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Interdisciplinary Course Archive

You are welcome to explore and use materials for educational purposes from this interdisciplinary course archive. Although they are categorized below by a primary academic discipline, they all share an interdisciplinary spirit, and you will find a mixing of humanities, social sciences and sciences throughout each of these courses that were taught at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges.

Jump to: 360 | Athletics | Biology | Chemistry | College Seminar | Computer Science | Disability Studies | E-Seminar Liberal Arts | Economics | Education | English | Environmental Studies | Gender and Sexuality Studies | General Studies | Philosophy | Political Science | Psychology | Social Work

 

"360" - 3 Courses Taught Contemporaneously


Arts of Resistance
A cluster of three courses in a 360° about the constraints and agency of individual actors in social spaces, with a particular focus on the institutional settings of colleges and prisons and the “critical spaces” that can open up within them.

 

Eco-Literacy 360
This Eco-Literacy 360° cluster considers our participation in the environment from the perspectives of economics, education, and various forms of literary and visual expression.

 

Identity Matters 360: Being, Belonging, Becoming
This cluster of courses, which have been co-designed by professors with shared interests in disability studies, gender studies, human development, literature, social work, visual studies and writing, considers how multiple systems of identity, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson says, “intertwine, redefine, and mutually constitute one another.”

 

Women in Walled Communities 360: Silence, Voice, Vision
A cluster of three courses in a 360° that focuses on the constraints and agency of individual actors in the institutional settings of women's colleges and prisons.

 

Athletics

Women, Sport and Film: a series that explores the role of women and sport as seen through documentaries and popular film.

 

Biology

Biology 103: a one-semester introductory biology course.

Biology 202: an introduction to the prospects and problems of trying to understand behavior in terms of nervous system function

Biology 223: The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories: Exploring the Significance of Diversity

This course experiments with two interrelated and reciprocal inquiries: whether the biological concept of evolution is a useful one in understanding the phenomena of literature (in particular: the generation of new stories), and whether literature contributes to a deeper understanding of evolution. Also see English 223.

Biology 245: Mental Health and the Brain, 2008 - A seminar course exploring implications of past and ongoing research on the brain for thinking about the nature of mental health and about the value of various therapeutic and institutional approaches to mental health problems.

Senior Seminar: Biology 396 / Psychology 396, Neural and Behavioral Sciences, 2010

Senior Seminar: Neural and Behavrioral Sciences, 2008 - This course explores some of the opportunities and risks being opened up by past, ongoing, and anticipated research in the neural and behavioral sciences, in ways that make such explorations accessible to broader and continuing engagement by the public at large.

Senior Seminar: Nature, Nurture and Evolution, 2002 - a discussion of the significance of genetics and evolution for understanding human behavior.

Senior Seminar: Exploring the Consciousness Problem, 1999 - a resource base for examining what is consciousness? can it be productively explored scientifically? what are the best routes for such exploration?

Biology 361: Emergence, 2009
Biology 361: Emergence, 2006 - Crosslisted as Computer Science 361

Biology 390: Biodiversity

Biology 398: Biology in Society

 

Chemistry

Chemistry 100: The Stuff of Art: a one semester course on art and chemistry, 2010
Chemistry 100: The Stuff of Art: a one semester course on art and chemistry, 2004-2006

 

College Seminar Courses

In Class/OutClassed: On the Uses of a Liberal Education, 2011 - This course is an invitation to reflect on the assumptions that shape education in the U.S., as well as on the habits of thought and action it encourages.

Food for Thought: The Omnivore's Dilemma, 2009

Food for Thought: The Omnivore's Dilemma, 2008 - This College Seminar was designed by a biologist and a literary critic to explore how we--as “free thinkers” with “open-ended human appetites”--might learn to make thoughtful decisions in a world that we may experience alternatively as both too-constrained and too-bountiful. We will draw on disciplines ranging from statistics to food studies--including anthropology, neurobiology, philosophy, psychology and literary interpretation.

