Reed College
Reed College

Master of Arts in Liberal Studies

2025-2026 Evening and Summer Graduate Courses

The following courses are scheduled through the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program for the 2025–2026 academic year. Typically, MALS courses must enroll a minimum of five students to be offered. Most enroll between five and ten students and all are capped at 15 students. The MALS thesis, MALS 670, is a one-unit, one-semester course.

See Reed's academic calendar for important dates.

Visit this page for information about summer 2025 classes.

portrait of professor maureen harkin Portrait of Professor Michael Breen Portrait of Professor Nicole James Portrait of Professor Chauncey Handy
Portrait of Professor Jay Dickson Photo of Professor Chris Koski Portrait of Professor Vasiliy Safin Portrait of Professor Lexi Neame

2025-2026 MALS Faculty: Maureen Harkin, Michael Breen, Nicole James, Chauncey Handy, Jay Dickson, Chris Koski, Vasiliy Safin, and Lexi Neame

English 553

British Romanticism and its Contexts
The period 1789-1832 was one of dramatic political, social, and industrial upheaval in Europe. In response, British writers and artists produced some of the most powerful representations in English literary history of hopes for liberty and progress, and of pure transcendent joy, as well as some of its sharpest attacks on oppression and convention. The class will analyze the formal and stylistic innovations of these writers and the relation of their works to the profound social changes and experiences that they depict, connecting them to their aesthetic, political, and colonial contexts. The main focus will be on the poetry of the period, with some discussion of contemporary prose. Primary readings will be drawn from the works of William Blake, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Robinson, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and others. Class readings will also include recent critical and historical studies of this revolutionary era.

 

0.5 units
Maureen Harkin, Professor of English and Humanities
Tuesdays, 5:40–7:10 p.m.

 

History 554

The French Revolution (c. 1770 – c. 1804)
Few events are as significant, or controversial, as the French Revolution of 1789. From one perspective, it marked the sudden, violent end of the ancien régime. Within a few years, revolutionaries eliminated the monarchy, aristocracy, guilds, and a corporate society rooted in legal privileges and traditional hierarchies. They also deprived the Catholic Church of much of its power and confiscated most of its property. In France’s lucrative Caribbean colonies, meanwhile, enslaved people and free people of color set in motion a chain of events that culminated with slavery’s abolition and the ultimate independence of Saint-Domingue (Haïti). From another perspective, the French Revolution can be seen as the beginning of the modern world. Its struggles were replayed across much of the world for a century or more. Concepts such as human rights, nationalism, mass democratic politics, and even our understanding of “Revolution” as a process of radical change can be traced to the events that unfolded in the wake of 1789.
 
This course will examine the history of the French Revolution as well as the ongoing debates surrounding its causes, trajectories, and consequences. Exploring competing Marxist, Revisionist, and Post-Revisionist interpretations of the Revolution we will also contrast the wide range of approaches historians have used to analyze how the Revolution happened and why it followed the course that it did.

 

0.5 units
Michael Breen, Professor of History and Humanities
Wednesdays, 5:40–7:10 p.m.

 

Liberal Studies 515

Science Education Research: Methods and Insights
What factors influence educators’ practices and students’ learning in the natural sciences? What role do discipline-specific characteristics of the natural sciences play? These are some of the questions investigated through discipline-based education research (DBER), which integrates disciplinary STEM knowledge and skills (e.g., from chemistry, biology, etc.) with social science research methods to study teaching and learning in STEM fields. In this course, we will examine how science education knowledge is generated and discuss insights about science teaching and learning. In this course, students will develop their ability to assess the alignment between research questions, theoretical frameworks, methods of data collection, and the analysis and interpretation of data. Through this process, students will evaluate scholarly claims about science education by considering the strengths and limitations of the evidence and reasoning associated with the claim.

 

0.5 units
Nicole James, Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Thursdays, 5:40–7:10 p.m.

Liberal Studies 521

Bible, Race, and Empire
This course explores the inherent connections between US expansionism, concepts of race/racialization, and biblical interpretation. We will analyze biblical texts and their reception in their historical and literary contexts, explore the contours of critical race theory, and consider the complex histories of American expansion “from below” (from the point of view of the marginalized). In short, we will seek to understand the confluence of various socio-political currents, delineating the ways in which biblical texts are redeployed as tools of oppression or instruments of liberation in the burgeoning American empire.

