First-Year Seminar/Launch Archive

This seminar is designed to investigate how the concept of race has been represented in cinema historically, with a particular focus on representations of race when blackness is masqueraded. Its intent is to launch an investigative inquiry into how African Americans are represented on screen in various time periods, how we as spectators are manipulated by these cinematic constructions of race, and how race is marked or coded other than through visual representation. Students will view films that deal with “passing” from the various historical periods and will utilize theoretical concepts introduced in class to read these visual representations. Films selected for viewing include the pre-World War II Era, the Civil Rights Era, and the “Post-Racial” era. Students will be required to write three papers that reflect their ability to apply theoretical concepts to reading racialized representations on screen in these three historical periods to demonstrate their understanding of how racial masquerades have evolved over time and continue to persist in contemporary culture.

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.

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.

The term “African diaspora” usually refers to the consequences of the transatlantic slave trade, but there have been many diasporas of people of African descent. One major movement took place in the U.S. in the early 20th century when millions of people left small southern communities for large industrial northern cities. This seminar examines that phenomenon through the lens of a single site where migrants lived in the city of Chicago. The Phyllis Wheatley Home for Girls was run by black women to provide social services for female migrants from 1926 through the 1960s. Research at this site combines elements of archaeology, anthropology and history to study their lives. Students, working in teams, will have the opportunity to contribute to the ongoing research effort via analysis of written records and artifacts. This multidisciplinary project will be of interest to students curious about 20th century history, African-American culture, museums and heritage, women’s and gender studies, migration and labor history.

In this course, we examine disability from the perspective of cultural and medical anthropology. Specifically, we consider how people living with physical, mental, visible, and invisible disabilities navigate physical and social spaces, deal with prejudices of all kinds, and experience everyday life. By engaging with leading anthropologists and activists, spending time with community-based disability groups on and off campus, and studying cross-cultural scholarship, we will learn about the richness and vitality of disability worlds. Furthermore, we will look at how societal and medical conceptions of disability are changing in the context of COVID-19, human-animal entanglements, and climate change. Overall, the people we meet and material we cover emphasize the multitude of ways in which a focus on disability can generate creative modes of thinking, connection, and experience in the twenty-first century.

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.

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.

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?

Alice Walker wrote “Time moves slowly, but passes quickly”. Tennessee Williams wrote, “Time is the longest distance between two places”. Throughout history, time has captivated and inspired artists, writers and musicians. From subtle movements to clearly defined sequences of change, artists will manipulate the element of time to enhance their ideas. “Time, A Doorway to Visual Expression”, considers the concept of time from a variety of perspectives and provides a path to investigate your own notions of time. As a group, we examine this mystifying topic through readings and discussions of Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams and Leonard Shlain’s Art and Physics. We also watch films, analyze videos and listen to music as we express our personal views through the art making process. As a first-year seminar, the course presumes no previous art experience and students may carry out their projects through a medium of their chossing (e.g., drawing, photography, painting, video, sound, performance and/or sculpture). We will immerse ourselves in the subject of time and create works of art inspired by our personal experiences and increased understanding of Time.

Taking the recent Korean Wave phenomenon as its point of departure, this course introduces students to the history of transnational imaginations in modern and contemporary Korean culture. Drawing upon literature, film, television, and secondary scholarship, we will explore how a diverse array of Korean cultural producers have used narratives of cross-border travel, migration, and exchange to rethink Korea’s place in the world and refashion Korean identity. In each section of the course, we will consider a different domain or dimension of border-crossing activity: education; labor; migration and diaspora; North-South interactions; war and military; cosmopolitan imaginings and the making of “global Korea.” In so doing, we will learn to think critically about the relationship between works from colonial Korea, postcolonial North Korea, postcolonial South Korea, and the Korean diaspora, and we will also gain a more nuanced understanding of popular culture’s place within its broader social and historical contexts.

We all know that love is not easy. But what makes it so complicated? This course examines how the Chinese conception of “love” offers a key for us to understand Chinese emotions, family structure, gender and sexuality, consumer desire, as well as political passion. We will probe into these issues through some of the most essential Chinese cultural texts from the 8th century B.C.E. to the 21st century, reading a variety of genres including poetry, fictional narratives, and films. We will also visit the Ackland Art Museum and engage with creative transmedia storytelling, exploring different perspectives to approach primary sources. By the end of the course, you will be able to deconstruct fixed notions about love in the contemporary West, and broaden your perceptions of selfhood, partnership, and community through “love” in the Chinese-speaking world. No prior knowledge of Chinese language and culture is required, and all readings are available in English translation.

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.

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.

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.

Prerequisite, MATH 110. Chemistry 101 is the first half of a yearlong overview of the exciting field of chemistry, the study of the properties and changes of matter and energy. Students will be exposed to many new concepts, techniques and phenomena including atomic and molecular structure, stoichiometry, conservation of mass and energy and thermochemical changes. Chemistry 101 is a pre-requisite for Chemistry 102, and together, Chemistry 101 and 102 are the gateway to all courses in chemistry.

CHEM 101 and 101L; C- or better required in CHEM 101 and from community college or AP/IB exam. The General Descriptive Chemistry II course is a continuation of Introduction to College Chemistry (CHEM 101) and considers a range of important and fascinating topics: • How do batteries, which are potential energy in a metal housing, work? • Why does sweating cool us? Why is sweating more effective in a dry desert than in humid North Carolina? How is the same effect achieved when dogs pant? • Why does brining the roads before an ice storm make it safer to travel? How does the salt lower the temperature at which liquid water turns into slippery ice? Why does salt dissolve in water anyway? • How does an enzyme increase the rate of a biochemical reaction? • What is a semiconductor, present in electronics and solar panels, and how is it different from a metal? CHEM 102 is a wonderful course because so many concepts you will learn can be found in real-world examples and will be concepts you would utilize in a range of other disciplines and areas of study, not just chemistry. Bulk properties of gases, liquids and solids, intermolecular forces, solutions and solution behavior, chemical equilibria, spontaneity and Gibbs energy, chemical kinetics and rates of reactions, acid-base chemistry, and electrochemistry. (thermodynamics, chemical kinetics, chemical equilibrium, intermolecular forces, solutions and solution behavior, bulk properties of gases, liquids and solids, acid-base chemistry, and electrochemistry). What is exciting about the First-Year Launch CHEM 102 class is that you will explore how the concepts you are learning in class reveal themselves in the world around you, and in modern research endeavors. In addition, we will build community, examine data and concepts, and develop problem solving and critical thinking skills. One planned activity will be to find examples of the concepts in the news and taking the first 5 minutes of class to share with the rest of the class, whether medically related examples, environmental examples, materials science examples, or other areas that interest you. Unlike regular CHEM 102 classes, we will help you engage with the science in meaningful ways, while also allowing you to learn how scientists think and solve problems. We’ll bring current research into the classroom, whether by interviewing research faculty to learn how they got interested in their area of chemistry and learn about the research they conduct, or attending a research seminar that would have concepts pertinent to class topics, or a research scientist as a guest lecturer. UNC is one of the top research institutions in the world, so we have as a goal to expose all of you to what is happening at UNC. Because the FYL classes are capped at 30 students, a lot like our First-Year Seminar classes and some of our Honors Chemistry classes, students will get to experience a small class environment. The class will become its own community as we explore these concepts together and begin to fill your “toolbox” with those tools that will allow you to be successful in your upper level classes, and be excited about what you are learning. All the introductory chemistry classes at UNC are high structured active learning classes, so we will use evidence-based pedagogical methods to help you master course goals. While introductory chemistry classes can sometimes make students a little nervous, we as a class will be walking this path together to learn, to explore, and to grow in our appreciation of chemistry.

This will be an in-person class with in-person exams; no remote options. The FY Launch section will take their exams during the regular class exam time and not during the common time with all the other CHEM 101 and 102 sections.

Bindings and curses, love charms and healing potions, amulets and talismans – from simple spells to complex group rituals, ancient societies made use of both magic and religion to try to influence the world around them. In this course, we shall examine the roles of magic and religion in the ancient Greek
and Roman worlds, paying special attention to their local contexts and to the myths and actual techniques ancient practitioners used to serve their clientele.

