The College will introduce a new Humanities Core sequence option, Poetry and the Human, beginning in Autumn 2017. The newest Core sequence since the addition of Language and the Human in 2007, Poetry and the Human joins other multi-quarter courses such as Media Aesthetics, Readings in World Literature, and Human Being and Citizen that can satisfy the Humanities sequence graduation requirement.

Students in Poetry and the Human will study the techniques, explored concepts, and social implications in poetry from various cultural traditions. This sequence distinguishes itself from other Humanities Core sequences by offering the option of taking a creative writing poetry course in the Spring, which satisfies one quarter of the Core’s Arts requirement.

“I think that now more than ever it is imperative to maintain the role of poetry as a form of innovative thought, communication, and critique, partly by way of learning to hear and formulate new language to answer the challenges that are arriving so swiftly at our door,” said Sarah Nooter, Associate Professor in the Department of Classics. Both Nooter and her colleague Na’ama Rokem, Associate Professor in the Departments of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature, spearheaded the creation of the new Core sequence.

The instructors in Poetry and the Human will come from ten departments in the Division of the Humanities, as well as the Committee on Social Thought and the Creative Writing program. This diversity of disciplinary scholars will introduce students in the College to a cross-section of cultural phenomena fundamental to understanding how societies have thought and continue to think about the world.