Senior College

The creators, composers, and authors of that singular American art form—musical theater—often wrote specifically to highlight the gifts of the best singers, dancers, and actors. This symbiotic relationship made space for these performers to grow and helped to refine the musical itself. This course will focus on each generation’s greatest performers to chart the development of musical theater, beginning with classic Broadway, on through the realism and grit of the shows of the 1960s and 70s, the invasion of the British pop-rock-jazz musical, and ending with the diversity and athleticism of contemporary musical theater.

INSTRUCTOR: Christopher Okiishi is a writer, performer, director, and producer of theater. His work has been seen at City Circle Acting Company, SPT Theatre, Coe College, Riverside Theatre, Los Angeles’s Odyssey Theater, and the New York Film Academy. He has written scores for three theater projects and one award-winning film. He is also a practicing psychiatrist who lectures regularly at the UI Carver College of Medicine.

This course will consider how U.S. presidents have responded to the challenge of explaining America, both in the context of their own particular moments and as a larger expression of the nation’s essential values and commitments. Our discussions will focus on a relatively small but varied sampling of executive messages (by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump) in an effort to better understand the role of presidential rhetoric in shaping and reflecting how Americans understand what holds us together and what most endangers that union.

INSTRUCTOR: Wayne Fields is retired from Washington University in St. Louis, where he was professor of English and American culture studies.

Course 2 is now full.
Thank you for your interest in Course 2. The waitlist for this course has reached its capacity and we are no longer accepting names to be placed on the list.

NOTE: March 12 class will be held at the Coralville Center for the Performing Arts, 1301 Fifth St., Coralville, from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

Warren’s All the King’s Men is a political novel of the first magnitude. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1947. The movie version, directed by former communist Robert Rossen (who was later blacklisted), won the best picture Oscar in 1950. Our course will explore the populist politics of the novel and the film and their representation of the complex interplay between political ambition and personal morality. In the course’s final session, we will screen the film and compare it with the novel. Before the first class, students should read chapters 1-3 of the original 1946 Robert Penn Warren edition of All The King's Men (not the "restored" edition that lists Noel Polk as the co-author or editor).

INSTRUCTOR: John Raeburn is professor emeritus of English and American studies at the University of Iowa. He taught courses in American fiction, film, photography, and cultural history.

NOTE: No class March 21.

This course will consider U.S. immigration law and policy, focusing on the particular issues at the forefront of current political debates. Topics will include brief overviews of U.S. immigration history and our current system, including a consideration of who gets in and who doesn’t, and a comparison of the U.S. system with those of other countries. Specific issues that may be addressed include our asylum and refugee policies; family immigration; the treatment of children, including under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program; immigration enforcement and illegal immigration; and naturalization and birthright citizenship. Optional readings and interesting guests will deepen students’ understanding of these issues.

INSTRUCTOR: For 20 years, Barbara Schwartz, clinical professor emerita at the UI College of Law, led the Immigration Law Project in the Clinical Law Program. She and her students represented hundreds of foreign nationals seeking asylum, green cards, and citizenship. She retired in 2015 after 38 years of teaching.

Course 4 is now full.
Thank you for your interest in Course 4. The waitlist for this course has reached its capacity and we are no longer accepting names to be placed on the list.

This course will give participants an opportunity to view Tchaikovsky’s 1879 opera Eugene Onegin alongside John Cranko’s 1965 ballet Onegin and to consider how composer and choreographer adapted Pushkin's great novel in verse. Suggested reading: Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, Vladimir Nabokov translation recommended.

INSTRUCTOR: Daniel Benton is a composer, musicologist, and ballet historian with a long-standing interest in the intersection of music and dance. He received a PhD in music composition from the UI in 1973 and was the first music director of the radio station KSUI-FM.

Innovations in engineering during the 21st century are resulting in technological advances that were once in the realm of science fiction. This course will update students on the latest research in four areas:

• Human modeling and simulation in virtual environments, including the Virtual Soldier Research program.

• Improving flood monitoring and prediction through modeling and simulation.

• Techniques and programs in engineering flight testing for manned and unmanned aircraft.

• Automated driving systems, including the sensors and data, from computer vision to high-definition maps, that will be needed to power tomorrow’s self-driving cars.

INSTRUCTORS: Karim Abdel-Malek is director of the Center for Computer Aided Design. Witold F. Krajewski is director of the Iowa Flood Center. Thomas Schnell is associate director of the Center for Computer Aided Design and director and founder of the Operator Performance Laboratory. Daniel V. McGehee is director of the National Advanced Driving Simulator Laboratories. All are faculty members in the UI College of Engineering.

Course 6 is now full.
Thank you for your interest in Course 6. The waitlist for this course has reached its capacity and we are no longer accepting names to be placed on the list.

Polonius’s famous description of the traveling actors in Hamlet might well be applied to Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, since this play has everything: issues of succession, political rebellion, love relationships, parent-child problems, a comic robbery, and boisterous tavern scenes. Its characters range from the highest (the King and the Prince of Wales) to the lowest (servants and highwaymen). And in Falstaff, Shakespeare created a character so large, in body and in spirit, and so subversive of political and social norms that he still challenges us today. Through discussion of the text and of various film and video versions, we’ll confront this exciting play — and look forward to its production by Riverside Theatre this summer.

INSTRUCTOR: Miriam Gilbert is professor emerita of English, having taught at the UI from 1969 to 2013. She still enjoys studying and teaching Shakespeare and going to see Shakespeare in performance, especially in her second home, Stratford-upon-Avon.

Over the past 50 years, major progress in the understanding of disease processes has resulted in dramatic advances in the diagnosis and treatment of many common yet significant diseases. Each week a team consisting of a pathologist and an internist or surgeon with expertise in certain areas will examine progress in the understanding and consequent refinement of the treatment of colon cancer, prostate cancer, breast cancer, and diseases of the liver, including hepatitis and cirrhosis. The course will highlight how the interaction between diagnostically oriented pathologists and dedicated clinicians can contribute to medical advances and, importantly, to patient care.

INSTRUCTORS: Frank Mitros, professor emeritus in the UI Department of Pathology, will coordinate this course. Co-instructors, all physicians and faculty members in the Carver College of Medicine, will be Amani Bashir and Laila Dahmoush (pathology), Adrian Holm (gastroenterology), Douglas LaBrecque (hepatology), Carol Scott-Conner (surgery), and James Brown (urology).

Course 8 is now full.
Thank you for your interest in Course 8. The waitlist for this course has reached its capacity and we are no longer accepting names to be placed on the list.

In recent years, Ed O’Bannon, Kain Colter, and Jeffrey Kessler have become almost as well known in college sports circles as Nick Saban, Jim Harbaugh, and John Calipari. Why? Because O’Bannon, Colter, and Kessler have led high-profile legal attacks against the NCAA’s principle of amateurism. This course will consider the evolution of the NCAA and the current events and litigation that threaten the amateur underpinning of college athletics. Participants will be challenged to think critically about accepted ways of doing business in college sports and to engage in discussion about the industry’s future.

INSTRUCTOR: Dan Matheson is director of the UI Sport and Recreation Management program and chair of the UI Presidential Committee on Athletics. He has received the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean’s Distinguished Lecturer Award and the President and Provost Award for Teaching Excellence. Previously he worked for the NCAA and the New York Yankees.