Courses

This seminar will explore diverse processes through which knowledge is acquired in the physical sciences, in mathematics, and in the study of human psychology. We will consider fundamental epistemological questions that arise in these disciplines: Can knowledge ever be objective? Is it fundamentally an individual construct, or a social construct? How do different human cultures develop it? Is it possible to distinguish among beliefs,… Continue Reading – Beliefs, culture, and the search for truth: Paths to knowledge in science, mathematics, and human psychology

Politicians love to talk about “restoring the American Dream.” “The candidate who celebrates the American Dream wins the heart,” blared a headline in Summer 2015. In a speech delivered in 2007, Barack Obama declared, “we need to reclaim the American Dream.” In 2015, Donald Trump announced, “The American Dream is dead.” Of course, obituaries for the American Dream have been offered since its inception and may even be part of the DNA of the… Continue Reading – The American Dream

Who’s afraid of little old me? On her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poet’s Department (2024),Taylor Swift warns: Well, you should be. Swift is no stranger to the reductionist binaries often ascribed to powerful women: bitch/boss, monster/Madonna, whore/hero. This course will take an interdisciplinary approach to close reading and analysis of Swift’s extensive repertoire—songs, music videos, documentaries, journals, The Eras Tour concert… Continue Reading – B*tch, Smile: Taylor Swift’s Female Rage

As Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and many subsequent disasters have made clear, black people in the US and in the wider Africa Diaspora are on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Yet these communities are often marginalized within discussions centering earth’s metabolic transformation, flattened as victims of toxic dumping or rising water, scapegoated as abusers of the environment, or neglected as having no stakes in questions of the present or… Continue Reading – Black Ecologies

In the 21st century, data is widely used in sports in pursuit of performance and profit. Professional sports teams use predictive analytics to forecast the value  of their prospects and optimize their lineups, television broadcasts use AI to calculate real-time win probabilities, fantasy leagues and sports betting markets monetize statistical compilations of historical data, and individual athletes wear biometric sensors to track their… Continue Reading – Before Moneyball: History of Sports Data

Once dismissed as irrational, and confined to the margins of society, populism and its conceptual offspring, “illiberal democracy,” are now recognized as posing a serious threat to democratic governance, not only in advanced industrialized countries but in Latin America, South Asia and the Middle East as well. Populism presents a challenging but still unanswered question: What is populism and what accounts for its spread in the 21st century?… Continue Reading – Democracy, Ethnonationalism and the Threat of Populist Autocracy

This course examines the nexus between war and literature through a multifaceted approach: by reading texts from a variety of genres and regions in the Arab world, students will be exposed to the diverse experiences and perspectives that helped shape the creative process of writing during times of high conflict and crisis. This course includes a comparative component that explores the interconnections between Arabic wartime fiction and… Continue Reading – War and Literature in the Arab World

This is an honors course for non-physics majors and majors alike. It will require knowledge of mathematics at the level of solving linear algebraic equations in two variables and a lack of fear when being told that that corresponds to doing “linear operations” and can be written in terms of “matrices”. Those concepts will be explained in the class. The class will also explain the basic ideas of probability theory, which are at the heart of… Continue Reading – Why Quantum Mechanics Is Weird and Why That’s OK

Transgender individuals—those whose gender identity does not align with their sex assigned at birth—have always existed, but the number of people identifying as transgender has significantly increased in recent years, particularly among those under 18. This rise in visibility has been accompanied by the development of medical interventions to support transgender youth in their gender transitions. Leading medical experts and organizations… Continue Reading – Health in the Crossfire: Medicine and Transgender Youth

“Why do bad things happen to good people, and good things to bad?” is as old and challenging a question as any in intellectual history, going back at least as far as the Old Testament’s Book of Job, otherwise known as 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 described it.1 It’s a very old problem, that… Continue Reading – The Problem of Evil in Philosophy and Popular Culture

Prereq: FSH placement, SPA 204, or permission of the instructor

This seminar explores Miguel de Cervantes Don Quijote (1605, 1615) through a critical reading of the impact books produce in the community of readers in early Modern Spain. Don Quijote’s lofty ideals of freedom, equality and inclusiveness are the product of his mis-readings of chilvalric novels. This irony guides both volumes of Cervantes’s masterpiece as… Continue Reading – Don Quijote: una crónica de absurdos, lectores y el placer de leer

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

This course offers students the opportunity to develop skills in critical reading, scholarly research, and analytical writing by studying protest music during two significant periods: apartheid South Africa and the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. It explores the intersections of protest music in these contexts, focusing on three key research strands: Ubuntu, social movements, and responses to systems of oppression.

The… Continue Reading – Protest Music and Activism: Building Bridges across Oceans

In a world fraught with uncertainty, how do we make the best decisions with what we know now (and what we don't)? This course examines how we make decisions under uncertainty by integrating research from psychology, cognitive science, and behavioral economics. Students will explore how people make decisions with incomplete data and how these processes differ from models of “optimal” decision-making. Key topics include risk and uncertainty,… Continue Reading – Deciding in the Dark: The Science of Uncertainty

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 and cognitive effects on adults’ difficulty… Continue Reading – One Mind. Two Languages.

History is a selective narrative that leaves silences and gaps in its wake. What does it mean to speak about these silences—to encounter pasts that may never be fully known? How does one attempt to recover lost histories (should one attempt at all?), and what implications do such endeavors have?

This class explores these questions through works of literature, film, and art that focus on the histories of imperialism and colonialism in… Continue Reading – Lost Stories: Historical Amnesia and the Imagination of Recovery

Changemaking in Cross-Cultural Communities for healthcare is designed to equip students with the practical tools to research and address pressing global challenges, specifically within the realm of healthcare, through an explicitly cross-cultural lens. Students will learn how to conduct in-depth, culturally aware research, design interventions that respect and reflect cultural diversity, and work collaboratively across cultural boundaries to… Continue Reading – Changemaking for Healthcare

Changemaking in Cross-Cultural Communities for climate change is designed to equip students with the practical tools to research and address pressing global challenges, specifically within the realm of climate change, through an explicitly cross-cultural lens. Students will learn how to conduct in-depth, culturally aware research, design interventions that respect and reflect cultural diversity, and work collaboratively across cultural… Continue Reading – Changemaking for the Climate