WRC 1104. 101 Investigations Global: History Food Lab
- Gen Ed Designation: Intercultural Literacy and Literary Studies Designation
- Instructor: Dr. Joseph Gonzalez
- Time: TR 11:00 am - 1:45 pm & TR 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm
Imagine a world without sugar, chocolate, tea, or coffee. Envision a world without wheat, corn, rice, potatoes—or alcohol of any kind. Now visualize your diet. It probably seems pretty paltry, doesn’t it?
Well, fortunately that’s not the world we live in. Mercifully for us all, our ancestors created what we think of as “food” over many, many millennia, largely through trial and error. The result has been a rich diversity of cuisines, all of them unique, each indicative of the people who embraced it.
In this class, we will examine how the great cuisines of the world came to be. Along the way, we will explore why and when certain animals and plants became “food,” and how those foods traveled great distances with the humans who valued them.
For our part, we will also travel great distances in time and space, from the first fires of the first hominids, to the elite restaurants of today. We will also read from a variety of sources and genres, engaging with memoirs, sacred texts, historical texts, and even cookbooks.
We will also meet with local restaurateurs who are doing interesting things with food in our community for our community.
And we will research. In conjunction with other Wataugans, you will prepare a meal from the past; you will make a video of your attempt, showing how you created what you created to other Wataugans. Your group will also produce a home for your meal--a restaurant of your very own design, using materials from the maker space in the library.
Come join us. It will be a banquet you will not soon forget.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 1104.410
WRC 1104.102 Investigations Global: Science and Nature in Literature
- Gen Ed Designation: Intercultural Literacy and Literary Studies Designation
- Instructor: Dr. Michael Dale
- Time: TR 11:00 am to 1:45 pm & MW 2:00 pm -3:15 pm
In 1952 Rachel Carson received the National Book Award for The Sea Around Us. In her acceptance speech she explained: The aim of science is to discover and illuminate the truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography, history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science … If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.
Living in relationships with the natural world (land, oceans, and the larger universe of galaxies and star systems) and reaching for an understanding of nature provides fertile ground for novelists, short-story writers, and writers of narrative non-fiction. In this seminar we will explore and examine the intellectual and emotional landscape of fictional and non-fiction beings as they are immersed in and navigate the world of science and nature. What happens when the sciences and humanities meet? What do we learn about science and the all-too-human human beings who pursue scientific knowledge and understanding when both are brought together on the landscapes of novels, short stories, poems, and essays? What do we hear from the voices of science and scientists in narrative literature and poetry?
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 1104.411
WRC 1104.103 INVESTIGATIONS GLOBAL: Mapping Monsters
- Gen Ed Designation: Liberal Studies Experience and Literary Studies Designation
- Instructor: Dr. Audrey Fessler
- Time: TR 11:00 am - 1:45 pm & MW 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm
This course will range across many eras and cultures to explore diverse monsters and their psychological and social functions. Andrew J. Hoffman, in his anthology Monsters, posits that "Monsters are not merely entertainment. The study of monsters is the study of what it means to be human in a world that provides much to fear and avoid. Since time immemorial, people have had to deal with fear: fear of the wild, fear of the unknown, even fear of each other. Monsters may be a repository for much that is negative in human experience. In this way, monsters provide us with the opportunity to connect to important issues of society, psychology, science, medicine, art, and religion" (3). Analyses by scholars from many fields—including classical studies, critical studies, cultural anthropology, history, monster theory (yes!), sociology, philosophy, psychology, religion, and urban theory—will inform our responses to primary sources of monster lore. Course work will include weekly reading reflections, frequent quizzes, occasional leadership of portions of class discussion, and two research projects with accompanying research presentations.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 1104.412
WRC 1104.104: Investigations Global: America, Climate, and the Environment
- Gen Ed Designation: Intercultural Literacy and Literary Studies Designation
- Instructor: Dr. Clark Maddux
- Time: TR 11:00 am - 1:45 pm & TR 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm
In this course, we will examine how literature, history, and naturalist and scientific writing informs, questions, and constructs our stories about our sense of place and the climatological and environmental outcomes arising from them. This course uses long and well-established traditions of American Studies to cross disciplinary boundaries and explore the spaces in between them to examine how America becomes America in relation to the environment and climate. Throughout the term, we will explore how our relationship to place is as much about how we live in our world, as it is an idea of the limits of governance or beliefs in liberty and equality. From the 17th century to the present, who we are is almost always where we are in America, and where we are is affected, always radically, by consequences of our thought as well as our mere presence.
