FSEM 100   Conversations

Faculty Profile for Professor Blackshear

Employs a set of five common texts – selected by the faculty teaching the course – to promote wide-ranging conversations, anchored in the past and directed toward the present. Core Conversations defines the term “text” expansively, not limiting it to written work but encompassing diverse modes of intellectual and creative expression. As such, the common texts for this course are drawn from multiple disciplines, from pre-modern and modern worlds, and from Western and non-Western cultures. Instructors are encouraged to add other materials in order to enhance the themes of the course.

FSEM:Students grapple with a set of very complicated texts together (and sometimes a “text,” in this case, means a work of art, a film, or even a landscape). Students try to work out for themselves what these texts might be doing (often on the level of single words!) before contemplating some of the ways they have been or might be put in conversation with other authors, ideas, and discourses. Students think about them together—across time and space—and grapple with what makes this kind of comparative analysis helpful, difficult, dangerous, or productive. Students who successfully complete this seminar receive credit for CORE 111 and satisfy the Core Conversations requirement.

Chloe Blackshear studies Religion and Jewish Studies. Her research focuses on the Hebrew Bible and its afterlives in literature, particularly in 20th-century European and American fiction. She is interested in the ways writers respond to and adapt sacred texts—to celebrate, preserve, challenge, or overturn them.