In this class, we examine descriptions of religious and magical practices in the multicultural contexts of ancient Greece and Rome. Our sources include literary accounts, legal documents, and material objects, such as inscriptions, amulets, tablets, magical images, and papyri. Additionally, instruction for this class incorporates a combination of locations and technologies, including the the BeAM Makerspaces, the Greenlaw Gameroom, and the Ackland Art Museum. During the course of the term, students will be expected to analyze ancient literature and material artifacts, construct replicas of ancient objects, and explore reconstructions of the ancient Greco-Roman world in video games.

Taking a participatory approach to ancient Greek drama, this course pairs readings from three Athenian playwrights (Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes) with performance-oriented activities and scholarship. At its most traditional, this course surveys the historical and cultural context of the so-called “classical” Athens of the fifth-century BCE, emphasizing the political, religious, and aesthetic forces that gave rise to humankind’s first recorded theater. More innovatively, this course probes the dual nature of theater, its distinct but intertwined existences as codified script and socially-embedded performance, through sustained investigations of some of its most influential texts and their modern reception in a global context with case studies focused on post-Apartheid South African and 21st-century Chicanx experiences. Through a variety of original compositions (including Tweets, TikTok/FlipGrid videos, character backstories, stand-up routines, director’s notes, and scholarly analyses), students gain practical experience and theoretical insight into the ways text, performance, and culture interact. Through improvisational activities, recorded videos, and scene rehearsals, students become thespians in their own right, pressing the limits of how far performance might extend beyond the traditional stage. Class trips to Davis Library, the Forest Theater, and live performances introduce first-year students to some of the academic and cultural resources UNC offers.

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, by Fay Weldon, that engages many of these mythic women. We will studythe Greek tragedies intensively, along with their reception in later art, from paintings to poems, stage productions to sculptures, operas to ballets. 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 are their stories relevant to the 21st century? Did the ancient Athenians know something we don’t?

Examines the basic nature and importance of rhetoric and argumentation. Attention is devoted to interpreting the persuasive function of texts and their relation to modern forms of life.

Today we tend to see curiosity and imagination as two peas in a very positive pod. Yet, although they have often been linked together, neither curiosity nor the imagination has always been viewed in such a favorable light. Pandora’s curiosity supposedly unleashed all ills and calamities upon the world. In the sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne famously called the imagination a “runaway horse” and asserted that the imagination brings fevers and death to those who give it a free hand and encourage it. How did we get from Pandora’s calamitous curiosity and Montaigne’s death-dealing imagination to Epcot Center’s gleeful celebration of curiosity and the imagination? In this course, we will seek answers to this question by looking back in time to the thought and literature of classical antiquity and Early Modern Europe–to writings by Plato, Lucian, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and others.

Students in this seminar will attend and study the production process of multimedia, music, dance and theater performances on campus and on-line. The Process Series of the Performance Studies program in the Department of Communication Studies, Playmakers, Carolina Performing Arts, and others across campus and additional on-line performance. We will discuss how performance as it was experienced (pre-Covid) and as it currently experienced. We will examine performance through multiple lenses, from Aristotle’s Poetics, Peter Brooks’s Empty Space, up to current writing from Performance Studies scholars. We will explore the ways that performances engage us, communicating powerful ideas and emotions through their various media of expression. Students will research performance pieces, interview the performers, attend rehearsals and performances, and write essays that combine their own experiences of the performances with class readings. Students will also create their own performance pieces as they observe the relationship of preparation and practice to the spontaneity and surprise of performance.

An introduction to the critical analysis of film, television, advertising, video, and new media texts, contexts, and audiences.

The majority of computing devices are not inside personal computers, laptops, or in data centers. Instead, they are integrated into multiple objects around us. From the small computers integrated into water taps that automatically shut off when not in use to the integrated computers assessing the health of jet engines, these computers are pervasive and impact several walks of life. In this course, we study such embedded devices. We first investigate the various applications of such embedded computing systems in our day to day lives. We then understand the design principles behind these embedded devices by studying the design constraints and the possible space of solutions. Finally, we will pick a specific application of interest and design an embedded system for that application.

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 great 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.

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.

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.

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.

Introduction to fundamental issues in economics including competition, scarcity, opportunity cost, resource allocation, unemployment, inflation, and the determination of prices.

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 course, students will study epic and anti-epic strains in Western literature, reading key texts in the epic tradition from Homer and Virgil through the 20th century in light of various challenges to that tradition and tensions within it.

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.

Fulfills a major core requirement. Studies in African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, Native American, Anglo-Indian, Caribbean, gay-lesbian, and other literatures written in English.

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.

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 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.

French culture and fashion have been synonymous since the age of Louis XIV. This is not only because Paris traditionally occupied the center of the global fashion industry. It’s also because fashion has a respected place in French culture. This seminar investigates what fashion has meant to French-speaking writers, artists, and philosophers through the centuries. We will explore key episodes in the history of French fashion from the emergence of the idea of fashion in the seventeenth century, to Marie-Antoinette’s role as fashion icon, to the birth of haute couture in the 20th century, to contemporary debates about fashion’s impact on the environment and global economy. Along the way, we will discover how French thinkers have interpreted the allure and significance of fashion from multiple perspectives. In short, we will consider what it means to take fashion seriously. This seminar will take place in English. No knowledge of French is required (although French speakers are very welcome!).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

This seminar explores the “question of the animal” in the works of major Russian writers (Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov) and introduces students to the main theoretical texts on the animal/human relationship (Nietzsche, Levinas, Derrida, Irigaray). Among the topics to be discussed are the animal as the other, animal and human natures, dominance and submission, ethics of the human/animal relations, and the theme of “talking” animals.

Ever since antiquity, the notion of underworlds has been an integral part of how humans see and understand their living environment. This course examines concepts and representations of underworlds in literature and the visual arts from the ancient world to the Middle Ages and Renaissance 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 underground 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 and intellectual values and social realities. Readings include excerpts from the Bible, Homer’s Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Plato’s Republic, Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoirs, Don de Lillo’s Underworld and we will watch movies and episodes from TV shows such as Apocalypse Now, The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. We will visit the museum and a music/theater performance. Through reading responses, a creative writing project, an argumentative paper, and an oral presentation you will develop and practice skills of critical thinking as well as persuasive written and oral communication and you will have the opportunity to develop and use your creativity effectively.

This seminar explores the problem of revolutionary upheaval in Latin American history. Why did people like Simón Bolívar, Pancho Villa, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro take up arms, and what has been the impact of the insurgencies they helped lead? This explores these and other questions by examining the various causes, manifestations, and outcomes of revolutionary violence in modern Latin American history. Students will develop their interpretive skills through a close reading of English-language primary sources from the wars of the independence to the guerrilla insurgencies of the late-20th century. The seminar begins with an exploration of the wars of independence (1810-1825). Students will then analyze the twentieth-century revolutions in Mexico (1910-1917), Cuba (1953-1959), and Nicaragua (1979). The course concludes with an exploration of the late-20th century guerrilla insurgencies of the Shining Path (Peru), FARC (Colombia), and Zapatistas (Mexico).

Rally around the Flag! Leaders’ calls to action on behalf of the nation has led to common action against invasion, disaster, and disease. The same exhortation has preceded aggression, exclusion, and hostility. How have people defined their collective identities? What roles do borders have in separating–and creating–nations? What kinds of other identities motivate people, and why do we assume it is nationalism that dominates history? We will use a variety of historical sources to analyze the ways collective identities have defined the past.

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.

For thousands of years, people have grappled with fundamental questions about the meaning of their lives: How do we find our place in the world? How should we live? What should we strive for? What legacy can we hope to leave behind? The answers are hard to find, but we can search for them by looking to the past. History gives us innumerable examples of how different people have grappled with these questions in different ways. This seminar will look at a few of these people, both famous and obscure, and five major themes: macro and micro; family and everyday life; transformation and adventure; conflict and survival; and inheritance and memory. Using biographies, memoirs, oral histories, and historical narratives, we will explore what history can teach us about life’s biggest questions.

This course focuses on the history of modern Afghanistan over the past two hundred years. Its main methodological feature is an interplay between a main textbook and fictional and journalistic materials as well as primary sources.

