Global Arc

Storytelling shapes the public narratives around wars, and journalists face massive challenges in witnessing and communicating complex global conflicts. Focusing on empathy and rigorously independent thought, this course will examine tried and tested lessons of celebrated 20th-century war reporting as well as newer techniques and perspectives that ready reporters for the intricate landscape of contemporary conflicts. Students will learn foundational journalistic skills and approaches used to produce sensitive, compelling reporting in the face of online warfare and misinformation campaigns.

ENV 210A offers an introduction to the scientific and technological dimensions of the nexus of global environmental problems: climate change, the carbon cycle, biodiversity loss, and food and water for 9 billion people. The course will provide students the scientific foundations to understand each of these complex environmental problems, first in isolation and then in its interaction with the others. By the completion of the course, students will be able to understand major scientific reports on the interacting environmental challenges of the 21st century. All sections of ENV 210A will meet together for lecture and precept each week.

ENV 210B offers an introduction to the scientific and technological dimensions of the nexus of global environmental problems: climate change, the carbon cycle, biodiversity loss, and food and water for 9 billion people. The course will provide students the scientific foundations to understand each of these complex environmental problems, first in isolation and then in its interaction with the others. By the completion of the course, students will be able to understand major scientific reports on the interacting environmental challenges of the 21st century. All sections of ENV 210B will meet together for lecture and lab each week.

This immersive, multimedia course invites us to come to our senses in creative ways, exploring climate crises like melting ice, rising oceans, deforestation and displacements. We will come alive to hidden worlds, kayaking the Millstone and trips to Manhattan, engaging animal and environmental studies. Through film, images and writing, we explore the vital ways environmental issues intersect with gender, race and sexualities. Themes include: wilderness; national parks; violent settler colonialism; masculinities; militarization; Indigenous knowledges; animal intelligence and emotions; slow violence; the commons; and strategies for change.

How have French writers, thinkers, and activists addressed the growing environmental crisis in recent decades? In what ways does their work converge? We look here at how fiction and thought-often inspired by the work of activists-have confronted this challenge. Themes include climate change; agribusiness and factory farming; development and (de)growth; nuclear risk; environmental justice and health; species extinction; the attention economy; and ecofeminist and decolonial thought. Novels, essays, and BDs paired with landmark works by thinkers such as Gorz, Guattari, Serres, Latour, Descola, Zask, Morizot, Pelluchon, and Ferdinand.

This course explores the fundamentals of atomistic modeling and its applications to the study of material properties. The theory section emphasizes a conceptual framework of atomistic modeling. The section on applications provides examples of deriving material properties using atomistic modeling with available codes/softwares. Students gain experience applying atomistic modeling to their individual areas of research interest, such as material sciences, mineral physics, seismology, geochemistry, and environmental sciences. Individual projects are developed by students throughout the semester.

This course will explore the intellectual history of race, gender, and sexuality in Latin America. We will first analyze the representation of these intersections in reggaetón and Latin trap. Students will then examine the impact of conquest, colonization, and slavery in the rise of racial categories and heteronormative gender norms in the history of Latin America. Furthermore, we will focus on multiple case studies, such as the legacies of the Haitian Revolution, the history of racial genocide in Puerto Rico, the Hollywood representation of Latin America, and colorist beauty standards in Brazil and Mexico.

We will consider the art of music for the moving image. We will look at historic examples, scoring styles and techniques, and the choices that directors and composers make. We will begin by looking at the basic elements of film and music. Then we will consider the role of genre and style, focusing especially on early Hollywood and Russian filmmakers. Finally, we will look at a range of modern scoring techniques.

Moving from Baghdad to Paris, Jerusalem to Addis Ababa, Iceland to Dunhuang, this course examines the musical cultures of some of the most vibrant centers of the Middle Ages. We consider what it means to study medieval music "globally," focusing on key moments of cultural contact (trade, pilgrimage, conflict), while remaining attuned to the particularities of specific places. Emphasis is on the physical traces of premodern music, and we encounter the distant musical past in a variety of materials and formats (paper manuscripts, papyrus fragments, parchment rolls, stone steles), meeting weekly in Special Collections.

Using the musical story-work "Tularosa: An American Dreamtime" as a springboard, students will explore the mythology of the American West and musical storytelling through a multidisciplinary lens. Students will then use a variety of creative methods including songwriting, theatrical performance, experimental movement and dance, video, dramaturgy, archival and site-specific research, and artifact- and symbol-making to create unique multidisciplinary storytelling projects from their own points of view.