38 courses with the subject LTA, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
LTA 2001Staging Immigration4
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits Migration, immigration, assimilation: these complex, charged, and multifaceted ideas are debated in political spheres, examined in scholarly discourse, and are featured daily in various media outlets and publications. These ideas however, have also long captured the imaginations of artists and audiences alike, and the stories of those who have moved their families, their lives, and themselves to another country or continent have been central in the theatre, particularly in the United States, a nation of immigrants. In this course, we will attempt to understand both the captivating power and the political potential of performance focused on immigrants and the immigrant experience. We will study a variety of theatrical productions, from plays, to musicals, to contemporary stand-up comedy and solo performance and examine the ways theatre artists consider and understand identity, prejudice, familial ties and loyalties, and notions of the American Dream. We will connect the interests and goals of theatre artists staging immigration 100 years ago to those artists working in 2020. Finally, we will create and perform original theatre pieces, inspired by the artists we study, focused on a pressing societal problem. The scholarly and experiential elements in this course will, hopefully, shift our notions of the profound journeys and undertakings by immigrants and illuminate new and crucial understandings of the immigrant experience unfolding in our world today. RHT1000) Credits 4 241
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits This course is designed to introduce you to the realm of visual communication - how it's done, how it works and how cultural and personal experiences shape your reactions to it. Fine arts (painting, sculpture, architecture), industrial arts (graphic and product design) and everyday objects will be presented as the workings of visual communication, the role of art and artists in a variety of times and places, the nature of good and bad art and design are explored. RHT1000) Credits 4 242
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits This course presents a panorama of art and culture in Latin America from ancient times to the present. Topics include Pre-Columbian Empires; Spanish Colonial Cities; Revolution, Reform and Modernism; Indigeneity, African diasporas, and Nationalism. Looking through the lens of art and architecture, the course pays special consideration to Latin America’s enduring legacies and dynamic processes of change. This is an introductory survey intended for students of all academic and professional interests: no previous art history courses or experience with Latin America necessary. WRT1001) Credits 4
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits Children’s minds work differently from those of adults; it’s the way they make sense of the world, the way a child’s own small world is the whole world and, at the same time, an ever-evolving concept, as they learn and grow and change. They understand and react instinctively. This can result in thoughts and actions that are both naïve and profound, innocent and wise, non- sensical and brilliant. And even when they don’t (or can’t) understand sophisticated issues, they remain keen observers. At Babson, there’s a great deal of emphasis in thinking about your future self, the person you will be in five years or in twenty years. Clearly, that has value. But this course asks if there is also benefit in looking to the past. Through our texts and discussions, we will look at the ways we look at the world as children, the ways our perceptions change as we grow older, and the ways in which that evolution is both positive and negative. RHT1000) Credits 4 Babson College Undergraduate Catalog 2026-2027
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits This course examines a range of fairy tale motifs as they recur across time and cultures, asking such questions as: Why are fairy tales so popular with children and adults? How do the messages of fairy tales shape both individual identity and the broader cultural moment? How does culture shift fairy tales? What are the hegemonic and subversive possibilities of fairy tales? For example, what are its gendered tropes and how are these re-examined or subverted? We will examine multiple genres including short stories, poems, and films. To place these works in their cultural context, we will also read select items of literary theory and criticism, history, and psychology. This course contributes to both the Cultivating Inclusion and the Embracing Global and Multicultural Perspectives educational themes. The class will be built on active learning and reading and will deepen critical thinking skills. Course materials will draw on print, visual, and auditory sources, to expose students to a wide range of literary/artistic styles. Class discussion will be largely student-focused, including student presentations. Students will write an essay, complete a creative project, and give an oral presentation to demonstrate their analytical skills, and will take both a midterm and final exam to measure recognition, critical thinking, and synthesis skills. Credits 4 243
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits American Film History offers an overview of the history and theory of Hollywood movies while exploring the basic cinematic techniques used by film directors to express their ideas and tell their stories. The course proceeds chronologically starting in the 1920s silent era. The goals of the course include introducing students to film history, theory, and terminology while simultaneously considering the relation between cultural values and popular culture forms. American Film History will equip students to view movies as points of intersection for artistic intent, cultural mythmaking, individual and social identity formation, and ideology. Students will view one film per week. They will also be expected to read and learn terminology in preparation for each class. Other assignments include written work, quizzes, a midterm, and a final. American Film History is an intermediate course that fulfills the Literary and Visual Arts (LVA) requirement. Credits 4
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits This course will introduce students to the African American literary tradition starting with the slave narrative and concluding with contemporary literary production. Along the way, we will consider the move from oral to written literatures, the aesthetic forms created and adapted by African American writers, and the role of African American letters in chronicling and shaping the experience of African American people. Our study will be informed by major historical moments —slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration from south to north, the Civil Rights and post-Civil rights eras—and we will read work by writers such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. RHT1000) Credits 4 Babson College Undergraduate Catalog 2026-2027
