Courses: Summer   

**This class will be taught In-Person**

Click to watch the course preview video.

The course is an introduction to the ancient Chinese practice of moving meditation designed to improve  all aspects of personal health. Regular practice of Tai Chi has been shown to improve balance, reduce the  likelihood of falls, improve immune function, reduce stress, and lower blood pressure, among many other  benefits. Anyone who is able to walk is able to practice Tai Chi. Clothing that allows for comfortable  movement and reasonably flat shoes are recommended.

Week by Week Outline

Week 1: Learn the first of the foundation exercises (Shaolin Temple tendon-changing-bone-marrow washing exercises) and then start learning and practicing the first four moves of the Taoist Tai Chi™ set of  movements.

Week 2: Review week one, learn the second foundation exercise, and add moves 5 through 8.

Week 3: Review week two, learn the third foundation exercise, and add moves 9 through 12.

Week 4: Review week three, learn the fourth foundation exercise, and add moves 13 through 17.

Week 5 and 6: Review the first four foundation exercises and learn the fifth and sixth. Practice moves  1 through 17 and delve deeper into the health benefits of the moves. 

**This class will be taught In-Person**

Watch the preview video here.

Metamorphosis can be painful, exhilarating, confusing, or some combination thereof. In these six  masterpieces of the short story genre, we will explore how writers from diverse backgrounds portray the  complexity of personal transformation. Starting with James Joyce’s stunning 1914 story “The Dead” and  ending with Edwidge Danticat’s devastating 1995 short story “The Children of the Sea,” this course traces  how the short story form is particularly suited to depictions of transformation. Students will learn about  the historical, social, and cultural context of each story, practice literary close reading skills, and develop  an understanding of the conventions of the short story genre. 

Stories will be provided to students as pdfs.

Week by Week Outline 

Week 1: Introduction to the Short Story Genre; James Joyce, “The Dead” (1914)

Week 2: James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues” (1957) 

Week 3: Bharati Mukherjee, “A Wife’s Story” (1988) 

Week 4: Sandra Cisneros, “Woman Hollering Creek” (1991) 

Week 5: Sherman Alexie, “Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi  Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock” (1993) 

Week 6: Edwidge Danticat, “Children of the Sea” (1995)

Osher Online Course - produced by the Osher National Resource Center

**To get to the course you will not be sent the Zoom link, but log into a portal (instructions will be provided to those enrolled)
**This course will be presented via Zoom and will not be recorded. Space is limited.**
**If you have a course package that you would like to use, please contact olli@sfsu.edu**

Introduction: https://vimeo.com/1032064833

Economics plays a central role in shaping every aspect of society. This course examines a series of prominent policy issues with economics at their core. We will explore the origins of these issues, the underlying data and evidence, and the policy tools available to address them. Each lecture will be standalone, delivered by a subject matter expert with a Ph.D. in economics. Potential topics include climate change, healthcare economics, economic inequality, and more, with final selections based on the most relevant and timely issues at the start of the course.

Instructor: Geof Woglom, PhD is professor emeritus of economics at Amherst College, where he taught for over 40 years. He has held visiting positions at Cambridge, Harvard, and the London School of Economics. Woglom was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town and at Nanjing University. Over his career, he has served as an economic consultant for the International Monetary Fund, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

**This class will be taught In-Person**

Poet Stanley Kunitz wrote: “Poems would be easy if our heads weren’t so full of the day’s clatter. The task is to get through to the other side, where we can hear the deep rhythms that connect us with the stars and the tides.”

Does the day’s clatter seem especially loud right now? Join us this summer for six weeks of reading and writing poems that help us get through to another side. Together we’ll listen for deep, connecting rhythms and look at poems from a variety of times and places that comfort and provoke, nourish our souls and advocate for change.

Throughout history, while regimes have shredded safety nets and oppressed people, poets have woven beautiful, lasting webs of words and inspired/uplifted people. In this class, we’ll read and write both spiritual and political poetry that engages eloquently with our inner and outer worlds: prayers, manifestos, meditations, calls to action…sometimes all rolled into one!
 

