4 Humanities Summer Course Programs

UM’s Pre-College Summer Program Summer Exploration experience is a transformative live-in experience while exploring all aspects of student life as you engage with world-class faculty, explore iconic landscapes and communities surrounding Missoula, Montana, and build meaningful connections with other high school students and graduating seniors, like yourself.

This seminar is devoted to an examination of United Nations peacekeeping, from its inception in 1956 in the wake of the Suez Crisis to its increasingly important role as an enforcer of political stability in sub-Saharan Africa. We will look at the practice of "classic" peacekeeping as it developed during the Cold War, with the striking exception of the Congo Crisis of 1960; the rise and fall of so-called "second-generation peacekeeping," more accurately labeled "peace enforcement," in the early 1990s in Bosnia and Somalia; and the re-emergence in recent years of a muscular form of peacekeeping in sub-Saharan Africa, most notably in Congo in 2013. Students will learn the basic history of the United Nations since 1945 and the fundamentals of the United Nations Charter, especially with respect to the use of force and the sovereignty of member states.

The course traces the history of genocide in the 20th century and the question of humanitarian intervention to stop it, a topic that has been especially controversial since the end of the Cold War. The pre-1990s discussion begins with the Armenian genocide during the First World War and includes the Holocaust and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. Coverage of genocide and humanitarian intervention since the 1990s includes the wars in Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, the Congo, and Sudan. The final session of the course will be devoted to a discussion of the International Criminal Court and the separate criminal tribunals that have been tasked with investigating and punishing the perpetrators of genocide.

Located in the historic city of Edinburgh, students will embark on a scholarly adventure through a range of disciplines including literature, philosophy, history and art history. Students on this course will develop their academic skills and gain a fascinating insight into studying Humanities at the university level. Using a range of modern and contemporary texts and artworks from Scotland, students will be introduced to relevant concepts and perspectives used in the study of the Humanities.