How do countries overcome histories of racial injustice, inequality, and violence? What role can history play in promoting reconciliation? In 1994, South Africa embarked upon an experiment to answer these questions. The centerpiece of South African efforts was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). From 1995-2002, TRC appointees did research and interviewed thousands of South Africans to uncover a hidden history of apartheid-era violence in the hope that truth would bring about reconciliation. South Africans still debate whether the TRC met its aims, but the model of the TRC has been emulated around the world since. This course will examine the significance of the TRC in the longer history of transitional justice from the end of World War II to the present. Students will conduct historical research, whether about South Africa or another country, in order to propose their own plans for a truth commission.

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.

The linguistic landscape of the United States in historical and contemporary perspective: American English dialects, language maintenance and shift among Native American and immigrant groups, language politics and policy.

In many societies today, we live our lives surrounded by the written word. But did you ever stop to wonder how reading works? How do we go from looking at symbols on a page, sign, or screen to understanding the writer’s message? How do children learn to read, and what ways of teaching reading would best promote success for all students? We will explore these questions through hands-on analysis of language and writing-system structure, as well as discussion of the primary research literature. Your final course project will address a real-world question about reading, literacy, or reading education from the perspective of language and cognition.

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.

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.

Prerequisites, score of at least 32 on the ACT Math Test or Score of at least 700 on the SAT MATH 2 Subject Test or score of at least 4 on the AP Calculus AB Test or on the AB Subscore for the AP Calculus BC Test or Grade of A- or higher in MATH 130 at UNC-CH (or have the equivalent transfer credit). Students may not receive credit for both MATH 231 and MATH 241.

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.

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, including the epsilon-delta definition of limit. 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.

A leading expert in Modern Combinatorics wants to share his vision of the subject with the students. The seminar is a perfect background for future specialists in mathematics, physics, computer science, biology, economics, for those who are curious what statistical physics is about, what is cryptography, and how stock market works, and for everyone who likes mathematics.

The course will be organized around the following topics:

• Puzzles: dimer covering, magic squares, 36 officers
• Combinations: from coin tossing to dice and poker
• Fibonacci numbers: rabbits, population growth, etc.
• Arithmetic: designs, cyphers, intro to finite fields
• Catalan numbers: from playing roulette to stock market

The students will learn about the history of Combinatorics, its connections with the theory of numbers, its fundamental role in the natural sciences and various applications.

It is an advanced research course; all students are expected to participate in projects under the supervision of I.Ch. and the Graduate Research Consultant (the GRC Program). This seminar is partially supported by Honors Carolina.

The grades will be based on the exam, bi-weekly home assignments and the participation in the projects. The course requires focus and effort, but, generally, the students are quite satisfied with the progress they make (and their grades too).

From the Course Evaluation: “A difficult but wholly worthwhile course: I feel more competent for having taken it”, “I would recommend this FYS to others ONLY if they have a VERY strong affinity for and ability in Algebra (I thought I did, but I was wrong)”.

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 course explores the primary concepts, techniques, and artists/works falling under the category of “sound art,” an interdisciplinary field that centers sound and listening in contexts outside of traditional musical performance. Examples of sound art include sound installations, soundwalks, performance art, conceptual music, music technology, and more. Artistic work at the intersections of visual art, sculpture, science, architecture, theater, poetry, and music will be discussed in a seminar-style class format. In addition to learning about the history and aesthetics of sound art, students will participate in the creation and performance of original sound art works.

What is a musical genre and why does it matter? Much more than a label, genres have the power to bring individuals together into communities of artists, critics, and fans, while at the same time putting artists and fans in a box defined by stereotypes. In this way, music genres both reflect and shape broader issues in society centered around race, gender, and class. Thus, a study of genre helps us understand why country music came to be connected primarily with white people, why some genres (R&B, soul, hip hop) are considered “Black music,” why some genres are associated with teenaged girls and others considered low class. This course seeks to answer these questions from an historical perspective. You will examine how genres have organized the production, consumption, and interpretation of popular music since the late-nineteenth century and the profound influence genres have today in shaping our aesthetics, values, and identities.

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.

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?

A game is (perhaps by definition) an activity that lacks a serious point. Yet, we humans spend a lot of time and energy playing games, and we sometimes take them very seriously. How is this possible? Are games mere entertainment, or do they have some kind of deeper value?

We will use the tools of contemporary philosophy to examine questions about games, including: What makes a game a game? Is game-design an art form? To what extent are other (more ‘serious’) areas of life similar to games? Can this similarity be used to clarify those other areas of life? What ethical obligations we have when it comes to playing games, or designing them? Is the ‘gamification’ of real life possible? Would it be a good idea?

Students will collaborate in writing a philosophy research paper, and each student will do a final project in which they design a new game.

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, and quantum computing). 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.

Requisites: Prerequisite, MATH 231; Pre- or corequisite, MATH 232; permission of the instructor for students lacking the prerequisites.

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.

Requisites: Prerequisite, MATH 231; Pre- or corequisite, MATH 232; permission of the instructor for students lacking the prerequisites.

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.

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 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.

This seminar focuses on education in the multicultural society of the United States, and aims to help students develop new understandings of the role of schools and teaching. We will also work to construct alternative perspectives on and approaches to examining educational issues. Featuring opportunities for engaged learning, we will learn in the environment surrounding UNC, working to understand how local histories, cultures, and experiences have affected the opportunities that young people have– and have not– experienced in public schools. Moving into the policy space, we will evaluate and design for equity and justice in public schooling. We will also include work on portraiture, on seeing and learning about the experiences of race and racism in public schools, and the ways in which communities have advocated for experiences in ways that are strength- and asset-filled.

This course is designed to throw students into New York City in 1775 and Paris in 1791 by recreating and engaging with the ideas and arguments of these times. The course will rely on the Reacting to the Past pedagogy. “Reacting to the Past” (RTTP) consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by classic texts in the history of ideas. Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. It seeks to draw students into the past, promote engagement with big ideas, and improve intellectual and academic skills. The course will be extremely hard work, but should also be intellectually engaging and, to put it simply, a good deal of fun. Click here to see a video of students discussing their experiences in the class.

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 class will be taught remotely with both asychronous and sychronous components.

The alliance between America and the European Union is one of the most important political relationships today.

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.

This course is designed to provide an introduction to the politics of climate change at multiple levels of policy making, from global efforts down to local communities. Throughout the course, climate policy is investigated as a result of the interplay of science and politics. At each level of politics – global, regional (EU), country (US), sub-national (US states), and local (regional and city) – students will have the opportunity to review existing policy approaches, explore official inter-governmental and governmental policies, and read social science analyses. In addition, at each level, a scientific expert and/or activist will visit class to interact on climate issues. Student participation is required, with the format for class meetings combining a mixture of lectures and discussions as well as expert and activist speakers, video resources, and group presentations.

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.

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.

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.

This interdisciplinary course explores various, often conflicting ways of conceiving and shaping reality in the ancient world – religious, scientific, and philosophical. The course is organized around a series of case studies: (1) the formation and makeup of the cosmos; (2) the origin of mankind and its sexual differentiation; (3) the invention of the ‘self’; (4) the origin and nature of dreams; (5) foundations of law, justice, and morality. Short writing assignments, in-class discussions, oral presentations, and a term-paper will be used to introduce students into a complex intellectual network of natural scientists, philosophers, and oral story-tellers throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. Readings include Near Eastern mythical narratives and Homeric poems and hymns; selections from the earliest Greek philosophers through Plato’s dialogues to Hellenistic and Roman philosophical schools; works from the famous Hippocratic corpus and Galen’s medical treatises; and various religious texts from ancient Greece and Rome, early Christianity, and late antiquity.

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 several Japanese films, both anime and documentaries, that deal with animals and environmental issues.

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.

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.

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.

Sharing food is central to social life as well as to the formation of cultural identities. We can see this in how people come together over food, structure their days around it, and perform national or ethnic identities through it. At the same time, food allergies are on the rise and introduce many challenges to individuals, families, and organizations. The situation is complicated by the fact that public awareness, responses from schools and other organizations, and regulatory safety measures tend to lag behind. This course explores the topic of food allergies through several important lenses: biomedical, political, cultural, and social. The course’s goals are to understand how living with and managing food allergies can be challenging to individuals and families, as well as to query how potential therapies for food allergies should be regulated and how schools and business should accommodate for food allergies. The course critically engages concepts such as risk/benefit, medicalization, disability, and quality of life to better understand the social and cultural values that shape perceptions of and responses to food allergies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Like breathing, the human capacity for language is something we take for granted. How is it that we so effortlessly listen, understand, and make sense of the sounds and squiggles we are bombarded with from the moment we’re born? Language offers a window of insight into other people’s minds, allowing us to understand their thoughts, intentions, beliefs, desires, and knowledge. By the time we’re adults, humans carry information about tens of thousands of words, about what those words mean, how they’re spelled, how they sound, and how to join them up into sentences, paragraphs, and conversations. In short, human language allows us to put thoughts into other people’s heads, and to access the thoughts that are in other people’s heads. Topics explored in this course include how language develops in infants and children, how adults use language to understand the world, how the human brain supports language, and what happens to language when brain function is divergent.

