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Triple-I Archive

Term Subject Catalog Number Section Course Title Days Times Description Instructor 1Instructor 1 Bio Instructor 2Instructor 2 Bio Instructor 3Instructor 3 Bio
Fall 2022 IDST 116 001 Gender MWF 1:25 PM – 2:15 PM

What is gender and where does it come from? Is gender something that people are born with? Or are they socialized into gender roles? Is gender in the eye of the beholder? To what extent do artists represent gender issues differently? How might one best critique or challenge gender norms? Are gender differences legal ground for treating men and women differently? Or should the law prohibit treating people differently based on gender? This course will consider these questions and more through the lenses of psychology, art, history, and law. The class will explore gender-related experiences across the lifespan, consider how gender has been represented and challenged in art throughout history, and discuss the differing ways that courts and lawyers have approached cases involving gender. This course will establish a foundation from which students can think critically about gender from multiple perspectives—personal, social, cultural, political, and juridical.

Maxine Eichner

Maxine Eichner, the Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor of Law, writes on issues at the intersection of law and political theory, focusing particularly on family relationships, social welfare law and policy; feminist theory; sexuality; and the relationship of the family, the workplace, and market forces. Professor Eichner is the author of The Supportive State: Families, Government, and America’s Political Ideals (Oxford University Press, 2010). She is now finishing a second book, The Free-Market Family: How the Market Crushed the American Dream (and How It Can Be Restored), which considers the harsh effects that market forces are having on American families today, and which argues that the government’s role is to shield families from these forces. She is also an editor of Family Law: Cases, Text, Problems (eds., Ellman, Kurtz, Weithorn, Bix, Czapanskiy, and Eichner, 2014). In addition, she has written numerous articles and chapters for law reviews, peer-reviewed journals, and edited volumes on law and political theory.

Elizabeth Olson

Elizabeth Olson is Professor of Geography and Global Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She holds an M.A. in Political Science/Public Policy and a Ph.D. in Geography, both from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She was previously on faculty at Lancaster University, England, and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She researches care, ethics, and geographies of inequality. She has published widely on topics related to normative ethics, the geographies of religion and spirituality, and youth and young people, and is co-editor of Religion and Place: Landscapes, Politics and Piety (2012) and The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies (2020). She loves teaching and offers classes related to global inequality and global theory, cultural landscapes, and geographies of religion.

Cary Levine

Cary Levine is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History. His first book, Pay for Your Pleasures: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon, examines the work of three important Southern California artists. His second book, The Future is Present: Art, Technology, and the Work of Mobile Image focuses on the intersections of art, politics, and technology. He was a 2020 recipient of the Art Journal Award and a 2014 recipient of the Hettleman Prize for Scholarly Achievement at UNC. He has lectured nationally and internationally, has written for various magazines and museum catalogues, and previously worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Fall 2022 IDST 118 001 Fake News, Real Science TTH 8:00 AM – 9:15 AM

Students often come into science courses with preconceptions about how the world works. These preconceptions are often retained even if the course content illustrates that they are incorrect. The role of educators then is not only to teach students new content, but also to help them to dismantle pre-existing misconceptions so that they can create new foundational ideas for understanding science.

This course will explore how news media’s portrayals of controversies (or perceived controversies) in science affects how students learn in the classroom. Students will be taught science content using passive and active instructional techniques and will analyze the data to explore how each teaching technique addressed their own misconceptions. They will also explore best practices for conveying potentially controversial science information in the news media and analyze how objective science information can become biased prior to media dissemination.

Troy Sadler

Troy Sadler is the Thomas James Distinguished Professor of Experiential Learning in the School of Education. He studies how people learn science and how to improve the teaching of science. He is particularly interested in how people think about complex societal issues that connect to science such as climate change, food security, and genetically engineering. He is also interested in how technologies can support learning experiences and has led efforts to design and test two serious games, one related to biotechnology and another related to water resources. He has taught science in middle school, high school, undergraduate, and graduate contexts.

Megan Plenge

Megan Plenge is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Geological Science. She has always loved teaching science, and particularly loves increasing science literacy by helping people understand the nature of science. She thinks the best way for students to learn how to think like scientists is to address real-world problems. Her approach to science research has been interdisciplinary, including environmental geochemistry, microbial ecology, and water-rock interactions. She loves drinking coffee, reading science fiction books, and commuting on bike or by foot.

Deen Freelon

Deen Freelon is an associate professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina and a principal researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). His theoretical interests address how ordinary citizens use social media and other digital communication technologies for political purposes, paying particular attention to how identity characteristics (e.g. race, gender, ideology) influence these uses. Methodologically, he is interested in how computational research techniques can be used to answer some of the most fundamental questions of communication science. Freelon has worked at the forefront of political communication and computational social science for over a decade, coauthoring some of the first communication studies to apply computational methods to social media data. Computer programming lies at the heart of his research practice, which generates novel tools (and sometimes methods) to answer questions existing approaches cannot address. He developed his first research tool, ReCal, as part of his master’s thesis, and it has since been used by tens of thousands of researchers worldwide. His scholarship has been financially supported by grantmakers including the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Spencer Foundation, the Knight Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation; and published in top-tier journals including Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Freelon earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2012 and formerly taught at American University in Washington, D.C.

Fall 2022 IDST 119 001 Food: People, Politics, Policy TTH 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM

Have you ever really thought about the meal that you just consumed? If you ate a hamburger, fries and milkshake, or a kale salad, where did that meal come from, and what does it mean to you? If you were living in a different country, what might that meal look like? Who are the laborers who made the meal possible? What are the ethics surrounding the work that went into that meal? How does that meal interact with your body? Is your body designed for this food? How do we make policies about food in the US? Is it any different in other countries? What are the ethical concerns of food policy? All of these questions and more will be discussed in this course.

Sarah E. Dempsey

Sarah E. Dempsey is a critical organizational communication scholar who thinks, writes, and teaches about work, labor, and the dynamics of communication and power. Her current research examines the values and practices animating the living wage movement and its impacts on the restaurant industry. Before becoming a professor, she worked as a: dishwasher, restaurant server, river boat ticket seller, salesperson, tractor driver, environmental educator, and web site developer. If she could be anything in the world, she’d be a detective.

Melinda Beck

Melinda Beck is a Professor in the Department of Nutrition. Her PhD is in microbiology and immunology. So why is she a faculty member in a Nutrition department? Because she learned that what you eat can have a profound effect on your body’s ability to fight off infections. She loves teaching undergraduates, and she wants to instill a life-long passion for learning in all students. One of her sons graduated from UNC and he now works for a non-profit that assists the homeless with obtaining permanent housing. Professor Beck’s hope is all students find careers in an area they are passionate about.

Lindsey Smith Taillie

Lindsey Smith Taillie studies the impact of policies on diet and health. In the US, she conducts experiments using the convenience store lab (UNC Mini Mart) to examine how changes in the food environment affects what parents and children buy and eat. Internationally, she works in Mexico, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, and South Africa to examine the impact of policies like bans on junk food marketing to kids and taxes and warning labels on sugary drinks. She has two daughters (5 and 2) whose favorite foods are sauerkraut and olives, and an enormous poodle whose favorite food is microwaved hot dogs.

Fall 2022 IDST 190 012 Humans and the Cosmos TTH 3:30 PM – 4:45 PM

This course is an interdisciplinary introduction to some of the most essential and exciting debates about humanity’s relationship to the universe. We explore such topics as the beginning of existence, the nature of time, contact with the supernatural world, and predictions about the end of all things–from the perspective of philosophy, physics, history, and related disciplines.

Molly Worthen

Molly Worthen teaches courses in the history of religion and ideology, primarily in the U.S. and Canada. Her latest book is Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Trump (2025). Dr. Worthen has also published courses with Audible and The Great Courses on global Christianity and charismatic leaders. She writes for the New York Times and other outlets about religion, politics and higher education.

Joaquin Drut

Joaquin Drut is a quantum many-particle theorist by training. That means that Dr. Drut spends most of his time thinking about how to calculate and predict the physics of systems of many particles, when they are governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. Some of those systems are studied in labs on Earth, but the most interesting ones are deep inside the most massive stars, where the elements are created at unimaginably high densities and temperatures. Dr. Drut regularly teaches a course on computational and mathematical methods for physics majors, where the importance of abstract linear algebra and generalized Fourier analysis as concepts underlying physical laws are emphasized.

Gabriel Trop  

Gabriel Trop has intellectual interests in philosophy from antiquity to the present focusing on theories of art (aesthetics), science, and literature, with a special emphasis on German and French literature in the long nineteenth century. In his teaching, he tends to explore resonances between literature, film, politics, and philosophical existentialism; Dr. Trop has taught previous courses on Freedom and Terror in German Philosophy, and on the films of Christopher Nolan and German Romanticism, for example. As a classical musician (cellist), he is also interested in the aesthetics of music.

Fall 2022 IDST 190 013 Borders and Boundaries TTH 9:30 AM – 10:45 AM

What are borders and boundaries? Have they always existed? How do they come into being and how have conceptualizations of borders and boundaries changed throughout human history? What can people do when borders and boundaries impinge on their lives? How do people experience borders and border-crossings? These are some of the questions we will address in Borders and Boundaries, particularly through case studies anchored in the Middle East. We will consider ancient theories of borders and boundaries as material objects and in relation to human bodies and political institutions. We will also consider the role of borders and boundaries in the formation of culture, identity, and the state. By studying the cultural and political meaning of both ancient and modern borders and boundaries, we will examine the role these geographical structures play in producing differences between groups of people, particularly in situations of displacement and migration. Throughout the course our study of specific historical and political cases will be supplemented with analysis of imaginative works (literature, films, and art) that arise directly out of the creation and maintenance, as well as the crossing, of borders and boundaries. This interdisciplinary framework will encourage students to consider borders and boundaries at the level of theory and of the lived experiences of specific communities and individuals.

Nadia Yaqub

Nadia Yaqub is professor of Arab culture in the Department of Asian Studies and adjunct professor in the department of English and Comparative literature. She received her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research has treated Arab cultural texts ranging from medieval literature and contemporary oral poetry to modern prose fiction and visual culture. Her recent publications include Bad Girls of the Arab World (University of Texas Press 2017), a volume of essays co-edited with Rula Quawas, and Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (University of Texas Press, 2018), a monograph about Palestinian cinema of the long 1970s. She is currently working on a book about engaged cinema from the Arab world of the 1970s and 1980s and an edited volume about visual representations of Gaza.

Jennifer Gates-Foster

Jennifer Gates-Foster is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and Curriculum in Archaeology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She received her PhD at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2005 and has been at Carolina since 2013. Her primary research interest is in the archaeology of the Hellenistic and early Roman Eastern Mediterranean, especially Egypt, with a focus on the construction of identity and political authority in border regions.

Banu Gökariksel

Banu Gökarıksel is Professor of Geography and the Chair of the Curriculum in Global Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where she have been a faculty member since 2005. She grew up in Turkey and earned her B.A. (in Economics) and M.A. (in Anthropology/Sociology) at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul and Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Washington, Seattle. She is a feminist political and cultural geographer interested in bodies, borders, and everyday spaces as key sites of politics and geopolitics. Her research analyzes embodied and lived experiences of religion and secularism, the production of social difference, and the formation of subjects, borders, and territory.

Fall 2022 IDST 190 017 What is Art? Where is Art? TTH 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM

What is art? And where is it found? Museums are devoted to it, scholars study it, collectors spend millions to own it. And yet, definitions of art reveal more about the people doing the defining than they do about the creative expressions themselves. By asking the question—rather than by answering it—this class will explore why art matters as a category, what roles artists play in their societies, and what changing conceptions of art tell us about people, cultures, and values around the world.

Victoria Rovine

Professor Rovine loves all kinds of art. She teaches African art history courses, with a focus on dress and adornment. Her current research is on the roles of textiles in French colonial West Africa, when they were important as cultural symbols and as clothing. Her first book is on a type of cloth from Mali whose patterns and techniques were adapted to new markets and meanings in the late 20th century. Her second book is about African fashion design, looking at how designers reimagine styles from their own cultures to create new artistic statements that both preserve and transform the past.

Meta DuEwa Jones

Professor Meta DuEwa Jones is a researcher, creative scholar, poet, and professor. She believes writing and teaching about art and literature can transform the way we read, see, and think and thus can influence how we live. She currently researches and teaches courses focused on African American literature, music, visual art and graphic novels. Her first book was about innovations in American poetry that were influenced by blues, jazz and hip hop. Her research also illuminated how central gender and sexuality are to writing about music and its attendant visual cultural aspects. Her current book explores how writers and visual artists transform their experiences living or traveling within Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas into expressive media.

