Course Descriptions

John L. Heineman Intersession 2025 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

The Age of Uncertainty: Toward the Modern World and the Forces that Shaped the Millennium

This year our intersession classes will begin with World War II and its aftermaths. This second millennium has been a headlong rush to the edges of human creative and destructive genius, ranging from walking on the moon and the fading of colonialism to the horrors of the Holocaust and the dangers inherent in splitting the atom. The shape of the next era is beyond anyone’s power to define: today our thinking is fashioned through icons on screens and instant access to information, as had been done in earlier eras by theology, poetry, and the fine arts. But what saves us is the survival of a good deal of literature, history, and art, from the years of western culture, mingled with an infusion of the eastern. So as always in our intersession classes, we will concentrate on history, art, and literature. In history, we’ll consider the legacy of the New Deal, the ending of colonialism, the expansion of rights through social movements, and the growing role of technology in shaping our lives. Our art classes will broaden our European and American focus and include artists from China, Korea, and Japan, and in literature, we will examine a variety of poets who reflect this changing human experience and help us to understand our own humanity in this complicated modern era.

History Component

9:00 A.M. – 10:15 A.M. 
David Smailes, PhD 

January 10:  the stock market crash and Great Depression, Roosevelt's election and the New Deal, World War II ending with the development of the atomic bomb;

January 17:  post-war Europe, the end of the British empire (especially India's independence) and colonialism, the start of the Cold War and American influence in world affairs (UN, NATO, etc.);

January 24:  the Eisenhower years, 1950's and arms race, desegregation, the start of the Civil Rights Movement, Betty Friedan and the women's movement;

January 31:  the Kennedy administration and Cuba, Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam, feminism and the new role of women in society, the rapid development of technology (computers, the space race, consumer goods) ending with the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Art History Component

10:30 A.M. – 11:45 A.M.
Camille Sung, PhD

January 10: Surrealism movements in Europe and the United States, artists' exile from Europe to the United States during WWII, and the start of the new era of American art

January 17: War paintings during WWII (Germany, the U.S.) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (Japan, China, and Korea), including those about victory, propaganda, atrocity, and death 

January 24: postwar European and American art, such as Abstract Expressionism, Nouveau Réalisme, Neo-avant-garde, and happenings, which responded to the war experience, postwar economic development and reconstruction of a nation

January 31: art in Cold War East Asia (Japan and Korea) in the Asia-Pacific context at the intersection of the development of industrialization and mass production and consumption, women's rights movement, optimism for technological development, and the World Expositions in Montreal and Osaka

Literature Component

1:00 P.M. – 2:15 P.M.
Helen Heineman, PhD 

Weekly topics are forthcoming: please check back soon! We will examine poets who reflect the changing human experience and help us to understand our own humanity in this complicated modern era.