Boundary making, migration, and population displacement have been significant dimensions of the contemporary African experience. How has boundary making, broadly defined (inclusive of national borders, rural-urban distinctions, and ethnic and racial groupings, for example), shaped contemporary Africa? What types of and through what processes were boundaries were created? How did the African people respond to these processes? What population displacements unfolded in the context of this boundary making? And how did the people of Africa make sense of and understand boundary making, migration, and displacement? These are some of the questions we will be examining in this interactive and discussion oriented class. We will build our examination of these issues around six novels written by African authors. These novels will provide insight into the ways by which boundaries, migration, and displacement impacted the everyday lives of the African people.

What does it mean to be both racially Black and ethnically Latino in the U.S.? This discussion-based course will look at the history, culture, experiences, political struggles, and social dilemmas of “Afro-Latina/o/xs”: African-descended peoples from Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean who reside in the U.S. The erasure of these communities, along with their struggles for well-being, prosperity, belonging, and visibility, will be explored. The class provides an opportunity for a deeper understanding of the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade, ethno-nationalism, and U.S. foreign-policy, and their connection to contemporary issues of migration, sexism, inequality, and anti-blackness. In-depth conversations about the politics of “race” and “ethnicity” will trouble dominant U.S. paradigms of identity. We will engage with a variety of sources, from academic books and scholarly articles to film. Students will synthesize their understanding through daily forum posts, a collaboratively-prepared presentation, an essay, and a group research project.

This course will explore the history of African Americans on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus from earliest times to the present. Campus tours, interesting reading and in depth exploration of the lives and times of African Americans associated with UNC-CH will feature prominently.

This course explores birth and death as common human rites of passage impacted by changing American historical and cultural contexts. Since both are defining life events that remain beyond experiential recall, studying them in interdisciplinary ways opens powerful insights into how culture mediates the construction of bodies, social identities, and philosophical meanings. Readings and assignments are designed to examine changing anthropological rituals, medical procedures, scientific technologies, and ethical quandaries. We will also explore a variety of representations of birth and death in literary expression, film, and material culture as well as in hospitals, funeral homes, and cemeteries.

Designed to help prepare students for future study abroad opportunities and travel, service, and work in a global environment, the seminar focuses on critical differences, including transportation and other forms of infrastructure, that impact navigating places, people, and information. Individual competitive global travel proposals will be developed and presented.

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is central to one of the most profound revolutions in the history of thought, generating stunning insights but also some misunderstanding and tragic abuse. This seminar aims to provide a clear understanding of how natural selection works, and how it doesn’t. We will examine objections to the theory; how the environmental and health problems we face today reflect processes of natural selection; and recent attempts to understand why we get sick, how we respond to disease, why we get old, why we choose mates the way we do, and more. Class sessions will feature a mix of lecture and discussion of concepts and issues. Students will also engage in small group projects—cooperative explorations of problems raised in class or in the readings and/or designing mini research projects.

With the United States as our geographic focus, this seminar explores a range of 20th- and early-21st-century American Indian topics and current issues. We look at Indian casinos, tribal colleges, identity, gender, tribal courts, sports, and other topics. An exploration of the history of American Indians before and after the arrival of Europeans, a history with which we begin the seminar, provides essential background for looking at the present and recent past. This seminar will help students better understand the challenges facing American Indian communities both internally and externally and the creative solutions being forged to address these challenges. It will also help students further develop skills in reading, writing, critical analysis, and public speaking.

Archaeology often captures the popular imagination through fantastic and farfetched portrayals of lost civilizations, aliens, and spectacular treasures. While these depictions of archaeology and the past may not be accurate, the story being told is nonetheless significant and reflects something about the culture that produced it.

This course explores how these films, televisions shows, books, and video games tell stories about the past, what stories are being told, and what these representations imply about the relationship between archaeology and society. We will critically analyze popular representations of archaeology, comparing how competing visions of fact and fiction operate in the public sphere.

Students work in flexible, interdisciplinary teams to assess opportunities, brainstorm, and prototype solutions. Design thinking and physical prototyping skills are developed through fast-paced, iterative exercises in a variety of contexts and environments.

Trees, through their biology, meaning and uses, create an arc of understanding that spans what it means to be human. Ultimately, we will explore the meaning of trees and wood and why we seek happiness in nature, cherish wood and the creation of objects of wood. Tree: What is a tree from a biological perspective? How do they represent a complex community and play a vital role in life on the planet? Timber: What is the economy of wood internationally and in the state of NC? What are biophysical and material properties of trees that allow them to grow so large and be so useful to human society? Totem: Why do we respond emotionally to wood and choose it as a material in our lives and surroundings? How do we design and create objects of meaning from wood? We will walk in the woods, meet “wood people” from across the state and country and learn woodworking with projects of the students’ design and creation.

What did it mean to be a man or to be a woman in the Renaissance? This seminar will explore the ways in which constructions of gender are critical to understandings of the visual arts in the early modern period (c. 1400-1650). We will discuss and analyze a focused group of representations of men and women: portraits, mythological and biblical paintings and sculptures, and even turn our attention to the buildings these men and women inhabited. We will study the work of artists such as Michelangelo, Donatello, Titian, Holbein, and Rubens, amongst others, to find ways of understanding how masculinity and femininity were central concerns in early modern society and in the art produced in this period.

Focusing on the Carolinas, this seminar explores the many ways African Americans have used art to define themselves and their communities. We will ask how art has been used to maintain cultural traditions, shape American culture and build political solidarity from the era of colonialism and slavery to the present. We will study the cultivation of artistic practices from Africa; African American painters, sculptors and craftsmen who earned national reputations for the quality of their work; artists who re-imagined and redefined African American identity through art; and artists throughout the 20th century who represented the daily lives and hardships of rural and working-class blacks. Students will visit campus museums and archives and conduct original research using regional sources. Persistent questions throughout the semester will include, How does the art of African Americans in the Carolinas provoke us to question our own identities and roles within the region, and what is the contemporary role of art in shaping public discourse?

Acknowledging the everyday requires a heightened sensitivity to the world around you. The simple ability focus deeply and to pay close attention to one’s surroundings is often one of the most overlooked tools in an artist’s creative practice. In this seminar, we will examine what characterizes the “everyday” and explore how seemingly mundane subject matter has inspired and been transformed by a variety of modern and contemporary artists. We will look at art historical movements, groups, and individuals that considered the everyday and used it to push the boundaries of art and daily life.

This course will encourage students to explore their own experiences of everyday systems, patterns, and objects, through creative activities, including photography, journaling, and sketching. Class time will consist of meditative observation work, group conversations, watching films, going for walks, visiting museums, and learning about artists and their creative approaches to the “everyday.” As a first-year seminar, no previous art experience is necessary.

This course is the prerequisite to most higher courses in biology. An introduction to the fundamental principles of biology, including cell structure, chemistry, and function; genetics; evolution; adaptation; and ecology. (See department concerning Advanced Placement credit.) Three lecture hours a week.