 

0.5 units
Chauncey Handy, Assistant Professor of Religion and Humanities
Tuesdays, 7:30–9:00 p.m.
 

Literature 537

James Joyce
This class surveys the fiction of the writer often called the most influential and innovative novelist of the twentieth century. For all of its modernist difficulty, Joyce's fiction, when read in chronological progression, actually educates its readers in strategies of reading each of his successive new styles. Joyce's most accessible naturalistic stories from Dubliners, and then progresses to his experiments with stream of consciousness in a Portrait of a Young Man before tackling his mature explorations into changing rhetorical styles in Ulysses. We will also look at the contexts of popular, social, and political culture from early twentieth-century Ireland and Europe in which Joyce's in his fiction, as well as critical scholarship on the fiction.

 

0.5 units
Jay Dickson, Professor of English and Humanities
Wednesdays, 5:40–7:10 p.m.
 

Political Science 553

Turning Down the Temperature: Climate Politics in America

The United States is a significant contributor to global climate change. The American economy and way of life generate greenhouse gasses in the in-country use of fossil fuels and the consumption of goods. Despite intransigence within certain members of the population and the government, the United States has positioned itself as a leader in climate negotiations and in identifying innovative solutions to climate problems. This course considers climate change, climate change politics, and thought about climate change. We will examine the reasons for commitments to climate change (or lack thereof) at the local, state, and federal level. In addition, the course also considers values associated with climate politics, the role of science in climate politics, and undercurrents of skepticism. Ultimately, climate policies have three goals which can work in concert with each other, but not always: preventing climate change from getting worse, dealing with climate change that has and will occur, and potentially turning back the clock on climate change. Each of these decisions have different political challenges involving distinct risks and philosophical underpinnings that will be explored in this course.

0.5 units
Chris Koski, Daniel B. Greenberg Professor of Political Science and Environmental Studies
Tuesdays, 5:40–7:10 p.m.

Liberal Studies 529

Disinformation & Propaganda: A Cognitive Science Approach to the Art of Persuasion
Why do people appear to believe things that are so clearly false? The course will explore the cognitive science behind cognitive biases and heuristics that make us vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation. We will examine select historic propaganda campaigns, but will focus on more recent and present disinformation and persuasion campaigns. We will also work to address and compensate for the constraints of human cognition that have been exploited by disinformation campaigns. In addition to covering the psychology of propaganda and cognitive biases, the course will incorporate readings from political science, philosophy, linguistics, marketing, and computer science to compare how each discipline provides the tools for identifying and overcoming misinformation and polarization that has been increasing with the rise of social media. The goal of the course is for students to recognize their biases, practice techniques for identifying misinformation and disinformation, and develop a model of ethical decision-making for sharing information.

 

0.5 units
Vasiliy Safin, Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology
7 weeks, one meeting per week: Time and dates TBD
 

Political Science 5--:

Heidegger and Arendt at the Movies
Edmund Husserl called earth “the originary ark.” Martin Heidegger wrote that earth must not be associated with “the merely astronomical idea of a planet.” After the launch of Sputnik, Hannah Arendt called earth “the quintessence of the human condition,” a “free gift from nowhere” that we now wish to exchange for something we have made ourselves. All three were worried about the fate of the world once we left earth and ventured into space. This course takes up these anxieties from the perspective of our own world by placing them in conversation with science, art, and film. What “world picture” comes into focus through the lens of Earth System Science, contemporary climate modeling, and astrobiology? Primary texts are “The Age of the World Picture,” “The Origins of the Work of Art” and “The Question Concerning Technology,” the final chapter of The Human Condition, along with excerpts from Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Alexandre Koyré’s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Our contemporary archive includes images of the earth from space, the concepts of the Anthropocene and technosphere, the history of climate modeling and the future of geoengineering, the films Koyaanisqatsi and Gravity, and Yinka Shonibare’s Refugee Astronaut. No scientific or technical knowledge is required – only curiosity and a sense of wonder.

 

0.5 units
Lexi Neame, Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science
7 weeks, one meeting per week: Time and dates TBD
 
* Registration for Summer 2026 courses will open on April 20, 2026.