Global Arc

This new course will introduce students to logic, probability theory, decision theory, and argument analysis, and will teach them to apply those tools to philosophical issues including the limits of computation, the value of testimonial evidence, the problem of peer disagreement, the justification of probabilism, traditional vs Bayesian statistics, group coordination and responsibility, imprecise probability, and the rationality of voting. Students will also learn argument mapping, a technique for visually representing the structure of prose arguments that improves analytical reasoning.

Love and respect are responses to recognizing value in another person. However, respect is typically thought to be a response to some value that all people have, whereas love is a response to the value of some specific person. In this class, we will investigate both love and respect, first separately and then comparatively. Alongside the more theoretical texts, we will look to depictions of love and respect in literature and film in order to round out our investigation.

Cuba, Brazil, and Angola share intimately linked cultural histories. Brazil and Cuba received large numbers of enslaved peoples from Angola, crucial agents in forging the two American nations' emerging modern cultures. In the 20th century the newly independent republics of Cuba and Brazil inspired anti-colonial Angolan cultural production. And in the 1970s Cuba sent massive numbers of Cuban troops to fight in the Angolan civil war. This course explores these and other aspects of a shared history characterized by both violence and flows of ideas, aesthetic forms, and political theories beyond nation and empire.

A four-week summer immersion course in Lisbon, designed to increase students' linguistic and cultural fluency providing a deeper understanding of Portuguese culture and society through literary texts, periodicals, cultural excursions, and lectures. Students will explore the city as a means to discuss national and transnational identities, with particular emphasis on Portugal's relationship with Africa. We will investigate its histories of slavery, colonialism, immigration, commerce, and cultural exchange from the age of maritime expansion to the present day, revealing the way in which these have shaped the Portuguese cultural landscape.

The ancestral home of millions of dwellers, the symbolic space of the Amazon rainforest and its cities has been dominated by colonial thought for almost 500 years. Fortunately, the last few decades have witnessed the emergence of critically engaged Indigenous artists, whose productions provide a decolonizing perspective and create a broader and deeper artistic imagination. This course will critically examine how writers, travelers, and visual artists have imagined and re-imagined Amazonia.

This course focuses on the works of individuals and collectives whose projects challenge traditional notions of women's writing and representation. From renowned authors like Clarice Lispector to contemporary figures such as Txai Suruí and Djaimilia Pereira, we will look at writers and artists with gender identities ranging from cisgender to transgender and non-binary, examining how their interventions reshape the feminist canon. By connecting words, bodies, and voices, and engaging with works from outside the Portuguese-speaking world, we will analyze how feminist ideas move and transform across languages, cultures, and experiences.

This course explores interdisciplinary ways of tackling the problem of understanding ourselves. Students will learn how to critically evaluate research examining the porous boundaries between self and society, and to think imaginatively about what the scientific method can reveal about humans- now and in the future.Two lectures, one preceptorial.

By collaborating with others, humans can achieve goals that would be beyond the reach of a single person: No one can play a symphony, build a city, or land on the moon entirely on their own. This seminar will take a multidisciplinary view to understand how humans collaborate, including examining how the capacity to collaborate develops in childhood, when teams outperform individuals, what we can learn about human collaboration from multi-agent AI, and how we can apply insights from the social science of teamwork to make scientific collaborations smoother and fairer.

This sequence is designed to provide Sophomores with an in-lab research experience over two semesters, with PSY 230 (non-credit bearing) in the Fall being the prerequisite for PSY 231 (credit bearing) in the Spring. Both are graded P/D/F. Students will gain an introduction to research within a Psychology lab and are expected to spend a minimum of 6 hours per week engaged in research and attend weekly meetings as outlined by the mentoring faculty. At the end of each semester, students will submit a written report of their research experience (PSY 230) and present their findings (PSY 231).

Close study of empirical works by Freud. The course continues HUM/PSY 365 (Freud on the Psychological Foundations of the Mind), which scrutinizes Freud's general theory of the mind, and forms the backdrop to this course's inquiry into specific portions of mental life Freud investigated. Topics include aesthetic sensibility, dreaming, humor, mental glitches, superstition, indecision, group psychology, and religion. The aim is to examine the psychology emerging from those investigations and the method by which Freud extrapolates it. More recent research and commentary is consulted for additional perspective.