Special Topics Course Descriptions
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Special Topics Course Descriptions Spring 2005
To find course descriptions, go to the 2004-2005 on-line catalog on the Mills website. Course descriptions for the Special Topics (180/280) and
Advanced Seminar (183/283/483) courses, which are not in the catalog, are included here and in the Course Descriptions section of the on-line
schedule.
ANTH 180: ST: Controversies in Archaeology
Mitch Allen
Did ancient astronauts build the pyramids? Was prehistoric Europe a peaceful community of goddess worshippers? How true are stories of Atlantis, of
Troy, of the Bible? Archaeologists, scholars who study the cultures of previous centuries, are continually asked to evaluate the evidence for competing
stories about the past. This course will show how archaeologists use a critical lens and rigorous methods to assess these and other claims—some
preposterous, some perplexing—about the ancient world.
CHEM 180: ST: Nanoscience
Elisabeth Wade
An introduction to the cutting-edge field of nanoscience, beginning with underlying principles including cluster chemistry, quantum dots, carbon
nanotubes, and self-assembling monolayers. The course will then move on to nanotechnology applications including quantum computing, molecular
machines, molecular electronics, nano-medicine, and space elevators. This course is intended for students who have completed at least one year of
general chemistry, although a semester of organic chemistry or physics is also strongly recommended. This course meets for the second half of the
semester, starting March 14, 2005.
COLL 060M Greening of Mills College: Resources for a Sustainable Future (Pending Faculty Approval)
Emery Roe, Susan Spiller
This course focuses on issues of environment and sustainability at Mills and within Mills’ broader community. Format includes lectures, visiting
speakers and field trips within the Mills campus, local neighborhoods, and the Leona creek watershed. Audiovisual tools will tape events, interviews,
and performance pieces for community and public outreach.
DNC 180: ST: Problems in Design
Richard Battle
Designed to allow the intermediate and advanced student in design an opportunity to pursue her interest in any of the three areas of
theatrical design: scenery, costuming, and lighting. Includes, upon successful submission of portfolio designs, the opportunity to design for
productions staged by the department.
EDUC 480: ST: Constructivist Perspectives on Learning, Development, Teaching and Leadership
Linda Kroll
Our goal in this course is twofold: to relate what we know about learning and development from a constructivist perspective to teacher
learning and development, and to think about how our knowledge of teacher learning and development can help us to think about school
leadership from a constructivist perspective. We will review and discuss literature and research on teacher development and learning in
conjunction with considering children’s development and learning, and literature on leadership that supports teacher development and
learning. Thus, we will consider, for example, how children learn mathematics and how their teachers learn to teach in a way that is consonant
with how children learn most effectively. This means that we will not only consider teachers learning about pedagogy, but also teachers
learning about subject matter. Then we will consider how teachers learning about pedagogy and subject matter can be facilitated by school
leaders. To enhance our understanding of these processes, we will also embark on a learning experiment ourselves, choosing a topic of general
interest that we can explore as a group. Finally, each of us (myself included) will be pursuing our own individual inquiry into how either our
students are learning or how we ourselves are learning or both.
EDUC 483: Adv Seminar: Ed Leadership and Change
Delaine Eastin, Janet Holmgren, Jane Bowyer
This course is designed for students who aspire to lead large or small educational organizations including independent schools, large complex
school systems, and non-profit or service organizations. The advanced leadership course encompasses executive leadership in an organization.
Executive leadership is accountable to boards or constituencies, not bosses, for guiding the formulation, execution, and realization of an
organization’s vision, goals, and aspirations. The executive leader assumes responsibility for fostering the elements of an organization’s
effectiveness, including its: 1) values and character; 2) vision and point of view; 3) strategies to coalesce support for fulfilling the organization’s
mission; and 4) goals. All of this occurs in an environment of ever-accelerating change, turmoil, and diminishing leadership authority.
ENG 180/280: ST: Activating the Local
Juliana Spahr
What responsibilities do writers and artists have as activists? As residents of places such as Oakland and students at Mills? How do writers and
artists engage with the public--and just what is that thing we call “the public”?--and local communities? This course will be a survey of literature
and art that engages with local communities in order to affect positive change. We will look at the places where boundaries between the
creative and the critical get very productively confused. Emphasis will be placed on creative thinking, collaborative enterprise, research, and the
creation of writing that respects local--rather than international or global--aesthetics, ecological, and cultural values. We will discuss Oakland’s
complicated history and consider how we might create exemplary works that retell often overlooked local histories.
