Davidson College is a private liberal arts college in Davidson, North Carolina. It has consistently been ranked in the top ten best liberal arts colleges in the country by U.S. News & World Report magazine and was recently ranked the 3rd most rigorous school in the United States by Newsweek.
Davidson College seeks out intellectually curious students who are committed to developing their talents for lives of leadership and service.
English Classes
Designed for majors. Emphasizes theoretical approaches and critical strategies for the written analysis of poetry, fiction, and drama. Writing intensive.
Theory and development of the short story with emphasis on 19th- and 20th-century authors. Lecture, discussion, and workshops. Some attention given to writing for publication.
Designed for majors and prospective majors. Introductory survey of the British literary tradition in poetry, drama, and narrative during the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Eighteenth Century, with special emphasis on Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton.
Designed for majors and prospective majors. Historical survey treating the development of American letters from the beginnings through the twentieth century.
Designed for majors and prospective majors. Historical survey of selected texts outside the British and American literary traditions.
How do modern students approach Shakespeare’s plays as texts to be performed in the early modern theater?
This course begins with the premise that Shakespeare’s dramas, while composing an impressive body of literature, are first and foremost play scripts for actors who performed 400 years ago. As such, they require their own set of reading skills. Through regular writing assignments, class discussions, and acting workshops, students practice the skills required to understand the words on the page as clues to their embodiment on the early modern stage. The course surveys plays across Shakespeare’s theatrical career—comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. Critical reading includes both literary criticism and theatrical history.
For students who wish a more advanced instruction in writing. The focus of the course may vary from semester to semester.
This seminar explores various ways that words and images combine to make meanings. Students will study a range of word-image texts, from illuminated books and graphic narratives, to digital poetry and blogs. Students will write critical papers about these image-texts, and you’ll create your own. The seminar is a double hybrid—word/image texts and critical/creative writing—designed to stimulate your intellectual and imaginative faculties, and to help you develop literacies for the digital age, including mastery of WordPress.
Analytic and comparative reading of major critical texts.
In this course students explore works by eleven southern women writers including Dorothy Allison, Harriet Arnow, Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, Sheri Reynolds, Alice Walker, Jesmyn Ward, and Eudora Welty. Together we will encounter narratives that challenge our understanding of public and private histories and impel us to consider both theoretically and personally the effects of gender, race, class, and region on creative expression and the stories that unfold. We will question the texts, their contexts, and ourselves, always acknowledging Welty’s assertion that “there is absolutely everything in fiction but a clear answer.”
In Shakespeare’s London, audience members referred not to “watching” or “seeing” a play, but to “hearing” it.
“Radio Shakespeare” is a new incarnation of English 452, “Performing Shakespeare.” The course will culminate in three full-length radio performances of The Merchant of Venice before live audiences. A fourth performance, a Sunday matinee on the order of a staged reading, may occur at the Zimmermanns’ Renaissance villa, Pian del Pino. One of the audio performances will be broadcast live on WDAV. Post-production, engineers will assemble an immortal pod-cast combining the strongest elements of the three recorded performances into one whole.
German Classes
Continuing work in developing language skills, with strong emphasis on speaking and writing. The course requires online work and participation in AT sessions. Fulfills the foreign language requirement.
An introduction to authors, genres, and periods in German literature as well as methods of literary criticism. Close reading, discussion, and analytical writing in German about key original texts from various periods and traditions.
Close attention to the various answers to the questions: “Was ist Deutsch?” and “What does the study of German culture entail?” Texts drawn from various discourses, including history, literature, film, visual arts, political and social science, as well as journalism and popular culture
Selected topics primarily in German and Austrian film which introduce students to genres, historical periods, and methods of film analysis. Sample topics include an overview of German cinema, as well as German popular film. Classes are taught in German and focus on close readings and discussions.
For majors, minors, and other advanced students. Independent study under the direction and supervision of a faculty member who reviews and approves the topics of the study, reviews the student’s work on a regular basis, and evaluates the student’s accomplishment. Either one major paper or a series of shorter ones will be among the requirements.
Selected topics primarily in German and Austrian film which introduce students to genres, historical periods, and methods of film analysis. Sample topics include an overview of German cinema, as well as German popular film. Classes are taught in German and focus on close readings and discussions.
Other Classes
Each student must complete eight courses fulfilling distribution requirements, one course in each of the following categories.
HISTORICAL THOUGHT
Courses that seek to understand past human societies and how those societies have evolved over time. Examining documents and/or artifacts to construct broad narratives about the past and how human societies have evolved over times, these courses reveal the constructed ways in which we understand the past and suggest the contingency of how we understand the present.
LITERARY STUDIES, CREATIVE WRITING AND RHETORIC
Courses that develop skills for creating and analyzing the complexities of language, form and aesthetics through which speakers and writers represent the world or express their ideas about it. These courses explore written and oral forms of expression that invite creative interpretation.
