This class will explore the meanings of race and ethnicity through a transnational perspective, examining how racial and ethnic identities are constructed, negotiated, and contested across different national and cultural contexts, with a focus on the Americas, particularly Latin America.

This seminar examines the ways that healthcare access and health itself are shaped by social, racial, and economic inequalities in our society and others. The geographic focus of this course is Africa and the United States, but case studies from the Caribbean and other African diasporic communities will be included. Drawing on research in medical anthropology, sociology, public health, and history we will gain an understanding of the political, economic, and social factors that create health inequalities. Topics include gender inequality and HIV/AIDS in Africa; race and chronic disease in the U.S.; inequality and the practice of global health; and how racial difference has historically been used to justify and explain health disparities. Students will gain experience with ethnographic research methods, and work on small qualitative research projects investigating health inequality in their own communities.

What does it mean to truly read? What are “texts” and how do we read them closely, carefully, critically? How does reading separate us from the machines that seek to streamline our learning and work at best, or displace us at worst? And, with the swift changes in technology exemplified by the rise of artificial intelligence, how do we read to learn and positively inform what we know? Reading Beyond the Page is a first-year seminar designed to teach students how to read critically for general knowledge across different forms of media. Through close reading, discussion, and collaborative projects, students will explore how texts shape our collective understanding. By the end of the course, students will not only have honed their ability to read critically across multiple genres but will also have developed a more nuanced understanding of how knowledge is constructed, communicated, and contested in the world around them.

This course examines constructions of gender and individual and collective responses to developing systems of inequality in the Atlantic world shaped by sex, race, and class. Students analyze and compare how African, European, and American societies constructed the category of “woman” and the constraints and liberties these constructions imposed.

Course participants document and examine how concepts of race and processes of racialization impacted experience for African and African descent women throughout the Atlantic World. Course readings survey societies from the early modern period to the twentieth century focusing on power, kinship, labor, and sexuality in daily life. The course highlights women’s cultures of resistance to interlocking systems of oppression in West and West Central Africa, the Caribbean, and North and South America. Students will engage travel writing, visual art, and historic Afro-Atlantic spiritual traditions as critical source materials.

This course explores the African American experience in education, from the days of slavery to the present. All levels of education, from elementary to university will receive consideration, though high school and college will get particular attention. Course topics will range widely, from self-education in the 19th century to the crisis at Little Rock’s Central High in the 1950s to African American education at UNC across the years, particularly as revealed in the built environment of the university.

In this course, students will explore American culture through a focus on the human body. While maintaining an eye on the material, flesh-and-blood body, we will also consider it as a “text” that carries meanings about (dis)ability, gender, race, nationality, and other themes. We will do so by exploring various representations, from memoirs to audio/visual culture; students will ultimately conduct a project in which they explore and develop their own bodily practices. Ultimately, we aim to understand how material bodies are deeply intertwined with broad social and political issues.

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.

Blackness and Racialization is an introduction to the history, social construction, cultural production, and lived experience of race. The course focuses on Blackness in the United States and Jamaica (for comparison), though it necessarily addresses other race formations such as Whiteness and Brownness. The course approaches racialization from three angles: historical; social; and personal. It utilizes historical, theoretical, ethnographic, and popular culture productions to explain the effects, uses, durability, and pliability of racial formations.
Some questions that the course will address include:
• What does the social construction of race mean in practice? How is race socially constructed?
• How do racial categories and identities develop, persist, and change?
• How does race work at various “levels,” such as the level of the individual, collectivity, and history?
• What are the origins of various racial stereotypes?
• Why do people have very different understandings of race, some embracing race, some rejecting race, and some claiming to not understand race at all?

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.

We learn about the world as we move through it. In moving, we change the world around us and we are transformed by our experiences. However, we are not free to move wherever we wish. We live with boundaries, some only dimly understood. And yet, sometimes we come together to challenge these boundaries and struggle to create something new.

In this class, students will learn how anthropologists create research projects to explore these questions. While our focus will be on cultural anthropology, students will be exposed to the ways in which artists, historians, geographers, novelists, philosophers, outdoor athletes, soldiers, and activists approach similar problems.

Beyond readings and small-group discussions, students will step out of the classroom to design and carry out short research projects. They will share their result in journals entries and critical essays, and I will mentor each student as they develop their ideas.

Disability is a part of life: we all get sick, age, and require care. This course examines debates on disability from a perspective of cultural and medical anthropology. We focus on the diversity and richness of disability worlds, learning how different societies make sense of disability and how living with disability leads to a proliferation of identities and cultures. This course covers a wide range of topics, from the history of disability to cross-cultural approaches to mental health to the intersections of disability with gender and sexuality to caregiving. Course material illustrates that disability is a collective project that encourages individuals and communities to engage in creative modes of thinking and being in a world that moves beyond the binary of “normal” and “abnormal.” This course shows that studying disability unveils new ways to see the world and helps us to better understand what it means to be human.

Dogs are humanity’s oldest companions. While researchers dispute how, where, and when our mutual involvement arose, it has affected both species. This class will use the tools of sociocultural anthropology—its concepts, types of evidence, and forms of analysis—to examine human-canine relations. While our main experience of dogs is as pets (and kin), most dogs around the world have only a loose affiliation with humans, and their lives will be a major focus. We also will chew over the services dogs perform for humans, both old (hunting, herding, guarding), and new (de-mining, assisting). We will learn about the rise and spread of our own dog-keeping practices, before exploring changes in the role of dogs in American households and their consequences. Throughout, we will ponder what it might mean to experience the world from “the dog’s point of view” (or nose!)

