Students gain knowledge from hip-hop and vampire courses

When professor Robert Carl Metil instructs the course Vampire: Blood and Empire, he doesn’t… When professor Robert Carl Metil instructs the course Vampire: Blood and Empire, he doesn’t limit the discussion to Dracula and Edward Cullen.

“I have fielded questions on subjects as diverse as the existence of child and animal vampires and the nature of the universe and the afterlife,” he said.

Vampire: Blood and Empire is just one of a variety of classes that Pitt offers that exceeds the expectations of academia. Less-than-traditional courses such as Madness and Madmen in Russian Culture, Indo-European Folktales and Bible as Literature inhabit many departments and can help students gain credits while opening doors to different fields and interests.

Take a look at some of these nontraditional classes as examples of what you can find in Pitt’s course catalog.

Vampire: Blood and Empire

Metil taught his vampire course, which was offered through the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, in the 2011-2012 academic year. As a child, he was often exposed to traditional Slavic cultures, and he traveled throughout Eastern Europe. These travels contribute to his knowledge on the subject.

He incorporates vampirism into the discussion of different social issues such as the breakdown of the nuclear family, the spread of communicable diseases and the fear of migration. He also applies it to various emotions that society tends to suppress and the ways in which individuals deal with grief.

“While keeping much of the previous content, due to my upbringing and ethnographic experience, I have introduced new information on Slavic folkloric and historical vampirism as well as contemporary ethnographic case studies from the perspective of believers in the concept of the unclean dead,” Metil said.

These weighty topics directly relate to vampirism, and though some students may find the material daunting, vampirismhas received a fair amount of attention in past years.

Nontraditional Languages

The Less-Commonly-Taught Languages Center gives students the chance to learn languages that are outside the range of traditional Romantic and Germanic language courses typically offered at universities. Claude Mauk, the director of the LCTL center, explained that the program’s main goal is to cater to students’ desires.

“We try to look at students’ interests, what languages students want to take,” he said. “We try to achieve a greater level of diversity with these different languages.”

After 9/11, there was an increase in the number of students who wanted to study Arabic. Before 9/11, the LCTL center only offered one Modern Standard Arabic 1 course each fall semester, but because of the increased interest, Pitt now has six sections of this course available in the fall.

Many current and incoming students don’t realize that Pitt offers more than 25 language courses, Mauk explained. The LCTL center sponsors 12 to 14 of them each year. In the fall semester, the LCTL center will provide 13 different languages other than the department-based languages, such as Spanish and German.

Quechua, a language from South America, is indigenous to the Andean region. People continue to speak this language in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, Mauk said, although it is a minority language in these countries.

The language, which predates Spanish, is culturally and linguistically diverse and does not fit into any other departments at the University. To continue to provide it as a course, the LCTL center offers it to students as one of its many languages. Quechua 1 and 3 are offered in the fall semester, while Quechua 2 and 4 are offered in the spring.

“We definitely serve as a home for languages that couldn’t be offered elsewhere. Even languages that are becoming more common, for example, American Sign Language and Arabic,” Mauk said.

The LCTL center received 1,076 enrollments for the 2011-2012 academic year, reaching a large group of students at the University.

Global Hip-Hop

Another atypical course, Global Hip-Hop is taught through the Department of Music by professor Adriana Helbig. Global Hip Hop focuses on the various societal roles of hip-hop across the globe. The course will be offered for its third term in the upcoming fall semester.

Helbig began her research on the subject in 2005, after she viewed a picture of an African hip-hop artist performing in traditional Ukrainian clothing. The artist, who was an immigrant from Africa, altered the traditional dress in order to fit the role of a hip-hop artist and posed in a stereotypical hip-hop stance. The unusual image caused Helbig to form a long-term interest in global perceptions of hip-hop, which later led to the creation of her course at Pitt.

The course looks at a broad geographic span, including countries such as Japan, South Africa and Brazil, among others. It investigates the media’s portrayal of these different countries’ forms of hip-hop and compares the various movements.

“It’s a great topic, but you could kill the class,” Helbig said. “You need to base it on what the students are interested in.”

Helbig explained that the course connects a broad range of subjects such as economics, gender roles and politics. Though the course may have a different focus than traditional classes, it still relates to broader themes that students often expect to see.

Physics and Society

For students looking to fulfill a natural science requirement, professor Edward Gerjuoy offers Physics and Society, a course that examines the need for public policy makers to better understand science.

“There are courses which are designed for undergraduates who aren’t science majors, but we’d like for them to have an understanding in science,” Gerjuoy said. “This is one such course. We feel that students should have an understanding of science in general, and physics in particular.”

The course looks at physics as a subject and reveals the ways in which it applies to subjects other than the sciences. Gerjuoy stressed that certain concepts in physics apply to other areas, such as public policy-making, and those who are decision makers should know how to obtain a certain amount of information before creating public policy.

“I don’t expect that somebody making decisions would know all types of science and details. But they should know what kind of people will give them good science advice,” he said.

Gerjuoy hopes the course will offer students an understanding of what serves as credible scientific research.

These courses may not be every student’s first choices, but they certainly offer alternatives to more conventional classes. And for professor Metil, he believes that students respond to this authenticity.

“Students find it appealing because it directly stimulates both their active imaginations and their unconscious minds,” Metil said.