What does it mean to be both racially Black and ethnically Latino in the U.S.? This course will look at the history, culture, experiences, political struggles, and social dilemmas of “Afro-Latinos”: 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. This course 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, inequality, and anti-blackness. In-depth conversations about the politics of “race” and “ethnicity” will trouble dominant U.S. paradigms of identity. In this discussion-oriented class, 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.

What can the study of the Black family in U.S. history and culture tell us about the past and about our present? This seminar examines the history of marriage and family from slavery to freedom. It is designed with the idea that there is no one singular representative experience, but rather a multitude of voices and perspectives that comprise this history. Readings will consider the historical processes and constraints shaping Black family life in the U.S. alongside themes of resistance, adaptability, and resilience. Over the course of the semester, we will explore historians’ responses to contemporary narratives about the pathology of the Black family after the Civil War.

This seminar is designed to teach students how to navigate new intellectual terrain and process unfamiliar information from a variety of disciplinary perspectives with an emphasis on simulations, field study, reflections, and documentation. Each student will plan, implement, and document an individual short journey. This voyage of discovery on the campus or in the surrounding community will be chronicled with a documentary journal and presented to the class in a multi-media format that conveys the individual’s perspective, journey, and discoveries. Additionally, the class will collaboratively plan, implement, and document a common full day journey. This required field study will be a core aspect of the experiential education connection for the course.

By AD 1200, most Southeastern Indians were farmers who lived in societies ruled by hereditary chiefs. After 1500, encounters between Indians and Europeans changed the lives of all concerned, but the changes took place in, and were shaped by, existing cultures. This seminar uses reading, discussion, and lecture to examine the lives of Southern Indians and to understand how encounters and interaction with European explorers and colonists changed the worlds in which the Indians lived. Students will learn how archaeologists and historians work, both separately and together, to study the past of Native societies. Students will study and analyze archaeological artifacts, Spanish accounts of Southeastern Indians, and other primary materials in class. These activities, along with various role-playing exercises, will directly involve the students in the study of Native people in the period between 1200 and 1800. Grades will be based on class participation, two short papers, participation in a group project, and a final paper related to the group project.

From “rage bakers” to tragic lobsters, from sushi chefs to pitmasters, and from Guy Fieri to M.F.K. Fisher, subjects in this seminar reveal the ways in which representations of food in the media shape discourse about modern American culture. Class readings combine media and cultural studies research with journalism, linguistics, history, literary analysis, gender studies, psychology, and folklore in order to explore the ways in which foods, including (but not limited to) General Tso’s chicken, industrially produced meat, and pumpkin pie have become part of the weft and weave of contemporary American social life. Class topics will center on the history of food advertising in America; the rise of the American cookbook industry; the uses and meanings of food on social media platforms; and the role of food in literature and on film. Ultimately, we analyze the ways in which representations of food and eating connect to and even drive social and political debates. The course emphasizes practical learning (short weekly writing prompts; film and textual analysis skills; and one final research-based project using primary and secondary sources).

In this seminar, we will study the history, cultures, and documentation of Asian Americans in the U.S. South, from the 19th century to present. Drawing on a range of sources, from oral histories and poetry to documentary film and short stories, we will examine how Asian Americans have grappled with identity, belonging and home in the South. In our studies together, we will consider how Asian Americans have navigated national and regional histories of slavery and segregation, immigration exclusion, and the shifting borderlands of the American South and the Global South. With a focus towards working with community and institutional archives, we will explore how to research, discuss, write, and create with the stories of Asian Americans throughout the region, and across time, towards a richer understanding of Asian American history and identity.

The goal of this First-Year Seminar is to help students develop their own sense of Black feminist thought and practice through exploring the lives and works of several key Black feminist figures with ties to North Carolina. The figures are Harriet Jacobs, Anna Julia Cooper, Pauli Murray, Ella Baker, Nina Simone, Jaki Shelton Green, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Students will engage materials that put these figures in context of Black feminist thought and will do hands on activities that reflect Black feminist practices.

By AD 1200, most Southeastern Indians were farmers who lived in societies ruled by hereditary chiefs. After 1500, encounters between Indians and Europeans changed the lives of all concerned, but the changes took place in, and were shaped by, existing cultures. This seminar uses reading, discussion, and lecture to examine the lives of Southern Indians and to understand how encounters and interaction with European explorers and colonists changed the worlds in which the Indians lived. Students will learn how archaeologists and historians work, both separately and together, to study the past of Native societies. Students will study and analyze archaeological artifacts, Spanish accounts of Southeastern Indians, and other primary materials in class. These activities, along with various role-playing exercises, will directly involve the students in the study of Native people in the period between 1200 and 1800. Grades will be based on class participation, two short papers, participation in a group project, and a final paper related to the group project.

“By persons unknown” is the phrase historically used across the white South to erase the identities of the killers responsible for lynchings. Though communities certainly knew who these murderers were, the press and the courts publicly denied this knowledge, offering the killers a cloak of anonymity. This research-intensive seminar explores this act of cloaking, addressing the legacy of race and racial terrorism in N.C. by using archival resources and community testimony. The class projects—focusing on a single county—will explore the public erasure of Black histories, the careful craftings of public memory, and the far-reaching impact of racist practices on the economic, educational, social, and political lives of communities. Our goal is not merely to “study” racist practice, but to actively confront it, working with community members to build public awareness of the legacies of racial violence, and assisting in efforts to create public memorials to that violence’s victims.

How did we get here? What were the major transformations in human history that created our world? What impacts have these changes made on the natural world and on us? What can we learn from this long history? This class is about objects and social change: meaning that we will use human-made objects – artifacts – as a way to understand the long and complex history of our species. We use the concept of ‘object biography’ to do this – you will each get a chance to produce an object biography of your own and to think critically about how we understand and represent material culture in museum displays.

Our early human ancestors were great travelers moving across great distances over many generations and thousands of years. Our more recent human history is dominated by human colonization as new waves of people traversing the globe using technological innovations and paving a path of incomparable destruction and exploitation that continue to overshadow the lives of millions of people and our very planetary health to this day. In early 2020 Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX released their campaign to “Occupy Mars” by 2050, joining a long linage of human ventures that have considered places and peoples unknown to them up for grabs and consequently, ownership and exploitation. Fantastic research, technology, international cooperation, and human advancements have come out of space research. However, the idea that life and resources outside our planet or beyond our galaxy is tenacious and remains an influential factor. In this course, we will explore our human future beyond Earth through the lens of our past asking the question is colonization inevitable? Is it possible as described in Star Trek to “explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no [hu]man has gone before?” without contaminating, dominating, and destroying that which exists out there? Can we as a species learn from our human past and avoid colonial mistakes? Can we handle discovering new resources without depleting them? How might discoveries made beyond Earth influence the meaning, use, and ideas about our resources here at home? Applying an anthropological lens to understand the human experience of curiosity, travel, expansion, and colonization, this class, dares to dream big and ask hard questions. This discussion-based seminar will read research and popular publications of nonfiction and fiction including a SciFi novel and ethnographic book, view films and documentaries, and look for signs of space in everyday life on Earth. Through assessment activities such as “Taking up Space” students will learn to critically break down and research the role of cultural ideas and how they influence scientific research and discovery.

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.

This course explores the complex relationship between art, war, and conflict.  We will consider the tensions between glorifying war and violence and memorializing their victims, between political justification and moral outrage, between political programs (many of the works being commissioned to legitimate a particular view of war) and the malleability of meaning.  In most weeks, we focus on single or small groups of works, mostly from Europe and the U.S.,  in a variety of media: painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, and graphic arts, taking the opportunity to study them in depth while also gaining exposure to a range of interpretive methods and the richness of the historical context. We also look at the ways works of art themselves become the trophies or stakes of conflict.