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.

Convergence research focuses on addressing complex problems in science, engineering, and society. Today’s and tomorrow’s grand challenges will not be solved by one discipline, but by the integration of knowledge, methods, and expertise from across various disciplines.

This first-year seminar will introduce students to the new scientific language of convergence research. Through surveying the grand challenges of engineering, we will learn how through pursuing a common research challenge, experts from various fields intermix their knowledge, theories, methods, data, and research communities, enabling new discoveries to emerge. Students will participate in various in-class activities, group discussion and problem-solving coaching to enhance understanding of how chemistry, physics, materials science, biology, math, and computer sciences are applied to engineering.

Seminar will host guest lecturers with expertise on a particular topic, allowing the students to gain a true interdisciplinary view of the subject, instead of an isolated view of each.

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?

Class examines how to advance and sustain artistic production, focusing not only on being a successful artist, but also on the importance of creativity and hard work in any successful venture.

This class will investigate the idea of personal histories in visual art. As a studio class, the course will be organized around several art making projects. As a catalyst to our own art making, we will explore the idea of personal history and memory through readings, as well as looking at contemporary artists whose work functions in an autobiographical framework.

This course is designed for Equity in Teaching. During this course we will be implementing an innovative and interactive learning method—Collaborative Online International Learning, or COIL. During this course we will engage in class discussions and lectures and a final presentation assignment with Dr. Amir Hossein Vafa and students from the Shiraz University in Iran for approximately five class session (asynchronous and synchronous options available). These activities will enhance your learning of the course content, and your participation in the COIL activities is required. COIL activities will provide you with exposure to new cultural contexts, knowledge, and perspectives on the course material. By participating in the COIL activities, you will develop and enhance cross-cultural communication skills and gain experience working in multicultural teams. As part of your grade and COIL activities, in groups with Iranian students, you will sketch, design, and create a war-related artifact using the campus MakerSpace (BeAM) facilities.

The biological diversity we see on Earth today encompasses a variety of genetic, species, and ecosystem level variation. This course will focus on the biological principles that push biologists to understand what produces and sustains the biodiversity of life on Earth. This class will address key questions about how we identify and measure biological diversity, how it changes over time, and why biological diversity matters as our planet continues to change.

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.

Nuclear chemistry is a broad field which we all are affected by almost daily in some way, shape or form. In this course we’ll explore many aspects of nuclear chemistry in an attempt to better understand the historical development, the present technology and the future of the field. A general chemistry background in atomic history and theory will first be reviewed, followed by a survey of the applications and research topics of nuclear chemistry today. Many topics discussed in the course are surrounded by controversy. In each of these cases, students will research and discuss the various sides of each argument to better understand the topics. Field trips, guest speakers, and student research presentations will make up an integral part of the course.

Additional Information
Students should have credit for CHEM 101 before enrolling in this course.

Paying attention to the world around us is foundational to our understanding of the people, behaviors, environments, and living species that co-exist alongside us. Attention fuels our curiosity, deepens our empathy, and invites us to step outside of ourselves. Re-presenting what we pay attention to is the art and practice of documentary. At its essence, documentary is a “document” of what we observe and what we record. In this course, we will use video/sound, photography, and creative writing to document and then re-present what we are paying attention to. Students will strengthen their attention-paying capacities, develop research skills, and learn how to refine their chosen methods of documentation. Class discussion, readings, film screenings, creative assignments, site visits, and in-class exercises will provide an opportunity to experiment, ask questions, and collaborate with peers. The course will culminate in a final documentary project done in small groups on student-chosen and researched topics.

The globalization of food systems is both a hotly contested subject and a central part of contemporary life. This course provides an applied introduction to key debates by adopting a critical organizational communication lens on our globalized food system. Drawing on readings, popular media texts, discussions, and experiential activities, we will explore food system labor practices, the role of multinational companies and global commodity chains, the status of hunger and food deserts, the role of food marketing and consumption practices, and the growth of local and sustainable movements devoted to food justice. Throughout, we investigate how our global food system is shaped by different types of organizations operating within particular locales, such as North Carolina, USA.

This is an APPLES-designated service-learning course that requires service hours. In addition to experiential field activities and visits, our course is organized around group-based engaged research projects. Your success will depend upon your ability to work independently and practice collective leadership. This project will increase your research and writing skills, sharpen your leadership and collaborative skills, and provide you with applied insight into the themes of the course.

This seminar helps students learn to think more critically, speak more persuasively, and argue more effectively by focusing on practical skill development in reasoning and debate. Students at Carolina learn to sharpen their thinking, speaking, and argument skills in the course of their normal classwork, but this happens more or less indirectly. This seminar will focus directly on improving each of these skills. Students will learn to think more critically by reflecting on the work of philosophers who deal with reasoning and informal logic, to speak with conviction and clarity through hands-on learning about the tradition of rhetoric, and to argue more effectively by debating the pressing issues of our day. The skills that we hone in on in this course will help students become more effective in the classroom, in their chosen vocation, and as citizens in an increasingly complex global public sphere.

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 goal of this seminar is to get you doing theatre, to spark your creativity and to connect you with the deeper lessons of this dynamic art form. You will act. You will write. You will work with others. It will not always be easy, but if you are willing to stretch yourself, you should have a good time. Each lesson is organized around a principle or virtue inherent in the practice of the art. Participants study a quotation or two that relate to that principle and then engage in drama exercises that spring from that principle. By the end of the course, you will have gained skills to make you comfortable to write, stage and perform your own 10-minute plays. Not just for those interested in pursuing theatre, this seminar will give you a more holistic understanding of essential principles in the practice of your life.

