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Courses 2023–24

Ancient Mediterranean Studies 100 - The Topography and Archaeology of the Ancient Roman City

One-quarter-unit semester course. The city of Rome was the capital and largest city of the ancient Mediterranean’s longest-lasting and most geographically expansive empire. During this study tour, we will visit the major monuments and museums of the city, considering Rome’s development from a small village (ca. 1000 BCE) to the Augustan age (first century BCE–first century CE) to the capital of a world empire (second–third centuries CE). Through site visits and lectures, students will examine the development of Rome’s urban and monumental landscape, including religious, mortuary, and public architecture; learn how to interpret archaeological/architectural evidence and confront its difficulties; and consider the (ab)uses of the Roman past in the present, especially during the Fascist era, and how that has shaped the modern city. We will also visit the exceptionally well-preserved city of Ostia to examine aspects of urbanism and domestic life. Prior to the study tour during spring semester, students will be required to attend several mandatory class meetings (with readings), conduct research on a chosen site/monument, and prepare an oral presentation to be given on site in Italy. Students must register for both the fall and spring sections of the course. Prerequisite: students must apply to participate; approval is required from the instructor and from the International Programs Office. Lecture-conference. May be repeated for credit.

Ancient Mediterranean Studies 251 - Ancient Greek Athletics

One-unit semester course. For better or worse, the ancient Olympics (motto now “Faster, Higher, Strong—Together”) has proved itself one of the most influential of Greek institutions. This course will study the values and meanings given to the ancient Olympics by studying the representation of athletic victory in the poetry and dedications that celebrated victors. What ideas of athletic victory did these memorials produce? How did they link athletic success to moral excellence, natural talent, family history, masculinity, beauty, or divine favor, and build up these very notions so that they seemed real and significant? Who could claim the political capital of athletic excellence for their own—victors? Their cities? Second-place finishers? Non-Greeks? What events counted as events—women’s events, team events, running with a shield, dog racing? And what kind of work even qualified you as a victor? Throughout we will use comparisons to the meanings that other sporting movements have sought to claim, and so we will take time to study Roman sports and the modern Olympic movement, again focusing on how various artistic forms (poetry, film, mass choreographed performances) construct victory. Course conducted in English; no Greek required. Conference. Cross-listed as LITL 251.

Not offered 2023–24.

Ancient Mediterranean Studies 261 - Greek and Roman Mythology

One-unit semester course. We will study different theoretical approaches to mythology and a variety of literary and material sources for Greek and Roman myths. Where do myths come from and how are they perpetuated and made distinct? How do they contribute to different forms of knowledge, custom, and creative expression? What role do they have in the formation and maintenance of group identities? How have Greek and Roman myths been received and revised to comment on contemporary experiences? Ancient authors studied may include Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Apollonius, Virgil, Ovid, and Apuleius. Prerequisite: first semester of HUM 110. Conference. Cross-listed as LITL 261.

Ancient Mediterranean Studies 372 - The Hellenistic World: Egypt, the Middle East, and Central Asia after Alexander the Great

One-unit semester course. This course examines the political, cultural, and social landscape of the Middle East, Central Asia, and Egypt from the conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great (r. 336–323 BCE) to the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BCE and the incorporation of the last Graeco-Macedonian successor state into the Roman Empire. Topics to be covered include the development and character of the great Hellenistic empires, with a focus on the Ptolemaic and Seleucid states; Hellenistic Central Asia and interactions with India, especially Ashoka and the Mauryan Empire; the nature of kingship; political and cultural continuities and disruptions; the Hellenistic city, especially Alexandria in Egypt; and scientific, literary, and religious developments. Throughout this course, we will emphasize and interrogate the nature of cross-cultural interaction in the Hellenistic period, considering its social, cultural, and material consequences. We will also consider the relevance of modern concepts such as colonization and globalization to our understanding of this period. Classes will focus on the examination and interpretation of ancient evidence (textual, documentary, and archaeological) as well as discussions of secondary scholarship. Prerequisite: sophomore standing. Lecture-conference. Cross-listed as HIST 392.

Ancient Mediterranean Studies 373 - The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic

One-unit semester course. This course offers a chronological survey of Republican Roman history from Rome’s consolidation of power on the Italian peninsula in 266 BCE to the death of the Emperor Augustus in 14 CE. We will begin with a consideration of Rome’s rapid growth from 264 to 146 BCE and the various theories concerning the factors behind Roman imperial expansion. We will then explore the political, social, economic, and cultural repercussions of Rome’s transformation into the leading power in the Mediterranean and the various factors that led to the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire under Augustus. During the semester we will cover the following topics: the structure and evolution of the Roman constitution; the development of the “professional” Roman army and its political ramifications; changing gender relations in Roman society; imperial governance; the growth and practice of slavery; Rome’s cultural interaction with Greece and the East; the social and cultural function of gladiatorial combat; Rome’s relations with its allies; the politicization of the Roman people and the rise of “popular” politicians; and the Augustan settlement. Emphasis is placed on the interpretation of ancient evidence, including primary literary works, inscriptions, and relevant archaeological material. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference. Cross-listed as HIST 393.

Not offered 2023–24.

Ancient Mediterranean Studies 374 - The Athenians and the “Other”

One-unit semester course. This course examines the conception and construction of otherness from the vantage point of the male citizen in fifth- and fourth-century Athens, who framed himself as the ultimate insider. We will begin by briefly considering both the “other” as the object of historical analysis and the various lenses through which male Athenians constructed their identity during this period. We will then spend the rest of the semester examining the Athenians’ construction of self and other via a number of intertwined categories including ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, religion, and disability. This examination will involve the close study of a number of different genres, such as historical accounts, tragedy, comedy, and oratory. In addition to reading authors such as Herodotus, Euripides, Aristophanes, and selections from the Hippocratic corpus, this course will also examine relevant archaeological evidence. Prerequisite: HUM 110. Conference. Cross-listed as HIST 394.

Not offered 2023–24.

Ancient Mediterranean Studies 377 - Women in the Ancient World

One-unit semester course. This course examines the female experience in the ancient Mediterranean from the middle of the eighth century BCE to the second century CE. We will begin by briefly considering some main themes in women’s history and the applicability of gender as a category of historical analysis to the study of the ancient world. We will then turn to a close analysis of the available literary, documentary, and archaeological evidence that illuminates ancient attitudes toward women, women’s daily lives, the female life cycle, and the various practical and symbolic roles that women played in Greece, Rome, and the broader Mediterranean world. Topics include the portrayal of women in ancient myth, literature, and art; the political, legal, economic, and social status of women; women’s roles in state and private religious activities; women in the family and household organization; women’s education and female literacy; philosophical treatments of gender; scientific knowledge and folklore concerning gender and sexuality; and the function of gender in ancient ideologies. The course follows these topics chronologically, with special emphasis given to the coincidences and conflicts between literary images of women and the realities of their everyday experience recoverable through documentary and archaeological evidence. Prerequisite: HUM 110. Conference. Cross-listed as HIST 397.

Not offered 2023–24.

Ancient Mediterranean Studies 382 - Material Culture and Empire: The Archaeology of the Roman World

One-unit semester course. This course considers the archaeology and material culture of the Roman Empire, including the city of Rome, Italy, and the provinces. This course is theoretically grounded in the archaeology of empire, but will also be content-based, covering major sites throughout the empire and classes of material culture. Topics to be covered may include the origin and development of the city of Rome; imperial display; daily life in the Roman Empire; the archaeology of the Roman economy; the archaeology of cult and religion; provincial archaeology and the relationship between center and periphery; the archaeology of border regions; and methodological and disciplinary issues in approaching a vast territorial empire. Throughout the course, emphasis will be placed on the archaeology of identity in an imperial context. Prerequisite: HUM 110, or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference. 

Ancient Mediterranean Studies 383 - Contact and Exchange in the Mediterranean: The Archaeology of the Greek World

One-unit semester course. This course considers the archaeology and material culture of the Greek world, centering on the Aegean and the wider eastern Mediterranean and Near East, as well as other areas of Greek settlement. The focus will be both theoretical and content-based, covering important sites, objects, and classes of material culture. Topics to be covered may include the development of urban and public space; monumental architecture; sculpture and other fine arts; houses, households, and the archaeology of daily life; Greek colonization and city foundations; ceramics and the use of pottery as archaeological evidence; and funerary practices. Throughout the course, emphasis will be placed on the interaction between Greeks and other groups in the Mediterranean, and the material effects of that interaction. Prerequisite: HUM 110, or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference. 

Not offered 2023–24.

Ancient Mediterranean Studies 384 - Empires of the Nile: The Archaeology of Egypt and Nubia

One-unit semester course. This course examines the art and archaeology of ancient Egypt and Nubia from late prehistory (ca. 3000 BCE) through the Nubian Meroitic period (ends ca. 400 CE). These two regions of northeast Africa were economically, culturally, and politically intertwined throughout their history, and offer an exceptional case study for the examination of the material effects of imperialism and cross-cultural interaction over the long term. This course will survey major aspects of Egyptian and Nubian archaeology, including death, burial, and mummification; tombs and their development; ideologies and iconographies of kingship; material culture and religion; temples and other religious architecture; the emergence of the state; archaeologies of imperialism; and archaeologies of daily life. Specific attention will be paid to Nubian material culture, the reciprocal political and cultural interactions between Egypt and Nubia, and the unique material culture that resulted from these interactions, though the course is overall centered on Egyptian archaeology due to the quantity and quality of data. Emphasis will be placed on engaging with and critically analyzing archaeological and visual data, as well as some primary textual sources.  We will also consider the modern reception and study of ancient Egypt in relation to Nubia and the broader archaeology of Africa. Lecture-conference.

Ancient Mediterranean Studies 385 - Mummies, Urns, and Ancestors: The Archaeology of Death and Burial

One-unit semester course. This course examines archaeological approaches to human death and burial, introducing how archaeologists use the material remains of mortuary practice to analyze ritual, social, economic, and ideological institutions, structures, and identities in past societies. Using case studies drawn from ancient Egypt and the wider ancient Mediterranean, this course will present a theoretical grounding for the archaeological investigation of human burial, including bioarchaeological and osteological approaches. From the perspective of funerary practice, we will examine social structure, class, and rank; religion and belief systems; ethnicity and cultural identity; age, sex, and gender; and memory and ancestor veneration. This course will also consider aspects of archaeological ethics as it relates to the study of human remains. Lecture-conference. 

Not offered 2023–24.

Ancient Mediterranean Studies 481 - Independent Reading

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Prerequisite: approval of instructor and division.

Ancient Mediterranean Studies 501 - Archaeological Fantasies: Pseudo-archaeology, Pseudo-history, and Nationalism

One-half-unit semester course. In this course, we will examine the (ab)uses of archaeological material, sites, and data in the service of pseudo-historical/pseudo-archaeological arguments and conspiracy theories, as well as nationalistic agendas. We will start the course by examining accepted methods and theories of archaeology and how they have developed over time, while also considering archaeology’s place in popular culture. Further topics to be covered include the use of archaeology in the construction of national narratives; Nazi uses of archaeology; white supremacist uses of ancient DNA; ancient aliens narratives; Atlantis and other hyperdiffusionist stories; and ways in which pseudo-archaeological theories erase Indigenous histories. In addition to examining these uses of archaeology and the ends they serve, we will also consider the epistemological roots of pseudo-archaeological thought. Conference. Offered spring 2024.

Anthropology 201 - Topics in Contemporary Anthropology

One-unit semester course. Conference. May be repeated for credit.

Anthropology of Global Health
One-unit semester course. This course is designed to be a gateway course in cultural and medical anthropology geared toward first- and second-year students. Global health presents itself as a timely intervention that redistributes the means of physical and mental well-being to those who lack it, typically in resource-poor or underserved settings. But in what sense is global health “global” if it is driven by the agendas of specific nations and institutions? How can it command such implicit recognition as a force for good and yet seem to recapitulate the imperial agendas and perspectives of the colonial era? Rather than considering global health as obvious, coherent, and necessary, we will examine its foundations: What assumptions does global health reflect about bodies, families, history, and biomedicine itself? In what ways do global health programs build upon or distinguish themselves from colonial-era medical campaigns that tied biomedical interventions to Christianity, modernization, and the demands of industrial labor? How does global health both reflect and perpetuate transnational political and economic shifts? What are the unexpected consequences of global health programs—for the individuals who compose target populations, but also for global health professionals themselves as well as local experts? In exploring answers to these questions, we will draw on recent ethnographic analyses from around the world as well as historical studies that illuminate global health’s antecedents. This course applies to the department’s SETS concentration. No prerequisite. Conference. Not offered 2023–24. 

Bodies, Spaces, Subjectivities
One-unit semester course. This course is designed to be a gateway course in cultural-phenomenological anthropology geared toward first- and second-year students. It introduces basic concepts and methods in anthropology through a sustained attention to human bodies as the preeminent space of subject making in different cultural contexts. Drawing on phenomenology, practice theory, urban studies, performance studies, and gender theory, the course approaches culture as a form of doing rather than of being, as first and foremost a set of embodied, material practices and cultivated dispositions. It explores both how corporeality connects people with others and their environments, and how, in the process, bodies become objects of individual attention and social action. Readings connect classics in social theory (Merleau-Ponty, Schutz, Bourdieu, Simmel, Goffman) with canonical anthropological texts (Boas, Sapir, Mauss, Gluckman, Sahlins), and ethnographies focusing on particular forms of embodiment and space making in the Americas, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania. Topics include dwelling, working, playing, learning, making, modifying, exchanging, and contesting. Students will partner to conduct small fieldwork projects in the Portland area, learning basic qualitative methods in the process. No prerequisite. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

Decolonizing Archaeology
One-unit semester course. This course is designed to expand students’ notions about just what archaeologists do and what questions archaeology can answer. Through a review of archaeology’s history, goals, theories, and methods, we will explore the ways in which archaeology is practiced, focusing in particular on the questions and techniques that shape our knowledge of the human past. In addition to dispelling misconceptions about archaeologists studying dinosaurs or ancient aliens, this course will be candid and critical of the colonial and imperialist histories of archaeology while also highlighting the positive ways in which it has been practiced. We will examine how it is that archaeologists develop ideas about the past through its material remains and the relevance of their research in the present. We will pay particular attention to the challenges and ethical dilemmas that come from collecting, studying, and displaying the material remains of ancient cultures, especially those with descendant communities in the present who have historically been marginalized by archaeology. Thinking about how archaeologists can build relationships and partner with contemporary communities will be a core component of this course. While this course is not meant to be a survey of world history, we will explore the history of archaeology through references to studies from all over the world that investigate periods ranging from prehistory to the present. Students will be encouraged to develop and pursue interests in any regions, time periods, and topics they feel drawn to and will be given frequent opportunities to explore these further through various assignments. This course applies to the department’s SETS concentration. No prerequisite. Conference.

Global Political Ecology
One-unit semester course. This course is designed to be a gateway course in the anthropology of political ecology geared toward first- and second-year students. Despite enormous scientific and political efforts, scientists and activists have found themselves unable to bring about the political changes that might reverse climate change and environmental degradation. The degradation of earth’s environment has been caused by humans, but somehow humans have not been able to stop or reverse the social processes that cause this degradation. This course examines case studies of environmental degradation at multiple scales, from Superfund sites in Oregon to deforestation in the Amazon to global climate change, to three ends: to explore fundamental questions in social theory about the relationship between humans and the world, to understand why coordinated scientific and political efforts to prevent environmental degradation have tended to fail, and to think through new political and environmental interventions that might succeed. The course readings are drawn from both environmental science and anthropology, and one of the tasks of the course is to introduce students to anthropology through the multiple ways in which the discipline has dealt with knowledge produced in the natural sciences. By putting environmental science in conversation with anthropology, we will also think through ways to reconcile the disciplines in political practice. This course applies to the department’s SETS concentration. No prerequisite. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

Language, Culture, Power
One-unit semester course. This course is designed to be a gateway course in linguistic anthropology geared toward first- and second-year students. Language permeates our lives, identities, and relationships, yet most of us take it for granted. This course introduces students to some of the foundational concepts, methods, and issues addressed in linguistic anthropology. Starting with the basic premise that language, thought, and culture are inextricably intertwined in practice, we take a fundamentally comparative and global perspective on the study of language. We will consider language not as a simple means of communication, but as a medium through which values, subjectivities, and sociopolitical relationships are created and transformed. We ask: How do differences in language affect how we think and act? How do people do things with language, and how does this vary across cultures, times, and places? How does linguistic communication interact with nonverbal or embodied forms of communication? What ideologies of language shape our understandings of difference and hierarchy? In exploring answers to these questions, we will draw on media resources, natural language examples, and recent ethnographic analyses from around the world to consider the ways in which language is implicated in power struggles within specific domains of social relationships (race, class, gender, sexuality) and institutions (education, medicine, law, immigration, electoral politics). This course applies to the department’s linguistic anthropology concentration. No prerequisite. Conference. 

Anthropology 211 - Introduction to Anthropology: History, Theory, Method

One-unit semester course. An introduction to the history, theory, methods, and subject matter of the field of social and cultural anthropology. Students become familiar with the conceptual framework of the discipline and with some of its techniques of research and interpretation. Anthropology is considered in its role as a social science and as a discipline with ties to the humanities and natural sciences. Emphasis is on close integration of analytic abstractions with empirical particulars. Conference. Not open to first-year students.

Anthropology 300 - African Technoscience

One-unit semester course. In the global North, Africans frequently appear as the beneficiaries and consumers of global flows of science and technology or, conversely, science and technology’s misusers and refusers. Rarely do they figure as its authors, producers, or animators. This course interrogates the conditions of possibility for African technoscience. What do the key themes of the anthropology of science—the politics of knowledge production, naturalizations as a site of investigation, the role of the state in shaping scientific infrastructures—look like when viewed from the African continent? What is at stake in claiming a particularly African logic, or in insisting on the rationality of witchcraft? Foregrounding the work of African anthropologists and historians, this course will examine Africans’ participation in and contestation of science as a practice of knowledge production, as a technique of colonial governance, as a site of anticolonial resistance, as a tool of postcolonial nation building, and as a potential instrument of decolonization. Drawn from across sub-Saharan Africa, our readings will analyze knowledge production practices such as molecular biology, geology, mathematics, and anthropology while also grappling with how the boundaries of these practices have emerged and the people, objects, and forms of knowledge that exceed those boundaries. This course meets the department’s area requirement and applies to the department’s SETS concentration. Prerequisites: ANTH 201 or 211. Conference. Cross-listed as CRES 390.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 305 - Musical Ethnography

See MUS 305 for description.

Music 305 Description

Anthropology 306 - #CentralAmericanTwitter: Continuity and Rupture in Central American Indigenous Histories

One-unit semester course. Of the 250,000 Guatemalan migrants apprehended at the US-Mexico border between 2018 and 2019, many Americans may be surprised to learn that at least half are Indigenous, often with little fluency in Spanish and with a distinct cultural background. Understanding the forces driving this modern-day migration, and its effects on these Indigenous migrants, requires a historically situated understanding of Central American Indigeneity itself and its unique legacy within countries like Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. This course provides that historical background, beginning with the archaeology and ancient history of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and continuing through the conquest of the Americas to the present day. By focusing on topics such as Indigenous culture, social inequality, and religion, we will track historical currents through time and discuss what effect they continue to have today. From this framing, we will use a multimedia approach that includes films, excerpts of novels, ethnographies, photographs, and social media to access firsthand accounts of the topics discussed in class. This course meets the department’s area requirement. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211. Conference. Cross-listed as CRES 396.

Anthropology 307 - “One Good Turkey Hen is Worth 100 Cacao Beans”: An Introduction to Economic Anthropology

One-unit semester course. What does it mean to be in debt? What is the difference between exchange and barter? Why do things have prices? What are gifts? What is value? These are questions that are fundamental to economics, yet their answers vary significantly between different cultures and time periods. In this course, we examine these questions through the lens of economic anthropology and adopt a holistic framework that considers the diversity of preferences, behaviors, and activities that relate to how people meet their basic (or not) human needs. We will consider behaviors like production, consumption, and exchange from a cross-cultural perspective that shows alternative practices and understandings that confront conventional arguments about human economic behavior. To do so, we will learn about the principles and history of economic anthropology and consider how we might study the economic practices of people today and in the past. What kind of material evidence do we look at? How do we know what was valued in the past? Through a combination of ethnographic texts, museum collections, and archaeological reports, we will consider these questions and call into question the assumed logics and structures of our current economic system. Students will be encouraged to develop and pursue interests in any regions, time periods, and topics they feel drawn to and will be given frequent opportunities to explore these further through various assignments. This course applies to the department’s SETS concentration. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211, or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 308 - Obsidian Rocks! A Natural and Social History

One-unit semester course. Today, most people have little if any relationship to the dark, black, brittle volcanic glass we know as obsidian. But from early Neolithic farmers trading throughout the Mediterranean, to Maya priests conducting ritual sacrifices, to Polynesian explorers sailing across the Pacific, obsidian can tell us about the daily lives, practices, technologies, and relationships of ancient peoples. For much of human antiquity, obsidian was prized not only for its sharpness, but also for its distinct physical properties. Its translucency, color, and shimmer have made an aesthetically pleasing material as well, with obsidian used as often for elaborate figurines, mirrors, and weapons as used for tools. Moreover, the volcanic conditions necessary to create obsidian make it a scarce resource in many regions of the world, and therefore traded for over great distances. The various uses and cultural connotations of obsidian persist up to the present day, whether in its use in jewelry, in surgical tools, or in popular media (as dragonglass in Game of Thrones). This course examines the history of this unique material, its many uses, its cultural and symbolic meanings, and the ways in which archaeologists study it today. In investigating the natural and social history of obsidian, this course will not only draw on scientific articles and archaeological reports, but also include hands-on tutorials in obsidian knapping, chemical sourcing, artifact illustration, and quantitative and qualitative lithic analyses. By analyzing obsidian firsthand, students will learn the diversity of approaches that archaeologists employ to understand the use, function, history, and meaning of ancient materials. This course applies to the department’s SETS concentration. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211, or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 320 - Social Movements, Protests, and Historical Change in South Asia

One-unit semester course. The Arab uprisings, the Black Lives Matter movement, the ongoing student movement in India, and the rise of far-right movements in the United States and elsewhere have given a new urgency to an examination of the tactics and possibilities of mass movements and protests: How and why do large groups of people come together to protest? When and how do some people and issues become political, and when and how do they not? How and when are these movements successful in achieving their aims? What social, cultural, and political effects do they have beyond their explicit aims? How, finally, do these movements interact with existing state and legal structures, whether antagonistically or through participation and engagement? By examining South Asian social movements with a focus on India, this conference analyzes current and historical attempts to reconfigure the relationships between people, laws, and states. In the process, the conference engages with challenges facing anthropology in theorizing historical change and in finding methodologies suited to large- and multi-scaled social processes. South Asia, with its vast scale and its complex and constantly shifting political landscape, is both an ideal and an important site for these inquiries. This conference also serves as an introduction to the anthropology of South Asia. It begins with a historical and theoretical consideration of the play of domination and hegemony in the colonial period, moves to a study of nationalist movements in India and Bangladesh, and then draws on the theoretical frameworks studied in the beginning of the semester to consider a range of contemporary social movements, including the Indian Maoist uprising, Dalit and anticaste movements, and the Sri Lankan Civil War. This course asks what an anthropological approach to the specific and local can bring to the study of politics, and what a study of large-scale movements can bring to anthropological understandings of historical change. This course meets the department’s area requirement. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211. Conference. 

Anthropology 324 - Sport and Society

One-unit semester course. Sports are deeply entangled with and imbricated in social processes, cultural institutions, and everyday life across much of the globe. The course approaches sports play as a set of embodied practices and performances, as a primary site for the reproduction and innovation of fundamental categories of gender/sex/sexuality, class, race/ethnicity, and nationality. Through case studies of situated sporting practices (notably football/soccer, cricket/baseball, basketball, bodybuilding, boxing, capoeira, skateboarding, and parkour), we will examine how colonial legacies are literally embodied in contemporary forms of urban space, nationalism, and globalization. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211, or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 331 - Archaeology of Reed

One-unit semester course. This course is an introduction to the practice and process of archaeological fieldwork. Students will learn the foundational methods of archaeological recovery: survey, mapping, documentation, excavation, artifact identification, and artifact interpretation. The fieldwork will also extend beyond the excavation, as students will become familiar with political and ethical challenges and combine historical and archaeological sources in their research. Excavations will be done on the grounds of Reed College. Students who have completed ANTH 201 as Decolonizing Archaeology may register with instructor approval. Prerequisite: ANTH 432 or ANME 385. Lecture-laboratory.