The global pandemic has refocused the attention of the world on the importance of using science to address pathogens in a global way, and on the inequities in our health care system in the US and globally. In this course we will examine the challenges of treating infectious disease in the developing world, and explore the root causes of global health care inequity. We will use HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis as examples, and the nation of Haiti as a case study, as we explore viral and bacterial pathogens, how they affect our bodies, and how we can use this information to develop better treatments. We’ll also explore innovative ways to bring health care to resource-poor nations.

This interdisciplinary first-year seminar examines the roots, ideas, questions and applications of evolutionary biology. What is evolution, how does it work, and how do we study it? How did modern scientific theories of evolution emerge from the traditions of natural philosophy and natural history? How do we use evolution to understand fundamental questions ranging from adaptation, biological diversity and human origins to the evolution of disease, aging, sex and culture? We will learn about the central concepts of evolution, the scientific tools used to study evolution and the history of life, and apply these concepts and tools to understand how evolution occurs in the past, present and future.

We are living in times of a genetic revolution. We have sequenced the human genome and are in a position to transform medical treatment in the world. In spite of the advances in DNA sequencing, there remain mysteries in terms of how the cell accesses genetic information and how our genomes are transmitted to progeny cells with such high fidelity. The principles governing chromosome organization have been discovered through advances in biology, physics, statistics and computational sciences. This class will explore advances from the diverse disciplines and discuss the successes and limitations of the different approaches.

The course is the second in a two-semester sequence. See also CHEM 101. This course considers reaction rates; equilibrium and its applications; spontaneity and Gibbs energy; bulk properties of solids; thermochemistry; and electrochemistry.

The course is the second in a two-semester sequence. See also CHEM 101. This course considers reaction rates; equilibrium and its applications; spontaneity and Gibbs energy; bulk properties of solids; thermochemistry; and electrochemistry.

Fear of a global famine inspired chemist Fritz Haber’s research into the production of ammonia from nitrogen in the air. Following a breakthrough laboratory discovery, engineer Carl Bosch led the development of a large-scale industrial process to produce ammonia… and together they changed the world. This First Year Seminar will introduce concepts of scientific inquiry and interdisciplinary collaboration in the context of the humankind’s utilization of fertilizers. Weaving together elements of plant biology, chemical synthesis and catalysis, environmental science, and technoeconomic analysis, the course will critically examine the past, present, and future of fertilizers.

The course is a comparative study of the archaeology of Ancient Egypt and the Bronze Age Aegean, ca. 3000-1100 B.C., exploring the public art produced by two Mediterranean state-level societies: the Aegean Bronze Age palace centers of Crete and Mainland Greece (Minoans and Mycenaeans); the territorial state and empire of ancient Egypt. These interrelated cultures produced very different forms of public art and architecture reflecting unique cultural developments, and forms of urbanization. We examine the form, style, context, and media of production, consumption and display of art in the public sphere, exploring the definition of art; art as material culture; and art as an expression of social values and projection of dominant sociopolitical ideologies. While these ancient civilizations on opposite sides of the Mediterranean were in contact with each other, borrowing or sharing certain cultural traits, they ultimately produced very different forms of complex society. The goal of the course is to compare and contrast the method, media, and subject matter of public art toward a contextual and archaeological understanding of these differences and similarities, and ultimately the cultures that formed them.

In this course, we will study the great tragic heroines of ancient Greek drama, focusing on Clytemnestra, Medea, Alcestis, Phaedra, the Trojan Women, Antigone. We will also read a contemporary novel that engages many of these mythic women. We will study the Greek tragedies intensively, along with their global reception in later art, from paintings to poems, stage productions to sculptures, operas to ballets—these plays have been adapted and engaged in virtually every part of the world. Our questions will include: why does Greek tragedy focus so intensely on women? Are the playwrights misogynists or do they express some sympathy for women? What about these female characters grabbed the imaginations not only of ancient Greek playwrights but of later writers, painters, composers, not to mention readers? How do these characters appeal to artists and audiences from Alaska to Asia, from Latin America to Eastern Europe? How are their stories relevant to the 21st century? Did the ancient Athenians know something we don’t?

A study of Greek and Roman depictions of marginalized and peripheral peoples in both literary and visual sources, with consideration of the origin, development, and social roles ascribed to these groups.

What is health? What does it mean to be ill? How would doctors, patients, and ordinary people who lived more than two thousand years ago in the ancient Mediterranean have answered these questions? Ancient Greek medicine is often claimed as an ancestor of modern Western biomedicine – but what is the nature of this relationship? In this course we learn about ancient Greek concepts of disease and therapy as they were developed and appropriated through cross-cultural conversations with Egyptian, Roman, Christian, Arabic, and Enlightenment cultures. Our sources include ancient medical writings, literary texts, and archaeological evidence for therapeutic practice, including votive offerings, surgical tools, and visual images. Thematic units on medical ethics, physiological models, gendered bodies, concepts of disability, and the relationship between religion and science help students gain an understanding of how cultural attitudes to the body inform scientific approaches, and of the relationship between medicine and the humanities.

The “network” is the 21st century’s most popular metaphor, used to describe relationships, economies, technological infrastructures, and politics. In this class, we will delve into the relationship between networked digital technologies (social media, video games, server farms, gig economy apps like Uber and Care.com, cryptocurrency, online retailers, political campaign apps, etc.) and the ways we think about ourselves, our communities, our jobs, money, our careers, and our environment. In this seminar, we will delve deeply into some of these technologies and processes, with the goal of providing participants with a set of critical and theoretical tools to interpret the complexity of everyday life. We will do a lot of reading, try out a variety of new networked technologies, and debate their ramifications in class, culminating in a series of essays on technology and society. This class is a great fit for sci-fi nerds, Black Mirror fans, social media gurus, gamers, tech enthusiasts, or anyone who likes thinking deeply about the impacts of technology locally and globally.

Development of the skill to analyze plays for academic and production purposes through the intensive study of representative plays. DRAM 120 is the first course in the major and the minor in dramatic art.

The course seeks to help students find ways to articulate their own motivations for dress and then apply the ideas they have discovered to the ways in which individuality as well as group attitudes are expressed through clothing. Honors version available.

This seminar will explore the artists, art and technology involved in creating the world of the play. It is intended as an overview for students who want to learn about theatrical design. Students will create their own designs in the areas of scenery, costumes, and lighting for three plays throughout the semester. The plays will be placed outside of their traditional setting while still maintaining the story and themes. Students have placed Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a trailer park and a daycare center for example. Careful historical research, close reading and analysis, text and source material, and collaboration will be the focus of the student projects.

This course explores the political and social ramifications of documentary theatre in the United States. Students will investigate a local community of their choosing and create an interview-based performance. Honors version available.

