Tuesday, April 19, 2011

NEW UWM COURSES FOR FALL 2011

Title: Hist 700 Intro to Public History
Professor: Jasmine Alinder, Associate Professor and Co-Coordinator of Public History
Seminar on community history, relations between academic history and public history, and uses of material culture and oral history.

Title: Art History 370 Trends in Contemporary Architecture TR 11:00-12:15 MIT 195
Professor: Jennifer Johung, Assistant Professor, Art History
This course examines current trends in architectural practice, focusing on the materiality and temporality of organic, animate, portable, interactive, sustainable and bio-mimetic structures within performative, digital, and virtual architectures. Today, buildings are no longer only conceived as objects, but are designed and constructed according to what they do on site or how they perform in response to their users’ needs. Through a selection of contemporary case studies, we will explore a building’s flexible relationship to its physical or digital environment while analyzing its bodily-like movement and responsiveness to both real and virtual users.

Title: Geography 905: City, Environment, and Nature
Professor: Ryan Holifield, Assistant Professor, Geography

The purpose of this seminar is to introduce graduate students to different ways of conceptualizing, theorizing, and researching urban environments and urban natures. Through close, intensive readings of a series of books and articles, we will examine several different approaches to urban ecology, including approaches grounded in systems theory, environmental history, radical urban political ecology, and actor-network theory. In the process, we'll consider a wide range of substantive themes: urban ecosystems, natural resources, environmental justice, sustainable cities, health risks and hazards, and urban infrastructures, just to name a few. This seminar will be of potential interest to students in geography, urban studies, urban planning, architecture, anthropology, history, sociology, urban education, biological sciences, and others interested in the relationships between cities and nature or the environment.