Anthropology 332 - Mesoamerican Archaeology

One-unit semester course. This course serves as an introduction to the field of Mesoamerican studies, focusing on the peoples and cultures of this region that includes modern-day Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. We will explore the development of the great Olmec civilization of the Gulf Coast, the city of Teotihuacan in central Mexico, the Maya civilization in Central America and the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Aztec Empire of central Mexico. Through studying these sites and cultures, we will investigate the political organization, economy, and belief systems of these ancient people through their material culture, architecture, and texts. We will also explore the ways in which archaeology is practiced in this region, focusing in particular on the questions and techniques that have shaped our knowledge of these ancient civilizations, while also being mindful and critical of the colonial and imperialist histories of archaeology. Though this course will primarily focus on Mesoamerica’s pre-Columbian history, this course will also include frequent readings from colonial documents and modern-day ethnographies to explore how this ancient past remains relevant and impactful in the present. This course applies to the department’s SETS concentration. This course meets the department’s area requirement. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211. Lecture-conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 334 - Queer Politics and Pleasures

One-unit semester course. Queerness speaks to bodily pleasures, longing, intimacies, affects, and desires that present an outside to cis-heteronormativity. Focusing on ethnography and history, this course examines how such sensations occur towards such lofty ambitions as sexual fulfillment, self-making, political uprisings, and world making. Exploring works in anthropology, art, film, television, music, and literature, this course tackles the intersections of queer theory, activism, and practices of everyday life as shaped across a range of cultures, places, and times. Central attention to race, gender, class, and the ongoing legacies of colonialism frame the course. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 337 - Black Ecologies in the Americas

One-unit semester course. Since the era of the Middle Passage, the survival, fates, and fortunes of Black communities throughout the Americas have turned on contested relations to landscapes—both rural and urban. Historical and ongoing legacies of coerced forms of racialized and gendered labor, as well as extractive (e.g., plantations, mines) capitalist political-economic structures too often overshadow co-occurring material and spiritual practices of care that constitute countermanding critical ecologies. This course explores myriad Afro-diasporic cultural forms of land use, land ownership, land occupation, and the significances of the environment in their diverse manifestations across South America and North America, including the Caribbean. Particularly, we will study such elements as contemporary environmentalist social movements, small-scale rural and urban farming, conservation, gastronomy and foodways, and notions of a Black commons, as well as Afro-spiritual conceptions of nature. Primary attention to the interstices of race, gender, sexuality, class, and the ongoing legacies of colonialism frames the course. This course applies to the department’s SETS concentration. This course meets the department’s area requirement. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 342 - Language and Medicine

One-unit semester course. This course examines the intersection of language with practices of health and healing in anthropological analyses. While medical anthropologists have long pointed to healing as a cultural practice, they have given less attention to its linguistic dimensions. Within anthropological analyses, moreover, language as a tool of healing is consigned to biomedicine’s suspect others (e.g., traditional healing, ritual) and to the treatment of what biomedicine frames as ephemeral phenomena (minds, emotions, selves, subjectivities) relative to the body’s seeming concrete reality. This course will take a cross-cultural approach to healing, asking how linguistic anthropology can contribute to analyses of affliction broadly construed. We will also look at the history of the subdisciplinary division of labor that has made language and biomedicine seem incompatible as objects of anthropological analysis. This course applies to the department’s SETS and linguistic anthropology concentrations. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 343 - African Pasts, African Futures

One-unit semester course. This course examines the ways Africans engage the past and imagine the future. How do the slave trade, colonial rule, anticolonial resistance, the development initiatives of the Cold War era, and lingering promises of modernity figure in Africans’ perceptions, experiences, and visions of the world? The first goal of the course is to attend to the conditions of possibility that make African pasts and futures thinkable and inhabitable. We will examine the conceptions of time that have shaped Africans’ lived experiences of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, giving close attention to the material and symbolic structures these conceptions have reflected and reinforced. Our second goal is to interrogate Africa as a site of knowledge production. What would it mean to decolonize African studies, or to center Africa in planetary accounts? Drawn from across sub-Saharan Africa, our readings foreground the work of African scholars and engage themes such as the significance of “custom” and “tradition,” transformations in intergenerational relations, the ethics and politics of remembering and forgetting, the built environment as a site of memory and resistance, and the place of Africa in the world. Topics may include the politics of race and ethnicity, the appropriation of African knowledge in the colonial encounter, the consequences of colonial and postcolonial development projects, and efforts to decolonize higher education. The syllabus pairs works of empirical research with suggested contemporary African novels. This course meets the department’s area requirement. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211. Conference. Cross-listed as CRES 392.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 345 - Black Queer Diaspora

One-unit semester course. This course examines ethnographies of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people across the Black diaspora. The history of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and their ongoing aftermaths have created both interlinked and locally variant lifeways across the Americas, Africa, and Europe. Black queer studies queries the creativity and variation with which Black people have been shaped by and continuously reshape these histories, undermining presupposed norms of race, gender, and sexuality. We will look at ethnographic explorations of these particulars, differences, and commonalities as documented in texts, images, and sounds across multiple disciplines. We interrogate how conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality shift across time and space and as lived by Black social actors who both participate in and defy colonial and nationalist projects. This course meets the department’s area requirement. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Cross-listed as CRES 395.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 347 - Outbreak, Emergency, Pandemic: Anthropology of Health Systems

One-unit semester course. In the past few decades, infectious diseases such as HIV, Ebola, and COVID-19 have illuminated the urgency of health systems research. These mass infections have also highlighted the strengths and weakness of different health systems, while also illustrating just how complex and unwieldy public health interventions can be. Even in supposedly “developed” or “wealthy” countries, public health interventions in mass infections can exacerbate existing inequalities along lines of race, class, and gender, sharpen political antagonisms, prop up cronyism, erode existing health services by redirecting resources in ways that negatively impact public health in the process, and radically transform how individuals and groups regard themselves and others. Ethnographic research provides a critical vantage point for thinking about what health policy and health systems do and what they mean beyond their stated intentions and actions. Focusing on epidemics past, present, and future, this class will pose the following questions: What can ethnographic research illuminate about health systems, particularly health systems under immense strain? What do strategies implemented to respond to mass infections tell us about how public health policymakers view the world, and the historical and political contexts that give rise to these visions? In what ways must ethnographers modify their research methodologies to respond to outbreaks of infectious disease? We will also explore different ways anthropologists engage with health policy making and health systems reform, and critically examine the ramifications of these engagements. This course applies to the department’s SETS concentration. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 349 - Time and Space

One-unit semester course. Introduction to classic and contemporary anthropological literatures on the sociocultural production and experience of time and space, supported also by readings from several allied disciplines. Emphasis is on forming propositions specific enough to be relevant to interpretation of concrete ethnographic materials. Topics of major concern include memory, ritual, narrative, deixis, chronology and time reckoning, embodiment, landscape, the turn (or return) to history in anthropology, and the spatiotemporal organization of contemporary industrial societies. Narrower subproblems receiving deepest consideration will vary in different years of offering. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211, or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 357 - Comparative Fascisms

One-unit semester course. This course attempts to provincialize the category of fascism, using it to analyze moments both historically and geographically distant from mid-twentieth-century Europe. We will begin with a set of historical apologetics and critiques from European fascists, American white supremacists, intellectuals associated with European imperialism, and right-wing nationalist intellectuals from across the globe, alongside their contemporary critics. Drawing upon the analyses we build of ideologies, tactics, and historical conditions of the various political projects, we spend the second unit of the course reading ethnographic accounts of contemporary fascist and right-wing movements from India, Europe, and the United States. We end the semester with readings from contemporary antifascist movements, comparing their analyses with those that have emerged from our readings. Prerequisites: ANTH 201 or 211, or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 361 - The Middle East: Culture and Politics

One-unit semester course. The Middle East has been the focus of increased scrutiny over the past few decades in light of U.S. economic and political interests, and yet the region’s internal cultural complexity is poorly understood and often overlooked. This course provides both an anthropological overview of the region’s political culture and cultural politics, as well as a critical inquiry into the very anthropo-geographic categories that have historically sustained a sense of unity in the region, including tribalism, honor and shame, religious piety, and poetic practices. In the process, the course explores larger comparative issues of colonialism, nationalism, state formation, sectarianism, urbanism, and globalization. This course meets the department’s area requirement. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211, or consent of instructor. Conference.

Anthropology 363 - Race and Transnational China

One-unit semester course. Debates about forms of perceived or imagined social difference have a long history among people who identify as Chinese, including negotiations of diasporic relations with a Chinese homeland, now claimed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Those debates took on new urgency in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for Chinese intellectuals faced with the threat of Western colonialism, the imperative to establish a sovereign nation-state, and the concomitant rise of Western modernity discourses that were grounded in notions of essential biological differences hierarchizing human “races.” Yet since the emergence of the PRC as global power in the 2010s and President Xi Jinping’s effort to extend Chinese infrastructure development and investment programs to over 70 countries worldwide, transnational China has seen reintensified debates about social difference and the meaning of Chineseness, as well as the rise of new mass-mediated Han Chinese nationalisms. In this course we engage multimedia sources (texts, videos, images) to explore these most recent debates in historical context. We do this as a way to dialogue with critical race theory, and to delve into the high-stakes interpretive politics of “race” and “racism” transnationally. As many Chinese scholars and netizens ask: are these English language terms even applicable in the very different cultural, historical, and political economic contexts of transnational China? We start with comparative theoretical debates about the nature of “race” as historically situated perceptions and claims about biological/embodied difference. We then turn to debates in recent Chinese contexts to consider for example the relationship between discourses of “race” and “nation,” the nature of “Han-ness,” the status of “ethnic minorities,” and the status of “Blackness” amidst increased Sino-African engagement. Our goal will be to expand our understandings of the stakes and contexts of cosmologies and ontologies of social difference and inequality transnationally. This course meets the department’s area requirement. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Cross-listed as CRES 393.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 364 - The Anthropology of Global Tibet

One-unit semester course. Since the Dalai Lama fled to exile in India in 1959, Tibet and Tibetans have garnered emblematic status in global debates on Indigenous cultures and human rights. The widespread Tibetan unrest and subsequent military crackdown during China’s summer “Olympic year” (2007–08) focused renewed international attention on the issue of Tibet in the face of China’s rise as an important political and economic power. Meanwhile, tightening political constraints and rapid development under president Xi Jinping have ushered in a new and complicated era for the transnational Tibetan community. Yet Tibet has long been both a cosmopolitan place and an object of translocal interest and desire. This course draws on anthropological theories of ethnicity, modernity, nationalism, space, and globalization to understand this phenomenon in its historical and ethnographic contexts. Working with a wide range of theoretical, historical, and ethnographic writings, as well as a variety of other media such as film, popular songs, websites, and blogs from in and outside of China, we consider the transnational contexts and causes of changing meanings of Tibetanness before and after Chinese Communist intervention. We focus especially on the historical and contemporary diversity among Tibetans across the Himalayan region and into the diaspora, as well as the changing political economic conditions of Chinese-Tibetan relations. This course meets the department’s area requirement. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 365 - The Anthropology of Development in Post-Mao China

One-unit semester course. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, state leaders have struggled to chart a course to a Chinese modernity that would break with the perceived humiliations of European domination in the nineteenth century and bring China commensurate status in a newly configured world stage of nations. Since Deng Xiaoping’s post-Mao reforms in the early 1980s, the PRC has been one of the fastest growing economies in the world. As such, it is poised to have major impacts globally, and especially since the PRC’s entrance into the World Trade Organization in 2001, these meteoric socioeconomic changes have complex implications for its diverse 1.4 billion people, as well as for many communities abroad now impacted by the expanding reach of Chinese investment and development efforts. This course draws on anthropological theories of modernity, capitalism, globalization, and development to turn a critical eye on discourses and practices of “development” in the PRC. Drawing on theoretical, historical, and ethnographic writings, as well as on other media such as government policy papers, advertising, and documentary and feature films, we consider the contexts and contradictions of various development efforts just before, during, and after the Maoist period, focusing especially on the post-Mao era of economic reforms. The PRC thus will serve as a case study for our broader examination of theories conceptualizing the relationships among transregional capitalisms, changing forms of governance, and local communities’ experiences. This course meets the department’s area requirement. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211, or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Anthropology 374 - Urban Anthropology

One-unit semester course. The course provides an introduction to urban anthropology, with a particular focus on the colonial and postcolonial metropole as an exemplary site for the reciprocal influences of global and local processes. It explores how the city functions simultaneously as a locus for the negotiation of cultural diversity and for utopian ideals of rational communication. Drawing from cases throughout the “developed” and “developing” worlds, the course examines how urban culture is produced and reproduced under regimes of industrialization, colonialism, modernism, and globalization. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211, or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 375 - Anthropology of Science

One-unit semester course. This course examines scientific practices and knowledge as cultural, social, and political phenomena. Scientific knowledge often appears to be none of these things, and so central questions of the course are how such knowledge is produced and how it is able to transcend its context. The course begins with a set of orienting texts from Kuhn, Foucault, and Latour before turning to ethnographic and historical work on science and expertise, with an emphasis on feminist and postcolonial approaches. Along the way, we ask how the questions and methods drawn from the study of science can reshape larger anthropological understandings of the political and the social. This course applies to the department’s SETS concentration. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211. Conference.

Anthropology 378 - Nature, Culture, and Environmentalism

One-unit semester course. Western epistemology is considered to be based on a strict separation and opposition between nature and culture. While this divide is under increasing scrutiny in the face of the climate crisis in the Anthropocene, anthropology has long been a pioneer in challenging and dismantling this binary. This course examines canonical and contemporary anthropological approaches to the concept of nature and human relations with the natural environment. We will discuss how conceptions of nature are always shaped, transformed, and produced by historically situated social relations and how such conceptions, in turn, shape environmental struggles across the globe. Course materials focus primarily on ethnographies from the Global South oriented towards the intersections of political ecology and environmental justice, science and technology studies, postcolonial theory, and more-than-human perspectives. Course topics include the history of the Western nature-culture binary and its critiques, and recent environmental scholarship on issues such as agro-food systems, extractive conflicts, toxicity, genetic engineering, climate change, disasters, microbial lives, and multispecies entanglements. This course applies to the anthropology department’s SETS concentration. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211. Conference.

Anthropology 379 - Resource-making through the Mediterranean

One-unit semester course. Through the ages, the Mediterranean Sea has been a conduit of interaction rather than an obstacle, connecting continents, peoples, ecologies, resources, and politics. This course examines the interplay between power relations and natural resources in the Mediterranean region by surveying works in anthropology, history, human geography, and political ecology. Scholars have examined natural resource management from international relations, geopolitical, or political economy perspectives for decades. Recent scholarship brings other critical approaches to bear on the discussions of environment and politics in the Mediterranean region. Focusing on this rising critical scholarship, we will elaborate on how water, oil, coal, land, forests, fisheries, agriculture, and solar energy - among others - are made into sources of political power at scales ranging from everyday life to national and transnational politics. By challenging the “naturalness” of resources, we will reflect on what a natural resource is and how it connects with sociocultural practices, power relations, and historical processes. In this course, we will focus on the Mediterranean to explore themes and concepts such as colonialism, nationalism, power, resistance, access, scarcity, abundance, pollution, and temporality through the lenses of critical social studies on natural resources. This course applies to the anthropology department’s SETS concentration, and to the department's area requirement. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211. Conference.

Anthropology 380 - Anthropology of Risk and Uncertainty

One-unit semester course. Risk has become a major theme shaping our contemporary life. The climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic are two most recent contentious domains where the intimate and the personal are entangled with the global scale through risk. But what is risk? Is it an external reality that can be objectively calculated? Is it a subjective experience lived and assessed differently across the globe? Is it the primary qualifier of our late modernity? What are the interplays between the notions of risk, uncertainty, and danger? This course unpacks the socio-political worlds of risk. Through ethnographic and science and technology studies (STS) informed accounts across the globe on various topics such as health, toxicity, disasters, economics, safety, security, and climate, we will scrutinize the multi-faceted aspects of risk. By examining competing social theories of risk, ethnographic studies of culturally diverse ways of assessing and managing risks, historical analyses of how risk emerges as a techno-political domain of intervention, and STS accounts of how risk expertise is created and circulated, this course divulges the polysemous, productive, and ultimately contentious life of risk. This course applies to the anthropology department’s SETS concentration. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 391 - Legal Anthropology

One-unit semester course. The course examines the concept of legality as a social institution and a prominent feature of popular culture. Beginning with the emergence of legal anthropology and its history within the larger discipline, the course will focus on the relationships human actors have with the law as both an embedded social institution, and a disembodied set of authoritative doctrines. The course will orient students to productive ways of studying law and legality anthropologically. Topical areas will include Rule of Law, crime and punishment, sovereignty, alternative legal institutions, colonial and postcoloniality, environmental law, and transnationality. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211, or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 395 - Globalization

One-unit semester course. This course is an introduction from an anthropological perspective to recent theories and debates about the nature of “globalization.” What is “globalization?” Why has this term become so prevalent in social theory and popular discourse in the past 20 years? What competing worldviews and political economic visions does it encompass? Beginning with influential debates outside of anthropology, we move quickly to consider the criticisms and alternatives offered by anthropologists and their interlocutors, especially since the late 1980s. Drawing on the recent spate of theoretical literature, ethnographies, and award-winning films on globalization and capitalism at a variety of scales, discussions and written assignments will address some of the most pressing and conflictual issues facing humankind today. How new are the translocal processes now labeled “globalization?” What is the nature of capitalism in a so-called “postcolonial” or “neoliberal” age? How are new forms of infrastructure, networks, economic development, and exploitation connecting different regions of the world? What forms of social and spatial mobility are emerging? What are the roles of both national states and transnational organizations and associations in these changes? How are forms of racial, ethnic, and gender difference constructed through these processes? What alternatives and resistances have been constructed? While course readings will touch on perspectives from a variety of disciplines, the course is designed to provide a specifically anthropological lens on these issues. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211. Conference.

Anthropology 397 - Media Persons Publics

One-unit semester course. The meteoric rise of new forms of digital data and social media in the past 20 years has generated, on the one hand, fantasies of utopic intimacy (the immediacy promised in a new “global village”), and on the other, moral panics about unprecedented estrangement (the hypermediation of virtual worlds and corporate or government “big data”). In this course, we challenge this dichotomy of intimacy/immediacy versus estrangement/mediation by taking an anthropological approach to the question of human communication. Drawing on interdisciplinary debates in philosophy, linguistic anthropology, and media studies, we develop tools for understanding all communication as both mediated and material, grounded in embodied practices and technological infrastructures and situated in historical events. This in turn will allow us to grasp how circulations of media forms and commodities participate in the creation of types of persons and publics across multiple scales of time and space. Bringing those theoretical and methodological debates into dialogue with ethnographic studies and other forms of media, we ask: How do people sense and interpret themselves, others, and their worlds? What is the boundary between the human and nonhuman in a digital age? What roles do states or transregional capitalisms play in the mediation of valued and devalued persons and publics? What are the possibilities for communication amidst great gaps in access to valued forms of media? This course applies to the department’s SETS and linguistic anthropology concentrations. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 398 - Race and Immigration

One-unit semester course. This course explores immigration through the lens of critical race theory and social phenomenology. Drawing on historical and contemporary case studies from the United States, Brazil, Britain, France, Germany, and Australia, the course considers subjective experience, structural conditions, and political contests around immigration. The course focuses on issues of embodied labor, identity formation, and particularly the ways in which immigrants incorporate themselves into and/or are excluded from processes of nation formation and imagination. In this respect, the course interrogates the racial boundaries of contemporary citizenship and the limits of liberal ideologies of multiculturalism. To gloss W.E.B. Du Bois, how does it feel for immigrants to be a problem? Prerequisite for anthropology credit: ANTH 201 or 211. Prerequisite for CRES credit: completion of or concurrent enrollment in any CRES foundational course. Cross-listed as CRES 300. Conference.

Anthropology 411 - The Politics of World Making: Semiotics, Pragmatics, Performance

One-unit semester course. Anthropologists have long been interested in humans’ dynamic efforts to create multidimensional social worlds amid ongoing contestation. Yet early attempts to account for this cultural politics of world making were obscured in favor of conveniently static representations of bounded “cultures” or/as “races,” and dualistic understandings of sociocultural structures versus individual actions or intentions. This course considers “semiotics,” “pragmatics,” and “performance” to be methodological rubrics that have grouped together a wide variety of social theorists who have focused instead on the emergent and contested nature of all meanings, persons, and places as they are interpreted in everyday and ritualized speech, practice, and performance. The course brings linguistic anthropological methodologies into dialogue with critical race theories since the early twentieth century to interrogate the possibilities and limits of anthropological world making in the face of Western Theorists’ complicities with modernist white supremacy. Moving from key foundational texts in the science and philosophy of language, social action, and subjectivity to more recent theoretical and ethnographic work, we rethink language and semiotics as social action, the nature of context and interpretive politics, the relationships between formal events or performances and everyday life, and the precarious, often violent creation of selves and others. By directing analytic focus to the indeterminacy, ambiguity, and multiplicity inherent to social life and weaponized or erased in racialized political economic orders, the course challenges students to reconsider some of the central issues in anthropological theory, such as agency, identity, power, and resistance. This course applies to the department’s linguistic anthropology concentration. Prerequisite: ANTH 211. Conference.

Anthropology 425 - Marx from the South

One-unit semester course. This course engages with a long history of Marx and political economic thought in relation to the global South. The course is organized around key concepts, such as labor, value, capital, property, and class. We examine these concepts through readings of foundational texts in political economy including Marx, Locke, and Smith and the historical context of empire in which these texts were written. Alongside this historical context, we examine these concepts as they have been drawn upon analytically by anthropologists working on and politically by social movements working in the global South. Prerequisite: ANTH 211 or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Anthropology 432 - Archaeological Method and Theory

One-unit semester course. This course is a survey of the aims, methodology, theory, and practice of archaeology with a focus on the key questions of contemporary archaeological research. We will begin the semester by considering the broad goals of the discipline and review the diverse kinds of data that can help address questions about the past. We will then turn towards reviewing various archaeological approaches that investigate those data, focusing on methods for 1) understanding the sediment and stratigraphy of sites, 2) the materials and artifacts found therein, and 3) the contextualization of those remains within the broader landscape. In addressing these various methods, we will explore how theoretical approaches influence the kinds of questions that are asked in archaeology and the kinds of interpretations that are made. By doing so, we will emphasize throughout the semester the interdisciplinary nature of archaeology and the broad kinds of issues and topics to which it can be applied. This course applies to the department’s SETS concentration. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211. Lecture-conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 442 - Ontological Politics

One-unit semester course. This course offers a critical examination of anthropology’s recent “ontological turn,” notable for the influence of such scholars as Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Challenging universalist assumptions that posit an inert and inanimate world of objects as a backdrop to human action, the study of the cultural and historical specificity of ontologies presents alternative views about the nature of what exists. Observing the things that populate, and the processes that make, the lived and known experience of anthropology’s ethnographic subjects draws attention to contrasting knowledge regimes. Consideration of alternate ontologies allows Euro-modernity’s “others” articulation of their own bases of knowledge, logics of practice, and courses of action. However, how anthropologists approach such considerations entails its own sets of political terms and stakes in knowledge production. This seminar examines anthropological debates about how to analyze and address the political tensions that arise in settings where nonmodern beings and forces are recognized and addressed by “other” political actors. This course applies to the department’s SETS concentration. Prerequisite: ANTH 201 or 211 or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 461 - Theories of Practice

One-unit semester course. Social theorists have long struggled with delineating the precise relationship between social structure and human agency in the explanation of extant cultural forms and their transformations over time. This course explores one set of proposed solutions generally classified under the rubric of “practice theory.” Building from the social philosophies of Elias, Bourdieu, Giddens, and de Certeau, the course examines how practice theory has informed anthropological inquiry and constituted a response to seemingly determinist theories of human behavior associated with structuralism and structural functionalism. Contemporary anthropological work by Marshall Sahlins, Sherry Ortner, and the Comaroffs, among others, will be read in light of earlier disciplinary engagement with the structure-agency question, including by Manchester School ethnographers. Prerequisite: ANTH 211 or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Anthropology 465 - Suffering, Narrative, and Subjectivity

One-unit semester course. “The subject living in pain, in poverty, or under conditions of violence or oppression,” Joel Robbins contended a decade ago, “now very often stands at the center of anthropological work.” This course examines the emergence of what Robbins calls “the suffering slot,” that is, the displacement of difference in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century anthropology as the discipline’s organizing principle, and a reorientation toward universal human vulnerability. Our concern is with how this turn has shaped both the substantive and ethical contours of anthropological investigation and ethnographic writing: What can, and ought, anthropologists know and say about the world and those who inhabit it? What can, and ought to, be the relationship between anthropologists and their objects of study? We will give particular attention to philosophical arguments that emphasize the ineffability of suffering—that is, the ways that suffering defies narrative—and the implications of these arguments for theories of subjectivity. Of particular interest is how these ideas have shaped the generic conventions that have emerged in anthropological studies of suffering, and how these conventions in turn reflect a particular moment in anthropology’s self-understanding as a discipline. This course applies to the department’s SETS and linguistic anthropology concentrations. Prerequisite: ANTH 211. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 470 - Thesis

Two-unit yearlong course; one unit per semester.

Anthropology 481 - Independent Reading

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Open only to upper-class students with special permission.

