Courses

This seminar will focus on the role of religion in 21st-century right-wing movements in Europe and the Americas. For each case study, we will spend one week learning the basic history and contours of the case and one week reading and discussing material that analyzes and attempts to explain the case. Categories and explanatory models covered in these more analytical weeks will include religious nationalism, secularism and laicism,… Continue Reading – Religion & 21st-Century Right Wing Movements

The search for other intelligent life in the universe and the question of how humans would manage first contact with such life poses many scholarly questions. These include: Does such life exist or is it likely to exist? Is contact possible? Why have we not had such contact? If we encounter such life, how should we respond and what might we expect? How could we possibly even begin to understand alien intelligence? These questions demand an… Continue Reading – Xenoanthropology

The act of artistic creation is one of the profound mysteries of human existence. While thousands of artists and composers have endeavored over the centuries to make works of lasting value, only a select few have had the “creative spark”—the flash of brilliance that resulted in a masterpiece that transcended its time and place. Precisely how these artists and composers have attained this goal is… Continue Reading – The Creative Spark: The Making of Masterpieces in Music and Art

This course will explore the intersection of art, science, and technology as represented in the visual arts of the 20th century, primarily but not exclusively, in the USA, Western, and Eastern Europe. It will be organized thematically around shifts in technology that brought these areas of human creativity into close contact. Each theme addresses the impact changes in the urban environment, the… Continue Reading – International Avant-Gardes: Modernist Art of the Machine Age

Societies responded to epidemics in many different ways based on their understanding of the nature and causes of specific diseases and structures of belief about the body, health, medicine, disease, religion, race, class, and gender. For centuries, the city has been a place of freedom from tradition and custom where people could blend into a crowd and construct new identities. In some parts of… Continue Reading – Ten Plagues: A History of Cities and Pandemics

From its ancient origins in the Book of Job, or farther back even in the Babylonian Poem of the Righteous Sufferer, through the early decades of the Enlightenment, the problem of evil — the perniciously difficult to satisfy “need to find order within those appearances so unbearable that they threaten reason’s ability to go on,” as Susan Neiman has aptly described it, as when, to one degree or another, bad things happen to good people, and… Continue Reading – The Problem of Evil in Philosophy and Popular Culture

Sport is one of the most visible and influential aspects of modern popular culture. This course will explore the cultural aspects of sport, focusing on basketball, soccer, American football, and track using literature, film, journalism, memoirs, and secondary material from a variety of scholarly fields. The course’s basic question will be how should we think about sports as a social, cultural, and… Continue Reading – The Culture of Sport

Once upon a time a young lady called Beauty found a man asleep: he was so beautiful that she kissed him a hundred times to wake him up... Rewritten and altered, this tale became Disney’s famous production Beauty and the Beast, a movie designed for children that makes the Stockholm syndrome look fancy and trivializes domestic violence. This rewriting also prepares young minds to find… Continue Reading – #HerToo: When Women Reclaim Fairy Tales

This seminar will examine the strategic ways in which leaders have sought to institutionalize their activism and public dissent.  The class will utilize an interactive discussion format. On a macro-level, the focus will include founders of civil and human rights organizations and other social change pressure groups.  On a micro-level, we will contrast leadership roles of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his co-founding of the… Continue Reading – Anti-Apartheid & Civil Rights Movements: King and Mandela, Lessons in Leadership

How do bilinguals handle having multiple languages in a single mind? Why do adults have difficulty achieving native-like competence in a foreign language? Why do some people learn foreign languages more easily than others? In this course, students will learn about a myriad of topics related to the bilingual mind. These include neural underpinnings of bilingual processing, biological, linguistic… Continue Reading – One Mind. Two Languages.

This course examines histories, theories and practices of photography, a medium that has transformed significantly since the daguerrotypes of the mid 19th century.  In 1839, Daguerre’s invention was presented as “a free gift to the world.”  This course will look at how that gift has been put to use in photographic cultures around the world in contexts as diverse as portrait studios in Yogyakarta,… Continue Reading – Photography: Theories and Practices of an International Medium

An examination of current slavery reparations debates in the US, the course seeks to situate these initiatives in a broader international context. We will thus study the Jewish material claims against Germany brought in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the history of Indigenous children in Canada, the "Stolen Generation" in Australia, and the children torn from their parents in the Belgian Congo.… Continue Reading – Reparations: An International Perspective

Be it solar panels or biofuels, everybody has their own favorite solutions for fixing the climate which are invariably based on new technologies that are "almost here". But greenhouse emissions need to be reduced substantially now! How can we get the quickest and biggest bang for our buck in reducing emissions? With new “supply-side” technologies to provide more energy, or by targeting grimy fossil-fuel power plants which run our society?… Continue Reading – Climate Crisis: Shiny Toys to the Rescue?

Animals populate the Arabic canonical tradition. The word hayawan, ‘animal’, invokes a number of classical Arabic texts and treaties. One may argue that Arabic letters encompass an encyclopaedic genre that is devoted to exploring, commenting on, or surveying sources on animals, ranging from Al-Jahiz, Al-Qazwini, Ibn Qutayba, and Ikhwan al-Safa to Al-Damiri. More specifically, pre-Islamic and oral poetry’s zoopoetics embody… Continue Reading – HumAnimals in Middle Eastern Literature

Building on the momentum of the Arab Spring and European Squares Movements, Occupy Wall Street burst on to the scene in the Fall of 2011 and quickly took the world by storm. Arguably the most important social movement the United States had seen since the 1970s, Occupy reshaped the American political landscape over the next decade and beyond, influencing Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ movements, the Fight for 15, and the Bernie Sanders campaign.… Continue Reading – Occupy Wall Street

In this course, we will focus our attention on two book-length essays by Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.

Why focus on two short books? Woolf’s essays are works of art and ideas; they are best savored. In addition, we learn to read critically not by reading, but by re-reading. And yet, you could scan university syllabi the world over and you would find few, if any, courses where… Continue Reading – Reading in Slow Motion: Virginia Woolf’s Essays

“Secrets of the Quantum Universe” will be an interdisciplinary honors seminar, open to science and non-science students, without any requirement of prior science or math achievement, that will introduce students to the history and the current frontiers of research into quantum matter. The  course will introduce quantum mechanics in every-day materials: everything from the atom up. This topic, known as “quantum condensed matter physics”… Continue Reading – Secrets of the Quantum Universe

Many of the most enduring social divisions, political conflicts, and policy debates in the United States revolve around the issue of race, and to a lesser extent ethnicity. This course will examine the role of race in American politics and its contemporary significance. It will focus on the experiences and activities of different groups in America through an examination of social policies. The course will examine social policies related to… Continue Reading – The Politics and Power of Race in American Social Policies