Whether it’s cute animal cams or frightening visualizations of climate change, pictures of nature are both ubiquitous and powerful. This seminar explores the ways in which nature has been collected, displayed, and represented in art, science, and popular culture from the Renaissance to the present. We will explore nature’s many meanings: as curiosity and resource, as playground and lab, and as preserve and wasteland. How have portrayals of nature shaped ideas in the arts and sciences? What is the place of nature imagery now in a time of environmental crisis? Students can expect to experience nature in addition to reading and writing about it. For final projects, students will research and write an op-ed article about picturing nature during uncertain times.

Alice Walker wrote “Time moves slowly, but passes quickly”. Tennessee Williams wrote, “Time is the longest distance between two places”. Throughout history, time has captivated and inspired artists, writers and musicians. From subtle movements to clearly defined sequences of change, artists will manipulate the element of time to enhance their ideas. “Time, A Doorway to Visual Expression”, considers the concept of time from a variety of perspectives and provides a path to investigate your own notions of time. As a group, we examine this mystifying topic through readings and discussions of Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams and Leonard Shlain’s Art and Physics. We also watch films, analyze videos and listen to music as we express our personal views through the art making process. As a first-year seminar, the course presumes no previous art experience and students may carry out their projects through a medium of their chossing (e.g., drawing, photography, painting, video, sound, performance and/or sculpture). We will immerse ourselves in the subject of time and create works of art inspired by our personal experiences and increased understanding of Time.

Examines how the East is constructed as the Orient in different historical periods: 19th-century European colonialism, 1950s to 1960s Hollywood films, contemporary Japanese animation, and the current global war on terrorism.

In this course, we watch art films by filmmakers working in various languages and regions of India. Our cinematic journey will touch on important themes in South Asian culture and history over the past 200 years. It will also introduce students to some of the formal elements of filmmaking to help them better “read” and appreciate the text of film. There will be weekly readings on Indian cinema, culture, and film theory. The Monday class is for weekly film screenings, although the Monday class will not meet if the assigned film is available streaming (about half the time).

This course explores the idea of Palestine as it is presented in Palestinian writings, films, and other creative works. We will study what Palestine is for the Palestinians, none of whom have lived in a Palestinian state and many of whom have spent more time in exile than in the land that has been known historically as Palestine; how Palestinian relationships to and expectations of Palestine may have changed over time; and how Palestinian portrayals of their dreamed-of homeland have affected our own perceptions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Arab world generally. How have Palestinian art, film, and literature helped to shape Palestinian identities and aspirations in different ways over the course of modern Palestinian history? In what ways have art, film, and literature intersected with Palestinian politics and a sense of political and personal agency?

Requisite: Prerequisite, BIOL 101. This class is designed for first- or second-year students beginning their study of biological sciences. The course will cover both biological concepts and scientific competencies necessary for a foundational mastery of genetics, molecular biology, and cellular biology. For biology majors, this is one of the three mandatory fundamentals courses required before taking relevant 200-level core classes and upper-level electives.

Requisites: Prerequisites, BIOL 101 and 101L. 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.

A good life depends on access to adequate food and medical care. Advances in biotechnology have made possible both agriculture and medicine, and further advances may allow us to feed and keep healthy a burgeoning population in both developed and undeveloped countries. This seminar will examine the science behind a number of striking recent advances in biology, including animal cloning, genetic engineering of crop plants, development of new therapeutic drugs, development of embryonic stem cells, and deciphering of the complete human genome sequence. Students will debate how specific technological advances force us to confront new social and ethical choices, such as whether you want your own genome to be sequenced. We will also consider how new technologies are actually implemented, especially in regard to recent public health challenges such as Zika and SARS-CoV-2 viruses. The seminar should bring together the humanistic and technical impulses in students, and is open to students planning careers in scientific or humanities fields.

In this course you will learn about the biodiversity around us, and the discipline of citizen science as a means to understanding more about that biodiversity. Citizen science is the public generation of scientific knowledge, and in this era of mobile technology and artificial intelligence, non-expert members of the public are providing millions of biodiversity observations each year. We will learn about the promise of citizen science for answering important questions in biodiversity science, we will contribute our own observations to citizen science databases, and we will learn how to make and interpret graphs and figures using citizen science data.

From milk bottles and grocery bags to contact lenses and diapers, polymers influence nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Through hands-on activities, readings, and interactive lessons, we will examine the role polymers have played, both positive and negative, on our society and world. The course will start with a general chemistry background in chemical structure. Then we will examine the impact of common plastics before exploring how polymers have influenced specific fields, including parts fabrication (e.g. 3D printing), dentistry, and electronics. During the course, students will have the opportunity to create their own biodegradable plastic as well as practice science communication through two separate projects: creating a stop-motion animation video and a 30-min group presentation.

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.

Helen of Troy is said to have been the most beautiful woman in the world, yet we have no evidence of what she really looked like. This missing piece has worked in her favor, as authors and artists have tried to “fill in the blank” ever since. For over two millennia, her story has inspired countless creative responses, from Homer’s Iliad to Hollywood’s Troy. Helen makes us think about issues that still resonate today: how do we define beauty? what is worth fighting for? how far should one go for love? In this course, we will study the story of Helen in multiple retellings, asking questions about the value of beauty, the risks of desire, and the consequences for society when individuals place love above all else. Students will read ancient and modern sources, analyze and debate them, and write about the issues. The course requires no prior knowledge of the material.

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 course introduces students to several primary areas of focus for social justice-oriented scholarship and activism. These areas include racial justice, labor and economic justice, gender and sexual justice, and environmental justice. The course will also introduce students to ways that these issues are studied in the Department of Communication at UNC, by paying particular attention to popular culture and public engagement as sites of struggles for social justice.

Qualitative research offers an exciting way to discover the world. There are so many unknowns about why people do the things they do, what is meaningful in people’s lives, how conflicts arise or are resolved, how technologies shape possibilities, how symbols acquire meaning, and how social change occurs. Whereas we all have ready-made “frames” that provide us with hunches about why things are the way they are, the task of the researcher is to ask good questions and then seek answers, all the while being open to—and eagerly pursuing—surprises. This intellectual posture of genuine curiosity is what animates some of the best research. This is the kind of research you will learn about and will conduct yourself in this course.

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 seminar studies the elements of design in their pure form and in context, surveys a history of period styles and theatre, and identifies their causes. Consider Oscar Wilde’s statement from The Decay of Living 1889:

“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely from Life’s imitative instincts, but from the fact that the self conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy…”

Do you agree or disagree?

Art and design have frequently shown the inner life of humankind throughout history better than political, intellectual or social history. While a period’s style is seldom defined by the everyday choices of everyday people and is most often recorded in the works of artists, writers and intellectuals we must recognize the “times” as a major motivator for all stylistic choices. Even minor arts reflect major events.

We will study the elements of design as they exist in their pure form; a “tool box” of elements available to artists and practice the principles to which design is bound.
We will survey a history of period styles, period theatre and identify their causes.
We will explore one period’s style as a foundation for the next and dispel the Star Trek premise that future styles will only reflect the future.

Introduction to fundamental issues in economics including competition, scarcity, opportunity cost, resource allocation, unemployment, inflation, and the determination of prices.

In this Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE), we will study the barriers and tools for success in college. Students will develop a measure of success and identify a focal barrier to success in collaboration with classmates and drawing on existing research. Students will synthesize existing evidence in the related literature, collect their own data and create their own evidence on the topic.

What explains the ‘pull of the Poles’? What motivated early explorers to undergo great hardships to investigate the Arctic and Antarctic, and what did they discover about these regions? What have we discovered in the intervening decades, and what do we still not understand about polar regions? Why do the Arctic and Antarctic play such a critical role in global climate? This seminar will combine scientific and historical perspectives to investigate the ‘ends of the earth’, the Arctic and Antarctica. We will begin by surveying the geography and oceanography of these regions, and then step back into the past and follow in the footsteps of some of the early polar explorers through their own accounts of their explorations. Modern accounts will help us compare and contrast these early explorations. The seminar will also include readings and discussions about current questions and problems of the polar regions, in particular human impacts and potential effects of global warming. A ‘Makerspace’ component is an important feature of the class – students will be supplied with materials to work on a design/build challenge, testing, revising, discussing, and consulting with one another to improve their efforts through the course of the semester. This ‘making’ experience is highly relevant to the experiences of early polar explorers as well as modern oceanographers, who often have to improvise and fix or build or create things on the spot, with materials at hand, in order to solve specific problems. Note that no experience in Makerspace, and no design or build experience, is assumed, expected, or required for this seminar. There are no prerequisites for this seminar.