MATHEMATICAL AND QUANTITATIVE THOUGHT
Courses that study mathematical, programming or statistical concepts. Some of these courses instruct students in making and analyzing numerically based claims about reality; others develop knowledge based on mathematical proof and problem-solving.
NATURAL SCIENCE
Laboratory courses that study the natural and physical world through direct observation, experimentation and/or analysis of empirical evidence. In these courses, students encounter concepts and models and test them against measurements of natural and physical processes, differentiating knowledge based on testable explanations of phenomena from other kinds of knowledge.
PHILOSOPHICAL AND RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES
Courses on fundamental questions, philosophical reasoning and religious thought and practices reflect on questions about knowledge, existence or the social and ethical world; reasoning about the derivation of positions, beliefs or values; or practices forming individual or community identity.
SOCIAL-SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT
Courses that employ systematic analysis of qualitative, quantitative and/or ethnographic information drawn from the human world. These courses develop, test, and explain concepts and theories about human behavior, either individual or collective and differentiate knowledge derived from observations of the human world from other sorts of knowledge.
VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS
Courses that teach students to represent or express ideas or formulate arguments about how the world is represented in music, theatre, visual art, dance, and screen media. These courses help students build conceptual vocabularies for interpreting and communicating ideas about such works and the formal and aesthetic concerns related to them and/or understand how other have interpreted and communicated these ideas in historical contexts.
LIBERAL STUDIES
Introductory courses accessible to first- or second-year students without prior background in the field that do not fall neatly into one of the seven categories listed above.
This class aims to help students understand the main currents in the Western Tradition from antiquity until the present and to appreciate literary, religious, philosophical, and artistic monuments of the past.
Interdisciplinary study of texts and contexts of the Hebrew scriptures and the ancient and classical world
This class aims to help students understand the main currents in the Western Tradition from antiquity until the present and to appreciate literary, religious, philosophical, and artistic monuments of the past.
Interdisciplinary study of texts and contexts of the Roman Empire, the Christian gospels and epistles, and medieval Europe.
This class aims to help students understand the main currents in the Western Tradition from antiquity until the present and to appreciate literary, religious, philosophical, and artistic monuments of the past.
Interdisciplinary study of texts and contexts of Western culture from the Renaissance to the late 18th century.
This class aims to help students understand the main currents in the Western Tradition from antiquity until the present and to appreciate literary, religious, philosophical, and artistic monuments of the past.
Interdisciplinary study of texts and contexts of Western culture in the 19th and 20th centuries.
A descriptive course, intended primarily for non-science majors, concerning the laws of mechanics, heat, electricity, light, magnetism, the atom, and the nucleus as applied to the devices and technology used and the natural occurrences observed in everyday experience.
Intensive introductory course equivalent to Spanish 101 and 102. Meets six class-hours per week plus four hours weekly with an Assistant Teacher. Completes two semesters of Spanish in one semester. Counts as two courses.
Extensive reading and discussion in Spanish of texts of moderate difficulty in the cultures and literatures of Spain, Latin America and US Latino; grammar study; extensive conversation practice. Requires attendance at Assistant Teacher sessions once a week and online work through the Language Resource Center. Service learning may be required. Meets the degree requirement for proficiency in foreign language.
Survey of contemporary political and economic issues facing the Middle East, including international relations of the Middle East.
The foundation of the first German nation state in 1871 to German unification of 1990. Examines modern German history in the context of cross-regional exchanges, inter-cultural connections, and European-wide and global transformations.
Those who wish to promote social change have typically relied on language, perhaps our most important symbolic resource, to help them to define problematic social and political practices and to argue for new policies. How have persons and groups mobilized linguistic resources in order to argue for social change in the United States? Rhetoric- the study of how public understandings are shaped, shared, and changed through the agency of language- has since ancient times guided speakers and writers in the production of persuasive discourses.The course will examine several episodes of sharp disagreement in American life where civic roles and the rights of citizens have been contested. Using a rhetorical lens, we will analyze primary documents (written and spoken discourses produced during these episodes) in order to understand and evaluate the ways in which groups with unequal power have struggled to define some significant part of their common experience.
A study of how people have portrayed the religious dimension of life through works of narrative fiction. Examines the various motives — religious, political, aesthetic, or otherwise — that guide American imaginings about religion.
Introduction to philosophical issues in classical and contemporary religious thought. Topics vary, and have included the justification of religious claims, the relation of faith to knowledge, arguments for the existence of God, divine attributes, life after death, the problem of evil, the status of religious language, the relation of religion to morality, and alternatives to theism.
Psychology of learning as it relates to teaching. Focus on contemporary theories of learning, retention, transfer, motivation, educational assessment, and adolescent psychology, and their particular application to classroom teaching. Includes special emphasis on teaching exceptional students and appropriate clinical experiences in educational institutions.
Investigation of methods of artmaking using digital technologies, including DSLR cameras and Adobe Master Collection software. Assignments focus on the creative pipeline for developing digital art, video art, and animation. Weekly exercises improve our digital literacy, visual thinking, and technical craft.