Art 170 - Introductory Drawing

One-unit semester course. An introduction to studio art through the processes, concepts, and subjects of drawing. Work in the first half of the semester involves the apprehension of landscape spaces and natural forms through contour, shape, gesture, and chiaroscuro, leading to the study of the human form and self-representation. The second half of the semester focuses on spatial representation (isometric projection and Western perspective, and chiaroscuro) in still life and architectural spaces. The final project is a series of eight drawings exploring a particular interior or exterior space each student has chosen. Throughout the semester there are also nontraditional assignments that involve working from memory, working from nonvisual sensory experiences, abstraction, and collaboration. ART 170, 173, and 175 are alternative prerequisites for ART 271 and ART 274. Enrollment limited to 18. Studio.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 171 - The Figure

One-unit semester course. Making an image of the human body is one of the most basic artistic acts. It involves sympathy with another body, self-identification, and empirical observation. As practiced by Western artists it serves as both the basic roots of drawing and the height of artistic facility. In this class we explore all dimensions of the studio practice of rendering the figure. The course begins with observational drawing moves through figure sculpture and finally ends with portraiture. We will create a rigorous studio practice centered on the act of drawing. Readings, homework assignments, and discussions will unpack traditions based in gender and race. Through field trips to galleries and museums we will look at the uses of the figure in art history and contemporary art. The bulk of the studio work will be done in class. An average of one to three hours outside of class per week is expected. Aside from the work of observing and sussing out the details of the figure, classes will include discussions of assigned readings. Enrollment limited to 18. Studio.

Art 173 - Intaglio Printmaking

One-unit semester course. An introduction to studio art through the processes, concepts, and subjects of printmaking. Intaglio printmaking includes drypoint, linear etching, aquatint, soft ground, sugar lift, and multiple tone and color processes. In the first half of the semester these techniques will be introduced and applied to thematic projects involving natural and manmade forms, landscape and architectural spaces, self-representation, relationships of images and text, etc. Two large projects will occupy the second half of the semester: a class-sized edition of a print on an agreed-upon theme, and a final project, a large, complex image or a sequence of images, involving several processes. Additional sketchbook work will study the styles and compositions of master and contemporary printmakers. The class will also study prints in the Reed College collection, the Portland Art Museum, and local galleries. This course is offered in alternate years with ART 175. ART 173, 175, and 170 are alternative prerequisites for ART 271 and ART 274. Enrollment limited to 18. Studio.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 175 - Relief Printmaking

One-unit semester course. An introduction to studio art through the processes, concepts, and subjects of printmaking. Relief printmaking includes woodcut, linocut, stencil, nonrectangular-shaped and puzzle-piece blocks, reduction block printing, and multiple-block/multiple-color printing. We will use both hand and press printing in the making of our work. Three main projects focus on the print in different environments: the print on the wall, the print in the book, and the print in the “expanded field.” Some bookbinding will also be taught. We look at a wide variety of both contemporary and historic print; host visiting artists or visit their studios; study prints in the Reed College collection, the Portland Art Museum, and local galleries. Students are required to spend 4–6 additional hours per week in the studio to complete assigned work. The course is offered in alternate years with ART 173. ART 175, 173, and 170 are alternative prerequisites for Art 271 and Art 274. Enrollment limited to 15. Studio.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 176 - Beginning Bookbinding

One-unit semester course. This hands-on course offers an introduction to the techniques, tools, materials, and processes used in bookbinding. We begin with basic box construction in order to build eye/hand skills, then follow with a variety of sewn book structures that have evolved in different cultures around the world. We end with a multisection hardcover binding. Along the way are field trips, artist lectures, and two self-directed assignments that allow students to express their own ideas within the realm of book and box structure. Four hours of additional studio time is required to complete each week’s binding. No prerequisites. Enrollment limited to 15. Studio.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 177 - Drawing in Many Forms

One-unit semester course. Drawing is a basic building block for visual art and other creative practices. It is important in ways to develop the skill of producing an image on a page. However, it is just as important to think about how to apply the practice of drawing to other methods of making. In this class students will learn some basic methods of drafting an image and begin to apply those methods to other media, platforms, and social contexts. The class will explore traditional methods of mark making including pencil, pen, watercolor, and other media per student interest. We will also explore and or flirt with collage, digital mark making and production techniques, screen printing, and more. Enrollment limited to 18. Studio.

Art 181 - Architectonic Structures

One-unit semester course. This course introduces students to the structural principles and communicative possibilities of sculpture and architecture. Each project addresses one of the three scales: the architectural, into which the body fits; the human, to which the body relates or which the body physically inhabits; and the intimate, which relates to the hand or head. We will study the fundamentals of wood and aluminum fabrication, including handcrafted joinery, lamination, steam bending, wall construction laser cutting, and 3D printing. Readings will focus on the application of craft-based architectural construction and the direct impact this has on society through communal projects, new types of housing, and personal agency. Students will be exposed to diverse, international contemporary artists and architects. Students are required to attend workshops and do studio work outside of class times. Enrollment limited to 15. Studio. May be repeated for credit.

Art 182 - Material Objects

One-unit semester course. A crafts-based course that focuses on the form, function, and concept of handmade objects in our society. The class will learn skills in hand-built and thrown clay forms, casting and fabricating with ceramics, wax, paper, cloth and glass. The assignments will explore the poetic language of each material, fusing the analog and the digital, and will focus on cooperative and community-based works that can emerge from these mediums. Readings will focus on social practices and culturally significant, politically motivated works made for and with communities. Students will have technical workshops with studio assistant in glass and ceramics weekly. Students are required to attend workshops and do studio work outside of class times. Enrollment limited to 15. Studio. May be repeated for credit.

Art 183 - Art and the Printed Word

One-unit semester course. This course explores text and its relationship to image as the focus of a fine art practice. Technically, the course covers page design, typography, letterpress printing, simple bookbinding, and some low-tech image-making processes. Projects explore the space of the calling card, the poster, and the book through three main assignments. We will read Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks to connect language to the natural world, and other texts that explore the social and political significance that text-based works have in society. Requirements beyond assigned studio projects include written responses to writings and videos, one research presentation, and attendance at organized field trips. Students need 4–6 additional hours per week in the studio to complete assigned work. Enrollment limited to 15. Studio. May be repeated for credit.

Art 188 - Object and Social Context

One-unit semester course. Objectness is the nature of a tangible material or thing. Every object has a number of social contexts surrounding it. It is important to consider the social relationships within the materials we use for artworks to truly express the intention of the maker. In this class we will explore the meanings behind the materials we work with in our practices, and how teasing out and understanding the underlying contexts within those media can be used to make more visually striking and conceptually compelling artwork. To do this we will take mini–field trips around campus to harvest objects, perform white elephant gift exchanges with material, and play with different sculptural techniques with an emphasis on conceptual underpinnings in the work. Technically we will cover the fundamentals of wood and aluminum fabrication, wall construction, and laser cutting. Students are required to attend workshops and do studio work outside of class times. Enrollment limited to 15. Studio. May be repeated for credit. 

Art 190 - Art and Photography I

One-unit semester course. This course introduces students to the fundamentals of photography through both analog and digital photographic processes and investigates the use of photography in the context of contemporary art. The class will cover camera operation, principles of exposure, basic understanding of light, film development, and darkroom/digital manipulation of photographic images. Technical, aesthetic, and conceptual possibilities of photography are explored through assignments, readings, slide presentations, and critiques. Enrollment limited to 16. Studio.

Art 196 - Digital Video and Coding Interactivity

One-unit semester course. We will explore the use of the moving image, digital video, and interactivity as related to art. Students will be exposed to the concepts and visual strategies surrounding digital media, and techniques of nonlinear, nondestructive video editing and interactivity. We will look at the various ways in which artists employ these technologies and tools in their works through readings, class discussions, and slide presentations. First, students will deal with moving image as a medium as practiced in art and will be exposed to media software such as Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects. Then, we will take apart and reexamine the moving image and the tools artist use to edit the moving image in an attempt to expand our understanding of the medium through a graphical programming environment for video, music, and data called Max/MSP/Jitter. Students will be expected to respond to assignments with technical competence and critical clarity. Enrollment limited to 12. Studio.

Art 201 - Introduction to the History of Art

One-unit semester course. Basic art-historical methods and examples of recent scholarship are examined in relationship to a chronologically, geographically, or thematically defined body of art. Lecture-conference.

Art 251 - Making Graphic Novels

One-unit semester course. This course will examine the history of comics as well as contemporary trends. Students will study the mechanics and structure of the medium. We will also refer to other forms of visual storytelling, such as serial television, film, and art-historical references. Students will apply these directly to their own work. Each student will create a self-published comic. Discussions and lectures will cover topics such as character studies, format, size, material choice, etc. Occasional field trips to printers, comic shops, and comic companies will give students a sense of professional resources. The class will produce an anthology based on a selection of work produced in class. Prerequisite: one 100-level studio art course, consent of the instructor based on senior standing, or consent of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 16. Studio.

Art 271 - Painting I

One-unit semester course. The class explores color structure, interaction, and illusions (transparency, luminosity, atmosphere), through abstraction and various compositional strategies. Major projects involve creating a “shape alphabet” and a series of variations on it; paintings in which there is a close correspondence, or a tension, between image and support; paintings that focus on process and nontraditional techniques; and an independent final project that builds upon previous work in the class. Weekly slide lectures focus on color and composition in representational and abstract painting. Prerequisite: ART 170, 173, or 175, or consent of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 18. Studio.

Art 274 - Painting II - Naturecultures

One-unit semester course. In this painting class, we will create work that is in conversation with the broader questions: Can we identify and follow specific naturecultures near and on the Reed campus? How might we paint, map, and story such specificities as we engage with our local environments as sites of knowledge? In this class we will use a contemporary painting approach to create alternative mapping narratives, trace our diasporic human and ecological relationships, and question what a decolonial painting approach could look like. This class will include lectures, videos, discussions, field trips, microscopic work, and developing a relationship with a tree of your choosing on the Reed campus. Students will create multimedia paintings in the studio and the field, and thoughtfully discuss their own and each other’s work. Prerequisite: ART 170, 173, 175, or 177, or consent of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 18. Studio.

Art 275 - Bookbinding: History and Practice

One-unit semester course. The book has evolved for 2,000 years as an extension of the human mind and body. Its various forms express unique understandings of materials, technologies, tools, and usage. Students in this course will create 4–6 book models, ranging from simple pamphlet and accordion structures to a case binding and a Coptic binding with wooden board covers. In order to develop clean and precise hand skills, we begin with a four-walled box and a clamshell box before turning to the sewing of book structures. Visits to Reed’s Special Collections offer us the opportunity to view and handle many historic and contemporary examples, including the William Morris masterpiece known as The Kelmscott Chaucer. Readings cover both bookbinding history and current directions in the field of artists’ books. Together with successful completion of the taught structures, there are two main assignments: a historically based structure based on independent research, and a final project responding to an excerpt from Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities. Class time will be spent introducing, demonstrating, and beginning work on each book structure. 4–6 hours of additional studio time is required to complete each week’s binding. Prerequisites: ART 170, 171, 173, or 175; consent of the instructor based on senior standing; or consent of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 15. Studio.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 276 - The Artist Book

One-unit semester course. This studio course focuses on the book as a vehicle for artistic voice. We will explore the intrinsic nature of books: that they are physical objects operating in one moment as sculpture, in the next moment as a piece of interactive time art; that they are understood in the hands of a reader who performs the book’s content; and that they speak to us not only through words and images but through the weight, texture, and body language of the object itself. Students will learn techniques of ideation, model making, material manipulation, print/binding processes, and more as they create two artist book projects. The course will also delve into the history of artist books in their many iterations, from unique objects to hand-printed editions to zines and other forms of artist publications. Visits to Reed’s artist book collection as well as other field trips and artist talks supplement this course. Four to six hours of outside studio time is required for this course. Prerequisite: two semesters of studio art. Enrollment limited to 15. Studio.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 282 - Sculpture in the Expanded Field

One-unit semester course. A studio sculpture course exploring the human body as a site for transformation through clothing, performance, and architectural construction. We will explore wearable works as well as spatially dynamic and temporal art form, directly related to the human form and phenomenological experience. Readings and discussions will focus on feminist theory, queer theory, and critical race theory, and the representation of the body throughout art history, fashion, and performance art. Technically, we will focus on metal fabrication, welding, and sewing. Prerequisite: ART 181, ART 182, or any 100-level studio course or consent of the instructor. Students are required to attend workshops and do studio work outside of class times. Enrollment limited to 15. Studio. May be repeated for credit.

Art 284 - Craft and Culture

One-unit semester course. This is a studio art course covering the craft of ceramics and glass, their historical and cultural context, and contemporary culture’s engagement with these craft forms. The course will focus on how and why artists have explored materials, methods, and strategies of craft over the last seven decades. Many have chosen to expand on their own cultural histories of craft while others have been experimental. In all studio work, the labor and process will be focused on with an eye to training and practice as the core of the craft. Projects will be both utilitarian and conceptually based. Students will advance their skills in hand building, throwing, glazing, glass casting, and 3D ceramic printing. Discussion will cover crafts subversion of the so-called “fine art” and the political stance that the works take. New perspectives on subjects that have been central to artists, including popular culture, feminist and queer aesthetics, and recent explorations of identity and relationships to place will be explored. All students will keep a research notebook/sketchbook in which they will respond to all readings, research artists, and design projects. Prerequisite: ART 181 or 182. Students are required to attend workshops and do studio work outside of class times. Enrollment limited to 15. Studio. May be repeated for credit.

Art 288 - Engaged Objects

One-unit semester course. Much of the material culture in the arts is poised towards the creation and sale of objects. While this practice is valuable in and of itself, there are other ways to apply skilled craftwork. What if the objects one made were designed for application and use? Beyond a cup or a plate, artists have the ability to design unique creations that serve uncharted ends. In this course we will imagine new potentials for the work we make, merging studio practice with interactivity as an additional medium for consideration. We will consider particular audiences and design artistic objects for integration into their lives. To do this we will think about site, participant engagement, and material design solutions that tie these ideas together. Technically, we will focus on metal fabrication, welding, and sewing. Students are required to attend workshops and do studio work outside of class times. Prerequisite: ART 181, ART 182, or any 100-level studio course or consent of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 15. Studio. May be repeated for credit.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 291 - Art and Photography II

One-unit semester course. The course will introduce advanced topics such as color, large-format, and medium-format photography. Technical, aesthetic, and conceptual possibilities of photography are explored through projects, readings, slide presentations, lab work, and critiques. Class time will be spent in lecture, slide presentations, lab work, critique, and occasional field trips. Students will be expected to respond to assignments with technical competence and critical clarity. Prerequisite: ART 190 or consent of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 16. Studio.

Art 293 - Internet Literacy, Culture, and Practice

One-unit semester course. Students will develop an understanding of the technology and the issues surrounding the internet and the web through studio activities, readings, and online and/or physical fieldwork. Students will gain literacy in web development languages (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). We will cover the history of the use of computers and networks as a tool for empowerment and for creating art. We will explore topics such as hypertextuality, nonlinearity, interactivity, authorship, web as archive, net neutrality, and the open-source movement. With the newly acquired literacy in hand we will investigate how the convergence of the web/social media with social practice/activism reconfigures the ways in which artists and citizens view, participate in, understand, and narrate real-world issues. Prerequisite: one 100-level studio art course, or consent of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 12. Studio.

Art 301 - Recent Writing About Art

One-half-unit semester course. While open to all students who meet the prerequisites, this course is required for all declared art history majors in their junior year. Juniors will have additional assignments that will serve as the junior qualifying exam in art history. Prerequisites: ART 201 and one 300-level course in art history or studio art. May be repeated for credit. Conference.

Art History Beyond the Visual
One-half-unit semester course. Art history is a discipline, institutionalized in the nineteenth century, that mobilized vision as a tool of western imperialism. In this course, we seek to decenter the visual by problematizing our definition of visuality and by examining aspects of works of art that have gone unseen. For example, we will explore the ways in which works of art acted on the body and the sensorium; the significance of materials whose identities were not visible; the purposes for which art was never meant to be seen; and the artistic practices that provoked non-physical ways of seeing. While studying how works of art have interacted in non-visual ways with their human interlocutors across a wide range of times and places, we will also consider how art historians can integrate new methodologies that go beyond the traditional ocularcentric approaches. This team-taught course will introduce students to innovative examples of recent art-historical scholarship. While open to all students who meet the prerequisites, this course is required for all declared art history majors in their junior year. Juniors will have additional assignments that will serve as the junior qualifying exam in art history. Prerequisites: ART 201 and one 300-level course in art history or studio art. Conference.

Art 305 - The Camera in South Asia

One-unit semester course. The paradox of photography is such that photographs reveal and conceal, obscure and illuminate, mutate and remain static. How do we read a photograph? What does it transmit? This course will investigate the development and reception of photography in South Asia, from the introduction of the camera in the mid-nineteenth century to the present. We will explore photography’s diverse iterations, including its role as an apparatus of colonial surveillance, a transcript of historical knowledge, a material technology, and a performative practice, to investigate how photographic practices evolved in response to shifting social, political, and aesthetic concerns. We will examine a wide range of case studies, including the works of nineteenth-century British and Indian photographers; vernacular uses of photography in local studios; the translation of the aesthetics of photography into painting (and vice versa), panoramas, stereographic views, early seminal films such as Raja Harishchandra (1913), and the works of contemporary photographers such as Dayanita Singh, Raghubir Singh, and Pushpamala N. We will also delve into photographic theory by reading Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Christopher Pinney’s writings. The aim of the course would be to develop the analytical tools for the evaluation of photography that take seriously the protean nature of photographic technology. Prerequisite: ART 201. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 313 - Art and Life in Renaissance Florence

One-unit semester course. In Lives of the Artists Giorgio Vasari describes how “the arts were born anew” in Renaissance Florence. The city’s streets and piazzas, palaces and churches, paintings and sculptures all give visual form to the cultural and social changes that affected Florentine life. In its study of artists such as Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, this course concentrates on the 15th and 16th centuries as a period of innovation, in terms of both artistic theory and practice. Through an examination of Florence’s public, ecclesiastical, and domestic spaces, we will consider how visual and material culture served as markers of civic identity and social distinction. Prerequisite: ART 201 or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 321 - Moving Pictures: The Migration and Manipulation of Images in the Early Modern Period

One-unit semester course. Images in the early modern period moved further and more regularly than at any other time in history up until that point. While scholars have increasingly taken an interest in the movement of early modern images in recent years, we still lack a study that takes into account the many different ways in which images were understood to move. This class is an attempt to understand and synthesize the early modern concept of movement in its many forms, and by extension the role and status of images. We will explore movement from the micro to the macro, and both literal and figurative. Topics will include the transportation of images between Europe and the rest of the world, representations of travel and movement, translation and mistranslation, prints that were meant to be altered and interacted with, automata, affective and miraculous images, and works of art that were meant to make viewers move in particular ways. Prerequisite: ART 201, or permission of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 323 - Global Early Modern Visual Culture

One-unit semester course. This course explores art produced around the world during the sixteenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries, a period of intense contact between cultures with widely varying ideas about what constitutes art. Out of this contact came a myriad of strange works of art that speak to the pressures of often violent colonial and economic encounters. We will look at the impact on European art of contact with Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas, as well as the ways in which European art and culture changed the local traditions of art making in the rest of the world. We will consider what happens to culturally specific forms and styles when they cross cultural, geographical, ideological, political, and theological boundaries. Among the topics we will discuss are the Italian Renaissance nude, miraculous images in New Spain and Peru, Mughal miniatures, African ivory carvings, one-point perspective, Protestant European printed representations of Native Americans, Japanese iconoclasm, and chinoiserie. Prerequisite: ART 201 or permission of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 325 - Appropriation and Transformation in Early Modern Art

One-unit semester course. This course will explore the myriad ways in which early modern European artists took forms, media, materials, and subjects from other cultures and transformed them into something different. These acts of transformations could be violent, ignorant, admiring, relatively benign, or even unintentional. We will consider what was at stake in these transformations, what was changed, how and why they happened, and what role they played in the broader context of cultural contact in the early modern period. We will analyze the terminology of these “transformations,” and focus in particular on the term “appropriation” and its relationship to power. The latter part of the semester will be devoted to looking at how early modern European art has been commented upon, transformed, remade, and translated by curators and contemporary artists. Prerequisite: ART 201. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 327 - Colonial Pasts, Decolonial Futures: Museums and the Global South

One-unit semester course. This course will trace the histories of displaying and interpreting the art of South Asia from the nineteenth century to the present and explore new possibilities for curating South Asian art in the future. While focusing on shifts in the display of South Asian art, we will also interrogate the political and theoretical stakes of curating non-Western art more broadly. A study of the history of the museum from its colonial inception to its postcolonial iterations will foreground the ways in which museums were mobilized for imperial and nationalist aspirations in and beyond South Asia. We will examine key exhibitions including the 1984–85 “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art show at the MOMA, the 1985–86 Festival of India, and the 2014 Yoga exhibition at the Freer Sackler Museum. A speaking Shiva sculpture will open for us the arguments for and against the repatriation of stolen antiquities. We will conclude with a reflection on museums’ varying roles in the present and an invitation to imagine new ways to transform museums into spaces of diversity, inclusion, social justice, and anti-racism. Prerequisite: ART 201. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 328 - Nonextant Art and the Early Modern World

One-unit semester course. What do we learn from objects, images, texts, and performances that no longer exist? How do we write histories of things that have been violently destroyed, involuntarily lost, or deliberately left to decay over time? What is the role of the conservator in recreating lost works of art? What do nonextant things tell us about trauma and collective memory? In this course, we study works that can no longer be experienced firsthand to explore how nonextant art informs our understanding of the past. This course is a team-taught collaboration between the art departments at Reed College and Lewis & Clark College. Prerequisite: ART 201 or consent of the instructors. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 332 - Art and Archaeology in Early China

One-unit semester course. This course will explore artifacts excavated in China from the height of the Neolithic period (c. 4000–2000 BCE) to the end of the eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE). Excavated objects from these periods rarely have accompanying textual explanations. Instead, we rely primarily on archaeology, which provides the raw material for understanding the distant past and constructs temporal narratives that account for the categorical differences between artifacts. With the rise of material culture studies in the field of art history, enigmatic objects that fell within the domain of archaeology may now have art-historical explanations. The course is organized chronologically by archaeological site. Secondary textual sources and comparative studies with other sites will be used to refine our understanding of artisans and their craft and the social and cultural functions of objects. What types of training did artisans undergo? What sources (manuals, tacit knowledge, guild practices, etc.) provided the necessary skills for artisans to work? How was labor divided and what were the social structures in place that dictated artisans’ modes of production? How were these objects used and circulated by the living and the dead? Prerequisite: ART 201, or HUM 231 and 232, or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Art 335 - (Trans)Nationalism and Indian Cinema

One-unit semester course. Described by author Salman Rushdie as “Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art,” popular Hindi cinema—or “Bollywood”—brings to mind song and dance, epic melodrama, romance, violence, pastiche, or pandemonium at its chaotic best (Rushdie, 1995). Yet films have also served as significant cultural artifacts in the building and maintaining of a national consciousness in and beyond the nation-state of India. The question of an “Indian identity,” as we shall see, takes myriad forms in relation to shifting contexts of colonialism, postcolonialism, and globalization. In this course, we will consider how films like Lagaan (2001) both posit idealized visions of a collective national identity and, simultaneously, reinforce exclusionary attitudes toward minority religious, regional, and caste groups. Keeping in mind that the Hindi film industry remains one of the many constituents that make up Indian cinema, we will view Indian films that extend beyond the sphere of Bollywood such as Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1991) and Mani Ratnam’s Roja (1992) to interrogate the version of the imagined nation as articulated through popular Hindi cinema. Taking into consideration the transnational histories of Indian cinema, we will also analyze representations of homeland, migration, and diasporic identity with films such as Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1993) and Bhaji on the Beach (2002). By combining the formal analysis of popular Hindi film—its narrative structures, cinematography, songs, dances, and other distinctive formal conventions—with critical insight from race, gender, sexuality, class, and caste studies, we will think, discuss, and write about the politics of Indian cinema. Conference.

Art 346 - Introduction to Media Studies

See LIT 346 for description. 