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The course will feature a series of guest speakers, including both Mills faculty and visiting writers/artists who will be on campus next spring as part of
an Irvine funded series of multicultural and interdisciplinary fine arts programming called "Art and Activism: Activating the Local, Performing the
Local."
The class will look at a variety of writing and projects. These might include: Ishmael Reed’s study of Oakland, “Blues City: A Walk in Oakland,”
Samuel Delany’s lament to the death of Times Square, “Times Square Red Times Square Blue,” Brenda Coultas’s celebratory poem about the
Bowery, “A Handmade Museum;” Gaye Chan’s and Nandita Sharma’s website that presents alternative local histories of Waikiki; Sarah Schulman’s
“People in Trouble,” a novel about AIDS, and her website which collects oral histories of the New York chapter of ACTUP in order to provide a
model for future resistance movements; the local art collective Oaklandish and their street art; Amy Balkin’s public domain project which creates a
permanent international commons; the Oakland Oral History Project, archived at the Olin Library and administrated by Nancy MacKay.
Course assignments will encourage students to initiate and participate in a cumulative community-based event (we will discuss this in class, but
possibilities include a campus-wide performance and/or an interactive website, somewhat on the model of Chan’s and Sharma’s
http://www.downwindproductions.com but with an emphasis on Oakland). Part of the class will involve creative planning sessions and collaboration
with other students and faculty, as well as with community members. Advanced study in literature is not necessary for this course and non-English
majors are more than welcome.
ENG 280: ST: The Inclusion, Exclusion, or Intrusion of the "I": First Person in poetry, fiction and memoir
Elmaz Abinader
This literature course for graduate students investigates poetry and prose that uses the first person point of view or the "I." The effect of designating
author as character and narrator is examined in light of issues of identity of self in the work, intrusion of the author, and effective development of the
characters, perspective and angle of discovery. Boundaries (or the lack thereof) between the author and character, author and narrator, narrator and
character are discussed.
Class requirements: readers responses, oral presentation, in-class writings; final paper.
Readings include works by: Gloria Naylor, Mama Day; Meena Alexander, Raw Silk; Lucille Clifton, Blessing the Boats; Jessica Hagedorn, DogEaters; bell
hooks, Bone Black; ZZ Packer, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere; Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief; Catherine Gildiner, Too Close to the Falls; and Rita Dove The Yellow
House on the Corner. Anthologies include: An Anthology of New American Poets, Lisa Jarnot, etc., ed.; Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache: Adventures in the First
Person, Clint Catalyst and Michelle Tea, eds.
ENG 191/183/283 Senior/Adv Seminar: Oral Traditions
Ajuan Mance
In this class we will explore the ways that the various orally transmitted literary forms that developed in the United States have helped to shape
and define our concepts of literature, aesthetics, and identity. We will read, listen to, and watch performances (videotaped and -- hopefully -live) of a wide variety of those texts whose primary modes of transmission are speech and song. Primary source readings will come from a
variety of sources, including Zora Neale Hurston’s collection of African American folktales, John W. Work’s compilations of the African
American Spirituals, Alan Lomax’s collection of American folk ballads, the Blues and rap music. The most important component in our
course, however, will be performance. We will listen to and watch a variety of performances of America’s various orally transmitted forms, and
students will be required to perform/interpret a few transcribed pages of an orally transmitted text. Assignments will include midterm and final
papers, oral interpretation/performance and occasional written response papers.
ENG 180/280: ST: Queer Theories – Odd Bodies
Rebekah Edwards
This course juxtaposes a survey of queer theory and body criticism, noting their areas of overlap and independence, while closely studying their
perspectives in novels that intensely engage with "the queer
body." We will familiarize ourselves with the central texts and terms from both theoretical fields taking up questions of essentialism,
subjectivity, performativity, transgression, corporeality and normality.
Some of the theorists we will read are: Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis, Gloria Anzaldua, Adrienne Rich, Eve Kosofksy
Sedgwick, Audre Lorde, David Halperin, Elizabeth Grosz, Susan Bordo, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Lennard Davis, Anne Fausto-Sterling.
Likely literary texts are: Barbin, Herculine Barbin; Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey; Woolf, Orlando; McCullers, Ballad of the Sad Cafe; Puig, Kiss of the
Spider Woman; Muhanji, Her; Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night.