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits Global Cinema provides an overview of the history and aesthetics of films from Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. Students will analyze films as cultural artifacts and will consider the interrelationship among various national film movements and aesthetic approaches. Weekly film viewings will be complemented by readings in the history and practice of several national cinemas and of post-colonial, transnational cinemas. Films are in their original language with English subtitles. RHT1000) Credits 4
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits This course looks at money and economic thinking in literature. We will examine works from a wide range of periods and genres, with a strong grounding in fiction and drama from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Aesthetic genres such as naturalism, modernism, post-modernism, and expressionism will be considered in terms of how they inform and are informed by thinking about money. There will also be contextual/ theoretical readings from Marx, Benjamin, Simmel, Freud, Lacan, and others. RHT1000) Credits 4 244
LTA 2022The Speculative Genres: Horror, Sci-Fi and
Fantasy Literature and Film 4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits In this class, we examine the speculative genres, stories containing science fictional, gothic/horror, or fantastic qualities that are particularly invested in socio-political questions. Rather than resolutely celebrating a techno- scientific future, these stories engage audiences in difficult ethical and philosophical discussions: What does it mean to be human? What is the cost of progress? What does it take to imagine (and then create) a more equitable world? We discuss a range of texts, including essays by J. R. R. Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin; novels by Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, Karen Tei Yamashita, Cormac McCarthy, and Margaret Atwood; short fiction by Keri Hulme, Carmen Maria Machado, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ted Chiang; films such as Get Out, The Hunger Games, Black Panther, and Blade Runner; and tv such as Station 11 and The Rings of Power RHT1000) Credits 4 245
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits Empires have been built and toppled all over the world since the beginning of recorded history, and literature has served both in the building and in the toppling. This course begins by examining 19th century imperialism with a focus on European colonization of territories in Africa and South Asia; moves through the nationalist movements that arguably brought political but not economic independence or prosperity to these places; and concludes by examining the shape of the global landscape today with its “remote control” empires that work through markets and information channels rather than territory and raw resources. We will explore these great geopolitical shifts by studying literature and film from European, African, and South Asian perspectives that can reveal the many perspectives on the impacts of cultural, political, and economic contact through imperialism. RHT1000) Credits 4 Babson College Undergraduate Catalog 2026-2027
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits This course is designed to introduce students to painting, architecture, and sculpture from the Renaissance to the early 20th century and to give students an understanding of the general principles governing the visual arts. Topics such as the role of the artist, the functions of art in society, and the nature of visual language, among others, will be discussed as major artists and their works are presented in this survey of Western art. Class lectures and discussions are based on the presentation of slides. RHT1000) Credits 4 Babson College Undergraduate Catalog 2026-2027
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits Curiosity contains within it a contradiction; it is our drive to know battling against our fear of the unknown, and it has played a major role in literature for a very long time. In this course, we will read texts that span several continents and centuries as we study curiosity and ask ourselves myriad questions. Why did the definition of curiosity change from negative to positive in the 14th century? Is curiosity hubristic tinkering or social responsibility? How is curiosity valued? Is the valuation of curiosity dependent on what is being sought? Is curiosity linked to gender? Who is rewarded for possessing it? Who is punished? If curiosity killed the cat, why? We will study Greek Myths and Fairy Tales as well as the following authors: John Milton, Christopher Marlowe, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Sigmund Freud, Agatha Christie, Anne Sexton, and Patricia Highsmith. We will also view Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo. Credits 4 247
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits The British novelist Virginia Woolf declared that human nature underwent a fundamental change _on or about December 1910.The first few decades of the twentieth century are characterized by a fervent desire to break with the past and to reject traditions that seemed outmoded and too genteel to suit an era of psychological and technological breakthroughs and violence on a grand scale. This class will look at works that reflect ideas of experimentation, in both form and content, and that engaged new understandings of time, space, and human subjectivity. We will read writers such as Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, E.M. Forster, Djuna Barnes, and Katherine Mansfield, as well as the theories of Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein (this is a tentative list). Be prepared; there is a lot of reading. These are difficult and challenging texts that do not rely on straightforward plot and narrative; they require careful analysis and critical engagement. RHT1000) Credits 4 Babson College Undergraduate Catalog 2026-2027
LTA 2049Seeking Enrichment: Pilgrims and Pilgrimage
in Literature 4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits The novelist Joyce Carol Oates has said, _To be an American is to be a kind of pilgrim ... a seeker after truth. The pilgrim is our deepest and purest self. In this course we'll explore the character of the pilgrim in selected fiction, essays, and poems, using questions such as: What inspires someone to take and retake pilgrimages: long, often difficult journeys far from home? What friendships and other communities form along the way and why? What besides self-enrichment do pilgrims hope to find, or possibly lose? Through close reading, discussion, and written analyses, we'll study how writers use setting, plot, and theme to consider these questions. There will also be one field trip, which will serve as a local pilgrimage. Course texts may include contemporary works by Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula Le Guin, and Curtis Sittenfeld, as well as selections from Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer, Basho, and Thoreau. RHT1000) Credits 4
