The Valente Roundtable includes 12 to 15 highly motivated students and four professors, each one bringing a different form of expertise to the study of important books that enrich student understanding of the arts, history, literature, business, politics, and life in general. The Seminar is a three-credit course that meets every week. The books chosen are ones that the faculty members do not already know and that do not come from their field of expertise. This way the seminar has no “teacher” in the usual sense. Students and faculty members read and learn together, and it is the student participants who lead the discussion.
Have questions about how the Seminars work? See FAQ or contact Prof. Rob Deleo.
Spring Semester 2019
Program: Democratic Dystopias to Totalitarian Utopias: Exploring Government Through the Eyes of the Science Fiction Genre
Faculty: Rob A. Deleo [Department of Global Studies], Sung-eun Choi [Department of History], Janis Gogan, [Department of Information and Process Management], & Chris Skipwith [Department of Natural and Applied Sciences]
Books: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Infomocracy by Malka Older
The course will broadly investigate how "government" is depicted in popular literature, namely the sci-fi genre. We'll consider a number of broad yet interrelated topics including representation, the strain between freedom and security, and the distribution of power. Participants will read texts to provide some historical context regarding the evolution of this theme across time.
Grades for the seminar are based on participation, a reflection paper, and a final research paper. The seminar meeting time is to be determined. The Valente Center provides lunch and covers the cost of all books as well as the cost of trips to local cultural events and/or dinners as selected by students and faculty.
Rob DeLeo
Coordinator of the Valente Roundtable
Office Morrison 274, extension 2572
rdeleo@bentley.edu