HSA Department Updates, Sept. 2025

Sabbaticals Beginning and Ending

The department welcomes Alfred Flores (Associate Professor of Asian-American Studies) and Ken Fandell (Professor of Art and Michael G. and C. Jane Wilson Chair in Arts and the Humanities) back from their spring semester sabbaticals.  Vivien Hamilton (Professor of the History of Science) and Salvador Plascencia (Associate Professor of Creative Writing) are heading off on sabbatical this semester.  The department wishes them a productive time away!

New Work by Bill Alves 

Composer and professor of Music Bill Alves’s work has appeared most recently on an album of songs released by soprano Stacey Fraser (https://microfestrecords.com/my-dancing-sweetheart/).  Spotify subscribers can hear Alves’s contributions here: 

Seitz on Pei Hsien Lim and YIMBYism 

Two recent publications by Associate Professor of Cultural Geography David Seitz extend his increasingly wide-ranging body of scholarship into new areas.   “I Will Always Be There in the Front Line Fighting”: The Defiant Art and Activism of Pei Hsien Lim (1953–1992), is a new online exhibit curated for OutHistory that explores the life, art, and political resistance of Singaporean-born, U.S.-based artist and activist Pei Hsien Lim. The exhibit highlights Lim’s contributions to queer liberation and AIDS activism.  View the exhibit here: https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/seitz

Seitz’s article “YIMBYism and the Economies of Fantasy: Affect, Psychoanalysis, and the Critique of U.S. ‘Pro-Housing’ Discourse” was published in cultural geographies in March.  According to Seitz, the article “makes a cultural-geographical contribution to the growing critique of ‘Yes in My Back Yard’ or ‘YIMBY’ movements, which invoke (neo)liberal supply-side economics to advocate for increased urban housing production as a means of resolving a host of social and environmental crises.” 

New Courses  

HSA faculty are always designing new courses to expand our offerings.  Here are some of the new courses being launched this year. 

Architecture 179C, Campus Architecture – Jia Yi Gu

This course focuses on historical research methods and architectural study. The seminar will explore the architectural history of Harvey Mudd College, from a study of its foundational ideas and processes to social, political, material, and formal analysis of its built and natural environment. Substantial archival and bibliographical search will be required to trace and collect historical materials related to the architectural history of the college, in order to produce a community archive and/or repository related to the campus. Each student will conduct archival research at Claremont College Library’s Special Collections (in person), Library of Congress, Getty Research Institute, amongst others. The material consulted include institutional and personal correspondences, architectural drawings, photographic documentation, project statements, popular and professional magazines, and oral histories. The final project will be a digital timeline, digital repository of archival materials, and student-led walking tour and audio guide of the architecture of Harvey Mudd College.

Music 179I, Taiwan Through its Music, Documentary, and Film – David Wilson

In this course, we will embrace documentary film as a means to approach a topic that has, until recent years, occupied an ambiguous position in academic literature: Taiwan. In turn, we will use our focus on Taiwanese documentary film to expand our understanding of the potentials and pitfalls of documentary film in the 21st century. This course is planned in collaboration with faculty at National Taiwan University, and will provide opportunities for interaction with students in the parallel course in Taiwan. Unlike text-based media, documentaries offer multisensory portrayals of their subjects, combining image, text, and music to provide audiences with a sense of their subject matter. Despite the many strengths of documentary film, however, many scholars remain cautious of documentary film, skeptical of documentary’s potential for totalizing narratives and privileging of emotional oomph over historical nuance. No foreign language proficiency required. All course materials and classroom discussions are in English, and all required films are subtitled.

Political Studies 179D, How to Defeat a Dictator – Paul Steinberg

The United States was designed to be dictator-proof. It is, in fact, one of only a handful of democracies with constitutions lasting over a century. With US authoritarianism on the rise, this course draws on the experiences of numerous countries and historical periods to understand how dictators arise, how they rule, how they are resisted, and how they fall. Topics include psychological resilience, social movement theory, protest tactics and strategies of resistance, political artwork, the nature and types of authoritarian rule, the relation between bureaucrats and dictators, the experience of exile, international democratic alliances, and policymaking styles of authoritarian regimes. Students will discuss the social science literature on these themes and participate in related group projects.