Gabrielle Berlinger

Gabrielle A. Berlinger is a folklorist who studies creative expression in everyday life. She consider how people tell stories, dress, cook, dance, make music, and perform religious rituals to be artful acts of communication, all revealing the individual within a tradition. Her first book focused on the nature and significance of material creativity and ritual practice in contemporary Jewish communities. Currently, she is researching the poetics of everyday object collection, preservation, and use in alternative house museums.

Fall 2022 IDST 190 020 The Future of Food: Technology, Policy, Culture MWF 9:05 AM – 9:55 AM

The course will explore a range of topics around the food we eat before shifting focus to how we might grow food in the future. We will cover different disciplinary perspectives including science fiction, anthropology, public policy and marine ecology. The course begins with a history of food gathering: how has our love of and need for food influenced our social and political structures, trade and conflict among cultures, and the exploration of the planet? Students will learn about the impacts of feeding 8 billion humans on the natural world and strategies for reducing these impacts. A survey of recent innovations in food tech will be supported by historical background of how technology has shaped our relationship with food. We will use short fiction, one novel, films, and primary literature (journal articles) to compile, contrast and synthesize diverse perspectives on food systems of the past, present and future.

John Bruno

John Bruno is a marine ecologist and Professor in the Department of Biology. His research is focused on marine biodiversity and macroecology, coral reef ecology and conservation, and the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems. He earned his Ph.D. from Brown University in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University in disease ecology. His lab group primarily works in the Galápagos and the Caribbean – including Belize, the Bahamas, and Cuba. He is also a science communicator and co-developer of the oceans website SeaMonster.

Caela O’Connell

Caela O’Connell is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and the Environment, Ecology, and Energy Program. She got hooked on researching farmers and the environment in particular while studying Spanish at the Universidad de Habana in Cuba. Dr. O’Connell runs the Socio-Ecological Change Research Lab (SECR Lab) at UNC investigating different aspects of sustainability, agriculture, inequality, water, disasters, adaptation, crisis and environmental conservation and partnering with community organizations for engaged scholarship. Her work is primarily in the Caribbean and North and South America. When not thinking about the future for farming and our global environment, Dr. O'Connel enjoys cooking, baking for friends, hiking (nothing too steep), taekwondo, tracking hurricanes, and traveling with her family.

Anna Krome-Lukens

Anna Krome-Lukens is a Teaching Associate Professor in Public Policy. Her research focuses on the history of welfare and public health policies. She teaches courses about the intersection of policy and history, including “Why History Matters to Public Policy” and a first-year seminar on higher education policy. She also directs the UNC Public Policy Capstone program, facilitating the work of student teams who do policy analysis for non-profits and government agencies. She loves thinking about how the history of food systems shapes their possible futures, and she also loves cheese.

Spring 2023 IDST 112 001 Death and Dying MWF 10:10 AM – 11:00 AM

Death and dying are universal human experiences. Yet there is immense cultural variation and historical fluidity to the ways we define, understand and treat death, dying and relations between the living and the dead. This course explores the concepts of death and dying from three different disciplines (examples may include, but are not limited to, Anthropology, English and Comparative Literature, and American Studies). This course will consider similarities and differences between the three discipline research methodologies and will also introduce students to data literacy and principles of evidence.

Seth Kotch

Seth Kotch, associate professor in the Department of American Studies, conducts research in modern American history (specifically the social history of the criminal-legal system in the American south) and directs the Southern Oral History Program.

Jocelyn Chua

Jocelyn Chua earned her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University and is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology. As a medical anthropologist, Dr. Chua is broadly interested in people's lived experiences of suicide, death, and violence in the contemporary world, and particularly how mental health professionals and therapies intervene to reshape how people respond to these experiences. She has conducted research in India on suicide, and is currently working on a new project examining the use of psychiatric medications in war by the United States military.

Jennifer Larson

Jennifer Larson earned her PhD in English from UNC-Chapel Hill and is the Director of Credit Programs and Summer School at Digital and Lifelong Learning at UNC. She is also a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of English & Comparative literature. Her research interests include African-American literature (especially African American drama), Film Studies (especially race in contemporary cinema), American literature, and Composition (especially writing in/about law). She teaches courses such as Film & Culture, Literature & Law, and ENGL 105.

Spring 2023 IDST 113 001 The Idea of Race TTH 8:00 AM – 9:15 AM

This course, taught by a biologist, a linguist, and an ethnomusicologist, focuses on the idea of “race.” Historically, the idea that humans can be divided into distinct races has been a singularly pernicious one, having been used to justify the persecution, enslavement, and extermination of groups based on their presumed biological inferiority. Today, scientists agree that race is a false and distorting concept for understanding biological diversity among humans: what we describe as races are in fact social constructs, not genetic realities. Nonetheless, the idea of biological race persists in the popular imagination. In this course, students learn why race is not a viable human biological concept, how the idea of race arose historically (and continues to be maintained), and what alternative concepts exist for understanding human diversity and change over time.

Michael Terry

Michael Terry is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and adjunct associate professor in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. He researches the structure of dialects and the implications of dialectal differences for linguistic theory and educational practice.

David Pier

Dave Pier specializes in music, art, literature, and cultural politics in Africa and the African diaspora. His book, Ugandan Music in the Marketing Era, is an ethnographic study of folklore performance, corporate arts sponsorship, branding, and grassroots entrepreneurialism in contemporary Uganda. Currently, he is researching kadongo kamu, a Ugandan guitar-based pop music genre. He is also writing about the development of modern/contemporary dance in this country. Pier serves on the editorial board for the journal African Arts, as well as on the advisory board for UNC’s Process Series. He teaches Introduction to Africa, Music of Africa, Music of African Diasporas, Politics of Cultural Production in Africa, and a freshman seminar on Afrofuturism. As a jazz pianist, he has performed and recorded with Clark Terry, Jane Monheit, Roswell Rudd, Marcus Belgrave, and other jazz luminaries.

Daniel Matute
Spring 2023 IDST 121 001 Performing and Imagining the American South TTH 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM

The Mason and Dixon line marks a physical boundary, but beyond geographic location, what is the US South? Did its swamps spontaneously produce the blues? Did bluegrass music arise magically from the hills? What does the history of slavery in the US South have to do with the emergence of country music, R & B, or Soul? How did Gone With The Wind recreate the plantation myth for global audiences? In this course, we will examine the South in its cultural and historical incarnations to examine how it both generated and was generated by economic, technological, and political factors. Through textual and data driven analysis, we will come to understand how the South can be simultaneously the birthplace of rock and roll and the origin of the “Southern Strategy” — at once the seat of American authenticity and origin of Coca Cola, America’s first global brand.

Martin Johnson

Martin L. Johnson is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Main Street Movies: The History of Local Film in the United States (Indiana, 2018), and has published journal articles in Film History, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, Early Popular Visual Culture, and The Moving Image.

Jocelyn Neal

Jocelyn Chua earned her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University. As a medical anthropologist, she is broadly interested in the global proliferation of mental health sciences and therapies and how they transform people’s lived experiences and relations with others, particularly in response to death and violence in the contemporary world. Her current research examines the use of psychiatric medications in war by the US military. She teaches courses such as ANTH 147 Comparative Healing Systems, ANTH 405 Mental Health, Psychiatry and Culture, and ANTH 430 War, Medicine and the Military.

Fitz Brundage

I have taught at UNC since 2002. My broad area of interest in the United States since 1865, with a particular interest in the American South between 1865 and 1930. I teach courses on the social history of American popular music and on American film. I seem compelled to write books on somber topics, including lynching and torture. Currently I am writing a book on prisoner of war camps during the American Civil War. These topics undoubtedly have contributed to my fascination with American popular music, which provides therapy for my soul.

Spring 2023 IDST 124 001 Pandemics: Ethics, Literatures, and Cultures MWF 8:00 AM – 8:50 AM

For many people alive today, the COVID-19 pandemic created a new way of life different to anything they had previously experienced. Yet these new realities – social distancing, quarantine, protective masks, job loss, education disruption, anxiety, loneliness and death, among so many others, have been part of many peoples’ lives in pandemics – and epidemics – across time and global space. The Spanish flu of 1918 is a well-known example, as is the black death of 1346-1353. This course addresses the ties that bind, and ruptures between, experiences of pandemics. In so doing, we bring three specific lenses and sets of methods to bear – those of literature, anthropology, and philosophy. Approaches will hone skill sets including analysis, argumentation, close reading, and comparative thinking. Themes that will be weaved throughout the course are those of care, resources, and knowledge production. Care of patients, families, local and global values; Resources of medical interventions, social connection, political structures, and financial means; Knowledge produced through science, narrative, myth, metaphor, and argument.

Rebecca Walker

Rebecca Walker is Professor of Social Medicine and of Philosophy, and in the Center for Bioethics. She is a philosopher of medicine whose primary focus is on the relationship between moral theories and concepts and various biomedical practices. Her publications include over 30 original research articles and book chapters and her co-edited books are: Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems (2007), Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice: New Conversations Across the Disciplines (2016), and The Social Medicine Reader, third edition, Volumes 1&2 (2019). Prof. Walker teaches medical students during the foundational phase of their curriculum and ethics courses for undergraduate and graduate students.

Michele Rivkin-Fish

Michele Rivkin-Fish is Associate Professor of Anthropology. Her research focuses on health and gender in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russian societies, and on notions of justice in US health care reform. She is the author of Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Reproduction (2005), and is currently writing a monograph entitled “Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Search for a Liberal Biopolitics.” She is a co-editor of Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice: New Conversations Across the Disciplines (2016). Her teaching in medical anthropology focuses on the symbols, meanings, and political-economies of health and justice globally.

Jane Thrailkill

Jane F. Thrailkill is Bank of America Honors Distinguished Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. A scholar of American literature and health humanities, she publishes widely on the connections among literary study, the sciences, medicine, and philosophy. Her books are Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literature Realism (Harvard UP, 2007) and Philosophical Siblings: Varieties of Playful Experience in Alice, William, and Henry James (UPenn Press, 2021). Since 2016 she has taught third-year medical students at UNC’s School of Medicine. With Prof. Jordynn Jack, she co-founded HHIVE Lab in 2015 and collaborates with colleagues in the health sciences on interprofessional education projects. She has received recognition for her teaching, including UNC-Chapel Hill’s Board of Governor’s Award.

Spring 2023 IDST 125 001 The Art and Science of Expertise TTH 12:30 PM – 1:45 PM

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a practical framework of expertise development and self-regulation to pursue mastery in their personal passions. Through collaborative discussions and interdisciplinary instructor perspectives on expertise scholarship and course material, students will gain an understanding of the things that are most important to them, what it takes to become extraordinary in these areas while maintaining their psychological well-being, and a personalized plan to maximize their potential. Topics covered include deliberate practice, the psychology of motivation and positive functioning, accountability, competitiveness, leadership, resilience, happiness, flow, performance measurement, and well-being. The course will include both lectures and collaborative discussions, supplemented by research articles, Ted Talks, books, case studies and experiential exercises. Ultimately, at the end of the semester students will walk away from this class with a better understanding of the things that are most important to them, what it takes to become extraordinary in these areas, how to maintain students’ psychological and emotional well-being, and a personalized plan to do just that.

Jeff Greene

Jeff Greene is the McMichael Distinguished Professor of Educational Psychology and Learning Sciences in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology in 2007 from the University of Maryland at College Park. In his research, he studies the ways people learn using digital resources, and how to help them use those resources more effectively. Specifically, he studies how people can learn to self-regulate their learning, as well as how they can become better critical consumers of what they encounter online and in the world. He has published three books and over 60 book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles. Currently, he is the co-Editor of the American Psychological Association (APA) journal Educational Psychologist. He is the recipient of the Richard E. Snow Award for Early Career Contributions in Educational Psychology from Division 15 of APA, and he is an APA Fellow.

Erianne Weight

Erianne Weight is a Professor of Sport Administration who studies the intersection of sport and higher education, college sport organizational structure and culture, and the pursuit of expertise. She is the Director of the Center for Research in Intercollegiate Athletics, President of the North American Society for Sport Management, Chair of the UNC Faculty Athletics Committee, and consultant for LEAD1 Association and Collegiate Sports Associates. She earned her Ph.D. in Sport Marketing and Management from Indiana University, and her Master of Business Administration and B.S. in Exercise and Sport Science from the University of Utah where she also competed as a heptathlete and graduate assistant track coach. She is a Research Fellow for the College Sport Research Institute, has published 3 books, over 100 refereed articles and book chapters, has consulted for over 30 organizations, and has given roughly 150 invited and refereed research presentations. She is married to Matt Weight and has two daughters – Aleah and Lillian.