Is it possible that people across generations and geographies see differently? What if what we see is related to who we are and our cultural beliefs? These are among the questions we will explore in this class on visual literacy and comics (in the form of adult graphic novels). We will question how meaning is made through the juxtaposition and framing of images as well as the relationship between words and images. In the process of comparing images, visual patterns emerge that enable the reader to identify artistic techniques and strategies that attempt to convey meaning where words might fail. We will work to sharpen our critical thinking (and reading) skills and reflect on how seeing is a socially and culturally circumscribed phenomenon. Creating a graphic narrative and a podcast about graphic novels are two projects we will undertake.

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.

How have ideas about courtship changed between the twelfth century and today? Just what was “courtly love”? And how has it influenced our own views of romance? Our readings will include literature that defined this influential concept, from medieval Arthurian romances to Renaissance sonnets and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. We will trace the influence of these traditions on twentieth-century films such as The Philadelphia Story, and on our popular culture now. In the process, we will explore the history of Western thought about gender relations, and the political and economic implications of our ideas about beauty, sex, and love.

When medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman writes that “illness has meaning,” he reminds us that the human experience of being sick involves more than bodily symptoms. Moreover, the effects of illness and disability are rarely confined to one person. In this course, we will analyze a diverse collection of writers who have taken as their topic the human struggle to make sense of suffering and debility through a range of genres including fiction, non-fiction, graphic memoir, podcasts, and oral histories. Divided into five units, the course will allow us to explore not just the medical, but also the personal, ethical, cultural, and political facets of illness from the perspectives of patients, healers, and families. Central texts will include works by Abby Norman, Damon Tweedy, Brian Fies, and Lulu Wang. Additionally, students will explore a set of oral histories from the Stories to Save Lives project to learn more about the experiences of patients, healers, and families from across North Carolina.

Scan any bookstore shelf and you’d think the human psyche is hanging on by a thread. From fighting anxiety to seeking happiness to putting an end to procrastination, the titles compete for the opportunity to fix our problems with the promise of self-improvement. But are we really in worse psychological shape than those who have come before us? And how would we begin to study the status of our wellness? This first-year seminar will offer one approach to exploring these and related questions: studying the rhetoric of self-help. Rhetoric provides a lens for thinking about the ways people talk about self-help. This lens will drive the organization of the course. Studying the language in online self-help discourse, for instance, will enable extensive research activities. Students will learn to collect a corpus of Tweet data, and then use grounded theory and qualitative approaches to study the conversation. Using mixed methods, they will then quantify interpretations and develop visuals to recognize patterns. In addition to working with contemporary online discourse, students will explore texts with historical instantiations of self-help rhetoric—from classical instruction linked with civics and oration to medieval meditations to 1960s and 70s self-actualization to modern mindfulness. Rhetorical study will also facilitate the production of knowledge as students translate their understanding into communication to be shared publicly. The class activities will feature the creation of texts in a range of media. Students will produce print reports, visual memes, and PSA video projects. Students will also explore oral communication through the creation of podcasts. The combination of mixed methods research and public communication will drive the class. Teaching methods will tap into this dynamic by augmenting lecture and discussion with hands-on activities, collaboration, and the drafting and revision of projects.

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.

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.

How sustainable is our university? Cities around the world face issues of environmental degradation, congested traffic, poor water supplies, sanitation concerns, poor energy delivery and waste management. A research university is analogous to a small city, where we can both investigate and more easily implement sustainable technologies and practices. In this class we will examine the sustainability concerns of the modern university, going “back of the house” around UNC—how green is our energy? Our food? Our water? How do we handle waste across these inputs? We will examine how sustainability is measured and improved, comparing our institution’s progress to other similar schools, and ask ourselves both where we can do better and how we can convince the system to make it happen.

The study of the structure of the human body with special emphasis on the musculoskeletal, articular, and nervous systems. Prosected cadaver materials are utilized to study the skeletal muscles and body viscera.

This first year seminar designed to discuss the limits of human performance and equipment that is engineered to enhance performance. How fast is it possible to run or swim? Will Olympic records continue to be broken? When do we reach our full athletic potential? This course is designed to challenge your thinking about performance using the science that governs biomechanics and human physiology as well as exploring the data that drives equipment development.

An introduction to historical and contemporary ideas about practices and meanings of development. Students will explore “development” in a global landscape of poverty, power, and struggles over inequality.

This seminar uses the lens of culture to explore the codes of meaning and values, and relations of social power, that are ‘hard-wired’ in our technologies. Focusing on reflections of technology in film, art, literature, media, and built environments, while introducing students to interdisciplinary cultural studies of technology and human geography perspectives, the course encourages critical thinking and writing about the place of technology in past, present, and future worlds.

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.

This seminar deals in the broadest possible context with two critical issues that dominated the 20th century: the rise of fascism out of the carnage of World War I 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. Towards the end of the semester, we will 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 will conclude the seminar 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 general prognosis for democracy in the future.

This course presents a critical analysis of the migrant experience in North America and Europe. In addition to examining theoretical explanations for migration, this course will ensure that students develop a deep, personal, and practical appreciation of migration rooted in a social justice framework. To do so, we will utilize storytelling, documentaries, and my own firsthand lived experiences as a Latina immigrant. 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.
• Assess whether media portrayals of immigrants via shows such as TLC’s 90 Day Fiancé accurately represent the empirical reality of the migratory experience.

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.

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.

The seminar examines twentieth century European history through the lens of women’s autobiographical writings. It explores women’s voices from different generational, social and national backgrounds. We will read and discuss autobiographical texts by six women, who grew up in middle class families in Austria, Britain, France and Germany and wrote about their lives in the first half of the twentieth century. They all tried to make a difference in society and politics: Emmeline Pankhurst (1958-1928), a leader of the militant British suffragette movement; Alice Salomon (1872-1948), a liberal Jewish-German social reformer and activist of the German middle class women’s movement; Vera Brittain (1893-1970), a British volunteer nurse during World War I, who became after the war a peace activist and writer; Toni Sender (1888-1964), a German-Jewish socialist and one of the first female parliamentarians in Weimar Germany, who like Salomon after the Nazi’s takeover in 1933 had to flee Germany; Genevieve De Gaulle-Anthonioz (1920-2002), a French resistance fighter during World War II and a survivor of the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück; and Ruth Klüger (1931-2020), an Austrian-Jewish student who survived Auschwitz and became a professor in the U.S. The overarching theme of the seminar is the struggle of women for equal economic, social and political rights. We will explore what effects social and political changes, revolutions and wars as well as the Holocaust had on this struggle and the lives of women in Europe more general. Through intensive discussions of the reading in class, group work and the opportunity to do research on an autobiography written by a European women born between the 1850s and 1920s of their own choice, the seminar offers students a unique approach to twentieth century European history, will introduce them to research and writing, and the resources UNC-Chapel Hill offers.

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.

A workshop in autobiographical and creative short story, focusing on the complex connections between story-telling, interpretive skill, and the practice of medicine. Students will write and distribute autobiographical and and creative short stories about illness and medical care; the seminar will meet weekly to discuss these stories, attempting to identify and articulate the key issues each story expresses about what it means to be sick, what it might mean to take care of others in their illness. The writing and (especially) interpretive skills acquired in this workshop are directly valuable to anyone contemplating a career in medicine, but are equally valuable to anyone who might at some point encounter (in themselves or in someone they care for) the trauma of illness. In addition to the weekly workshop, participants will have one-on-one conferences with the instructor (himself an MD with an international reputation as a writer). The capstone project will be a public reading (via webinar, allowing participants to invite an audience from anywhere on the globe) of participants’ work, which may (at student option) be in the form of a film composed under guidance of experts at the University’s Media Resources Center illustrating images and themes from the written work.

Requisites: Prerequisite, MATH 110; a grade of C- or better 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.