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.

This seminar examines our national drama from its colonial origins to the present. Participants read plays and criticism, screen videos, engage in critical writing, and consider performance as related means of exploring the visions and revisions constituting American dramatic history. We will approach American drama as both a literary and commercial art form, and look to its history to provide a context for current American theater practice. Readings are chosen for their intrinsic merit and historical importance, but also for their treatment of key issues and events in American life. Our focus throughout will be on the forces that shaped the American drama as well as, in turn, that drama’s ability to shed light on the national experience.

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.

Introduction to Economics (Economics 101H) is the Honors section of the introductory course in Economics for undergraduates. The Honors section covers the same material as the large enrollment version but does so in more depth. This is an introductory course in both microeconomics and macroeconomics. In this one-semester course students are introduced to fundamental issues in economics including competition, scarcity, opportunity cost, resource allocation, unemployment, ination, and the determination of prices. This course is the gateway course for the major of Economics; if you wish to major in Economics, you must have at least a C in this course.

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 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.

We will expand our horizons in biology by learning about some of the most extreme microorganisms on the planet – microorganisms that thrive without oxygen in deep marine sediments and in the Earth’s crust, under high temperatures in boiling hot springs or in superheated deep-sea water under high pressure, and under chemical stress factors (high sulfide and heavy metal concentrations) that were once thought to be incompatible with life. Numerous extremophilic (extreme-loving) microorganisms of different metabolic types have been isolated in the laboratory as pure cultures; others have been observed in Nature but have so far resisted cultivation. Extremophiles provide opportunities to study the unusual and strange biochemistry that allows them to thrive in their unique habitats; they are also valuable model systems for potential life on other planets. We will get to know the unusual habitats where extremophiles are found, for example hot springs and volcanic areas on land (Yellowstone) and in the ocean (hydrothermal vents), and we will explore the earliest history of extremophiles as some of the most ancient microorganisms on Earth.

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 (typically, 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

Human-environment interactions are examined through analytical methods from the social sciences, humanities, and sciences. The focus is on the role of social, political, and economic factors in controlling interactions between society and the environment in historical and cultural contexts. Three lecture hours and one recitation hour a week.

Climate change and natural disasters are not purely environmental issues: they are fundamentally tied to political and economic activities deeply rooted in cultural understandings of the relationship between humans and nature. In this class, we will explore the cultural side of ecological problems by considering how ideologies, ethics, and art shape the ways humans interact with plants, animals, and landscapes. In doing so, we will unpack a foundational dichotomy of our time—are humans separate from the natural world, or part of it? By consulting artists, poets, writers, and thinkers, students will untangle this nature-culture relationship, tapping into key existential questions about what it means to be humans who not only live in this world, but who seek to solve the environmental problems that they have caused or exacerbated. The class will include reading discussions, podcasts, projects, and—as much as possible—time spent outdoors in our campus environment.

In this first-year seminar, we will explore science fiction as a history of the future. What we call “science fiction”—fiction that imagines a future shaped by changes in science or technology–has been around for a while, at least since Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516. Since this beginning, writers have been using the genre to ask two large questions: 1] where are we, as a society, now? As we will see, science fiction can be a shrewd instrument of social critique. And 2] what will happen next? These invented futures, whether good (“utopian”) or bad (“dystopian”) have a lot to tell us how such writers understood themselves and their place in history. But there’s a twist: the future they conceive is the one we live in! Or… do we? Did they get it right? Or wrong? Why? In this seminar, we’ll consider such questions across a range of science fiction of several types: books (Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination [1956], William Gibson’s Neuromancer [1984], and Martha Wells’ recent series The Murderbot Diaries [2017-], among others) and films (Forbidden Planet [1956], 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968], and Blade Runner (1982 and 2017, among others), with excursions into other media.

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.

In this seminar we will embark on a world tour of modernist cities across the Global North and the Global South including London, Dublin, Paris, Kolkata, Chicago, and New York. We will read fiction and poetry and watch films by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Sam Selvon, and Satyajit Ray, among others. Modernism has been historically celebrated as an art of the cities. However, this claim has also been contested. In this seminar we will ask the following questions: how does modernism depict the theme of alienation and mental life in the city? How does modernist literature transgress conventions of gender and sexuality within the cityspace? Is the modernist city welcoming to everyone or are there individuals/communities who remain marginalized? What is distinctive about the architecture and urban planning of the modernist city and how does it relate to ideas of environmental sustainability? The course will conclude with students creating a digital storymap on a city of their choice.

In this course, we will study all of Jane Austen’s six major novels. In addition, we study one film adaptation of each novel to determine what aspects of Austen’s work translates into the film medium and what aspects are harder to capture in a cinematic format. Students will gain a thorough knowledge of Austen’s innovations in narrative and place in literary history. After receiving in-class instruction on filming, students may create their own adaptation of a scene from one of Austen’s novels as a final research project.

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

Brain Matters: The Human Computer will explore one of the greatest anatomical and physiological mysteries known to us: the brain. The brain contains over 100 billion neurons allowing the human brain to serve as the hub for everything we do, say, or feel. It is by far the most complex and sophisticated ‘computer’ in existence. Together, we will explore this vast unknown. We will discuss and explore topics ranging from anatomy, neurodevelopment, decision-making, maturation, disease, and other topics related to our cerebral computers. The seminar will draw from faculty expertise across campus and may use examples from research and mass media to complement the teaching materials in the seminar. You will have opportunities to work together, present your work, submit article critiques, and participate in class discussion on these topics. The seminar is intended for all first-year students—regardless of intended major—interested in neuroscience.

