Foundation Seminars

• Instructor: Professor Jeremy Chow, English: Animal Stories

  This course asks you to question: what does it mean to be animal? How are our ideas of animality constructed by what we read, watch and experience? What are the limits of animality? And how do they rub against or surpass limits of the human? How does our love or fear of animals connect to activism, captivity and ethics? 

  Animal Stories asks us to reconsider the concept of the animal by looking to a variety of interconnected readings from disciplines such as literature, history, popular culture, media, philosophy, psychology and environmental studies. We will encounter works by Franz Kafka, Elizabeth Bishop, Haruki Murakami, Art Spiegelman, Pierre Boulle, George Orwell, J.M. Coetzee and Sy Montgomery. We will debate issues such as animal cognition, zoo captivity, meat eating, animal liberation and empathy. 

   

• Instructor: Professor Mark Spiro, Biology: Humans: Wild & Domesticated

  We will focus on human evolution, both biological and cultural, in the context of our current environmental and health crises. We will consider our place within the deep history of the Earth and the ecological systems with which we have evolved. This will provide a context for understanding the impact of the agricultural and industrial revolutions on ecological and human health. A major focus will be on our modern diet and industrial food systems.