Global Arc

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.

These courses cover one or more advanced topics in modern Earth science. They are offered only when there is an opportunity to present material not included in the established curriculum; the subjects vary from year to year. Three classes or a three-hour seminar.

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.

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.

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.