Varieties of Human Experience

Other courses in Reed’s Humanities Program

Humans make things. We make art, literature, philosophy, history, religion, music, science, and political and social order. Through these, we express ourselves, experience our lives, and find meaning and beauty in them. In studying the humanities, we delve into who we are and how we got here. We investigate the world and systems we have made for ourselves. And question them.

Reed’s curriculum is distinctive in its dedication to multidisciplinary inquiry that revolves around the humanities. From the first-year Introduction to Humanities to Senior Symposium, these courses exemplify the kind of inquiry at the heart of a liberal arts education, developing a multidisciplinary mindset and honing critical thinking. These courses emphasize the development of thought while also immersing students deeply in diverse cultural contexts. They range over swaths of human history, spark intellectual curiosity, and deepen students’ understanding of human histories, cultures, identities, and the texts and ideas that emerge from them.

Hum 110: Introduction to the Humanities

As the only course required of all first-year students at Reed, Hum 110 serves as the college’s foundational writing course and introduces students to the skills and habits of mind necessary for academic inquiry in their future work at Reed. The current first-year humanities curriculum ranges widely over time and space, from the diverse cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and a deep dive into classical Greece in the fall to close looks at two of the Western Hemisphere’s great urban centers in the spring, Tenochtitlan/Mexico City and Harlem.

Hum 220: Modern European Humanities

Hum 220 studies transformations of ideas, political institutions, social structures, and artistic expression from the Enlightenment to the mid20th century. It delves into the events that built the modern era, from the French Revolution to the Bolshevik Revolution, and covers topics like empire, colonialism, psychoanalysis, and modernist art. Hum 231/232: Foundations of Chinese Civilizations

Covering the periods of the Qin and Han dynasties (Hum 231) and the Song dynasty (Hum 232), the interdisciplinary Chinese humanities program examines two of the most significant moments in Chinese history through the lenses of art, history, literature, philosophy, and religion, with emphasis placed on reading primary source materials, engaging in close analyses of artifacts, and examining the ways in which the distant past and a non-Western culture might help students navigate and nuance their contemporary moment.

Senior Symposium

In seminars led by small teams of faculty, this course turns the lens onto our own era, discussing how various authors and artists present and interrogate problems of our age, from the political to the personal. Selected works comprise a variety of genres, such as memoir, graphic novel, short fiction, poetry, sociological case study, film, and investigative journalism.

lauren labarre Humanities 211/212 Faculty

Michael P. Breen is professor of history and humanities and editor-inchief of H-France (www.hfrance.net). A historian of early modern Europe, he has published Law, City, and King: Legal Culture, Municipal Politics, and State Formation in Early Modern Dijon (2007), as well as numerous articles on early modern legal, social, and cultural history. “Hum 211/212 is a joy to teach. Examining these incredibly rich and complex materials with students never ceases to teach me something new. The course provides a wonderful introduction to a fascinating period while also prompting us to think about questions and problems of vital importance in the present.” Michael Faletra is professor of English and humanities at Reed, where he teaches and writes about the literatures of the Middle Ages. He is the author of Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination, translator and editor of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, and cotranslator of Until She Beckons: Poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym.

“I see it as my central vocation at Reed to explore alongside my students the vibrant imaginative worlds of medieval and early modern writers, artists, and thinkers. The Birth of the Modern enables us to take the ‘long view’ and to consider deeply how nothing we take for granted about our modern secular world—our technologies or philosophies, our political structures, our attitudes toward art or religion or ourselves—is inevitable.”

Dana E. Katz is Joshua C. Taylor Professor of Art History and Humanities at Reed. Her research explores representations of religious difference in early modern European art. She is the author of The Jew in the Art of the

Italian Renaissance (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) and The Jewish Ghetto and the Visual

Imagination of Early Modern Venice (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Her current book project, “Materials of Islam in Premodern Europe,” studies the material effect of Christian and Muslim encounters.

“Teaching Hum 211/212 has been one of the great pleasures of my teaching career. I profit from my Reed students, who read the primary sources, as well as the modern theoretical texts, treated in class with care to ignite dynamic classroom discussions. I also benefit immensely from collaborating with my Reed colleagues. They have motivated me to think between and through disciplinary boundaries and to draw from the disparate approaches of cognate disciplines in analyzing early modernity. My colleagues have delivered lectures in the course that reaffirm my scholarly commitment to and pedagogical interest in interdisciplinarity. Such methodological richness, analyzed through the lens of the Reed classroom, has pushed my own scholarship in new directions.” Lucía Martínez Valdivia is associate professor of English and humanities at Reed, where she teaches courses on early modern poetry, poetics, and aesthetic and phenomenological theory. She has published extensively on early modern English poetic form, music, and verse history, and is at work on a book about reading and audiation, or the mind’s ear. For 2021–22, she is an external faculty fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.

“I adore teaching in Hum 211/212. The syllabuses include some of my favorite texts, works of art, and even composers, and it’s an incredible privilege to introduce students to them. I get a chance to dwell at length in my areas of expertise, lecturing on texts like The Book of the Courtier, with its influential thoughts on politics and personal style, or on the music of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, in which I lead the class in singing examples. We have time to read and think slowly and carefully, which has fostered some incredible and even revelatory discussions and papers. I also love the context and insights provided by my colleagues in their lectures, which help expand my view beyond early modern England to the bigger European picture.”