Spring 2027 KHC First-Year Seminars

Please use the information below to identify your spring 2027 seminar preferences. Note that courses with a MyBU Class Number (e.g., 18053) after the course title below are currently viewable in the MyBU Student portal; courses without a Class Number below are not yet in MyBU, but will be soon. All seminars are 4 units.

KHCAN 106: Scientists in Society (3431)
Jean Morrison, CAS Earth and Environment; Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences
Tuesday and Thursday, 11:00 am-12:15 pm

Understanding the nature of science and the role of the scientist in society is critically important in an increasingly technologically driven and interconnected world. Through an examination of the work of 5 impactful scientists and their interactions with prevailing institutions and societal norms, we will explore the fundamental nature of science and how individual scientists have navigated unique challenges created by their work. We will examine the work and controversies that surrounded:

Galileo Galilei and Church authorities in the 1600’s
Alan Turing and the British Government post WWII
Percy Lavon Julian and higher education in the US in the 1900’s
Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier and the battles over credit and patent rights for CRISPR-9 technology
Antony Fauci and his leadership role in the nation’s public health during COVID-19

Through a combination of assigned readings, lectures and interactive classroom discussions, students will explore the scientific achievements of each person(s) and then explore their broader circumstances and interactions with society. Using this knowledge students will consider and reflect on the nature of scientific contributions and important societal institutions and norms.

Hub areas: Scientific Inquiry I, Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings, Critical Thinking

KHCEH 103: Race in America: Understanding the Present by Exploring the Past (3480)
Luther Young, School of Theology
Tuesday and Thursday, 2:00-3:15 pm

Course explores how contemporary racial dynamics in the US have deep roots in the country’s cultural imagination. Using books, music, film, art, and journalism, we will examine topics including slavery and higher education, #BlackLivesMatter, Christian nationalism, and more.

Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness, Research and Information Literacy

KHCFT 102: Global Film (3532)
Hiba Aleem, Kilachand Honors College
Monday, 2:30-5:15 pm

Our course will examine cinema as an art form, engaging with diverse film traditions, movements, and voices from around the world, especially from beyond Hollywood. Through films from diverse regions, including but not limited to Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, we will explore how cinema reflects, distorts, shapes, and challenges historical, social, and political contexts. We will consider together as a class questions about the transnational production, circulation, reception, and consumption of films, as also the ways in which local storytelling traditions, aesthetics, politics, and audience demands interact with the medium. We will also go over key concepts in film theory and cultural studies, analyze narratives, visual rhetoric, genres, and representation across national and cultural boundaries, and learn to situate and appreciate films within their cultural and historical contexts. By the end of the semester, we will be able to value cinema both as an artistic medium, and as a form of cultural expression that is both a reflection and a distortion of our material realities.

Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness, Research and Information Literacy

KHCIR 105: History of Inequality (18156)
Quinn Slobodian, Pardee School of Global Studies
Tuesday and Thursday, 9:30-10:45 am

Inequality is a leading global concern in the 21 st century. But where did inequality come from—and what do we mean by it? How does inequality differ from dominance, difference, hierarchy, particularity, and distinction? What are the politics of organizing human life into categories of sameness and difference? What matters enough to be measured? This course investigates the origins of present-day global inequality and asks how inequality—and equality–have been understood differently over time. We will explore how hierarchies of difference have been imagined and institutionalized through categories of gender, race, class, time, land, population, capacity, geography, and biology and learn how turning inequality into politics has required technologies of counting, quantifying, and ranking from demographics to GDP, from IQ scores to credit ratings. We will learn how to unpack arguments about inequality for their assumptions about human nature, the world, and the good life as well as dissect evidence for its built-in narratives, truth claims, and blind spots. Though rooted in Europe, the course will account for the globalization of projects of empire, capitalism, science, state-making, and postcolonial international governance.

Hub areas: Critical Thinking, Historical Consciousness

KHCMD 185: God and Capital: Capitalism and/as Religion (18139)
Filipe Maia, School of Theology
Tuesday and Thursday, 12:30-1:45 pm

Is capitalism simply an economic system, or does it function as a religion? What is the historical and social relationship between capitalism and Christianity? Does capitalism embrace ideas and practices from Christian theology and does it require faith and trust from its “followers”? This course explores the complex historical, moral, and theological entanglements between Christianity and capitalism, asking whether capitalism depends upon religious ideas, competes with them, or even replaces them.

Beginning with early modern economic thought and culminating in contemporary debates about debt, work and vocation, trust and meaning-making, the course examines capitalism both in relation to Christianity and as a quasi-religious formation in its own right. We will read classic texts by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Walter Benjamin alongside contemporary thinkers, theologians, and religion scholars who reconsider capitalism’s moral psychology, ritual practices, and theological residues.

