Academic Affairs

As part of a recent, comprehensive revision of its mission and curriculum, the Department of Theater and Dance has added several new courses, including Performance in the 21^st Century; Theater, Dance, and the Common Good; and Performance and Narrative.  The 21^st century is clearly a hypertrophied and accelerated age, and these courses represent our attempt to create a curriculum for that age, one that prepares students to think critically about and respond creatively to its complexities and challenges.  A seminal course in this series, however, is one yet to be formally proposed: Digital Media and Live Performance.  My goal in submitting this proposal is to obtain the funding necessary to develop this course over the next year, so that it can be offered in the Fall of 2010.  After that, the course would be offered every other year.

The course will trace the ways notions of identity – including global, national, ethnic, caste, and individual – have changed among groups in the Himalayas in response to recent political, economic, and historical circumstances.  The course focuses on the influence of culture on identity formation and the deployment of identity in a political fashion in the Himalayan region.  We will pay particular attention to the ways in which the global intersects with local constructions of identity.  Topics include Hindu caste and gender hierarchies, constructions of ethnicity, Tibetans and tourists, Sherpas and mountaineers, development ideologies, and consumerism.

A Journey Around Macondo proposes a trip to the genesis of One Hundred Years of Solitude as a means to enrich the reading of this master work and students’ understanding of the main topics, techniques and contributions of Colombian Nobel Prize Winner Gabriel García Márquez. Three particular locations are critical to the development of the narrative voice that will materialize in the writer’s first major novel: Aracataca, Cartagena and Barranquilla. If approved, funds from the Course Development Award will be used to collect written and visual materials that will support the students’ journey to these spaces and times.    

My new course, Political Economy of Pan-Americanism, examines programs for economic and political integration of the Americas from the early nineteenth century to the present. The International Perspectives angle of the course consists of an exploration of the material and ideological motives for hemispheric integration not only for the United States, but also for its partners. To collect evidence of the partners' motives presents a challenge: most of the published sources are preoccupied mainly with the U.S. perspective or, if they represent the Latin American view, focus on the period after the Second World War.

We need to rethink and reshape our existing cities along new ecological lines and, at the same time, we need to develop a set of organizing principles to create new cities. Does the Ecological city leave any place for contingency? What is the role of aesthetics to be in a sustainable city? What are the social costs of the sustainable city? What new forms of mobilitiy should our cities include? What role will they play in shaping a new urban form? With what materials should we build the city of the future? And, what have we learned from our mistakes and achievements in our previous attempts at city building.

An examination of the transnational history of North and South America over the past five hundred years. Students will explore this through directed readings on specific themes including exploration and imperial conquest, trade, migration, labor, warfare, and biological exchange, culminating in an original research paper, based on primary and secondary source research, to meet the requirements of their major.”

This course builds upon an important but, for the most part, a still unrealized direction in teaching at Bowdoin—to examine traditional historical subjects in their transnational or global context. To date, most history courses at Bowdoin remain bound to their national or thematic focus. Few look at subjects in comparative perspective. This course is part of a growing initiative, at Bowdoin and in the historical profession as a whole, to teach and research the transnational context of particular historical subjects.

I have been accepted as a participant in a National Science Foundation workshop on “Systematic Techniques for Gathering and Analyzing Video Data” which will take place in Beaufort, North Carolina from 27th-31st of July, 2009. This NSF Short Course on Research Methods (or SCRM) is aimed at enhancing the methodological training of PhDs in Anthropology and the students we teach. Although I have received some training in digital video editing (from Bowdoin’s IT), this SCRM is specifically directed towards gathering and analyzing ethnographic data. Participating in this intensive course would enable me to gain necessary technical background within a context that highlights the methodological concerns specific to my discipline. This would contribute immeasurably to my pedagogical and scholarly endeavors over the next several years. The NSF covers most of the costs of my participation in the SCRM; I am requesting funding from Bowdoin for the remaining travel and housing expenses.

Cross listed with Africana Studies, Women Studies and Latin American Program, Voices of Women, Voices of the People is an advanced level course that has been taught before and which examines literary texts produced by women in francophone countries of the Caribbean and Africa. The course uses interdisciplinary perspectives and draws in sociology, anthropology, literary theory, philosophy and history to analyze the ways  women writers articulate thematics ranging from colonization, to slavery, to female emancipation, to male and female relationships, motherhood, history, social and economic development, childhood, religion, initiatic growth, modernity and traditions.

Francophone cultures is cross listed with Africana Studies and the Latin American Program. It is an advanced level course taught each fall semester and designed to introduce students to and raise awareness on the richness and singularity of what is now called la Francophonie, that is, those regions of the world in which French is spoken outside of France. In addition to literary texts students read news articles and view films to study sociological, historical, anthropological, and cultural facts pertaining to francophone countries, principally from Africa and the Caribbean. A particular effort is made to expose students directly to cultural artifacts and this next semester voodoo will be an important aspect of the course as exploited literarily. It will also be studied through concrete anthropological and religious perspectives.