in fact many of his sources came from classical Greek texts, meaning the concept and experience of trauma have been around for centuries.

In the past, knowledge about trauma came predominantly from psychoanalysis; to a lesser extent, literary theory has explored how cultural texts reflect phenomena related to trauma such as repetition, disruptions of time and temporality, and fragmented points of view. Post-Traumatic Stress was a chronic, cyclical dis-ease with devastating consequences. In the past decade, however, neuroscientists have exponentially advanced our understanding of trauma and its relation to our bodies, not just our minds, and theorists have shown how trauma is also a cultural phenomenon, transmitted from one generation to the next. Most importantly, this new research also shows proven pathways to transformation and healing-pathways that also correspond to collective movements for healing our world.

Starting with Freud's foundational work and the classical texts that inspired him, we will study how cultural texts have represented both traumatic stress and methods for its healing. From there, we move quickly to study new developments in the understanding of trauma and post-traumatic stress, including methods of healing and transcending traumatic repetition that have gained traction in broader change-making contexts. We will conclude our study by exploring the concept of Transformational Literacy operating at the MIT Presencing Institute, and how the notion of collective trauma invites collective healing responses as together we bring "the emergent future" into being.

Prerequisites: Any Combination of 2 Intermediate liberal arts (HSS, LTA, CSP)