ENG 280: ST: The Gothic
Kim Magowan
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
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Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Edgar Allan Poe, Collected Stories
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
This course will explore a genre of literature which proudly intended, as Frankenstein author Mary Shelley put it, “to awaken thrilling
horror…curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.” As a genre, the gothic was both frequently written and voraciously read
by women, and we will consider the gender politics of the gothic, paying particular consideration to its interest in the “dark” sides of
sexuality, childbirth, and maternity. We will examine some familiar gothic tropes: unreliable, often menacing narrators; dark, collapsing
houses closeting mysterious tenants; the grotesque; madwomen in attics; incest; bodies that won’t stay dead. These are not polite, feminine
subjects, and the texts we will read express a self-conscious uneasiness with their shady content. In these novels, we will repeatedly
encounter readers whose reading has pernicious effects on their imagination and their perception of “reality.” A subversive, skeptical
response to the Age of Reason and its conviction that humans are innately rational and observant, these gothic texts question the reliability
of sense perceptions, dramatizing how easily senses can be corrupted or misled. We will also explore how gothic fetishes adapt when
transplanted to modern narrative forms. The ghosts who stalk characters become incarnations of a troubled history: a past that cannot be
safely buried. The fact that the entities which haunt characters reveal themselves to be psychological hallucinations or embodiments of
history does nothing to ease the intensity of their assault. We will see how the gothic shuttles between an urgent need to express –“it’s
because she wants it told” (Absalom, Absalom!)–and to repress, to shut itself up: “this is not a story to pass on” (Beloved).
Please read the following poems and bring copies of them to the first class: “This Living Hand” (John Keats), “One need not be a
Chamber–to be Haunted” (Emily Dickinson), “The Raven” (Edgar Allan Poe), and “Porphyria’s Lover” (Robert Browning).
HIST 180: ST: California/Western History
William Issel
California: the Golden State! Named by Spaniards after a mythical Queen Califia who ruled over a tribe of fierce Amazon warrior women, the native
Indians described it as a place where “you dance on the edge of the world.” In 1888, the English aristocrat James Bryce wrote that “more than any
other part of the Union, [California] is a country by itself.” Thirty years later, Senator James Duval Phelan remarked that “If I owned both Heaven
and California, I would rent out Heaven and live in California.” In 1949, journalist and critic Carey McWilliams characterized the state as “The Great
Exception.” “California” he wrote, “is not another state: it is a revolution within the states.” McWilliams had a point but should have written that
California is not just another state. California is the United States but more so. This course is a survey of California history from the 1700s to the
present, and it covers the major political, economic, social, and cultural dynamics that have characterized the state’s history. Three themes receive
special attention: the contributions of Californians to national debates over liberty, equality, and democracy in relation to human rights and citizenship
rights; the impact on California of international economic trends and international political events; the consequences for California of transnational
social and cultural patterns.
HIST 180: ST: Queer American History
Christine Rose
This course will examine lives, loves, losses, longings, laments, liberations, legislations, and legalizations pertinent to Queer American History. Taking as
our starting point the curiously queer (read: odd) possibilities of its title, we will interrogate “queer,” “American,” and “history,” asking what it means to
take each term seriously and to explore its richly embedded etymological, cultural, and social history. Attentive to the endless possibilities of what it
might mean to tell a story of Queer America, we will examine key figures that the history of anti-heteronormativity has produced in the United States
over the last century or so. Examples of figures include the dandy, the invert, the psycho-dyke, the spinster, the closet case, the pederast, the passer, the
hermaphrodite, the stone butch, the femme, the activist, the fag hag, the queer of color, the bisexual, the drag king, the intersex, the he-she, the
transgender, the transexual, and the lesbian mother. Each figure emerges out of a specific socio-cultural context, and we will ground its corporeal
emergence before looking at how the figure has circulated in culture.
Taking “queer” to be a noun, an adjective, and a verb, we will examine bodies, behaviors, identities, and desires that have counted as queer
(read: odd, perverse, deviant, non-heterosexual, non-normative). We will ask ourselves throughout how to read and write a history of the
not-quite-heterosexual. Attention will also be placed upon how the art of taxonomy works in queer culture, from early 19 th century sexology
to the proliferation of gender-and-sex-queer identities and communities in the 20th-21st centuries. In other words, we will ask how certain
categories, inflected by race, class, gender, ethnicity, age, religion, aesthetics, and sex, circulate as critical constellations through which to
identify, desire, and/or disidentify.
A course reader will be compiled including excerpts from anthologies such as Abelove, Barale, and Halperin’s The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader;
single-authored studies such as Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity, Halperin’s How To Do the History of Homosexuality, Lisa Duggan’s Sapphic
Slashers, Jose Esteban Muñoz’ Disidentifications, Kennedy and Davis’ Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, Siobhan Somerville’s Queering the Color Line,
and Susan Stryker’s Gay By the Bay; and queer journals such as GLQ and The Journal of the History of Sexuality. Film screenings, including The
Children’s Hour, Tongues Untied, The Watermelon Woman, Last Call at Mauds and clips from the L-Word will be scheduled as well.
