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2009-10 Wednesday University Courses Register now for 2009-10 Wednesday University courses! All courses begin at 7:30pm. Teachers: Wednesday University courses are approved for 7.5 Washington State clock-hour credits per course. Please indicate when you register if you would like to receive clock-hour credit. Fall: Art, Dissent, and Social Change Fall: Art, Dissent, and Social Change In the decades spanning the great world wars, a call to social action swept through the artistic practices of dance, music, cinema, and the visual and literary arts. During this tumultuous period, many American artists strove for transparency and mass appeal in their work and were committed to producing art that depicted social and political issues that they deemed to be of concern to all Americans. Their mediums became a weapon for social change - a means to expose the ills and injustices of society, and a catalyst to make citizens want to rise up and reshape the world. This course examines the creative processes and projects of American artists whose work challenged the status quo, exposing and interrogating practices of oppression, inequality, and corruption condoned or ignored by government Betsy Cooper is Associate Professor and Director of the UW Dance Program. She currently performs with Seattle Dance Project and Chamber Dance Company. Her academic research focuses on the Federal Dance Project. Winter: Mixed Race in the United States Is it coincidence that the first nonwhite president of the United States comes from a multiracial background? Or was his election, in fact, partially due to his mixed-race background and the idea that it somehow resonated with all Americans, regardless of race? In the twenty-first century United States, mixed-race people, from the chief executive to the family next door, seem to be everywhere. In the past twenty-five years, the period since the decriminalization of interracial marriage, the births of monoracial babies have increased 15%, while multiracial births have increased a dramatic 260%. But what do these numbers imply? Has racialized inequality changed with the surging numbers of multiracial Americans? This course will interrogate what it means to understand mixed-race identity in America, and what representations and histories of U.S. multiracialism can illustrate about changing notions of race, power, and privilege in the United States. Ralina L. Joseph is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and an adjunct assistant professor in the departments of American Ethnic Studies and Women Studies at the University of Washington. She recently completed a book manuscript, Beyond the Binaries?: Reading Mixed-Race Blackness in the New Millennium, and is currently at work on her second book project, Speaking Back: How Black Women Resist Post-Identity Culture. Joseph teaches about issues of race, gender, sexuality, and the media, and is a 2009 recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. Spring: Blues for Hard Times—and for All Times What is the “blues,” and why has the word itself come to have such resonance within—and beyond—American culture? In this course, we will investigate many different musical manifestations of the blues. We will listen to the "blues songs" of the early twentieth century, the "classic" or "city" blues of Bessie Smith and her contemporaries, and the rural blues of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, and others. We will explore the "white man's blues" of country music, the essential role of blues in the development of jazz, and the post-World War II electric blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and its evolution into rock 'n' roll. We will study the adaptations of the blues by the Beatles and other "British invasion" bands of the 1960s, the recent "blues revival,” and even the migration of blues into the formal concert hall, as in Gershwin’s immortal "Rhapsody in Blue." We will also consider the larger significance of the "blues" as a term loaded with cultural, racial, and emotional connotations. Larry Starr, Professor of Music History, has been teaching courses on twentieth-century and American music at the University of Washington for more than twenty-five years. He has written and lectured extensively on American topics ranging from Gershwin to the Beach Boys. He is the author of A Union of Diversities: Style in the Music of Charles Ives; of American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MTV (with Christopher Waterman); and of the monograph The Dickinson Songs of Aaron Copland. He is currently at work on a book about the Broadway music of Gershwin. Thanks to KBCS 91.3FM Community Radio for support of Wednesday University. Wednesday University, a program of Seattle Arts & Lectures and the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities provides Puget Sound residents with an intellectually stimulating and fun way to continue their education in the arts and culture. Each year, the Wednesday University offers three courses taught by distinguished professors at the University of Washington known for their scholarship and their teaching ability. These courses, which meet on Wednesday evenings in the UW's Kane Hall and Brechemin Hall, are open to anyone—from high school students to senior citizens. Past courses have included Early Modern Art, Greek Myth, Silent Film, and Race in the American West, among others.
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