Georgetown Learning Community – Fall 2024 Course Descriptions

Three Economic Puzzles: Economic Growth – Price Inflation and Interest Rates – and How the Government Tries to Manage Them

Professor Stanley Nollen

Thursdays – October 3, 10, and 17 from 10:30 a.m. – Noon, Online on Zoom

Registration Closes: Friday, September 20 at Noon EDT

This interactive course is focused on some of the most controversial and misunderstood economic issues in our time. They show up every day in the presidential election campaign, talk shows, social media, and print newspapers. We articulate the issues and try to understand public reactions to them. We try to make non-partisan sense of them.  The course will cover the following topics: Economic Growth, in the US and beyond, Price Inflation, and Interest rates, and How the Government Tries to Manage the Economy.

How do governments try to manage economic growth? Price inflation? Interest rates? Are US government budget deficits too high? Should taxes go up? Who pays taxes in America? Should we raise revenue via tariffs instead of taxes? How does the central bank (Federal Reserve) manage interest rates? Is the Fed making a mistake?

Stanley Nollen’s field of research and teaching is international business. He studies firms and industries in emerging market economies and has directed foreign study programs in Delhi, Bangalore, Dubai, Ho Chi Minh City, Prague, and Seoul. He has been a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and the University of Antwerp, with Fulbright fellowships in Delhi and Prague. His recent published research is about software and hardware industries in India and China, and about the transition of firms in the Czech Republic. Publication outlets for his articles include the Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Development Studies, International Organization, Industrial Relations, and Harvard Business Review, and books from Stanford University Press with the World Bank, and Sage. Professor Nollen twice received Fulbright awards in Delhi and in Prague. He was an academic visitor at the London School of Economics and at Universiteit Antwerpen. Professor Nollen teaches courses in international business and in macro- and micro-economics. He has won MBA teaching awards four times.

Matthew’s Gospel: Justice, Judaism, and Church Organization  

Professor Anthony Tambasco

Mondays – October 7, 21, and 28 from 10:30 a.m. – Noon, Online on Zoom

Registration Closes: Friday, September 27 at Noon EDT

This mini-course will discuss the development of the Gospel according to Matthew as a handbook for Church organization and teaching as Christianity at the end of the first century evolved in a shifting view of the end of time that necessitated ongoing engagement with the world, with secular society, with Judaism, with Roman oppression, and with a continuing Church mission.  Students will find it helpful to bring a Bible to class.

Anthony Tambasco is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown and was chair of the department for six years.  He also taught in Graduate Liberal Studies and was Associate Dean in the School of Continuing Studies for five years.  He authored five books and edited three on biblical topics, including the Bible for ethics and social justice.

The Experience of Alzheimer’s Disease*

Professor Steven Sabat

Wednesdays – October 16, 23, and 30 from 10:30 a.m. – Noon, In Person

Registration Closes: Friday, October 4 at Noon EDT

In this course, Professor Sabat shall present a bio-psycho-social approach to understanding people living with Alzheimer’s disease.  There is a difference between understanding what Oliver Sacks called, “the disease a person has” and “the person the disease has”.  Most of what is presented in the mass media is concerned with the former, far less with the latter.  Alzheimer’s disease is something that is experienced by the person diagnosed as well as that person’s family and friends.  To live with the effects of this disease requires that we understand (a) the effects of the brain damage caused by the disease, (b) the perspective–the subjective experience– of the person diagnosed, and (c) how family and friends can support the person diagnosed as best they can.  In this course, we will introduce people in the class to these crucial areas of concern.

 *This is an in-person course that will be taught at 2115 Wisconsin Avenue, NW. Room locations will be sent by email to course participants on October 4. There is a limit of 20 persons for this course.

Steven R. Sabat has been at Georgetown University since earning his doctorate at the City University of New York, where he specialized in Neuropsychology. The main focus of his research has been the intact cognitive and social abilities (including aspects of selfhood) of people with Alzheimer’s disease in the moderate to severe stages of the disease, the subjective experience of having the disease, and the ways in which communication between those diagnosed and their caregivers may be enhanced. In addition, his interests include the epistemological basis of our understanding of the effects of brain injury on human beings. He has explored all of these issues in numerous scientific journal articles, in The Experience of Alzheimer’s Disease: Life Through a Tangled Veil (Blackwell, 2001), and in his co-edited book, Dementia: Mind, Meaning, and the Person (Oxford University Press, 2006).

The Maiden and the City: Dangerous Virgins in Tragedy

Professor Victoria Pedrick

Wednesdays – November 6, 13, 20, and December 4 from 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., Online on Zoom

Registration Closes: Friday, October 25 at Noon EDT

The wellborn maiden in Greek myth is the precious flower of her father’s household, her fragility carefully guarded as a sign of his prestige and his contribution to the well-being of his city. In Greek tragedy, however, the maiden’s very name can terrify: Antigone, Iphigenia, the daughters of Danaüs, Polyxena, all take actions that ruin the armies of men or cities that gave them birth, take them in, or capture them. The ancient Athenian audience, as it watched these maidens defy restraint or demand impossible things, might have pondered how very dangerous the unruly young woman could be. We too can still be startled by the shocking power of a child—at least in our eyes—who decides she has nothing to lose.