Beauty, a Conversation between Chemistry and Culture, 2005

Memory and Imagination: The Self in Story and Society, 2004 - How do our human memories and imaginations give rise to the stories we tell and to the selves that we are becoming? In this course we consider the nature of memory and its relationship to imagination, both in the evolving life of the individual and in the development of the larger group or culture.

The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories: Exploring the Significance of Diversity, 2004 - This course experiments with two interrelated and reciprocal inquiries: whether the biological concept of evolution is a useful one in understanding the phenomena of literature (in particular: the generation of new stories), and whether literature contributes to a deeper understanding of evolution.

Questions, Intuitions, Revisions: Story Telling as Inquiry, 2007

Questions, Intuitions, Revisions: Storytelling as Inquiry, 2006

Questions, Intuitions, Revisions: Storytelling as Inquiry, 2005

Questions, Intuitions, Revisions: Telling and Re-Telling Stories About Ourselves in the World, 2004

Questions, Intuitions, Revisions: Telling and Re-Telling Stories About Ourselves in the World, 2003

Questions, Intuitions, Revisions: Telling and Re-Telling Stories about Ourselves in the World, 2002 - co-designed by teachers of Biology, English and Folklore to explore the variety of ways in which we are all continually reaching for new understandings.

Questions, Intuitions, Revisions: Telling and Re-Telling Stories about Ourselves in the World, 2001 - co-designed by members of the Biology and English faculty to explore the variety of ways in which we are all continually reaching for new understandings.

The Nature of Inquiry: Story Telling and Re-Telling in the Sciences and the Humanities, 2000 - co-designed by faculty from the Departments of Anthropology, Biology, and English, explores the processes involved in telling and retelling stories, an activity in which all humans engage and one which is fundamental to intellectual and academic activities of every kind.

Human Understanding and Aspiration in a Material World, 1997 : a consideration of the similarities, complementarities , and differences between scientific and literary perspectives on the human condition, with a focus on such questions as the nature of truth and reality, and the relation between physical reality and the pictures of it generated by the human brain

 

Computer Science

Gender, Information, Science and Technology, 2011

Computer Science 361: Emergence, 2006 - Crosslisted as Biology 361

 

Disability Studies

Critical Disability Studies 2022
Critical Disability Studies 2021
Critical Disability Studies 2020
Critical Disability Studies 2019
Critical Disability Studies: Theory and Practice 2018
Critical Disability Studies 2017
Critical Disability Studies 2016

Portraits of Disability 2022
Portraits of Disability 2021
Portraits of Disability 2020
Portraits of Disability 2019
Portraits of Disability 2018
Portraits of Disability and Difference 2017
Portraits of Disability and Difference

 

E-Sem, Liberal Arts Courses for First Year Undergraduates

Changing Our Story, 2016
Changing Our Story ESEM: Shifting Identities, Altering Environments, 2014

Ecological Imaginings ESEM, 2012

Play in the City, 2013

 

Economics

Economics 136: Working with Economic Data: Valuing the Environment

 

Education

Advocating Diversity in Higher Education 2017 (* private)
Advocating Diversity in Higher Education

Breaking Esem 2013
Breaking Esem 2012

Changing Our Story 2016

Critical Issues in Education 2016
Critical Issues in Education - Fall 2015
Critical Issues in Education - Spring 2015
Critical Issues in Education 2014
Critical Issues in Education 2013

Education, Technology and Society 2015
Education, Technology and Society 2013
Education, Technology, and Society 2012

Empowering Learners 2016
Empowering Learners 2015
Empowering Learners 2014

Education 244: Unsettling Literacy 2017

Identity, Access and Innovation in Education

Identity Matters 360: Being, Belonging, Becoming

Literacies and Education 2013
Literacies and Education 2012

Education Fieldwork

Multicultural Education 2015
Multicultural Education 2014
Multicultural Education 2013

Education 208: Race-ing Education

Schools in American Cities 2017
Schools in American Cities

Education 225: Empowering Learners: Theory and Practice of Extra-Classroom Teaching
Education 225: Empowering Learners: Theory and Practice of Extra-Classroom Teaching

 

English

English 207: Big Books of American Literature, 2006 -"Alchemies of Mind": The Emotional Landscape of Classical Nineteenth-Century Texts
English 207: Big Books of American Literature, 2003 - a (re-?) turn to the grand old mid-19th-century American literature narratives, (re-?) reading them through the lenses of contemporary theory and contemporary culture.

