Global Arc

Science underpins many of our biggest societal challenges and is therefore crucial to the most complex issues facing Washington, DC. Influencing the outcomes involves understanding the policy of the issue, the politics of change, and the process of government. Students will learn these skills from practitioners, academic literature, and class lectures and put them to work by lobbying in groups on a topic of their choice. Students will visit Washington, DC to meet with and influence policy makers.

This course investigates the relationship between the built environment and the human cultures that create them. The focus is on the Ise Shrines in Japan, which we will visit. The study of their history and architecture will allow us to identify how celestial orientation, materials, form, craft and ritual can all play important roles not only for shrines but simple storehouses and granaries, temples and churches, and modern museums.

The process of roasting coffee beans and brewing a cup of coffee involves several fundamental engineering principles. This course, a combination of lectures and labs, open to all first-year undergraduate students, explores fundamental concepts in chemical engineering, fluid mechanics, physics, chemistry, and colloid science. The experiments draw on science and engineering concepts introduced in the lectures, and the course culminates in a design competition where students work in groups to brew the best tasting cup of coffee with the minimum amount of energy.

Many Latin American performance artists have reimagined the use of theater to challenge social and political structures. Boal's 'Theater of the Oppressed', Teatro Yuyachkani, TiT, Teatro Trono, and more, challenge, subvert, and manipulate classic Eurocentric theater perspectives to spur awareness and action in their audiences. Through readings, discussion, viewing, writing, improv and play we will explore these artists' work, theatrical origins, and socio/geopolitical contexts. We will apply inspired tactics to our own work. Spanish not required. Acting experience not required. Willingness to play and take risks is integral to class.

In this class we will learn how to 'read' films. Like literary scholars investigating the poetics of text, we will similarly 'read' videographic language to understand how films convey meaning. We will analyze storytelling elements (plot, genre, context) and technical aspects (cinematography, montage, mise-en-scène) of filmmaking. The city of Rome will serve as our central cinematic landscape to study works spanning over a century from the Italian silent era (Cabiria, 1914) to the digital blockbusters of the new millennium (Gladiator, 2000). Class will comprise lectures, discussion, creative assignments and presentations.

This course invites students to reflect upon the interdependence between humans and the natural world through the voice of poets, philosophers, filmmakers, and artists whose attention focuses on nature's glow, that is, on its inspiring aura. Can a work of art or a cultural artifact help us understand the connection of all living and nonliving things? Can it allow us to deepen our understanding of our place on earth? Can art's insight inspire compassionate knowledge, and spark action? The final project for this course will be to imagine and craft an ecological restoration project.

Does modern progress corrupt our morals and degrade our humanity? Has the march of civilization exhausted our souls? This course engages classic literary and philosophic works that explore how humanity has been shaped by modernizing forces. Students will investigate the enlightenment's promise to improve the human condition through the accumulation of knowledge, the technological mastery of nature, and the conferral of natural rights. They will consider--and question--modernity's faith in the goodness of progress, liberalism, socialism, science, technology, and democracy.

In Western society, we're not great at endings. We try to prolong the life of a person or venture at all costs. We avoid planning for or even talking about the end. Yet new initiatives often cannot begin without something else's end. This course explores the complexities of our relationship to endings: their philosophical and theological conceptions, the psychological underpinnings of our resistance to them, the sociological implications of current approaches. We also contemplate ways that behavioral science and other disciplines might inform a new and potentially more advantageous approach to policy decisions by keeping the end in mind.

In this seminar, students learn how subjectivities are negotiated in and through language, and perform a critical exploration of languages as social institutions, ideological battlegrounds, instruments used to homogenize populations, define citizenship, and create hierarchies. We discuss language as part of the social, cultural, and political machinery that enabled the rise of the nation-state, linguistic nationalism and colonialism, and we focus on the emergence of complex multilingual identities against a backdrop of monolingual forces that remain ubiquitous in our political institutions and cultural and epistemological productions.

This seminar studies how relations among pets and humans have changed over the past two centuries. Reading across humanities and social science disciplines, we will consider the unexpected connections that link pets to specific articulations of gender, race, sexuality, class, ability, and species. Arranged topically and historically, the seminar considers issues ranging from the gendered development of cat breeds in Victorian England to the racial politics of modern dog rescue. We will study animal companions not as passive receptacles of human culture, but rather as beings with agency who have co-determined their places in our lives.