TRUE CRIME | CRIM 477
Violence, death and suffering saturate our culture. Traumatic and inescapable as it all might seem, these ill-fated tragedies are quite often the very things we seek to escape the drudgery of our lives—to imagine motives, to hunt a killer, to think the unthinkable. To reckon with this enduring fascination, in this class we will step into crime’s archive—detective fiction, true crime documentaries, horror films, criminology itself—to ask what the genre can teach us about ourselves and our place in this world.
CRIMINAL JUSTICE IN CONTEXT | SOCIO 850
Catalog Description: This course examines the various institutions of contemporary criminal justice operations, focusing primarily on the “three C’s”—cops, courts, and corrections—and adjacent subjects like law. Emphasis will be given to foundational works in the area that emphasize history, theory, policy, and empirical research.
Instructor’s description: This class is not meant, nor could it be, an exhaustive treatment of the interworkings of US criminal justice. Instead this class is deliberately interdisciplinary—privileging the historical, theoretical and conceptual over the empirical—and intended to expose students to a variety of ways to theorize, analyze and document all that is bound up in “criminal justice.” Towards that end, we will step outside the confines of traditional social scientific research and begin to trace the political, cultural and ideological forces that have produced the largest prison population the world has ever known.
THE WAR ON DRUGS
SOON
CRIMINOLOGY OF SERIAL MURDER | CRIM 562
Course Description | There are monsters among us, haunting the shadows of our cities and those places in our imaginations to which we retreat and escape. But what hand do we have in creating these monsters? Wherever and however we tell our stories—from serious literature to lurid films—you will find them there. So that we might reckon this enduring fascination, in this course we will make serious study of “serial murder” asking what the phenomena can teach us about ourselves, our relations to others and our place in this world.
From the KSU course catalogue | The course critically examines the social construction of serial murder as a phenomenon that has long existed but only recently has been polarized as a concern of the criminal justice system and the public in general. The objective of the course is to synthesize historical and social scientific analysis of serial murder, assess public and media debates centered on both offenders and victims, and evaluate the portrayal of serial murder in contemporary literature and film.