This is section C, which fulfills the Historical Perspectives Discovery requirement. All sections are Writing Intensive.
 

HUMA 526: The Undead Humanities: (Pseudo-) Science, Humanities, and Our Fear of Zombies

Centered on the question “Why do we fear the living dead?” this course investigates how the zombie phenomenon reflects the anxieties of western societies from antiquity to the present. In particular, it explores how the living dead embody fears that focus on our relationships with our bodies and the systems of knowledge and technology that we use to understand and control them and the world in which we live. The first several weeks explore pre-modern societies and how the undead were tangled in discourses of the nature of the body, the soul, and resurrection. The 19^th century serves as a pivot where earlier concerns come into contact with the explosion in scientific research and medical experimentation. The majority of the course will trace the ways the explosion in medical, scientific, and technological advances that occurred in the 20^th-21^st centuries manifested in an explosion in cultural productions about zombies. We shall discover that we have a zombie for every fear raised by modern science--whether nuclear war, pollution and the environment, epidemics, globalization and the digital age, or 9/11.