MCS 180/280: ST: Information Retrieval Systems
Ellen Spertus
One of the most important applications of computer science is
enabling users to find the specific piece of information they desire within the immense space of data available. This noble endeavor builds on
all areas of computer science: theory, systems, artificial intelligence, and user interfaces. This programming-intensive course will focus on the
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efficient representation and use of textual data and indices for traditional information retrieval domains and the World-Wide Web.
Pre-requisites: MCS 111, MCS 124
Co-requisites: MCS 122
Satisfies the undergraduate computer science major software
engineering requirement.
MGMT 280: ST: Consulting, Capital Markets, and Real Estate
Sullivan, Verges and Barad
This course provides an in-depth understanding of three business disciplines. Recent areas examined were Management Consulting, Capital
Markets, and Real Estate. The instructors, one for each five- week segment, are business professionals currently working in these fields. They
familiarize students with the overall scope of the field, the variety of transactions that take place, and the specialty areas that exist. By doing
hands-on projects, students are introduced to skills necessary for success in these specialties.
MGMT 283: Seminar in Entrepreneurship
Nancy Williams
Entrepreneurship is the engine of economic growth in our society. New ventures create jobs, foster product innovation, and generate wealth
and well being for founders, employees, investors, and communities. That said, new businesses are also risky, requiring would-be entrepreneurs
and investors to “go in with their eyes
open.” This course will delve deeply into a wide range of entrepreneurship topics with the goal of preparing aspiring business owners for
success. Students will be required to research and write a business plan which will be evaluated by investor representatives and small business
experts. Note: the course will not cover non-profit start-ups, however, many of the skills and perspectives useful in a business setting can be
applied to the non-profit sector.
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PSYC 180: ST: Social Personality Seminar
Dean Morier
An examination of advanced research topics in Personality and Social Psychology, this seminar will examine the topic of risk taking. Research
on risk taking, the avoidance of risk, health threats, social perception, and the personality of sensation seekers will be the focus
of the course. Prerequisite: Psychology 49
SPAN 180: ST: Latin American Travel Narratives
Carlota Caulfield
Travel literature spans centuries and continents, embracing a variety of genres: autobiographies, chronicles, diaries or journals, travel letters, memoirs,
cuadros de costumbres, reports, and more. The theme of the journey constitutes the organizing principle in accounts of factual or fictional travels. The
theme has been used effectively to entertain, to instruct, to philosophize, to criticize or even satirize, and to create the illusion that the reading
experience is a journey. To understand the world, distant and near, proves to be mind-expanding, not only for the narrator or protagonist but also for
the reader. The figure of the traveler has been represented as a person motivated by a thirst for adventure or knowledge.
This course will deal with many categories of travel literature. We will read prose and poetry. We will read texts of metaphorical and literal journeys.
We will witness voyages of self-discovery and many adventures. We will meet many travelers: antiheroes and antiheroines, pícaros and pícaras,
cross-dressed women, pilgrims, heroes and heroines, adventurers, daydreamers, flâneurs and flâneuses, among others.
We will read texts by Anónimo, Martín, Adán, Reinaldo Arenas, Carmen Boullosa, Alejo Carpentier, Ana Castillo, Catalina de Erauso, Luisa
Futoransky, and Sara Sefchovich, among others.
This course will offer many opportunities for exploring, researching, and presenting your own interests in this subject over the course of the
semester. This will be a lecture and discussion course.
WMST 180: ST: Women in World Religions: Gendered Experience and the Sacred in the Traditions of the West
Judith Bishop
This course takes a historical and comparative look at ways in which women have understood and experienced gender and leadership roles, meaning
and self-understanding in Native American, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Traditional African religious traditions. Included will be a discussion of
women's traditional roles and status, the many ways in
which women themselves have understood their identity in terms of cultural and religious participation, and recent feminist efforts to reevaluate and
transform contemporary, yet culturally grounded, religious life. Attitudes toward the body--involving sexuality, purity, fertility, and seclusion--will be
examined in a comparative context as will the meanings of gender in religious symbolism, myth and ritual. As much as possible, we will be drawing on
the words and images of women themselves. Readings will include scriptural writings, poetry, religious narratives, autobiography, musical texts, and
critical theory in order to explore the question: What does the experience of religious women contribute to an awareness of the sacred, to the
understanding of community, and, ultimately, to the meaning of being human?