Over the next two weeks, undergraduate students will shop many of the usual courses, from CHEM 0330: “Equilibrium, Rate and Structure” to ENGL 0930: “Introduction to Creative Nonfiction.” But for those interested in spicing up their schedule with a one-of-a-kind academic experience, Brown offers a wide range of unique courses for students to explore.
The Herald surveyed five of these courses.
‘Snot and poo’ drugs: Medicine in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia
Long before Jonathan Russell, assistant professor of Egyptology and Assyriology, began teaching at Brown, he was shown a book that was said to hold 2,000 ancient recipes — all for laxatives.
Russell’s class this semester, titled EGYT 0900: “Demons and Drugs, Magic and Medicine: Healing in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia,” is largely rooted in his research, inspired by that moment. While the class focuses on Egyptian and Mesopotamian history, Russell said he plans for the course to be “as interdisciplinary as possible” by examining ancient medicine through plants and pharmaceuticals.
He also plans to spend time discussing the components of the drugs themselves, giving students a chance to recreate the pharmaceuticals that, according to Russell, often look like “snot or poo.” This process not only allows students to understand the texture of the materials, but it also provides insight into how those in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt thought about the body and illness, Russell said.
With his emphasis on interdisciplinary exploration, Russell hopes to “demystify” preconceived notions that STEM-focused students can’t study the humanities, and vice versa. “It gives different perspectives on the same (topic), and that’s just the most valuable thing,” he said.
Feeling through history
In her class, RELS 0843: “How do you Feel? The History of Emotions,” Associate Professor of Religious Studies and History Nancy Khalek will look at emotions like hope and fear through a biological, historical, philosophical and social lens.
“Emotional experience is a fundamental part of human experience, and it always has been,” Khalek said. The course examines how different fields from “psychology to neuroscience to social sciences to history engage with … the reality of emotional experience.”
The course will begin by defining what an emotion is, both philosophically and biologically. It will then shift, Khalek said, to focus on how emotion has been studied and represented in various mediums throughout history.
“Everybody knows what it means to feel, so we take it for granted that we understand,” Khalek said. But when diving deeper into the study of emotions, “you realize that there’s still new things to discover, (and) there are still new ways to be.”
Throughout the course, Khalek will situate emotion in contexts ranging from historical linguistics to racemaking, capitalism and consumerism.
The class is meant not to be a form of therapy, Khalek said, but rather to “give students a sense of how everybody through time, from so many different points of view, has engaged with this question of emotional experience.”
Friends and flora: exploring the biodiversity of Rhode Island’s ecosystems
Rhode Island’s shores are currently bordered by over 4,000 acres of salt marshes — ecosystems that are flooded by saltwater tides. On their first field trip, students in BIOL 0940D: “Rhode Island Flora: Understanding and Documenting Local Plant Diversity,” will get the chance to walk through one of these lumpy marshes.
This sophomore seminar features weekly field trips to different ecosystems in Rhode Island led by Rebecca Kartzinel, assistant teaching professor of biology, ecology, evolution and organismal biology.
For Kartzinel, in some ways, seeing a plant that she knows is like seeing an old friend. Over the semester, students will learn how to use dichotomous keys to identify plants they encounter on their field trips.
During one field trip, the class will walk around campus and Fox Point to look for the plants that line the walls of the building or sprout from the cracks in the sidewalks, Kartzinel said. She hopes students will grow more familiar with the state’s flora, “even if it’s seeing the plants in the crack of the sidewalk and maybe saying, ‘Hi, friend.’”
But more importantly, Kartzinel hopes her students leave the course with a greater appreciation of the nature that frequents their everyday lives.
Intellectualizing memes
In one of the first class sessions of the semester, Rahma Haji, a Pembroke Center postdoctoral fellow, will introduce her students to feminist and queer thought through literary collections housed in the center.
But the main focus of GNSS 1962H: “Is It Me or Is it Meme?: Blackness and Memes” is not analyzing archival work. Instead, it’s unpacking memes.
The class stems from Haji’s research, which focuses on the relationship between memes, gender, sexuality and Blackness, locating the meme within the larger context of Black cultural production.
As a kid, Haji and her friends consumed many memes, especially those using “evil Kermit the Frog,” she said.
“I was always kind of interested in how people were able to latch on to different memes in order to communicate,” Haji said. “To intellectualize memes is kind of funny. It’s also kind of like a meme on its own.”
Haji hopes that the course will help students be more aware of media they consume and leave as “more conscious citizens of the world” — what she sees as the goal of any humanities course.
Setting the White House menu
Up until recently, steak was a classic menu item at White House dinners, according to Damien Mahiet, director of academic programs at the Cogut Institute.
But over the course of the fall 2024 semester, students in Mahiet’s HMAN 1977B: “Foreign Policy Worlds: Diplomatic Designs and International Relations” hypothesized that the White House has slowed the frequency at which it serves steak because staff is paying more attention to the tastes of the President’s visitors. Every element of the dinner, from menus to decor to background music, is now increasingly tailored to the visiting diplomat, Mahiet said.
This semester, students in HMAN 1977B will continue to approach “international relations from the perspective of the senses and see how that comes into play in designing a political event,” Mahiet said.
Specifically, the class focuses on dinners held during the Obama administration to help the U.S. rebalance its international engagements with Asia and the Indo-Pacific.
The course itself functions as a “research lab,” Mahiet said. “There’s a lot of give-and-take and fluidity in the process.”
One of Mahiet’s favorite elements of a dinner is the background music, noting how individuals often “ignore how sound and acoustic space shape our daily experiences,” he said.
As the elements of these dinners become more complex, the events themselves are “also becoming harder and harder to script,” Mahiet said. “As soon as you pay more attention to something in diplomacy, it’s an opportunity to make mistakes.”
Hadley Carr is a university news editor at The Herald, covering academics & advising and student government.
