CSP2035 Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East

(Formerly CVA2035)
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts CreditsWhile the Middle East continues to dominate Western foreign policy concerns and is a focus of Western media, understanding of this region is often based on stereotypes that do not consider the everyday lives of Middle Eastern people, and that do not attempt to differentiate between peoples of this region. This course will introduce several groups and cultures of the Middle East in detail, while focusing on thematic topics that are of particular interest to current world events. A brief survey of the history and geography of the region will be followed by more in-depth study of topics such as political Islam, the Israeli-Palestine conflict, the war in Afghanistan, gender and sexuality, and human rights issues. The course will be highly interactive, and will make frequent use of documentaries, movies, literature, and current news events as well as anthropological and ethnographic material.

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

LIT4610 Performing Social Class
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsThis 4-credit course employs gamified pedagogy to explore the multifarious ways that social class functions. Students will read texts that explore the issues of class consciousness, class performance, classism, and cross-class communication; act in in-class simulations of events that reveal the ways that social class operates; and write character biographies, scripts and analytical reflections. Simulations will include school events, job interviews, holiday celebrations, and more. Readings will be drawn from both nonfiction (from fields such as sociology, economics and cultural studies) and fiction (primarily short stories and excerpts from novels and plays). The overarching objective will be for students to become aware of the often-invisible ways that social class operates in daily life. In a global society that is marked by increasing socioeconomic disparity, it is especially important for students to become critical thinkers about social class.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

FIN2520 Personal Finance
4 General CreditsThis course teaches students to negotiate the retail financial landscape, emphasizing issues that have a large impact on their future financial well-being. It assumes no financial knowledge other than first-year finance. The course covers topics such as understanding and appreciating the time value of money, the financial planning process, financing the purchase of a house and other consumer loans, saving for retirement and other goals, selecting a financial advisor, taxes, estate planning, behavioral finance and common investment scams. Specific investment products studied include mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, municipal bonds, alternative investments (including hedge funds, private equity funds, and commodities), annuities, and insurance products. Consideration will be given to the problem of an entrepreneur or start-up employee who has a substantial fraction of personal wealth invested in a single business venture, including evaluating stock-and option-based compensation plans. Over the duration of the course, students will work to develop a personal financial plan.

Prerequisites: SME2021

PHO1100 Photography

4 Free Elective Credits

Introduction to Digital & Darkroom Photography is an art course designed to explore visual ideas and concepts about photography as an expressive art medium. Content in a picture and its emotional and aesthetic value is of paramount importance and one of the most essential communicative tools of our era. This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of photography with an objective to master the manual camera operating modes, compositional elements, light, color, and black and white imaging. We will learn digital software editing applications and digital printing using Adobe Photoshop software programs. In addition, we will also learn the art and craft of the traditional darkroom using 35mm film cameras and wet-lab printing. Digital workflow terminology and digital printing will be explored in the first part of the term followed by darkroom techniques in the second segment of our class. This foundation course will form the basis of further studies within photography while emphasizing the rich cultural and historical vocabulary associated with this time and narrative based medium.

Note: Babson Photography program has 35mm film cameras and lenses to check out but only a limited number of digital fully manual cameras on reserve. Students are responsible for providing their own digital camera, film and printing papers. You will have 24/7 access to both the digital and darkroom labs.

Prerequisites: None

LTA2049 Seeking Enrichment: Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in Literature

4 Intermediate Liberal Arts CreditsThe novelist Joyce Carol Oates has said, _To be an American is to be a kind of pilgrim ... a seeker after truth. The pilgrim is our deepest and purest self. In this course we'll explore the character of the pilgrim in selected fiction, essays, and poems, using questions such as: What inspires someone to take and retake pilgrimages: long, often difficult journeys far from home? What friendships and other communities form along the way and why? What besides self-enrichment do pilgrims hope to find, or possibly lose? Through close reading, discussion, and written analyses, we'll study how writers use setting, plot, and theme to consider these questions. There will also be one field trip, which will serve as a local pilgrimage. Course texts may include contemporary works by Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula Le Guin, and Curtis Sittenfeld, as well as selections from Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer, Basho, and Thoreau.

