Sample Clusters and Projects

Spring 2013

Nature

Designating Natural Spaces

How do ideas about the natural play into the local imagination (the Great Park, local nature preserves, UCI arboretum)?

How do specific indigenous groups promulgate a particular ideology about nature?

How has the Imperial Valley defined nature in relation to its histories of agricultural development?

How have immigrant communities defined or redefined notions of “nature”?

Representing Nature

How is the natural represented through artifice?  

What kinds of artistic representations of nature are available in local museums, galleries,
libraries, or archives (nature photography, botanical illustration, landscape painting, recordings, etc.)?

Nature as Limit

How do works of art and literature thematize nature as an obstacle or limit to human endeavor?

Humans as Nature

How do works of art and literature define the natural or artificial aspect of the human (Brave New World, Atwood's Handmaid's Tale etc.)?

How has the advance of scientific techniques of controlling nature led to an "unnatural" manipulative control of humans?

What do "natural" and "unnatural" mean in the realm of humans and society today?

Society

Republics of Letters

How did the Tea Party function as a public sphere for Elizabeth Cady Stanton?

To what extent did Toussaint L’Ouverture’s Constitution participate in a single public sphere that bridged St. Domingo and France?

Individual and Society

To what extent do the immigrants in China Men pursue individual projects or community projects?

What kind of notion of individual responsibility does In the Penal Colony (or Faust) defend?

Law and Society

To what extent did the 13^th amendment produce changes in social attitudes about racial equality?

How did changes in the interpretation of the Constitution in Brown vs. Board of Education depend upon the experience of World War II?

Divinity

Literary form in religious texts

How does the Koran establish its ethos?

How do the creation myths in Genesis and in African myth lead to different conceptions of family?

Representing divinity

How does Disneyland structure the human relationship to the divine?

How is the divine represented through artifice in the Coventry Cathedral?

Religious aspects of literary texts

How does covenant function in Moby Dick?

How does sacrifice function in China Men?

Divinity and Ethics

What are the consequences of Epicurus’s notion of divinity for our conception of war?

How does Maimonides’s conception of negative theology lead us to particular forms of leisure?