Week by Week Outline 

Week 1 Contemplative poems close to home

Week 2 Contemplative international poems

Week 3 Political poems of the United States

Week 4 Political poems globally

Week 5 Blending contemplative/political themes and approaches

Week 6 Blending contemplative/political themes and approaches

Osher Online Course - produced by the Osher National Resource Center

**To get to the course you will not be sent the Zoom link, but log into a portal (instructions will be provided to those enrolled)
**This course will be presented via Zoom and will not be recorded. Space is limited.**
**If you have a course package that you would like to use, please contact olli@sfsu.edu**

Introduction: https://vimeo.com/1033522265

Paul Newman, the embodiment of charisma, captivated movie audiences with his iconic baby blue eyes, striking features, and powerful screen presence. Known for his multiple Academy Award-nominated performances in films like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), The Hustler (1961), and Absence of Malice (1981), Newman ultimately won an Oscar for The Color of Money (1986), the sequel to The Hustler. Alongside his acting career, he pursued a parallel path as a race car driver and dedicated significant time to entrepreneurial and philanthropic endeavors. This course will trace the timeline of Newman’s remarkable career, from his legendary collaborations with Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973) to his final roles in Road to Perdition (2002), Empire Falls (2005), and Cars (2006), where he voiced the retired race car Doc Hudson.

**This class will be taught on Zoom**

Watch the preview video here.

Despite its critics and its flaws, psychoanalysis continues to be a cultural force in the Euro American world. Far from being only relevant for the rich and famous, psychoanalysis permeates  our everyday thinking and discourse in multiple ways. But today’s psychoanalysis, both in  theory and in practice, is very different from Freud’s original perspectives. Although both  women and men have contributed to the transformation of psychoanalytic thought, in this mini course we will focus on the lives, careers, and contributions of women analysts who influenced  psychoanalysis. We will consider how these women helped broaden psychoanalytic theory  beyond looking at family history to focus on relational, social, and cultural influences on psychological life. Even though some of these women were considered rebels at the time and  were vilified by their more traditional (mostly male) colleagues, all of them refined and/or  challenged the original Freudian concepts. Their impact is present in contemporary theories and  practices of therapy and in common understandings of human psychology.  

Week by Week Outline

Week 1- Introduction 
Anna Freud: Her father’s daughter 
Melanie Klein: The mother-child dyad and the mysteries of children’s minds

Week 2- Karen Horney: Feminist challenge to Freud 

Week 3- Clara Thompson: On women and relationships
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann: Therapy in the rose garden  

Week 4- Anna Maria Rizzuto and others: Religion and Psychoanalysis 

Week 5- Nancy Chodorow: Mothers, daughters, and sons
Jean Baker Miller: Self in relation 

Week 6- Lynn Layton and others: Social Psychoanalysis
Summary and Conclusion 

**This class will be taught In-Person**

Click to watch the course preview video.

What happened in Early Modern Europe didn’t stay in Early Modern Europe. 

This period, from the invention of the printing press to the French Revolution created much of our modern world. This includes the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, global exploration, the birth of capitalism, and the very idea of change that define much of how we see ourselves. First, we will ground our survey in the ideas of “early modern” and “Europe” and get the lay of the land in the 15C. Over the following four weeks, we will take thematic looks at the people, their ideas and beliefs, the development of capitalism across a newly integrated globe, and questions of politics and power. We will conclude with the so-called “age of reason” and the beginnings of industrialization.

Week by Week Outline 

Week 1: Introduction: What is “early modern”? What is Europe? What did things look like five hundred years ago? How did they get to the starting gate of modernity? 

Week 2: God: Who believed what and why? 

Week 3: Nature: Was there a “scientific revolution?” How did it work? What did it accomplish? 

Week 4: The World: How did Europe connect to the rest of the planet? How did it come to dominate so much of it? 

Week 5: Society: How did people live, work, think, and relate to each other? 

Week 6: States: How did governments get organized? How and why did they fight? How was democracy reborn?

Osher Online Course - produced by the Osher National Resource Center
**This course will be presented via Zoom and will not be recorded. Space is limited.**
**If you have a course package that you would like to use, please contact olli@sfsu.edu**

Introduction: https://vimeo.com/1032421484

Historians, beer enthusiasts, and curious minds alike will enjoy this exploration of the history of brewing. We will begin in the distant past with the invention of beer around 4000 BCE. Then we will journey through time to the modern rise of craft brewing. Along the way, we will dive into fascinating topics including medieval brewing, beer in Shakespeare’s era, colonial brewing, Prohibition, indigenous brewing traditions worldwide, and the evolution of beer commercials. This course meets during happy hour, so feel free—nay, encouraged—to raise a glass and toast to history while we learn.

