A number of courses address zombie studies:
Biology of Zombies
C. Tatum Parker, Ph.D
Course Section Number FYS-175-04
Designed to introduce first-year students to university level academic study while fulfilling a General Education requirement in Life Science. This seminar will use the model of zombies to introduce students to fundamental biology concepts, including enzymes, cells, systems, pathogens and disease outbreaks. Intended for non-science majors.
The Walking Dead? An Introduction to Popular Culture
Shannon O. Ambrose, PhD
Course Section Number FYS-175-03 or 05
FYS-175-03 (or 05) could very well be the manufacturer’s serial number for a synthesized virus that short-circuits the hardwiring of the human brain and reduces victims to gibbering, drooling, no-longer-functioning beings, easily bulldozed by some invading military. But, . . . it’s not.
Instead, it’s a First-Year Seminar with several purposes, none of which are to reduce you to gibbering and drooling. The first is to provide you with an active model for the kind of engagement and participation that will ensure your success as you move up the academic ladder. We call them “seminars” because they’re built on the idea of active, consistent contributions from their students. The seminar isn’t a lecture course—and you should understand that “lecture courses” are no longer a recommended pedagogy anyway. The seminar seeks a productive conversation among its participants, a conversation within certain boundaries, but an active debate that demands thoughtful, considered arguments and responses. That debate—your work in the course—is based on the development of your critical thinking skills: explanation, self-regulation, inference, analysis, evaluation, and interpretation.
To give these skills a real testing, we must have a subject worthy of discussion, and that’s what “the walking dead” provides. Here we have a popular cultural phenomenon, which touches upon so many contemporary fears and desires that it’s difficult to catalog them all, and making the connections between, say, horror film and cultural issue will be a primary task of our conversations.
For now, let it suffice to say that we’ll be concerned with the human body, race, class, gender, the fear of disease and epidemic, law and the collapse of social structure, disaster and apocalypse, survivalism, science and technology, human interaction, violence and its representations, commercialism and consumerism, language and metaphor, satire and realism, God, the loss of God, and, oh yes, life and death. All at 9:00 am. Get ready.