Literature 346 Description

Art 350 - Oceans, Rains, Rivers, Pools: Histories of Water

One-unit semester course. Why did artists from the regional courts of India paint poetic visions of rains, lakes, and rivers during periods of drought? How can the ocean serve as an archive, metaphor, and method for thinking about early modern and colonial material cultures, trade, and mobility? How do media images of environmental catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina make visible, and invisible, the ocular tactics of biopolitical racism? How do our current water crises demand a wholesale rethinking of how we write and think about art? This class will focus on water as a subject and a methodology for studying early modern, colonial, and contemporary visual cultures. We will study a range of case studies, including regional Indian paintings, early modern hydro-architecture in South Asia, material cultures shaped by the Manila galleon trade and Indian Ocean trade networks, media images of environmental catastrophes, recent museum exhibitions on climate change, and more. Our studies will be supplemented by writings in art history, environmental humanities, anthropology, and new materialism. We will also consider the emergence of an art historiography of water that has been shaped by the ecological turn in the humanities. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 351 - Making Space

One-unit semester course. Space isn’t an empty, neutral vehicle in which artworks simply appear for public consumption. While an artwork makes the space for its own display, spaces do their own work to determine the range, impact, and execution of an artwork within them. But when all space is necessarily coded as real estate, all but the most famous and privileged artists will struggle to make space not just for their own work, but to support other artists and build various forms of community. In this, present-day Portland is both an exemplary and a distinctive case. This art history class will visit a number of art spaces that are commonly understood as small, alternative, or experimental, although this in no way predefines their relationship to institutionality. Each week we will spend time with and, most weeks, in a different space around Portland, talking to the people who established and run those spaces. In these conversations, we will ask about their engagement with their communities, why and how they established their space, the uses and valences of institutionality, and the relationship between art’s attempts to make space and the ongoing processes of gentrification in and around Portland. Participating spaces/collectives include home school, Physical Education, Pochas Radicales, Portland Museum of Modern Art, Sunday Painters Group, The Residency in the Garden, and more. We will meet once per week, in the evening, for 3 hours in order to facilitate travel. Prerequisite: ART 201 or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Art 354 - Performing Mediation (Video Art, 1960–2000)

One-unit semester course. Video art began with artists turning the camera on their own bodies and their own studios. But far from being a privatized art form, the video medium implicates various popular media, including home video, cinema, television, and, more recently, webcams and online video. We will study the aesthetic precursors of video art as well as the histories of the popular media with which video art is historically and technologically enmeshed. Central to our discussions will be questions of media as well as questionings of embodiment, focusing particularly on gender and race. We will look at a wide range of video practices (analog, digital, closed-channel, broadcast, networked). We will watch videos together in class, but students should also expect to spend time each week watching videos outside of class. Prerequisite: ART 201 or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 365 - Intersection: Architecture, Landscape Sculpture

One-unit semester course. This advanced studio sculpture course explores architectural and landscape-based works. Reading and research will focus on artists and architects from the 1970s to the present who use public process and sustainable materials to design and build innovative forms within urban spaces. The class will create a set of potential design solutions for a site in Portland. Studio training will include drafting, drawing, and planning strategies and building scale models in wood and metal. Knowledge of Google SketchUp and or Photoshop desired. Students are required to attend workshops and do studio work outside of class times. Prerequisite: one 100-level studio art course and ART 281 or 282 or consent of the instructor. Studio. 

Art 368 - Image and Text: The Book as a Sculptural Object

One-unit semester course. This course explores the significant role artists’ books have played among the avant-garde of eastern and western Europe and the United States from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. The structural format book works take and their social and political functions will be viewed, discussed, and fabricated. The course will cover binding both codex and accordion books, reproducing images using palmer plates, and setting and printing type and images using a Reprex letterpress. Reed’s special collections will provide a spectrum of professional artists’ books, including magazine works, anthologies, diaries, manifestos, visual poetry, word works, documentation, albums, comic books, and mail art. We will read and discuss essays relating to each studio problem. Students are required to attend workshops and do studio work outside of class times. Prerequisites: one 100-level studio art course and one 200-level studio course or consent of the instructor. Studio-conference.

Art 372 - Intermediate Experiments in Painting, Drawing, and Printmaking

One-unit semester course. We will develop and articulate individual research approaches to an art-making practice. By working with traditional art mediums while also creating our own experimental inks, paints, and stains, we will consider how to give form to narrative through composition, color, and materiality. The first part of the course will involve exploratory mark making towards a research-based project to be proposed and executed over the rest of the semester. The project might involve continued work in drawing, painting, printmaking, collage, or experimental mixed media. In a weekly studio section that will include lectures, videos, discussions, and field trips, we will encounter and learn terms and concepts common to contemporary visual culture, ecology, design, and activism. Students will create multimedia works in the studio and the field, and thoughtfully discuss their own and each other’s work. Prerequisites: one 100-level studio art course and one 200-level studio art course, or consent of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 18. Studio.

Art 374 - New Media/Old Media—Experiments in Optical Media and Computation

One-unit semester course. The course will examine and experiment with various forms of old and analog media combined with new and speculative twenty-first-century media technology to see if they can be productively remade and integrated into contemporary art practices. Our goal is to defamiliarize photography and new/digital media by finding alternative uses, or by revisiting a time when they had not separated themselves into distinct and different discourses looking at historical devices, methods, and tools that shared common aspirations and limitations. Technical, aesthetic, and conceptual possibilities are explored through studio workshops, projects, readings, slide presentations, lab work, and critiques. Students must be highly self-motivated and will be expected to design independent projects. Prerequisite: one 200-level studio art course, or consent of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 16. Studio.

Art 382 - Installation/Participation

One-unit semester course. An advanced sculpture/multimedia course investigating research-based and social art practices including the intersection of art, science, and society. Students may make work in any 2D, 3D, or time-based medium they are comfortable with, including performance and electronic media, to create installation-based works that inform and immerse the viewer. All sculpture construction shops and tools are available, including laser cutting, 3D printing, and casting. Weekly readings will include contemporary art theory, feminist theory, and critical race theory, and will center on artists working directly with social and political issues at the intersection of art, science, and society. Prerequisite: ART 181, ART 182, or any 100-level studio course, or consent of the instructor. Students are required to attend workshops and do studio work outside of class times. Enrollment limited to 15. Studio. May be repeated for credit.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 388 - Socially Engaged Art Forms

One-unit semester course. Socially Engaged Art Forms, also referred to as social practice, are rapidly developing areas of the contemporary art world. Much of this work is embedded within the contexts from which the works are derived—a distinctive component of how this work functions. This can also be described as the creation of space for conversation, sharing of experiences, and information, or connections to people and places for specific and/or exploratory purposes. This is all conducted with consideration for each of the underlying elements as individual artistic and creative decisions. In this course we will explore projects that center specific people and communities as well as places, things, and events. Students who are excited to engage with other classmates and collaborate to do work in the Reed community and beyond using an equitable and social justice-informed lens make strong candidates for this class. Prerequisite: ART 181, ART 182, or any 100-level studio course, or consent of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 15. Studio. May be repeated for credit.

Art 390 - Realism and Its Discontents in Contemporary Chinese Visual Media

One-unit semester course. With the opening up and economic reforms beginning in the late 1970s in China, a new aesthetic question confronted literature and the arts: what constitutes the real and what counts now as legitimate modes/means of its representation? While socialist realism was on the wane, realism continued to condition various forms of cultural production and took myriad guises—from an attempt at complete objectivity devoid of emotion to a complete dependence on subjectivity and affect for delivering a sense of the real; from drawing on the experiences of everyday life of individuals to the legendary feats of martial artists and utopian ideals of science fiction. This course grapples with these various interpretations of realism in modern and contemporary Chinese media, while reaching back in time to trace the precedents of these new forms that negotiate the blurry lines between truth and fiction, the objective and the subjective, the real and the fantastical. Prerequisite: sophomore standing. Conference. Cross-listed as CHIN 390 and LITC 390.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 393 - Art of Writing

One-unit semester course. This course is a survey of the history and aesthetics of Chinese calligraphy from the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BCE) through the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). In addition to familiarizing students to the calligraphy of this period, this course also seeks to bring into conversation early Chinese theories on writing and contemporary art historical literature on the relationship between words and images. Some questions that will guide the general theoretical arc of the course include how the origins and development of the Chinese writing systems inform its later incarnations as an inextricable part of literati art; what it might mean to emphasize the look of writing more than its linguistic characteristics; and how an everyday skill (writing for the sake of communication) and medium (brush and ink) become an art. Prerequisite: ART 201. Conference.

Art 414 - Appropriation and Transformation in Early Modern Art

One-unit semester course. This course will explore the myriad ways in which early modern European artists took forms, media, materials, and subjects from other cultures and transformed them into something different. These acts of transformations could be violent, ignorant, admiring, relatively benign, or even unintentional. We will consider what was at stake in these transformations, what was changed, how and why they happened, and what role they played in the broader context of cultural contact in the early modern period. We will analyze the terminology of these “transformations,” and focus in particular on the term “appropriation” and its relationship to power. The latter part of the semester will be devoted to looking at how early modern European art has been commented upon, transformed, remade, and translated by curators and contemporary artists. Prerequisites: ART 201 and two 300-level art history courses. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 470 - Thesis

Two-unit yearlong course; one unit per semester.

Art 481 - Independent Projects or Independent Reading

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Independent courses are usually offered only to students already admitted to the division as art majors. Such courses cannot be used to satisfy the basic course requirements of the department. Prerequisite: approval of instructor and division.

Art 551 - Theories of Visuality

One-half-unit semester course. Theories of visuality are central to debates in the humanities. Interdisciplinary approaches to art have changed the parameters of our objects of study. Such changes have resulted in new relationships of words to images and objects, as well as innovative conceptual tools available to interpret all three. In this course we will examine the phenomena of cultural production and consumption of a range of media, asking how images and objects function and how they mediate what we see and experience. Through shared readings, student presentations, and written projects, we will consider issues of form, representation, and knowledge, and the politics of ascribing meaning and value. Conference. Offered fall 2023.

Biology 101 - Topics in Biology I

One-unit semester course, taught by several staff members. The course furnishes an understanding of biological principles and the properties of life. Among topics considered are structure and function of plants and animals, relations of organisms to each other and to their environment, energy relations of organisms, integrative and coordinating mechanisms of organisms, cell biology principles, genetics, molecular biology, reproduction, development and growth, and the evidence for organic evolution. The laboratory deals with the descriptive and experimental aspects of the topics covered in the lectures. BIOL 101 and 102 comprise a full year of introductory biology, and may be taken in either order. Lecture-laboratory.

Biology 102 - Topics in Biology II

One-unit semester course, taught by several staff members. The course furnishes an understanding of biological principles and the properties of life. Among topics considered are structure and function of plants and animals, relations of organisms to each other and to their environment, energy relations of organisms, integrative and coordinating mechanisms of organisms, cell biology principles, genetics, molecular biology, reproduction, development and growth, and the evidence for organic evolution. The laboratory deals with the descriptive and experimental aspects of the topics covered in the lectures. BIOL 101 and 102 comprise a full year of introductory biology, and may be taken in either order. Lecture-laboratory.

Biology 113 - Lichens of the Pacific Northwest

One-unit semester course. This course will explore Pacific Northwest lichens as simultaneous ecosystems and organisms, allowing an introductory setting and study system for student investigation into biological and ecological thinking. Topics will include natural history of lichens, lichen biology (structure, life history, diversity, reproduction, physiology, and ecology), ethnobotany, bioindication, and lichens as ecosystem engineers. Students will learn the ways in which living things are interconnected and interact with one another, using lichens to explore biological and ecological concepts and the local environment. Students will build natural history skills through place-based campus observations, form an understanding of basic lichen biology and ecology, and examine current topics in lichenology through academic literature. This course will include outdoor field-based components (class time as well as potential off-campus field trips). Students must be prepared to spend time in unpredictable field conditions. Conference.

Biology 131 - Introduction to Computational Biology

One-unit semester course. This course provides an integrated survey of fundamental questions in molecular biology and the computational tools that are used to solve them. Elements of molecular biology and computer programming are presented in parallel throughout the semester. Topics include molecular sequence analysis (identifying repeats, regulatory/binding motifs, and genetic variation) using pattern-matching operations on text strings. Assignments will include writing Python programs to analyze human DNA, RNA, and protein sequences. Prerequisite: BIOL 101 or 102, or consent of the instructor. Lecture-laboratory.

Biology 172 - Cells and Society

One-unit semester course. This course explores the role cells play in society and will simultaneously building foundational knowledge about how cells function. Topics will include the role of mitochondria in neurodegenerative diseases, common mutations linked to cancer and how they affect the cell cycle, cell migration and its relationship to metastasis, and the biology and therapeutic potential of stem cells. The course will feature combination of lectures and conferences, allowing students both to learn the foundations of cell biology and, through close reading of the primary literature, to develop an understanding of how those basic principles dictate how cells function in normal and diseased states. Conference.

Biology 181 - Introduction to Neurobiology

One-unit semester course. This course will explore nervous system functions and the biological processes underlying these functions. Topics will include nervous system structure and function, sensory processing, generating behaviors, and how evolution has shaped diverse nervous system functions that support animal survival. The course will focus on basic biological rules that contribute to, and constrain, nervous system function. Students will explore major neurobiological concepts, unanswered questions, and common experimental techniques through careful readings of primary research articles. Conference.

Biology 211 - Introduction to Scientific Literature and Discourse

One-half-unit semester course. In parallel with the biology department seminar series, this conference course explores current topics in biology through reading and discussion of primary literature. The course is designed to deepen understanding of the many forms of biological inquiry; students will learn to evaluate biology scholarship, pose questions, and participate in scientific discourse. Prerequisite: BIOL 101 and 102 and sophomore standing, or consent of the instructor. Credit/no credit only. Conference.

Biology 273 - Evolution

One-unit semester course. This course will focus on the central, unifying tenet of biology—evolution. Despite its centrality, evolution is often misunderstood. Learning objectives 1) provide an accurate and integrative understanding of evolutionary biology, generally; 2) introduce patterns of micro- and macroevolution, as well as the use of phylogenetic analysis to understand relatedness; 3) connect biological phenomena (e.g., adaptation or horizontal transfer) to their evolutionary consequences; 4) review evolutionary theory and debate (e.g., selectionist vs. neutralist); 5) learn to read papers detailing experimental evolution and evaluate evidence for evolutionary change in populations; 6) explore human origins and evolution; 7) confront the problematic and racist roots of evolutionary biology as a field; 8) examine the current-day issues related to the acceptance of evolution in society; and 9) discuss the relevance of evolution in other contexts (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic). Prerequisite: BIOL 101 or 102, or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference.

Biology 301 - Ecology

One-unit semester course. This course examines fundamental concepts in ecology such as limits to distribution, behavioral ecology, population ecology, species interactions, community ecology, and ecosystem ecology, and will examine the relevance of such topics for addressing contemporary applied issues of global change, human health, and sustainability. Central objectives of this course are to 1) evaluate the evidence that supports major theories in ecology and 2) actively participate in the process by which theories are tested, falsified, and refined. Weekly laboratories will help facilitate the latter objective. Lectures and laboratories will emphasize how ecologists gain inference from experiments, observations, and ecological models. Prerequisite: BIOL 101 and 102, or consent of the instructor. Lecture-laboratory.

Not offered 2023–24.

Biology 303 - Leaves to Landscapes

One-unit semester course. This is a field experience–based course that examines the underlying structure, function, diversity, and ecology of Pacific Northwest (PNW) Forests. The heart of this course is the weekly and extended (weekend) natural history field trips that allow for exploration of our amazing native forests and the identification of all the major tree species in the PNW. These trips provide an outdoor classroom for us to discuss topics such as plant water and carbon relations, plant life history and resource use, resilience of trees and forests to disturbance, and plant responses to global change. In addition, we will explore how our forests operate as complex socio-ecological systems through direct interaction with the natural resource managers, conservationists, and decision makers who steward these lands. In the latter part of the semester, an independent course project will be undertaken that focuses on (1) building skills for testing hypotheses about the patterns and processes of trees and forests and (2) employing a translational-science approach that connects decision-makers to the scientific process. It is important to note that this is a FIELD-BASED COURSE. As often as possible, class will occur outdoors. As such, the course requires the willingness to spend considerable time in challenging and unpredictable field conditions. Prerequisite: BIOL 101 and 102. Lecture-laboratory.

Not offered 2023–24.

Biology 308 - Restoration Ecology

One-unit semester course. This is a project-based field course that examines the biological concepts that drive our efforts to restore natural ecosystems. Successful restoration projects require a multiscale biological approach, from understanding the role of local genetic adaptations in individual species to making predictions about the response of whole ecosystems to disturbance and global change. In the lab portion of the class, students will have the opportunity to directly apply the concepts covered in lecture as they take on the role of ecological consultants for a local restoration site. Working in small groups and interacting with local restoration professionals, students will design a monitoring plan to shed light on the patterns and processes that affect restoration potential at the field site. Methods will include biodiversity monitoring, demographic analyses, species behavioral observations, and soil and water quality testing. Students will learn to collect and analyze the data in the context of setting management goals, identifying uncertainties and trade-offs, and practicing adaptive decision-making. This class effort will be synthesized into a management plan that would aid the landowner in the restoration of the site. Note that this is a field-based course, and requires the willingness to spend time in unpredictable field conditions. Prerequisite: BIOL 101 and 102. Lecture-laboratory.

Not offered 2023–24.

Biology 313 - Forest Canopy Ecophysiology

One-unit semester course. This course will explore of the physiological and ecological principles that govern the responses of forest trees to dynamic local, regional, and global environmental conditions. Importantly, study of forest ecosystems has historically taken place from the forest floor. Yet many of the processes that drive forest ecosystem function take place far above the ground in the complex intersection of branches that forms the forest canopy environment. This course will leverage recent advances for studying this unique and important environment, such as arborist-style tree climbing and drone-based technologies for sampling and surveying the canopy. Students will learn the underlying structure-function relationships and other biological theories that describe ecophysiological patterns and processes, as well as develop skills for asking important research questions and test hypotheses that advance this exciting and important field. Prerequisite: BIOL 101 and 102. Lecture-laboratory. 

Biology 331 - Computational Systems Biology

One-unit semester course. A survey of network models used to gain a systems-level understanding of biological processes. Topics include computational models of gene regulation, signal transduction pathways, protein-protein interactions, and metabolic pathways. Laboratory exercises will involve building a collection of biological networks from public data, implementing a graph library and foundational algorithms, and interpreting computational results. A programming-based independent project will answer biological questions by applying graph algorithms to experimental data. Prerequisite: BIOL 101 and 102, and either BIOL 131, or CSCI 121, or consent of the instructor. Lecture-laboratory.

Not offered 2023–24.

Biology 332 - Vascular Plant Diversity

One-unit semester course. A survey of vascular plants using evolutionary and ecological principles to interpret patterns of diversity in vascular plant form and function. Topics include plant species, methods of phylogenetic reconstruction, paleobotany, plant reproductive biology, and plant ecological interactions. Laboratory work will include a survey of flowering plant families with an emphasis on learning elements of the flora of the Pacific Northwest. Laboratory projects will demonstrate methods used for establishing evolutionary relationships, assessing genetic structure in natural populations, and identifying adaptive features of plant form and function, and will include independent research in the laboratory or field. Prerequisite: BIOL 101 and 102. Lecture-laboratory.

Biology 342 - Animal Behavior

One-unit semester course. An integrated approach to the study of behavior—the phenotype through which an organism interacts with, and also modifies, its environment. We will study how behavioral phenotypes are shaped by the social and physical environment and analyze how they are implemented through development by neural physiology, gene networks, and individual genes. Conversely, we will study how behaviors modify the environment and thus impact the physiology and genetics of organisms as well as the evolution of species. Examples will be drawn from both laboratory and field studies using comparative molecular and behavioral approaches to identify patterns and recurring themes, which will be discussed in the context of existing theories about animal behavior. The laboratory will cover both bench skills and field techniques that will then be applied in independent student projects. Prerequisite: BIOL 101 and 102. Lecture-laboratory.

Not offered 2023–24.

Biology 351 - Developmental Biology

One-unit semester course. Analysis of one of the most remarkable events in biology—the formation of a complex, multicellular organism from a single cell. With an emphasis on principles common among many species, this course explores how cellular, molecular, and genetic events contribute to distinct stages of embryogenesis. How are body patterns generated? What are the morphogenetic processes that give rise to specific organ systems? How is cell fate decided? What are the processes that guide tissue growth, regeneration, and differentiation? We will address these and other fundamental questions, discussing primary literature, recreating classic experiments, and performing new investigations. Students will apply the techniques and skills gained during the first part of the course to carry out an independent laboratory project. Prerequisites: BIOL 101 and 102, CHEM 101 and 102. A course in genetics or cell biology is strongly recommended. Lecture-laboratory.

Biology 352 - Bioinformatics

One-unit semester course. This course will explore the range of biological questions being addressed with genomic approaches, the specific genomic methods employed to address these questions, and the kinds of bioinformatic challenges and solutions that exist for working with genomic data. The primary objectives of this course are 1) to understand the biological principles that underpin and are illuminated by specific genomic techniques and 2) to be able to evaluate and utilize existing bioinformatics tools to work with genomic datasets. Lectures will focus on contemporary studies from the primary literature that utilize genomic approaches. These will provide case studies to critically assess the utility of these approaches for addressing specific biological questions, as well as to examine the kinds of data that are produced and the challenges presented in analyzing them. Computer-based laboratories will provide opportunities to develop and implement bioinformatics pipelines to analyze genomic datasets. Prerequisites: BIOL 101 and 102. Lecture-laboratory.

Biology 358 - Microbiology

One-unit semester course. The biology of microorganisms, including structure and function of the prokaryotic cell, metabolism, genetics interactions with host organisms, and cell-to-cell communication. Course will emphasize current areas of active research using the primary literature to illustrate key concepts discussed in lecture. Laboratory exercises emphasize interactions of bacteria with their environment and with host organisms, using classical and molecular genetic techniques to address biological problems. An advanced independent research project is required. Prerequisites: BIOL 101 and 102, CHEM 101 and 102. Lecture-laboratory.

Biology 363 - Genes, Genetics, and Genomes

One-unit semester course. Overview and exploration of fundamental concepts and processes in genetics including heredity, mitosis, meiosis, DNA replication, transcription, translation, segregation, linkage, recombination, epistasis, selection, migration, drift, and evolution. Topics will also include DNA and RNA structure, coding and noncoding DNA, chromosomes, genome architecture, mechanisms of mutation, horizontal transfer, and genomics. Laboratories will provide the opportunity to investigate genetic questions and concepts using molecular and bioinformatic tools. Prerequisites: BIOL 101 and 102, CHEM 101 and 102. Lecture-laboratory.

Biology 372 - Cellular Biology

One-unit semester course. An in-depth study of the structure-function relationships within eukaryotic cells. The course emphasizes macromolecular organization and compartmentation of cellular activities. Lecture topics include evolution of cells, cellular reproduction, motility, signal transduction, cell-cell interactions, energy transduction, functional specialization, cell death, and cancer. Laboratories investigate models of cellular regulation and incorporate methods that integrate morphological and biochemical techniques. Prerequisites: BIOL 101 and 102, CHEM 101 and 102. CHEM 201 and 202 are recommended. Lecture-laboratory.

Biology 381 - Neurobiology and Physiology

One-unit semester course. An examination of the nervous and endocrine systems, especially as they relate to the unique physiological challenges faced by animals. The course begins with fundamental concepts and mechanisms of nervous system function, followed by an exploration of the role that endocrine systems play in integrating a range of interdependent physiological processes. Readings from the primary literature will be chosen to demonstrate the multidisciplinary approaches used by researchers to investigate neurobiological and physiological processes. The laboratory will provide hands-on training in neurophysiological techniques that students will use to investigate their own questions. Prerequisites: BIOL 101 and 102, CHEM 101 and 102. CHEM 201 and 202 are recommended. Lecture-laboratory.

Biology 411 - Scientific Inquiry, Methods, and Analysis

One-half-unit semester course. In parallel with the biology department seminar series, this course explores current methods of evidence collection and analysis in biology through reading and discussion of primary literature, attending seminars, and interacting with visiting seminar speakers. In this course designed to deepen understanding of the many forms of biological inquiry, students will learn about collecting data, designing experiments, testing predictions, assessing evidence, analyzing data, and making inferences by reading, listening, and talking with scientists about their work. The focus will be on question development, methods, and analysis, but many other related topics (e.g., ethics, collaboration, and innovation) will also be discussed. Prerequisite: BIOL 101 or 102 and junior or senior standing, or instructor permission. Conference.

Biology 431 - Seminar in Biology: Contemporary Topics

One-half-unit semester course. An examination of current topics and areas in biology with an emphasis on primary literature. Participants will lead group discussions and/or make oral presentations. Prerequisites: BIOL 101 and 102, two additional units of biology with laboratory, and junior or senior standing. Conference. Not all topics offered every year. May be repeated for credit.

Advances in Forest Canopy Research. Most research to understand the forest ecosystem has taken place from the forest floor. Yet many of the ecological and physiological processes that drive forest ecosystem function take place far above the ground in the complex intersection of branches that forms the forest canopy environment. This class will explore the history of, common techniques in, and recent advances for studying this unique and important environment through study of the academic literature and hands-on investigation of canopy access techniques, including tree climbing and canopy sampling using drone-based technology.

Bacterial Pathogenesis. An examination of how bacterial pathogens interact with host organisms in order to cause disease. Topics include adhesion, colonization, invasion, toxins, subversion of host cell signaling events, immune evasion, and bacteria-to-bacteria communication as they pertain to pathogenesis.

Behavioral Genomics. An exploration of current research that pairs genomic techniques and bioinformatics approaches with classic questions in animal behavior.

Computational Cancer Biology. Investigation of computational methods to analyze high-throughput biological measurements collected from hundreds to thousands of cancer samples. Biological topics include tumor classification, tumor heterogeneity, and dysregulated signaling pathways. Computational topics include algorithms and models to synthesize, integrate, and manage large-scale cancer datasets.

Conservation Genetics. An exploration of issues of current controversy and active research in conservation biology, highlighting places where molecular genetic techniques and data are providing new insights for classical problems in the management and conservation of rare and threatened species.

Cytoskeletal Dynamics. An exploration of our current understanding of the cytoskeleton and its role in cell migration, morphogenesis, and disease. We will explore the primary literature and discuss how the cytoskeleton (actin, microtubules, and intermediate filaments) is regulated and how the molecular motors (kinesin, dynein, and myosin) contribute to cellular function.