This course is an introduction to historical and contemporary ideas about practices and meanings of development through the perspective of geography. Students will explore the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of struggles over inequality. They will also consider how development and inequality become constructed and institutionalized throughout history, the radical and not-so-radical ways that individuals, governments, and organizations have sought to change inequality, and the ways that geographical concepts can improve our thinking about these puzzles. SPECIAL FOR SPRING 2025: We will be collaborating with a local arts organization, Culture Mill, and a local community group on a new performance titled ‘Bloc’, in order to understand local landscapes of inequality and also of community in Chapel Hill.

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, their integration and adaptation into their new host societies and the backlash endured. Through historical readings and selected works of literature we will explore what motivates and drives their choices, what guides their actions and what keeps them focus and grounded during their perilous journey. We will also discuss the significant role that the U.S and European governments have in influencing an individuals’ decisions to migrate.

This seminar offers first-year students an introduction to the German-Jewish experience and the history of anti-semitism in Germany, from early modernity to the present day. Students in this seminar will learn to analyze a variety of texts (both literary and philosophical), musical works, and films in relation to the history of Jews in German-speaking countries, and will be able to apply their knowledge to their analysis of present-day manifestations of antisemitism and xenophobia in Germany. The course has no requisites and presumes no prior knowledge of the subject matter.

Before Timothy McVeigh, Taliban, Al-Qaeda and ISIS/ISIL, Russia provided the world with visual imagery and vocabulary to refer to terror perpetrated in the name of ostensibly lofty goals and ideals. This course offers you an opportunity to acquaint yourself with such key concepts as anarchism, nihilism and “Red Terror” as well as the minds responsible for their invention and application. As we delve into the substance of these ideas and attempt to understand the reasons for their enduring relevance, we will examine the different ways in which leading Russian intellectuals, including Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Pyotr Kropotkin and others, envisaged their coming to fruition. In addition to a selection of literary texts and political manifestoes composed by visionaries of both conservative and libertarian persuasions, we will examine witness accounts of those at the receiving end of many progressive initiatives.

This course explores the problem of revolutionary upheaval in Latin American history, from the revolutionary wars of the independence era (1810-1825) to revolutionary episodes of the 20th century.

Despite its centrality for the lives and the livelihoods of people in the Middle East, water has seldom been examined in its own right as a contributing factor to its history. This new First Year Seminar will explore the many ways in which water has shaped the history of the region, and the effects it currently has on life in the Middle East.

Along the Mediterranean and Aegean coasts as well as the Red Sea and Arab/Persian Gulf, seafaring and fishing played important roles in the economy; in the Gulf, pearl-diving became an important local industry as well. Agricultural innovations allowed permanent settlement in areas with little rainfall. Rivers and seas were essential for transportation, connecting populations of far-flung parts of the Middle East with each other, facilitating commerce and pilgrimage. The availability of clean water has become an increasing problem as industrialization and consumerism soil beaches and sully the region’s drinking supplies. Water and conflict have been indivisible in the region, since water is one of the crucial and rare resources in the Middle East. Some have argued, for example, that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians can only be resolved by taking water resources into account; others have pointed to recent drought in Syria as a major factor contributing to the uprising that began in 2011. This course will focus in turn on the historical, cultural, and contemporary issues surrounding the presence and absence of water in the Middle East.

In this course, we will analyze the re-presentation of historical events and movements of the twentieth century in a number of landmark films. We will ask how a film can help us better understand resistance in a past situation, and, through their reactions to individual films, audiences’ relations, in particular times and places. to these representations of the past. In this class, students will view and discuss a dozen films. There is little reading for this class. The instructor will lay out the historical context and the historical situation which each film shows (and does not show), but the emphasis of the class is on students’ use of evidence from their viewings to develop insightful readings of the past and how it can and has been interpreted. Particular attention will be given to the concept of resistance–what are its qualities and attributes manifest in a wide variety of historical situations and what are the ways that film presents resistance and helps audiences understand it in new ways.

Public figures ranging from former U.S. President Jimmy Carter to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof have suggested women’s increased entry into the labor market as a cure for the problems that face their families and their societies. But scholars have demonstrated that paid work has offered women new freedoms while subjecting them to new forms of control. This course will explore that paradox by examining women’s diverse experiences as workers historically and today.

The course examines 20th-century European history through the lenses of women’s autobiographical writings. It explores women’s voices from different generational, social, and national backgrounds and asks what formed their memories.

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.

This first-year seminar introduces students to the foundations of U.S. democracy through its most significant speeches, declarations, letters, proclamations, and other writings. Together, we will analyze, discuss, and write about foundational documents from the Declaration of Independence to more efforts to form “a more perfect Union.”

This seminar explores food as both a historical object and a lens for examining power, inequality, and migration in U.S. history. We’ll trace food’s role from the Columbian Exchange to the early 20th century, analyzing how settler colonialism, slavery, and urbanization shaped food markets and labor. Through primary sources and historical scholarship, we’ll examine immigrant foodways, racial and gendered consumption, and the political economy of food. By the course’s end, students will understand how food has functioned as both a tool of oppression and empowerment and how it helps recover the histories of marginalized communities.