Anson Dorrance

Anson Dorrance is the women's soccer coach at the University of North Carolina. Under Dorrance's leadership at the University of North Carolina, the Tar Heels women’s soccer teams have won 22 of the 42 Women's Soccer National Championships with a .88 winning percentage over 44 seasons. He has led his team to a 101-game unbeaten streak and his players have won 20 National Player of the Year awards. He is not only the most successful coach in the women's game — a six-time National Coach of the Year — but an ambassador of the game. As a player in the ACC he was voted as one of the conference’s Top 50 players in the First 50 years (1953-2003). Many of his former players (including superstar Mia Hamm) have gone on to become the most accomplished players in the world, winning four World Championships (1991, 1999, 2015, 2019) and four Olympic Gold Medals (1996, 2004, 2008, 2012).

Spring 2023 IDST 126 001 Values and Prices TTH 9:30 AM – 10:45 AM

It is common today to use the price of a product or service as shorthand for its value. There is reason for this substitution, but it can be misleading as well, and too often leads people to ignore crucial questions about value in critical thinking and decision-making. In this course we will explore the distinction between:

What people happen to want, prefer, or value and
What people should want, prefer or value.

Observing peoples’ choices often puts us in a good position to understand why they do things they do and also helps us make sense of how markets work, how prices arise, and how various incentive structures influence our behavior. Thinking about what people should value, in contrast, is the necessary first step in evaluating what people do, making sense of how markets should work and what is involved in their failure, interpreting when a price reflects the true value of a product or service (or not) and designing incentive structures to encourage citizens to make the right choices.

Lord Darlington, in Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windemere’s Fan” warned against being someone “who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” In this course we will investigate the degree to which price and value are related. One theme we will be pursuing is that a society’s choices, as reflected through the pricing system of markets, often differ from what seems truly good, or just, or right. In light of this contrast, we will examine how and when economic, social and political systems can work to take advantage of, or even forge, a connection between what people choose and what they should value.

Patrick Conway

Patrick Conway is Professor of Economics. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University, a Masters in Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, and his undergraduate degree in Foreign Service from Georgetown University. He teaches introductory economics and international economics courses on campus. He has received the William A. Friday Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Bowman and Gordon Gray Professorship.

Kristin Wilson

Kristin Wilson is Clinical Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Kenan-Flagler Business School. She received her Doctorate in Business Administration in strategy from Harvard Business School. She earned a BA in economics and Latin American Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. She currently teaches courses in business strategy and business ethics to undergraduate business students.

Geoff Sayre-McCord

Geoff Sayre-McCord is the Morehead-Cain Alumni Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) Program. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh, and his undergraduate degree with honors in Philosophy from Oberlin College. He has held visiting positions and fellowships at Princeton University, the University of Edinburgh, the Australian National University, Auckland University, and the University of California at Irvine. Dr. Sayre-McCord is widely published in moral philosophy and the history of philosophy (with a focus on David Hume and Adam Smith). He regularly teaches an introductory ethics course — Virtue, Value, and Happiness, among others. He is the recipient of several teaching awards at UNC including three Tanners and, most recently, the Board of Governor's Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Spring 2023 IDST 132 001 Science for Hyperpartisan Times MWF 3:35 PM – 4:25 PM

Science for Hyperpartisan Times’ is a course about the place of science and scientific argument in public life. Specifically, it focusses on the ways that public discourse, debate, and discussion around how science and the presentation and interpretation of science influence our understandings of the world. Our goal is both to think carefully about how partisan public politics influence public debates around science policy, and to analyze how arguments about science shape contemporary public discourse and debate. We will pursue both goals with a careful eye for the ways that claims about the science and/or the authority of science can advance or detract from productive public debate.

Molly Worthen

Molly Worthen teaches courses in the history of religion and ideology, primarily in the U.S. and Canada. Her latest book is Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Trump (2025). Dr. Worthen has also published courses with Audible and The Great Courses on global Christianity and charismatic leaders. She writes for the New York Times and other outlets about religion, politics and higher education.

Jeffrey Warren

Formally trained as a marine geologist, Jeff Warren has spent the past 17 and a half years in State-level science policy positions including the coastal hazards policy specialist for the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management (2004 to 2010), the science advisor for the North Carolina Senate (2011 to 2017) and, most recently, the research director and now executive director for the North Carolina Policy Collaboratory headquartered at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2017 to present). Warren earned his BSc in geological sciences from the University of Arizona (1994), his MSc in geology from Auburn University (1997), and his PhD in geological sciences from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2006). Warren’s academic research included field sites in the southeastern US, northern Mexico, the East and South China Seas, and Antarctica for which he received the Antarctica Service medal of the United States of America from the National Science Foundation. In addition to his primary duties at UNC Chapel Hill with the Collaboratory, Warren has also been appointed a Professor of Practice in the Department of Public Policy.

Christian Lundberg

Chris Lundberg is a professor of rhetoric, a political consultant, and a corporate communications strategist. He is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at UNC Chapel Hill, where he writes about and teaches courses in public speaking, debate, persuasive communication and political rhetoric.
His academic work includes multiple books and award-winning articles on rhetoric, speech, and persuasion, including: The Essential Guide to Rhetoric (Bedford St. Martin’s, 2008, 2e 2017); Public Speaking: Choices and Responsibility (Cengage Publishers, 2014, 2e 2016, 3e 2022); and a book about the psychology of public persuasion called Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (University of Alabama Press, 2012). He has served as a debate and messaging consultant for numerous US Senate races, gubernatorial campaigns, and cabinet-level confirmation processes. His international work features extensive work in the United Kingdom, including work on the UK Prime Ministership, the Scottish leadership election, and consulting services for the “Vote Leave” campaign during the EU referendum. He is also the founder and CEO of Vocable Communications, a speech focused and data-driven communication consultancy serving senior leadership at multiple fortune 500 corporations. He received his Ph.D. in rhetoric from Northwestern University’s School of Communication in 2006, and his Master of Divinity from Emory University in 2000. In addition to his experience in the classroom and with consulting clients, he has over fifteen years of experience in speech and debate coaching, serving most recently as a coach and argument consultant for Harvard University. He has coached national championship intercollegiate debate teams at four separate universities (Liberty University, Emory University, Northwestern University, and Harvard University), and has coached multiple competitors to the top individual speaker award at the National Debate Tournament.

Fall 2023 IDST 112 001 Death and Dying TTH 12:30 PM – 01:45 PM

Death and dying are universal human experiences. Yet there is immense cultural variation and historical fluidity to the ways we define, understand and treat death, dying and relations between the living and the dead. This course explores the concepts of death and dying from three different disciplines (examples may include, but are not limited to, Anthropology, English and Comparative Literature, and Psychology & Neuroscience). This course will consider similarities and differences between the three discipline research methodologies and will also introduce students to data literacy and principles of evidence.

Jocelyn Chua

Jocelyn Chua earned her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University and is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology. As a medical anthropologist, Dr. Chua is broadly interested in people's lived experiences of suicide, death, and violence in the contemporary world, and particularly how mental health professionals and therapies intervene to reshape how people respond to these experiences. She has conducted research in India on suicide, and is currently working on a new project examining the use of psychiatric medications in war by the United States military.

Jennifer Larson

Jennifer Larson earned her PhD in English from UNC-Chapel Hill and is the Director of Credit Programs and Summer School at Digital and Lifelong Learning at UNC. She is also a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of English & Comparative literature. Her research interests include African-American literature (especially African American drama), Film Studies (especially race in contemporary cinema), American literature, and Composition (especially writing in/about law). She teaches courses such as Film & Culture, Literature & Law, and ENGL 105.

Jeannie Loeb

Jeannie Loeb earned her PhD from the University of North Carolina @ Chapel Hill, specializing in Behavioral Neuroscience. She has been a Teaching Professor in the Psychology & Neuroscience Department since January 2005 and is currently also the Director of Undergraduate Studies. She has taught a variety of courses over the years, but currently, she focuses on teaching General Psychology, Biological Psychology and a graduate course on college teaching. In her spare time (ha, what’s that?), she enjoys watching sci-fi and K- and C- dramas; walking on trails and sleeping.

Fall 2023 IDST 115 001 Understanding Health and Happiness TTH 9:30 AM – 10:45 AM

This course is designed to expose students to diverse approaches in the scientific study of health and happiness. In addition to introducing students to the scientific literature on these topics, the course will also teach students a variety of life skills, such as teamwork, developing social connections and “belongingness” at UNC, being physically active, and becoming confident that they can deploy evidence-based skills to increase their health and happiness, both in college and beyond. This is also a research-exposure course that aims to develop students’ data literacy to enable them to conduct their own scientific research. The three professors combine their intellectual resources and distinct disciplinary methods around topics related to the scientific study of happiness, assessed as both subjective and physical well-being.

Claudio Battaglini

Claudio L .Battaglini, PhD, is a Professor of Exercise and Sport Science (Exercise Physiology Specialization) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Battaglini received his BS degree from the Catholic University of Brasilia Brazil (1992) and his MA (1999) and PhD from the University of Northern Colorado in 2004. Dr. Battaglini’s research focuses on the effects of acute and chronic exercise on physiological, psychological, and physical functioning in cancer patients.

Barbara Fredrickson

Dr. Barbara Fredrickson is a Kenan Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she directs the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Laboratory. She is both an award-winning teacher and also among the most highly-cited scientists worldwide. Her books, Positivity and Love 2.0 have been translated into dozens of languages. She has been President of the International Positive Psychology Association and the Society for Affective Science. In 2017, Professor Fredrickson was honored with the Tang Prize for Achievements in Psychology, awarded to recognize exceptional career contributions to the well-being of humanity.

Arne Kalleberg

Dr. Arne Kalleberg is a Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has Adjunct Professorships in the Kenan-Flagler Business School, the Department of Public Policy, and the Curriculum in Global Studies. He received his BA from Brooklyn College and his MA and PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published extensively on topics related to the sociology of work, organizations, occupations and industries, labor markets, and social stratification. He served as Secretary of the American Sociological Association from 2001-2004 and as its President in 2007-2008. He is currently the editor-in-chief of Social Forces, an International Journal of Social Research.

Fall 2023 IDST 116 001 Gender TTH 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM

What is gender and where does it come from? Is gender something that people are born with? Or are they socialized into gender roles? Is gender in the eye of the beholder? To what extent do artists represent gender issues differently? How might one best critique or challenge gender norms? Are gender differences legal ground for treating men and women differently? Or should the law prohibit treating people differently based on gender? This course will consider these questions and more through the lenses of psychology, art history, and law. The class will explore gender-related experiences across the lifespan, consider how gender has been represented and challenged in art throughout history, and discuss the differing ways that courts and lawyers have approached cases involving gender. This course will establish a foundation from which students can think critically about gender from multiple perspectives—personal, social, cultural, political, and juridical.

Maxine Eichner

Maxine Eichner, the Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor of Law, writes on issues at the intersection of law and political theory, focusing particularly on family relationships, social welfare law and policy; feminist theory; sexuality; and the relationship of the family, the workplace, and market forces. Professor Eichner is the author of The Supportive State: Families, Government, and America’s Political Ideals (Oxford University Press, 2010). She is now finishing a second book, The Free-Market Family: How the Market Crushed the American Dream (and How It Can Be Restored), which considers the harsh effects that market forces are having on American families today, and which argues that the government’s role is to shield families from these forces. She is also an editor of Family Law: Cases, Text, Problems (eds., Ellman, Kurtz, Weithorn, Bix, Czapanskiy, and Eichner, 2014). In addition, she has written numerous articles and chapters for law reviews, peer-reviewed journals, and edited volumes on law and political theory.

Cary Levine

Cary Levine is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History. His first book, Pay for Your Pleasures: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon, examines the work of three important Southern California artists. His second book, The Future is Present: Art, Technology, and the Work of Mobile Image focuses on the intersections of art, politics, and technology. He was a 2020 recipient of the Art Journal Award and a 2014 recipient of the Hettleman Prize for Scholarly Achievement at UNC. He has lectured nationally and internationally, has written for various magazines and museum catalogues, and previously worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Anna Bardone-Cone

Anna Bardone-Cone, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. She graduated from Williams College with a BA in Mathematics and French, received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and completed her predoctoral clinical psychology internship at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic. Her research interests are in eating disorders and body image, in particular: 1) defining eating disorder recovery; 2) identifying and testing pathways to disordered eating with particular interest in the role played by psychosocial variables (e.g., perfectionism, self-efficacy, social comparison, stress) and how these variables interact; and 3) examining cultural, familial, and media factors related to disordered eating and body image.

