Courses
Students may focus all their elective coursework in a single discipline or they may distribute their electives across disciplines, depending on their interests and desired trajectories
MAPH is a one-year, degree-granting graduate program that begins in mid-September with the MAPH Core Course and concludes in Spring quarter with completion of a thesis project. Students may focus all their elective coursework in a single discipline or they may distribute their elective across disciplines, depending on their interests and desired trajectories.
All MAPH students are required to take the MAPH Core Course (Foundations of Interpretive Theory), which is a twelve-week course that begins two weeks before the start of regular classes in Autumn. MAPH students take the Thesis Writing Workshop in both Winter and Spring. In addition they take seven elective courses, normally two in the Autumn, three in the Winter, and two in the Spring. While the vast majority of MAPH students—those seeking to strengthen doctoral program applications and those making extra-academic career transitions alike—pursue individualized programs of study, small groups of creative writers, classicists, students interested in cultural policy work, and students of cinema and media orient their programs of study in special tracks called 'Options'.
The MAPH Core
The MAPH Core will offers a rigorous introduction to theoretical work that fosters a dialogue with a range of cultural objects. In lieu of an Introduction to Theory course (and the Greatest Hits approach that often characterizes it), we will seek thematic and analytic coherence around a set of unfolding questions concerning identification and desire and their relations to social form, politics, ideology, and aesthetics. Readings will include works in psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, and post-colonial studies by such writers as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, Homi Bhabha, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Slavoj Zizek. While the majority of lectures will be presented by the program’s co-directors, the Core course will also feature a series of distinguished guest lecturers drawn from the University of Chicago faculty.
The Thesis
In late Autumn and early Winter, in consultation with their preceptors, MAPH students develop their thesis topics. The thesis is an independent research paper of 25-35 pages, exclusive of endnotes and bibliography, written over the course of the Winter and Spring terms under the supervision of a faculty thesis adviser and a preceptor. Although most theses are scholarly papers, students may do creative thesis projects in literature, music, art, etc.; such projects include an essay analyzing and explaining the work. Sometimes, thesis projects grow out of disciplinary coursework. Sometimes, thesis projects involve cross-disciplinary coursework and research. Ideally, thesis projects, scholarly or creative, draw on the base students develop in taking their elective courses.
In conjunction with the writing of the thesis, students sign up for the Thesis Writing Workshop in both Winter and Spring Quarters. The preceptor-led Workshops provide a context for students to develop and revise their thesis projects. Students who wish to devote extra time to their theses may sign up for a reading course as one of their Winter or Spring quarter electives.
Special Electives
MAPH students fill out their programs with seven elective courses. They are eligible to enter any courses open to first-year graduate students (although some courses have restricted enrollment). MAPH students can take all of their electives in a single discipline, like English or Art History, or can develop programs of study that involve work in several disciplines. Some Humanities course offerings are designed specifically to dovetail with our program.
Each Winter, we offer Community College Pedagogy, for students interested in using their MA to teach in two-year colleges
Several courses open to (or required of) first-year graduate students in traditional departments are built in part with MAPH in mind. Our Core course, for example, is scheduled to allow MAPH students to take advantage of the core sequences in Cinema and Media Studies and in the Human Rights Program. Each Winter, the Art History Department sponsors an extra section of its required Methods course to accommodate MAPH students interested in pursuing doctoral degrees in Art History. That same term, we offer MAPH 47600, Teaching in Community College, for students interested in using their MA to teach in two-year colleges. Taught by a Master Teacher from a local college, this course covers curricular development, pedagogic technique, assessment, and other matters crucial to academic work in the classroom. MAPH works with Career and Placement Services to build a resume book for students in this course, which is then sent to personnel directors at local colleges for faculty recruitment purposes. At the conclusion of Winter term, we invite the personnel directors to come meet the students who have taken the course. We strongly recommend that MAPH students interested in academic careers in two-year institutions also take ENGL 33000, Academic and Professional Writing, in Autumn or Winter.
Preceptor Courses
In addition to providing a vital advising resource for current MAPH students, MAPH preceptors also teach their own courses. The following courses are being offered during the 2008 Winter Quarter.
Philosophy of Action
Charles Todd
MAPH 34123/PHIL 24123
Wittgenstein once rhetorically asked, What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm? Whatever Wittgensteins own views on the matter, understanding the difference between mere bodily movement and intentional action became central to the philosophical investigation of action and agency in the 20th century. In this course we will examine this distinction between mere movement and action and why it should matter to us. Our topics include the causal theory of action, human freedom, the nature of reasons for action, the role of desire and belief in reasons explanations, anti-psychologistic views, and the possibility of locating reason in action. We will read works by Bratman, Davidson, Hume, McDowell, Nagel, Thompson, Velleman and others. We will discuss Austins Three Ways of Spilling Ink on the first day of class.
Victorian Obligation
Kathleen Frederickson
MAPH 34152/ENGL 21906
This course will examine the Victorian ethics of obligation and duty in fiction by Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Anthony Trollope, and Joseph Conrad. We will look at how these Victorian texts adapt and revise Enlightenment legacies around social and moral obligation, examining how they conceptualize and deploy the ideology of obligation differently in relation to the organization of domesticity and kinship and the governance of empire and metropolitan poverty.
Approaches to Art History
Erin Hazard
ARTH 39800
Through critical reading of various articles, essays, and books, members of this class analyze approaches to the
practice of art history that have been characteristic of scholarship during the past 50 years. The emphasis is on
premise, procedure, and the nature of evidence, as these can be ascertained in particular case studies instead of
through their articulation in theoretical tracts; materials will be drawn from all corners of the discipline and efforts
will be made to select studies that relate to students field of interest.
All graduate course offerings are published by the Office of the University Registrar in the Time Schedules.