What does it mean to study food history, and how do we approach it from a global perspective? The world of food (and the food of the world) is a huge subject, and the focus in this class will be on historical texts and topics (as opposed to contemporary food issues), and on global examples (with an emphasis on non-Western regions, including Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East). Class topics will center on three major themes: Food as Identity (Nation, Gender, Memory, Diaspora), Food as Value (Taste, Commodity, Feasting, Famine); Food in its Modern Forms (Industrialization, Consumption, Globalization). The course emphasis will be on giving students the opportunity to practice fundamental skills of historical methodology (written primary and secondary source analysis), and using what they have learned for a creative final project presentation, based on an oral history interview.

This seminar will discuss and explore how health should be defined and various classical and contemporary views of medical practice. Ethical controversies in modern medicine will be discused and anlayzed.

This seminar offers first-year students an introduction to the German-Jewish experience and the history of anti-semitism in Germany, from early modernity to the present day. Students in this seminar will learn to analyze a variety of texts (both literary and philosophical), musical works, and films in relation to the history of Jews in German-speaking countries, and will be able to apply their knowledge to their analysis of present-day manifestations of antisemitism and xenophobia in Germany. The course has no requisites and presumes no prior knowledge of the subject matter.

Jewish life and civilization in Spain have been compared to a drama in which moments of cultural flourishing are mixed with tragedy and exile. This seminar explores the history and culture of the Golden Age of medieval Spanish Jewry, as well as how modern Hispanic cultures have interpreted and reimagined this historical past. We will interrogate how this fascination with Sephardic Jews overlaps with a variety of topics: national identity, anti-Semitism, liberal democracy, colonialism, exile, Holocaust memory, among others. Throughout this journey across time and space, we will think about the relevance of Sepharad, or 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, and Cuba.

The seminar deals with the origin and evolution of writing systems; the methods for deciphering ancient scripts and studying contemporary scripts; and the socio-cultural and linguistic underpinnings of literacy in the ancient and contemporary worlds. Students will study and analyze, through a series of workshops and group projects, the early Sumerian, Egyptian, Harappan, Chinese and Mesoamerican writing systems—the five writing systems that account for much of the diversity of scripts known today. These are all non-alphabetic scripts, and studying them offers insights into the cognitive processes involved in the origin and evolution of writing, the relationship between script and image, and between script and language, and the challenges of learning to read and write in any writing system. Students will use group and individual projects emphasizing linguistic methodologies to study a variety of undeciphered (or partly deciphered) scripts such as Etruscan (Italy), Cretan Hieroglyphic (Crete), Linear A (Crete), Rongorongo (Easter Island), Zapotec (Oaxaca Valley, Mexico), Olmec (Veracruz, Mexico), Harappan (India), Khipu (Peru) and the increasingly visual and pictorial multimedia literacy strategies of the contemporary world.

This course will examine facets of one of the transcendental events of the twentieth century in Latin America. Under the auspices of la revolución, Cubans embarked upon an ambitious revolutionary project. Virtually all previously existing national institutions were abolished, modified, or otherwise reorganized in the service of an egalitarian project inscribed into the claim of national sovereignty and self-determination.

The seminar will focus on the origins and development of the Cuban revolution, spanning the years of the insurrectionary war of the 1950s through the present. The seminar will direct attention to in-depth analyses of the salient facets of the Cuban experience of the past fifty years–including the context of social change, relations between Cuba and the United States, the role played by Fidel Castro, change and changelessness in gender and race relations, and the impact of the Cuban revolution in Latin America and the world–all through multi-disciplinary perspectives as a way to arrive at a deeper understanding of the multiple and interacting facets of the revolution.

This course has several objectives. First, it seeks to promote the development of knowledge of the complexities of the Cuban revolution, including the antecedents and sources of the revolution, the “whys” and the “hows” of the revolution, the personalities and the policies, the cultural context and political setting of change, and the complicated relationship between Cuba and the United States.

The seminar is also designed to promote skills for the evaluation of conflicting arguments and assessment of multi-disciplinary perspectives, with particular attention given to issues of evidence, disciplinary diversity, and the character of sources. It seeks to develop awareness of the process of critical interpretation and the means with which to make judgments on the Cuban revolution as a transcendental event of twentieth-century Latin America.

But more than the acquisition of specific knowledge relating to Cuba and the Cuban revolution, students will be encouraged to “think through” controversy, to develop analytical frameworks within which to evaluate competing–and often conflicting–claims, and most of all to develop the skills of critical thinking as a method with which to take measure of issues–often controversial issues–that matter.

Emphasis will also be given to the practice of formal writing: the experience of preparing a coherent narrative to convey ideas, render judgments, and craft arguments and to develop the skills necessary for clarity and cogency.

Students will be asked to prepare analytical written assessments of the assigned readings and to engage in thoughtful and respectful discussion and debate in a seminar environment. This implies skills related to the evaluation of information–including scholarly texts, biography, novels, and film–and the formulation of arguments based on newly-acquired knowledge. It involves also a critical reading and formulation of arguments and points of view.

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 designed to offer students the tools and techniques for understanding multi-media, staged musical works like opera, musical theater, and film. The goal of the seminar is to develop students’ analytical skills in verbal and non-verbal media and to encourage their visualization of the potential and implications of artistic forms and structures. No ability to read music is required. We will discuss musical, visual, and textual narratives, source materials, and the various means by which such multi-media artworks are transmitted to modern audiences.

Born out of the oppressions of slavery, the spiritual is a folk song created by Africans forcibly brought to America and enslaved for 250 years. Spirituals were created through the combination of African melodies, rhythms, and performance practices with the influences of European Christian Hymnody. The Library of Congress has collected over 6,000 of these melodies. They contain themes of suffering, hope, rebellion, and longing. They tell the story of Africans in America through song and has become the catalyst through which all “American Music” was born. This course will examine and chronicle the origin and performance practice of the Negro Spiritual, it’s presence throughout American History and its influences on Contemporary American Music.