Developmental Neurobiology. An exploration of our current understanding of how brains and eyes form, focusing on the visual system. Our investigations will focus on patterning, size determination, morphogenesis, neuronal connectivity, regeneration, stem cells, and cancer. Examples of developmental diseases will provide context. This course includes a collaborative writing component.

Ecology and Evolution of Plant-Human Interactions. Ecological and evolutionary contexts of interactions between plants and humans. Potential topics include agricultural ecology, grazing, plant-resource extraction, crop evolution and their diseases/pests, plant breeding, transgenic species, and invasive plants.

Global Change Ecology. In light of ongoing environmental change, how are the Earth’s ecological systems likely to respond? We will discuss and present primary literature related to advanced basic and applied concepts in ecology to 1) explore the theories and tools for understanding the ecological response to environmental change and 2) identify sources of uncertainty for accurately understanding such issues.

Mobile DNA. The course will focus on reading, discussing, and presenting papers from the primary literature on mobile genetic elements and viruses, including research about transposition, horizontal transfer, silencing, accumulation, and domestication.

Neuroethology. Exploration of modern and classic research aimed at understanding the neural basis of behavior. Neuroethologists investigate how the brains of diverse species generate natural behaviors, with the goal of elucidating fundamental principles of brain function. Topics may include animal communication, learning and memory, locomotion, prey capture, and escape behavior.

Novel Ecosystems. As anthropogenic influences continue to shape our natural world, we are witnessing the emergence of historically unprecedented, “novel” ecosystems composed of both native and nonnative species. Some biologists argue that these ecosystems should be embraced and even curated, as they can fill important ecological niches that would otherwise be lost. Others view this concept as an acceptance of environmental destruction. In this course, we will read excerpts from foundational texts, take a tour of novel ecosystems across the globe, and study the ecological dynamics that shape them. Through this course, students will be encouraged to formulate their own personal “land ethic” and to articulate opposing viewpoints on how to approach novel ecosystems.

Biology 463 - Immunology

One-unit semester course. A discussion of the properties of innate and adaptive immunity, the cells of the immune system, antibody structure and function, antigen recognition, lymphocyte activation, and immunity to microbes. Topics also covered will include immunodeficiency and AIDS, and transplantation. An inquiry-based laboratory exercise will be required. Prerequisite: BIOL 101 and 102, and one of BIOL 351, 358, or 372, or consent of the instructor. Lecture-laboratory.

Not offered 2023–24.

Biology 470 - Thesis

Two-unit yearlong course; one unit per semester.

Biology 481 - Special Topics

One-half-unit semester course. Independent laboratory or library research on a topic chosen in consultation with the instructor. A final written report is required. Prerequisites: standing as a junior or senior biology major, or approval of instructor. Independent study requires approval by the instructor, the department, and the division.

Biology 505 - The Biological Legacy of Lewis and Clark

One-half-unit semester course. An examination of the natural history of the Lewis and Clark expedition with an emphasis on the new species of plants and animals and their communities that were first described on the expedition. The scientific discoveries will be placed into a modern context by using these species to illustrate underlying biological principles such as community structure and ecological interactions. Consideration will be given to the knowledge that the captains learned from Indigenous peoples and the ways that Native peoples enabled the success of the expedition. Coverage will be given to changes that have occurred since 1800 as well as changes that might be expected in the future. Class meetings will include both lecture and discussion. Conference. Offered fall 2023.

CHEM 010 - Reactor Seminar

Zero units. This course provides an introduction to research reactor operations. Specific topics include; basic nuclear physics, research reactor operations and applications, radiation safety concepts, and science communication. No background in science or mathematics is necessary. Seminar. May be repeated for credit.

Chemistry 101 - Molecular Structure and Properties

One-unit semester course. Introduction to the chemist’s description and use of light and matter. Specific topics include the interaction of light and matter (spectroscopy), the structure of the atom and the atomic structure of matter, chemical bonds and intermolecular forces, and chemical descriptions of color and solubility. Lecture-conference-laboratory.

Chemistry 102 - Chemical Reactivity

One-unit semester course. An introduction to the reactions of atoms and molecules. Specific topics include gas laws, solution phenomena, thermodynamics, chemical equilibria, electrochemistry, and kinetics. Prerequisite: CHEM 101. Lecture-conference-laboratory.

Chemistry 201 - Organic Chemistry I

One-unit semester course. Introduction to theories describing the structure and reactivity of organic compounds. Theoretical principles are illustrated using computer-based molecular models. Structure, methods of preparation, and reactions of important classes of organic compounds are examined. Laboratory work introduces techniques used in the preparation, purification, and spectroscopic identification of organic compounds. Prerequisite for 201: CHEM 101 and 102 or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference-laboratory.

Chemistry 202 - Organic Chemistry II

One-unit semester course. A continuation of CHEM 201. Structure, methods of preparation, and reactions of important classes of organic compounds will be stressed. Laboratory work includes the preparation, purification, and spectroscopic identification of organic compounds. Prerequisite: CHEM 201 or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference-laboratory.

Chemistry 212 - Inorganic Chemistry

One-unit semester course. An introduction to inorganic chemistry, including the structure, bonding, and reactions of main-group molecules, transition metal complexes, and organometallic compounds. Laboratory work is focused on scientific inquiry, along with synthesis, characterization, and reactivity of inorganic compounds. Prerequisites: CHEM 101, 102, and 201, or consent of the instructor. Lecture-laboratory.

Chemistry 220 - Geology

See ENV 220 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

Environmental Studies 220 Description

Chemistry 230 - Environmental Chemistry

One-unit semester course. An introduction to the chemistry of natural and polluted environments. Fundamental principles of chemistry are used to understand the sources, reactivity, and fate of compounds in the Earth’s atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere. Topics include the stratospheric ozone layer, photochemical smog and particulate air pollution, climate change and energy use, water toxics and treatment, and agricultural modification of the surface environment. Prerequisite: CHEM 101 and 102. Lecture-conference.

Chemistry 311 - Analytical Chemistry and Instrumentation

One-unit semester course. An examination of the principles of data acquisition and statistical analysis, chemical equilibria, and the principles and methods of chemical and instrumental analysis. The functions of classical volumetric and gravimetric techniques, along with electronic, optical, and mechanical instrument components and features of their organization into measurement systems, are discussed. Prerequisite: CHEM 101 and 102 or consent of the instructor. Lecture-laboratory.

Chemistry 315 - Physical Chemistry Laboratory

One-half-unit semester course. An exploration of various experimental strategies and techniques in physical chemistry, as applied to inorganic, organic, and/or biochemical problems. Laboratory work includes investigations of energetics, molecular structure, and reaction dynamics requiring the use of large instrument systems and critical analysis and interpretation of experimental data. Corequisite: CHEM 311, or consent of the instructor. Lecture-laboratory.

Chemistry 316 - Physical Chemistry Laboratory: Spectra of Diatomic Molecules

One-half-unit semester course. An exploration of various experimental strategies and techniques in physical chemistry, as applied to the study of diatomic molecules. Laboratory work includes investigations of energetics, molecular structure, and/or reaction dynamics requiring the use of large instrument systems and critical analysis and interpretation of experimental data. Prerequisites: CHEM 311 and 333, or consent of the instructor. Lecture-laboratory.

Not offered 2023–24.

Chemistry 324 - Advanced Physical Organic Chemistry

One-unit semester course. An introduction to modern concepts in experimental, computational (molecular modeling), and theoretical methods used to understand foundational interrelationships between structure and reactivity in organic molecules. Topics include chemical structure and reactivity, intermolecular interactions, molecular recognition, photochemistry, pericyclic reactions, and review of applications in state-of-the-art research. Hands-on experience with single-crystal X-ray diffraction will provide additional insight to the analysis of organic molecules. Prerequisite: CHEM 201 and 202. Lecture-conference.

Chemistry 332 - Chemical Thermodynamics and Kinetics

One-unit semester course. An introduction to statistical mechanics, which provides a bridge between the quantum mechanical description of properties pertaining to microscopic systems and the classical thermodynamic description of properties pertaining to macroscopic systems. An examination of the relations between molecular dynamics, observed rates, and inferred mechanisms of chemical reactions will be included. Prerequisites: CHEM 102, MATH 111, and PHYS 101, or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference.

Chemistry 333 - Quantum Mechanics and Molecular Structure

One-unit semester course. An introduction to principles of quantum mechanics and their application to problems in atomic and molecular structure. Meets four days per week to incorporate study of multivariable calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations. Prerequisites: MATH 111 and PHYS 101 and 102. Lecture-conference.

Chemistry 345 - Advanced Synthetic Chemistry

One-unit semester course. A study of advanced synthetic methods and design. Topics include methods of building carbon skeletons and changing functional groups as well as strategies for multi-step synthesis. Predictive models for selectivity and the use of organometallic reagents will be emphasized. Advanced spectroscopic techniques, such as multidimensional NMR, are discussed as critical tools for structure determination. Prerequisite: CHEM 201 and 202. Lecture.

Chemistry 347 - Advanced Synthesis Lab

One-half-unit semester course. An introduction to performing multistep synthesis in the context of a semester-long research project. The course focuses on the use of organometallic reagents, application of selectivity in synthesis, and the use of spectroscopic techniques, such as multidimensional high-field NMR, for structure determination. Prerequisite: CHEM 201 and 202. Corequisite: CHEM 345, or consent of the instructor. Laboratory.

Chemistry 391 - Structural Biochemistry

One-unit semester course. An examination of the structure and function of biological molecules, including lipids, polysaccharides, proteins, and nucleic acids. Areas of study include protein stability and folding, protein-ligand interactions, enzyme kinetics and catalysis, and protein biosynthesis. Special attention will be given to biophysical techniques employed in the characterization of biological molecules. Prerequisite: CHEM 201, 202. Lecture-conference.

Chemistry 392 - Metabolic Biochemical Homeostasis

One-unit semester course. This course describes the energetics, bioinorganic, and bioorganic chemistry of the cell as it maintains stable internal conditions despite changes in external conditions. Focus will be placed on the origins and chemical evolution of metabolism, principles of metal ion homeostasis, and the energy-producing pathways: glycolysis, the citric acid cycle, oxidative phosphorylation, and fatty acid oxidation. Prerequisites: CHEM 201, 202, and 391, or consent of the instructor. Lecture.

Chemistry 394 - Biochemical Methods

One-half-unit semester course. An introduction to the laboratory techniques commonly used in biochemistry. Experiments demonstrate methods used in the purification and characterization of proteins with attention to a variety of biophysical techniques. Prerequisites: CHEM 391 or 392, or consent of the instructor. Lecture-laboratory.

Chemistry 396 - Bioinorganic Chemistry Seminar

One-half-unit semester course. A study of the role of metals in biological systems and biomedical applications. Topics will include the structure and function of metalloproteins, including electron transfer systems, small molecule transport, storage, and activation, and the use of metals in pharmaceuticals. Discussion will focus on techniques used to characterize the active sites of the native biomolecules and the mechanisms of the reactions they promote with an emphasis on spectroscopy and the use of small molecule model complexes. Prerequisites: CHEM 212 or 391. Lecture-conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Chemistry 403 - Topics in Physical Chemistry

One-half-unit semester course. An examination of current topics relating to the use of spectroscopy to study electronic structure, molecular dynamics, and chemical reactivity with an emphasis on the primary literature. Prerequisites: CHEM 316, or 332, or 333, or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Chemistry 470 - Thesis

Two-unit yearlong course; one unit per semester.

Chemistry 481 - Individual Work in Special Fields

One-half-unit semester course.

Chinese 111 - Beginning Chinese I

One-unit semester course. A beginner’s course in standard (Mandarin) modern spoken and written Chinese, aimed at building a solid foundation in all its aspects: pronunciation (especially the tones), syntax, and basic vocabulary. Attention is given to a balanced development of all the basic skills of the language: listening and reading comprehension, speaking, and writing. Pinyin is the romanization system used in this and all other Chinese language courses. Both the traditional and simplified characters are taught. Students are expected to read both and write one of the two versions. Lecture-conference.

Chinese 112 - Beginning Chinese II

One-unit semester course. This course is designed to build the skills of students who have studied at least one year of Chinese (or equivalent) to achieve intermediate-level proficiency in the oral and written use of the language through speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Emphasis in the course will be placed on learning to recognize and reproduce the natural flow of the spoken language, expanding vocabulary, and learning to write short essays in Chinese. Prerequisite: CHIN 111 or equivalent. Lecture-conference.

Chinese 211 - Intermediate Chinese I

One-unit semester course. This course is designed to build the skills of students who have studied at least one year of Chinese (or equivalent) to achieve intermediate-level proficiency in the oral and written use of the language through speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Emphasis in the course will be placed on learning to recognize and reproduce the natural flow of the spoken language, expanding vocabulary, and learning to write short essays in Chinese. Prerequisite: CHIN 112 or equivalent. Lecture-conference.

Chinese 212 - Intermediate Chinese II

One-unit semester course. This course continues to build the skills of students who have studied at least one year of Chinese (or equivalent) to achieve intermediate-level proficiency in the oral and written use of the language through speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Emphasis in the course will be placed on learning to recognize and reproduce the natural flow of the spoken language, expanding vocabulary, and learning to write short essays in Chinese. Prerequisite: CHIN 211 or equivalent. Lecture-conference. 

Chinese 311 - Third-Year Chinese

One-unit semester course. This course is designed for students who have completed at least two years of Chinese language (or equivalent). The course will focus on student acquisition of near-native fluency in spoken Chinese, competence in reading a variety of contemporary texts (with a dictionary), and employment of different registers and genres of Chinese in students’ writing. Prerequisite: CHIN 212 or acceptance through placement test. Conference.

Chinese 312 - Advanced Chinese

One-unit semester course. Topics vary, selected from Chinese literature, journalistic writing, essays, or contemporary audiovisual material. Readings and instruction in Chinese. Prerequisite: third-year level of Chinese proficiency or equivalent, or instructor approval. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Chinese 316 - Classical Chinese

One-unit semester course. Intensive introduction to the grammar of classical Chinese through the study of selections from ancient literary, historical, and philosophical texts. Readings include the Analects, Mencius, Zhuangzi, Shiji, and Tang-Song prose essays. Conducted in Chinese. Prerequisite: CHIN 212 or equivalent. Conference.

Chinese 325 - Songs to Lost Music: Ci-Poetry

One-unit semester course. This course investigates the rise and the development of ci-poetry, a genre related closely to music. Its formal features and their emotional qualities, major modes of expression, and different stages of its development from the ninth to the thirteenth century are the foci in the close reading of selected poems. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor; for students enrolling in Chinese credit, CHIN 212 or equivalent. Conference. Cross-listed as LITC 325.

Chinese 327 - Chinese Inhumanities: Construction of the Other in Chinese Literature

One-unit semester course. This course explores the construction, preservation, and interrogation of class, race, and ethnicity within China’s literary traditions. Through reading and analysis of narratives treating its alleged “others”—uncultured barbarians from the territories that surround the middle kingdom; the myriad undead who haunt the living; shape-shifting animals who beguile, seduce, and love hapless humans; or individuals who transcend humanity through alchemy, physical and mental inhumanity, monstrosity, or posthuman existence—who are used to define and exclude communities, to express or explore cultural fears, anxieties, or doubts, and to reinforce or undermine belief in China’s cultural superiority. All readings in translation. Students taking the course for Chinese credit will meet for an additional hour of reading in the original language. Prerequisites: CHIN 212 or equivalent (for Chinese credit), and sophomore standing. May be repeated for credit. Conference. Cross-listed as LITC 327.

Not offered 2023–24.

Chinese 330 - Chinese Ghost Stories and Supernatural Tales

One-unit semester course. Powerful spirits, vengeful ghosts, and monstrous creatures—stories of oddities abound in Chinese literature. In this class, students will explore mythologies, tales of the strange, novels of deities and demons in translation, and explore Chinese conceptions of the body and soul(s), the afterlife, and the relationship between the living and the dead. Materials will include original stories in translation, scholarly works, and modern reinterpretations of these tales in film and other media. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor; for students enrolling in Chinese credit, CHIN 212 or equivalent. Conference. Cross-listed as LITC 330.

Not offered 2023–24.

Chinese 334 - The Yijing: Text and Tradition of the Book of Changes

One-unit semester course. The Yijing, or Book of Changes, is a text of limitless possibilities. This course explores various strategies of reading the text and examines philosophical, religious, historical, and literary critical implications of the text and the tradition associated with it. The system and the language of the 64 hexagrams and various layers of attached verbalization are the focus of investigation. Readings are in English. Students who take the course for Chinese credit meet for additional tutoring to read parts of the text in the original. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor; for students enrolling in Chinese credit, CHIN 212 or equivalent. Conference. Cross-listed as LITC 334.

Not offered 2023–24.

Chinese 346 - From Allegories to Documentaries: Screening Postsocialist China

One-unit semester course. This course investigates interactions between literary production (focusing primarily on fiction) and filmmaking since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. Issues to be explored include the shared sociohistorical context that conditioned the production of these two cultural forms and the multivalent differences between them in terms of intended audience, narrative modes, and thematic concerns. Readings are in translation, and films selected are subtitled in English. No Chinese language training is required. Readings in the original Chinese and additional instruction will be offered for students taking this course for Chinese credit. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor; for students enrolling in Chinese credit, CHIN 212 or equivalent. Conference. Cross-listed as LITC 346.

Chinese 355 - Early Chinese Philosophical Texts

One-unit semester course. This course examines various philosophical discourses in the early period leading to the unification in 221 BCE. It is a selective discussion of a few major philosophical texts and schools of thought. We investigate the predominant interest in human nature and cultivation, the epistemological models for understanding such emphases, and the implications of Chinese epistemology. Readings in translation. Students taking the course for Chinese credit will meet for additional hours for the guided reading of selected texts in the original Chinese. Prerequisite for Chinese credit: CHIN 212 or equivalent. Conference. Cross-listed as LITC 355.

Not offered 2023–24.

Chinese 366 - Masters and Miracles: Chinese Buddhist Literature and Culture

One-unit semester course. This course examines the intricate relationship between Buddhism and Chinese literature from the medieval period to contemporary times. By analyzing and discussing literary portrayals in various genres, such as Buddhist scriptures, Chan poetry, travelogues, transformation texts, precious scrolls, Gong’an stories, and Buddhist-themed fiction, students will gain a deeper understanding of the literary activities of Buddhist masters and lay authors who have integrated Buddhist concepts and themes into their works. Additionally, sources in various media, including paintings, calligraphy, and films, will be utilized to provide visual and literary perspectives. The course also addresses how Buddhism interacted with other religions in China, and its influence on the development of Chinese literature. By the end of the course, students will have a comprehensive understanding of the historical, cultural, and literary significance of Chinese Buddhist literature, and develop critical thinking and analytical skills. Lecture-conference. Cross-listed as LITC 366.

Chinese 367 - Love in Late Imperial China

One-unit semester course. This course will examine representations of love and lovers in the literary and historical discourses of the fourteenth through nineteenth centuries. Approaching “love” (qing 情) through key words, conceptions, ideals, and acts with which it was associated, we will explore a number of questions, including: What kinds of behaviors or speech were coded as “romantic?” Were representations of “love” consistent across different discursive contexts (fictional, dramatic, poetic, historical)? Were literary representations of love seen as promoting positive ideals of romance and marriage or encouraging socially deviant and dangerous behaviors? We will also explore the discursive boundaries of love, places where words and deeds shift from love to desire, lust, madness, and obsession. Within what contexts were otherwise romantic words and deeds suddenly viewed as transgressive or disturbing? How did different forms of discourse (medical, legal) identify pathologies of love and/or propose to treat them? All readings in translation. An additional hour session of guided readings in the original will be offered for students taking the course for Chinese credit. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor; for students enrolling in Chinese credit, CHIN 212 or equivalent. Conference. Cross-listed as LITC 367.

Not offered 2023–24.

Chinese 374 - Reading Early Chinese Novels: The Four Masterworks

One-unit semester course. This course explores the development of the novel as an artistic literary form in late imperial China by introducing students to representative novels from the Ming dynasty (fourteenth through seventeenth century), particularly the “four masterworks” (四大奇書) including Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國志通俗演義), Outlaws of the Marsh (水滸傳), Journey to the West (西遊記), and Jin Ping Mei (金瓶梅). Through closely reading select chapters of these four novels, we will explore the relationship between the Ming masterworks and a number of other factors, ranging from history (the long tradition of historiography in China as well as changes in intellectual history during Ming), the rise of material culture, shifting societal norms, and the growing focus on the individual, to more literary concerns with authorship, genre, intertextuality, and reception history. Close textual analyses of the primary sources will be supplemented by critical and theoretical readings that will introduce us to current scholarly approaches to the study of early modern Chinese fiction and help us dialogue with specialists in the field with our own interests and interpretations. We will also examine adaptations of these monumental novels in a variety of other popular media to appreciate their long-lasting cultural influences across (and beyond?) East Asia. All readings are available in translation. Students taking the course for Chinese credit will meet for an additional hour of reading in the original language. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor; for students enrolling in Chinese credit, CHIN 212 or equivalent. Conference. Cross-listed as LITC 374.

Not offered 2023–24.

Chinese 390 - Realism and Its Discontents in Contemporary Chinese Visual Media

One-unit semester course. With the opening up and economic reforms beginning in the late 1970s in China, a new aesthetic question confronted literature and the arts: what constitutes the real and what counts now as legitimate modes/means of its representation? While socialist realism was on the wane, realism continued to condition various forms of cultural production and took myriad guises—from an attempt at complete objectivity devoid of emotion to a complete dependence on subjectivity and affect for delivering a sense of the real; from drawing on the experiences of everyday life of individuals to the legendary feats of martial artists and utopian ideals of science fiction. This course grapples with these various interpretations of realism in modern and contemporary Chinese media, while reaching back in time to trace the precedents of these new forms that negotiate the blurry lines between truth and fiction, the objective and the subjective, the real and the fantastical. Prerequisite: sophomore standing. Conference. Cross-listed as ART 390 and LITC 390.

Not offered 2023–24.

Art 390 Description

Chinese 412 - Selected Topics in Chinese Literature

One-unit semester course. Topics vary, selected from Chinese literature. Readings and instruction in Chinese. Prerequisite: third-year level of Chinese proficiency. Conference. May be repeated for credit.

Chinese 470 - Thesis

Two-unit yearlong course; one unit per semester.

Chinese 481 - Independent Study

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Prerequisite: approval of instructor and division.

Comparative Literature 201 - Introduction to Comparative Literature

One-unit semester course. In forgoing the national framework as its organizing principle, comparative literature is becoming increasingly synonymous with world literature today. What is a world? Is it a spatial or temporal category, lived realities or literary constructs? And how does literature interact with the world in its many forms? What does it mean to study literature across the boundaries of histories, cultures, languages, and art forms? What are some of the pitfalls and payoffs of the comparative practice? In this course we will read theoretical reflections on some core concepts of the discipline, along with a selection of works organized largely around the theme of “action and its impediments.” Key topics to explore will include translation and transculturation; intertextuality and interdisciplinarity; realism and its discontents; colonialism and postcolonialism. Conference.

Comparative Literature 470 - Thesis

Two-unit yearlong course; one unit per semester.

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 150 - The Cultural Study of Music

See MUS 150 for description.

Music 150 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 225 - Religion, Race, and Ethnicity

See REL 215 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

Religion 215 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 226 - Islam in America

See REL 226 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

Religion 226 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 254 - Africa in the Black Musical Imagination

See MUS 254 for description.

Music 254 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 260 - Dance, Race, and Gender

See DANC 270 for description. 

Not offered 2023–24.

Dance 270 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 261 - Dancing Latinx America

See DANC 241 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

Dance 241 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 284 - Latinx History in the United States

See HIST 284 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

History 284 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 286 - Histories of Immigration and Migration in the United States

See HIST 286 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

History 286 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 300 - Junior Seminar: Race and Immigration

One-unit semester course. This course for CRES majors explores the way race and ethnicity can be analyzed from interdisciplinary perspectives, considering categories of “race” and “ethnicity” a) both together and in relation to each other, and b) as designating or emerging out of separate politics of difference and otherness. Course topics may change from year to year. Conference.

Race and Immigration
One-unit semester course. This course explores immigration through the lens of critical race theory and social phenomenology. Drawing on historical and contemporary case studies from the United States, Brazil, Britain, France, Germany, and Australia, the course considers subjective experience, structural conditions, and political contests around immigration. The course focuses on issues of embodied labor, identity formation, and particularly on the ways in which immigrants incorporate themselves into and/or are excluded from processes of nation formation and imagination. In this respect, the course interrogates the racial boundaries of contemporary citizenship and the limits of liberal ideologies of multiculturalism. To gloss W.E.B. Du Bois, how does it feel for immigrants to be a problem? Prerequisite for anthropology credit: ANTH 201 or 211. Prerequisite for CRES credit: completion of or concurrent enrollment in any CRES foundational course. Cross-listed as ANTH 398 for 2023–24. Conference.

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 321 - Deuteronomy, Ethnicity, and Mestizaje

See REL 351 for description.

Religion 351 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 324 - Bible, Race, and Empire

See REL 354 for description.

Religion 354 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 327 - Erasure and Location of Muslims in Western Humanities

See REL 327 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

Religion 327 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 330 - Modernity and Memory in the Indian Ocean

See ENG 370, Modernity and Memory in the Indian Ocean, for description. 

