Featured BA Courses

BA students can select courses from more than 50 academic departments and interdisciplinary programs from across the School of Arts and Sciences. You may choose evening courses from the LPS Course Guide. For a full roster of courses, including those offered during the day, visit the Penn Registrar’s web site pages including the Course timetable, the Penn Course Register and department, program and graduate group web sites.

Featured Spring 2011 Courses

ENGL 102 601
Study of a Literary Theme: Gothic
Deborah Burnham
Fulfills Arts & Letters Sector

A look at various manifestations of the gothic in fiction and nonfiction prose. We’ll begin with a quick look at the ur-Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, then proceed to Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights. Moving across the ocean, we’ll look at American Gothic, which is dramatically different from its British parents. We’ll read tales by Hawthorne, Melville and Poe, and then venture into the ghost story with Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. We’ll meet another ghost in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, then explore nonfiction prose with Capote’s In Cold Blood and Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle. We’ll also see clips from the many film versions of these texts. Requirements include brief weekly reading responses, a mid-term and a take-home final.

HSOC 259 601
Introduction to Complementary and Alternative Medicine
Elizabeth Mackenzie

This course will present the study of health traditions in the field of folklore and folklife. It is designed to explore the value of this approach to disciplines and individuals as they simultaneously bear upon all human experience with, communication about, and understanding of illness, disease and healing.

HIST 097 401
History of Modern China
Leander Seah
Fulfills History & Tradition Sector

From an empire to a republic, from communism to socialist-style capitalism, few countries have ever witnessed so much change in a hundred year period as China during the twentieth century. How are we to make sense out of this seeming chaos? This course will offer an overview of the upheavals that China has experienced from the late Qing to the Post-Mao era, interspersed with personal perspectives revealed in primary source readings such as memoirs, novels, and oral accounts. We will start with an analysis of the painful transition from the last empire, the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), to a modern nation state, followed by exploration of a century-long tale of incessant reform and revolution. The survey will focus on three main themes: 1) the repositioning of China in the new East Asian and world orders; 2) the emergence of a modern Chinese state and nationalistic identity shaped and reshaped by a series of cultural crises; and finally, 3) the development and transformation of Chinese modernity. Major historical developments include: the Opium War and drug trade in the age of imperialism, reform and revolution, the Nationalist regime, Mao's China, the Cultural Revolution, and the ongoing efforts of post-Mao China to move beyond Communism. We will conclude with a critical review of the concept of "Greater China" that takes into account Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora in order to attain a more comprehensive understanding of modern China, however defined, at the end of the last century.

PHIL 026 601
Philosophy of Space & Time
Murad Akhundov
Fulfills Natural Sciences & Mathematics Sector

This course provides an introduction to the philosophy and intellectual history of space-time and cosmological models from ancient to modern times with special emphasis on paradigm shifts, leading to Einstein's theories of special and general relativity and cosmology. Other topics include Big Bang, black holes stellar structure, the metaphysics of substance, particles, fields, and superstrings, unification and grand unification of modern physical theories. No philosophy or physics background is presupposed.