This course will introduce geological concepts through the lens of U.S. national parks and a plate tectonic framework. The course will take a small-group approach to in-class work where developing collaboration and communication skills will be a focus. Students will apply their talents, skills, knowledge, and creativity to investigate related topics of interest as they manifest in a specific U.S. National Park to examine the interconnectedness of the geologic sciences and other fields of study. They will present their work in a manner appropriate to their project. Because this course is geared toward students newer to the university environment, the course will also discuss adjacent issues relevant to first-year students such as studying approaches, professionalism, as well as usefulness of meta-cognition, self-reflection, and feedback. Students will practice employing these ideas and approaches though individual and small-group work. Optional laboratory: GEOL 101L.

This seminar will introduce students to the nature of the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere, and describe the processes that lead to our weather patterns and global climate. Emphasis is placed on understanding how the oceans and atmosphere affect human population, how oceanic and atmospheric changes are linked to increasing human activity, and how these changes can affect you. Basic principles and modern theories of changing climate, severe weather events, oceanic hazards, and interactions between the oceans and the atmosphere will be studied. Examples of presently active research being conducted at UNC and at other institutions will be used to highlight how the above topics are investigated scientifically. Readings will be taken from introductory textbooks on meteorology, oceanography and environmental sciences; and modern articles in periodicals such as Scientific American, Nature, American Scientist, National Geographic, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and Weatherwise. Various websites, including those within the UNC Department of Marine Sciences, will be used. Classroom presentations, seminars, and group discussions and debates will be utilized.

This seminar provides students with opportunities to explore recent changes in marine environments caused by the interactions of fascinating oceanographic processes. Class presentations and discussions focus on the work of active marine scientists who combine their traditional disciplinary research with knowledge and skills from other fields as needed to understand new environmental challenges. This cross-cutting scientific approach prepares class members to recognize important connections between traditional disciplines to discover interdisciplinary research areas that they might wish to further explore during their undergraduate careers at Carolina. Each week we read a series of cutting-edge, non-technical research papers focused largely on recent changes in marine ecosystems in preparation for in-class discussions, laboratory demonstrations, and “video- and photo-trip” visits to field sites. We use information from those papers, other course materials and current research at Carolina, to investigate how biological, geological, physical, and geochemical processes interact to influence coastal, open-ocean, and tropical environments. Students are expected to actively participate in discussions during classes, in demonstrations using state-of-the art instrumentation in MASC laboratories, and in “hands on” mini-field experiments (as weather allows) designed to emphasize the importance of the scientific question rather than just the technology involved. Please note that this seminar has no prerequisites.

Have you ever wanted to stand on a volcano, see a glacier, trace out an earthquake fault, or see the Earth’s oldest living things? This seminar is designed around a one-week field trip to eastern California, where students will study geologic features including active volcanoes, earthquake-producing faults, and evidence for recent glaciation and extreme climate change. Before the field trip (which will take place the week of Fall Break and be based at a research station near Bishop, California), the class will meet twice a week to learn basic geologic principles and to work on developing field research topics. During the field trip students will work on field exercises (e.g. mapping, measuring, and describing an active fault; observing and recording glacial features) and collect data for the research projects. After the field trip, students will obtain laboratory data from samples collected during the trip and test research hypotheses using field and laboratory data. Grading will be based on presentation of group research projects, and on a variety of small projects during the trip (notebook descriptions, mapping projects, etc.). Students may be required to pay some of the costs of the trip (a maximum of about $500.) This course will require missing three days of classes. The course is designed to teach basic geology “on the rocks”, so there are no prerequisites. Link to Yosemite Nature Notes video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5RQp77uVPA

What will our world look like in ten years? Fifty? One hundred? Will the future be a utopian paradise or a dystopian wasteland? Through a wide-ranging survey of popular science writing, novels, and films, this first year seminar will examine fictional and nonfictional attempts to imagine the future from the nineteenth century to the present. We will explore everything from futurology and transhumanism to warnings of imminent environmental collapse. Our focus will be less on assessing the accuracy of these predictions and more on determining what they tell us about the hopes and fears of the times in which they were made. The course will culminate in a short research paper on a future-oriented topic of your choosing.

William Blake, the visionary poet, artist and printmaker of the British Romantic period, has had enormous influence on modern art and popular culture. His illuminated poetry integrated word and image anticipating graphic novels and influencing many modern musicians, poets, writers (including Pullman, His Dark Materials Trilogy, Bono, Patti Smith and Jim Morrison). Using the Blake Archive, a hypertext of Blake’s poetry and art, we will study key Blake works as well as the digital medium that enables us to study these works in new ways. We will also explore the Web for performances and adaptations of the works we study and for works by musicians, painters, poets, writers, actors, playwrights, performers, dancers and film and video makers who were or are inspired or influenced by Blake. Students will share their discoveries with the class and produce critical or creative responses to a work by Blake or by an influenced artist.

This course guides students slowly and carefully through one extraordinary long book that is well worth the time and effort. Texts vary year to year. Required text: one book you’ll never want to sell back.

In this class we will investigate the history of human rights from the perspective of literature. We will explore how rights are represented and narrated in novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and how founding declarations—famously, the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)—rely on fictional structures. While attending to some of the more politically contentious issues involved with human rights, such as the claim that universal rights lack political and legal enforcement, we will also consider the following questions: how does fiction help articulate and represent claims to human rights? Why might a political philosopher or legal scholar turn to a work of fiction from the eighteenth century or present day in order to make an argument about human rights? Alongside theoretical and historical writings about human rights we will read authors such as Hannah Arendt, Edmund Burke, Behrouz Boochani, Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Hobbes, Mohsin Hamid, Thomas Paine, Mary Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

This course focuses on the creative processes involved in writing poetry. We will look at poets’ revisions of their work, their statements about poetry, their letters to and from other writers, and the publication and reception of their poems in their own time. We will concentrate on specific case studies: the manuscripts and letter-poems of the reclusive writer Emily Dickinson; the notebooks, letters, and poems of Walt Whitman that he wrote while tending the wounded in the Civil War hospitals; the poems, manuscripts, and letters of George Moses Horton, who taught himself to read and write and published two books of poetry while enslaved in North Carolina; and the drafts, revisions, and animal drawings of twentieth-century modernist Marianne Moore. The course seeks to develop close reading skills that are crucial for interpreting poetry; to explore how social and cultural conditions both limit and enable poetic expression, and how poets analyze and criticize those conditions; to strengthen writing and oral communication skills; and to develop research skills.

This first-year seminar provides a multi-faceted, in-depth, and unique exploration of William Shakespeare’s tragic masterpiece, Hamlet. A play as oft misunderstood as it is celebrated, Hamlet occupies a strange place in our cultural landscape, being a work with which many of us become acquainted early on – be it through The Lion King, parodies, or compulsory high school reading – while at the same time remaining a kind of distant, difficult, and marble-encased “classic” that seems to evade our attempts to appreciate or even understand it. Put more simply, Hamlet is an artistic masterpiece – though an extremely difficult one – that we have been told we “should” know and love, but that for many students remains a frustrating, even confounding, mystery.

