Global Arc

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a wave of revolutions swept across the Atlantic world. They shook the empires that had controlled this area of the globe, launched bold new experiments in democratic politics, challenged or overthrew existing social, cultural and religious hierarchies, and were accompanied by considerable violence. This course will examine this remarkable period in world history, concentrating on the American, French and Haitian revolutions, and devoting significant attention to issues of gender and violence, the overall global context, and theories of revolution.

World War II was the crucible of much of the world we now know, not just in geopolitics and economics but also in science and technology. This course focuses three key military technologies that emerged to prominence then: nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and digital computers. Each would define its own "Age" - Atomic, Space, and Information - in the popular imagination. That popular vision is often highly Americanized, located paradigmatically at Norad, Cape Canaveral, and Silicon Valley. As an exercise in interrogating that teleology, we will examine the USSR's own distinctive "Ages" from the end of the war to the post-Soviet era.

Attention lies at the nexus of perception and action, aesthetics and ethics, wealth and power. Whose eyes (and minds) are where? And for how long? These are central questions driving the evolution of "surveillance capitalism" (not to mention social life itself). New technologies, and new practices, are reshaping our understanding of the attentional subject -- with consequences for learning, politics, and collective existence. This course will take up these problems, delving the history of changing ideas about attention in the modern period.

We live in a therapeutic society. This upper-level seminar aims to understand and complicate the reach of therapeutic culture by looking into crucial moments of its history. We will explore a range of formulations of the therapeutic, including psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, and psychiatric drug treatment, but also move beyond the psychologist's office to explore therapeutic culture in social work, pastoral counseling, self-help groups, education, and TV.

In this upper-level undergraduate seminar, we will explore the making of the medicine of mind and brain, paying particular attention to the complex relationship between biological investigations of the brain and subjective experience of mental and neurological illness. We will look at patient memoirs; therapeutic regimes (including drugs and somatic treatments); psychiatric classification; trauma; mind-body medicine; the neuroscientific identification of brainhood with personhood; and anti-psychiatry, amongst others.

Alchemy provides a core theme in medieval and early modern European culture, and a key to understanding early science and medicine. From transmuting base metals into gold and silver, to prolonging human life, alchemy offered fabulous rewards. Alchemical books were studied by princes, physicians, priests, and noblewomen, who sought experimental instructions, medical remedies, and political influence. Yet alchemical ideas also challenge modern perceptions of the relationship between art and nature, science and religion, and learned and craft knowledge. We will explore these contrasts using texts, images, objects, and laboratory reconstructions.

The sourcing, preparation, and consumption of food (and drink) represent essential aspects of human culture, even as these activities have long had massive implications for the planet. Science and technology are deeply implicated in the history of changing diets, and industrialized agriculture has profoundly shaped both human populations and global environmental conditions. This course aims to introduce students to a range of recent writings that take up these problems, with an emphasis on scholarship in history and history of science.

A review of recent thinking/writing about objects; an effort to experiment with activations of this work. Our course will explore approaches to material culture from the early modern period to the present, with particular attention to new philosophical and anthropological perspectives. Historical questions will be paramount, but aesthetic and epistemological problems will also be engaged. Guided by diverse readings, we will endeavor to heed Wordsworth's bold injunction--to "see into the life of things."

Introduction to limits and derivatives as preparation for further courses in calculus. Fundamental functions (polynomials, rational functions, exponential, logarithmic, trigonometric) and their graphs will be also reviewed. Other topics include tangent and normal lines, linearization, computing area and rates of change. The emphasis will be on learning to think independently and creatively in the mathematical setting.

First semester of calculus. Topics include limits, continuity, the derivative, basic differentiation formulas and applications (curve-sketching, optimization, related rates), definite and indefinite integrals, the fundamental theorem of calculus. Prerequisite: MAT100 or equivalent.