As the 2012-2013 academic year winds down, Campus Reform’s Macaela Bennett lists the “dirty dozen” of odd college offerings:

1. Lesbian Lives – DePaul University: “Using the political cartoons of Alison Bechdel and theoretical and historical readings, this course has students “examine the constructions of identities and politics within lesbian culture.” 

2. The Politics and Aesthetics Of Black Queer Formations – Princeton University: …this course analyzes “diasporic black queer cultures as political and philosophical engagements.”

3. Ecofeminism – University of South Carolina: ..an “exploration of the connections between oppression of women and oppression of nature.”

4. Prostitution and Social Control: Governing Loose Women – Oberlin College:  ..analyzes “why recent legal solutions cannot fulfill expectations and discuss how the social control of prostitution might actually cause it”…

5. Mad Dogs, Vampires and Zombie Ants: Behavior Mediating Infections – Vassar College: …combines “aspects of multiple fields including infections disease microbiology, neurobiology, epidemiology and animal behavior”…

6. Possessive Investment In Whiteness – Stanford University: This course “challenges and refines the ideas of white privilege and race in the history and contemporary United States ….

7. This is Sparta! – Brown University: This course studies “the history and culture of ancient Sparta from her beginnings to her final decline into obscurity and impotence” by learning “about warfare in the ancient world and why the Spartans excelled in it.”

8. How To Win A Beauty Pageant – Oberlin College: This course “examines US beauty pageants from the 1920s to the present” with the aim of analyzing “pageantry as a unique site for the interplay of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation” ….

9. How to Rule the World – Bowdoin College: … this course will explore the requirements of great political leadership.

10. Politics of Obesity – University of California, Santa Cruz: … “examines the construction and representation of the so-called epidemic of obesity, the major explanations for the rise in obesity and the interventions they bege…”

11. The Survival of the Whitest: Two Centuries of Racism And Evolutionary Theory – Brown University: This course introduces students to evolutionary theory and related ideologies and concepts like Social Darwinism, Eugenics, Scientific Racism…”

12. Deconstructing the Diva – DePaul University : This course studies “the figure of the diva as a powerful cultural text,” ..