Weird Teaching choices

[Riotbeard]

I am teaching a self-designed low/middle-level seminar this semester, and as I make my syllabus, I am constantly wondering what my students will think about the assignments.  I was wondering what other grad students were teaching and what choices they were making that they viewed as adventurous? The class I am teaching is Cultural History of American Medicine: from Cholera to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

 

For most of the semester were are reading cultural history monographs (hardly adventurous given the course), but for the last two weeks we are working with primary sources from 1990-2002.  In the last two weeks, my students read parts of Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole, Watching 12 Monkeys, X-Men, and an episode of Buffy.  Early on they have to read some Foucault also...

 

What else are people teaching? What are you assigning that you are excited about?

[thedig13]

I am teaching a self-designed low/middle-level seminar this semester, and as I make my syllabus, I am constantly wondering what my students will think about the assignments.  I was wondering what other grad students were teaching and what choices they were making that they viewed as adventurous? The class I am teaching is Cultural History of American Medicine: from Cholera to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

 

For most of the semester were are reading cultural history monographs (hardly adventurous given the course), but for the last two weeks we are working with primary sources from 1990-2002.  In the last two weeks, my students read parts of Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole, Watching 12 Monkeys, X-Men, and an episode of Buffy.  Early on they have to read some Foucault also...

 

What else are people teaching? What are you assigning that you are excited about?

As a bit of a graphic-novel nerd myself, your class sounds absolutely awesome.

 

I know I'm not a grad student yet, so I hope that I'm not speaking out of place, but I'd suggest throwing some of Alexandra Stern's Eugenic Nation into your syllabus. Her first chapter, in particular, does a great job of drawing connections between the racialization of diseases, then-modern medicine (people were just discovering the health-benefits of hygiene), and the eugenics movement that emerged around that period.

[Riotbeard]

The syllabus is locked, but I did look that book and it looks great (I added it to my amazon wishlist as a matter of fact).  I am assigning a eugenics book, Martin Pernick's The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915. I am also assigning reverby's new(ish) tuskegee book.