Global Arc

This course explores the construction, imaging, and experience of the racialized body while considering modern regimes of power. It examines the legacies of White supremacy and Coloniality in relation to cultural production and the body. This course's pedagogical approach is rooted in Chicana/o Studies and will examine power in relation to Latinx and other communities of color--it does not focus on Mexican/Latinx communities exclusively. When analyzing power, it recognizes the importance of contextualizing visual, audio, and embodied performative representations of culture to understand how the body speaks back to power.

Beginning as early as Don Quixote, experiments with translation have long accompanied Hispanic literary innovation and, often, political subversion. In this course, we will consider Latin American and Latinx texts from across much of 20th and 21st centuries that engage translation as trope, form, or material rearrangements (including translation narratives, fake translations, mistranslations, transcreations, conceptual experiments) and those that rewrite established texts from the margins. We will read these materials alongside translation theory and criticism to tease out the aesthetics and politics of translation in each undertaking.

This courses provides an overview of classic theories of state building, resistance, and political violence, as well as contemporary challenges to these theories and how they apply to Latin America. Drawing on a range of methodological traditions and examples from around the region, and a few from elsewhere, this course offers a look at the complex relationship between political authority and violence. The class examines this relationship at different scales, from the state to the street gang and everything in between.

How are social rights won in Latin America? After decades of increasing income inequalities, Latin America experienced an impressive and unexpected expansion in social policy. The arrival to government of Left parties across the continent in the early 21st century raised hopes of progress toward universalism in social policy. Yet, persistent inequities across sectors of the population undermined progress toward a universalist welfare regime. This course offers an overview of the general trends, achievements, and shortcomings of these developments, as well as the social forces and historical circumstances that determined these changes.

The Molecular Biology Research Experience is a two-semester sequence that provides sophomore students with an in lab research experience mentored by faculty in the department. MOL 280, offered in the fall semester, is a non-credit bearing P/D/F course and the required prerequisite for MOL 281, which is offered in the spring semester and carries one unit of credit. Students must earn a "P" in MOL 280 to enroll in MOL 281. Students are expected to spend a minimum of 6 hours per week engaged in research and attend weekly meeting as determined by the mentoring faculty.

This class considers atonality and noise as resources for 20th & 21st century musicians, ranging freely across folk, popular, and notated traditions. We begin with percussion music, music concrete, and sampling; then consider pitch as a kind of noise: free atonality, free improvisation, textural music (Penderecki, Xenakis, etc.), and spectralism. Also fusions of pitch and noise: feedback, distortion, extended techniques, and modular synthesis. Ending with set theory, total serialism, and the attempt to devise a "language" of atonality.

An exploration of ritual and ceremony as creative, interdisciplinary spaces imbued with intention and connected to personal and cultural histories. A broadening and deepening of knowledge around historical and contemporary ritual, ceremonial, and community-building practices of queer and trans artist communities from around the world, with a deeper focus on the extraordinary history of the queer trans shamans of early 20th century Korea.

How do musical sounds hang together and convey meaningful ideas to its local audience--emotions, acoustic, semiotic, and ideological dimensions to theorize how it answers to diverse aesthetic and epistemic conditions across listening cultures. Students will engage a range of musical sounds through embodied analysis, (auto)ethnography, and close readings in music theory, ethnomusicology, and music perception. While this course welcomes students without previous training in music theory, it is also poised to challenge those with substantial experience.

This sequence is designed to provide Sophomores with an in-lab research experience over two semesters, with PSY 230 in the Fall being the prerequisite for PSY 231 in the Spring. PSY 230 is a non-credit bearing class while PSY 231 carries a full unit of credit (both are graded P/D/F). Students will gain an introduction to research within a Psychology lab. Students are expected to spend a minimum of 6 hours per week engaged in research and attend weekly meetings as outlined by the mentoring faculty. At the end of each semester, students will submit a written report of their research experience (PSY 230) and present their findings (PSY 231).

In this course you will learn two of the most popular programming languages in biology, R and python, along with current bioinformatics tools for dealing with genomic datasets. We will cover the basics of programming logic, along with project and data management skills. Special focus will be given to processing and curation of large tabular and genomic datasets. This course will serve as a practical introduction to programming, giving students the tools they need to succeed in their projects and showing how simple computational tools can liberate them to pursue the questions they are passionate about.