With fall registration approaching, students are sorting through hundreds of course listings in PATH. While many courses return each semester with familiar syllabuses and core requirements, a number of new or redesigned classes are also being introduced.
Literature of the Holocaust
Literature of the Holocaust will be taught for the first time this fall by department chair of German, Slavic and Eurasian studies Tobias Boes, under the Department of German and Russian Languages and Literatures. The course explores how trauma is processed through writing and traces the remembrance of the Holocaust across generations.
“The purpose of the class is twofold,” Boes said. “To introduce students to what the Holocaust actually was and to examine how literature can both express and carry the weight of trauma.”
The reading list includes “If This Is a Man” by Primo Levi, “Night” by Elie Wiesel, “Still Alive” by Ruth Klüger and “Maus” by Art Spiegelman.
“Many survivor accounts were written decades after the fact … So even nonfiction has a layer of narrative construction,” Boes said.
Students select archived video interviews of Auschwitz survivors, conducting research and presenting findings on testimonies that are rarely studied.
The course proposes a fall break trip to Berlin and Auschwitz.
“I'm hoping I can bring these testimonies to life in a way that otherwise wouldn't be possible … And also help students understand how integrated Jewish life once was in Germany and Poland. This wasn't something that happened to some distant ‘other,’” Boes said.
Adapting Oz
The course, Adapting Oz, taught by assistant dean of the Office of Undergraduate Studies, Darlene Hampton, examines American culture through the story, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum. First published in 1900, the novel remains deeply tied to American identity.
“Baum's Oz has arguably more adaptations, across more media, than any other work of American fiction … That makes it an ideal lens for exploring how American myths — about gender, race, the frontier or magic — are reinforced or challenged over time,” Hampton wrote in an email.
The course begins with Baum's novels, then moves through adaptations from the MGM musical to “Wicked” and reinterpretations in internet and meme culture.
“Adaptations are all about recreating a story in a new sociocultural context … That process tells us a lot about what a culture values — and what it's trying to suppress,” Hampton wrote.
Students will examine different media through close reading, collaborative discussion and individual projects. In past semesters, students have designed their own Oz adaptations, podcasts or presentations.
“Even children's stories are political,” Hampton wrote. “Who tells them, who gets left out and how they change all reflect deeper tensions in American culture.”
Exploring Access to Play Through Community Coaching
Director of education, schooling and society Andrea Christensen will be teaching the course, Exploring Access to Play Through Community Coaching, that combines classroom learning with on-the-ground coaching work in South Bend, Indiana. The course examines youth access to play through a social justice lens.
“The course is really grounded in this idea that play isn't optional for kids — it's essential,” Christensen said. “But the opportunity to play is not equally distributed.”
Each student will be placed with a local youth organization and coach weekly throughout the semester. Class sessions will cover coaching strategies, trauma-informed care, cultural competency and community engagement.
“There are real access issues in our community and across the country and we're giving students a way to respond to those issues in real time,” Christensen explained.
The course is open to students across disciplines, and no prior coaching experience is required.
“The goal is to prepare students not just to coach, but to lead … and to understand how leadership in sport intersects with race, gender, class and ability,” Christensen said.
Economics of the Seven Deadly Sins
Keough-Hesburgh professor William Evans, under the department of economics, will instruct the course, Economics of the Seven Deadly Sins. This aims to frame economic research methods through the classic vices and identify causal relationships behind social issues.
“We're not just talking about vice abstractly. We're reading studies on the opioid crisis, chronic stress, social comparison — topics that connect to everyday life,” Evans said.
The course places greater emphasis on wrath, gluttony and envy, where Evans said the literature is both compelling and accessible.
The class fulfills the University's writing-intensive requirement and centers on a major independent research project with an original causal question.
Past projects have investigated the effects of the Affordable Care Act on suicide rates or whether alcohol sales at football games impact DUI fatalities.
“A lot of papers ask you to write about something,” Evans said. “This one asks you to come up with the question and figure out how to answer it — that's much harder and also much more like the work economists actually do.”
Unlocking Puzzles: Sociology and Data Science
Assistant professor of sociology, Daniel Tadmon, will be instructing the course, Unlocking Puzzles, to introduce students to the world of quantitative social research using real-world data. Designed for sociology majors and data science minors, the course emphasizes practical skills in coding, data analysis and social inquiry.
“I’m a sociologist of culture and mental health,” Tadmon stated. “These are big, often abstract topics. What makes someone feel well or unwell? What does culture say about who we are? This course is about finding ways to study those questions through data.”
The course uses publicly available data, where students read current research and apply similar methods in their final projects.
One student used 60 years of Billboard Hot 100 data from the United States and Mexico to track shifting cultural values across borders. Another tested whether artificial intelligence replicates human emotional contagion by feeding a large language model emotional content.
Students are not expected to have extensive research backgrounds, with preferable small experiences in coding and statistics.
While the course has only run once before, Tadmon said student work was “grad school level” in quality.
“They're learning not just how to consume knowledge, but how to produce it,” Tadmon said.