Fall 2023 IDST 123 001 Borders and Boundaries MWF 9:05 AM – 9:55 AM

Have you ever wondered how the borders that you see on maps or cross in your own life came to be? Have you ever considered how those lines correspond with the lived experiences of communities and how those who cross borders, such as refugees, experience them? Have you ever wondered how boundaries and borders become a locus of conflict or sites of resistance? This semester we will tackle these and other questions by considering the concept of the border from different disciplinary perspectives and focusing our case studies on locations in the Mediterranean, Middle East and North Africa. We will consider ancient theories of borders and the body and the role of borders and boundaries in cultural formation and identity. We will explore different technologies used to govern borders and boundaries and how they affect migration, mobility, and security. Much of our work together will involve the examination of creative responses to the border and will take us from ancient Athens and Egypt to Palestine and Turkey/European Union.

Nadia Yaqub

Nadia Yaqub is professor of Arab culture in the Department of Asian Studies and adjunct professor in the department of English and Comparative literature. She received her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research has treated Arab cultural texts ranging from medieval literature and contemporary oral poetry to modern prose fiction and visual culture. Her recent publications include Bad Girls of the Arab World (University of Texas Press 2017), a volume of essays co-edited with Rula Quawas, and Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (University of Texas Press, 2018), a monograph about Palestinian cinema of the long 1970s. She is currently working on a book about engaged cinema from the Arab world of the 1970s and 1980s and an edited volume about visual representations of Gaza.

Jennifer Gates-Foster

Jennifer Gates-Foster is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and Curriculum in Archaeology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She received her PhD at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2005 and has been at Carolina since 2013. Her primary research interest is in the archaeology of the Hellenistic and early Roman Eastern Mediterranean, especially Egypt, with a focus on the construction of identity and political authority in border regions.

Banu Gökariksel

Banu Gökarıksel is Professor of Geography and the Chair of the Curriculum in Global Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where she have been a faculty member since 2005. She grew up in Turkey and earned her B.A. (in Economics) and M.A. (in Anthropology/Sociology) at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul and Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Washington, Seattle. She is a feminist political and cultural geographer interested in bodies, borders, and everyday spaces as key sites of politics and geopolitics. Her research analyzes embodied and lived experiences of religion and secularism, the production of social difference, and the formation of subjects, borders, and territory.

Fall 2023 IDST 129 001 Countering Hate TTH 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM

Many of our social problems appear to stem from feelings of animosity people have towards others: racism, misogyny, antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, white supremacy, etc. At the same time, many of our most profound cultural endeavors are aimed at overcoming the fears, suspicions, and misunderstandings that underpin that animosity. In this class, we examine the cognitive and psychological bases for animosity towards others, and how our political and social structures have fostered such feelings. We then examine cultural efforts to overcome them through performance, literature, visual representations (including film, photography, and other visual arts), and faith. The questions we will address include: How have performers, directors, writers, artists, and faith leaders addressed problems of hate and misrepresentation in their work? How do writers and other artists approach painful moments in history? How can our practices of reading, viewing, or listening counter hate? What role do faith communities play in generating and countering hate?

Yaakov Ariel

Much of Yaakov Ariel’s research has focused on Protestantism, especially Evangelical Christianity, and its attitudes towards the Jewish people and the Holy Land; on Christian-Jewish relations in the late modern era; and on the Jewish reaction to modernity and postmodernity. He has published numerous articles and three books on these subjects. One of these books, Evangelizing the Chosen People, was awarded the Albert C. Outler prize by the American Society of Church History. His latest book, An Unusual Relationship: Evangelical Christians and Jews, was published in 2013 by New York University Press. His current project looks at the religious aspects in the life and career of poet Allen Ginsberg who was, in significant ways, a pioneer and prophet to many of his generation.

Peter Gordon

Peter Gordon’s field is the psychology of language and his interests in that field are very broad. Right now his basic research focuses on several topics related to word recognition and to higher levels of language comprehension. These include: the nature of the memory processes involved in understanding complex sentences, the interaction between lexical and higher-levels of language processing, and the coordination of language processing with more general mechanisms of memory, perception, attention, and motor control. Research on these topics in his laboratory uses two primary methods, eye-tracking during reading and measurement of event-related potentials (ERPs).

Afroz Taj

Afroz Taj’s research and teaching center around South Asian media, with emphasis on the film industry and television. His book, The Court of Indra and the Rebirth of North Indian Drama, explores the origins of the Urdu-Hindi musical theater in mid-nineteenth century Lucknow. His current book project focuses on the dynamics of the transition from the Parsi theater to early sound films in the 1920s and 1930s. He is also interested in the aesthetics of cinema, filmmaking techniques and technologies, and the history of Bollywood. While researching the history of Indian cinema he began to collect past issues of Shama magazine; in his next project, he will trace the impact of Shama on South Asian popular culture, including its visual and verbal constructions of gender identity in twentieth-century India and Pakistan.
Dr. Taj is also a creative writer: he has written, published, and recited his ghazals, geet, dohe, and short stories in Urdu and Hindi. Over the past ten years, he have undertaken to film interviews with important literary figures of South Asia, and he has made a number of short films in conjunction with the Door Into Hindi and Darvazah language-learning websites. His interest in media has enabled him to pioneer the use of new technologies and multimedia resources in language teaching.

Fall 2023 IDST 130 001 The Future of Food MWF 10:10 AM – 11:00 AM

You’ve probably been offered almond milk, but have you heard of potato milk? It’s coming. The ways we make, eat, and think about food are constantly changing. What will food look like a decade or century from now? This course combines perspectives from science fiction, anthropology, public policy, and marine ecology to address related questions: How has our love of and need for food influenced our social and political structures, trade and conflict among cultures, and exploration of our planet? How does food affect our relationships and shape our sense of who we are? How do policy choices shape the food we eat? How can we feed 8 billion humans without sacrificing the environment? How might technology and innovation shape our future food? This class will probably make you really hungry, and it might even change how you think about the food you eat.

Eliza Rose

Eliza Rose is Assistant Professor and Laszlo Birinyi Sr. Fellow in Central European Studies in the Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her research uses art, film, and science fiction to explore how the future was imagined in socialist Eastern Europe during the twentieth century. She is an alumna of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and her science fiction stories have been published in English, Polish, and French. The great paradox of her life is that she constantly thinks about outer space but would never want to travel there.

Caela O’Connell

Caela O’Connell is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and the Environment, Ecology, and Energy Program. She got hooked on researching farmers and the environment in particular while studying Spanish at the Universidad de Habana in Cuba. Dr. O’Connell runs the Socio-Ecological Change Research Lab (SECR Lab) at UNC investigating different aspects of sustainability, agriculture, inequality, water, disasters, adaptation, crisis and environmental conservation and partnering with community organizations for engaged scholarship. Her work is primarily in the Caribbean and North and South America. When not thinking about the future for farming and our global environment, Dr. O'Connel enjoys cooking, baking for friends, hiking (nothing too steep), taekwondo, tracking hurricanes, and traveling with her family.

Anna Krome-Lukens

Anna Krome-Lukens is a Teaching Associate Professor in Public Policy. Her research focuses on the history of welfare and public health policies. She teaches courses about the intersection of policy and history, including “Why History Matters to Public Policy” and a first-year seminar on higher education policy. She also directs the UNC Public Policy Capstone program, facilitating the work of student teams who do policy analysis for non-profits and government agencies. She loves thinking about how the history of food systems shapes their possible futures, and she also loves cheese.

Fall 2023 IDST 132 001 Science for Hyperpartisan Times MWF 2:30 PM – 3:20 PM

This course aims to help students navigate the messy intersection of science, policy, and politics by teaching how the substance, history, presentation, interpretation of science – as well as education about science – influence our understandings of the world. Students will: 1) analyze public discourse, education, and debate about science, 2) consider how philosophies, knowledge, data, and interpretations are created, delivered, and received, and 3) discuss how these factors – alongside partisan politics and bias from both sides of the aisle – influence science policy outcomes.

Matthew Springer

Matthew G. Springer is an interdisciplinary policy scholar by training and studies educational innovations and policies for improving system effectiveness and access to educational opportunities. Matt consults widely with government agencies and international organizations, including the U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Government Accountability Office, the National Governor’s Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the United Kingdom and Mexico governments, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. He has taught courses on the history and current trends in higher education, educator policy, education finance, research methods and causal inference, policy analysis, reading and writing academic research, and public policymaking. Matt’s research has appeared on ABC World News Tonight, Lou Dobbs Tonight, CNN’s Top of the Hour, National Public Radio, and The New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal. He is a managing partner at Basis Policy Research, an applied research and technical assistance firm with offices in Denver, Co, Grand Rapids, MI, and Hillsborough, NC. Before joining Basis, Matt was the Hussman Distinguished Professor of Education Reform at UNC and an education and public policy faculty member at Vanderbilt University.

Jeffrey Warren

Formally trained as a marine geologist, Jeff Warren has spent the past 17 and a half years in State-level science policy positions including the coastal hazards policy specialist for the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management (2004 to 2010), the science advisor for the North Carolina Senate (2011 to 2017) and, most recently, the research director and now executive director for the North Carolina Policy Collaboratory headquartered at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2017 to present). Warren earned his BSc in geological sciences from the University of Arizona (1994), his MSc in geology from Auburn University (1997), and his PhD in geological sciences from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2006). Warren’s academic research included field sites in the southeastern US, northern Mexico, the East and South China Seas, and Antarctica for which he received the Antarctica Service medal of the United States of America from the National Science Foundation. In addition to his primary duties at UNC Chapel Hill with the Collaboratory, Warren has also been appointed a Professor of Practice in the Department of Public Policy.

Christian Lundberg

Chris Lundberg is a professor of rhetoric, a political consultant, and a corporate communications strategist. He is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at UNC Chapel Hill, where he writes about and teaches courses in public speaking, debate, persuasive communication and political rhetoric.
His academic work includes multiple books and award-winning articles on rhetoric, speech, and persuasion, including: The Essential Guide to Rhetoric (Bedford St. Martin’s, 2008, 2e 2017); Public Speaking: Choices and Responsibility (Cengage Publishers, 2014, 2e 2016, 3e 2022); and a book about the psychology of public persuasion called Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (University of Alabama Press, 2012). He has served as a debate and messaging consultant for numerous US Senate races, gubernatorial campaigns, and cabinet-level confirmation processes. His international work features extensive work in the United Kingdom, including work on the UK Prime Ministership, the Scottish leadership election, and consulting services for the “Vote Leave” campaign during the EU referendum. He is also the founder and CEO of Vocable Communications, a speech focused and data-driven communication consultancy serving senior leadership at multiple fortune 500 corporations. He received his Ph.D. in rhetoric from Northwestern University’s School of Communication in 2006, and his Master of Divinity from Emory University in 2000. In addition to his experience in the classroom and with consulting clients, he has over fifteen years of experience in speech and debate coaching, serving most recently as a coach and argument consultant for Harvard University. He has coached national championship intercollegiate debate teams at four separate universities (Liberty University, Emory University, Northwestern University, and Harvard University), and has coached multiple competitors to the top individual speaker award at the National Debate Tournament.

Fall 2023 IDST 133 001 How to Not Be Fooled - Or Fool Yourself TTH 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM

Our society is drowning in information, so how do you avoid being fooled by bogus claims? In this class, we will examine two provocative topics (the age of Earth and the universe and climate change) where the data and our underlying beliefs often push us toward contradictory conclusions. We will learn how to study these ideas critically while remaining professional and respectful in our discourse. Our examination of these topics will be informed by the complementary perspectives of the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. Students will learn the fundamental science and data interpretation skills needed to understand these topics, how to deal with probability and uncertainty in science, how to recognize logical fallacies in arguments, how to critically examine claims, the psychology of belief systems, and how our brains decide what to accept and what to reject when we are forming beliefs.

Steven Buzinski

Dr. Steven Buzinski is a Teaching Associate Professor, the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies, and Directs the Karen M. Gil Internship Program, in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience. He is also the Executive Director of Instructional Development for the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding. Dr. Buzinski is an award-winning instructor who primarily teaches courses in Social Psychology, including Introduction to Social Psychology, Attitude Change, and Self-Regulation. His research focuses on the development of self-regulatory interventions to improve health and education outcomes.

Ram Neta

Ram Neta is Professor of Philosophy at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he's taught since 2002. His research attempts to understand the nature of rationality, and its relation to knowledge. He has published many articles in the leading academic journals in philosophy, and (in collaboration with his Duke colleague Walter Sinnott-Armstrong) has taught a Coursera course on reasoning and argumentation to over a million students around the world.

