Search Content

This course explores the global significance of the modern colonization of Palestine and the resulting Palestinian struggle for national liberation. Moving beyond conventional interpretations of the conflict between Israel/Zionism and the Palestinians, the course emphasizes Palestine’s location within a set of broader global structures and processes including settler colonialism, militarization, social acceleration, solidarity movements, and the relationship between state and non-state forms of terrorism.

An introductory survey of China from four perspectives: China as China, China as a Communist party state, China as a developing country, and China as a rising power. Through these lenses, the course examines the historical factors that have shaped contemporary Chinese institutions and the Chinese Communist Party. It also examines China’s influence and security concerns within the international community. Especially recommended for students who plan to participate in an off-campus program in China and for students returning from the program.

LT: American Romanticism: 1830-1860.  In this course students will embark on a wild ride through the canon of mid-nineteenth-century American literature. During this literary odyssey, we'll explore both land and sea in the company of several great American writers: Cooper, Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman and Dickinson.

This course introduces culture and society in twentieth century Korea (1900 to the present). The course will overview major historical topics in modern Korean society—colonization, Korean War, economic and social developments, to the most recent phenomena of Korean Wave. By reading, watching, and discussing various materials, this course provides students opportunities to trace salient cultural features of the Korean societies in the north and south.

This is a lecture-laboratory course that examines from multiple perspectives the ways in which humans and lower animals perceive and react to the world around them. All of the major senses are covered, with particular emphasis on vision and hearing. Topics include perceptual development, color perception, visual illusions, taste and smell perception, brain disorders and perception, perception of music, psychophysics, visual and hearing impairment, and pain perception. Counts toward the neuroscience major (behavioral track).

The goal of this course is to introduce students to theories and concepts of sociology, as well as to facilitate the development of each student’s “sociological imagination.” Members of the class will critically examine how social institutions and social structures operate, and to what ends.

Comparative politics analyzes how demands emerge, power is exercised and benefits are distributed in different countries. It uses both historical and contemporary evidence to examine how societies respond to these challenges in order to appreciate and learn from the differences among them. Developing societies, communist and formerly communist regimes, as well as industrialized democracies, are analyzed and compared as a basis for evaluation and judgment.

What happens to the body and mind at the limits of human endurance? How do humans acclimate physiologically to extreme environments, such as Mt. Everest, Antarctica, the Sahara Desert, the ocean depths, and space? This course investigates how geographic exploration has transformed modern medicine and our understanding of how the human body is capable of surviving extreme duress. You will learn core principles of cardiovascular, respiratory, water balance, and stress physiology by studying human performance under adverse conditions.

A growing field of contemporary ethical inquiry, bioethics grapples with the unique ethical quandaries emerging in the light of new biotechnologies (affecting both human and non-human forms of life), the universal need for health care, and public health concerns at large. Topics include birth and reproductive justice, the impacts of racism on health and health care, and the implications of various approaches to bioethics for those living with disabilities (a group which may well include all of us at some time in our lives).

This course uses the stories of people's lives - memoirs, biographies, and oral histories - to study the history of the African continent. Some historians assume that the only "legitimate' sources for historical knowledge are archival documents. In contrast, this course insists that history is fundamentally a craft of story tellers. Through this lens, we will study the craft of writing a life story in the African context. What's in a life? What does it mean to record and narrate the story of someone else's life?