ET Residential Fellow Application

Jordan Bell, English Instructor, Dutchess Community College

This course examines the relationships through which racial knowledge is constructed and communicated in contemporary American literature and historical texts. It approaches racial literacy, and its development, as constructed through sets of relationships between different racial and ethnic groups mediated by culture, history, social media, and assumptions about knowledge (and what is worthy of being deemed as knowledge) and ignorance. Students will study the textual history of racial literacy to segue into how racial literacy and illiteracy manifest in contemporary texts, such as Colson Whitehead’s, The Intuitionist. Moreover, students will be introduced to critical discourse analysis and de-centering Whiteness. Students’ ethnographic experiences (real-world experiences) will be included and studied to help frame contemporary issues with racial literacy in contemporary American literature.

Leroy Cooper, Assistant Professor, Department of Biology and Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Vassar College

The major focus of public health is to prevent disease and promote health. Utilizing a wide range of subjects, public health is inherently multidisciplinary. This course will incorporate aspects of epidemiology, biostatistics, and biology (i.e., the natural history of disease) through lectures, discussion, and laboratory sessions. This course focuses on the principles of quantitative approaches to clinical and public health problems. Study design and validity of public health research, quantitative measures of frequency and association, and methods of data analysis are discussed and applied in the biostatistical laboratory. Critical interpretation of quantitative evidence and public health literature are emphasized throughout the course. Discussion of case studies and primary literature will incorporate aspects of health services, ethics, and policy while also providing students with rigorous experience in quantitative reasoning and evidence-based decision making.

Michelle Ronda, CUNY-Borough of Manhattan Community College Eric Trump, Vassar College

This interdisciplinary course explores the ways in which power structures our behavior and determines what we can and cannot do with our bodies. The difference between the normal and the pathological (or deviant) is not naturally given, but shaped by, for example, tests, laws, custom, wealth, gender, and ethnicity. Depending on time and place, the normal might be deviant and vice versa. This course introduces you to ethical theories and sociological perspectives related to how our bodies and our selves are shaped by the ways we succumb to and resist coercive practices of power. Through readings of key philosophical, bioethical, literary, and legal texts, in-class debates, and exposure to guest speakers, we will explore how medicine and medical research, law, the criminal justice system, and social norms shape and sometimes transform the political, cultural, and social meanings of the human body and the way it inhabits the world. You will learn to examine and discuss complex topics, and to assemble and present research to your professors and peers. The only prerequisite is a willingness to read complex arguments carefully, to be comfortable with ambivalence, and to be open to views other than your own.