This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Spring

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

LTA2030 Reading Place and Landscape in American Literature
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts CreditsThis course investigates the ways American writers use place and landscape in their art. Reading fiction, essays, and poetry beginning in the 19th century and moving to contemporary works, we will explore the nature of place and landscape as physical, social, and intellectual and consider what it suggests about American culture and ideas. We will also look at several theoretical texts by cultural geographers, ecologists, and scholars of landscape architecture and regional planning. Ultimately, we will consider how place and landscape, both real and imagined, influence selected American writers' use of theme, imagery, character, and style, and reflect as well on how these concerns influence our own lives as readers, writers, thinkers, and dreamers.

Reading Place and Landscape in American Literature is an intermediate level course and part of the Literary and Visual Arts category of the Liberal Arts Curriculum. Courses in this category focus on frameworks for understanding and appreciating the practice of representation, the creative process, and diverse modes of aesthetic expression. They also consider individual, historical, cultural, and formal factors in artistic creation and make manifest the multiple vantage points from which art can be interpreted.

This course is typically offered in the following semesters: Fall or Spring

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

HUM4601 Place, Space, Occasion: Public Discourse in Theory and Practice
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

We are living in a moment of great social, cultural, and political unrest. To examine, understand, and, most importantly, solve society's most pressing problems requires vigorous and inclusive civic deliberation and dialogue. Our focus this semester will be on discovering what makes for logical, nuanced, productive, and exciting argumentation while also creating our own. We will study rhetorical principles, from antiquity to the present day, and consider various strategies for speaking in public forums. You will have the opportunity to experiment with these principles and strategies as you craft original oratory and speeches for specific audiences and contexts as well as practice with theatrical and performance methods for vocal variation and body language. Theory-driven and practice-oriented, this course offers you a space to both explore how any public discourse reflects its historical and social context and to engage in the public sphere as a speaker, audience member, and citizen-scholar.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

LIT4693 Play, Performance, Politics: The London Stage
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

Program fee is paid to Glavin Office - program fee includes accommodations, breakfast, tube pass in London, airport transport, theatre tickets, program planned meals, and cultural excursions. Not included: tuition, international flight, visa costs, additional meals and personal expenses.

The course aims to develop an appreciation for and deeper understanding of the theatre as an art form through an immersive experience of play-text study, play attendance, performance workshops, and class discussion. While we will see a variety of types of plays on a variety of subjects, our approach to these plays will particularly emphasize the social and political context and issues raised implicitly or explicitly by the plays we read and see. We will also place the issues raised in a number of the plays into a wider discussion of social and political issues occurring in the world today - be they around matters of inequality at local, national and global levels, the role of government, the meaning of freedom in daily life and as a legal and political concept, and the effort of people to shape their collective futures through political action and argument. Success in this class is dependent upon students' ability and willingness to participate fully in all class discussions as well as work outside of class, both individually and in teams, and to contribute their independent insights and observations to the learning community of the class. Participation is imperative.

The course will involve a combination of close reading of the play-texts and contextual readings, careful and critical analysis of the performances, and engaged participation in acting workshops, tours, and class discussions.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

LIT4689 Poetic Elegy: Shaping Cultural and Personal Loss
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsAn elegy is a poem of mourning, a lament that can express both private and public grief. Reading elegies offers insight into cultural attitudes towards life and death while featuring the resilience of poetic form. From antiquity to the present, poets have used this shaping form to memorialize, describe, reflect, critique, and witness. In this course we will examine the origins of the form and study pivotal poems and poets in its development. We will also explore the contemporary elegy-certainly in the shadows of 9/11 and the war in Iraq-both as a private expression of feeling and as a public need for decorum and custom. Texts may include poetry by John Milton, Anne Bradstreet, Thomas Gray, Thomas Hardy, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich, Yusef Komonyakaa, Carolyn Forché, Mark Doty, Marie Howe, and Brian Turner, as well as lyrical prose elegies by Joan Didion and Philip Roth.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

ECN3662 Political Economy of Latin American Development and Underdevelopment

4 Advanced Liberal Arts Elective Credits

This course is for any individual interested in the political, financial, historical, and social determinants of economic development in Latin America. Both theoretical and policy issues in development are covered. Analyzing the characteristic volatility of the region's business environment, the course provides an in-depth examination of the workings of Latin America's economies, which in combination with courses in the liberal arts, leads to a greater appreciation of this region's global distinction and diversity.

Prerequisites: ECN2000 and (SME2031 or ECN2002)