Interdisciplinary Courses
Note: This page contains all of the regular courses taught by this department. Not all courses are offered every year. Check the searchable schedule to see which courses are being offered in the upcoming semester.
INDS 163 Entrepreneurship
Credit: 0.5
This course will explore the concept of entrepreneurship on a number of levels. At the societal level we will explore the effects on society of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurial activity. At the individual level will look at what, if anything, it means to "think entrepreneurially." Students will explore their personal strengths to determine their relationship to an entrepreneurial mindset. At the level of the firm, we will use a set of linked frameworks to analyze entrepreneurial concepts and better understand the types of entrepreneurial activity. Finally, we will consider the effects of geography, immigration, gender and "intrapreneurship" on entrepreneurial success. At the term's end, students should understand entrepreneurial thinking, be able to generally examine an entrepreneurial concept and more fully understand how entrepreneurs contribute to and/or cost society.
Instructor: Rice
INDS 231 The Holocaust: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry
Credit: 0.5
This course presents an interdisciplinary inquiry into the destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War. How was it that in the twentieth century, in the midst of civilized Europe, a policy of genocide was formulated and systematically implemented? We will examine the Holocaust within the contexts of modern European history, Nazi ideology and practice, the Jewish experience in Europe, the history of antisemitism, and the psychology of human behavior. Data will be drawn from films, literature, art, memoirs, theology, and historical investigations. An ongoing concern of the course will be the significance of the Holocaust in political discourse and in our own thinking as individuals. When a faculty member from religious studies, modern languages and literatures (German) or history is teaching the course, students may count it toward majors in history, modern languages and literatures (German) or religious studies. Paired with another religious studies course, it will fulfill the diversification requirement in the humanities.
Instructor: Dean-Otting, Riegert
INDS 333 Reading World Literature
Credit: 0.5
Literature is world literature when it is read for its truly global significance. To read literature as world literature is to discover its diversity. It is to see how fundamental questions inspire very different forms of literary creativity across the globe--to seek intersections across time and space and thereby to appreciate the many ways literary texts represent their cultures. This course explores what it means to read world literature by focusing on a single theme or problem common to many cultures but different for each. For example, the course might focus on the problem of migrations to see how global literary forms have found different ways to represent what happens when people move from place to place. Or the course might focus on the world's different ways of representing coming of age, or how the environment is figured across cultures. The course studies these themes through focus on texts including poems, plays, novels, stories, and other literary forms from nations and cultures not routinely featured together in literature classes. At the same time, the course explores the theory of world literature, as well as the reasons to study it, which include broadening our sense of literature's possible forms and uses, appreciating the world's diversity through its literature, and developing one basis for a sense of global citizenship. Offered every other year.
Instructor: Landry