Throughout the semester, students will be invited to ask: What moral visions of the human person underwrite modern economic life? Does capitalism require certain virtues, habits, or beliefs to function? In what sense might capitalism demand faith, promise salvation, or generate guilt and sacrifice? What resources does Christian theology and religion in general offer for critiquing, sustaining, or reimagining economic life?

Hub areas: Historical Consciousness, Critical Thinking, Research and Information Literacy

KHCMU 105: Displacement and Arts (3534)
Kinh Vu, CFA Music in Music Education
Tuesday and Thursday, 2:00-3:15 pm

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that more than 122.6 million people were forcibly displaced at the end of 2024. This figure represents refugees, asylum seekers, people in need of international protection, and internally displaced people (UNHCR, 2025). Vũ and de Quadros (2020) defined displacement generously, situating the term both inside, near, and perhaps farther afield and beyond the purview of the UN definition of displacements. Examples of this expanded definition include domestic violence, LGBTQIA+ discrimination, and climate change as potential antecedents to displacement (de Quadros, 2020).

Artists’ roles in attending to, addressing, ameliorating, and/or disrupting the effects of displacement have scarcely been explored due in part to necessary, emerging, and ongoing life-saving undertakings (e.g., evacuation, health and human services, housing) for victims of various kinds of emergency cross-country and/or cross-border movements. Community arts organizers, university arts professionals, as well as refugee camp and asylum center aid workers are beginning to enter displacement frontiers to offer an assortment of arts-based initiatives (e.g., theatre, music, visual arts) for displaced and dispossessed peoples to process displacement experiences.

Hub areas: Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Teamwork/Collaboration

KHCPO 105: Controversies in Youth Politics (3540)
Seth Blumenthal, CAS Writing Program
Tuesday and Thursday, 12:30-1:45 pm

Youth in the 20th century created new ways to consider how young people thought of their generational identity but also developed a more potent social and cultural agency that shaped an evolving political influence. This emergence provoked compelling questions about this bloc. Why don’t young voters turn out as much as older voters? What familial, cultural and social factors shape youth’s politics? Do they always lean left? To what extent is youth a valuable category for a generation? And finally, what is the best way to compel young people to engage in civic or political activism? This class invites students of all backgrounds and academic disciplines to examine the controversial field of youth politics and investigate the ways in which this topic can be best understood to explain current attention and conceptualization of young people’s activism in America and internationally.

Hub areas: Historical Consciousness, The Individual in Community, Writing-Intensive

KHCPS 103: Performance Psychology (3536)
Carly Block, Wheelock College of Education and Human Development
Tuesday and Thursday, 9:30-10:45am

This course is designed for students interested in the psychological and social factors related to performance across domains such as sports, performing arts, medicine, military, and business. Students will explore core theories and evidence-based practices in performance psychology while learning strategies to address mental performance challenges (e.g., performing under pressure) within these domains. They will also engage with diverse performer experiences and develop skills to critically analyze research and apply concepts in real-world contexts.

Hub areas: The Individual in Community, Teamwork/Collaboration, Creativity/Innovation

KHCSO 102: Health Justice (16909)
Joseph Harris, CAS Sociology
Tuesdays, 3:30-6:15 pm

This course puts five pressing social problems related to human, animal, and planetary health under a microscope, examining the dynamics that led to these problems and innovative policies and practices that are being developed to address them.

Hub areas: Social Inquiry II, Digital/Multimedia Expression, Research and Information Literacy

KHC TH 103: Contemporary Playwrights (Class Number TBD)
Kristin Leahey, CFA School of Theatre
Mondays, 2:30-5:15 pm

Contemporary Theatre addresses contemporary playwrights, directors, and their collaborations. The contemporary plays we read plays represent a diverse body of styles, genres, and forms. Through theoretical, sociological, political, cultural, and predominantly textual analysis lenses we will approach the material in this class. All of the works we encounter grapple with issues such as identity, globalization, racial injustice, islamophobia, feminism, wealth disparity, loss, oppression, political turmoil, love, truth, family, sexuality, gender, and intersectionality. Their creators were compelled to explore these ideologies and themes through the vehicle of theatre, which we will likely both scrutinize and celebrate. We will discuss them as works of dramatic literature–on the page–and as theatre–how they are performed. By the successful completion of this course, you will be able to thoughtfully write and orally respond to the relevance of contemporary performance and how it is produced. In turn, your work will further develop your skills in research, inquiry, and analysis.

Hub areas: Individual in Community, Aesthetic Exploration, Creativity/Innovation