2027 Program Academics

Faculty: Stephanie Pocock Boeninger, Ph.D. and Licia Carlson, Ph.D.

Maps can serve as important scientific tools to help us understand the spread and transmission of disease. But they are also important visualizations of illness as a collective phenomenon, something that goes beyond the incommunicable pain of the individual. As Tom Koch argues “It is in the map that a consistent collection of symptoms is located by a dot, bar, or ‘x’ to mark the location of the person who suffers. In the map those cases are joined in a manner that asserts their commonality in a way all can see” (4). In this course we will examine the ways in which maps of London have been used throughout history to understand and mark the effects of disease, and the moments when maps have contributed to surprising medical advancements and the saving of many lives.

But, of course, maps aren’t the only ways we understand illness. If maps show us the collective effects of illness on a city, they cannot capture the lived experience of the individual. For those experiences we will turn to other kinds of visual art: the etchings of William Blake that worked alongside of his poetry to capture the suffering of London’s poor and the art of William Hogarth, whose detailed caricatures often visually linked London’s diseases to the debauchery and drunkenness of its people. We will also read the works of authors who engage with experiences of illness and disease, who attempt to capture in words what pain feels like to them or to those around them. Interestingly, many of these authors also use the idea of the map to connect their suffering to those around them, or to reveal their own isolation. Our main novel for the semester, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) follows protagonists who wander the streets of London as they encounter the effects of physical and mental illnesses on themselves and those around them. We will also consider philosophical and theological responses to disability, pain, and suffering.

We will begin with two significant events: the Great Plague of London in 1665 and the cholera epidemic in the 19th century. We will then move into an examination of wealth and poverty, mental illness, the eugenics movement, disability rights, healers in the East End, and end with the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the semester we will be taking full advantage of being in London by visiting museums (The Museum of London, the Foundling Museum, The Wellcome Collection, and Florence Nightingale museums), planning a series of walking tours relevant to the texts we are reading, and taking a day trip to Oxford University.

We will also visit Paris for our weekend away. Known, as the city of love, it also has a darker side, one that we will explore through our readings of Michel Foucault and our viewing of Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade, set in a French lunatic asylum during the Revolution. We will visit the famous Salpetriere Hospital, formerly the asylum about which Foucault writes and where he died in 1984, the French physician Dr. Charcot’s library, and the Musee de L’Histoire de la Medecine.

Faculty: Stephanie Pocock Boeninger

• Fulfills Diversity Proficiency
• Fulfills Fine Arts Proficiency

London has long been the theatrical center of the English-speaking world. Night after night, theaters in London’s West End light up as famous and aspiring actors, tourists, and locals converge for anything from Shakespeare to surrealism. However, theater serves more purposes than entertainment. London stages have not only been involved in the production of art, but in the creation, maintenance, and dismantling of the British Empire. Plays often articulate the values of a community, demonstrating what makes its members different from (and they might think superior to) other ethnic, racial, national, or linguistic groups.

This course will examine the way in which theatre has functioned as a tool of national self-definition, for England and for postcolonial nations breaking away from the British Empire. It has also functioned as a means of individual self-definition and expression for immigrants to London who find themselves in the heart of Empire. We will also compare the forms of representation that occur in theatrical spaces with the visual representations of race and national identity in art and museum spaces. In our reading, writing, and class discussion, we will address some of the most significant questions that have shaped postcolonial theatrical movements, including:

• How have immigrant communities in England used theatre to assert their identities or to claim their rights as British citizens?
• Is theatre a democratic form? Does it promote equality and the free exchange of ideas or is it simply a medium through which the powerful elite shape the ideas and attitudes of the less powerful?
• How does theatrical representation compare to representation in the visual arts?
• Can postcolonial playwrights ever truly escape from the ethnic and national stereotypes popularized by British theatres (the stage Irishman or the stage African, for example)?
• Does the adoption of Western theatrical structures and conventions by non-Western playwrights indicate a new, more insidious form of colonialism, or does it represent an invigorating creative pluralism?
• Can and should theatre be a revolutionary form? What is its relationship to violent resistance and direct political action? 
• Do plays by women and other minorities participate in the project of national self-definition or do they attempt to create other, more inclusive ideas of community?