This course explores the place of music within the carceral system of the United States, particularly since the early 20th century. Among the questions that guide course content and discussion are the following: How do incarcerated people claim and reclaim their humanity through music? What are the arguments for and against facilitating music-making in carceral spaces? How have incarcerated musicians and their music been represented in scholarship and by the media? What ethical challenges and considerations face those who facilitate or study music in prisons? The seminar will examine a variety of musical genres and combine historical and ethnographic approaches. Throughout the course students will engage with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated musicians.

Healthcare systems are responsible for fostering the competence and safety of practitioners. Patients and families are integral members of the healthcare team. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that individuals possess the necessary knowledge and skills to navigate the complex healthcare system and advocate for high-quality and safe healthcare to ensure their optimal well-being.

Navigating and Advocating for your Wellness is a dynamic and interactive freshman seminar course designed to empower students with the knowledge and skills to become actively engaged participants in their own health and healthcare. Through a combination of expert guest speakers, real-world case studies, and hands-on learning activities, students will explore the principles of patient engagement, the dynamics of the healthcare system, and the critical role of effective communication in healthcare interactions.

The historical Socrates did not write any philosophical works; instead, he engaged in philosophy through conversation. Yet, he made such a profound impression on some of his Athenian contemporaries that other philosophers wrote dialogues featuring him as the main character. Plato portrays Socrates defending the view that the unexamined life is not worth living, that no one voluntarily chooses to do wrong, that suffering injustice is worse than committing it, that all wrongdoing arises from ignorance, and that goodness amounts to wisdom. These views have been among the most influential—and, at times, the most controversial—in the history of philosophy. Even today, some philosophers agree with them, while others reject them. In this course, we will explore Socrates’ philosophical method and the philosophical theses attributed to him. Our goal will be to critically examine Socratic philosophy: Is Socrates right? What arguments does he offer in support of his views? What further arguments could be made in favor of or against them? This course will focus on developing philosophical skills through engagement with Socratic philosophy, while also addressing questions of enduring importance for how to live a good life.

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.

You are different now from how you were ten years ago; but still you are one and the same person, who underwent those changes. (You weren’t replaced by an imposter.) What makes you the particular person you are, and the same person as the youth you used to be? What kind of thing is a person, that it can maintain its identity even through such changes? Are we identical to our life stories? Is the idea of a persisting self just an illusion? What would it take for a person to stop existing? Do you have an immortal soul that could survive the death of your human body? Or are you identical to your body? Might it be possible to survive the death of your body by having your brain, or the information in your brain, transplanted into a new body? or into a computer network? Might amnesia or dementia amount to one person’s ceasing and being replaced by another? Would teleportation like they use in Star Trek be a fast means for you to travel — or would that be another way for you to cease to exist and be replaced by a perfect copy? Why do we take special interest in our own continued existence as persons, moreso than the continued existence of people similar to us, or who will push forward our projects? Should we?

In this discussion-focused First Year Seminar, we will closely read influential texts by African American philosophers that engage with issues concerning identity. We will ask questions like: What types of identity, if any, do all Black people have in common? What is the relationship between Black identity and Black culture? What types of Black identity are necessary for Black political solidarity? We will consider Black feminist insights about how some identities lie at the intersection of multiple social groups.

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 provides a general introduction to nanoscience and nanotechnology, focusing on recent advances in molecular electronics, nanomaterials, and biomedical research. Course activities include group model-building projects, presentations, and discussions of reading material.

This course introduces students to World’s Fairs in the US between 1893 and 1965 (1884 World Cotton Centennial, New Orleans; 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago; 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, Saint Louis; 1939 New York World’s Fair; 1962 Seattle World’s Fair; 1964/1965 New York World’s Fair). We will look at how ideas about cities and world’s fairs changed over time. We will also look at the role World’s Fairs played in: (1) promoting a city’s place in the US and the world, (2) addressing social issues, and (3) disseminating ideas about progress. We will learn about world’s fairs through documentaries (video/audio), texts, as well as examine memorabilia from each of the Fairs. Students will be responsible for participating in weekly discussions on readings and biweekly journal responses. Students will work on a group project on a world’s fair and present at the end of the semester. This project can use traditional means of presentations–such as PowerPoint and posters, or it could be a podcast (5 minutes), video, or some other media.

Higher education is undergoing rapid transformations that may dramatically change the undergraduate college experience. In this course, you will examine urgent questions facing American colleges and universities. For example, why is the cost of college rising and what implications does this shift have for who attends and graduates from college? How well is higher education preparing students for jobs of the future? How has new technology reshaped the college experience, both academically and socially? How should universities respond to student needs and desires? What role should athletics play in higher education? We’ll explore these and other topics through class discussion, position papers, oral presentations and debates, and interactions with UNC faculty and staff. By introducing you to the history, institutions, and culture of higher education, this course also will help you transition into and make the most of your college experience.

This seminar will define a policy entrepreneur and examine strategies used by policy entrepreneurs to achieve policy change or innovation in the policy making process. This course also aims to explore ways that public, private, and non-profit sectors collaborate to address problems that cannot be solved by one sector alone. There is growing recognition that sustainable solutions to some of the most complex challenges confronting our communities can benefit from these collaborative or “intersector” approaches.

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.

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.

