Heather Glenny

From 17th-century public dissections to the sewage scene on “Ted Lasso”, how has medicine and public health been represented in London’s popular media? In the city’s theatrical productions, museum exhibitions, literature, film, and television, where do representations of Western medicine reflect, undermine, or strengthen its authority, particularly as it became an increasingly professionalized and distinct discipline to the exclusion of other systems of knowing? We’ll look at the tools cultural producers use to reinforce, challenge, or complicate medical theories and definitions of what makes a healthy body, a raced body, a gendered body. With particular attention to horror and satire, we’ll track anxieties and hopes over the “medicalized” body and the “healthy” city, drawing on scholarship in critical race theory, queer studies, disability studies, and media theory. This course focuses on research methodology and producing original, personally meaningful scholarship. Each week we will visit a different archival or cultural site, speak with scholars in the field, create a network of peer support, and ultimately build a robust toolkit for our own work. The final project is an independent research paper scaffolded through a series of mini-assignments and peer workshops. Our syllabus is intentionally conceptual and capacious—spanning centuries, mediums, and disciplines—in order to open up points of entry for every student to make their own

This course looks at the mutated, rearranged, supplemented, and hyper-able bodies of superheroes and supervillains. Drawing on disabilities studies, critical race theory, gender studies, and trans and queer studies, we’ll examine 20th- and 21st-century representations of super-anatomies and their place in American culture. Within superhero media—a genre full of spectacular bodily transformation, biological difference, and physical violence—where do ideologies around race, gender, sexuality, ability, and definitions of “human” get reproduced or destabilized? How can these biodivergent figures who stretch, incinerate, and bubble with muscle be resources for envisioning new possibilities for queer and racialized living, or for reading outside of traditional fantasies of white male power? What is the role of Western science and medicine, of accidents, experiments, and evolutions? Looking at film, graphic novels, and literary texts, we’ll ask how materiality—what the body’s made of—can (re)produce ideology. Finally, we’ll consider these narratives in relation to how bodily transformation is policed today, from bans on gender-affirming care to non-consensual “mutations” caused by environmental racism. Students of all majors are welcome.