SHUM 4719/6719 The Dark Side of the Renaissance: The Tragic Origins of Modernity

Jérémie Foa
T 11:15am-1:45pm | A.D. White House

This course examines the Renaissance and the early modern period not only as a celebrated age of creativity, artistic innovation, and intellectual rebirth, but also as an era deeply marked by violence, domination, and systemic inequality. By moving beyond triumphalist narratives of “progress” and “civilization,” the course invites students to consider the darker foundations of modernity: the emergence of practices of exclusion, exploitation, and repression that shaped both European societies and the wider world.

https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/SP27/class/SHUM/4719 

SHUM 4722/6722 Birth Strike: On (Not) Having Kids in the Era of Climate Change

Jamie Budnick
T 2-4:30PM | A.D. White House

What would it mean to refuse to procreate, because of climate change? What kind of action is this refusal: the ultimate personal sacrifice, cavalier selfishness, or a perhaps a growing social movement? Could having children be a radical act of hope and a commitment to survival? This class explores the meaning and power behind both paths as intentional engagement in climate-motivated action, and provides graduate and advanced undergraduate students with an overview of perspectives related to understanding fertility, family, and reproduction against the backdrop of the climate crisis.

https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/SP27/class/SHUM/4722 

SHUM 4723/6723 Survival by Design: Desert Architecture at the End of the World

ALSO ARCH 4408/6408
Pamela Karimi
R 8:30-11am | A.D. White House

Survival by Design: Desert Architecture at the End of the World investigates how architecture mediates survival in arid environments through history, environmental design, critical theory, and speculative imagination. Focusing on global case studies shaped by colonialism, resource extraction, and climate crisis, the course explores the desert as both a site of ecological precarity and a laboratory for adaptive design. Students from all disciplines can engage with architectural precedents, from ancient qanats to postwar eco-experiments and contemporary regenerative systems, alongside speculative fiction that envisions life beyond Earth. Through readings, discussions, workshops and interdisciplinary assignments, the course invites students to rethink sustainable architecture not merely as a response to crisis but as a creative and ethical practice of survival.

https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/SP27/class/SHUM/6723 

SHUM 4724/6724 Après le Déluge: History and Disaster

Also ASIAN 4724/6724; HIST 4424/6424
Kristin Roebuck
R 2-4:30pm | A.D. White House

When disaster strikes – war, earthquake, epidemic, nuclear fallout – how do people survive and rebuild? This course explores the history and aftermath of natural disasters and man-made catastrophes. Such disasters often overlap, as when hydroengineering leads to catastrophic flooding; government, military, or industrial policy foster famine or disease; and tsunami bring a nuclear facility to meltdown. Disasters destroy, but they also spark creativity: new scientific paradigms, art forms, communities, politics, and profits. One man’s disaster is another man’s opportunity, as when bombs and earthquakes clear the way for urban planners or spark investment in research and reconstruction. Survivors, scientists, activists, artists, and politicians compete over how to remember past disasters and prepare for – or avoid – a reprise. At stake is the future opened up by disaster.

https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/SP27/class/SHUM/4724 

SHUM 4725/6725 Animals, Multispecies Kinship, and the Environment in Korean Literature and Film

Also ASIAN 4725/6725
Ivanna Yi
R 2-4:30pm | A.D. White House

This course explores more-than-human animals and their relationality with other species, including the human, in Korean literature, culture, and film. We will explore key questions in the environmental humanities as they relate to ecological change in the two Koreas and the DMZ region. How does storytelling make environmental crises, their effects on sentient beings, and the earth itself more visible? How do works of literature and films give voice to changing relationships between humans and the more-than-human world? How have humans labored with, and for, more-than-human animals, and vice versa? The seminar will examine how poets, novelists, filmmakers, artists, nonfiction writers, and critics have envisioned multispecies survival and flourishing as they have responded creatively to biodiversity loss and environmental change.

https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/SP27/class/SHUM/4725 

SHUM 4726/6726 Queer Asian Cinema: History of Survival and Politics of Representation

ALSO FGSS 4726/6726; LGBT 4726/6726
Ungsan Kim
M 11:15am-1:45pm | A.D. White House

This course surveys the evolution of queer Asian cinema as a critical and artistic mode of production. Students will rigorously examine and analyze each representative work of queer Asian cinema beyond cultural and national borders. Students will also deliberate on the meaning, politics, and usability of cinema in times when people stopped going to the movies by historicizing and contextualizing queer Asian cinema as a minor cinema. Ranging from queer avant-garde films of the 1960s, through politically charged and stylistically innovative queer films of the 1990s, to the recent mainstream films, the course will historicize the politics of queer Asian cinema that has survived various historical setbacks, oppression, and crises.

https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/SP27/class/SHUM/4726