Colin Wallace

Colin Wallace is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. His research work focuses on identifying conceptual, reasoning, and problem-solving difficulties students experience when studying physics and astronomy. He has developed many pieces of research-informed curricula, including the Lecture-Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy, which are used by tens of thousands of college students across the nation. He leads professional development workshops across the country on effective teaching and assessment. Since 2017, he has been the director of UNC’s Summer Institute for College Teaching, a week-long professional development experience in which participants learn how to foster diverse and inclusive classroom environments; design learning goals; optimally implement active learning techniques; and assess the quality of their instruction.

Spring 2024 IDST 111 001 Ethics, Economics, and Public Policy TTH 8:00 AM – 9:15 AM

This interdisciplinary course provides an overview of core tools used to analyze issues at the intersection of ethics, economics and public policy. It introduces students to the tools of economic analysis, including markets, prices, and market failures; discusses the ethical dimensions of markets and public policy, including socio-economic justice, the nature of well-being, and individual liberty; and describes challenges in political organization and action that confront policy makers motivated by economic or ethical objectives. During the course, students will see how these related fields provide distinct but complementary perspectives on contemporary issues such as climate change, higher education access and costs, fairness in labor markets, and how technology affects our material well-being and freedom.

Luc Bovens

Professor Bovens is Professor of Philosophy and Core Faculty in UNC’s Philosophy, Politics and Economics Program. His philosophical interests include paradoxes of rationality, issues in formal epistemology, philosophy of economics, political science, and moral psychology. His most recent book is *Coping: A Philosophical Guide* (2021), freely available on the web from OpenBookPublishers.

Douglas MacKay

Douglas MacKay is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Policy, and a Core Faculty Member with UNC's Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program and the UNC Center for Bioethics. Dr. MacKay holds a PhD in Philosophy and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on ethics and public policy. He is currently working on projects concerning justice and economic inequality, public policy research ethics, and the ethics of health policy.

Brian McManus

Brian McManus is a Professor in UNC’s Department of Economics, where he also serves as the Director of Graduate Studies. His regular undergraduate and graduate teaching focuses on the strategic actions of firms with market power, including how firms and their customers are impacted by public policy. Professor McManus’s research is in empirical microeconomics, and his recent work examines the pricing of internet access and content, health care policy design, and how individuals deal with asymmetric information in markets and other strategic environments.

Spring 2024 IDST 117 001 Experiencing Latin America: Bodies, Belonging, Nature TTH 9:30 AM – 10:45 AM

This Triple-I course is taught by specialists in Latino/a and Latin American literature, geography, and women’s and gender studies. Through assignments forging connections between the arts, humanities, and social sciences, this course offers creative methods and approaches that encourage an intersectional understanding of Latino/a identities and belonging in the Americas. Course topics (e.g., migration, justice, and environmental wellbeing) are examined through Spanish and English language-based films, readings, and artwork. Engaging with a variety of media, students will learn about global issues, Indigenous populations, and transnational connections (e.g., immigration, cultural adaptations, labor and exploitation, ethnicity and religion), with attention to how gender, class, racial and religious differences shape experiences of belonging.

Oswaldo Estrada

Oswaldo Estrada is a Peruvian-American writer and literary critic. He is a Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has authored or edited over a dozen books of literary and cultural criticism. He is the author of a children’s book, El secreto de los trenes (2018), and of three collections of short stories, Luces de emergencia (2019; International Latino Book Awards 2020), Las locas ilusiones y otros relatos de migración (2020; International Latino and Latin American Book Fair Prize 2020), and Las guerras perdidas (2021). He has recently edited the short-story collection Incurables: Relatos de dolencias y males (2020; International Latino Book Awards 2020).

Gabriela Valdivia

Gabriela Valdivia is a professor in the Department of Geography at UNC-Chapel Hill and Assistant Dean at Honors Carolina. Gabriela is a feminist political ecologist examining the relationship between resources and socio-environmental inequities. Her research and teaching focus on how environmental injustices shape everyday life experiences and decisions in the Americas. She is an author of the digital project Crude Entanglements, which explores the affective dimensions of oil production; a co-author of Oil, Revolution, and Indigenous Citizenship in Ecuadorian Amazonia; and a co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography. She grew up in Peru and conducted ethnographic research in Ecuador and Bolivia, and brings these experiences into her courses on Latin American environments and societies and advanced undergraduate courses on political ecology and global environmental justice.

Ariana Vigil

Ariana Vigil is Professor and Chair of the Department of Women's and Gender Studies and an affiliate of the Program in Latina/o Studies. Her teaching and research focus on contemporary Latinx cultural production; in particular, how gender, race, sexuality and class are deployed in various national and transnational contexts. Her most recent book is Public Negotiations: Gender and Journalism in Contemporary U.S. Latina/o Literature.

Spring 2024 IDST 118 001 Fake News, Real Science TTH 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM

Students often come into science courses with preconceptions about how the world works. These preconceptions are often retained even if the course content illustrates that they are incorrect. The role of educators then is not only to teach students new content, but also to help them to dismantle pre-existing misconceptions so that they can create new foundational ideas for understanding science.
This course will explore how news media’s portrayals of controversies (or perceived controversies) in science affects how students learn in the classroom. Students will be taught science content using passive and active instructional techniques and will analyze the data to explore how each teaching technique addressed their own misconceptions. They will also explore best practices for conveying potentially controversial science information in the news media and analyze how objective science information can become biased prior to media dissemination.

Troy Sadler

Troy Sadler is the Thomas James Distinguished Professor of Experiential Learning in the School of Education. He studies how people learn science and how to improve the teaching of science. He is particularly interested in how people think about complex societal issues that connect to science such as climate change, food security, and genetically engineering. He is also interested in how technologies can support learning experiences and has led efforts to design and test two serious games, one related to biotechnology and another related to water resources. He has taught science in middle school, high school, undergraduate, and graduate contexts.

Shane Peterson

Shane Peterson is originally from Las Vegas, NV. He received a BA in English with minors in editing and creative writing from BYU and a Ph.D. in language and rhetoric from the University of Washington in Seattle. His research primarily centers on the rhetorics of crisis, apocalypse, and precarity, both historically and in contemporary settings. He is particularly interested in how the affective qualities of crisis rhetorics are embodied and enacted in American political spheres, scientific discourses, religious communities, and more public, everyday contexts. He is also interested in developing new pedagogies of crisis, namely on how to teach writing and research during ongoing periods of disruption and uncertainty.

Megan Plenge

Megan Plenge is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Geological Science. She has always loved teaching science, and particularly loves increasing science literacy by helping people understand the nature of science. She thinks the best way for students to learn how to think like scientists is to address real-world problems. Her approach to science research has been interdisciplinary, including environmental geochemistry, microbial ecology, and water-rock interactions. She loves drinking coffee, reading science fiction books, and commuting on bike or by foot.

Spring 2024 IDST 120 001 Myths, Moons, and Methods MWF 10:10 AM – 11:00 AM

Astronomy is one of the oldest global enterprises of humanity. This course will focus on astronomy as it developed in the ancient Mediterranean and in early modern Europe, taking students on a voyage through time — from astronomy’s early beginnings as a means to keep calendars and as the underpinnings of mythology, to its central role during the early modern period in the development of natural sciences as we understand them today. The logical, epistemological, and conceptual foundations of early modern astronomy became the model for all future scientific research. Since astronomy lives at the intersection of mythology and language, philosophy, and natural sciences, students will encounter research methods specific to each of the three subjects. Students will acquire the logical, quantitative, and analytic skills necessary for understanding how different epochs interpreted the generation of knowledge; how their interpretations were influenced by their culture, mythology, and religion; and how science arrives at knowledge even when the empirical evidence is logically compatible with many rival theories.

Marc Lange

Marc Lange is Theda Perdue Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. He specializes in the philosophy of science and related areas of metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of mathematics, along with the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of biology. He won UNC’s 2016 Distinguished Teaching Award for Post-Baccalaureate Instruction and a Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professorship for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. (For a brief sample of his teaching, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SKmqh5Eu4Y)

James Rives

James Rives is Kenan Eminent Professor in the Department of Classics at UNC Chapel Hill. He received his PhD at Stanford University in 1990 and has been at Carolina since 2006. His primary research interest is in the religious history of the Roman empire in the first few centuries CE, with secondary interests in Roman historiography and in the cultural and intellectual history of the ancient Mediterranean.

Fabian Heitsch

Fabian Heitsch is a professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UNC Chapel Hill. He received his degree at the University of Heidelberg in 2001, and he came to UNC in 2009. His research interests focus on astrophysical fluid dynamics, investigating the interplay between stars and gas in our Galaxy. He and his group develop computer models of how stars form and explode.

Spring 2024 IDST 121 001 Performing and Imagining the American South TTH 3:30 PM – 4:45 PM

The Mason and Dixon line marks a physical boundary, but beyond geographic location, what is the US South? Did its swamps spontaneously produce the blues? Did bluegrass music arise magically from the hills? What does the history of slavery in the US South have to do with the emergence of country music, R & B, or Soul? How did Gone With The Wind recreate the plantation myth for global audiences? In this course, we will examine the South in its cultural and historical incarnations to examine how it both generated and was generated by economic, technological, and political factors. Through textual and data driven analysis, we will come to understand how the South can be simultaneously the birthplace of rock and roll and the origin of the “Southern Strategy” — at once the seat of American authenticity and origin of Coca Cola, America’s first global brand.

Florence Dore

The 2024 recipient of the Board of Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, Florence Dore teaches literature courses in Carolina's English Department. After finishing up a BA in English at Wesleyan University, she worked as a waitress and taught eight graders how to diagram sentences, eventually returning to school and earning her doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley in 1999, where she specialized in American modernism with a focus on the fiction of William Faulkner. She has written three books and numerous articles, including one about the relation between rock music and Southern literature.

Fitz Brundage

I have taught at UNC since 2002. My broad area of interest in the United States since 1865, with a particular interest in the American South between 1865 and 1930. I teach courses on the social history of American popular music and on American film. I seem compelled to write books on somber topics, including lynching and torture. Currently I am writing a book on prisoner of war camps during the American Civil War. These topics undoubtedly have contributed to my fascination with American popular music, which provides therapy for my soul.

David Garcia

David Garcia is an ethnomusicologist whose research focuses on the music of the Americas with an emphasis on Black music and Latin music of the United States and with a theoretical focus on race and historiography. Garcia has published two books (Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins, 2017, and Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music, 2016). His current research focuses on the long nineteenth-century history of Latin music and culture in the United States.

Spring 2024 IDST 125 001 The Art and Science of Expertise TTH 12:30 PM – 1:45 PM

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a practical framework of expertise development and self-regulation to pursue mastery in their personal passions. Through collaborative discussions and interdisciplinary instructor perspectives on expertise scholarship and course material, students will gain an understanding of the things that are most important to them, what it takes to become extraordinary in these areas while maintaining their psychological well-being, and a personalized plan to maximize their potential. Topics covered include deliberate practice, the psychology of motivation and positive functioning, accountability, competitiveness, leadership, resilience, happiness, flow, performance measurement, and well-being. The course will include both lectures and collaborative discussions, supplemented by research articles, Ted Talks, books, case studies and experiential exercises. Ultimately, at the end of the semester students will walk away from this class with a better understanding of the things that are most important to them, what it takes to become extraordinary in these areas, how to maintain students’ psychological and emotional well-being, and a personalized plan to do just that.

Jeff Greene

Jeff Greene is the McMichael Distinguished Professor of Educational Psychology and Learning Sciences in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology in 2007 from the University of Maryland at College Park. In his research, he studies the ways people learn using digital resources, and how to help them use those resources more effectively. Specifically, he studies how people can learn to self-regulate their learning, as well as how they can become better critical consumers of what they encounter online and in the world. He has published three books and over 60 book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles. Currently, he is the co-Editor of the American Psychological Association (APA) journal Educational Psychologist. He is the recipient of the Richard E. Snow Award for Early Career Contributions in Educational Psychology from Division 15 of APA, and he is an APA Fellow.

Erianne Weight

Erianne Weight is a Professor of Sport Administration who studies the intersection of sport and higher education, college sport organizational structure and culture, and the pursuit of expertise. She is the Director of the Center for Research in Intercollegiate Athletics, President of the North American Society for Sport Management, Chair of the UNC Faculty Athletics Committee, and consultant for LEAD1 Association and Collegiate Sports Associates. She earned her Ph.D. in Sport Marketing and Management from Indiana University, and her Master of Business Administration and B.S. in Exercise and Sport Science from the University of Utah where she also competed as a heptathlete and graduate assistant track coach. She is a Research Fellow for the College Sport Research Institute, has published 3 books, over 100 refereed articles and book chapters, has consulted for over 30 organizations, and has given roughly 150 invited and refereed research presentations. She is married to Matt Weight and has two daughters – Aleah and Lillian.