Intended for first-year students of any major, this course explores the role of public policy in shaping the innovation ecosystem where new science and technology emerge and how governments, organizations, and communities influence their development. By looking at contemporary and international case studies, we will examine key issues in the governance of emerging technologies, their ethical dimensions, and the intersection of science with issues like climate change, public health, and national security. Students will develop an understanding of policy-making processes, stakeholder engagement, and the role of public and private institutions in shaping science and technology landscapes. The course will also provide practical insights into regulatory frameworks, international collaboration, and the trade-offs involved in balancing innovation with safety, ethics, and public interest.

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.

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.

This course examines the diversity of political arrangements in societies across the globe. Honors version available.

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.

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.

Europe is facing numerous complex issues ranging from Brexit and populism to refugees and minority rights. A common thread running through many of its issues is the movement of people across national borders. This class examines an array of issues to explore how they affect, and are affected by, the politics in Europe, which are quite different from the politics in the United States. This class has two goals: 1) to give you a solid understanding of important issues affecting Europe today and comparing them to the U.S. so that you can contribute thoughtfully to discussions about them as a reader, writer and discussant; and 2) to introduce you to the many Europe-related faculty and resources at UNC if you want to explore this world region more deeply. This class encourages students from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives to enroll because it benefits significantly from including such diversity.

PSYC 101 is a prerequisite for all psychology courses. A survey of major principles of psychology and an introduction to scientific modes of thought about behavior. Students participate in ongoing psychological research in the department.

PSYC 101 is a prerequisite for all psychology courses. A survey of major principles of psychology and an introduction to scientific modes of thought about behavior. Students participate in ongoing psychological research in the department.

The goal of this first-year seminar course is to familiarize students with a range of topics associated with contemporary families, with a specific focus on familial influences on child and adolescent development. Also, given the increasing diversity among families in contemporary society, this course will increase knowledge of the various domains of diversity (i.e., developmental stage, race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity) as well as help students be attuned to pertinent issues faced by these families. Select course topics include 1) demographic trends of families; 2) parenting and development; 3) sibling relationships; 4) cultural contexts of parenting and families; 5) media and technology; 6) neighborhood and community influences; and 7) youth civic engagement.

How do you persuade others with numbers? What general principles should you think about when sharing data with others? What are the common biases and fallacies that we have in understanding numbers and statistics? How do you figure out if you should trust results from research studies reported in the media? This seminar introduces students to the many ways that data are reported to the public in our everyday lives-through advertising and media as well as scientific journal articles. Students in this course will create models in the BeAM spaces on campus that will help make abstract topics about numbers more concrete. Students will learn practical skills that will be useful in subsequent classes at Carolina and after graduation (e.g., in graduate school, in work, as a consumer, as a citizen).

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.

Students learn about Islam as a global, historical religious tradition and the dynamic interaction between religious ideas, practices, and debates on one hand and a variety of geographical and historical contexts on the other. The course takes as its starting point the assumption that every first year student has already been exposed to ideas about Islam and Muslims, usually in the form of religious, cultural and racialized othering, which means that the course has to respond to such preconceived notions that have shaped their worldviews. Students are challenged to consider both similar and dramatically different ways of learning, knowing, and perceiving the world by Muslims in past and present, thereby exposing them to alternative ways of knowing and nurturing at the very least an appreciation of the value of difference and understanding of a perceived other.

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 examines the cultural construction of animals in Japanese myth, folklore, and religion. We will discuss various kinds of animals: those that occur in the natural world, those that are found in myths and folklore, and those that have appeared in popular media such as animation. We will explore how images of various animals were culturally constructed as tricksters, gods, monsters, or anthropomorphic companions; how animals were ritualized as divine, demonic, or sentient beings in Buddhism, Shinto, and folk religion; and how animals could serve as metaphors that embodied collective ideals or anxieties. Most of our readings will focus on primary and secondary texts from the Japanese tradition (in English), but we will also read theoretical texts on human-animal relationships and historical studies on animals in the larger Asian context. We will also view and analyze Japanese films, both anime and documentaries, that deal with animals and environmental issues.

Jewish life and civilization in Spain have been compared to a drama in which moments of cultural flourishing are mixed with tragedy and exile. This seminar explores the history and culture of the Golden Age of medieval Spanish Jewry, as well as how modern Hispanic cultures have interpreted and reimagined this historical past. We will interrogate how this fascination with Sephardic Jews overlaps with a variety of topics: national identity, anti-Semitism, liberal democracy, colonialism, exile, Holocaust memory, among others. Throughout this journey across time and space, we will think about the relevance of Sepharad, or 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, and Cuba.

What is Afrofuturism? Afrofuturism is a movement that revisits discussions on Black identity through music, art, literature, cinema, and political resistance, analyzing and celebrating Black people’s culture and future. What is Afrotourism? Afrotourism is a movement in Africa and Africa Diaspora countries that transforms arts and questions traditional tourism. In this course, students will study Afrofuturism and Afrotourism and the importance of Black identity in the modern African Diaspora, emphasizing Latin America and Europe through music, readings, film, artifacts, and tourism. We will learn how people from the African Diaspora communicate culture through literature, cuisine, dance, music, religion, and tourism as way to legitimize and celebrate their culture and future.

We will also explore how people of African descent develop new tourist activities, foster economic growth, and celebrate Afro-futuristic societies. Students will discuss how these individuals and places are highly significant to the legacy of Black modernism in Brazil and the history of the African Diaspora.

