Hacker Culture, a 3rd year elective, traces the rise of hacker culture from its earliest incarnations in the Tech Model Railroad Club of MIT and the Homebrew Computer Club at Stanford to the cybercollective Anonymous. We study literary and cinematic representations of hackers and hacking to identify anxieties about technology, the Cold War, globalization, consumer culture, and the Information Age. Dwelling with the cultural touchstones that inform hacker culture itself, we define the ethical and political issues that hacker culture incites

The 9/11 Novel, an M.A. seminar, explores the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Widely been described as the inversion of the relation of fiction and reality, the attacks challenge the medium of the novel, which has traditionally been viewed as a site where the relations between the mind and the world, fantasy and reality, fiction and history, can be worked out. Keeping these issues in mind, we read novels written about and in the wake of 9/11, tracing the evolution from an initial discourse of trauma and tremendum to a critical engagement with memory and history in an international context.

Representing Violence, a 3rd year seminar in the Amirim honors program, explores the modalities of violence in a range of forms and contexts to reflect on how violence, and its representation, function as a site where our relations with ourselves, our relations with others, and our interactions with society can be productively, and creatively, revised.