As a lifelong lover of this play, one of my goals as a professor is thus to share that passion with students and help make this centuries-old work “come alive.” In particular, I will argue that Hamlet, for all its complexity, is a play about political, moral, and personal crisis that continues to resonate strongly with our own vexed present-day moment. Shakespeare’s plays, and especially Hamlet, remain relevant – via their humor, their vivacity, their pathos, their insight – through their remarkable ability to portray, critique, and question human nature and to prompt us as readers to reconsider our assumptions about the world around us, a world that Hamlet both reflects and makes new each time we revisit it.

In order to arrive at this deeper understanding of Hamlet’s relation to our own modern-day experience, the course will introduce various key contexts of the play that are essential to understanding it. Like the play itself, the course will follow a basic five-act structure:

• ACT 1 – Introducing (1) Hamlet’s 400-year legacy, (2) Shakespeare’s life and career, and (3) the practices of the Elizabethan theater in which he worked and created what we now know as Hamlet.

• ACT 2 – Reading the standard, full text of Hamlet (Q2) with an eye toward comprehension of Shakespeare’s early modern language as well as key literary themes and philosophical concepts at the heart of the play.

• ACT 3 – Understanding some of the key intertextual sources that Shakespeare used and referenced when writing Hamlet, from the Scandinavian legend of Amleth to Virgil’s epic Aeneid, in order to appreciate the way in which any “classic” text is informed by and based on other, earlier texts. Hamlet is a play about storytelling, and its references to other stories is key to that project.

• ACT 4 – To investigate the various early printed texts of Hamlet – including the notorious First Quarto (Q1) and the missing Ur-Hamlet – in order to appreciate how even the most classic works are created out of innumerable contingent and minute editorial decisions.

• ACT 5 – To survey some of the key moments in the past 400 years of Hamlet performance and criticism, from the earliest Elizabethans’ sense of the play, to the Romantics and Victorians, to modernist critics like T.S. Eliot, on to more global reinterpretations by various artists and scholars from Japan to the Soviet Union.

There is the assumption that science fiction propagandizes for the gleaming gadgetry that it depicts. It’s true that science fiction often endorses the scientific endeavor and worldview. It’s further true that the science fictionists of the 1940s and 1950s tended to pine for the space age that began in 1969. But even at its giddiest and wonkiest, science fiction remembers the lesson of Frankenstein. It remembers that our monsters develop ideas of their own; that they wind up haunting us and even hunting us; that our innovations—however seemingly benign—however fenced and fail-safe—threaten to escape our control and our comprehension. This course traces the genealogy of this machine anxiety. Our guiding questions will be: What are machines? Does the artificially intelligent “machine” cease to be a machine? Are machines “natural” or “unnatural”? Are they heretical? Are their dangers inherent? How do they change us?

Our course epigraph might paraphrase Winston Churchill: We shape our machines; thereafter they shape us.

This course is an entry into an undergraduate learning community organized by the Gillings School of Global Public Health, Department of Environmental Science and Engineering. The ECUIPP Lab (Environmentally-Engaged Communities and Undergraduate students Investigating for Public health Protection) is a creative community of students, faculty members and practice partners. Students in ENVR 89-001 will become members of the Environment-ECUIPP Lab. Over the course of the semester they will design and conduct research that addresses a pressing environmental health issue in a local community. Students will work with the local community partner to develop a research question and use the resources of the ECUIPP Lab and the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering to answer the question through the research process. The course is a hands-on undergraduate research experience

This course examines the ecology of infectious diseases including environmental and anthropogenic drivers of those diseases. During the semester we will focus on several case studies of diseases including COVID-19, malaria, cholera, and HIV/AIDS. The biophysical and evolutionary drivers of diseases will be examined as well as the political, economic, social, and environmental systems that shape health and disease across spatial and temporal scales. A political ecological framework is used to examine such topics as how political forces and economic interests helped shape the HIV/AIDS and malaria pandemics in Africa and beyond. We will also examine how emerging infectious diseases such as COVID-19 diffuse through populations and how public health efforts and geographical and epidemiological modelling and analyses can be used to predict and limit their spread.

Globalization is a word we hear every day, but what does it mean for us in local places? Specifically, what can an understanding of globalization tell us about Carolina and nearby places? This seminar weaves together perspectives on globalization with hands-on exploration of Carolina and its place in today’s global “knowledge economy,” and the University’s founding in relation to the globalizing forces of that day. Our focus will shift back and forth between the global and the local, even to the microscale of our campus. We will learn through a variety of experiences and approaches, including fieldwork, old documents, and some introductory GIS (geographic information systems) exercises in addition to readings, class discussion, and group work. By the end of the seminar, students will not only have an understanding of globalization and the very real connections between the global and the local, but also a unique perspective on our university.

This seminar examines the ways that politics, especially contests over territory, are part of our day-to-day life. We will explore a range of cases, from immigration policy and rhetoric in the US, to popular representations of geopolitics in film, to the politics of family planning in India. How do questions of love, friendship, family and youth identity tie into the international and national political stories that we see on the news? What does national identity have to do with our individual sense of self? We will also explore alternative ways that international politics have been studied, as feminist geopolitics or anti-geopolitics and questions of citizenship. Work for the seminar will involve original research on intersections of international politics and students’ daily life, as well as exploring representations of geopolitical issues in the media, film and fiction.

Freshwaters sustain myriad ecosystem services by providing drinking water, irrigation, inland fisheries, transportation, recreational opportunities, nutrient cycling, and biodiversity. At the same time, both water quality and quantity are impacted by land use, water abstraction, damming, contamination, and climate change. This seminar will focus (1) on understanding how these anthropogenic pressures affect freshwater ecosystems differently across ecoregions, and (2) how management, legislative, and social initiatives have adapted or developed solutions. We will focus mainly on the United States but consider case studies from around the world. Students should be prepared to read and discuss three materials per week. These reading materials will include a range of popular media including podcasts, newspaper articles, and book chapters, as well as scientific articles and overviews. We will also spend some time exploring and talking about streams accessible to the UNC campus. Class will culminate with research projects in which students get to explore a topic of their choice and presenting findings to their peers.

The course will critically analyze the migrant experience in North America and Europe with a focus on the experience of migrants from Mexico. Although the popular media often portrays migrants as agentless individuals making haphazard decisions, migration is a calculated decision that individuals, families, and groups make to improve their living conditions. We will explore the motivation of migrants, the nature of the migrant journey to their destination states, and their integration and adaptation into their new host societies. Through historical readings, selected works of literature, documentaries and my own firsthand lived experiences as a Latina immigrant, we will examine what motivates and drives their choices, what guides their actions, and what keeps them grounded during their perilous journey.

By the end of the course, students will:
• Develop a clear understanding of the theories driving migration and the various motivations (forced or voluntary) of individuals embarking in this journey.
• Become familiarized with the policies implemented by sending and receiving countries.
• Understand the reception and backlash migrants face.