Greek tragedy contains two striking images of maidens that appear fundamentally opposed to one another. We can watch a young girl such as Antigone defy the demands of her city in favor of her own desires and intentions, though this resistance proves ruinous for herself and for Thebes. But we can also watch a maiden such as Iphigenia face her own father’s demand for her death as a gesture that, she is promised, will permit the glorious enterprise he presides over—the Greek assault on Troy—to go forward. In either case the spectacle of the maiden facing death, whether in defiance or obedience, dramatizing a disturbing power within her that threatens the familial and social structures their male kin or rulers take for granted. Fathers expected to make good marriages for their daughters that would strengthen ties with allies and knit more tightly together the fabric of the city; the city counted on new generations of young men to fight its wars and eventually lead it.

This course studies how the ancient playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides each dramatize the deadliness of a maiden who seems helpless and yet turns out to be dangerous beyond all anticipation. The figure of the maiden is a wild and untamed force within the mythic and cultural stereotypes understood by the ancient audience as a great peril for their collective, whether the city or the army, but may shock us today.

Victoria Pedrick received her Ph,D, from the University of Cincinnati and her BA from Emory University.  She primarily taught courses in Greek and Latin language and literature, with a particular interest in Archaic and Classical Greek literature and culture. She also taught an introduction to Classical myth. In all her courses, she encourages students to focus on the audience and cultural contexts for ancient texts, including when appropriate modern engagement. She has published essays on Homer, Greek Tragedy, and Latin Lyric as well as two volumes on tragedy, one a collection of essays and the other a study of Euripides and Freud. This book studies the construction of identity within the context of originary or primal trauma as it is articulated in Euripides’ Ion and Freud’s case history of the Wolfman. She is currently writing a book on Greek myths about human violations against nature, including the cardinal cultural act of sailing, the deliberate desecration of sacred trees, and the wholly unnatural act of flying.

Who Gets What? The Mathematics of Voting, Sharing, and Conflict

Professor Hans Engler

Thursdays – November 7, 14, and 21 from 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., Online on Zoom

Registration Closes: Friday, October 25 at Noon EDT

What is a fair way to distribute an inheritance among several heirs? How about an equitable way of dividing household chores? How can one prove in court that a redistricting scheme is unfair? What is a good way to bid in an auction?  How about playing “rock – paper – scissors”? 

These questions are about individual or community decisions in situations of diverging interests and possibly conflict. Some of these have solutions that we all know from childhood: To divide a piece of cake, one person cuts, the other chooses. Is there a simple and fair division scheme if there are three people who each want a piece of the pie? In “rock – paper – scissors”, one should play unpredictably and choose all options more or less equally often. Is that also a good idea in a labor dispute or in a diplomatic standoff?  

The mathematical methods for these questions include theories of fair division, voting, and game playing.  The course will introduce some of these methods which can suggest solutions, clarify the issues, and in some cases show that good or practical solutions are very hard to find or do not exist at all. For example, dividing a pie equitably among four people may require many cuts and therefore generate a lot of crumbs. And there is no rational scheme that always turns individual preferences among three alternatives into a clear and unambiguous community decision.  These methods have found wide use in the social sciences and often have policy implications, e.g. in discussions and legal disputes about alternative voting schemes and redistricting. The course is based on an undergraduate course for non-majors that one of my students called “the class for people who liked math in middle school”.   

Hans Engler was born in Germany and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Heidelberg in 1981. He came to the US for postdoctoral training later that year and began teaching at Georgetown in 1984. He served as mathematics department chair in the 1990s and started two masters programs in applied mathematics and in data analytics in the following decades. He also worked for several tours as a program officer at the National Science Foundations, held guest scientist appointments at NIST and NOAA, and worked as a consultant. His scientific interests are in applied mathematics and data science, with applications in climate science. Together with Hans Kaper, he wrote a textbook on mathematics and climate, published by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2013. He lives in Bethesda, MD with his wife. Together they have two adult children and a grandson.   

Shakespeare’s King Lear

Professor Michael Collins

Tuesdays – November 19, 26, and December 3 from 2:00 – 3:30 p.m., Online on Zoom

Registration Closes: Friday, November 8 at Noon EST

Although some might say Hamlet, King Lear is for many Shakespeare’s greatest play. Complex and often ambiguous, it raises public questions about power and governance and private questions about aging and relationships in and among families. But at its core King Lear confronts the fundamental human question—the fundamental religious question—do we live in a sane or a lunatic universe?

The course shall consider how these questions emerge in the play, looking at some of its key scenes and, when recordings are available, observing how they have been played on the stage. The primary question the course will try to answer is what value the play might have even though it invites a diversity of responses and refuses to confirm any one of them.

Participants are asked to read the play before the class begins. (While the choice is not crucial, an edition based on the Folio text of 1623 is preferable to one based on the Quarto of 1608). Various productions of the play have been recorded. Productions with Laurence Oliver, Michael Hordern (for the BBC series), James Earl Jones, and Ian McKellen are available on YouTube. (The one with Ian McKellen is probably the best). Productions with Anthony Hopkins and Ian Holm are available on Amazon Prime.  (These are both very good productions of the play).   

Michael Collins is Professor in the Department of English. He is an expert on Shakespeare; British theatre since 1950; Anglo-Welsh poetry. Articles on Shakespeare (focus on performance and pedagogy), Anglo-Welsh poetry, and American literature. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. from New York University and his B.A. from Fordham College. Publications Collins has written include: Editor, Shakespeare’s Sweet Thunder: Essays on the Early Comedies (Delaware, 1997).