The University has introduced a new major, minor, and college over the course of the fall 2022 through fall 2023 semesters: the Global South Asian Studies (GSAS) major, the Animal Studies minor, and the College of Design and Engineering Studies (CoDES). These programs were created in response to student interest and desire to highlight courses related to these disciplines they had taken during their time at the University.
The University has offered a minor in South Asian Studies since 2010, with approximately 14 faculty members teaching classes in the study of South Asian society and diaspora. The GSAS major began this semester with 12 courses and 10 professors in the department.
“Two years ago, we decided to create a major in Global South Asian Studies…both as a way of formalizing our curricular strengths in South Asia-related topics and to highlight expertise in the way South Asian communities and culture have had a global impact,” Co-Chair of Global South Asian Studies and Professor of History William Pinch wrote in an email to The Argus. “We also wanted to create a structure that would facilitate greater interaction and cross-fertilization between colleagues in disparate disciplines.”
The gateway course for the GSAS major is “India: Identity, Globalization, and Empire” (GSAS150) which is cross-listed with the English department (ENGL254). The course will focus on literature and film, covering how socioeconomic and political trends impacted India and its inhabitants in the past two centuries. Students will read both English-language texts and texts in translation from Urdu, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, and Bengali. Other subjects of courses in the major offered in Spring 2024 include the history of British India, a selection of music courses, and a study of Islam and Muslim cultures.
In September, GSAS hosted LaWhore Vagistan’s “Lessons in Drag,” an educational performance focused on South Asian culture. On Tuesday, Nov. 7, the major also supported the guest lecture “The Liberatory Power of Guilt: How a Sikh Holy Town Shaped Utopian Dreams of Pakistan” by Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History at Stanford University Priya Satia, which was co-sponsored by the College of Letters and the History Department. Upcoming events include a visit from Assistant Professor in Asian American History at the University of Pennsylvania Hardeep Dhillon, who will lecture on the history of South Asian immigration to the United States.
“Finally, and perhaps uniquely for South Asia programs in this country, we have a shamiyana that we like to use for events—weather permitting,” Pinch wrote. “We recently erected it for our inaugural fall ‘mela’, or festival, and plan to use it again in the spring semester after the weather warms—perhaps in conjunction with the Holi festivities. We hope these can become annual celebrations, as we like to host a broad array of events and not simply scholarly lectures.”
CoDES also launched this semester alongside the Integrated Design, Engineering, Arts & Society (IDEAS) linked major. Approximately 60 students at the University are currently IDEAS minors. CoDES also hosts the Engineering Dual Degree Programs and is centered around the IDEAS Lab in Exley Science Center and the Digital Design Studio in the Center for the Arts.
“I am excited that a student who is interested in being an artist, but also wants to learn about engineering, the sciences, or the social sciences, or that someone who wants to be both an engineer and a painter, can do so,” Associate Professor of Art and Director of CoDES Elijah Huge said to the Wesleyan Connection. “We want to encourage students to have pathways to do that. It is about building a conversation across disciplines.”
According to the CoDES website, the college allows students to engage with complex social, technological, cultural, and environmental conditions through a curriculum centered around creation, experimentation, and critique. The IDEAS linked major is intended to be a secondary major to a primary, companion major; students cannot graduate with only the IDEAS major. The core requirement of four classes introduces students to hands-on, project-based studio, laboratory, and critical coursework in design and engineering.
“I’m very excited about the new IDEAS major and CoDES department,” Jesse Herrnson ’24, who was involved in creating a new game design minor track for CoDES, wrote in a message to The Argus. “Their approach of having linked majors makes a lot of sense for Wesleyan as a liberal arts university, allowing students to add on a bit of practicality to the theory which other majors provide. There are also so many options for tracks within the IDEAS major, so it seems like a welcoming environment—if this was available when I declared my major, it is definitely an option I would have chosen.”
The Animal Studies minor was first announced at Reunion and Commencement in Spring 2023, but the University has had an Animal Studies program since 2007, the only such program in the nation at the time. William Griffin Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Science in Society Lori Gruen is the coordinator for the Animal Studies program, and worked together with Professor of Environmental Studies Kari Weil and Assistant Professor of the Practice in Environmental Studies Elan Abrell to create the minor.
“Based on student input from our experiences teaching animal studies courses, Professor Gruen and I discussed how a minor could best support students’ needs and interests,” Abrell wrote in an email to The Argus. “Because animal studies is a multidisciplinary field of scholarship that engages with work across the social sciences and humanities, we wanted the minor to provide students with an understanding of important debates and varying disciplinary approaches through a range of courses from different departments that cover the various dimensions of animal studies.”
There is no major or certificate in Animal Studies, so the creation of the minor allows students to have their specialization in the program recognized. The minor requires a summer internship with an organization in animal-related career fields in order to provide practical experience and opportunities for professional connection. For current Animal Studies minor Nicole Steigerwald ’24, the internship experience was a unique and fulfilling opportunity to work with animals.
“I became a biology major so that I could study animal behavior through science,” Steigerwald wrote in an email to The Argus. “I thought this was the only approach to the ‘objective truth.’ My first Animal Studies course quickly showed me otherwise! The field is a completely different way to look at the same questions I’ve been trying to answer through biology. Learning about both sides of the coin has made each side more valuable to me.”
Ava Purdue MA’24 was among the first class to graduate with the Animal Studies minor and is currently working on her thesis, titled “Enhancing Sanctuary Animal Welfare Through Enrichment and Autonomy.” Her experience volunteering at a wildlife sanctuary in Namibia in 2020 encouraged her to pursue a career focusing on human-animal relations and animal welfare.
“While I majored in Psychology, minoring in Animal Studies helped inform many of my class discussions in many ways, including the similarities between humans and non-human animals and ways of conducting psychological studies with animals in more ethical ways,” Purdue wrote in an email to the Argus. “I cannot recommend this minor enough because of its interdisciplinary nature and impact on students’ perceptions of and relationships to nonhuman animals. Anyone who is interested in Philosophy, Psychology, Veterinary Medicine, Biology, Neuroscience, Environmental Science, Conservation, Anthropology, Law, History, and many more areas of study could benefit from and find overlap between Animal Studies and these other disciplines.”
Rose Chen can be reached at rchen@wesleyan.edu.