This course deals with critical issues, in the broadest possible context, that dominated the twentieth century: the rise of fascism out of the carnage of World War One and the Bolshevik revolution to which the war and Czarist Russia’s involvement in it helped contribute. As the semester unfolds, drawing on a variety of historical and documentary films, and literature (memoirs, novels), we will take a comparative look at singular personalities like Lenin, Stalin and Hitler and examine the role played by such key figures in historical events of this magnitude. More towards the end of the semester, we glance briefly at the situation created in Western and Eastern Europe by the defeat of fascism and contemplate the origins and evolution of the cold war. We conclude with a consideration of the dissolution and democratization of Eastern European countries, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and, against the tragic background of the past, the recent reemergence of conflict between Russia and the “West.”

This course examines concepts and representations of underworlds in literature and the visual arts from the ancient world to modernity. Our journey will take us to the realms of the afterlife as well as into the abyss of the human psyche and the shady areas of criminal activities. We will explore how the desire to know the beyond has triggered people’s imagination, inspired literary and artistic traditions and influenced new forms of knowledge, moral values and social realities. Readings include short stories by E.A. Poe and Franz Kafka, and excerpts from works such as Plato’s Republic, the Bible, Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno, Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoirs, Don de Lillo’s Underworld, and Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. We will watch movies and TV shows such as Apocalypse Now and Breaking Bad. We will visit the museum and a theater performance. Through reading responses, papers, and an oral presentation students develop and practice skills of critical thinking, persuasive written and oral communication and they use creativity effectively.

This seminar examines two key themes in modern cultural and intellectual history: the importance of travel in the lives and cultural identities of American writers and the important role of European cities in the evolution of modern American cultural identities. We shall focus on a historical era in which American writers were especially drawn to Europe as an alternative to the social and cultural life in the United States; and we’ll discuss how the encounter with Europe influenced these writers as they defined their national identities as well as their views of politics, social relations, gender identities, literature, art and European cultural traditions. The seminar explores how travel has become one of the most influential personal experiences in modern times; and we’ll conclude the course with discussions of how travel remained important for American writers at the end of the twentieth century. Our overall goal is to analyze the connection between travel, writing, and personal identities. This is a class for people who like to read about personal experiences and are intrigued by foreign travel. The assigned texts include works by women and men such as Margaret Fuller, David Dorr, Mark Twain, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller James Baldwin, Elizabeth Spencer, and David Sedaris; and we’ll focus on works that convey how writers have interpreted American experiences in European cities such as Paris, London, Rome, and Athens.

“Class” has been the subject of more mystification, misunderstanding, and ill-informed political disagreement than perhaps any other social category. Especially in the American South, the notion of fundamental class differences may seem antithetical to the aspirations, or even claims, for a class-less society. Yet differences in occupation, income, wealth, the habits of everyday life, and definitions of the “good life” clearly remain. This course examines how class experiences and debates over the meaning of work have shaped the postbellum Southern United States. Technological innovation, the emergence of a consumer economy, and the evolution of popular culture all have made and remade class identities and influenced ideas about the South as a region as well as the racial, gender, and sexual identities of its people. Students in this course will develop new perspectives on the South in American history. They will also cultivate skills (oral and written), using history as a way of learning to analyze the past and inform the present.

This first-year seminar is an invitation to explore new ways of seeing the world around us. Our homes, our workplaces, our towns, our natural areas, our transportation networks—all are products of history, shaped by people, rich with meaning and full of surprises. The course explores the concept of cultural landscapes as a way of studying history and its legacies. Through a combination of field work, historical research and analysis, we will use maps, photographs, GIS resources and archival documents to understand how–and why–people in the past shaped our surroundings today.

In ghettos and hiding places during the Holocaust, European Jews and other victims of Nazism recorded their experiences in diaries and other chronicles. Efforts to preserve individual histories continued after the war as survivors wrote memoirs and gave oral testimonies beginning in the earliest postwar years. In this course, students will read diaries, memoirs and literature as well as listen to oral histories to understand the history of the Holocaust through life narratives and to explore tensions between history and memory.

French history has recently witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of microhistorical studies covering a range of phenomena from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. This course explores both the distinctive features of microhistorical approaches to the past and the attractions of microhistory for the practicing historian. Does the efflorescence of microhistory among French specialists signal the maturity of socio-cultural history as a branch of the discipline, or does it instead signal the field’s sad retreat from grand interpretation and synthesis? Does the new appeal of the small-scale express historians’ capitulation to post-modern attacks on “truth” or new commitments to finding the truth? What are the strengths and limitations inherent to the genre? Students will read a sampling of recent work (much of it featuring murder and mayhem) and also try their hand at writing and otherwise formulating their own microhistorical narratives.

From battles in the courtroom to disputes in the comments section, scientific authority and its role in policy and practice are under increasing scrutiny. In 2021, more than 20% of adults in the United States were estimated to have little or no confidence in scientists and medical doctors. While distrust of research and academic institutions may seem like a uniquely modern issue, it is rooted in a broader history of anti-intellectualism, the “generalized suspicion and mistrust of intellectuals and experts”. In fact, debates over the nature of truth and whose “truth” is considered fact have persisted since antiquity. This course will introduce students to different theories of knowledge (e.g., positivism, constructivism, critical theory) and examine how each impacts what types of questions are asked, how data are gathered and analyzed, and the ways by which evidence is appraised. We will apply these systems of knowledge production to ongoing debates about climate change and its impacts on health and well-being. Teachings will focus on the validity of the scientific process while critically reviewing its shortcomings, from embedded power imbalances to the proclamation of value-free research. Students will also engage in discussions and exercises focused on ways to improve upon the status quo, including identification of innovative scientific research methods that promote equity, sustainability, and inclusivity.

This seminar explores the history and culture of Jews in the Golden Age of medieval Spain, as well as how modern Hispanic cultures have interpreted and reimagined this historical past. We will explore how this fascination with Hispanic Jews overlaps with a variety of topics such as national identity, anti-Semitism, liberal democracy, colonialism, exile, and Holocaust memory, among others. Throughout this journey across time and space, we will think about the relevance of Jewish Spain, to our present by working with a diverse group of cultural products that includes poetry, paintings, film, memoirs, and novels. The texts we will study come from numerous Hispanic cultures: Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, and Cuba. No knowledge of Spanish or Jewish history is required.

Covers the basic mathematical skills needed for learning calculus. Topics are calculating and working with functions and data, introduction to trigonometry, parametric equations, and the conic sections. A student may not receive credit for this course after receiving credit for MATH 231.

Math 231 is designed to provide a detailed introduction to the fundamental ideas of calculus. It does not assume any prior calculus knowledge, but the student is expected to be proficient working with functions and their graphs as well as manipulating variable expressions and solving equations using algebra. Students may not receive credit for both MATH 231 and MATH 241.

This is the Honors section of Math 231. It offers a more demanding and deeper treatment than the regular sections as well as more involved applications. There will be more emphasis on understanding theory than in other sections, and students will be expected to understand and reproduce proofs of theorems and formulas. In addition, this section will cover extra topics. Applications will be more involved and will sometimes involve real data. Homework will be more challenging, with more emphasis on creative problem solving and less emphasis on drill. Students will be expected to complete a final project.