Requisites: Prerequisites, MATH 110 and 130; Requires a grade of C- or better in MATH 130 or placement by the department. Limits, derivatives, and integrals of functions of one variable. Students may not receive credit for both MATH 231 and MATH 241.

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.

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, including the epsilon-delta definition of limit. 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.

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.

Philosophy is bursting with paradoxes: Zeno’s paradoxes of motion, the Liar Paradox, the Sorites Paradox, and also modern puzzles like the Trolley Problem. This class will explore the most exciting and influential paradoxes in the field, starting with ancient puzzles about infinity and ending with modern moral dilemmas.

Many features of human consciousness are puzzling. Why are people so ready to believe extraordinary claims on the basis of virtually no evidence whatsoever, but unwilling to accept the reality of well-documented phenomena? Why are people repulsed by some very ordinary biological phenomena but not by others? Why is it that some commonplace events can make some people anxious, while even near-fatal events can leave them unruffled? Why are we so much more willing to eat some things than others? This course will examine psychodynamic theories that attempt to explain these phenomena.

What is the point of learning about ethics? An ethics course should teach you how to recognize a moral issue when it stares you in the face. You should learn to appreciate its intricacies, to reason your way through it, and to discuss it with your peers. This will raise your skills of critical reflection and your moral sensitivities. And if you can translate what you gained into action, dare I say it, then it will make you into a better person as well. Short stories—much more so than the classics or contemporary journals of professional philosophy—are a great tool for this purpose. In this course, we will explore contemporary social, political and moral issues through short stories in world literature connect these stories with research papers in the social sciences and the humanities, blogs, and newspaper articles.

Requisites: Prerequisite, MATH 231; Pre- or corequisite, MATH 232; permission of the instructor for students lacking the prerequisites.

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.

Requisites: Prerequisite, PHYS 118; Pre- or corequisite, MATH 233; permission of the instructor for students lacking the prerequisites. Unification of the laws of electricity and magnetism; electromagnetic waves; the particle-wave duality; fundamental principles and applications of quantum mechanics. Students may not receive credit for PHYS 119 in addition to PHYS 105, 115, or 117.

In this seminar, we will analyze physics concepts by watching scenes from popular movies. The overall goal is to disentangle the complicated interplay of physics ideas in real-life situations and thereby to improve significantly our problem-solving skills. Emphasis is placed on group work rather than on traditional teaching. We will be addressing questions such as: Which scenes from movies are unphysical and which are realistic? How are physicists portrayed in movies? How does physics research influence society? Ultimately, we will gain a more fundamental understanding for physical concepts and how these concepts shape our world view. No prerequisite is required.

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

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 class will be taught remotely with both asychronous and sychronous components.

This course is concerned with politics and political conflict in the European Union and the United States. In part one you will learn about how democracy works (or doesn’t work) in liberal democracies. Why did socialism fail in the United States? What difference does the electoral system make? What are the reasons for the rise of nationalism and populism in Europe and the United States? How have these societies struggled with the challenge of the Coronavirus?

Are you interested in being a lawyer or public official? Do you know what it means to “think like a lawyer?” Have you considered why people mostly honor the law? Where do you find “the law?” How do judges decide difficult cases? This seminar will explore the notion of a rule of law, formal and customary law, legal analysis, judicial interpretation and the realities of the adversarial system and law practice. We will consider what makes law seem legitimate and how to assess whether it promotes liberty and justice. This seminar will challenge students to be reflective and critical about their own perspectives and to explore personal responsibility for promoting a rule of law. Students will be engaged in analytical thinking and expression through required participation in teacher-led dialogues based on assigned readings and with research and writing assignments. Reading materials include selections from court cases and other sources that provide an introduction to the notion of a rule of law, the sources of law that govern us and protect our individual rights, the nature of legal analysis, the different methods of judicial interpretation, and the realities of law practice and the adversarial system.

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.

What, if any, responsibilities accompany democratic citizenship? Voting? Active participation in political meetings? 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.

This seminar will introduce students to the issues, arguments, history, impact, and reasoning arising from or in conflicts between presidents and Congress. The constitutional conflicts that are the focus of the course involve presidents and Congress fighting for primacy in areas in which they have shared constitutional powers.

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.

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.

Explores linkages among nations, global environmental institutions, and the environmental problems they cause and seek to rectify. Introduces pressing challenges of the global environment, particularly around energy use and climate change, and potential solutions. Discusses perspectives of nations, NGOs, and the international community involved in crafting policy solutions. This class does not have any prerequisites.

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 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.

In 1905 the sociologist Max Weber famously proclaimed that capitalism has a “spirit.” Beyond just determining how we make money and circulate goods, Weber argued, capitalism is deeply entangled with religious ways of life. Both religious and economic systems work together to determine what we aspire to, how we organize communities and how we define our self-worth. Beginning from this insight, this freshman seminar examines the intersection of capitalism and religion through a series of key terms, including “vocation,” “aspiration,” “commodity,” “celebrity,” and more.

Set in plague-stricken Florence of 1348, Boccaccio’s Decameron begins with a portrait of social unravelling and civic collapse that is uncannily familiar in our jarring new pandemic reality. What can medieval literature and philosophy tell us about how to live when our knowledge, institutions, and laws falter? Who is at fault when catastrophe strikes? What is the role of art in responding to trauma, in rebuilding society? How does communal suffering compare to private suffering? How are power and privilege revealed, increased, or challenged in a pandemic? How do the narratives we tell about different maladies shape our lives and communities? This course explores Italian responses over the course of seven centuries to these questions, and reflects on how the Italian story continues to shape North American culture.

Hallucinations, depression, hysteria, paranoia, anxiety, neurosis, body dysmorphic disorder, obsession, and pain are only some of the symptoms that will be reflected in the narratives of this course. The authors featured in this seminar are familiar with the medical knowledge of their time and are often patients themselves suffering from the medical conditions they describe. Throughout the semester, we will examine the practices of authors – such as Maupassant, Montaigne, Selzer, Sembène, or Meruane – who not only borrow heavily from medicine in composing their works but also conceive of writing itself as something medical, that is, as having a therapeutic function for both writer and reader. Accordingly, we will study a group of writers and artists across time and space who explore, adapt, and converse with contemporaneous medical learning in their creative works.

Introduction to sociology as a discipline through documentary film that includes study of differences and equality, social structure and institutions, culture, social change, individuals and populations, and social psychology.

President Bill Clinton ended “welfare as we know it” in 1996 when he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act into law. This significant and historical welfare reform fundamentally changed the federal safety net in the United States and abolished guaranteed aid for those in poverty. In this first-year seminar, we will use a sociological lens to investigate the causes and consequences of welfare reform, as well as the subsequent expansion of other antipoverty programs designed to help the working poor. We will consider a range of viewpoints that inform current policy debates. Topics will include the conceptualization and measurement of poverty, causes of poverty, public and political attitudes toward welfare and the role of the government, and the implementation and efficacy of antipoverty policies.

Today, fast food restaurants have become a model for everyday life. Some scholars have even talked about the “McDonaldization” of the nation and the world. By that, scholars mean a drive toward greater efficiency, predictability, calculability, and control by non-human technologies in modern organizations. This drive has shaped many features of American life, including health care, law, and education. Such forces have even affected personal relationships. Sociologists have a term for this process: “rationalization.” We will explore “rationalization” through a process called “active learning” in which you will have opportunities to explore online resources, engage in peer-to-peer discussions, and work with me to develop a research project in which you explore the impact of rationalization on an occupation that might be a destination for you. We will spend one class period, every other week, working on the term paper in class. We will have four or five guests, sharing their expertise on how rationalization has affected their work. You will be assessed based on your contributions to blog posts, class discussion, short answer written assignments, and a research project culminating in a term paper (15-20 pages). You will then build an Adobe Spark page that explains, to the world, what you have learned. We will have no traditional examinations or quizzes.

Visit https://howardaldrich.org to view samples of prior term papers. Click on “Rationalization” in the top ribbon to see the beautifully illustrated term projects.

