Global Arc

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.

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.

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.

Are we living at the hinge of history? Is the best future for humanity one in which we become a vast interstellar civilization? Can we positively influence the long-term trajectory of our species? This course will examine both motivations and difficulties for longtermism, a novel position in ethics which says that ensuring a flourishing future for humanity should be our top moral priority. Topics will include population ethics,decision theory, the size of the future,cluelessness about the long-run effects of our actions, moral uncertainty, advanced artificial intelligence, and what to do if you are interested in existential risk mitigation.

This class will wrestle with an enormous evil that deeply implicates Christianity, both theoretically and practically - from its scriptures and creeds to its ecclesiology and history. We will examine how Christians, male and female, both contributed to and resisted the Nazi genocide that came to be known as the Holocaust, as well as the theological and moral dimensions of anti-Semitism more generally. The approach is inter-disciplinary and pluralistic, with readings including historical, sociological, and ethical analyses by Jews, Christians, and non-religious authors. Specific issues addressed include the nature of sin, especially hatred.

Vladimir Putin has confounded world leaders and defied their assumptions as they tried to figure him out, only to misjudge him time and again. In 2022, against all predictions the authoritarian leader started Europe's bloodiest war since WWII. While looking at Putin's rise to power (and his impending fall), we will also seek during this course to go beneath politics and policy to look at how human beings experience state power within the cultural phenomena including visual arts, literature, cinema, TV, Internet, popular music, and photography.

In this course, envisioned as both a language and literature course, we will explore Anton Chekhov's humor, Mikhail Zoshchenko's satire, and Fazil Iskander's irony, which will give us a glimpse into daily life in 19th century Russia and Soviet Union. The entire course will be conducted in Russian. Special emphasis will be placed on active use of language and expansion of vocabulary.

This seminar will examine social implications of the American food system as it developed during the twentieth century by delving into topics that range from gender, race, and labor to the construction of supermarkets, development of industrial meat production, and the increasing use of biotechnology in food production.