English 209: Literary Kinds, Emerging Genres, 2012
English 209: Literary Kinds: Thinking Through Genre, From Blogs to...?, 2010
English 209: Emerging Genres: Form and Transformation, From Novels to Blogs, 2008 - This course will look at the ways new genres evolve, and ask what aesthetic, cultural and political purposes those transformations may serve. The class will take as its point of departure a longstanding reliance on the Darwinian theory of evolution as the model for the development of literary forms.

English 212: Thinking Sex: Representing Desire and Difference, 2003
English 212: Thinking Sex: Representing Desire and Difference, 2002 - examining our ability to put sexual experience into language, and whether doing so is an expression of sexual (or some other kind of?) agency.

English 218: Ecological Imaginings 2015

English 223:The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories: Exploring the Significance of Diversity, 2011
English 223: The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories: Exploring the Significance of Diversity, 2009
English 223: The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories: Exploring the Significance of Diversity, 2007
English 223: The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories: Exploring the Significance of Diversity, 2005
English 223: The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories: Exploring the Significance of Diversity, 2004 - This course experiments with two interrelated and reciprocal inquiries: whether the biological concept of evolution is a useful one in understanding the phenomena of literature (in particular: the generation of new stories), and whether literature contributes to a deeper understanding of evolution.

English 271: “House of Wits”: The Intersecting Wor(l)ds of Alice, Henry and William James, 2010 - This course is conceptualized as an extended visit with one of America’s most interesting and influential families: the unruly, expansive children of Henry James, Sr. We will focus on the remarkable writings of three of them: the diarist Alice, who became a feminist icon; the great novelist Henry; and the groundbreaking psychologist and philosopher William.

English 244: Unsettling Literacy 2017 

English 293: Critical Feminist Studies 2013
English 293: Critical Feminist Studies 2012
English 293: Critical Feminist Studies: An Introduction, 2008
English 293: Critical Feminist Studies: An Introduction, 2007

 

Environmental Studies

Ecological Imaginings, 2015 - crosslisted in English and Gender and Sexuality

Eco-Literacy 360, 2014 - a trio of courses: Economics, Education, and English

 

Gender and Sexuality Program

Precarious, Performative, Playful, Potential ... Perspectives on Sex and Gender, 2011 - a junior seminar in the Gender and Sexuality Program, Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges

GASWorks: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Gender And Sexuality

Gender and Science: Re-envisioning and Revising the Relation, 2007

Playing with Categories: Re-doing the Politics of Sex and Gender, 2005 - a junior seminar in the Gender and Sexuality Program, Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges

Knowing the Body: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Sex and Gender, 2004 - the core course for the Feminist and Gender Studies Program, Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges

Also see listings under Computer Science, Disability Studies, English, Environmental Studies, E-Sem

 

General Studies

Mental Health — A BioPsychoSocial Perspective, 2002 - provide participants an opportunity to examine the concept "mental health" from a variety of perspectives (biological, psychological, and social/cultural/political), and to gain first hand experience with mental health services via a field placement in a community-based health, mental health, or social service agency.

 

Philosophy

Philosophy 310: Ideals of Scientific Exploration and the Nature of its Objects, 2008
Philosophy 310: Ideals of Scientific Exploration and the Nature of its Objects, 2006
Philosophy 310: Ideals of Scientific Exploration and the Nature of its Objects, 2005
Philosophy 310: Ideals of Scientific Exploration and the Nature of its Objects, 2003 - examining aims of scientific explanation, the realist/anti-realist controversy in the philosphy of science and the idea of growth of scientific knowledge.

 

Political Science

Political Science 291: Arts of Freedom

 

Psychology

Senior Seminar: Biology 396 / Psychology 396, Neural and Behavioral Sciences, 2010

 

Social Work

Social Work 556: Adult Development and Aging