If you are planning on majoring or minoring in music: this course is designed to open up the pathways in music at Carolina for you. It’s an introduction to the different approaches to thinking about and doing music–whether you’re an active performer, an electronic music fiend, a budding music researcher, an entrepreneurial arts administrator in the making…or more! Our classroom meetings expose students to a range of ways to “think about music,” emphasizing the breadth of routes music and sound take through human lives. As a foundational component of the music major and minor, the course emphasizes a range of genres of music making and fosters curious listening. Sometimes we’ll be challenged to think differently about very familiar sounds, sometimes challenged to connect to music very different from that we feel as ours. Expect to leave the semester with a new sense of what music can be for you at Carolina.

This seminar is for students who are interested in how music is made, how sound is produced in instruments, and how those sounds have been used in music making from ancient times to the present day. Students will study the basics of physics and music: wave motion, resonance, the perception of sound, scales, harmony, and music theory. Students who have never studied physics or music theory are welcome to enroll; there are no prerequisites. We will conduct four laboratory exercises (called etudes) in which students will work in small groups to investigate the acoustics of string, woodwind and brass instruments. Keyboards and percussion will also be considered, and students can pursue their areas of special interest in a research paper. The final project for each student will be a public performance of an original musical composition for an ensemble of instruments that the students have constructed themselves out of found objects. This class is taught in person and does not accommodate remote learners. This class meets in various locations according to a schedule listed on the class Sakai site.

This seminar is about the protest songs and history of the First and Second Waves of American feminism, from the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 – where women declared their equality with men and called for women’s right to vote – to the passage of Roe v. Wade and the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. Issues for discussion include the intersectionality of women’s rights and civil rights movements.

Neuroscience is a field that seeks to understand the structure and function of the nervous system and the brain. In this course, we will explore fundamental principles of neuroscience, involving molecular, cellular, behavioral, and computational mechanisms of the brain.

Neuroscience is a field that seeks to understand the structure and function of the nervous system and the brain. In this course, we will explore fundamental principles of neuroscience, involving molecular, cellular, behavioral, and computational mechanisms of the brain.

Illicit and legal drugs make the user feel good but also promote the development of dependence and long-lasting changes in brain physiology. In this biological psychology seminar, we will take a multi-disciplinary approach to learn about the neurobiology of drug addiction with a focus on the following questions: How do we define addiction? What are the beneficial and harmful psychological effects of abused drugs? What has scientific research revealed about the neurobiology of the “brain on drugs”? Do most users become addicts? How is drug addiction treated? We will tackle these and other questions through classroom discussions/debates, lectures, movies, reading and writing assignments, and an optional tour of a residential substance abuse recovery program. In this communication intensive seminar, critical analysis of information about the neurobiology of addiction will be used to separate fact from fiction.

This class critically examines the idea of aspiration and transformation. Readings will be drawn from philosophy, fiction, and literary criticism. The first goal of this course is to allow you to reflect on the nature of transformation and aspiration. By the end of this course, you will have developed a clearer understanding of these ideas and have developed your own perspective on them. The second goal of this course is to introduce you to philosophical methods of thinking and writing that will allow you to approach the topic of this course critically and rigorously. Finally, I hope that this course will empower you to get the most out of your college education. By the end of this course, you will be able to articulate a vision of your educational trajectory that aligns with your current values and with those of who you want to become.

This course explores both old and new questions regarding death. It will examine the presuppositions and cogency of the classical religious-philosophical conception of death.

The reasoning by which Galileo and his contemporaries defended the Copernican model of the solar system (the “heliocentric” model – that is, with the Earth orbiting the Sun rather than the Sun orbiting the Earth) can puzzle us even today. Here are a few of the questions that we could ask about the reasoning given by Copernicus, Galileo, and their contemporaries. Did Copernicus’s arguments support the heliocentric model strongly enough to justify believing it true? Or was it unjustified until Galileo amassed telescopic evidence for it? Or was it unjustified until even later – when Newtonian physics was developed? Or did it remain unjustified until even later – when various mechanical and optical discoveries were made in the nineteenth century? Was the Catholic Church justified at the time of Galileo in regarding Copernicus’s theory as just one among many fairly successful techniques for predicting the night sky’s appearance? Did Galileo bring his sentence (at his famous – and notorious – trial) on himself? Could Galileo argue persuasively for his telescope’s reliability? Could Galileo use mere “thought-experiments” (as opposed to actual experiments) to defend Copernicanism? In this course, we will grapple with these and related questions in order to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the logic by which scientific theories in general are tested and, ultimately, justified. We will also try to use this historical episode to understand better how political, social, and cultural factors can influence the reception of a scientific theory – even today! We will learn some of the means by which the biases and presuppositions introduced by these factors were overcome (eventually) in the Copernican Revolution, and we will apply some of these lessons to current science. At various points during our discussions, each student will submit in written form his or her own best reconstructions of some of the arguments that were given for or against the Copernican model. In other words, each student will offer his or her best advice regarding how a given scientist might have argued for or against Copernicanism, anticipating possible objections and responses. Students will occasionally form groups to examine and to critique one another’s proposals, with each group finally presenting its best thoughts orally to the rest of the class for further discussion. Students will, in effect, be putting Galileo on trial once again – not for heresy or for disobeying authority, but for having convincing or for having insufficient evidence for his Copernicanism. In all of these ways, students will learn how to appreciate sympathetically the competing astronomical theories from the perspective of the 16th and 17th centuries, when the truth was in some doubt. Along the way, students will wrestle with some of the puzzles and apparent paradoxes arising even from today’s best philosophical accounts of the logic of theory testing in science. No previous background in science will be assumed. Students will not need to purchase any books.

Mechanics of particles and rigid bodies. Newton’s laws; mechanical and potential energy; mechanical conservation laws; frame-dependence of physical laws; Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Students may not receive credit for PHYS 118 in addition to PHYS 104, 114, or 116.

Mechanics of particles and rigid bodies. Newton’s laws; mechanical and potential energy; mechanical conservation laws; frame-dependence of physical laws; Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Students may not receive credit for PHYS 118 in addition to PHYS 104, 114, or 116.

This seminar is for students who are interested in how music is made, how sound is produced in instruments, and how those sounds have been used in music making from ancient times to the present day. Students will study the basics of physics and music: wave motion, resonance, the perception of sound, scales, harmony, and music theory. Students who have never studied physics or music theory are welcome to enroll; there are no prerequisites. We will conduct four laboratory exercises (called etudes) in which students will work in small groups to investigate the acoustics of string, woodwind and brass instruments. Keyboards and percussion will also be considered, and students can pursue their areas of special interest in a research paper. The final project for each student will be a public performance of an original musical composition for an ensemble of instruments that the students have constructed themselves out of found objects. This class is taught in person and does not accommodate remote learners. This class meets in various locations according to a schedule listed on the class Sakai site.

