My Simmons

Boston Course

Fall 2023 Boston Courses

BOS-101-01 Boston Science Fiction

Instructor: Bob White
T/TH 9:30 – 10:50 a.m.

Wonder Woman fought injustice in Boston during the Crisis On Infinite Earths DC Comics series. Women were replaced with robots by their husbands in Stepford. King Ghidorah destroyed Fenway Park. Journey with me now in stories and movies and video games and TikTok as The Andromeda Strain virus, and Boston Dynamic Robots, dance us into the future. Where do ideas come from? For Science Fiction writers, illustrators, designers, producers, gamers, fans, and let us not forget readers late at night long after being sent to bed navigating their spaceship through the stars…possibilities.

BOS-101 (sections 2, 18) Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Building of a Culture Palace

Instructor: Gregory Slowik
Section 2: T/TH 2:00 – 3:20 p.m.
Section 18: W 11:00 a.m. – 1:50 p.m.

In this course, we will explore the amazing Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on a number of different levels. You will read about the founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and the Boston she encountered when she moved here in 1860. You will read about the artists, writers, and musicians who were her friends and how she came to believe that she needed to build a museum for her city. As a class, we will study the highlights of the collection and her installation of it. We will also look at how the museum functions today, and, in particular, how it has chosen to provide different kinds of programs to diverse audiences. We will look at the musical program and attend a concert. We will discuss the Gardner museum’s relationship to Boston schools as well as other public programming. We will meet some of the Gardner staff and learn more about what they do behind the scenes at the museum. In the process of this exploration, you will do many kinds of writing and will strengthen and expand your writing and thinking skills.

BOS-101-03 Boston Writers: Crossroads for Creativity

Instructor: Becky Thompson
T/TH 2:00 – 3:20 p.m.

This course explores writing as an embodied practice influenced by geography, history, politics and culture with special focus on 21st century writers/poets with ties to Boston. In this class, we will read a multiracial range of exemplary writers, visit neighborhood bookstores and cultural centers, and create space to practice the art of writing. Throughout the course, we will study how social location (race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, language, and culture) shapes one’s creativity. The course is designed to nurture your own creative, authentic voice as you learn from writers whose work inspires brave ways of engaging with and changing the world.

BOS-101 (sections 04, 15) Creole Boston

Instructor: Abel Djassi Amado
Section 4: T/TH 2:00 – 3:20 p.m.
Section 15: T/TH 12:30 – 1:50 p.m.

Boston is, as a “Creolepolitan”city, attracting a number of Creole communities. This course critically analyzes four different Creole communities, namely Cabo Verdeans, Haitians, Dominicans, and Jamaicans. It explores the local history, culture and politics of these social groups, from both inward and outward perspectives. Through visits to the community and meetings with their leaders, students will learn about strategies developed by Creole communities to combat social invisibility and reinforce their unique identity.

BOS-101-05 Immigrant Health and Boston

Instructor: Felipe Agudelo
T/TH 2:00 – 3:20 p.m.

This course introduces students to public health conditions that different immigrant groups located in Boston face. Students will explore and become familiar with the resources offered in the city of Boston to newcomers, the locations of different immigrant groups, and the role of immigration status in immigrant health. This course will approach immigrant public health issues by providing students with simple concepts and definitions related to public health and immigration.

BOS-101-06 Boston Strong: Racism, Health Inequities and Storytelling

Instructor: Meenakshi Verma-Agrawal
T/TH 2:00 – 3:20 p.m.

Place and history are strongly tied to identity. This writing course will explore the history of Boston through the intersections of structural racism, environmental justice and community building. By researching organizations that are working to dismantle health impacts on Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), students will learn how community organizing in Boston plays a key role in its history. Through this interdisciplinary lens, students will engage with the City of Boston to sharpen their writing, critical thinking and communication skills.

BOS-101 (sections 07, 17, 22) Food is Love

Section 07: T/TH 2:00 – 3:20 (Urshila Sriram)
Section 17: T/TH 3:30 – 4:50 (Karen Agostini)

Section 22: W 11:00 – 1:50 (Yara Gholmie)

Food is closely tied to identity. From our self-created identity rooted in current popular culture, to our family’s traditional identity, food reflects many aspects of who we are. This course will explore the role of food in development of identity, highlighting journeys of Boston immigrant populations spanning the city’s history.

BOS-101-08 Women Astronomers of Boston, New England, and Beyond

Instructor: Russell Pinizzotto
T/TH 6:00 – 7:20 p.m.

Women have made pivotal contributions to astronomy for millennia. In Boston, a team of women known as the “Harvard Computers”established principles fundamental to astrophysics. Maria Mitchell of Nantucket became Professor of Astronomy at Vassar College in 1865. Sara Seager is currently a Professor of Physics and Planetary Science at MIT. In this course students will discover the contributions that women have made to astronomy throughout history from Aganice in ancient Egypt to Caroline Herschel, the first woman to receive a salary as a scientist, to Katherine Louise Bouman, who led the development of the algorithm for imaging black holes.

BOS-101-09 Writing Boston

Instructor: Christy Lusiak
T/TH 2:00 – 3:20 p.m.

