The University Scholars core will be required of all students in the PPP program. In addition, students will complete a full minor in a foreign language. The Fine Arts requirement is satisfied by three, one-credit, single semester performance courses. The literature elective is satisfied as one of the requirements in the language minor.

Sample Course Descriptions:

PPP Core Courses: Constructing the Public I & II
America’s Civic Culture / Writing in Public
Dr. John Fairfield, Department of History

Mass Media in Politics / Legislative Politics
Dr. Eugene Beaupré Department of Political Science

Literature & the Moral Imagination / African-American Intellectual Traditions
Dr. Tyrone Williams Department of English
Mr. Bob Cotter, Instructional Technology

To be offered in Fall 2005 – Spring 2006
(Second Year PPP students)

A year-long set of six blocked courses that combine a rigorous, interdisciplinary investigation of public experience and civic culture in the United States with a practical experience in shaping public affairs. Taken as a whole, the six courses are designed to develop engaged and informed citizens who are imaginative and practical, reflective and effective, possessing vision and knowing how to exercise power, equally comfortable with political argument and political technique.

Fall 2005: HIST 408: America’s Civic Culture: The first part of the course focuses on the historical development and present condition of our civic culture. We begin by reading the work of several public intellectuals who have brought historical, philosophical, economic, political scientific, sociological and other approaches to the study of contemporary American politics. The idea is to engage students in arguments now going on, to ground our investigations in a concern with the here and now, and to show how indispensable rigorous, scholarly inquiry is to those arguments. The second part of the course traces the historical development of American civic culture with the help of student reports on outside readings in history, sociology, philosophy, economics and other disciplines. This part of the course explores the roots of the present in the past and, just as importantly, the roads not taken, the forgotten alternatives and buried possibilities as a means of enlarging and invigorating our political imaginations.

POLI 246: Mass Media and Politics: This course examines the intersection between contemporary electoral politics and the role and Politics: This course examines the intersection between contemporary electoral politics and the role of the media in political and cultural affairs in the United States. The students volunteer in one of the presidential campaigns, travel to some part of the state of Ohio to campaign over a long-weekend, complete field reports on their experiences, prepare and present a campaign strategy to win Ohio for their candidate based on their study of the behavior and attitudes of Ohio voters. As part of this exercise, they produce a short, thirty-second political commercial. They also speak on WVXU on election night on various local, state and national races in which they have a particular expertise.

ENGL 205 Literature and the Moral Imagination: The focus is on African-American literature and history to 1865 with an eye to deconstructing the public or interrogating “the public” as a description of politics and the exercise of power in 18th and 19th century U.S. history. Readings include autobiographies from Olaudah Equiano and Harriet Jacobs and fiction from Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson and Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Spring 2006: POLI 324 Legislative Politics: This course examines legislative politics and, more broadly, the various ways power in exercised in the contemporary U.S. In researching a specific issue and crafting a campaign designed to shape public opinion and the public agenda, the students will engage in policy research and policy-formulation, coalition-building, negotiation, organization, media relations, broadcast and narrowcast communications. The students will examine the issue in terms of local, state and national politics and will travel to both Columbus and Washington, D.C.

HIST 300: Writing in Public: This is a writing intensive tutorial designed to encourage students to develop philosophical, political, economic and historical perspectives on contemporary public issues and, second, to develop the skills of persuasive writing for a general public. The students will produce a portfolio of writings of different sorts (examples range from book reviews and review essays, analytical and research papers to letters to editors, press releases, policy statements, op-ed pieces). The idea is to do a good deal of writing in a variety of forms, some of which is related to the practical exercise in legislative politics which will include web-based and image-oriented communications. The course will feature four two-week presentations from faculty in diverse disciplines who will explore various approaches to contemporary public issues and various strategies of public communication. The central theme of Writing in Public in 2006 will be “the ecology of the city,” including presentations from an ecologist, an historian, an urban planner and a philosopher.

ENGL 357 African-American Intellectual Traditions: The focus is on African-American literature and history since 1865 with an emphasis on the development of the “black public sphere” as an arena for political and intellectual debate and cultural assertion.

Sample PPP Elective Courses

Inventing the Modern Irish (Re)Public
Dr. Graley Herren
Department of English
To be offered in Spring 2006

This course examines select writings from modern Irish authors in an effort to understand literature’s role in “inventing” the independent Republic of Ireland. We will also study literature which interrogates the identity politics of “Irishness,” both before and after independence. This course will call upon your skills in critical thinking, close reading, oral argument, written analysis, and academic research. “Inventing the Modern Irish (Re)Public fulfills the British elective requirement for English majors; it also counts as an elective course in the Philosophy, Politics & the Public honors program.

Texts:
Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth
Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose by W.B. Yeats (edited by James Pethica)
The Playboy of the Western World & Riders to the Sea by J.M Synge
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses [corrected Gabler edition] by James Joyce
Translations and Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel
Plays: Volume 1 by Marina Carr
Stones in His Pockets by Marie Jones
The Galway Trilogy by Martin McDonagh
Selected literary criticism and political writings on electronic reserve

* * * * *

Agora to Piazza: Public Space (in Pre-Modern European Cities)
Dr. David Mengel
Department of History
To be offered in Fall 2005

The architects of Berlin’s ultra-modern Potsdamer Platz sought to foster public life by their arrangement of the space that, for nearly half a century, existed as a no-man’s land between East and West Berlin. In creating a twenty-first-century urban landscape that would symbolize a re-unified Germany while bringing real Berliners together, they looked to the history of European cities. Public space and civic identity have always gone hand-in-hand, they understood. Sending automobile traffic underground and privileging the pedestrian was only the beginning. One prominent area of the re-arranged Platz now self-consciously recreates Siena’s famous elliptical Piazza del Campo. Its intimate rather than imposing scale was meant to encourage community spirit within a modern mega-city.

COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course will trace the roots of this principle and examine the nature of urban public space by exploring the shape and character of European cities from Ancient Greece through the Renaissance. Democratic Athens famously boasted the agora and acropolis, not to mention its theaters. Imperial Rome would be unthinkable without its forum, as would any Renaissance Italian city without its piazzas. For these and every other city, the public space within the urban topography formed an essential part of city identity— political, social, economic, and religious.

This seminar-style course will focus on approximately a series of European cities across the centuries from the fifth century BC to the sixteenth century AD. In addition to Athens, Rome, and Florence, we will likely study London, Prague, Paris, and perhaps a few other cities. We will consider all kinds of public urban spaces, from market squares and political centers to cemeteries, from the Colosseum to medieval cathedrals. We will also devote attention to boundaries between public and private space and to the relationships between power and urban space by examining struggles between individuals and groups to define and control urban space. Readings will include archaeological and architectural studies, contemporary travelers’ accounts, historical studies, political theory, and modern theoretical studies of the nature of urban public space. Students will be encouraged to make connections and comparisons with modern urban spaces that they know. Our activities will accordingly include a group analysis of the public spaces of Cincinnati that will culminate in a walking tour of downtown. The students’ own experiences of urban public spaces (and indeed, of the public spaces of a university campus) will enrich and inform their study. Likewise, this course will expect the students to apply what they have read and learned in other PPP courses to our common understanding of the public and its relation to urban space.