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| Each year forty-eight select incoming Northwestern freshmen embark on a pioneering and challenging year-long journey through the humanities. In a series of innovative and groundbreaking courses these Kaplan Humanities Scholars work closely with some of the top faculty at the university to investigate how diverse thinkers—at different times and in dissimilar ways—have answered one of humanity’s most enduring questions: what is the nature of “the good society”? Students in the program confront the works of great authors and artists, attend special performances and field trips, and examine how artists, thinkers, and ordinary citizens alike have tackled the special challenges of organizing a collective life. Throughout, students are exposed to the full diversity of scholarly disciplines and critical methods that are being brought to bear on fundamental humanistic questions in the modern university. |
The theater of Epidavros in Greece
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The Idle 'Prentice by William Hogarth |
The Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program provides a unique opportunity for students to learn in an unusual collaborative format. The program consists in a special set of four coordinated courses taken during the Fall and Winter quarters of the freshman year. In each of these quarters three stellar faculty from different departments across the humanities and social sciences co-teach a small lecture class, with each faculty member leading a separate but coordinated freshman seminar for a third of the students in the class. The program is innovative, exciting, inter-disciplinary, and dedicated to the best tradition of humanistic thinking about society, culture, and the arts. The program is NOT restricted to students in the arts and humanities (or even to students in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences), but is open to students of virtually all interests: those drawn to the natural and social sciences, as well as those who plan to major in the humanities. (Members of the 2010-11 class hail from 15 different departments and majors, ranging from Cognitive Studies to Art History, from Economics to Music Performance!) |
We are inviting YOU, members of the Class of 2015, to apply to join the program for the fall of 2011. The program will accept applications in late spring. We hope you will consider taking this opportunity to explore the humanities under the guidance of some of Northwestern’s most prominent faculty members in an innovative course format.
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| In 2011-12, the Humanities Scholars will take an interdisciplinary look at two core humanistic concepts: culture and justice. In the Fall, a team of award-winning professors from the departments of History and English will offer "Moral Drama, Melodrama: the Origins of Popular Culture," a course which leads students on an investigation ranging from medieval morality plays through the French Revolution and nineteenth-century Emancipation narratives to contemporary courtroom dramas. As students explore the visual, dramatic, fictional, and cinematic productions from these earlier periods they will be formulating questions about the definition and function of popular culture. What defines the popular? What is the relationship between popular culture and culture more broadly (both high and low)? What are the social, political, and religious forces that shape, compete with, and attempt to control popular culture? And how do these productions from the past inform our understanding of the culture we participate in today? The course will conclude by examining the courtroom dramas that dominate contemporary television and film. |
| The turn to the issue of justice at the end of the Fall quarter will open out into the fundamental questions addressed in the Winter portion of the program. In Winter 2012 the Humanities Scholars will take "Testimony and Justice: Dilemmas in the Good Society," a course designed by three nationally prominent scholars from the departments of Philosophy, History, and Political Science. The course will focus on the language, logic, and representational forms (e.g., witness accounts, memoirs, artistic representations) used in the cultural practice of testimony, and students will explore questions of justice within particular societies, between societies, and on a global scale. Justice without testimony is unimaginable. Whether we consider the little injustices of everyday life or the profound injustice of crimes against humanity, testimony is the medium through which voices are heard or silenced and narratives take shape and are contested. Testimony points to the limits of knowledge, the complexity of "telling the truth," and the tension between a particular account of one's experience and the historical narratives of a society. |
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As indicated above, both the Fall and Winter courses are composed of two linked classes that combine a small lecture class (attended by all 48 Kaplan students) with a coordinated freshman seminar (of 16 students each). Humanities Scholars will therefore receive a total of four class credits over the two quarters. In the process, they will fulfill the Weinberg requirement that they take two freshman seminars, and they will also receive credit for two Distribution courses; one in Area IV (Historical Studies) and one in Area VI (Literature and Fine Arts). In the spring, the Humanities Scholars will meet occasionally and/or attend programs that draw out the themes of the program. And of course throughout the year they will take advantage of the intellectual, cultural, and artistic resources of Chicago.
Humanities Scholars should be aware that the program demands a major commitment of scholarly effort on their part, but that its rewards, in terms of intellectual growth and course credit, are commensurate. Above all, the program offers students a chance to consider how major thinkers—as well as ordinary citizens—have expressed their vision of "the good society,” and do so in the company of a small group of some of Northwestern finest students: a kind of "good society" of its own. Students who complete the program will have richly earned their designation as Kaplan Humanities Scholars.
Interested students can learn more about the program by viewing our brochure or by consulting the FAQ.
Yours,
Jules Law
Director, Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program
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Jules Law is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Empiricism (Cornell 1993) and The Social Life of Fluids (Cornell 2010). He is currently at work on a book entitled Being There: Virtuality in the Victorian Novel. His essays on Victorian literature, James Joyce, and literary theory have appeared in PMLA, Critical Inquiry, SIGNS, New Literary History, ELH, Nineteenth Century Literature, and many other journals. He has received numerous teaching and community awards, most recently the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence (2007) and the Centro Romero Leadership Award (2008).
Students with questions should contact Darcy Hughes Heuring at the program office: darcyh@northwestern.edu. |
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