This course is dedicated to the following, twinning questions: 1) How do we define energy in the literary humanities and 2) What is the ecological value of science fiction (SF)? We will answer these questions by turning to the history of French and francophone SF literature and media, calling on French philosophy and contemporary theory from a diversity of fields—including art history, anthropology, and cosmology—for supplement. Beginning with Cyrano de Bergerac’s proto SF, we will move through Jules Vernes’s scientific romance, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s symbolism, Maurice Renard’s SF about invisible aerial aliens, Raymond Queneau’s surrealist anticipation of the new novel, Monique Wittig’s queer apocalypticism, countercultural comics, Ahmed Bouanani’s biohorror, and Marie NDiaye’s postcolonial fantastic, before concluding with Marie Darrieussecq’s SF about cloning. Along the way, we will watch SF from the history of French cinema, from Georges Méliès’s famous trip to the moon to Palme d’Or-winner Julia Ducournau’s recent Titane. Throughout the semester, we will remain attentive to questions of poetics, asking if, and if so, how and why SF generates a sense of wonder. Finally, then, what can this sense of wonder teach us about the energy crisis facing our planet today?

What, if any, responsibilities accompany democratic citizenship? Voting? Active participation in politics? Obeying laws? Volunteering in one’s community? Preserving natural resources for future generations? Adhering to certain values? Protesting unjust laws? This course offers an overview of the different ways in which Americans have answered these questions.

How shall we live together? Humans are unique among living creatures in that we cannot live solitary lives by ourselves, yet we also have no fixed method of organization. It thus remains an open question how we will organize our common life. To answer it, we need to ask whether there is any conflict between the life of a good person and a good citizen. We must weigh tradeoffs between liberty, justice, and stability. In this course, we enter into “the great conversation,” in which political thinkers for more than two millennia have debated these questions with each other.

This seminar considers the purpose and history of the university and different conceptions of liberal learning. Is the university primarily a place? An idea? A community of students and teachers? Focusing mainly on the development of higher education in the United States, we will debate the relationship between the university and democracy, the difference between academic study and professional training, and competing understandings of intellectual liberty and free expression.

This course explores the links between politics and literature in America, focusing on the way in which fiction is able to provide a unique view of politics. The course will look at American short stories, poems, films, and novels in roughly chronological order, examining how the political and social concerns of each era are expressed its literature. Throughout, we will address questions including: Is there a uniquely American mode of literary expression, and what does that say about the American character? How can literature serve as a commentary on or intervention into politics? Does doing so compromise its status as art? Can literature give us insight into politics that theoretical treatises, journalism, and other historical documents cannot? What are the limits of understanding politics through literature?

Happiness is a fundamental goal in many societies, despite being elusive for many people. In recent years, social scientists have become increasingly interested in the subject of happiness and its causes and consequences. Sociologists, economists, political scientists, geographers, and psychologists have joined with philosophers in studying the nature of happiness and subjective well-being and its relationship to social life. This course will provide an overview of how these different disciplines study happiness. We will examine the interplay between individual and social happiness by considering the nature and meaning of happiness in the contemporary United States and in other countries. We will seek to answer questions such as: What is happiness? Can we measure happiness, and if so, how? Does happiness vary among diverse groups (racial, ethnic, religious, gender, age, and social class groups)? How does happiness differ among cultures and nations? What is the relationship between biology and happiness? Between psychology and happiness? Does money buy happiness? What is (and should be) the role of happiness in formulating public policies? We will address these and other questions by reading books and articles; by class discussions and debates; by viewing films; by interviewing people; and by collecting information using the Internet and other sources.

Although women now attend and graduate from college at a higher rate than men, they remain underrepresented in STEM majors and careers in the US. This course explores the causes and consequences of why women – and other gender minority individuals – are less likely to pursue education and careers in the STEM fields. To do so, we will draw on sociological insights from the study of gender, education, work and occupations, and science and technology studies. Throughout the course, students will engage with social science research as well as contemporary news articles, films, and podcasts on these topics. They will also have the opportunity to meet experts who actively work on promoting diversity in STEM as well as established women and other gender minority individuals who have pursued STEM careers. This course is open to students of all backgrounds, majors, and genders.

What does it mean to live in poverty in the “land of plenty” and experience inequality in the “land of opportunity?” Why is the “American Dream” more attainable for some people than it is others? This FY-S will use a sociological perspective to explore these questions and more. We will cover a wide range of topics as they relate to poverty and inequality, including perceptions, measurement, causes, and consequences as well as different domains (e.g., housing, education, the labor market, the criminal legal system, etc.) and how they serve as inequality mechanisms. We will also discuss the significance of history and place as well as highlight different axes of inequality (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity, age, disability). Ultimately, this course aims to advance understanding of poverty and inequality in America, and in doing so, highlight why the American Dream is difficult (and becoming increasingly so) for some individuals and families to attain.

This first year seminar introduces students to the collection of concepts, research, and activist strategies now known as “reproductive justice” – the stigma-free right and ability of everyone to have and raise the children they want and not to have the children they do not want. We will also study the difficulties of and past and current opposition to this perspective. We will discuss and evaluate debates about reproduction-related laws, technologies, and health as we consider the language, assumptions, evidence, and consequences of stances taken in different sites, at different historical moments, and by different stakeholders – including ourselves — in both biological and social reproduction. We will consider the U.S. case in relation to debates within and policies from international organizations and transnational social movements. Students will do research and give presentations on a topic or debate not studied in class. There is no pre-requisite for this course other than an interest in the social meanings and contexts of reproduction, an openness to different perspectives, and a willingness to be an active and respectful participant in your own and your peers’ education.