In our class, we will explore this place: the Fenway neighborhood. We will write about our own observations and experiences as we consider the human geography that surrounds us. For inspiration, we will read works by writers including Henry David Thoreau, Mary Antin, Robert McCloskey, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Tracy K. Smith. Like all Boston courses, this is a college writing class. The goal is to help students gain the academic skills they will need at Simmons: navigating the campus, the library and the neighborhood; reading challenging texts; taking notes and preparing questions; learning to participate in college-level seminar discussions; working in small groups and individually; and (most importantly), writing college-level essays that address other peoples’ ideas in lively and original ways.

BOS-101-10 Text and Context: 19th Century Boston Writers

Instructor: Sheldon George
T/TH 2:00 – 3:20 p.m.

This course investigates issues of authority, voice, and persuasion in writing. It examines how an author’s rhetorical choices and strategic self-presentations may be informed by location. Organized around works by famous antebellum and postbellum authors of the greater Boston area, the course focuses upon texts that often engage anti-slavery and women’s rights issues. Some included authors are Nathanial Hawthorne, Harriet Wilson, Henry David Thoreau, William Wells Brown, and Louisa May Alcott.

BOS-101-11 Boston: Memories, Beauty, & Noir

Instructor: Patrick Sylvain
T/TH 2:00 – 3:20 p.m.

This Boston course will introduce you to Simmons and help you establish a greater sense of home in the city of Boston. In our class, we will explore The Greater Boston Area, which will positively include our own neighborhood, The Fenway. We will consider the history, art, literature, cultural politics and environment that make up the human geography of Boston. We will read some great writing (memoir, novel, poems, and short stories), look at some fantastic art and architecture, and wander around in this carefully constructed (and remarkably beautiful) landscape. Essentially, since this is a rapidly changing city, we will delve into parts of its morphing identity and the struggles that have provided writers a wealth of material to engage our imagination and interests. A part of that engagement will also be done through the Noir genre, where we will be analyzing tragic-heroes.

BOS-101-12 Black/Brown Power!: Race and Protest in Boston

Instructor: Tatiana Cruz
T/TH 2:00 – 3:20 p.m.

Known as the “Cradle of Liberty,”Boston often prides itself for its progressive politics, but many locals argue it is one of the nation’s most racist cities. Why is the city’s racial past hidden? Why is the city obscured in civil rights history? This course explores the history of Jim Crow segregation and urban crisis in the “Black Boomerang”neighborhoods of Roxbury, the South End, and Dorchester. Students examine how African American and Latinx residents responded to the city’s racial inequities and forged grassroots movements for racial justice from the 1950s to the 1980s.

BOS-101-13 Toxic Consumables

Instructor: Michael Paul
T/TH 3:30 – 4:50 p.m.

Chemicals provide the function consumers demand in everyday products. Neither the law nor FDA regulations require specific tests to demonstrate the safety of individual products or ingredients before cosmetics are sold. The potential unintended consequences of such hazardous chemicals are disproportionately impacting children and adults in low income, minority neighborhoods. This violates our definition of social and environmental justice where all people, regardless of race or economic status, have the right to live, work, play and learn in healthy, safe environments. The course will focus on: (1) key issues of social disparities related to exposure to hazardous chemicals; (2) how the field of green chemistry might offer solutions to achieve social and environmental justice; and (3) how to bring about awareness and change through education and outreach in Boston in collaboration with the Silent Spring Institute, the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry and the Beyond Benign Foundation.

BOS-101-14 Writing Boston

Instructor: Brendan Halpin
T/TH 2:00 – 3:20 p.m.

In our class, we will explore the neighborhoods of Boston. We will write about our own observations and experiences as we consider the city that surrounds us. (Some homework assignments will involve travel within the city). For inspiration, we will read works by contemporary Boston writers as well as the writers whose work is carved in granite at every Orange Line stop between Back Bay and Forest Hills. Like all Boston courses, this is a college writing class. The goal is to help students gain the academic skills they will need at Simmons: navigating the campus, the library and the city; reading challenging texts; taking notes and preparing questions; learning to participate in college-level seminar discussions; working in small groups and individually; and (most importantly), writing college-level essays that address other peoples’ ideas in lively and original ways.

BOS-101 (sections 19, 20) Boston Childhoods

Instructor: Kelsey Jaye
Section 19: T/TH 9:30 – 10:50 a.m.
Section 20: T/TH 2:00 – 3:20 p.m.

This introductory writing course explores a variety of neighborhoods around the city of Boston while serving as an introduction to children’s literature as a genre. Throughout the semester, we will grapple with themes such as childhood, innocence and coming of age, and the effects of city life and other cultural forces on children’s growth and development as we acquaint ourselves with the Boston area through a variety of media, and with the ins and outs of writing a college paper.

BOS-101-21 Writing Boston

Instructor: Phyllis Thompson (Lit & Writing)
T/TH 9:30 – 10:50 a.m.

In our class, we will explore this place: the Fenway neighborhood. We will write about our own observations and experiences as we consider the human geography that surrounds us. For inspiration, we will read works by writers including Henry David Thoreau, Mary Antin, Robert McCloskey, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Tracy K. Smith. Like all Boston courses, this is a college writing class. The goal is to help students gain the academic skills they will need at Simmons: navigating the campus, the library and the neighborhood; reading challenging texts; taking notes and preparing questions; learning to participate in college-level seminar discussions; working in small groups and individually; and (most importantly), writing college-level essays that address other peoples’ ideas in lively and original ways.