Mechatronics is a multidisciplinary synergy of STEM fields, specifically physics, engineering, electronics, and computer science. All students, regardless of their educational goals, will achieve critical introductory skills in numerical reasoning and analysis, model-building and prototyping, computer programming and electronics, and will demonstrate proficiency and knowledge about topics that increasingly impact society. The course focuses on four areas: Numeracy and Proportional Reasoning, Rapid Prototyping and Manufacturing, Computer Technology (Programming and Electronics), and Current and Future technologies (aka, shall we welcome our new mechatronic overlords – robotics, AI, quantum computing, with a new emphasis on disruptive technologies such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion). The course goals are to prepare students for academic success at UNC, to help science students be more capable scientists, and to help ALL students be stronger and better-informed citizens of the world.

This course is designed to introduce students to debates about the impact of policies on inequalities in the United States. We will begin the class by reviewing work on inequalities more broadly. At the beginning of the semester, we will touch on topics like Black Lives Matter, historical oppression, systemic racism, and Whiteness. From there, we will move to investigate the use of education policy as a tool to maintain inequalities within the United States. We will tackle areas such as Indian boarding schools, the desegregation of schools, academic tracking, criminalization of Black and Brown students, and achievement testing.

In this class, students will review relevant research, policies, court cases, and projects that aim to either maintain or eliminate inequality. Students will also be expected to engage in thought-provoking conversations around disparities and will be encouraged to think critically about challenging topics. Additionally, students will work individually and in small groups on a series of assignments over the semester. Prerequisites are not required for this introductory course.

Global health policy impacts the health and well being of individuals and peoples throughout the world. Many determinants of health operate at a global level, and many national policies, social practices, and individual health behaviors are structured by global forces. Concern for the spread of infectious diseases, increasing rates of chronic diseases and the effectiveness of health systems to provide quality care are among the daunting challenges to health policy makers.
With profound social, political and economic changes rapidly challenging global health, the aim of this course in Global Health Policy is to provide students with a variety of opportunities to understand the epidemiologic trends in world health, the institutions of global health governance, and the effects of globalization on global and national health policy.
This course provides an introduction to the relationship between international relations, global health policy and public health outcomes. The focus of this course will be on public policy approaches to global health, employing interdisciplinary methodologies to understand selected public health policies, programs, and interventions. Providing a foundation for responding to global health harms, this course will teach students how to apply policy analysis to a wide range of critical issues in global health determinants, interventions, and impacts.

This seminar will examine the role of schools and other institutions play in determining life chances, which educational interventions work well for economically and academically disadvantaged students, and what to do when institutions cease to work well. Students will learn how to analyze complex educational public policy problems while exploring questions of effectiveness, inequality, resource management, and politics.

This course focuses on education in the multicultural society of the United States. Diversity has been at the center of the American educational story, as society has continued to struggle with competing goals of assimilation and diversity, opportunity, and competition. The American dream that promises a better life through education has played out unevenly for different groups. This course aims to help students develop new understandings of the role and nature of schools and teaching, as well as to construct alternative perspectives on and approaches to examining educational issues. It will study inequality in public education in a way that is place-based, featuring extended opportunities for engaged learning in and around UNC.

If you eat, you are impacted by federal, state, and local food policies. These policies are, in turn, shaped by values. Over the course of the semester, we examine the values that underpin different approaches to food policy, including food labeling, nutrition assistance, agricultural subsidies, and responses to food deserts.

Why do Americans love democracy, but hate politics? Why are there only two political parties? Why do voters hate, yet respond to negative campaigning? This course will introduce students to politics in the United States, addressing these and many more questions about how American democracy works.

Over the past forty years, Latin America has experienced the most prolonged and extensive period of democratic politics in its history. State power today is accessed through reasonably competitive and fair elections in many countries in the region, in contrast to past patterns of openly authoritarian rule. This democratic shift, though, has often been challenged by serious problems with political representation and the effective inclusion of citizens, and in some cases with more serious setbacks. The way power is practiced by those in power reflects historical continuities and new forms of corruption or other types of abuses of state resources, as well as various forms of populism. With important variations across the region, countries have struggled to respond effectively to the Covid-19 pandemic, and more broadly to provide citizen security, economic development and social inclusion.
In this course, we will explore these issues of democratic governance through a combination of readings, videos, discussion, occasional short lectures, and team-based analyses of selected countries. The course has no pre-requisites and assumes no prior knowledge of Latin America.

This seminar focuses on explaining and understanding social movements and the collective political behaviors that they promote (e.g. demonstrations, protests, violence, and eco-terrorism). Our theoretical focus will be interdisciplinary, drawing on research in political behavior, social psychology, sociology, political theory, and the law. We will discuss when and why collective action occurs, who participates, what forms it takes, and how governments respond. Substantively, we will study a variety of movements including: Black Lives Matter, #MeToo movement, the Environmental movement, the White Nationalist movement, COVID protests, and the January 6th Capitol protest. We will use a variety of approaches and resources: class discussions, films, online forum discussions, and texts. Grades will be based on class participation, forum participation, a writing project, and several group papers.

This course examines the presidency of Barack Obama, the first African American to serve in the nation’s highest office. The course is broken down into four parts. The first part studies Shirley Chisholm and Jesse Jackson, two black people who ran for President prior to Obama. The second part examines Obama prior to running for office, reading a book that he authored. The third part of the class examines Obama’s presidency, both how he reached office and a look back at what he achieved while in office. The last part of the class considers American politics post-Obama, with a particular focus on race/ethnicity.

The movement of people across international borders is one of the most politically controversial issues in the world today. This class focuses on two different types of global migrants, immigrants and refugees, and explores why these two groups move out of their countries and how they are treated by receiving countries. Immigrants and refugees have traditionally been thought of as politically, legally and ethically different from each other and this class explores these differences, but it also explores the many ways that they are similar. Finally, the class explores a third type of global migrant that politicians and policy makers frequently promote, guest workers, and considers to what extent guest worker policies can effectively address the challenges and opportunities posed by the two other migrant groups. This class encourages students from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives to enroll because it benefits significantly from including such diversity.

As adults we constantly make judgments about other people’s beliefs, desires, goals, knowledge, and intentions from evidence like eye gaze and inferences from their words and actions. These judgments together can be called mindreading, or theory of mind (where “theory” refers to the theory someone might hold about another’s mental state, not a scientific theory). This information is known to guide some aspects of language use — for example, you wouldn’t ask someone to hand you “that book” if they don’t know it exists. But sometimes you might ignore what someone else does or does not know – for instance asking someone for “the red book” when that person is sitting in front of two red books. This course examines how children, adults, and individuals with autism infer other people’s mental states, and how they use it to guide decisions during speaking and understanding. A major focus of this course is on research methods, and how to investigate questions of mental state and language processing empirically. The course culminates in students conducting an original research project and reporting it in both spoken and written formats.

