Each year, courses in Humanities First are taught by faculty from across the Humanities division. Faculty for Humanities 101: "Dreams and Nightmares" in Autumn, 2026, are listed below.

Humanities 101 Autumn, 2026: "Dreams and Nightmares"

Joseph Bringman received his PhD in Classics from the University of Washington in 2024 after completing his dissertation on the portrayal of Roman revolutionaries in ancient historiography. He researches how ancient historians depicted political figures and what divergent interpretations of the same figure or event reveal about the authors and the perspectives from which they were writing. Joseph is also interested in how the Romans conceptualized libertas, examining freedom not only in the political context of the Roman government but also in its social, philosophical, and literary conceptions. His research interests also extend to Homeric poetry, and he particularly enjoys the ways in which the oral poets were able to imagine counterfactual possibilities in their narratives so as to express their creativity outside the bounds of their oral tradition while nevertheless refraining from actually violating tradition.

Sam Hushagen received his PhD in English literature from the University of Washington in 2019 after completing a dissertation on early-modern science and descriptive poetry. He researches the connections among poetry written between 1660 and 1850, philosophy of mind, and the history and philosophy of science to show how these areas can be seen in productive conjunction rather than as isolated pursuits. He is currently working on a book about landscape poetry and sense experience, and has published essays in The Wordsworth Circle, The William Carlos Williams Review, and Milton Quarterly. Sam began teaching at UW as a graduate student in the English department in 2013. Before pursuing his doctorate, Sam was a UW undergraduate in English and CHID. He joins Humanities First as an Instructor for Humanities 101, 102 and 103 and as Program Coordinator.

Marie La Fond is a lecturer in the University of Washington’s department of Classics, where she completed her BA and MA. She received her PhD in Classics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a dissertation exploring how the Homeric bard deployed significant objects as one tool in his poetic toolkit and what such objects signified, in particular about Odysseus’ identity as hero, king, husband, father, and son in the Odyssey. In addition to the ways we humans and objects can layer meaning onto one another, she’s also interested in myth as a means of sense-making, which she delves into with students in the course Greek and Roman Mythology.

Alex McCauley works on ecology and political economy in nineteenth-century literature. Drownings, floods, swamps, sinking islands, liquefying crowds—that’s his material. Dr. McCauley tracks those interests back to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, when he was living in Thailand and went to the coast with my high school to help out with relief efforts. That specific flood has led Dr. McCauley to global water issues: too much water, or not enough, everywhere we look. And, too often, that means a small number of people profiting from controlling that water. The humanistic question Dr. McCauley cares most about is how to read. That means thinking about the possibilities and limits of interpretive methods, whether interpreting a provincial Victorian novel or a contemporary report on dams filling up with silt. The hard work is avoiding algorithmic thinking. It’s very easy to see the same thing over and over wherever we look, and to repeat the same scripted arguments. (Like constantly complaining about a small number of people benefiting from controlling water.) The best solutions Dr. McCauley has found for that problem are attending to specifics, connecting those specifics to each other in new ways, and practicing self-criticism.

Ian Schnee is a teaching professor in the Department of Philosophy. Ian has always enjoyed talking about movies and video games. When he discovered philosophy, he realized that all along he had been practicing with his friends core humanistic skills: interpretating narratives; using evidence to argue for ambiguous character arcs; evaluating works according to norms of aesthetics, genre, morality, or game play. Philosophy concerns fundamental questions of what it means to be a person: how should we live; what gives our lives meaning; what (if anything) separates human intelligence from artificial intelligence? Ian's work takes films and video games to be philosophical works that insightfully investigate these questions just as much as traditional books and journal articles.

Humanities 102 (Winter 2026) and 103 (Spring 2026)

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Sarah Stroup, the program director of Humanities First, is a professor in the department of Classics and the chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies.  Prof. Stroup received her undergraduate degrees from the University of Washington (BA Philosophy; BA Latin and Classical Studies), and her graduate degrees from the University of California, Berkeley MA Latin; PhD Classics).  Prof. Stroup is interested in the intellectual and political history of the late Roman Republic, late Republican cryptography and doublespeak, ancient philosophy of science and knowledge, ancient sport and spectacle, and the advanced technologies of the Greeks and Romans.  Prof. Stroup is a strong believer in the public, professional, and personal value of a humanities education, where our focus is on strategic and effective communication. Prof. Stroup can be reached at scstroup@uw.edu.

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Sam Hushagen received his PhD in English literature from the University of Washington in 2019 after completing a dissertation on early-modern science and descriptive poetry. He researches the connections among poetry written between 1660 and 1850, philosophy of mind, and the history and philosophy of science to show how these areas can be seen in productive conjunction rather than as isolated pursuits. He is currently working on a book about landscape poetry and sense experience, and has published essays in The Wordsworth Circle, The William Carlos Williams Review, and Milton Quarterly. Sam began teaching at UW as a graduate student in the English department in 2013. Before pursuing his doctorate, Sam was a UW undergraduate in English and CHID. He joins Humanities First as an Instructor for Humanities 101, 102 and 103 and as Program Coordinator.