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Integrated Program in Humane StudiesInterdisciplinary FacultyKatherine Elkins Michael J. Evans Matthew W. Maguire Adam C. Serfass Timothy B. Shutt Timothy Spiekerman The Integrated Program in Humane Studies (IPHS), the oldest of Kenyon’s interdisciplinary programs, involves students in an intensive study of classic works that bridge diverse historical contexts, cultural settings, and fields of knowledge. Our mission is to encourage and guide intellectual exploration and experimentation. Balancing tradition and innovation, IPHS is dedicated to helping students clearly and articulately express their interpretations, analyses, and evaluations of classic works ranging from Homer and Dante to Kafka and Borges. By discovering or creating links between areas of knowledge and ways of knowing that are currently segregated by disciplines and departments, IPHS encourages students to think holistically and critically about these works. It also provides students with the opportunity to experiment with an array of expressive media, including essays, films, multimedia presentations, graphic arts, and plays. These projects enable students to develop their craft in written communication, oral communication, critical thinking, and new media skills, including design and composition. Unlike any other program of its kind, IPHS blends lectures, small seminars (typically twelve students), and one-on-one student-faculty tutorials. This unique approach to learning allows students to work closely with their professors. IPHS promotes a sense of community in which intellectual differences are respected and intellectual ties and relations are forged. By completing the first-year course, students can fulfill 2 units toward a concentration (and 1 1/2 units of the diversification requirement). Beyond the first-year course, IPHS students can earn a concentration by completing at least 1 unit of intermediate-level study, including at least one upper-level seminar, and at least 1/2 unit during the senior year. Enrollment is limited. Look for the Year CourseOdyssey of the West In the first semester, we explore the themes of love and justice, purity and power, fidelity to the family, and loyality to the state. With the Hebrew Bible, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Virgil, and Dante, we investigate these themes through the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions and their European legacies. In the second semester, we focus on the themes of law and disorder, harmony and entropy, and modernity and its critics. Beginning with Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and Hobbes, we investigate the desire to construct a unified vision through reason and the disruption of that vision in the works of such authors as Nietzsche, Darwin, and Marx. Throughout the year, we explore the connections between the visual arts (through art history and film), literature, and philosophy. In tutorial sessions, students concentrate on developing the craft of writing. In addition, we offer them an opportunity to express their creative talents in short performances and hypermedia projects. IPHS 113-114 will fulfill some of the College’s diversification requirements: up to 1/2 unit of history and/or political science, and/or up to 1 unit of English. Enrollment limited. First-Semester CoursesSenior Research Seminar/Project This course, designed as a research and/or studio workshop, allows students to create their own interdisciplinary projects. Students are encouraged to take thoughtful, creative risks in developing their ideas and themes. Individual Study This course is for students who wish to do advanced work beyond regular courses or to study topics not included in course offerings. Prerequisites: permission of instructor and director of IPHS. Second-Semester CoursesOdyssey of the West: Modernism and Its Critics Continuing the inquiries begun in 113-114, the IPHS 215 seminars address the rise of modernism, which represented a massive fissure in Western consciousness. A fault line visible since Romanticism suddenly fractured. One consequence was that something utterly unique, highly unsettling, and profoundly revolutionary occurred: the role of art and the artist leapt into extraordinary prominence. Why in modernism do the issues of “self,” “society,” and “authority” figure so prominently in the aesthetic domain? What does the signal role of art suggest about the character of modernism itself? How successful has art been as the focal point of questions regarding authority? Is art’s centrality itself a paradoxical response to the issues of complexity, specialization, fragmentation, and relativity which inform the modern world? In view of modernism’s paradoxes and chief concerns, we will address contending views of art and authority in terms of the following themes: (1) art and the artist; (2) art and memory; (3) art and order; (4) art and technology; and (5) art and rebellion. This course may be used as 1/2 unit of history for purposes of meeting the diversification requirements. Readings will include Nietzsche, Mann, Woolf, Kafka, Foucault, Camus, Kuhn, and Kundera, among others. Films will include Modern Times, Triumph of the Will, Metropolis, Rashomon, and Blow Up. Individual Study This course is for students who wish to do advanced work beyond regular courses or to study topics not included in course offerings. Prerequisites: permission of instructor and director of IPHS. Additional courses available another year: IPHS 313 War and Culture
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symbol, which designates the courses appropriate for first-year students new to the IPHS curriculum.