Anson Dorrance

Anson Dorrance is the women's soccer coach at the University of North Carolina. Under Dorrance's leadership at the University of North Carolina, the Tar Heels women’s soccer teams have won 22 of the 42 Women's Soccer National Championships with a .88 winning percentage over 44 seasons. He has led his team to a 101-game unbeaten streak and his players have won 20 National Player of the Year awards. He is not only the most successful coach in the women's game — a six-time National Coach of the Year — but an ambassador of the game. As a player in the ACC he was voted as one of the conference’s Top 50 players in the First 50 years (1953-2003). Many of his former players (including superstar Mia Hamm) have gone on to become the most accomplished players in the world, winning four World Championships (1991, 1999, 2015, 2019) and four Olympic Gold Medals (1996, 2004, 2008, 2012).

Spring 2024 IDST 127 001 What is Art? Where is Art? MWF 12:20 PM – 1:10 PM

What is art? And where is it found? Museums are devoted to it, scholars study it, collectors spend millions to own it. And yet, definitions of art reveal more about the people doing the defining than they do about the creative expressions themselves. By asking the question—rather than by answering it—this class will explore why art matters as a category, what roles artists play in their societies, and what changing conceptions of art tell us about people, cultures, and values around the world.

Victoria Rovine

Professor Rovine loves all kinds of art. She teaches African art history courses, with a focus on dress and adornment. Her current research is on the roles of textiles in French colonial West Africa, when they were important as cultural symbols and as clothing. Her first book is on a type of cloth from Mali whose patterns and techniques were adapted to new markets and meanings in the late 20th century. Her second book is about African fashion design, looking at how designers reimagine styles from their own cultures to create new artistic statements that both preserve and transform the past.

Meta DuEwa Jones

Professor Meta DuEwa Jones is a researcher, creative scholar, poet, and professor. She believes writing and teaching about art and literature can transform the way we read, see, and think and thus can influence how we live. She currently researches and teaches courses focused on African American literature, music, visual art and graphic novels. Her first book was about innovations in American poetry that were influenced by blues, jazz and hip hop. Her research also illuminated how central gender and sexuality are to writing about music and its attendant visual cultural aspects. Her current book explores how writers and visual artists transform their experiences living or traveling within Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas into expressive media.

Gabrielle Berlinger

Gabrielle A. Berlinger is a folklorist who studies creative expression in everyday life. She consider how people tell stories, dress, cook, dance, make music, and perform religious rituals to be artful acts of communication, all revealing the individual within a tradition. Her first book focused on the nature and significance of material creativity and ritual practice in contemporary Jewish communities. Currently, she is researching the poetics of everyday object collection, preservation, and use in alternative house museums.

Spring 2024 IDST 128 001 Never in Polite Company: Talking about Religion and Politics in Public TTH 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM

You may have been told by a loved one that there were two things you should never talk about in polite company: religion and politics. Nothing against those close to you, but we think that’s wrong. In fact, our collective inability to talk about religion and politics threatens to further polarize our public discourse and paralyze democratic institutions. This course offers an introduction to both subjects with the explicit goal of helping us all learn how to speak together and speak to the wider public about religion and politics. Along the way, we will consider how to discuss different ethical perspectives and distinctive approaches to current issues including, but not limited to memory, race, elections, public opinion, gender, sexuality, money, and social media. Students will engage the histories, politics, and religious traditions of communities that historically have been disempowered and interrogate structural processes of bias and inequality with the goal of both interrogating these systems and learning how to speak about resistance and transformation. From campus debates to family gatherings, our aim in this course is to equip you to better speak with others about those things you have been told to never bring up.

Christopher Clark

Christopher Clark’s research focuses on black electoral representation and its influence on political processes. Clark earned his Ph.D. in Political Science in 2010 from the University of Iowa, and he has been on faculty at UNC since July 2012. Chris is a huge sports fan, with his favorite team being the Kansas City Chiefs. He is married to Tiana and is father of Kaya, Cadence, and Kinlee; they all bring him great joy. Chris enjoys reading, cooking, playing sports, and he is active in his church community.

Brandon Bayne

TBD

Angela Stuesse

Angela Stuesse is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies at UNC, where she also directs the Graduate Certificate in Participatory Research. In 2018 she co-founded UndocuCarolina, which works to increase visibility, support, and resources for all members of the Carolina community living with the effects of undocumentation. Angela’s research and teaching explores the structural conditions shaping the lives of undocumented and other low wage workers in the United States. It has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Atlantic, CNN, Univision, and NPR, among other print, radio and multimedia outlets.

Fall 2024 IDST 113 001 The Idea of Race TTH 12:30 PM – 1:45 PM

This course, taught by a biologist, a linguist, and an ethnomusicologist, focuses on the idea of “race.” Historically, the idea that humans can be divided into distinct races has been a singularly pernicious one, having been used to justify the persecution, enslavement, and extermination of groups based on their presumed biological inferiority. Today, scientists agree that race is a false and distorting concept for understanding biological diversity among humans: what we describe as races are in fact social constructs, not genetic realities. Nonetheless, the idea of biological race persists in the popular imagination. In this course, students learn why race is not a viable human biological concept, how the idea of race arose historically (and continues to be maintained), and what alternative concepts exist for understanding human diversity and change over time.

Michael Terry

Michael Terry is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and adjunct associate professor in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. He researches the structure of dialects and the implications of dialectal differences for linguistic theory and educational practice.

Dave Pier

Dave Pier specializes in music, art, literature, and cultural politics in Africa and the African diaspora. His book, Ugandan Music in the Marketing Era, is an ethnographic study of folklore performance, corporate arts sponsorship, branding, and grassroots entrepreneurialism in contemporary Uganda. Currently, he is researching kadongo kamu, a Ugandan guitar-based pop music genre. He is also writing about the development of modern/contemporary dance in this country. Pier serves on the editorial board for the journal African Arts, as well as on the advisory board for UNC’s Process Series. He teaches Introduction to Africa, Music of Africa, Music of African Diasporas, Politics of Cultural Production in Africa, and a freshman seminar on Afrofuturism. As a jazz pianist, he has performed and recorded with Clark Terry, Jane Monheit, Roswell Rudd, Marcus Belgrave, and other jazz luminaries.

Daniel Matute
Fall 2024 IDST 114 001 Science Fiction, the Environment, and Vulnerable Communities TTH 12:30 PM – 1:45 PM

This course focuses on the question of how the genre of science fiction (film and literature) has been used to address the world’s environmental concerns and how these concerns affect characters differently depending on their gender, race, and class. Using this lens, the course investigates longstanding global environmental challenges including water resources, overpopulation, consumption, climate change, etc. This course provides students with a complex toolkit to understand environmental issues. We pay special attention to texts with characters or created by artists who are women and/or ethnic minorities. Our focus throughout the course is support comparative, global, intersectional and interdisciplinary thinking.

Tanya Shields

Tanya Shields is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. Dr. Shields believes that teaching should engage students’ everyday lives by helping them make connections between the past and the present. Her research area is the Caribbean, specifically literature and its role in Caribbean belonging.

Priscilla Layne

After completing her BA in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, where Professor Priscilla Layne concentrated on German and English literature, she spent three years in Germany. She received both a Fulbright TA fellowship and a scholarship from the Study Foundation of the Berlin Parliament. In 2005, Professor Layne continued her studies at the University of California at Berkeley where she received her MA in 2006 and PhD in 2011. In fall 2011, she joined the faculty of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Michelle Haskin

Michelle Haskin is an Assistant Teaching Professor who strives to facilitate undergraduate learning through equitable pedagogical practices and collaborative learning. She has an interest in metacognition and applying learning strategies to help students discover new ways to approach and reframe their learning. She has taught over 2300 UNC students and looks forward to teaching many more.

Fall 2024 IDST 116 001 Gender TTH 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM

What is gender and where does it come from? Is gender something that people are born with? Or are they socialized into gender roles? Is gender in the eye of the beholder? To what extent do artists represent gender issues differently? How might one best critique or challenge gender norms? Are gender differences legal ground for treating men and women differently? Or should the law prohibit treating people differently based on gender? This course will consider these questions and more through the lenses of psychology, art, history, and law. The class will explore gender-related experiences across the lifespan, consider how gender has been represented and challenged in art throughout history, and discuss the differing ways that courts and lawyers have approached cases involving gender. This course will establish a foundation from which students can think critically about gender from multiple perspectives—personal, social, cultural, political, and juridical.

Maxine Eichner

Maxine Eichner, the Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor of Law, writes on issues at the intersection of law and political theory, focusing particularly on family relationships, social welfare law and policy; feminist theory; sexuality; and the relationship of the family, the workplace, and market forces. Professor Eichner is the author of The Supportive State: Families, Government, and America’s Political Ideals (Oxford University Press, 2010). She is now finishing a second book, The Free-Market Family: How the Market Crushed the American Dream (and How It Can Be Restored), which considers the harsh effects that market forces are having on American families today, and which argues that the government’s role is to shield families from these forces. She is also an editor of Family Law: Cases, Text, Problems (eds., Ellman, Kurtz, Weithorn, Bix, Czapanskiy, and Eichner, 2014). In addition, she has written numerous articles and chapters for law reviews, peer-reviewed journals, and edited volumes on law and political theory.

Cary Levine

Cary Levine is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History. His first book, Pay for Your Pleasures: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon, examines the work of three important Southern California artists. His second book, The Future is Present: Art, Technology, and the Work of Mobile Image focuses on the intersections of art, politics, and technology. He was a 2020 recipient of the Art Journal Award and a 2014 recipient of the Hettleman Prize for Scholarly Achievement at UNC. He has lectured nationally and internationally, has written for various magazines and museum catalogues, and previously worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Anna Bardone-Cone

Anna Bardone-Cone, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. She graduated from Williams College with a BA in Mathematics and French, received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and completed her predoctoral clinical psychology internship at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic. Her research interests are in eating disorders and body image, in particular: 1) defining eating disorder recovery; 2) identifying and testing pathways to disordered eating with particular interest in the role played by psychosocial variables (e.g., perfectionism, self-efficacy, social comparison, stress) and how these variables interact; and 3) examining cultural, familial, and media factors related to disordered eating and body image.

Fall 2024 IDST 129 001 Countering Hate TTH 3:30 PM – 4:45 PM

Many of our social problems appear to stem from feelings of animosity people have towards others: racism, misogyny, antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, white supremacy, etc. At the same time, many of our most profound cultural endeavors are aimed at overcoming the fears, suspicions, and misunderstandings that underpin that animosity. In this class, we examine the cognitive and psychological bases for animosity towards others, and how our political and social structures have fostered such feelings. We then examine cultural efforts to overcome them through performance, literature, visual representations (including film, photography, and other visual arts), and faith. The questions we will address include: How have performers, directors, writers, artists, and faith leaders addressed problems of hate and misrepresentation in their work? How do writers and other artists approach painful moments in history? How can our practices of reading, viewing, or listening counter hate? What role do faith communities play in generating and countering hate?

Yaakov Ariel

Much of Yaakov Ariel’s research has focused on Protestantism, especially Evangelical Christianity, and its attitudes towards the Jewish people and the Holy Land; on Christian-Jewish relations in the late modern era; and on the Jewish reaction to modernity and postmodernity. He has published numerous articles and three books on these subjects. One of these books, Evangelizing the Chosen People, was awarded the Albert C. Outler prize by the American Society of Church History. His latest book, An Unusual Relationship: Evangelical Christians and Jews, was published in 2013 by New York University Press. His current project looks at the religious aspects in the life and career of poet Allen Ginsberg who was, in significant ways, a pioneer and prophet to many of his generation.

Peter Gordon

Peter Gordon’s field is the psychology of language and his interests in that field are very broad. Right now his basic research focuses on several topics related to word recognition and to higher levels of language comprehension. These include: the nature of the memory processes involved in understanding complex sentences, the interaction between lexical and higher-levels of language processing, and the coordination of language processing with more general mechanisms of memory, perception, attention, and motor control. Research on these topics in his laboratory uses two primary methods, eye-tracking during reading and measurement of event-related potentials (ERPs).