Not offered 2023–24.

English 370 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 333 - Jews across the Americas

See ENG 303, Jews across the Americas, for description.

English 303 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 336 - Douglass/Delany

See ENG 356, Douglass/Delany, for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

English 356 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 342 - Social Technologies of Belonging

See SOC 342 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

Sociology 342 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 343 - Sociology of Race and Racism

See SOC 343 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

Sociology 343 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 348 - Race, Economy, Public Policy

See SOC 348 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

Sociology 348 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 359 - Music and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1865–1965

See MUS 360 for description. 

Music 360 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 365 - Contemporary Global Dance

See DANC 365 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

Dance 365 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 381 - Race and Ethnicity in the U.S. since 1865

See HIST 381 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

History 381 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 383 - Race and Oral Histories in the United States

See HIST 383 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

History 383 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 384 - Race and the Politics of Decolonization

See HIST 334 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

History 334 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 385 - Defining and Defying Difference: Race, Ethnicity, and Empire

See HIST 315 for description. 

History 315 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 388 - Race and Ethnicity in the Andes

See HIST 388 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

History 388 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 389 - Race and the Law in American History

See HIST 369 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

History 369 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 390 - African Technoscience

See ANTH 300 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 300 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 392 - African Pasts, African Futures

See ANTH 343 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 343 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 393 - Race and Transnational China

See ANTH 363 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 363 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 395 - Black Queer Diaspora

See ANTH 345 for description.

Not offered 2023–24.

Anthropology 345 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 396 - #CentralAmericanTwitter: Continuity and Rupture in Central American Indigenous Histories

See ANTH 306 for description.

Anthropology 306 Description

Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 470 - Thesis

Two-unit yearlong course; one unit per semester.

Creative Writing 201 - Introduction to Creative Writing

Making Fiction
One-unit semester course. In this course, students will learn about and experiment with the tools of fiction writing. Students will complete numerous generative, exploratory forays into the world of fiction, honing their craft as well as considering the ethical, political, and personal implications that arise when one transmits language to the page. Our reading list will be comprised of work by contemporary writers who represent the range of what gets classified as fiction today, such as Carmen Maria Machado, Percival Everett, Stephen Graham Jones, Claire-Louise Bennett, N.K. Jemisin, and Poupeh Missaghi. Class sessions will be used primarily for discussion of assigned readings and student work. Enrollment limited to 15. Prerequisites: a writing sample of three to five pages, at least sophomore standing, and consent of the instructor. Conference.

The Short Story
One-unit semester course. In this course students will write short stories, and read the work of their classmates as well as that of published authors. Close attention will be paid to the narrative strategies used by writers such as Alice Munro, Jamaica Kincaid, Lydia Davis, George Saunders, and Yasunari Kawabata to help the students in writing their own fiction. We will consider these various strategies when reading and responding to the work of peers. Class sessions will be used for discussion of assigned readings and work in progress. Enrollment limited to 15. Prerequisites: a writing sample of three to five pages, at least sophomore standing, and consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

Creative Writing 207 - Introduction to Creative Nonfiction

Creative Writing 224 - Poetry Studio I

Introduction to Poetry Workshop
One-unit semester course. This is an introduction to writing and workshopping poems. Students will engage with weekly writing exercises and in-depth class discussion while reading a wide range of published works to develop critical skills and creative strategies beneficial to a sustainable writing practice. Emphasis will be placed on encouraging and reviewing student work within a workshop format. Enrollment limited to 15. Prerequisite: a writing sample of three to five pages of poems and consent of instructor. Conference.  

Creative Writing 321 - Special Topics Studio

One-unit semester course. Variable topics. Enrollment limited to 15. Writing sample required. See specific listing for other prerequisites. Conference. May be repeated for credit. 

Fiction Now! 
One-unit semester course. No matter how far into the future or back into the past we set our fiction, we are always writing from the now. How do we consciously and unconsciously bring the present moment to the page? How do contemporary events, aesthetics, technologies, and cultural and political understandings shape the fiction we write? How might being attuned to our selves—our bodies—in the present open up new possibilities in our work? In this class students will tune in to the contemporary through generative exercises and the writing and workshopping of short stories. Our reading of published authors will focus on writing published within the last decade, including works by Adania Shibli, Megan Milks, Amina Cain, Brandon Shimoda, N.K. Jemisin, and early-career writers in print and online journals. Class sessions will be used primarily for discussion of assigned readings and student work. Enrollment limited to 15. Prerequisites: a three- to five-page fiction writing sample, one 200-level creative writing course, and consent of the instructor. Conference.

Flash Nonfiction 
One-unit semester course. This workshop is designed for students with considerable experience in writing short prose. Students will read essays by authors such as Ross Gay, Lydia Davis, Sei Shōnagon, Sarah Manguso, and Brian Blanchfield in order to learn to manage effects economically and to write with maximum efficiency and suggestion. Students will write one short piece of prose every or every other week; critically responding to others’ work, and the revision of one’s own stories, will also be emphasized. Class sessions will be used for discussion of assigned readings and work in progress. Enrollment limited to 15. Prerequisites: a writing sample of three to five pages, one 200-level creative writing course, at least sophomore standing, and consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

The Realistic and the Fantastic
One-unit semester course. This workshop is designed for students with considerable experience in writing short fiction. Readings and discussion will focus on storytelling that relies upon a “realistic” depiction of our world, combined with narratives that contain events and situations that are exaggerated, surreal, speculative, and/or out of the “ordinary.” How are such stories similar, and how are they different? Students will read published stories by writers such as Munro, Gaitskill, Hemingway, Cheever, Dybek, McPherson, Poe, Bradbury, Borges, Cortázar, Henry James, Octavia Butler, Kelly Link, Shirley Jackson, Haruki Murakami, and Angela Carter, as well as fairy tales, folktales, and other texts. Special emphasis will be given to individual voices, critically responding to others’ work, and the revision of one’s own stories. Class sessions will be used for discussion of assigned readings and work in progress. Enrollment limited to 15. Prerequisites: a writing sample of three to five pages, one 200-level creative writing course, at least sophomore standing, and/or consent of the instructor. May be repeated for credit. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

Revision and Beyond
One-unit semester course. Often, we talk about writing as if the bulk of the work is in generating the first draft, and revision isn’t much more than a final polish. But most writers eventually find that revision is as creative and gratifying a part of the writing practice as the earlier stages. In this course intended for writers of prose (fiction and creative nonfiction), students will practice and develop strategies for revision from sentence to overarching narrative level, focusing on elements of craft as well as considerations of audience, genre, and the ethical dimensions of prose writing. Students will generate new work through in-class exercises and will workshop longer pieces with an eye toward putting revision strategies into practice. The course will also offer students the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the contemporary literary landscape through discussion and research around publishing, literary community building, the practice of creative writing in the academy, and other timely conversations in the field. Enrollment limited to 15. Prerequisites: a writing sample of one short story or creative nonfiction essay of any length, one 200-level creative writing course, and consent of the instructor. Conference.

Short Prose Forms
One-unit semester course. This workshop is designed for students with considerable experience in writing short prose. Students will read stories and essays by authors such as Ross Gay, Lydia Davis, Yasunari Kawabata, and Sandra Cisneros in order to learn how to manage effects economically, and to write with maximum efficiency and suggestion. Students will write one short piece of prose per week; critically responding to others’ work, and the revision of one’s own stories, will also be emphasized. Class sessions will be used for discussion of assigned readings and work in progress. Enrollment limited to 15. Prerequisites: a writing sample of three to five pages, one 200-level creative writing course, at least sophomore standing, and consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

Creative Writing 331 - Special Topics Studio

One-unit semester course. Variable topics. Enrollment limited to 15. Writing sample required. See specific listing for other prerequisites. Conference. May be repeated for credit. 

Advanced Poetry Workshop
One-unit semester course. The focus of this advanced workshop is to provide an intensive critical forum for students with previous poetry workshop experience to engage deeply with the practice of reading and writing poems. We will work diligently to further the development of each poem/poet, exploring various strategies to generate and extend new work, and giving close consideration to the different formal elements. Enrollment limited to 15. Prerequisites: CRWR 224, sophomore standing, a writing sample of three to five poems, and consent of the instructor. Conference.

Intermediate Poetry Workshop
One-unit semester course. The focus of this intermediate workshop is to provide an intensive critical forum for students with previous poetry workshop experience to engage deeply with the practice of reading and writing poems. We will work diligently to further the development of each poem/poet, exploring various strategies to generate and extend new work, and giving close consideration to the different formal elements. Enrollment limited to 15. Prerequisites: CRWR 224, sophomore standing, a writing sample of three to five poems, and consent of the instructor. Conference.

Creative Writing 481 - Independent Study

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Independent writing projects. Prerequisite: consent of the instructor and the division.

Computer Science 121 - Computer Science Fundamentals I

One-unit semester course. An introduction to computer science, covering topics including elementary algorithms and data structures, functional and procedural abstraction, data abstraction, object orientation, logic, and the digital representations of numbers. Emphasis is on mathematical problems and calculations and on recursive algorithms and data structures. The course includes a significant programming laboratory component where students will solve computational problems using a high-level language. The mechanisms for processing and executing programs will be surveyed. Prerequisite: three years of high school mathematics. Lecture-laboratory. 

Computer Science 122 - Intermediate Computer Science Fundamentals I

One-half-unit semester course. An introduction to computer science, covering topics including elementary algorithms and data structures, functional and procedural abstraction, data abstraction, object orientation, logic, and the digital representations of numbers. Emphasis is on mathematical problems and calculations and on recursive algorithms and data structures. The course includes a significant programming laboratory component where students will solve computational problems using a high-level language. The mechanisms for processing and executing programs will be surveyed. This is an accelerated version of CSCI 121 for students with significant programming experience. Prerequisite: three years of high school mathematics. Lecture-laboratory.

Not offered 2023–24.

Computer Science 221 - Computer Science Fundamentals II

One-unit semester course. A second course in computer science, an introduction to advanced structures and techniques. The course will develop the foundations of computing, providing an introduction to theoretical models of computation and also to practical computer system construction. Selected topics include digital design, from gates to processors; the construction of interpreters, including language parsing and run-time systems; parallelism and concurrency; and universality. There will be significant programming projects exploring a number of these topics, and students will be introduced to the advanced programming techniques and data structures that support their construction. Prerequisite: CSCI 121 or equivalent. Lecture-laboratory. 

Computer Science 315 - Ethics and Public Policy

One-unit semester course. This course examines the ethical and public policy questions raised by new computer technologies. Topics vary by year but usually include criminal hacking and cyber warfare, intellectual property laws, data privacy, and fairness of algorithmic decision-making. Prerequisite: CSCI 221 and Humanities 110 or equivalent. Lecture-conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Computer Science 351 - Software Engineering

One-unit semester course. This course explores the process of designing and implementing software. The course will cover software design methodologies, requirements design, design patterns, software design diagrams, testing strategies, code reviews, project plans, and software presentation. Students will work in groups on both writing and programming assignments. Prerequisite: CSCI 221. Lecture-conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Computer Science 368 - Modern Systems Security

One-unit semester course. This course focuses on the security aspects of modern system architectures. Concepts include secure software development, authentication, session management, access control, and mitigation of common attack patterns such as cross-site scripting. These are considered in the context of contemporary system architectures including microservice and API designs. Throughout the course and in a lab environment, students will perform hands-on work with security tools and be exposed to real-world security scenarios. Prerequisite: CSCI 221. Lecture-conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Computer Science 378 - Deep Learning

One-unit semester course. This course is an introduction to deep neural architectures and their training. Beginning with the fundamentals of regression, optimization, and regularization, the course will then survey a variety of architectures and their associated applications. Students will develop projects that implement deep-learning systems to perform various tasks. Prerequisites: MATH 201 and CSCI 121. Lecture-conference.

Computer Science 382 - Algorithms and Data Structures

One-unit semester course. An introduction to the design and analysis of algorithms. The course will focus on various abstract data types and associated algorithms. The course will include implementation of some of these ideas on a computer. Prerequisite: CSCI 121 or equivalent and MATH 112 and 113. Lecture-conference. Cross-listed as MATH 382. 

Computer Science 384 - Programming Language Design and Implementation

One-unit semester course. A study of the organization and structure of modern programming languages. This course will survey key programming language paradigms, including functional, object-oriented, and logic-based languages, with particular focus on the fundamental concepts underlying them, including their syntax, semantics, and type systems. It will take a mathematical approach, examining several strong ties with formal logic and the mechanization of proof, especially logics and proof methods related to the properties of programs. Prerequisites: CSCI 221 and one of MATH 112 or 113. Lecture-conference.

Computer Science 385 - Computer Graphics

One-unit semester course. Introduction to computer image synthesis and mathematical modeling for computer graphics applications. Topics include image processing, 2-D and 3-D modeling techniques such as curve and surface representation, geometric algorithms for intersection and hidden surface removal, 3-D rendering, and animation. Prerequisite: CSCI 121 and MATH 201. Lecture-conference. 

Not offered 2023–24.

Computer Science 386 - Private and Fair Data Analysis

One-unit semester course. This course studies two important social or ethical constraints one might face when analyzing data. The first half of the course covers privacy concerns, where one must analyze a data set without violating the privacy of the people whose data it contains. The second half of the course covers fairness, where one is seeking to ensure that classification rules output by a machine learning algorithm are not discriminatory with respect to race, gender, or other protected attributes. Throughout the course we will focus both on the process of creating mathematical formalizations of socially desirable properties and on the design of algorithms that satisfy those definitions. Students will engage directly with current research papers. Prerequisites: one of CSCI 121 or MATH 141, and one of CSCI/MATH 382, CSCI/MATH 387, or MATH 391. Lecture. Cross-listed as MATH 386.

Computer Science 387 - Computability and Complexity

One-unit semester course. Introduction to models of computation including finite automata, formal languages, and Turing machines, culminating in universality and undecidability. An introduction to resource-bounded models of computation and algorithmic complexity classes, including NP and PSPACE, and the notions of relative hardness and completeness. Prerequisites: CSCI 121 or equivalent and MATH 112 and 113. Lecture-conference. Cross-listed as MATH 387. 

Computer Science 388 - Cryptography

One-unit semester course. An introduction to modern cryptography. Topics include private- and public-key encryption, message authentication codes, pseudorandomness, and digital signatures. Emphasis is placed on formal definitions of security, proofs of security, and key constructions. Prerequisite: CSCI 382 or 387 or MATH 382, 387, or 332. Lecture-conference. Cross-listed as MATH 388. 

Not offered 2023–24.

Computer Science 389 - Computer Systems

One-unit semester course. A study of the design and implementation of computing systems, surveying computer architecture, machine organization, the hardware-software interface, memory and storage subsystems, compilation and run time, and concurrent and networked programming. Students learn to pay particular attention to the underlying factors that affect a program’s performance. An introduction to approaches to problems related to the synchronization and coordination of independently executing processes, and also to the structure of distributed and network-based services. Prerequisite: CSCI 221. Lecture-conference. 

Computer Science 393 - Operating System Design and Implementation

One-unit semester course. This course covers the low-level details of the software that drives computing hardware, spanning such disparate systems as supercomputers, the internet backbone, laptops, and smartphones. Topics include kernel architectures, scheduling, memory management, security policies and mechanisms, assurance, file systems, networking, virtualization, real time, safety-critical and security-critical systems. Students will implement several operating system components. Prerequisite: CSCI 389. Lecture-conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Computer Science 394 - Principles of Compiler Design

One-unit semester course. An in-depth look at the design and construction of programming language compilers, covering the basic phases of the compilation process, including syntactic analysis and parsing, semantic analysis, intermediate representations of code, dataflow analysis, register allocation, code generation, and other optimizations. Students will develop a working compiler and run-time system for a programming language. Time permitting, the course surveys advanced techniques such as compilation of functional programming languages or compilation for high-performance hardware. Prerequisite: CSCI 389 or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Computer Science 395 - Computer Architecture

One-unit semester course. A course that explores the implementation of computer processors, with focus on techniques and designs that seek high performance. We look at pipelining, superscalar designs, multiprocessor systems, cache coherence in multiprocessors, graphics processing units, embedded systems, and network processors. Prerequisite: CSCI 389 or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Computer Science 396 - Computer Networks

One-unit semester course. A broad-ranging exploration of topics in computer networks that includes history, communications theory, network architectures, internet protocols, client-server models, strategies for improving network security, and the social impact of modern networking. The course emphasizes both theory and practice and therefore includes both mathematical analysis and programming projects written in Python. Prerequisites: CSCI 221 and one of MATH 112 or 113. Lecture-conference.

Computer Science 441 - Topics in Computer Science Theory

One-unit semester course. Exploration of topics from advanced algorithm design and theoretical computer science including complexity theory, quantum computation, and approximation algorithms, as selected by the instructor. Prerequisites: MATH 201 and CSCI or MATH 382 and 387, or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference. May be repeated for credit. Offered in alternate years. Cross-listed as MATH 441. 

Computer Science 470 - Thesis (Computer Science)

Two-unit yearlong course; one unit per semester.

Computer Science 481 - Independent Study

One-half-unit semester course. Primarily for juniors and seniors. Prerequisite: approval of the instructor and the division.

Dance 100 - Dance Production

Variable (zero or one-half)-unit semester course. Students, faculty, and staff work together to create departmental dance productions. In this class, students learn the different parts of onstage and backstage work that are required to make a dance production. Students also learn the practices of collaborating and producing. Roles available include performer in thesis concerts or work as a dramaturg, designer, stage manager, or assistant choreographer in thesis and/or biannual departmental concerts. This course is available to majors and nonmajors, and students are admitted to the course by audition or departmental approval. All students, regardless of experience, are welcome to take this class, and if a student is interested in this class, the faculty will work with the student to help them find a role. Credit/no credit only. Studio. May be repeated for credit.

Dance 101 - Dance Technique

One-half-unit semester course. Through this course, students may take technique classes in ballet, Argentine tango, hip-hop, or other dance forms; students should consult the schedule of classes for specific techniques and levels offered in a given semester. Technique classes will be accompanied by readings and discussions that place movement practices in their historical and contemporary contexts. To qualify for one-half credit, students must have taken or be currently enrolled in a graded (rather than a credit/no credit) dance department course; each graded dance department course taken allows a student to earn credit for two semesters (one unit) in DANC 101. Students may repeat DANC 101 and/or enroll in more than one section for credit. A maximum of four units (eight semesters) in DANC 101 may be accrued overall. This course may be applied toward the dance studio requirements for majors and minors. Credit/no credit only. Studio. May be repeated for credit.

Dance 111 - Introduction to Contemporary Dance: Mind in Motion

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Designed for students with no previous dance training, this course provides a foundation for the further study of a variety of dance forms. Principles of alignment, body mechanics, and locomotion will be explored through the practice of movement vocabularies drawn from modern and contemporary concert dance. Though our primary work will be in the studio, the course includes a discussion of critical perspectives from which to view contemporary dance performance, and viewing of dance performances both live and on video. Students enrolled in the course for one unit will undertake additional reading, viewing, and writing assignments. This course may be applied toward the dance studio requirements. Studio.

Dance 112 - Introduction to Contemporary Dance: Cross-Cultural Contexts

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. This course emphasizes the study of modern and contemporary dance technique and introduces elements of movement composition through the creation of collaborative choreography projects. Active work in the studio, along with readings and discussions, is designed to locate modern and contemporary dance within cross-cultural contexts, emphasizing Afro-diasporic influences. Students enrolled in the course for one unit will carry out additional projects in choreography and additional written work. This course is suitable for students with no previous dance experience. DANC 111 is recommended but not required. This course may be applied toward the dance studio requirements. Studio.

Dance 201 - Introduction to Dance Studies: History and Culture

One-unit semester course. This course is an introduction to dance studies as an interdisciplinary field within the humanities and social sciences. Broadly defined, dance studies engages in critical analyses of dance practices from historical and cultural perspectives. Throughout the course of the semester, students explore and affirm dance as a vital cultural practice by considering a broad range of concert and social dance practices across time and geographic place. Course material pays particular attention to how dance articulates complex questions around race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and nation. Written and embodied assignments introduce and explore key methodologies in the field, including movement description and analysis, critical assessment of embodied practice, archival research, and interviews. No previous dance experience is necessary. This course may be applied toward the dance studies requirements. Conference.

Dance 202 - Ballet for All of Us

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Ballet classes serve a wide demographic of student, professional, and recreational dancers of diverse backgrounds. However, ballet continues to be among the least racially diverse of the performing arts, one that can reinforce gender stereotypes and unhealthy body images. How might we reenvision the practice of ballet to include our own bodies, histories, and perspectives and to serve our goals as individuals? How might ballet be for all of us? In this course, we will disrupt the hierarchy of ballet as “high art,” instead approaching it as “an art” that we can use towards our own agendas. Our primary work will be movement based; we will investigate how ballet class can enhance our own dance practices. We will also draw on our individual embodied histories and movement practices, putting these into dialogue with ballet to deepen our understanding of dance practice more broadly. For those taking the course for full credit, readings on race, gender, and body image in ballet will contextualize our studio work. Previous experience in choreographed movement (any form of dance, martial arts, etc.) is recommended but not required. This course may be applied toward dance studio requirements for majors and minors. Studio. May be repeated for credit. 

Not offered 2023–24.

Dance 211 - Contemporary Dance I: Invention and Design

One-unit semester course. Designed for the intermediate dancer, this course combines an exploration of modern and contemporary dance techniques with an extensive introduction to movement composition. Work in both areas emphasizes movement invention, design, and development. Course work includes attendance at professional dance performances, video viewings, discussions, and critiques. Students will perform their work in the end-of-semester concert. This course is appropriate for students with previous training in dance technique. This course may be applied toward the dance studio requirements. Studio.

Dance 232 - Community Dance and Collective Creation

One-unit semester course. Community Dance at Reed (2016–present, www.reed.edu/dance/community-dance) aims to bring together members of the Reed College and broader Portland communities through community dance as a form of social intervention and collective creation. Community Dance at Reed welcomes all bodies, with a critical awareness of how race, class, ability, gender, age, and sexuality impact the ways we relate to ourselves and one another. As a community project, the program offers creative movement sessions that are free and open to the public. Practice sessions employ improvisation-based techniques that strive to connect movement with salient social and political questions. Across the semester, we collaboratively create a dance work based on social, cultural, and identity-based themes of shared importance to group members. Enrolled students read and discuss the literature on community dance and performance, consider ethical and practice-based questions, and critically engage with case studies of community performance projects. Students develop and lead community movement sessions, and codirect the creation of the dance work with community members. No previous dance experience is necessary. This course may be applied toward either the dance studio or studies requirements. Studio-conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Dance 241 - Dancing Latinx America

One-unit semester course. This course is an introduction to Latinx American dance studies. This course takes a hemispheric perspective and considers a wide range of social, concert, and popular dance practices from the United States, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. From a disciplinary perspective, this course explores the intersection of three fields: dance studies, Latin American studies, and Latinx studies. At this intersection, it engages the methods used by scholars working from historical, ethnographic, queer, feminist, and ethnic studies standpoints to ask: What is the relationship between dance and Latinx American identity (national, personal, and/or transnational)? How do dance practices reinforce and/or deconstruct racialized, gendered, and classed stereotypes? How do movement forms and performance styles mobilize, remember, or reimagine Latinx identities and histories? No previous dance experience is necessary. This course may be applied toward the dance studies requirements. Conference. Cross-listed as CRES 261.

Not offered 2023–24.

Dance 252 - Improvisation

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Since the early 1960s, improvisation has played an increasingly sophisticated role in contemporary dance. This course will investigate contemporary improvisational practices that are at once creative, performative, and philosophic. Half of the semester will focus on contact improvisation, a partnering form that explores the exchange of physical support, the practice of which has challenged notions of gender roles, ability and disability, and community structure. The other half of the semester will focus on choreographic improvisation, a constellation of improvisational practices in which movement scores are developed and refined over time, and which has influenced changing views of the function of performance and the relationships between makers, performers, and viewers of dance. Our primary mode of investigation will be moving; this practice-based research will be contextualized by readings and viewings. Students enrolled in the course for one unit will undertake additional readings and a research project. One year of dance technique or one year of creative work in visual art, music, theatre, or creative writing is highly recommended. This course may be applied toward either the dance studio or studies requirements. Studio-conference. May be repeated for credit.

Dance 253 - Improvisation: Solo Forms and Shared Practices

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. This course will investigate a variety of solo improvisational practices that enhance holistic experiences of dancing; expand solo movement repertoires artistically, physically, and conceptually; and attend to personal movement aesthetics, philosophies, and intentions. Drawing on a variety of influential dance practices including authentic movement, site dance, improvisational technologies, and others, we will focus on the potential of these practices to expand and deepen our improvisational knowledge as soloists while sharing our solo practices within a community of artists/movers/peers. Students enrolled in the course for one unit will undertake additional reading, viewing, and studio-based work. This course may apply toward the dance studio or studies requirement for majors and minors. Studio-conference. May be repeated for credit.

Not offered 2023–24.

