New Orleans Book Festival: Student's Perspectives   
Four English majors share their highlights from last weekend's "Mardi Gras for the Mind," which saw a plethora of School of Liberal Arts faculty, staff, and alumni featured on panels throughout Tulane's third literary festival.

January 24, 2024  
Some new content for our readers this year! If you’re interested in the breadth and scope of Tulane’s Liberal Arts—with 35+ academic departments and interdisciplinary programs—this is a resource for recommendations from students, faculty, and staff. Bookmark it for an ongoing, crowdsourced list of contributions from members of our community.

The Individual, Society, and State - PECN303   
Associate Professor Caroline Arruda, Philosophy   
This course presents an integrated study of the main alternatives in political ideology (liberalism, socialism, fascism, Marxism) advocated in the modern world and the exemplifications of these ideologies in practice in the modern world (post-war West Germany, 20th-century Britain, Mussolini's Italy, the former Soviet Union).   
 

Elementary Haitian Creole II - HACR1020   
PhD candidate Kendall Medford, Linguistics   
This class is intended for students who have taken Elementary Haitian Creole I or who have already acquired competencies in Haitian Creole (e.g. high school, junior college, or exposure to Creole at home or abroad). Students will be exposed to more complex linguistic forms and longer texts. They will develop skills to participate in conversations related to real events in Haiti, and they will improve their ability to work on longer writing assignments. Communicative contexts and grammatical guides are introduced in class through a variety of activities, and acquisition is reinforced by interactive use of new structures and vocabulary. Prerequisite: HACR 1010.

Contemporary European Philosophy - PHIL3110   
Celia Scott Weatherhead Professor of Philosophy Richard Velkley, Philosophy   
A study of major philosophical issues and figures in 20th-century continental philosophy, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, among others.   
 

Development: Pitch to Picture - DMPC3010   
Visiting Assistant Professor Dodd Loomis, Theatre   
This course familiarizes students with the complex process by which film and television projects are found, proposed, sold, and produced. The course covers the search for stories, writing coverage, pitch pages, beat sheets, script notes, developing screenplays, and packaging a project for presentation to potential buyers. Prerequisite: DMPC 2002. 

Disasters and Past Societies - ANTH3435   
Professor Chris Rodning, Anthropology   
This class explores case studies on how past societies have prepared for or responded to disasters, critically reflects on "natural" and "cultural" forces that contribute to catastrophic events and that shape the aftermath of disasters, offers comparative assessments of relationships between culture and environment, and the application of resilience theory and models of cultural collapse to understand the effects of disasters on past societies.

Sociology of Crime Control - SOCI1901   
Professor Kevin Gotham, Sociology   
This course is an introduction to the theories, methods, and practices relating to crime control and prevention for students interested in studying criminal justice, criminology, and sociology. The course engages a variety of criminological theories including routine activities theory, situational-opportunity theories, crime pattern theory, and environmental criminology, among others. Students will investigate strategies designed to prevent conditions that foster deviance, and prevention measures directed toward persons or conditions with a high potential for deviance. The course also examines criminological theories and prevention strategies related to fraud, white collar and corporate crime. 

Read more about “Can't Miss Professors” we spotlighted in the latest issue of the Tulane School of Liberal Arts Magazine 

Laura-Zoë Humphreys, an Associate Professor in Communication at the School of Liberal Arts, has been honored with the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Cultural Anthropology Program Senior Research Award, securing more than $88,000 in funding. This grant will support Humphreys' ongoing research on Cuban media piracy—focusing on the impact of gender on the consumption and distribution of unauthorized global media within the island nation.

Humphreys has spent the last two decades studying Cuba, conducting research and living in Havana for months at a time. Her first book, Fidel Between the Lines: Paranoia and Ambivalence in Late Socialist Cuban Cinema (Duke University Press, 2019), shows how allegory and political paranoia shape the public sphere. Her current research is part of a second book project tentatively titled Waiting for the Copy: Gender and Media Piracy in Cuba. The project spans the history of media piracy in Cuba, from post-revolution stolen radio waves, through pirated satellite television and the VHS banks and salons of the nineties and early aughts, up into the digital contemporary landscape, where bundles, or “paquetes” of downloaded media travel the island on hard drives, circumvent the country’s limited internet infrastructure.

“There is a stereotype of Cuba being stuck in time or cut off from the rest of the world,” Humphreys says. “But what's interesting to me is that—while yes, they have had to struggle to gain access to it—Cuban people have always been immersed in global media flows."

Furthermore, Humphreys explains, in our current era—where streaming services dictate much of the world’s access to content—Cuban offline storage systems for pirated material have actually evolved into legitimate media archives.

In her research, Humphreys discovered the ways that gender shaped these informal media economies in terms of infrastructure, labor, and reception. During the nineties and early aughts, she found women who operated VHS banks from their homes to create informal means of living. Later, as media became digitized and piracy businesses were state-sanctioned, women were pushed out of male-dominated distribution networks. They remained, however, the media’s biggest consumers, particularly of pirated South Korean dramas, Turkish soaps, and Mexican telenovelas, which provided a lens for Cuban women to "reimagine race, romance, and capitalism."

The NSF grant will directly support various aspects of the research, and enable Humphreys to fund two Cuban research collaborators, Daymar Valdés Frigola and Sheyla Pool. Valdés Frigola, a Cuban film researcher and an archivist at the Cinemateca de Cuba, will join Humphreys in her fieldwork exploring the historical roots of media piracy. The Cuban sound engineer and film director Sheyla Pool will subsequently collaborate in producing bilingual podcast episodes alongside the research. The aim is to release the podcast through the book’s website and independent Cuban journalism sites, providing a public-facing dimension for both Cuban and international audiences. Throughout the project, Humphreys and her co-researchers are dedicated to preserving these unofficial histories of Cuban media, often reflecting significant political and historical moments, for the nation’s younger generations, and the rest of the world.

Humphreys has previously received a Wenner-Gren Post-PhD Research Grant and a Louisiana Board of Regents ATLAS award for related research. She now joins three other SLA faculty members with current NSF grants: Patrick Button (Economics), Brandon Davis (Political Science), and Katharine Jack (Anthropology).