Connections & Conflicts HUM 104 (Spring 2018)

The Humanities program was established in 1962 as a synthetic, interdisciplinary approach to liberal education that combined formal lectures and smaller discussion groups in a survey of key texts. The current course offering, Connections and Conflicts in the Humanities I and II (HUM 103 and 104), engages critically key texts and artifacts from the Western tradition and beyond, reaching out to diverse cultures. For each year, there will be a particular theme that we will bring to bear for all the things we study. In 2017-18, the theme is revolution. Why study the music, art, literature, philosophy, history, and sacred texts of cultures we know and inhabit as well as artifacts of cultures from distant chronological and geographical places that might be alien to our own? At Davidson, we believe that a liberal arts education requires a balance of courses from across the disciplines, including the humanities, in order for our graduates to have the greatest impact in their post-Davidson worlds. In the humanities, one can find a massive repository of ideas concerning the human experience. Some of the ideas will get expressed using words, others by using musical sounds, or dancers on a stage, or paint on a canvas, or celluloid flickers on a screen, or by objects in a space. You will hear and see the course referred to as Humes, HUMS, HUM, and humanities. It is referenced online generally as #HumDqavidson. We call it “Humes.” There is a HumanitiesAtDavidson twitter feed. Check it out.

The course is collaborative and team-taught, with plenary lectures by both the humanities faculty teaching the course and by other scholars and artists from Davidson and beyond. Some visiting scholars and artists will also take part in discussions and workshops.