Dance 265 - Dances of Africa and the African Diaspora

One-unit semester course. This course will explore dance practices and cultural traditions of West Africa and this cultural influence on Brazil, Cuba, and the United States. This course will combine geographic, cultural, political, and social studies through the platform of dance. Discussion, readings, and physical practice will frame our investigation of the ways that dance informs social practice and political change and affirms diasporic linkages. Course work includes studio assignments, readings, guest artists, and dialogue. This course may be applied toward either the dance studio or studies requirements and may be repeated for credit. Conference-studio.

Dance 270 - Dance, Race, and Gender

One-unit semester course. How do global dance practices perform and/or contest racial and gender identities? What is the relationship between quotidian and danced identities? This course introduces and explores the intersections between dance studies and constructions of race and gender with special attention to how these fields intersect with questions of labor, class, ability, and sexuality. It considers a wide range of historical and contemporary practices ranging across social dance, concert dance, site-specific performance, dance as visual art, and popular forms. Work inside and outside the classroom focuses on readings, viewings, class discussion, and written assignments; however, students also engage in movement workshops and dance practice–based classes throughout the course of the semester. DANC 201 is recommended but not required. This course may be applied toward the dance studies requirements. Conference. Cross-listed as CRES 260.

Not offered 2023–24.

Dance 311 - Contemporary Dance III: Action and Interaction

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Designed for high-intermediate- and advanced-level dancers, this course will combine rigorous technical training with work in choreography. Work in contemporary dance technique will include detailed work in alignment and focus on moving with energy and precision. Choreographic work will address compositional elements of dance—including action, space, time, gesture, structure, image, and interaction—as inherently meaningful catalysts for thinking choreographically. Studio work will be supported by video viewings, discussions, and critiques, as well as attendance at professional dance performances. Student work will be performed in the end-of-semester concert. Prerequisite: DANC 211, 212, 312, or 313, or equivalent experience. This course may be applied toward the dance studio requirements. Studio. May be repeated for credit.

Not offered 2023–24.

Dance 313 - Contemporary Dance V: Biography/Autobiography

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Designed for high-intermediate- and advanced-level dancers, this course combines rigorous technical training with work in choreography. Contemporary dance vocabularies will provide a platform from which to hone technical facilities and approach nuanced movement material. Work in choreography will investigate biographical and autobiographical sources as source materials for performance. A critical review of significant choreographic works employing biography or autobiography will inform our on-going investigation of ways to approach and develop these source materials. Through the use of movement, text, vocalizations, journal writing, memory games and storytelling, students will create performances based on biographical narratives and real-life experiences. Work in this course will include attendance at professional dance performances, video viewings, discussions, and critiques, and students will perform in the end-of-semester concert. Prerequisite: DANC 211, 212, 311, or 312, or equivalent experience. This course may be applied toward the dance studio requirements. Studio. May be repeated for credit.

Dance 321 - Contemporary Performance Ensemble

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. This course focuses on performance through the development, rehearsal, and production of contemporary dance works. Students will address the technical, stylistic, and interpretive challenges of choreographic material presented as well as develop and manipulate choreographic material of their own. Work in and out of class leading to performance will be supported through small group sessions and movement-based projects, as well as readings, viewings, written responses, and critiques. Requires rehearsal outside of class times. Prerequisite: instructor’s permission or by audition. This course may be applied toward the dance studio requirements. Studio. May be repeated for credit.

Dance 335 - Special Projects in Choreography: Political Bodies

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Focusing on a specific area of choreographic investigation, this course alternates between topics from year to year. Prerequisite: one year of dance technique and one year of creative work in dance, music, theatre, writing, or the visual arts. This course may be applied toward either the dance studio or studies requirements. Studio-conference. May be repeated for credit.

Not offered 2023–24.

Dance 362 - Dance Ethnography

One-unit semester course. This research seminar examines methods and theories that engage in and emerge from cultural analysis of dance practices. It explores the relationship between dance and ethnography through readings, performance, discussion, and independent research. Students read foundational texts in the field as well as recent ethnographies to address the politics of representing and engaging others, situating positionality, accounting for the transnational circulation of performance practices, and serving as advocate and/or witness. Assigned ethnographies emphasize the relationships between dance and race, nation, class, sexuality, and gender. DANC 201 recommended but not required. This course may be applied toward the dance studies requirements and as a junior seminar. Conference.

Dance 365 - Contemporary Global Dance

One-unit semester course. This course asks what it means to dance “locally” in a global world. It considers how contemporary global dance practices in historical context challenge neat distinctions between Western and non-Western traditions and serve as active sites that construct and/or critique these classifications. To explore dance as a complex site of cultural negotiation, contestation, and exchange, the course traces transnational dance diasporas across the global north/south axis and across the Atlantic Ocean. Students examine how global dance flows animate the formation of national, racial, ethnic, and gendered (post)colonial identities, chart global migration patterns, mobilize transnational political economies, and complicate facile understandings of cultural authenticity. Prerequisite: DANC 201 or consent of the instructor. This course may be applied toward the dance studies requirements and as a junior seminar. Conference. Cross-listed as CRES 365.

Not offered 2023–24.

Dance 411 - Advanced Technique: Performance Practices

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Designed for the advanced dancer, this course offers a rigorous examination of technique, integrating vocabulary from classical and contemporary dance with choreological conceptions of the body in motion. Emphasis will be placed on understanding and embodying the conceptual framework of movement material and the ways in which that understanding is integrated in performance. Focused assignments will center on how varying approaches to dance performance relate to genre and conceptions of the performative. With permission of the instructor, the course may be repeated as an advanced practicum. Prerequisite: DANC 311, 312, or 313 or equivalent experience. This course may be applied toward the dance studio requirements. Studio. May be repeated for credit.

Dance 470 - Thesis (Dance)

Two-unit yearlong course; one unit per semester.

Dance 481 - Independent Study

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Prerequisite: approval of instructor and division.

Economics 201 - Introduction to Economic Analysis

One-unit semester course. This course will introduce students to the analytical approaches and tools of the economics discipline, and how these are used to examine current issues and problems that arise in the functioning of economic systems. Microeconomic theories of consumption, production, and exchange provide much of the analytical framework that will be utilized, although we will also explore some relevant applications to the macroeconomy. A central feature of this course is the examination of markets and how they determine what is produced and how it is allocated. We also devote some attention to evaluating market outcomes, to thinking about remedies to resource allocation problems that markets cannot solve, and to thinking about the factors that determine long-run productive capacity and income potential. Lecture-conference.

Economics 281 - Revolution and Reform in Chinese Agriculture

One-unit semester course. China’s incredible economic transformation and growth trajectory started simply, by most accounts, with a few carefully chosen modifications to the incentive structure faced by farmers. The move away from collective farming is credited with unleashing productivity forces well beyond initial expectations and paving the way for a continuing series of market-oriented reforms, first in the rural and later in the urban sector. What is less well known, however, is that China also experienced a short-lived farm production boost in an earlier era, shortly after formation of the People’s Republic of China. In contrast to the decentralization moves in the 1980s, rather the 1950s was characterized by gradual introduction of collective resource ownership and management, ultimately leading to commune-style farming. We will draw from a variety of analytical sources to understand how China transformed itself twice, in opposite directions, exploring the impetuses behind these changes, their impacts, and their legacies. Conference.

Economics 304 - Intermediate Macroeconomics

One-unit semester course. A survey of basic theories of economic growth and business cycles using graphical and algebraic methods. Studies the relationships among aggregate economic variables such as GDP, inflation, interest rates, unemployment, and exchange rates. Analysis of macroeconomic policy issues. Prerequisite: ECON 201 or consent of instructor. Lecture-conference.

Economics 311 - Survey of Econometric Methods

One-unit semester course. An introduction to applications of empirical methods in economics. Students are introduced to the nature and sources of economic data and basic concepts of statistics and econometrics. Topics include the estimation of econometric models, hypothesis testing, and forecasting. Emphasis is placed on the use of these techniques in empirical economic literature. This course is not designed for students who have taken upper-level statistics courses. Students who have taken MATH 141 are encouraged to take ECON 312. Prerequisite: ECON 201. Lecture-conference.

Economics 312 - Theory and Practice of Econometrics

One-unit semester course. An introduction to the statistical methods commonly used in economic research. Classroom development of theoretical material is combined with extensive hands-on practice of econometric techniques. Statistical methods discussed include estimation and inference in simple and multiple linear regression models, detection and correction of autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity, time-series models and distributed lags, and estimation of systems of simultaneous equations. Considerable emphasis is placed on learning to specify, implement, and evaluate tests of economic hypotheses. Prerequisites: ECON 201 and MATH 141 or similar introduction to statistics, or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference.

Economics 313 - Microeconomic Theory

One-unit semester course. This course provides a thorough exposition of neoclassical theories of producer and consumer behavior. Considerable attention is devoted to understanding the economic concept of efficiency and demonstrating the efficiency of competitive equilibrium in a general equilibrium framework. The efficiency of market outcomes under alternative assumptions is also examined, and some time is devoted to discussing social choice theory and the limits of the market. Prerequisites: ECON 201 and MATH 111, or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference.

Economics 314 - Macroeconomic Theory

One-unit semester course. A detailed introduction to modern theories of economic growth and business cycles. Emphasizes the derivation of relationships among aggregate variables from assumptions about the behavior of households and firms. Examines empirical evidence for and against macroeconomic theories. This course is not designed for students who have taken ECON 304; students who have should consider ECON 416. Prerequisites: ECON 201 and MATH 111, or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference.

Economics 315 - Game Theory

One-unit semester course. Game theory is the study of strategy. This course introduces students to game theory and its application in a wide range of situations. We study various classes of games, including static and dynamic games as well as those of complete and incomplete information. We also consider various solution concepts, including iterated elimination of dominant strategies and Nash equilibrium. Numerous refinements of the Nash equilibrium concept, including subgame perfect Nash equilibrium, Bayesian Nash equilibrium, and perfect Bayesian equilibrium, are also considered. We apply game theory to the study of competition, the commons, bargaining, auctions, conventions, institutions, and political decision-making. Prerequisite: ECON 201 and MATH 111, or the equivalent. Lecture-conference.

Economics 328 - Latin America: Economic History and Policy Challenges

One-unit semester course. This course traces the economic development of Latin America from colonial times to the present. The first half of the course explores the economic history of Latin America, focusing on the creation of economic institutions that have shaped the growth and specific features of Latin American economies from the Spanish and Portuguese conquests through the second half of the twentieth century. Among the topics that will be studied in this part of the course are land property and reform, coercive labor institutions, development of export-oriented sectors, and the political economy of reform in the Latin American republics. The second part of the course examines current public policy issues such as crime, housing, inequality, and education from a microeconomic perspective. Prerequisite: ECON 201. Lecture-conference.

Economics 344 - International Monetary Systems

One-unit semester course. This course explores the history and functioning of international monetary arrangements and economic relations from the nineteenth century to the present day. Topics include the operation of the gold standard, the Bretton Woods exchange rate regime, the collapse of this regime and the advent of flexible exchange rates, the implementation of the European monetary union, and recent exchange rate and financial crises experienced in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Prerequisite: ECON 201. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Economics 348 - Economics of the Public Sector

One-unit semester course. This course considers the role of government in the economy. We examine the theoretical rationale for government intervention in the economy and the economic consequences of such government intervention, with examples coming primarily from the United States. In addition, the course studies how taxation affects economic efficiency, income distribution, capital formation, and microeconomic incentives. Major topics include environmental regulation, publicly funded education, welfare, social security, health care, tax reform, and international public finance. Prerequisite: ECON 201. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Economics 351 - Environmental Economics

One-unit semester course. This course presents an economic analysis of environmental issues and policies. We will examine the impact of the economy on the environment, the importance of the environment to the economy, and how policies such as transferable permits, subsidies, taxes, and regulations affect the environment and economy. Concepts covered in this course include static efficiency, equity, property rights, discounting, cost-benefit analysis, risk and uncertainty, market failure, nonmarket valuation techniques, and sustainability. Prerequisite: ECON 201. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Economics 352 - Natural Resource Economics

One-unit semester course. This course presents an economic analysis of renewable and nonrenewable natural resources. Concepts introduced include static and dynamic efficiency, equity, property rights, discounting, market failure, nonmarket valuation, and sustainability. The course will cover current and proposed policies for resource management such as transferable quotas, taxes, subsidies, regulations, and public versus private ownership. Prerequisite: ECON 201. Conference.

Economics 358 - Urban Economics

One-unit semester course. In this course, the focus is on the city, in determining its costs and benefits as well as location and land use. We explore policy issues specific to local governments in urban areas, including zoning, housing and segregation, poverty, homelessness, transportation, education, and crime. Prerequisite: ECON 201. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Economics 362 - Industrial Organization

One-unit semester course. In a market economy, firms decide what and how much is produced. This course introduces the student to the study of firm behavior, providing a solid foundation on the core theory that explains firms’ incentives and market structures. We also explore real-world application of these concepts with an emphasis on the modern U.S. economy. Topics to be covered include perfect competition, monopoly, dynamic oligopoly and collusion, antitrust and mergers, and vertical relationships. Prerequisite: ECON 201 and MATH 111, or the equivalent. Lecture-conference.

Economics 364 - Economics of Population, Gender, and Race

One-unit semester course. This course will consider race and gender as they influence and are reflected in decisions about schooling, work, and family. Using microeconomic models of marriage, fertility, migration, labor supply, and human capital investment, we will analyze and try to explain observed trends. Drawing on well-established literatures in the fields of labor economics and economic demography to provide frameworks for our discussions, we will consider the theoretical and empirical findings in light of their potential contributions to policy. Prerequisite: ECON 201. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Economics 366 - Jobs, Technology, and Trade

One-unit semester course. Investigation of the causes and consequences of changing patterns of labor demand. We will seek to understand how technological innovation and a rising volume of trade influence the structure of labor demand and the organization of the workplace. Effects on wage levels, wage inequality, and patterns of employment will be examined. The role of worker representation, in various forms, will be considered along with an analysis of factors that contribute to labor organizing efforts and outcomes. We will focus our attention on the U.S. labor market although comparative analysis with the experiences of other industrialized countries will enhance our understanding. Prerequisite: ECON 201. Conference.

Economics 369 - Growth and Inequality

One-unit semester course. This course will examine the historical evolution of modeling economic growth and development. We will first survey theories of economic growth and the associated empirical evidence in order to understand inequality across countries. We will then examine policies, at both the macroeconomic and microeconomic level, aimed at alleviating poverty and improving the lives of individuals in developing economies. This course will conclude with a brief examination of inequality in developed countries, focusing on the sources and evolution of inequality in the United States. Prerequisite: ECON 201. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Economics 371 - Law and Economics

One-unit semester course. Applications of microeconomic theory focused on common law and the legal system. Topics include the effect of the legal system on resource allocation, the establishment and scope of property rights, allocation of risk and efficient investments in precaution, product liability, and an economic analysis of criminal behavior and punishment. Prerequisite: ECON 201. Conference.

Economics 382 - Economics of Development

One-unit semester course. We consider the economic problems and policies of poor countries, with attention to the concept and measurement of economic development; human capital investments over the life cycle; gender and household decision-making; land, labor, credit, and insurance markets; inequality and development; the role of institutions and the state; and debates over the effectiveness of foreign aid. Factors and constraints influencing economic decision-making, including market failures and potential strategies for their resolution, are a recurring theme. Prerequisite: ECON 201. Conference.

Economics 383 - International Trade

One-unit semester course. This course analyzes the causes and consequences of international trade. The theory of international trade and the effects of trade policy tools are developed in both perfect and imperfect competition, with reference to the empirical evidence. This framework serves as a context for a discussion of several important issues: the effect of trade on income inequality, the relationship between trade and the environment, the importance of the World Trade Organization, strategic trade policy, the role of trade in developing countries, and the effects of free trade agreements. Prerequisite: ECON 201. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Economics 385 - China’s Economy in Transition

One-unit semester course. In the course of a few decades, China has launched itself from a poor country to a rising world power, at the same time substantially improving living standards and dramatically transforming its production base. What steps did China take to bring about these changes? We will examine China’s economic reforms and development, considering the goals and impacts of various policy measures along with ongoing challenges. Topics to be considered include population, labor, income inequality, land, food production, industry, foreign relations, credit and financial markets, macroeconomic policy, and the environment. While China will be our central focus, students will have some opportunities to compare and contrast with other country experiences. Prerequisite: ECON 201. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

Economics 393 - Global Health and Consumer Behavior

One-unit semester course. This course explores global health care, health outcomes, and health insurance markets from a consumer’s perspective. Students will apply health insurance theory to health care systems across the globe. We will read and discuss current literature about health phenomena and disease burdens in both developed and developing countries. Students will learn to analyze health behaviors from an economic perspective by, for example, evaluating how responsive demand for health inputs is to changes in the price of those inputs, exploring how information affects health behaviors, and determining the value of health insurance. Prerequisite: ECON 201. Lecture-conference.

Economics 401 - Contemporary Topics in Economics

One-half-unit semester course. A detailed examination of a topic of current theoretical or policy interest. The course may be repeated when topics vary, up to a maximum of one unit of credit. Prerequisite: varies by topic. Prerequisite: varies by topic. Conference. May be repeated for credit.

China and the World
One-half-unit semester course. In parallel with a fall 2023 lecture series, this course examines the policy questions that arise, both domestically and internationally, with China’s increasing economic and political significance on the world stage. From the Chinese side, what new challenges have emerged, and how can past successes and failures inform the next steps? From the perspective of the rest of the world, what does China’s entry as a rising economic and political superpower mean, and what responses might it elicit? Our investigations will take into account China’s position both within and outside of Asia. Prerequisite: ECON 201. Conference.

Economics 416 - Computational Macroeconomics

One-unit semester course. This course offers an introduction to the basic programing concepts and analysis of applied macroeconomic models using numerical methods. Students learn how to write computer programs to simulate macroeconomic models. These models will be used to answer questions related to many areas of macroeconomics, including growth, business cycles, patterns of consumption and savings over the life cycle, and the distribution of wealth, among other topics. No prior programming skills required. Prerequisite: ECON 304 or 314. Lecture-conference.

Economics 470 - Thesis

Two-unit yearlong course; one unit per semester.

Economics 481 - Independent Reading

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Credit in proportion to work done. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing.

English 201 - Introduction to Narrative

British Jewish Experience
One-unit semester course. Expelled in 1290, Jews officially returned to England in 1656, and then only because their entrance was interpreted by the Puritan government as a harbinger of the Messiah’s own return. Despite this promise, it would take nearly 200 more years for British Jews to achieve full rights as citizens. British Jewish Experience covers Jews’ presence as both authors and figures in British literature between 1840 and the present, during which Jews grappled with belonging and negotiated their contribution to English society. This course serves as an introduction to narrative and covers a range of genres such as fiction, diaries, autobiography, biography, television, and drama. Authors include Grace Aguilar, Benjamin Disraeli, Lady Montefiore, George Eliot, Amy Levy, Israel Zangwill, Daniel Abse, Andrea Levy, Charlotte Mendelsohn, and Naomi Alderman. Conference. 

Medieval Celtic Literatures
One-unit semester course. This course will focus on early medieval texts from Ireland, Wales, and England in order to understand the particular concerns and narrative techniques of Celtic literatures and to consider their transformation and integration into later English traditions. At the same time, students will interrogate the usefulness of the term “Celtic” as an accurate descriptor of Welsh and Irish cultures. Other issues under consideration will include the shift from orality to literacy in early Ireland and Wales; the tensions between the pagan past and the Christian present; the construction of notions of gender, heroism, and sovereignty; and, most importantly, the impact of twelfth-century Anglo-Norman colonization upon Welsh and Irish literary cultures. Specific texts under consideration will include the Irish Táin, The Voyage of Bran, The Wooing of Etaín, The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel, and The Tales of the Elders of Ireland; Welsh texts from The Mabinogion and from the Arthurian, Aneirin, Merlin, Taliesin, and Heledd traditions; and finally Anglo-oriented texts by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Giraldus Cambrensis, and Chrétien de Troyes. All texts will be read in translation. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

Medieval Women Writers
One-unit semester course. Although the secular and religious cultures of medieval Europe were often flagrantly patriarchal, medieval women nonetheless produced a host of some of the richest and most interesting narratives of the period. In this course we will practice the basic tools of literary analysis by exploring writings such as the Carolingian noblewoman Dhuoda’s book of advice to her son; the closet dramas of the Saxon nun Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim; the enigmatic account of the canny and saintly Englishwoman Christina of Markyate; the impassioned love letters of Heloise of Argenteuil to her castrated husband; the mystical visions of the German abbess Hildegard of Bingen and of the English anchoress Julian of Norwich; the illustrated encyclopedia of Herrad of Landsberg; the erotic and often tragic Breton lais of Marie de France; the spiritual adventures and misadventures of Margery Kempe; and the protofeminist manifestos of Christine de Pisan. The course will begin with a review of the most relevant early Christian contexts for medieval women’s writing, including excerpts from the book of Genesis and the Psalms, the Gospel according to Luke, and the account of the martyrdom of Sts. Perpetua and Felicitas. We will also study aspects of the material culture these women and their colleagues used and produced: manuscript illumination, psalters, books of hours, textiles. This course fulfills the English department’s pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

English 205 - Introduction to Fiction

Decolonization and the Novel in Africa
One-unit semester course. Taking root during late colonialism, the novel emerged as a prominent genre in the shaping of postcolonial societies in Africa. In the wake of decolonization, African writers turned to the novel, reinventing the genre to imagine new individual and collective identities and assess the legacies left behind by the colonial past. This course will examine various novelistic responses to the sociopolitical changes in different parts of Africa during the late twentieth and the twenty-first century. In what ways did the novel become a catalyst for cultural transformation in postcolonial Africa? How did the novel become the privileged genre of decolonization? Starting with the critiques of colonialism in the early decolonial period, we will explore topics including narratives of modernity and tradition, the failures of the nation-state, critique of patriarchy and gender, migration, displacement, neocolonial formations, and the promises and pitfalls of globalization. Readings may include novels by Tayeb Salih, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ama Ata Aidoo, Bessie Head, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Chimamanda Adichie, and Helon Habila. Theoretical readings may include writings of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, and Achille Mbembe, among others. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

Detective Stories and Crime Fiction
One-unit semester course. Often derided as a “lower” form of storytelling, crime fiction has been for decades one of the most popular genres of literature on both sides of the Atlantic. Engaged with central questions of what constitutes illicit actions in civilized societies, and how they might be detected and policed, the form also crucially concerns itself with matters both epistemological and ontological (especially concerning hidden identities). This course examines the development of classic crime and detective fiction, starting in the nineteenth century with Edgar Allen Poe’s pathfinding C. Auguste Dupin stories, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (often called the first popular detective novel in English), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s wildly popular Sherlock Holmes stories. The course will then proceed through the so-called golden age of detective fiction in the United Kingdom and the rise of hard-boiled detective fiction in the United States (both of which coincided with the era of literary modernism). We will finish by looking at how in recent decades the genre’s codes have been rewritten, particularly in light of questions about identity politics with regards to established social orders. Primary texts will also include works by Dorothy L. Sayers, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, Patricia Highsmith, P. D. James, and China Miéville. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

Memory, Desire, and the Modern Novel
One-unit semester course. T.S. Eliot begins his 1922 poem The Waste Land evoking the admixture of memory and desire, reflecting literary modernism’s preoccupations both with the subjective life and with time and historicity. This course will examine the ways in which fictions from roughly the first half of the twentieth century repeatedly return to questions of a remembrance of eros past, both in their thematic content and in their formal narrative complexities. Marcel Proust, the most influential literary explorer of these questions, will occupy a central position in our analysis, but we will also examine novels by transatlantic modern authors who may include Rebecca West, Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, Jean Rhys, Graham Greene, and James Baldwin. There will be brief critical readings by Stephen Kern, Anne Carson, Sigmund Freud, René Girard, and Michel Foucault, among others. Conference. Not offered 2023–24. 

The Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Bildungsroman
One-unit semester course. Young man from the provinces moves to the big city; young woman takes a new job. The youthful protagonists of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, or novel of formation, set out on journeys to seek their fortune and find their place in a society where, for the first time, social identity was not assumed to be identical with social rank and simply established at birth. The major novelists of the period depict a society fascinated with the idea of upward mobility, and return almost obsessively to narratives tracking the ways in which their protagonists react to a hierarchical but dynamic social structure and how they forge their identities within it. We will examine the multiple variations on this theme in works drawn from among the following: Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy. In addition to works of fiction we will read a number of critical texts on linked topics including narrators and narrative structure, the function of novelistic character, the concept of realism, and the nature and history of literary genres. This course applies toward the pre-1900 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2023–24. 

Tolkien and Lewis
One-unit semester course. The imaginative writings of the Oxford scholars J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis constitute some of the most widely read, most beloved, and most pervasively influential fiction of the twentieth century. The two friends shared drafts of their work and presided together over a group of like-minded writers and thinkers. Across all their varied writings—and especially in their construction of fictive worlds—Tolkien and Lewis both thought of themselves as effecting a resistance to the prevailing literary and cultural pieties of modernity. And yet the two men were also temperamentally quite different and often aesthetically in deep tension with one another. In this course, we will compare the ways Lewis and Tolkien deploy genre, character, diction, narrative voice, imagery, and other literary techniques in the construction of their various fantastic worlds. We will consider too, the ways in which both writers articulated their commitment to a Christian worldview (and their opposition to “the machine”) and how they both came to understand the power and purpose of mythology. We will also have occasion to think through together how Tolkien and Lewis reproduced certain problematic aspects of the racism and sexism of their culture and how these might affect our evaluation of their works. To all these ends, we will read a generous selection from their most important writings, including J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (in its entirety) and Smith of Wootton Major, his essay “On Fairy Stories,” and excerpts from his Silmarillion, as well as C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, his science-fiction novels Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, two volumes of his Chronicles of Narnia, and his late, possibly brilliant novel Till We Have Faces. We will preface our analysis of their fictions by reading important works that influenced them by George MacDonald and William Morris. Conference.