Afroz Taj

Afroz Taj’s research and teaching center around South Asian media, with emphasis on the film industry and television. His book, The Court of Indra and the Rebirth of North Indian Drama, explores the origins of the Urdu-Hindi musical theater in mid-nineteenth century Lucknow. His current book project focuses on the dynamics of the transition from the Parsi theater to early sound films in the 1920s and 1930s. He is also interested in the aesthetics of cinema, filmmaking techniques and technologies, and the history of Bollywood. While researching the history of Indian cinema he began to collect past issues of Shama magazine; in his next project, he will trace the impact of Shama on South Asian popular culture, including its visual and verbal constructions of gender identity in twentieth-century India and Pakistan.
Dr. Taj is also a creative writer: he has written, published, and recited his ghazals, geet, dohe, and short stories in Urdu and Hindi. Over the past ten years, he have undertaken to film interviews with important literary figures of South Asia, and he has made a number of short films in conjunction with the Door Into Hindi and Darvazah language-learning websites. His interest in media has enabled him to pioneer the use of new technologies and multimedia resources in language teaching.

Fall 2024 IDST 130 001 The Future of Food MWF 10:10 AM – 11:00 AM

You’ve probably been offered almond milk, but have you heard of potato milk? It’s coming. The ways we make, eat, and think about food are constantly changing. What will food look like a decade or century from now? This course combines perspectives from science fiction, anthropology, public policy, and marine ecology to address related questions: How has our love of and need for food influenced our social and political structures, trade and conflict among cultures, and exploration of our planet? How does food affect our relationships and shape our sense of who we are? How do policy choices shape the food we eat? How can we feed 8 billion humans without sacrificing the environment? How might technology and innovation shape our future food? This class will probably make you really hungry, and it might even change how you think about the food you eat.

John Bruno

John Bruno is a marine ecologist and Professor in the Department of Biology. His research is focused on marine biodiversity and macroecology, coral reef ecology and conservation, and the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems. He earned his Ph.D. from Brown University in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University in disease ecology. His lab group primarily works in the Galápagos and the Caribbean – including Belize, the Bahamas, and Cuba. He is also a science communicator and co-developer of the oceans website SeaMonster.

Caela O’Connell

Caela O’Connell is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and the Environment, Ecology, and Energy Program. She got hooked on researching farmers and the environment in particular while studying Spanish at the Universidad de Habana in Cuba. Dr. O’Connell runs the Socio-Ecological Change Research Lab (SECR Lab) at UNC investigating different aspects of sustainability, agriculture, inequality, water, disasters, adaptation, crisis and environmental conservation and partnering with community organizations for engaged scholarship. Her work is primarily in the Caribbean and North and South America. When not thinking about the future for farming and our global environment, Dr. O'Connel enjoys cooking, baking for friends, hiking (nothing too steep), taekwondo, tracking hurricanes, and traveling with her family.

Anna Krome-Lukens

Anna Krome-Lukens is a Teaching Associate Professor in Public Policy. Her research focuses on the history of welfare and public health policies. She teaches courses about the intersection of policy and history, including “Why History Matters to Public Policy” and a first-year seminar on higher education policy. She also directs the UNC Public Policy Capstone program, facilitating the work of student teams who do policy analysis for non-profits and government agencies. She loves thinking about how the history of food systems shapes their possible futures, and she also loves cheese.

Fall 2024 IDST 132 001 Science for Hyperpartisan Times MWF 2:30 PM – 3:20 PM

This course aims to help students navigate the messy intersection of science, policy, and politics by teaching how the substance, history, presentation, interpretation of science – as well as education about science – influence our understandings of the world. Students will: 1) analyze public discourse, education, and debate about science, 2) consider how philosophies, knowledge, data, and interpretations are created, delivered, and received, and 3) discuss how these factors – alongside partisan politics and bias from both sides of the aisle – influence science policy outcomes.

Matthew Springer

Matthew G. Springer is an interdisciplinary policy scholar by training and studies educational innovations and policies for improving system effectiveness and access to educational opportunities. Matt consults widely with government agencies and international organizations, including the U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Government Accountability Office, the National Governor’s Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the United Kingdom and Mexico governments, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. He has taught courses on the history and current trends in higher education, educator policy, education finance, research methods and causal inference, policy analysis, reading and writing academic research, and public policymaking. Matt’s research has appeared on ABC World News Tonight, Lou Dobbs Tonight, CNN’s Top of the Hour, National Public Radio, and The New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal. He is a managing partner at Basis Policy Research, an applied research and technical assistance firm with offices in Denver, Co, Grand Rapids, MI, and Hillsborough, NC. Before joining Basis, Matt was the Hussman Distinguished Professor of Education Reform at UNC and an education and public policy faculty member at Vanderbilt University.

Jeffrey Warren

Formally trained as a marine geologist, Jeff Warren has spent the past 17 and a half years in State-level science policy positions including the coastal hazards policy specialist for the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management (2004 to 2010), the science advisor for the North Carolina Senate (2011 to 2017) and, most recently, the research director and now executive director for the North Carolina Policy Collaboratory headquartered at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2017 to present). Warren earned his BSc in geological sciences from the University of Arizona (1994), his MSc in geology from Auburn University (1997), and his PhD in geological sciences from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2006). Warren’s academic research included field sites in the southeastern US, northern Mexico, the East and South China Seas, and Antarctica for which he received the Antarctica Service medal of the United States of America from the National Science Foundation. In addition to his primary duties at UNC Chapel Hill with the Collaboratory, Warren has also been appointed a Professor of Practice in the Department of Public Policy.

Christian Lundberg

Chris Lundberg is a professor of rhetoric, a political consultant, and a corporate communications strategist. He is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at UNC Chapel Hill, where he writes about and teaches courses in public speaking, debate, persuasive communication and political rhetoric.
His academic work includes multiple books and award-winning articles on rhetoric, speech, and persuasion, including: The Essential Guide to Rhetoric (Bedford St. Martin’s, 2008, 2e 2017); Public Speaking: Choices and Responsibility (Cengage Publishers, 2014, 2e 2016, 3e 2022); and a book about the psychology of public persuasion called Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (University of Alabama Press, 2012). He has served as a debate and messaging consultant for numerous US Senate races, gubernatorial campaigns, and cabinet-level confirmation processes. His international work features extensive work in the United Kingdom, including work on the UK Prime Ministership, the Scottish leadership election, and consulting services for the “Vote Leave” campaign during the EU referendum. He is also the founder and CEO of Vocable Communications, a speech focused and data-driven communication consultancy serving senior leadership at multiple fortune 500 corporations. He received his Ph.D. in rhetoric from Northwestern University’s School of Communication in 2006, and his Master of Divinity from Emory University in 2000. In addition to his experience in the classroom and with consulting clients, he has over fifteen years of experience in speech and debate coaching, serving most recently as a coach and argument consultant for Harvard University. He has coached national championship intercollegiate debate teams at four separate universities (Liberty University, Emory University, Northwestern University, and Harvard University), and has coached multiple competitors to the top individual speaker award at the National Debate Tournament.

Fall 2024 IDST 190 001 Relational Leadership TTH 3:30 PM – 4:45 PM

This course is designed to expose to students to the principles of relational leadership– a human-centered approach to working better together that prioritizes the quality of our relationships as a driving force that increases collaboration, equity, and impact across health systems and communities. Students will apply the relational leadership framework to develop tangible skills for advancing teamwork, communication, collaborative decision making, psychological safety, and trust. Students will have interactions with multiple leaders in healthcare, community, and academic spaces, building a network of community while also focusing on their individual growth in leadership. Both professors will share their application of relational leadership as they have built infrastructure and systems for engaged partnership and community building. Dr. Zomorodi’s expertise in building pan-university partnerships and engagement with rural communities blends nicely with Dr. Aliaga’s expertise focused on relationship building in hierarchical systems and across the care continuum. 

Sofia Aliaga

Sofia Aliaga is a Professor of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine, Director of Interprofessional Education and Practice for the School of Medicine, Director of the School of Medicine Simulation, Experiential Learning and Training Center, and associate program director for the pediatric residency. Sofia is committed to advancing simulation to support interprofessional education in health care. Sofia completed her medical school training in Lima, Peru and is bilingual in Spanish and English. She completed her pediatric residency training at the University of Colorado and The Children’s Hospital of Colorado. She has been a Tar Heel since moving to the area for her neonatology subspecialty training in 2007. During that time, she also completed a Master of Public Health degree. Sofia is looking forward to teaching this course and continuing to grow the Relational Leadership community.

Ryan Nilsen

Ryan is the director of special programs in the Office of Interprofessional Education and Practice and an adjunct instructor teaching through the Department of Public Policy and the School of Education. He graduated from North Carolina State University with a double major in English and international studies and a minor in mathematics and completed a Master of Theological Studies degree at Duke University with a focus on experiential education and community development. He also completed a graduate certificate in nonprofit leadership through the UNC School of Social Work. Prior to his current role, Ryan led undergraduate and graduate service-learning and community engagement programs at the Carolina Center for Public Service.

Meg Zomorodi

Meg Zomorodi is a Professor in the School of Nursing and Associate Provost for Interprofessional Health Initiatives. In her role in the Provost office, she oversees the Office of Interprofessional Education and Practice and the Office of Health Professions Advising. Meg has a passion for teaching, especially across disciplines and teaches courses and guest lectures in a variety of courses across campus. A double Tar Heel—Meg has both graduate and undergraduate degrees from UNC Chapel Hill and believes that the best way to lead is to form connections and establish relationships. In her current role, she builds opportunities for collaboration across health professions, engages with rural communities to support workforce needs, and works with different groups to build infrastructure for change. She likes to build stuff---and loves puzzles and problem solving. Meg is excited to teach this course as it is a way to share the Relational Leadership framework with students and to help empower the change agents of the future.

Spring 2025 IDST 118 001 Fake News, Real Science TTH 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM

Students often come into science courses with preconceptions about how the world works. These preconceptions are often retained even if the course content illustrates that they are incorrect. The role of educators then is not only to teach students new content, but also to help them to dismantle pre-existing misconceptions so that they can create new foundational ideas for understanding science.

This course will explore how news media’s portrayals of controversies (or perceived controversies) in science affects how students learn in the classroom. Students will be taught science content using passive and active instructional techniques and will analyze the data to explore how each teaching technique addressed their own misconceptions. They will also explore best practices for conveying potentially controversial science information in the news media and analyze how objective science information can become biased prior to media dissemination.

Troy Sadler

Troy Sadler is the Thomas James Distinguished Professor of Experiential Learning in the School of Education. He studies how people learn science and how to improve the teaching of science. He is particularly interested in how people think about complex societal issues that connect to science such as climate change, food security, and genetically engineering. He is also interested in how technologies can support learning experiences and has led efforts to design and test two serious games, one related to biotechnology and another related to water resources. He has taught science in middle school, high school, undergraduate, and graduate contexts.

Shane Peterson

Shane Peterson is originally from Las Vegas, NV. He received a BA in English with minors in editing and creative writing from BYU and a Ph.D. in language and rhetoric from the University of Washington in Seattle. His research primarily centers on the rhetorics of crisis, apocalypse, and precarity, both historically and in contemporary settings. He is particularly interested in how the affective qualities of crisis rhetorics are embodied and enacted in American political spheres, scientific discourses, religious communities, and more public, everyday contexts. He is also interested in developing new pedagogies of crisis, namely on how to teach writing and research during ongoing periods of disruption and uncertainty.

Megan Plenge

Megan Plenge is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Geological Science. She has always loved teaching science, and particularly loves increasing science literacy by helping people understand the nature of science. She thinks the best way for students to learn how to think like scientists is to address real-world problems. Her approach to science research has been interdisciplinary, including environmental geochemistry, microbial ecology, and water-rock interactions. She loves drinking coffee, reading science fiction books, and commuting on bike or by foot.

Spring 2025 IDST 121 001 Performing and Imagining the American South TTH 3:30 PM – 4:45 PM

The Mason and Dixon line marks a physical boundary, but beyond geographic location, what is the US South? Did its swamps spontaneously produce the blues? Did bluegrass music arise magically from the hills? How did Mississippi produce two such distinct figures as William Faulkner and Elvis Presley, and how were their works related to their origin? What does the history of slavery in the US South have to do with the emergence of country music, R & B, Soul, or Flannery O’Connor’s fiction? Should we understand the New York born James Baldwin as a southern author, given his family’s lineage in the South? In this course, we will examine the South in its cultural and historical incarnations to examine how it both generated and was generated by economic, technological, and political factors. Through textual and data driven analysis, we will come to understand how the South can be simultaneously the birthplace of rock and roll and the origin of the “Southern Strategy”—at once the seat of American authenticity and origin of Coca Cola, America’s first global brand.

Florence Dore

The 2024 recipient of the Board of Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, Florence Dore teaches literature courses in Carolina's English Department. After finishing up a BA in English at Wesleyan University, she worked as a waitress and taught eight graders how to diagram sentences, eventually returning to school and earning her doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley in 1999, where she specialized in American modernism with a focus on the fiction of William Faulkner. She has written three books and numerous articles, including one about the relation between rock music and Southern literature.

