Course Syllabus

Haunting, Horror, and Other Ghost Stories

This research seminar is designed to help students conceptualize, develop and finish significant research projects in a single quarter. It should be useful for a wide range of students—students with varying degrees of research experience and with varied research interests. The class can be applied towards the CHID senior thesis requirement, or it can be used to develop a stand-alone research project. The focus for this year’s research seminar is on haunting, horror, and ghosts as entry points into discussions about politics, culture, violence, and power. What do Indigenous zombie films tell us about colonialism? How might horror films speak to misogyny, political, and racial violence? Can we think about haunting as anti-colonial practice? What can Dracula and Frankenstein tell us about the anxieties of modern capitalism? Students will engage critically with academic texts, films, fiction, art, and other mediums, and will have the opportunity to work on a research project related to the themes of the course.

There are many limitations to completing research projects within the space of a quarter. With this in mind, this seminar tries to maximize the amount of time students can spend focused on their own projects. The first six weeks will be spent developing a common language by reading an assigned set of readings and discussing these texts in an intensive seminar setting. During the second half of the quarter each student will work toward the completion of a research project. In order to facilitate this, students will meet in small research clusters. I will also meet individually with small student groups, and with individual students as needed.

As we proceed through the quarter, students will learn skills useful in developing future research projects, such as proposal writing and working with primary and secondary sources. Students are encouraged to use a medium that best fits their goals although each project must incorporate a written component. 

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