The course catalog for the 2023–24 academic year features several new courses, pending approval from the Office of the Registrar. The offerings include new first-year seminars, Music Theory courses, and more across departments.

According to Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Michael Parkin, many new visiting professors and tenure-track professors, alike, have been hired for the coming academic year.

“We’re delighted to welcome many new visiting and tenure-track professors next year,” Parkin wrote in an email to the Review. “They will bring with them a number of exciting new courses for students to take.

These new hires have occurred across departments and have influenced course offerings accordingly.

“It looks like there are about 100 new courses at this point with a few more to be added soon,” Parkin wrote in an email to the Review. “The vast majority of these are brand-new courses, although there are a few that have been reactivated after not being offered for a few years.”

Music Theory courses, along with courses in other music related departments, are already open to students in the College of Arts and Sciences. The growth of these departments stems from the One Oberlin report, which recommended an increased availability of music-related courses for students in the College. In accordance with the report, in December of 2019, five new interdisciplinary programs emerged: Music and Cognition, Music and Popular Culture, Interdisciplinary Performance, Arts and Creative Technologies, and Arts Administration and Leadership. The Oberlin Center for Convergence, known as StudiOC, has also been a site for interdisciplinary learning. As part of the catalog for the upcoming academic year, students now have the opportunity to enroll in a set of StudiOC paired courses that connect the Writing and Communication and TIMARA departments.

College third-year Hazel Feldstein has registered to enroll in this course cluster. As a student looking to complete the Journalism Integrative Concentration, she is particularly looking forward to the potential applications this course cluster carries for audio journalism.

“As someone who wants to do stuff in audio storytelling, I didn’t really know where to start, so having it mixed with this communications course is exciting because it feels accessible,” Feldstein said.

New courses are being introduced in other departments as well. According to Chair of History Annemarie Sammartino, this can be attributed to the hiring of new professors.

“There’s a lot of hiring at the College last year — a lot of tenure-track hiring, more than there’s been in recent memory, Sammartino said. “My guess is that there probably will be a lot of new courses across the College.”

Within the History department, for example, there are three new faculty members joining the staff next academic year — one of which is a tenure-track hire, while the other two are two-year visiting assistant professors.

“I will say that [Caroline Newhall] is the first new tenure-track hire in over five years,” Sammartino said. “Unfortunately in the History department, we’ve lost a number of faculty over the last few years, so now we’re really starting the rebuilding process. …I would say every year when we have a new visiting assistant professor come, we get new courses in the curriculum. But this is opening up some new areas in some interesting ways.”

One new course, to be taught by Newhall, is a 400-level course titled “Slavery, Law, and Warfare in North America.” According to Sammartino, the course’s content will be related to Newhall’s second book project.

Some courses, such as incoming Visiting Assistant Professor Victoria Broadus’s 200-level course on the history of Rio de Janeiro and 400-level course on jazz in the Americas, have not yet appeared in the course catalog.

“It just takes the Registrar’s office a little while,” Sammartino said. “So if any of these courses sound interesting and you don’t see them in the catalog yet, feel free to get in touch with me. I can put you in touch with the instructor, they can give you more information about the class. They will be in the catalog for, at the absolute latest, fall add-drop, but probably well before that.”