As students begin to register for classes Oct. 30, new courses make their way to Course Counts. Among the variety of new courses offered next semester are “Grim Tales: The Fairy Tales of Brothers Grimm,” “Indecent: Liberation in Latin America” and “Islam and Capitalism.”
Comparative Studies in Literature & Culture (CSLC) professor Alex Gardner said he will teach “Grim Tales: The Fairy Tales of Brothers Grimm,” which will look at the Grimm’s fairy tales from a wide range of perspectives including psychoanalytic, historic and critical feminist perspectives. Gardner also said that many well-known fairy tales like Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty are Grimm fairy tales.
According to Gardner, his desire to create the course came from a personal connection with the stories.
“I find the stories magical, and I’m very interested in the idea that you can retell these stories over and over again,” Gardner said. “Their meaning can shift depending on how you tell them and who tells them, and yet, there’s something that always stays the same.”
Gardner said he often organizes his classes by themes, like the appearance of violence in fairytales and how a story is told with narrative theory. Gardner also said that he thinks his class is a good balance of fun and serious, and he wants students to come out of his class with more developed critical thinking skills.
“The class appeals to a lot of students across different majors and different interests,” Gardner said. “I tried to convey the notion that anything that’s transmitted to any cultural object [is] worth thinking about critically.”
Religious Studies professor Kimberly Diaz said she will teach “Indecent: Liberation in Latin America,” a course that studies how Latin American women have been the foundation for social justice in Latin America and around the world, sometimes exiled from their societies due to their immense power. Like Gardner, Diaz said she has a personal connection to her upcoming course and that her desire to teach comes from a passion for social justice.
“I am a firm believer that the most generative form of teaching is one where we tap into the personal,” Diaz said. “I’ve been told a lot throughout my life, specifically within my own family, ‘What does a decent woman do? What is something that’s indecent?’ And those kinds of examples will just organically pop up as we go through course material, so it’s very personal.”
Diaz said that for her upcoming class, her first priority is connecting with students who identify as Latinx and that she hopes the course is informative for people who don’t identify as Latinx.
“My motivation to teach [is] to illuminate power dynamics,” Diaz said.
Another new class in the Religious Studies department is “Islam and Capitalism,” which will be taught by professor Sohaib Khan. According to the course description, the class examines Islamic commercial law and its connection to economic life in Muslim societies throughout history.
Khan said that his interest in creating this course came from his experience of being an economics major as an undergraduate student. Khan said he studied economics mathematically but believed that human institutions function through social relations. He said he hopes that in his class, he and his students can better make sense of the amalgamation of religion and economics.
Khan said he wanted to design the course after his experience as a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University last year. He said that being part of that group enriched his thinking about this course and capitalism on a global scale.
“When students take this course, this is not just a conventional course in which you learn two interesting things about Islam, this exotic religion that exists in another part of the world,” Khan said. “The stuff that students learn in this course will help them understand their contemporary realities and will help them understand global capitalism in other contexts as well.”
Khan also said that he did his dissertation on Islamic banking and finance, which sparked his passion for the topic. He said he realized how economic decisions are informed by a number of cultural, religious and ethical considerations through his family’s experience of multiple migrations, from India to Pakistan to the United States.
“It expands the realm of religion and allows students to see religion in action in the realm of culture, politics, gender and sexuality and economics,” Khan said. “I don’t think a course has been taught at Oxy before that brings religion or Islam and capitalism together in this manner.”
According to Gardner, Diaz and Khan, they are all excited to see how students engage and connect with their course material. They all said that they are excited to teach their new course because of their personal connections to the material but are also excited to learn from their new students.
Contact Jameela Bowo at bowo@oxy.edu
Correction Oct. 29 at 12:30 p.m.: Updated to accurately reflect Khan’s new course description and his family’s motivations for immigrating to the U.S.