There are many forms of inequality in the U.S. labor market and in workplaces, including, for example, inequality across gender, race/ethnicity, social class, immigration status, sexual orientation, and parental status; and across dimensions and outcomes including pay, hiring opportunities, job authority, performance evaluations, and promotion decisions. This first-year seminar provides a deep dive into labor market inequality and specifically focuses on the causes, consequences, and opportunities to change inequalities arising from discrimination. We will consider questions such as: What are the causes of inequality and discrimination? How have causes and patterns of inequality changed in recent history? How do legal, academic, and other institutions understand discrimination, and how do these understandings differ from the lived experiences of people who may face discrimination? What forms of information would offer convincing evidence of discrimination? What are the consequences of labor market inequalities and how do experiences of discrimination shape future opportunities? Finally, we will consider what organizations and individuals can do differently to evaluate labor market or workplace inequality, develop solutions to reduce these forms of inequality, and implement sustainable changes.

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.

A smart city is one where the needs of a populace meet the needs of environmental sustainability. The balance between the social and environmental issues is governed by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) that power a smart city infrastructure. In this course, we learn about the influence of urban networks, smart city urban planning, energy as a catalyst of sustainable development, smart city infrastructure, sustainable transportation, flow of information and communications, smart grids, digital infrastructure and the role of data and information technology. We will discuss criteria for measuring the smartness of a city, including quality of life, citizen governance, and discuss issues that go towards the making of a future smart city. Several case studies will be presented with guest lecturers invited to present on critical thinking and practices in smart city development. Students will be involved in group projects to assess smartness of cities.

This course explores the role the Camino de Santiago (the Way of St. James) played in the construction of a distinctive Spanish identity in the medieval period of Europe. We will approach this issue from a variety of perspectives. From the religious point of view, we will discuss the transformation of the man into a legend and eventually a myth, as well as the growth of the pilgrimage to Santiago. From the political and economic perspectives, we will examine the role of the Camino in the strengthening of the first Christian Kingdoms in the North of Spain, the creation of the first Spanish knight orders and their fight against Islam. We will also discuss the cultural transference that took place along the Camino by analyzing the art, architecture, music and literature that developed in the cities and villages along the pilgrimage routes.

Few technological innovations have more profoundly shaped the course of human civilization than the invention of writing. This course explores the role of writing in the development of ancient religious traditions, covering the wide chronological period from the beginnings of writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt (approximately 3200 BCE) to the advent of Islam. We will begin by considering the nature of writing both as a technology and as a symbolic system, giving attention to insights coming out of modern linguistic research. Then we will examine a series of case studies of the relationship between religion and writing drawn from the ancient world (especially the ancient Near East), in order to illustrate the diversity and complexity of these interactions between technology and society. Specific topics to be addressed include: religion and the early alphabet, magical and mystical uses of writing, religion and literacy, scribal culture, and the development of “scriptural” texts such as the Bible and the Qur’an.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The lecture (PHYS 118-02F; meeting MWF, 9:05 AM – 9:55 AM; taught by Reyco Henning) is a large class shared with other lecture sections of PHYS 118. The studio lab (PHYS 118-401; meeting MW, 10:10 AM – 12:00 PM; taught by Yue Wu) is the First-Year Launch section.

PHYS 118 is a calculus-based introduction to Classical Mechanics. The course covers motion and kinematics in one and two dimensions, forces and Newton’s laws of motion, work-energy and conservation laws, frames of reference and Einstein’s theory of special relativity, rigid-body rotations, rolling, static equilibrium, and oscillations and waves.

The lecture (PHYS 118H-02F; meeting MWF, 9:05 AM – 9:55 AM; taught by Reyco Henning) is a large class shared with other lecture sections of PHYS 118. The studio lab (PHYS 118H-402; meeting TTH, 10:10 AM – 12:00 PM; taught by Amy Oldenburg) is the honors First-Year Launch section. The honors version of this course is differentiated by requiring a final project and presentation. Early in the semester, each honors student will identify a project of interest and submit the idea to the instructor, who will evaluate and discuss changes or other details with the student to finalize the curriculum for the semester. Suitable project choices will integrate multiple topics covered in the course and will require a detailed description and a brief literature review of relevant papers. A computational aspect is highly encouraged.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

A smart city is one where the needs of a populace meet the needs of environmental sustainability. The balance between the social and environmental issues is governed by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) that power a smart city infrastructure. In this course, we learn about the influence of urban networks, smart city urban planning, energy as a catalyst of sustainable development, smart city infrastructure, sustainable transportation, flow of information and communications, smart grids, digital infrastructure and the role of data and information technology. We will discuss criteria for measuring the smartness of a city, including quality of life, citizen governance, and discuss issues that go towards the making of a future smart city. Several case studies will be presented with guest lecturers invited to present on critical thinking and practices in smart city development. Students will be involved in group projects to assess smartness of cities.

By AD 1200, most Southeastern Indians were farmers who lived in societies ruled by hereditary chiefs. After 1500, encounters between Indians and Europeans changed the lives of all concerned, but the changes took place in, and were shaped by, existing cultures. This seminar uses reading, discussion, and lecture to examine the lives of Southern Indians and to understand how encounters and interaction with European explorers and colonists changed the worlds in which the Indians lived. Students will learn how archaeologists and historians work, both separately and together, to study the past of Native societies. Students will study and analyze archaeological artifacts, Spanish accounts of Southeastern Indians, and other primary materials in class. These activities, along with various role-playing exercises, will directly involve the students in the study of Native people in the period between 1200 and 1800. Grades will be based on class participation, two short papers, participation in a group project, and a final paper related to the group project.

By AD 1200, most Southeastern Indians were farmers who lived in societies ruled by hereditary chiefs. After 1500, encounters between Indians and Europeans changed the lives of all concerned, but the changes took place in, and were shaped by, existing cultures. This seminar uses reading, discussion, and lecture to examine the lives of Southern Indians and to understand how encounters and interaction with European explorers and colonists changed the worlds in which the Indians lived. Students will learn how archaeologists and historians work, both separately and together, to study the past of Native societies. Students will study and analyze archaeological artifacts, Spanish accounts of Southeastern Indians, and other primary materials in class. These activities, along with various role-playing exercises, will directly involve the students in the study of Native people in the period between 1200 and 1800. Grades will be based on class participation, two short papers, participation in a group project, and a final paper related to the group project.

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.

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.

What cultural and intellectual resources do we have to increase the intensity of our inner lives, to feel more vitally plugged into the world, and to be attracted to extraordinary modes of perception? We will read texts by famous philosophers, mystics, and poets in order to help us answer these questions. Assignments will explore creative and alternative forms of writing (rather than the standard academic essay): dialogues, narratives, letters, and free writing, among others. Authors include: Plato, Sappho, Marcus Aurelius, Hildegard von Bingen, Mechthild von Magdeburg, Meister Eckhart, Descartes, Pascal, Goethe, Kafka, Musil, Deleuze, and Rilke, among others. (Course taught in English. No prerequisites.)

No one would deny that Socrates, a 5th century BC Greek philosopher, was quite strange. He is perhaps the foundational philosopher of the West, yet he did not write a single word and claimed to know nothing; he was accused of corrupting the youth and undermining political institutions, yet is seen as one of history’s most important moral thinkers; he is infamous for his irony and playfulness, yet saw himself on a divine mission to convert people to the ‘examined life’; he cared little for his personal affairs or hygiene, yet believed that the only important thing in life is the improvement of one’s soul. In this course, we will seek to understand Socrates’ strangeness: what Socrates represented and continues to represent for so many, why he has had so much influence, and what we might learn from him, even 2,500 years later. We will read ancient authors who knew Socrates himself, (e.g., Plato, Aristophanes, Xenophon) as well as modern thinkers who are inspired by Socrates (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr., Hannah Arendt).

No one would deny that Socrates, a 5th century BC Greek philosopher, was quite strange. He is perhaps the foundational philosopher of the West, yet he did not write a single word and claimed to know nothing; he was accused of corrupting the youth and undermining political institutions, yet is seen as one of history’s most important moral thinkers; he is infamous for his irony and playfulness, yet saw himself on a divine mission to convert people to the ‘examined life’; he cared little for his personal affairs or hygiene, yet believed that the only important thing in life is the improvement of one’s soul. In this course, we will seek to understand Socrates’ strangeness: what Socrates represented and continues to represent for so many, why he has had so much influence, and what we might learn from him, even 2,500 years later. We will read ancient authors who knew Socrates himself, (e.g., Plato, Aristophanes, Xenophon) as well as modern thinkers who are inspired by Socrates (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr., Hannah Arendt).