IN 374 - Topics in Interdisciplinary Studies: Imaginary Places, Imagined Futures

Course Description

Rotating topics explore interdisciplinary areas of inquiry. Past topics include: The War on Drugs, Gender in the American Music Industry, and In the News. May be repeated for credit if topics differ. (Semester varies)

Summer 2025 Section 10:
In this course, we will explore the ways in which spaces, places, our pasts, our collective futures, and alternative versions of our present are imagined in four contemporary speculative fiction novels: The City and the City (2009) by China Miéville; Famous Men Who Never Lived (2021) by K. Chess; The Space Between Worlds (2021) by Micaiah Johnson; and A Memory Called Empire (2014) by Arkady Martine. Alongside our reading of fiction, we'll touch on some areas of critical theory, especially what Timothy Morton has termed "dark ecologies," but also other perspectives on topics like political sovereignty, race, queer studies, and posthumanism.