Students will need to purchase physical copies of the following texts:
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
Sanora Babb, Whose Names Are Unknown
John Brunner, The Sheep Look UpAmitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 1104.413
WRC 2001.101 28607: DAYS IN THE LIFE
Gen Ed Attribute: Sophomore Writing, Fills ENG/RC 2001 requirements
Instructor: Professor Cary Curlee
Time: MW 2:00 pm-3:15 pm
Days in The Life: Mountain Messages, will introduce students to writing across the curriculum using poems, essays, short stories and scientific texts. Readings in the course will touch spiritual, cultural, and environmental aspects of living in Appalachia and beyond. Our exercises will hone research and analytical skills learned in WRC 1000 while introducing you to writing and reading across academic disciplines. We will take a rhetorical approach to reading and writing across the curriculum and students will engage in more independent work and more involved research. We will read texts from a variety of academic disciplines, including analyses of disciplinary writing in order to identify other writers’ rhetorical choices and discipline-specific writing strategies and conventions. Our writing projects, some of which will entail independent research, will provide you opportunities to make effective choices in your own writing for specific purposes and academic communities, and using various digital methods. Learning to assess different writing situations and make effective context-specific rhetorical choices should prepare you to meet writing challenges in the future, whether it be for another college course, on the job, or for civic or personal reasons.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 2001.410
WRC 2001.102 28607: DAYS IN THE LIFE
Gen Ed Attribute: Sophomore Writing, Fills ENG/RC 2001 requirements
Instructor: Professor Cary Curlee
Time: TR 2:00 pm-3:15 pm
Days in The Life: Mountain Messages, will introduce students to writing across the curriculum using poems, essays, short stories and scientific texts. Readings in the course will touch spiritual, cultural, and environmental aspects of living in Appalachia and beyond. Our exercises will hone research and analytical skills learned in WRC 1000 while introducing you to writing and reading across academic disciplines. We will take a rhetorical approach to reading and writing across the curriculum and students will engage in more independent work and more involved research. We will read texts from a variety of academic disciplines, including analyses of disciplinary writing in order to identify other writers’ rhetorical choices and discipline-specific writing strategies and conventions. Our writing projects, some of which will entail independent research, will provide you opportunities to make effective choices in your own writing for specific purposes and academic communities, and using various digital methods. Learning to assess different writing situations and make effective context-specific rhetorical choices should prepare you to meet writing challenges in the future, whether it be for another college course, on the job, or for civic or personal reasons.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 2001.411
WRC 2100.101 THE LIVES OF ANIMALS
- Gen Ed Designation: Sustainability and Climate Literacy
- Instructor: Dr. Jeanne Dubino
- Time: TR 9:30-10:45 am
WRC 2100 The Lives of Animals examines multiple intersections and ties between human animals and nonhuman animals. In this interdisciplinary course we humans consider how we share our planet with other species. We will consider representations of the lives of animals and humans together—as pets and companion animals, as food and in experimentation, in the wild and as spectacle (for example, in the internet and in zoos), and more. Along the way we will dive into the ethical dimensions of our relationships with our fellow creatures. Some possible texts include Paul Auster’s Timbuktu, about an unhoused man traveling around the US with his dog; Thom Van Dooren’s Flight Ways, on the communities we humans form with wild animals, with a focus on birds; Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife, about two Polish zookeepers who lived during the Nazi invasion of Poland; and Kathryn Gillespie’s The Cow with Ear Tag #1389, about the lives of dairy cows and bulls.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 2100.410
WRC 2201.101 HEARING VOICES. INQUIRY IN LITERATURE
- Gen Ed Designation: Lit Studies and Humanity and its Systems
- Instructor:
- Time: TR 9:30-10:45 am
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 2201.410
WRC 2202.101 and 102 HEARING VOICES. INQUIRY IN LITERATURE
- Gen Ed Designation: His Studies and Intercultural Literacy
- Instructor:
- Time: TR 9:30-10:45 am
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 2202.410 and 411
WRC 3203.101 WHY ART? WAYS OF RESPONDING TO THE WORLD AROUND US
- Gen Ed Designation: Fine Arts and Sustainability and Climate Literacy
- Instructor: Professor Mel Falck
- Time: W 5:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Through creative and collaborative exercises, we will engage in art making as an experimental practice. By developing an awareness of contemporary art and visual culture, we will explore the ways that art impacts our lives and those around us. In Why Art? we will create projects that contend with social, political, environmental, economic and/or culturally-relevant topics.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 3203.410
WRC 3210.101 Poverty: Theory and Practice
- Gen Ed Designation: Lit Studies designation and Intercultural Literacy
- Instructor: Dr. Jeffrey Bortz
- Time: W 5:00 pm - 7:50 pm
This course introduces students to the theories and history of poverty, with an emphasis on learning the historical and social contexts of poverty, in part through experiential or service-learning.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 3210.410 Cross listed with HIS 3210 101
WRC 3401.101 MYTH AND MEANING
- Gen Ed Designation: Lit Studies designation and Intercultural Literacy
- Instructor: Dr. Laura Ammon
- Time: MW 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm
WRC 3401 Myths are the stories we tell about the world, exploring and explaining humanity's place in the past, the present and the future offering insights on what it means to be human. This course will explore various expressions of myth, from the real world examples such as the Aztecs to contemporary mythic tales like Spirited Away and Black Panther. We will explore how these myths construct meaningful imaginative worlds within specific historical, cultural, and literary contexts. We will cover an assortment of myths, rituals, symbols that construct the worldviews of various communities, investigating conflict, syncretism, and hybridity in differing global encounters, and how that conflict impacts the stories humans tell about their place in the world. This investigation is necessarily an interpretive journey involving theoretical approaches to the role of mythology in human cultures and religions.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 3401.410
WRC 4001.101 SEMINAR IN EXPERIENTIAL INTEGRATIVE LEARNING
- Instructor: Dr. Laura Ammon
- Time: TR 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm
WRC 4001 What does it mean to create and sustain a residential college such as Watauga? This class will explore WRC's past, present, and future, working on creative ways to take integrative, experiential education into the future through appreciation of its past. We will talk with former directors, faculty and alumni as well as connect with other residential colleges.