First Year

An instructor in front of a white board

Teaching Assistant Tanner Layton leads a first-year seminar discussion on the role of the Public Intellectual

 

SASAH 1020E is taught by Research Fellows in the School. In lecture, discussion, and workshop formats, these faculty members will aid you in completing a variety of assignments, which might include traditional academic writing, creative work, and collaborative projects.

Our central purpose in immersing students in interdisciplinary dialogue and debate early on in the Program is to encourage you and enable you to take an active role in the future of the humanities.

The course has several objectives:

  • to consider what it means to study “the Humanities” and how the Humanities needs to inform our understanding of our private and public roles. What is it to be human/inhuman, and what are our commitments as humanists?
  • to reflect on the diversity of human experience, both current and historical, and the role of the intellectual in the world within the university and beyond it.

Prerequisite: Admission to the School for Advanced Studies in Arts and Humanities 3 hours/week, 1.0 course

Fall 2025 

Climate Conversations: Finding Common Ground for the 21st Century

How might the arts help us to confront the urgent reality of climate change? What function might the humanities serve when the terms of human life seem increasingly precarious? Our approach to these questions will be anchored by two insights spanning climate science and climate activism: first, to mobilize meaningful climate action we must learn to navigate the pitfalls of polarization and individualism; and second, fostering collectivity depends on our capacity for conversation. For conversational models, we will look to leading climate communicators and activist groups, but also to artists, authors, scholars and organizers who have developed newly collaborative methods in response to ecological emergency. Drawing on these models, we will experiment with various communication and listening practices intended to establish common conversational ground in the classroom and beyond. This shared ground will in turn provide a platform for devising climate action projects that explore how best to integrate our climate commitments in everyday life.   

Winter 2026

TBA