Harman Academy for Polymathic Study, DML 241

Our 21st-century view of romance is often shaped by media and popular culture; from The Bachelor to rom coms, Austen adaptations to eHarmony ads, we are inundated with images of, rules about, and expectations for relationships. Given this, has our perception and experience of love changed over time—or is there something uniquely pure and unchangeable to the workings of the human heart, particularly when we look outside the media’s narrow definition of it? Furthermore, why is romance in popular culture so strictly associated with the female and culturally diminished by reductive...

You are what you eat. So runs a time-tested folkloric observation. The past four decades have witnessed a mounting concern with good nutrition as the basis of health. The nation, meanwhile, seems caught in an epidemic of obesity. Hunger, famine, and starvation seem permanently established in certain areas of the planet. Should we accept such disjunctions as part of a pattern of Malthusian necessity? Or will the ambition to feed the Planet be a signature accomplishment of the 21st century? Professor Alison Dundes Renteln has spent a lifetime seeking answers to these questions and will lead an...

The 19th century author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), created works that melded fiction, poetry, mathematics, games, logic and cryptography. This talk explores Dodgson’s use of puzzles and games, word play, and the creation of a cipher language to create iconic children’s tales, such as Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. In August and December 2014, Abby taught a Freshman Micro-Seminar titled “Decoding Wonderland: Puzzles, Logic and Cryptography in the Works of Lewis Carroll.” Through hands-on...

The Graphic Novel, also known as (but lately distinguished from) a comic book, has boomed and evolved as a storytelling format over the past decade. A truly polymathic form of storytelling, it combines images and the flash-point nature of the comic strip with the long-forms of literature and the novel. Recently, we have seen the graphic novel seep into popular culture and the public consciousness as inspiration for film adaptations and television series. However, graphic storytelling is nothing new – from the cave paintings at Lascaux to Satrapi’s Persepolis, the graphic format...

“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”


These are the profound words from Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankel, who found meaning and purpose in his captivity and suffering at Auschwitz. Moving into our individual and collective futures, we will certainly face some suffering, as well as joys and successes. According to Frankel, finding meaning in all life’s experiences is a reflective exercise, and finding purpose is forward looking and intentional. Frankel counsels us to develop these approaches as we embark on this thing called “life.”...

George Orwell’s 1984 described a dystopic future where privacy and individual thought had been stifled by the ever-watchful eye of Big Brother – but what might 2084 look like? Fears of dystopia – the loss of privacy, agency, and subjugation to a totalitarian regime—proliferate in popular culture still. From the recent success of The Hunger Games and Divergent to films like Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, our fears of a dystopic world are still very present. Where do these fears come from and what explains their recent boom in popularity? How might we...

Traditionalism might be described as the notion of holding on to the past to pass on to the future; folklore is the transmission of traditions -- art, literature, knowledge, and practice -- through oral communication and behavioral example. In our fast paced, ever-changing, futuristic, digital age, what new sorts of modes are emerging that millennials (Generation Y) employ to receive, hold, and transmit the traditions entrusted to them? Scholars of folklore and tradition recognize that the Internet has been transformative on these ancient cultural practices, but exactly how transformative...

Apocalypse has been handed down to us as total devastation, obliteration of all living things, the end of the world. Along this definitional line of thinking, Isaac Newton predicted the apocalypse would occur in 2060. We have trusted his theories on classical mechanics, laws of motion and universal gravitation—so should we worry? Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism each tell eschatological stories of doom, where good will ultimately reign supreme, but not before the earth is utterly destroyed. The Mayan calendar was advertised as predicting our end on...

The promise of time travel, be it forwards or backwards, has long been a compelling fantasy. What could we learn, predict, better understand, prevent, or resolve if we had the ability to move forwards or backwards in time? Historians are perhaps the closest we’ll ever get to the possibility of time travel – their painstaking work in archives, attempts to place themselves in the mindset of their subjects, and probing of the past for understanding (and how that understanding can prevent repeating our same mistakes) enacts the work of a time traveler. But can historians use their work to time...

Sound and the sonic are vibrant parts of the richly textured worlds we inhabit – how often does a song remind you of a particular time or place in your life? Or perhaps you associate a certain type of sound or music with an emotion or culture? Many of our experiences and feelings are defined by what we hear. But what will the future sound like? As globalization rapidly expands, redefining and blurring cultural lines, what will be the cultural remix of the future? Furthermore, looking backwards and forwards, how has the sonic shaped our histories and how will it impact our future...