LTA 2062Suburban America in Literature and Culture
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits American suburbs are simultaneously reviled as physical spaces comprised of little boxes made of ticky tacky, churning out homogeneous values and people, and revered as mythically perfect imagined spaces in television sitcoms and advertising. This class aims to examine the American suburbs as constructed through popular texts, classic literature, and contemporary art. We will consider how the tension between utopia and dystopia is imagined and re-imagined over time and across genres and texts, reading and analyzing works such as the poetry of Anne Sexton, Richard Yates' novel Revolutionary Road, and the short stories of John Cheever. We will also examine representations of the suburbs in science fiction and film. RHT1000) Credits 4 Babson College Undergraduate Catalog 2026-2027
LTA 2072Detective Fiction, Noir, and Social Criticism
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits This course explores the uses and genre development of detective fiction and film noir and their functions as social commentary, applying examples from different times and places - in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. What do these works have in common, and what separates them? How do they reflect or interrogate the cultures that produced them? Why has detective fiction (in its various incarnations) remained so popular? We consider revisions of the genre in the so-called “hardboiled” or serial “pulp fiction” of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as its representation in film noir. We analyze later versions of the genre through films such as Chinatown and Blade Runner, and recent alterations in neo-noir films, evaluating them in relation to contemporary culture. Short works by canonical Latin American authors such as Borges and García Márquez, among others, provide an introduction to Latin American crime fiction. Through the works of current and popular writers and filmmakers we consider the legacies of dictatorship in Spain and Latin America, and the genre’s use in investigating and exposing a conflictive past (or fear of what one might find). We will look at the female detective in varied works. How is she different (if she is?) from her male counterparts? And we examine how detective fiction can function to parody or subvert the possibility of an ordered solution, or the completion of justice. RHT1000) Credits 4 Babson College Undergraduate Catalog 2026-2027
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits This course explores the most provocative literary movements of the contemporary Middle East, including authors from the Iranian, Arab, Turkish, Armenian, and North African areas of the region. From the experimental novels of Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk to the prison poetry of Ahmad Shamlu, from such legendary voices of exile as Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish to the dark sensual narratives of Joyce Mansour and Forugh Farrokhzad, we will cover a range of creative experiments with romanticism, mysticism, surrealism, existentialism, and post-modernism. As such, this will also allow us to unravel the many intricate concepts (those of desire, violence, time, space, power, revolution, and catastrophe) that form the Middle Eastern cultural imagination. RHT1000) Credits 4 250
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits The film Ararat, by Atom Egoyan, contains testimony from a woman who has witnessed a massacre of young brides. She asks, “Now that I have seen this event, how shall I dig out these eyes of mine?” This woman occupies the most direct position—the eyewitness—in relation to an extreme event; however, the question of witnessing also extends to all of us who encounter images and stories of atrocities in our everyday lives. We will trace the concept of witnessing in philosophical, legal, and human rights contexts before turning to novels and other literature of witness by international writers such as Pat Barker, Nadine Gordimer, Gunter Grass, Primo Levi, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Rigoberta Menchu, Toni Morrison, and Virginia Woolf in order to investigate the following questions: What kinds of events generate or require witnesses, and how does witnessing differ from simply seeing? What effects does the event have upon the witness, and vice versa? What does it mean for literature to act as a kind o witness? How can literature ethically represent or “witness” extreme events? What responsibilities do we have to serve as witnesses to extreme global events, and what do we do with the energy created by our witnessing of such events? RHT1000) Credits 4
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits Explores how profoundly our lives are shaped by the designs of graphics we see, objects we use and buildings we move through every day. Students will gain increased understanding of the role good and bad design plays in affecting them and in shaping the world in which they live. RHT1000) Credits 4 Babson College Undergraduate Catalog 2026-2027
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits What is love? Where does it come from, what does it ask of us, and how does it alter our minds, bodies, values, and relations? Are sex, friendship, and marriage necessary for love, or do they inhibit love’s fullest expression? In this course, we will examine how influential writers have conceived and contested love’s meanings across a range of cultural contexts. Focusing primarily on erotic love (erôs), we will consider how such meanings relate to notions of art, beauty, conjugality, legality, pleasure, sexuality, spirituality, and transgression, both in their original era and our own. Particular attention will be paid to differences of race, class, age, gender, and authority as incitements to, and/or impediments of, relations of love and eroticism. RHT1000) Credits 4 251
4 Intermediate Liberal Arts Credits What gives a great short story its undeniable power? Some writers strive to make their stories pack a punch, while others create more reflective works, exploring interiors; in either approach, the impacts of a great story are both immediate and lasting. In this course, you will read a range of forms, from early tales to modern experiments. You will compare the intentions and effects of short stories that create entire worlds and those that are more elliptical and fragmentary, though they hint at more. You will learn the formal elements of the short story, such as characterization and point-of-view, and also trace the development of literary theories, those critical lenses that will increase your understanding and enrich your appreciation. Reading writers from several continents – from the famous, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Alice Munro, to the lesser-known, like Lucia Berlin and Edward P. Jones – you will follow stories of a family murdered senselessly by the side of the road, a bishop languishing in his final illness, and many more; you will even encounter a talking cat who proves to be careless in spilling the family’s secrets. RHT1000) Credits 4 252