This first-year seminar will reflect upon the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, exploring how the terrorist attacks occurred and why the U.S. intelligence community and policymakers failed to anticipate and prevent them as well as the subsequent effects on the United States, the Middle East, and the world. The instructor, a former intelligence analyst, will lead students in discussions and in-class exercises to encourage critical analysis of the implications of terrorism, particularly on United States national security. A variety of assignments will require students to assess the causes and results of American national security decisions and alternative decisions that might have been made, supported with research and evidence.

The Dead Sea Scrolls have been described as the most important archaeological discovery of the 20th century. The first scrolls were discovered in 1947, in a cave near the site of Qumran by the Dead Sea. Eventually the remains of over 900 scrolls were found in 11 caves around Qumran. The scrolls date to the time of Jesus and include the earliest preserved copies of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). They were deposited in the caves by members of a Jewish sect called the Essenes who lived at Qumran. In this seminar, students explore the meaning and significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls – and learn about broader issues such as how canons of sacred scripture developed among Jews and Christians – through classroom discussions, thought papers, and creative assignments.

Beliefs about what a human being is—and isn’t—lie at the root of all religious traditions and also of secular ideologies. This course explores the ways that different religious and cultural communities have conceptualized human nature, and how those understandings are reflected in diverse forms of personal identity and ways of organizing public life. Readings will include historic and contemporary texts, and case studies from places including India, Nepal, and the USA. We will structure our inquiries around three thematic questions: (1) How do religious beliefs and practices shape the way that individuals and societies understand what it is to be human? (2) How do these beliefs manifest in seemingly unrelated areas of life such as personal aspirations, gender ideals, social structures, political institutions, and economic ideologies? (3) How do we know what we know about these things—i.e., what theories and methods do scholars use to understand other societies and also their own? This course also involves an experiential component that allows students to undertake original research.

This seminar will examine how historians have reconstructed the life, teachings and death of the historical Jesus. We will look at the Gospels of the New Testament, as well as references to Jesus in other writings (Roman and Jewish sources, as well as Gospels that did not make it into the New Testament). In addition, we will explore how Jesus has been portrayed in modern film, including such Biblical “epics” as The Greatest Story Ever Told, such “period pieces” as Jesus Christ Superstar, such brilliant retellings as Jesus of Montreal and such controversial films as The Last Temptation of Christ and The Passion of the Christ. The ultimate goals of the seminar are to see what we can say about the historical man Jesus himself and how Jesus came to be portrayed in both ancient sources and modern imagination.

This course explores the messianic idea in America as well as the messianic movements that have been active in the nation’s history and their interaction with American society and culture.

An introduction to the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. We will look at the biblical text as modern interpreters and through the eyes of the Bible’s earliest Jewish and Christian interpreters with special attention to changing assumptions about how to read the Bible and the nature of Scripture itself.

This seminar focuses on the literary production of Latinos living in the U.S. Using a variety of materials (essays, documentaries, films, music) and English-language texts (novels, short stories, plays, poetry) we will examine works by Chicano, Peruvian-American, Nuyorican, Central-American-American, Dominican, and Cuban-American writers. Topics to be discussed include: Latino or Hispanic? What’s in a Name?; The politics of Bilingualism; The search for Home in Migrant, Rural, and Urban Environments; The Many Faces of Machismo; Religion and Spirituality in Latino Communities; Forms of Prejudice and Discrimination; Music as a Cultural Bridge. All readings will be in English, though knowledge of Spanish is desirable.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, numerous Iberian intellectuals promoted the idea that Portugal and Spain could combine efforts to overcome the crises that plagued the Peninsula. The Iberian intelligentsia came up with theories whose aim was to bring Portugal, Spain, and their ex-colonies closer together. In this course, students will become familiar with the contemporary histories of Portugal and Spain and with Iberian literature. Students will study culture from perspectives that may inspire them to reflect upon concepts such as decadence and identity. Furthermore, we will discuss the connections between the end of the Iberian colonial adventure in America and the crises that led the elites of both countries to meditate on the necessity of rediscovering new lifestyles. We will address the following questions: Why is it utopian to think that Portugal and Spain could become a single country? What does it mean to be Portuguese, Spanish, and European?

This course provides an introduction to the study of language (the science of Linguistics) through an exploration of how humor uses structural and discourse properties of human language for comedic effect. Students will examine how different features of spoken and written language, as well as contextualized communication are put to the service of jokes, comedy skits, cartoons, and other kinds of wordplay. We will use both instructor-contributed and student contributed clips, anecdotes, jokes, tiktoks, etc., in order to illuminate why we find them funny (or not!), what can we learn about language from our reactions (or lack thereof!), and just plain have fun in the process.

Universities are experiencing significant change and are the focus of intense debates. Some see college as an important equalizer that helps students reach their full potential and live more rewarding lives. Others see colleges as reinforcing inequalities and favoring students who are already privileged. Meanwhile, significant changes are underway include rising costs, greater competition, growing diversity, new technologies, and calls for greater accountability and oversight. We will read and reflect broadly on college and how higher education is changing, and we will conduct sociological research on three major themes. First, we will consider the sorting process – what factors shape who goes to college and where they go to college. Second, we will examine the social dimension – how the college experience shapes learning, identities, and relationships. Third, we will focus on the institutional context – how college is shaped by public policy, the economy, the legal system, and popular culture.

This course teaches critical concepts and skills in computer programming and statistical inference, in conjunction with hands-on analysis of real-world datasets, including economic data, document collections, geographical data, and social networks. It delves into social issues surrounding data analysis such as privacy and design.

Our day to day lives are filled with selfies and social media images. This course asks students to re-examine these images through feminist analysis. Students will make self-portraits that reflect the multiple and changing aspects of their identity and contemporary society. Thru role-playing, performance, and documentation we work to understand the construction of identity and the ways in which photography can help us control our own narratives.

We begin the semester with a close look at the ethics and issues of representation throughout the history of photography. Using visual analysis, we explore how photographers have historically used assumed identities and theatrical aspects of photography to push the boundaries of their realities and challenge society’s stereotypes. Students will complete the semester with a stronger set of visual literacy skills and a better understanding of how our identities are shaped by society and how we shape our identities and society in return.

There are no specific camera requirements. Phone cameras are the perfect tool for this course.

In Christianity and Islam, bodies populate the afterlife. What those bodies look like, how they act, what they feel, and who they engage with are subjects of contentious and long-standing debates. The various answers offered in these debates deeply affect Christian and Muslim responses to the body, sexuality, race, and gender in this life. This course examines how these two religious traditions’ diversity of histories and ideas construct theories of identity. In each tradition, we will look at attempts to dictate a wide variety of sexual norms and at the creativity followers have employed in interpreting such regulations. We examine the many ways that Muslims and Christians have used sexual practices, language, and images to enhance their devotion and pose questions about living out religion. This means analyzing how the afterlife affects earthly life, including family structures, health care debates, legal choices, questions of feminist agency, and imagery of war.