Instructor: Dr. Karl Brown teaches courses in modern European history, film and media studies, and the history of drugs and drinking at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater. Before his academic career, he installed and operated brewpubs in Japan and Greece. Brown co-founded Second Salem Brewing Company in Whitewater and is an avid homebrewer of beer, cider, wine, and mead. 

**This class will be taught In-Person**

Watch the preview video here.

Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio are among the most well-known Renaissance artists. They flourished due to the patronage of notable individuals, powerful rulers and civic organizations who commissioned their works. But what about the female half of the population?  The Renaissance saw the rise of women artists who navigated many obstacles to succeed in the male-dominated Italian art world. Confident self-portraits, realistic still lifes, portraits of noted individuals and their families all reveal the women’s technical skill and ingenuity. By exploring works made by women, this course aims to reconsider a period of creative ingenuity and artistic excellence from their often-overlooked perspective.  

Week by Week Outline

 

Week One:  Background to women artists in the Renaissance

Much of Renaissance art revolves around learning – about classical antiquity, philosophy, anatomy, or mathematics, not to mention the skills learned as an apprentice in a professional art studio. But gender norms of the time meant women’s education rarely exceeded what was needed to be wives and mothers. With almost no opportunities for apprenticeships with master/male artists, women were at a disadvantage.   Talented women did become artists under certain circumstances, such as being born in a family of artists or being a nun trained as a manuscript illuminator or painter in a convent. In all cases, the public personae of women artists were closely tied to gendered ideas that expected a respectable woman to be virtuous, pious, and obedient to God and her father/husband.
 

Week two:  Sofonisba Anguissola

Born into a noble family in Cremona, Anguissola’s family made the unprecedented decision to have her trained as a painter outside the family house. She moved to Spain at the height of her career and remained there for fourteen years. She became official court painter to Queen Isabel de Valois, an amateur artist to whom she gave painting lessons, as well as King Philip II.  Returning to Italy, she continued to practice as a leading portrait painter until her late 80s. Anguissola's great success opened the way for larger numbers of women to pursue serious careers as artists.  Some of her well-known successors include Lavinia Fontana and Artemisia Gentileschi.

 

Week three:  Sister Plautilla Nelli

Sister Plautilla Nelli was a self-taught Dominican nun and the first known woman artist of the Renaissance in Florence.  Like many daughters of wealthy families, she was placed in a convent which encouraged its nuns not only to pray but also to learn and draw. She became a prolific artist, overseeing a convent studio with perhaps as many as eight female nun followers. Nelli produced large-scale devotional paintings and manuscript illuminations for church and private commissions, including the largest and earliest known painting of the Last Supper by a woman.  

 

Week four:  Properzia de’ Rossi

Properzia de’ Rossi was a sculptor from Bologna, defying the stereotype that this art form should be reserved for men because it was seen as more masculine. She worked in a variety of mediums and taught herself to carve by working with peach stones. She was selected as one of several artists commissioned to create carved reliefs for the Cathedral of San Petronio in Bologna. She was also the only woman included in Giorgio Vasari's 1550 artistic biographical work Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. 

 

Week five:  Lavinia Fontana

Lavinia Fontana was taught to paint and draw by her father, a prominent painter in Bologna.  She was highly in demand as a portraitist by Bolognese noblewomen. She is regarded as the first female career artist in Western Europe as she relied on commissions for her income. She married a fellow artist and gave birth to 11 children (only three outlived her). Her husband took care of the household and served as an agent and painting assistant to his wife. The family relocated to Rome where she received commissions by many notable figures, including Pope Clement VIII, Pope Paul V and Pope Gregory XIII.

 

Week six:  Artemisia Gentileschi

Artemisia Gentileschi is the most celebrated female painter of the 17th century. In an era when women had few opportunities to pursue artistic training or work as professional artists, her training by her father, Rome-based painter Orazio Gentileschi, provided her with the background to pursue an international clientele. Artemisia became a successful court painter in Florence, enjoying the patronage of the House of Medici and playing a significant role in courtly culture of the city. She subsequently spent many years working in Rome, Venice, Naples, and London, for the highest echelons of European society.