I taught 3 classes this past term. My history of political thought course (which actually started in Sept 2021) was online for the full year for 270+ students. I also taught a brand new 4th year seminar titled "The Politics of Pandemics and Epidemics" for 18 students, and 7 graduate students took my "Science and Justice seminar. Because of the winter lockdown, the first half of these two seminar courses were virtual, and we moved back to in-person teaching in the last 6 weeks of the term.
Needless to say, with teaching 3 courses (one of which was a brand new course) that oscillated between online and in-person has been very taxing and exhausting. But it was also very rewarding! I was actually suppose to be on sabbatical for the term, but last year I decided to defer the sabbatical since travel looked like it would still be an "unknown" at the time. Plus I felt like students had already been shortchanged with the pandemic campus closures so I felt the least I could do was continue to offer my courses (and design a new one) and make them as engaging as possible. I have also agreed to offer my seminar on Science and Justice as a spring course to 4th year students, that starts in May. So the break from teaching is short lived.
My new course on "The Politics of Pandemics and Epidemics" proved to be very engaging and interesting. I learned a great deal. This was the schedule for the topics we covered in that class:
Week 1:
Introduction
Week 2: Public
Health Ethics (conceptual and theoretical frameworks)
Week 3: History of
Infectious Disease
Week 4: Vaccines
and Malaria
Week 5: HIV/AIDS
Week 6: Ebola
Week 7: Winter
term break
Week 8: COVID-19
Week 9: COVID-19 (part
2)
Week 10:
Obesity
Week 11: The “war
on drugs”
Week 12: Gun violence
Week 13 Conclusion
My summer research plans include making the final push to complete the textbook on the history of political philosophy. With a draft of 9 chapters already completed, the last remaining chapters include Black Political Thought (I have become a big fan of WEB Du Bois!), Aristotle and the Stoics, and Conservatism. The goal is to complete the draft of the book by the end of the year. But I also need to take some downtime this summer, after 2 years of online teaching. And I have a few new ideas in the works for longer term projects.
Cheers
Colin
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