Fitz Brundage

I have taught at UNC since 2002. My broad area of interest in the United States since 1865, with a particular interest in the American South between 1865 and 1930. I teach courses on the social history of American popular music and on American film. I seem compelled to write books on somber topics, including lynching and torture. Currently I am writing a book on prisoner of war camps during the American Civil War. These topics undoubtedly have contributed to my fascination with American popular music, which provides therapy for my soul.

David Garcia

David Garcia is an ethnomusicologist whose research focuses on the music of the Americas with an emphasis on Black music and Latin music of the United States and with a theoretical focus on race and historiography. Garcia has published two books (Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins, 2017, and Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music, 2016). His current research focuses on the long nineteenth-century history of Latin music and culture in the United States.

Spring 2025 IDST 122 001 Humans and the Cosmos TTH 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM

This course is an interdisciplinary introduction to some of the most essential and exciting debates about humanity’s relationship to the universe. We explore such topics as the beginning of existence, the nature of time, contact with the supernatural world, and predictions about the end of all things–from the perspective of philosophy, physics, history, and related disciplines.

Molly Worthen

Molly Worthen teaches courses in the history of religion and ideology, primarily in the U.S. and Canada. Her latest book is Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Trump (2025). Dr. Worthen has also published courses with Audible and The Great Courses on global Christianity and charismatic leaders. She writes for the New York Times and other outlets about religion, politics and higher education.

Joaquin Drut

Joaquin Drut is a quantum many-particle theorist by training. That means that Dr. Drut spends most of his time thinking about how to calculate and predict the physics of systems of many particles, when they are governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. Some of those systems are studied in labs on Earth, but the most interesting ones are deep inside the most massive stars, where the elements are created at unimaginably high densities and temperatures. Dr. Drut regularly teaches a course on computational and mathematical methods for physics majors, where the importance of abstract linear algebra and generalized Fourier analysis as concepts underlying physical laws are emphasized.

Gabriel Trop  

Gabriel Trop has intellectual interests in philosophy from antiquity to the present focusing on theories of art (aesthetics), science, and literature, with a special emphasis on German and French literature in the long nineteenth century. In his teaching, he tends to explore resonances between literature, film, politics, and philosophical existentialism; Dr. Trop has taught previous courses on Freedom and Terror in German Philosophy, and on the films of Christopher Nolan and German Romanticism, for example. As a classical musician (cellist), he is also interested in the aesthetics of music.

Spring 2025 IDST 124 001 Pandemics: Ethics, Literatures, and Cultures TTH 9:30 AM – 10:45 AM

For many people alive today, the COVID-19 pandemic created a new way of life different to anything they had previously experienced. Yet these new realities – social distancing, quarantine, protective masks, job loss, education disruption, anxiety, loneliness and death, among so many others, have been part of many peoples’ lives in pandemics – and epidemics – across time and global space. The Spanish flu of 1918 is a well-known example, as is the black death of 1346-1353. This course addresses the ties that bind, and ruptures between, experiences of pandemics. In so doing, we bring three specific lenses and sets of methods to bear – those of literature, anthropology, and philosophy. Approaches will hone skill sets including analysis, argumentation, close reading, and comparative thinking. Themes that will be weaved throughout the course are those of care, resources, and knowledge production. Care of patients, families, local and global values; Resources of medical interventions, social connection, political structures, and financial means; Knowledge produced through science, narrative, myth, metaphor, and argument.

Rebecca Walker

Rebecca Walker is Professor of Social Medicine and of Philosophy, and in the Center for Bioethics. She is a philosopher of medicine whose primary focus is on the relationship between moral theories and concepts and various biomedical practices. Her publications include over 30 original research articles and book chapters and her co-edited books are: Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems (2007), Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice: New Conversations Across the Disciplines (2016), and The Social Medicine Reader, third edition, Volumes 1&2 (2019). Prof. Walker teaches medical students during the foundational phase of their curriculum and ethics courses for undergraduate and graduate students.

Michele Rivkin-Fish

Michele Rivkin-Fish is Associate Professor of Anthropology. Her research focuses on health and gender in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russian societies, and on notions of justice in US health care reform. She is the author of Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Reproduction (2005), and is currently writing a monograph entitled “Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Search for a Liberal Biopolitics.” She is a co-editor of Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice: New Conversations Across the Disciplines (2016). Her teaching in medical anthropology focuses on the symbols, meanings, and political-economies of health and justice globally.

Jane Thrailkill

Jane F. Thrailkill is Bank of America Honors Distinguished Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. A scholar of American literature and health humanities, she publishes widely on the connections among literary study, the sciences, medicine, and philosophy. Her books are Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literature Realism (Harvard UP, 2007) and Philosophical Siblings: Varieties of Playful Experience in Alice, William, and Henry James (UPenn Press, 2021). Since 2016 she has taught third-year medical students at UNC’s School of Medicine. With Prof. Jordynn Jack, she co-founded HHIVE Lab in 2015 and collaborates with colleagues in the health sciences on interprofessional education projects. She has received recognition for her teaching, including UNC-Chapel Hill’s Board of Governor’s Award.

Spring 2025 IDST 125 001 The Art and Science of Expertise TTH 12:30 PM – 1:45 PM

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a practical framework of expertise development and self-regulation to pursue mastery in their personal passions. Through collaborative discussions and interdisciplinary instructor perspectives and course material, students will gain an understanding of the things that are most important to them, what it takes to become extraordinary in these areas while maintaining their psychological well-being, and a personalized plan to maximize their potential. Topics covered include psychology of motivation and positive functioning, deliberate practice, accountability, competitiveness, leadership, resilience, happiness, flow, and performance measurement.

Jeff Greene

Jeff Greene is the McMichael Distinguished Professor of Educational Psychology and Learning Sciences in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology in 2007 from the University of Maryland at College Park. In his research, he studies the ways people learn using digital resources, and how to help them use those resources more effectively. Specifically, he studies how people can learn to self-regulate their learning, as well as how they can become better critical consumers of what they encounter online and in the world. He has published three books and over 60 book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles. Currently, he is the co-Editor of the American Psychological Association (APA) journal Educational Psychologist. He is the recipient of the Richard E. Snow Award for Early Career Contributions in Educational Psychology from Division 15 of APA, and he is an APA Fellow.

Erianne Weight

Erianne Weight is a Professor of Sport Administration who studies the intersection of sport and higher education, college sport organizational structure and culture, and the pursuit of expertise. She is the Director of the Center for Research in Intercollegiate Athletics, President of the North American Society for Sport Management, Chair of the UNC Faculty Athletics Committee, and consultant for LEAD1 Association and Collegiate Sports Associates. She earned her Ph.D. in Sport Marketing and Management from Indiana University, and her Master of Business Administration and B.S. in Exercise and Sport Science from the University of Utah where she also competed as a heptathlete and graduate assistant track coach. She is a Research Fellow for the College Sport Research Institute, has published 3 books, over 100 refereed articles and book chapters, has consulted for over 30 organizations, and has given roughly 150 invited and refereed research presentations. She is married to Matt Weight and has two daughters – Aleah and Lillian.

Spring 2025 IDST 131 001 Voting and Elections TTH 8:00 AM – 9:15 AM

Across the world, nearly all political systems—even those that experts consider authoritarian—rely on voting and elections to legitimate leaders and the public policies that government enacts. What properties should a fair electoral system have? How can we measure and achieve free and fair elections? How have systems of voting and elections changed over time in response to social and economic upheaval? This course addresses these questions as students compare different election systems, evaluate their strengths, weaknesses, and abuses, and design improvements to current structures. Topics may include representation, responsiveness, gerrymandering, disenfranchisement, voter suppression, election fraud, polling, vote buying, and reforms such as ranked choice voting. The course will involve a blend of mathematical analysis, historical context, and political theory.

Will Goldsmith

Will Goldsmith is a Teaching Assistant Professor in Public Policy. His research looks at how new electoral coalitions unlocked by the civil rights movement influenced economic development and education policy in North Carolina, and broadly, he is interested in how institutions exacerbate and ameliorate historical inequalities. He teaches classes on making public policy, state and local politics, and conflict and cooperation between the public sector and private sector. Before graduate school, he worked as a high school teacher and journalist. As a 17-year old, he (legally!) cast his first ballot at the Crooked Creek Fire Department in western North Carolina’s McDowell County.

Linda Green

Linda Green is a Teaching Associate Professor in Mathematics. She attended high school at the North Carolina School of Science and Math, received her BS and MS in math from the University of Chicago and earned her PhD in math from Princeton University. Since joining UNC in 2013, she has taught every class in the precalculus-calculus sequence, first-year seminars on topics including voting, topology, and symmetry, and a general education class that applies quantitative methods to societal problems. She has recorded over 300 instructional videos that are posted on her YouTube channel. Linda received Math Department teaching awards in 2018 and 2023 and a University teaching award in 2022.

Benjamin Waterhouse

Benjamin C. Waterhouse is a Professor of History whose research explores the culture and politics of business, particularly in the modern United States. He teaches courses in American business history, modern U.S. social and political history, the history of capitalism, and the history of finance and financial crises. He is the author of three books: Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA (2013); The Land of Enterprise: A Business History of the United States (2017); and One Day I’ll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion that Conquered America (2024). He attended public high school in Bedford, Massachusetts, went to Princeton University, and earned his PhD in History from Harvard University.

Spring 2025 IDST 134 001 Jerusalem: Real and Imagined TTH 3:30 PM – 4:45 PM

Why has Jerusalem exerted such a powerful hold on people worldwide over the course of millennia? The simple answer is that for many followers of the three Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—Jerusalem is where the presence of God dwells and the Last Judgment will take place. It is the meeting point of heaven and earth—the locus of divine and human interaction. For this reason, throughout history imperial powers have fought over control of Jerusalem, which in the last century has become a flashpoint in the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. This course examines Jerusalem’s historical background, religious significance, politics, and geography, using works by Israeli and Palestinian artists to illustrate how visual, literary, and musical texts engage with the real and imagined city.

Yaron Shemer

Yaron Shemer is Associate Professor of film and Israel cultural studies at The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He earned his Ph.D. in Film Studies from The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel (U. of Michigan Press, 2013). Shemer has also published on the Jew in Middle Eastern Cinema and on Palestinian cinema. His current book project is “Israeli-Palestinian Encounters: National Narratives in Political Cartoons, Cinema, and Translation.” Shemer has also produced and directed documentary films in Israel, Poland, and the U.S.

Michael Figueroa

Michael A. Figueroa is Associate Professor of Music. A researcher of music in the SWANA region and diasporas, he is the author of City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem (Oxford University Press, 2022) and is currently writing a second book, Racial Awakening in Arab America: Performance, Intimacy, and Critique. His articles have appeared in Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, Journal of Musicology, and multiple edited volumes. Figueroa has been Associate Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, Coordinator of the Faculty of Color/Indigenous Faculty Group, and Director of the New Faculty Program.

Jodi Magness

Jodi Magness (JodiMagness.org) is the Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in the Department of Religious Studies. She specializes in the archaeology of ancient Palestine in the Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic periods. Since 2011, excavations that she directs at Huqoq in Israel’s Galilee have brought to light a Late Roman synagogue paved with stunning mosaics depicting an array of biblical and non-biblical stories – a discovery featured in the April 2024 issue of National Geographic magazine. This course incorporates research from Magness’ most recent book, Jerusalem Through the Ages: From Its Beginnings to the Crusades (Oxford University Press 2024).

Spring 2025 IDST 190 025 Art and Activism MWF 11:15 AM – 12:05 PM

The vision of this class is to generate community through multi-disciplinary teamwork for a more dignified and meaningful coexistence. Artivism will use traditional mediums like theater, film, visual art and music to investigate and raise awareness of social, environmental, and technological challenges in our society. Our focus will be around issues of incarceration with a focus on the death penalty in North Carolina.

Seth Kotch

Seth Kotch, associate professor in the Department of American Studies, conducts research in modern American history (specifically the social history of the criminal-legal system in the American south) and directs the Southern Oral History Program.

Kathyrn Williams

Kathryn Hunter Williams received her B.F.A from University of North Carolina School of the Arts and her M.F.A from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As a member of PlayMakers Repertory Company she has performed inDoubt, Romeo and Juliet, Yellowman and String of Pearls. She has also worked with Living Stage, The Negro Ensemble Company, Manhattan Class Company and New Dramatist. Kathryn is currently on the faculty of UNC Dept. of Dramatic Art and will continue exploring the ways the theater can provide insight about our differences and promote a better understanding of our community.

She is the performance director for HiddenVoices, a non-profit dedicated to bringing life changing stories into a public forum.

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