Global Arc

Students will make four short analog films using black leader film, clear leader film, found footage, and darkroom experimentation on 16mm and 35mm commercial film stocks.

This course invites students to participate in language creatively, playfully, and critically. The course unfolds in four phases: the first two take the form of research-based seminars, and the latter two are studio-based with hands-on workshops. Students examine the origins of writing systems across cultures, with attention to how nature has shaped human language; explore language as artistic material in historical and contemporary art; create an original language using gathered natural elements; and compile this invented lexicon into a handmade dictionary--an artist's book that documents and circulates each student's own feral literacy.

Speculative fiction is where the impossible happens.Though this expansive genre is often tagged as escapism, it connects to a deep part of our nature. Our foundation myths and fables are speculative fiction, and their current of fear and wonder runs straight through to contemporary science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In this class, we'll learn about some fascinating genre traditions, embrace experimentation, and try to build universes that won't (per Philip K. Dick) fall apart two days later. A mix of mind-bending readings, stimulating class discussions, and eccentric writing assignments will inspire our own forays into the slipstream.

In The Poet's Companion, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux argue that images should "produce a bit of magic, a reality so real it is `like being alive twice." After mining our imaginations and memories, how do we deepen a reader's experience with the poem via the image? How does one draft an image readers will remember?This workshop-focused course will explore the image, its implications, as more than mere scenery, and seeks to focus the image at the poem's center. To do this, participants will review poems with images that reverberate and reimagine poems with images that idle.

This is an intensive reading course, which focuses on the skills to read and reread like a writer. A wide selection of readings - novels, stories, plays, poetry - will be covered in the course, a guided tour of books and their authors. Students will be expected to read at least an hour a day, and the average weekly reading load will be between ten and fifteen hours. Students are expected to keep a detailed daily reading journal and participate in group discussions and class presentations.

This class is for students who are curious about how behavioral science and psychology can be used to inform policymaking. Lectures and readings introduce you to the basic concepts of behavioral science and to the evidence base for behavioral science in policy application. Precept activities help you to test out these principles as applied to policy areas that interest you. The course also presents and invites you to explore psychologies that are key to the translation of any policy idea to action, including design thinking, and psychologically wise leadership, conflict management, and communication.

For the first time, most people now live in cities. One in seven humans lives in an urban slum. We analyze the political, economic, and social dynamics that both create and arise from urbanization, informality, and attempts to govern our contemporary urban world. We ask how formal and informal institutions change inequalities of shelter, work, race, and other social identities, across urban space. We investigate the links between the processes of urbanization and climate change, and how they shape the politics of cities. We draw from cases across the globe and the US, along with a range of social science methods and theoretical perspectives.

This course offers an overview of Latin America's political and economic development issues. Understanding the region's challenges from institutions to infrastructure, from inequality to insecurity, from poverty to social development, will provide a broad perspective. Also analyzing successful policies inside the region or in other parts of the world, contributes to discuss areas of enhancement: institutions, human capital, competitiveness, investment, equality, and stability among others. In addition, the course intends to explore history and renewed opportunities in the relationship between the US and Latin America.

This course explores the development of the relations between Russia and the U.S. from the end of the Cold War to the present day. In the early 1990s, it seemed that Western liberal values were triumphant all over the world. But as Russia failed to become a democratic country, anti-Americanism and revanchism began to flourish there. After becoming president, Vladimir Putin began to exploit these sentiments, eventually making anti-Americanism his main international political platform. The course will conclude with an analysis of the present-day dynamics.

This course is about how U.S. constitutional law distributes policy-making power among and within the branches of the federal government; between the federal government and the states; between governing officials and the People they govern. It is not about what substantive policy should be, but about who does and should have the power to settle the answer. The course aims to provide students sufficient fluency in the language of law to excel in the world of U.S. public policy.