The Victorian Gothic
One-unit semester course. The Victorians prided themselves on their commitments to reason, taxonomy, order, and rectitude. The novel, however, which was their dominant cultural form, often concerned itself with the dark underside to their world, where concomitant fascinations with superstition, chaos, crime, and vice instead held sway. These gothic Victorian fictions—dominated particularly by the related forms of the sensation novel, the detective novel, and the imperial romance—will be the object of study for this course, which will examine major works by such potential authors as Emily and Anne Brontë, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Bram Stoker as a means of understanding not simply Victorian culture but more generally the form of the novel. We will also read short critical and theoretical works in the study of narrative to accompany our readings in gothic fiction. This course applies to the English department’s pre-1900 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

English 211 - Introduction to Poetry and Poetics

One-unit semester course. This course is designed to introduce students to the fundamental elements of a poem, such as rhythm, diction, imagery, metaphor, tone, form, speaker, and audience. We will read texts from a wide historical range and consider the historical development of selected forms and techniques. The course will also examine what some poets and critics have regarded as the nature and function of poetry and what bearing such theories have on the practice of poetry and vice versa. The course will emphasize close reading of the texts, and there will be frequent writing assignments. Conference. May not be repeated for credit. 

English 212 - British Poetry

Early Modern Woman
One-unit semester course. Queen Elizabeth I was both an exception and an ideal in early modern England: a woman, ruling a patriarchal nation, about whom countless poems were written. She was also a poet in her own right, serving as both literary subject and object, and the same was true of women at all levels of society. This course introduces students to the range of poetry written by and about women in early modern England. In particular, it examines the ways in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets represented the relationship of English womanhood to the world that produced and surrounded it, at home and abroad. What can we learn from both idealized and realistic portrayals of early modern women? To what extent do changes in literature reflect shifts in English history and culture, including the intersections of religion, politics, science, and class and gender relations? In considering these questions, students will develop a formal analytical vocabulary and skills central to the reading and studying of poetry. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. 

Not offered 2023–24.

English 213 - American Poetry

Ethnopoetics
One-unit semester course. The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the complexity and pleasure of poetry. We will be learning about the aesthetics of ethnic American poetry by reading it in the context of Western and non-Western poetic traditions. We will use the historical circumstances and theories of ethnicity to help us understand both the political and the aesthetic choices behind poetic allusions, language, genre, diction, rhythm, and figurative language. The poems we read are chosen from a variety of genres, authors, and historical periods. Our aim will be to understand how the various techniques and genres open to poets enable them to produce works of art which speak to us and push us to think. The course emphasizes close reading of the texts, and there will be frequent writing assignments. Conference.

English 220 - Studies in British Culture

British Romanticism
One-unit semester course. The period 1789–1832 was one of dramatic political, social, and industrial upheaval in Europe. In response British writers and artists produced some of the most powerful representations in English literary history of hopes for liberty and progress, and of pure transcendent joy, as well as some of its sharpest attacks on oppression and convention. This class will discuss poetry and prose from the period, showing the impact of the French Revolution on British intellectual and public life in the 1790s, as well as the agitation for political reform in the first decades of the nineteenth century. We will examine the formal and stylistic innovations of these writers and the relation of their works to the profound social changes they document, investigating their philosophical, aesthetic, and expanding colonial contexts. The goal is to construct an effective working definition of the term “Romanticism” that comes to grips with the achievement and diversity of this group of writers/artists, and to engage with the impact of their works on cultural life and critical debates over the last century. Primary texts will be drawn from William Blake, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Robinson, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. Class readings will also include recent critical studies of the history, political context, and aesthetic debates of this revolutionary era. This course applies toward the pre-1900 requirement. Conference. 

English 242 - Introduction to Drama

American Theatre Post–Angels in America II
One-unit semester course. In a 2018 article, “The Great Work Continues,” the New York Times asked how American theatre had changed since the first production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in 1993, and named the best 25 American plays written since then. This course begins with a study of Kushner, laying the groundwork for further study of the current state of American theater. This semester covers plays produced between 2000 and 2007, and includes plays from the Times’s list as well as Pulitzer Prize winners. Writers will include Suzan-Lori Parks, Wallace Shawn, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Sarah Ruhl, Nilo Cruz, David Auburn, and others. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

Black British Playwrights
One-unit semester course. What does it mean to be Black and British in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? This course will attempt to answer this question by reading a selection of plays written by Black British playwrights between 1998 and 2018. The course will look at how experiments with form, subject matter, and genre explore the experiences of Black people in local, national, and international contexts. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

Introduction to Shakespeare
One-unit semester course. This course serves as a general introduction to Shakespeare’s drama and poetry. We will read major plays in the principal genres of comedy, history, and tragedy, charting the development of Shakespeare’s craft over the course of his nearly 30-year career by contrasting early and late examples of his work. We will consider plays within the performance context of the early modern theater, developing a working knowledge of the theatrical conventions and cultural understandings that inform them. Reading Shakespeare’s narrative poems and sonnets in tandem with this writing for the stage, we will explore the complexities of Shakespeare’s language, including his use of poetic forms and devices. Given the breadth and variety of Shakespeare’s artistic production, we will ask ourselves what shared themes and characteristics allow us to identify a work as “Shakespearean.” Assigned texts will include, among others, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Henry V, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest, as well as performances recorded at Shakespeare’s Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

Irish Drama and the Politics of Place
One-unit semester course. The twentieth-century rise of Irish theater and Irish nationalism both coalesced around an ideal of rural life independent from British colonial rule. Depopulated by waves of famine and unrelenting emigration, the green world of peasant plays and Gaelic legends envisioned alternative forms of modernity grounded in a rural past, even as theatrical audiences became increasingly urban and global. This course explores the problem of pastoral representation in the history of the Irish stage and in the staging of Irish history. From the rose gardens and leisured English lovers of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) to the faerie stories and folklore of The Celtic Twilight, we trace a legacy adapted from British literary genres and motifs, but revived and reinvented for a national tradition rooted in precolonial myth. Pastoral drama was not merely a retreat from partisan violence, but a site of conflict in the turbulent decades leading up to Irish independence, as we find in the cultural nationalist projects of W.B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, and in the audience riots sparked by J.M. Synge and Sean O’Casey’s unflinchingly unromantic portrayals of poverty and pain. Connecting historical developments to the politics of place, we analyze how Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, Marina Carr, and Martin McDonagh engage and resist the legacy of rural Ireland on the stage. Topics include exile and diaspora; sectarian violence in relation to gender, class, race, and ethnicity; postcolonial theory and global Englishes; and the history of the Troubles. Although at times this bloody history seemed, as the Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney put it, “about as instructive as an abattoir,” the art it yielded still has the capacity “to hold in a single thought reality and justice,” one of his favorite Yeats quotations. From the Celtic Revival to the Celtic Tiger, we examine the struggle between reality and justice in Irish drama, and the power of theater to create the country as it was, and as it could be. Conference.

Shakespeare on Screen
One-unit semester course. Although Shakespeare’s plays were written for live performance “in the flesh,” we increasingly engage with his works through screens—in recorded performances, films, television shows, digital archives, and even video games. In this course we will use concepts from the fields of media and performance studies to analyze the implications of these shifts from live performance to screen-based engagement. How does the medium in which we encounter an early modern play influence our understanding of its language? What opportunities for interpretation and creative adaptation are opened or foreclosed by the different media in which a play appears? Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

English 261 - Introduction to Film

Film Noir
One-unit semester course. This course will focus on film noir in American cinema in the 1940s and 1950s, examining its plotlines and narrative methods as well as its distinctive visual style. Students will be introduced to the language of film analysis and trace the genre’s sources in “hard-boiled” detective fiction, German expressionism, and the cultural climate of the United States in the decades in which the films were produced. Questions about visual framing, narrative structure, and genre will inform readings and discussions, as will the films’ representations of tensions in postwar social roles. The course will conclude with a consideration of one or two more recent examples of “neo-noir.” Required readings on film and narrative theory; directors will include Billy Wilder, Orson Welles, Jacques Tourneur, Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks, and Michael Curtiz. Conference-screenings. Not offered 2023–24.

The Western
One-unit semester course. Film studies scholar Robert Ray once wrote that “many of Classic Hollywood’s genre movies, like many of the most important American novels, were thinly camouflaged westerns.” This course seeks to investigate that claim by examining film form, genre, and history through the lens of the cinematic Western, with all of the idealism and ugliness the subject entails. While the beginning of the course will focus primarily on the Western as imagined in classical Hollywood, our analysis will eventually track the genre’s development into the modern day. We will watch and analyze films by directors including John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, Sergio Leone, Richard Altman, Katherine Bigelow, Mario van Peebles, Ang Lee, and Quentin Tarantino. In addition to illuminating the concept of genre study and the history of U.S. film, this course will view the Western as a barometer of both American social anxieties and ideologies as the genre (and the nation) continually reinvents itself over time. Conference-screenings. Not offered 2023–24.

English 271 - Games, Play, and Stories

One-unit semester course. Humans have been playing games since before they were telling stories—arguably, since before they were human—but these sister arts have often been separated in the minds of scholars. Amidst a boom in new media technologies and a board game renaissance, the relationship between games, play, and stories has become ever tighter, and the new narrative and affective experiences they create are becoming increasingly larger forces in U.S. popular culture. In this introductory course, students will engage with some of the founding debates and methodologies of the field of game studies, including formal design analysis, the narratology/ludology “debate,” and theories of critical play. Students will be expected to engage with and formally analyze digital and analog game systems in a variety of genres, including text adventures, walking simulators, classic board games, storytelling card games, tabletop roleplaying games, and physical activities from the New Games movement as we investigate the point and potentials of play in a storytelling context. Conference-screenings. 

English 301 - Junior Seminar in English Literary History

One-unit semester course. This course offers a study of the methods and a sample of the materials of English and American literary history. Offered in two or three sections each year with different emphases, this course engages the in-depth study of one work and its precursors, influences, and effects, or may study a range of works attending to intertextual transformations and generic change. The course will also include substantial reading in literary theory, and students will develop their own critical history, together with an annotated bibliography of the work of a major author. This course is primarily for English majors, for whom the junior seminar is usually required no later than the end of the junior year. Prerequisite: junior standing and two 200-level English courses. Conference. May not be repeated for credit. 

English 303 - American Studies Seminar

Jews across the Americas
One-unit semester course. This course examines the diversity of the American Jewish experiences in South America, North America, and the Caribbean. Moving from the early colonial era to the present, we will examine Jewish life through a variety of literary genres ranging from poetry to fiction to graphic novels. This course offers an introduction to the methods of American studies and digital humanities, and focuses on how to read literature in the context of primary historical sources and material culture. Prerequisites: at least two 200-level English classes or Introduction to Judaism (REL 151) or any other course in Jewish literature or history. This course applies toward the pre-1900 requirement. Conference. Cross-listed as CRES 333 and REL 259.

English 333 - Studies in Fiction

James Joyce
One-unit semester course. In 2022, the hundredth-anniversary year of the publication of Ulysses, critics and scholars have repeatedly hailed James Joyce as the most influential and important fiction writer of the twentieth century, noting that he effectively rewrote the configurations and capabilities of the short story, novel, and epic. Over the track of his career, Joyce’s fiction progressed from its roots in literary naturalism to more complex modernist forms, exhibiting his uncanny ability to master and also invent different rhetorical discourses. This course tracks the full range of this development, from his earliest fictions in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man all the way through brief selections from his last and most difficult work, Finnegans Wake; we will focus particular attention on the entirety of Ulysses. We will pay attention as well to critical, biographical, and historical contexts for Joyce’s work. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

Postbellum, Pre-Harlem: The Literature of Reconstruction
One-unit semester course. Born too late for the slave narrative and too early for the Harlem Renaissance—“Post-Bellum–Pre-Harlem,” as he puts it—Charles W. Chesnutt missed two major African American literary movements. Chesnutt’s life (1858–1932) spanned crucial moments in American history—the Civil War, Reconstruction, the rise of post-Reconstruction violence, the establishment of schools for Black children led by Black teachers, the emergence of the convict labor system, and the beginnings of the civil rights movement. This course examines Chesnutt’s fiction as the core of the literature of Reconstruction and its aftermath, from the pernicious myths of the plantation school to the protest fiction of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis. Methodologically, we will draw on recent work in African American archival recovery and periodical culture, examining the cultural politics of publication history. Genres will include realism, regionalism, and sentimentalism; the slave narrative and the social problem novel; journalism, legal writing, and essays. Prerequisite: HUM 110 and two 200-level English courses or consent of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1900 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

Postcolonial Hauntings 
One-unit semester course. Haunting is central to postcolonial thought and literature. This course examines the aesthetics of haunting in postcolonial novels from the latter half of the twentieth century. Haunting invite us to radically rethink the relations between the past and the present in terms of their contemporaneity and interdependence. It also makes us examine the relationship between subjectivity, embodiment, and place. We will reflect on alternative space and temporalities opened up by literary evocations of ghosts, phantoms, and specters, and explore the themes of memory, loss, and trauma in various historical and cultural contexts. How might the language of haunting help us understand the unresolved histories of colonial, racial, nationalist, sexist, and ecological violence? How do these texts register the experience of loss? In what ways do narrative texts imagine the possibility of justice by opening up a space for reexamining and reinterpreting the past in the present and alternative modes of inhabiting space and place? This course will put postcolonial narrative texts in conversation with various postcolonial and poststructuralist theories, psychoanalysis, critical race and Indigenous theories, and posthumanist and ecocritical writings. Primary texts will include works by Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Leslie Marmon Silko, Patricia Grace, Erna Brodber, and Maisy Card. Prerequisite: sophomore standing and two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. 

Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Networks 
One-unit semester course. The idea of the network was central not only to the ways in which Virginia Woolf conceived of relations between and among people in her novels but also according to the terms by which she understood her own fictional career. Woolf’s affiliations with her Bloomsbury Group cohort and her other literary collaborators and rivals informed her own sense of herself as an author, and were ultimately turned into literary capital regarding the complex manner by which selves are constituted through their engagements with others. This course will explore this dynamic not only through Woolf’s own fiction and essays but also those within Woolf’s modernist networks both during her lifetime and after by figures such as Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth Bowen, and Toni Morrison (among others). Prerequisite: sophomore standing and two English courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. 

English 337 - Studies in British Culture

The Home Front: British Literature of World War II
One-unit semester course. World War II, the deadliest international conflict in world history, destroyed the United Kingdom’s role as one of the great world empires, and also forever transformed the underpinnings of its class system and its system of government. Nevertheless, the British people to this day view their shattering wartime experience as one of the great unifying and refining experiences in their culture and their history. This course will look at literary works brought forth from the wartime experience of primarily British civilians from the period from 1939 to 1945 and its aftermath, paying particular attention to its expression through late literary modernism, and looking at how values of Britain during the time (particularly regarding class, gender, national identity, and national loyalties) were tested and reshaped. In addition to brief critical and historical readings, we will look at fictions by writers who lived through the war, who may include Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Graham Greene, Penelope Lively, W.G. Sebald, Muriel Spark, and Evelyn Waugh. We will also see British films from the era by directors such as Alberto Cavalcanti, Humphrey Jennings, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, and Carol Reed. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. 

Not offered 2023–24.

English 341 - Studies in American Literature

American Pastoral: Literature and Environment
One-unit semester course. This course explores the relationship between idyllic fictions and concrete experience through two transformative centuries of American environmental history. Examining literature’s role as both the product and producer of “nature’s nation,” we trace the changing values attached to wilderness, farming, and the nonhuman environment, from early modern fantasies of the exploration and settlement to present day prophesies of environmental doom. We will examine the many ideological functions of pastoral imagination across literary genres, including enlightenment travel writing, romantic poetry, transcendentalist essays, regionalist fiction, and the naturalist movement. Prerequisites: two English courses at the 200 level or above, American studies or environmental studies background, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

Jewish American Graphic Novels
One-unit semester course. This course will consider the contribution of Jews to the historical development of the genre and techniques of the Graphic Novel in the United States. Our reading of the graphic novel will be contextualized within modernism and postmodernism and the changes in the notions of childhood, heroism, gender, and Jewishness in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American culture. Emphasis will be paid to close reading of the texts, including analysis of genre, panels, framing devices, layout, speech, plot, and characterization. Prerequisite: two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above, or Art 251. Conference.

Nature Writing, Ecocriticism, and the Problem of Social Justice
One-unit semester course. This course explores the relationship between idyllic fictions and concrete experience through two transformative centuries of American nature writing, from travel writing and transcendentalism to Cherokee protest poetry and regionalist short stories. We will use the paradigms we explore in the classroom—from evolving concepts of nature and wilderness to longstanding myths of agricultural improvement and property rights—to frame humanistic questions at stake in environmental and social justice initiatives. Fostering a more capacious understanding of social justice through the ecological imagination, this course acknowledges the role of storytelling in activism and advocacy, moving from models of individual rights to collective understandings of what is right for those who share a place. What can we learn about the origins of the Black freedom struggle from Charles Chesnutt’s fiction, which represents not only New Negro uplift in Northern cities, but also the leadership of disenfranchised storytellers in the rural South, who advocate for their communities by subverting the conventions of plantation pastoral and exposing the ecological and humanitarian costs of extractive capitalism? How might we deepen our understanding of U.S. cultural history by analyzing the linkage of environmental and social disruption in dystopian discourses, or by recovering the stories and perspectives of those excluded from citizenship and still largely overlooked by current models of social justice and environmental advocacy? How does writing, past and present, imagine alternatives to ecological crisis? In this upper-level course, we will reckon with the legacy of nature writing in American history and culture through ecocritical theory and criticism, current work on environmental justice and land rights, and in-depth analysis of primary sources in a range of genres. Some requirements for this course will involve community partnerships and field trips. As such, the course requires the willingness to spend some time off campus and outdoors, and to remain flexible and understanding if plans need to be adjusted. Prerequisites: two English courses at the 200 level or above, demonstrated interest in American studies or environmental studies, or consent of the instructor. Conference.

English 352 - Studies in Medieval Literature

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
One-unit semester course. The late-fourteenth-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer is surely one of the greatest masters of irony in English literature. In this course we will study a generous selection of his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales. The first section of the course will focus on developing students’ facility with Chaucer’s language and with medieval culture through a study of the General Prologue. As we proceed through the tales, we will pay careful attention to Chaucer’s representation of gender and class through his use of irony and satire, his manipulation of genre, his relationship to his source materials and to medieval Christian authorities, and his subtle exploration of a poetics of instability. Throughout the course we will also consider and reconsider the implications of Chaucer’s ambiguous social status within the Ricardian court, as well the validity of thinking of the poet as a “skeptical fideist.” Students will learn to read Middle English fluently by the end of the semester, though no previous experience with early forms of English is required. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference.

Dante’s Divine Comedy 
One-unit semester course. In this course we will study Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century masterpiece The Divine Comedy, seeking to understand this ambitious poem both on its own merits and as an index of the major literary, artistic, and intellectual currents of European culture during the High Middle Ages. The Divine Comedy as a whole narrates Dante’s fictional journey through the afterlife, where he witnesses the eternal torments of the damned souls in hell, the patient endurance of the restless Christian spirits in purgatory, and the ineffable delights of the blessed in paradise. As we follow Dante-pilgrim on his journey, we will look specifically at the poetic and narrative strategies that Dante-poet employs in thinking through the changing relationships between language and truth in the separate canticles of the poem, thinking about how an infernal poetics, for example, differs from a paradisiacal one. In light of ongoing debates in Dante studies, we will also focus on the extent to which Dante’s poem enjoins readers to a process of conversion and on the ways in which Dante establishes his own poetic and moral authority as a counterweight to the corruptions of the fourteenth-century church. Readings will be from the English translation by Robert and Jean Hollander, with the Italian text of Dante’s poem on the facing page. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

Middle English Literature 
One-unit semester course. In this course, students will acquire a fluent knowledge of the Middle English language, with hands-on experience reading texts written in English from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. We will also be introduced to the relevant historical and cultural backgrounds that will open up a deeper understanding of the contours of the medieval imagintion. Texts studied may include Middle English lyric poetry, The Owl and the Nightingale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, The Book of Margery Kempe, and excerpts from Thomas Malory's Morte D’Arthur. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above. This course fulfills the English Department’s pre-1700 requirement. Conference. 

English 356 - Studies in African American Literature

The Black Radical Tradition V: The Black Arts Movement
One-unit semester course. The Black Arts Movement is often referred to as the artistic wing of the Black Power movement. The artists who participated in the BAM were “cultural nationalists,” as opposed to the “revolutionary nationalists,” who were best represented by the Black Panther Party. Members of the BAM believed in the need for racial pride among Black people, self-determination, and the need for cultural institutions. The official start of the Black Arts Movement is identified by the creation of one such cultural institution: the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School (BARTS), founded by Amiri Baraka in Harlem in 1965. Amiri Baraka is widely known as the father of the Black Arts Movement. He set the tone for the type of politically conscious work that the Black artists at the time would create. In 1965, he wrote an essay for The Liberator called “The Revolutionary Theatre.” In it, he details many things that the Revolutionary Theatre must do. He claims it must “force change,” it must “be change,” and it must “EXPOSE!” Baraka thought the revolutionary theatre, the theatre of the Black Arts Movement, must be political, and antithetical to what he believed Western theatre was doing at the time. This course will examine some of the major works produced during this period by writers such as Baraka, Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins, and others. Prerequisites: two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

English 362 - Studies in Early Modern Literature

Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Early Modern Drama
One-unit semester course. This course explores early modern drama’s engagement with intersecting questions of gender, sex, and sexuality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Readings will include an introduction to influential criticism in the history of sexuality and literary criticism employing feminist and queer approaches to the plays. Authors will include Elizabeth Cary, Margaret Cavendish, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Mary Sidney, and Ben Jonson. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

John Donne
One-unit semester course. Obsessed with death, love, piety, loss, science, and the power of the written word, John Donne lived and worked on very private and public levels throughout his career. This course will consider the writer who noted that “no man is an island” and pondered “for whom the bell tolls,” reading the prose works in which these words first appeared together with his poetry and letters. We will also consider adaptations of Donne’s poetry and concerns by other writers in other genres in the seventeenth century; modern engagements with his work; and critical receptions from his death to the present. This course will assume familiarity with prosodic analysis. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above (ENG 211, 212, or 213 strongly recommended), or consent of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

English 363 - Studies in Shakespeare

Protest and Petition in Shakespeare’s Drama
One-unit semester course. Across his career and experiments in different genres, Shakespeare returned again and again to the issue of rule, in particular exploring the language and tactics subordinated people used to make requests and issue demands to those in power. Analyzing the language of “petition” and “protest” in Shakespeare’s plays allows us to regard communication between rulers and the ruled, social superiors and inferiors, as a source not only of compelling plot lines and theatrical spectacles, but also of artful rhetoric and poetic expression. Placing Shakespeare’s plays in conversation with early modern prose works that discuss hierarchies constructed along intersecting lines of gender and social rank, we will assess the language and function of “speaking up” in Shakespeare’s works, as well as the ways in which his plays explore the consequences of such speech—or its absence. Assigned texts will include early modern prose and contemporary criticism. Plays will include Henry V, Coriolanus, King Lear, Measure for Measure, and The Winter’s Tale, among others. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

English 366 - Studies in Poetry

Beauty and the Poetic Text
One-unit semester course. What makes us perceive things as beautiful? Why do certain works of art move us emotionally, while others engage us intellectually? The concept of aesthetics is nothing if not fluid: it can relate to perception through the senses; the philosophy of beauty; the art (or science!) of what is pleasing; the study of good taste; the standards by which art is judged—the list goes on. We will embark on a transhistorical exploration of beauty and the senses in Western literature across multiple genres, beginning with Plato and moving through the ideas of beauty and the sublime in the medieval world, representation and the self in the Renaissance, taste, sentiment, and the senses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, finally ending with the modern period and the turn toward self-conscious artistic creation. Likely texts include Shakespeare’s Sonnets and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, as well as works by Longinus, Aquinas, Donne, Thomas Gray, Edmund Burke, Wordsworth, Emerson, Dickinson, Wilde, and Walter Benjamin. This course will assume familiarity with prosodic analysis. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above (ENG 211, 212, or 213 strongly recommended), or consent of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1900 requirement. Conference.

Phenomenology of Early Modern Lyric
One-unit semester course. Early modern England was home to a flourishing of lyric poetry arguably unmatched before or since. Often used as a blanket term for short-form poetry, the essence of lyric lies in its vivid representation of a voice, whether as a script for the reader or a dramatic depiction of a scene, rendering the reader a spectator. But how is this voice on the page made “real” to readers? How do early modern poems situate readers with respect to the action or moment of a lyric poem? Literary and linguistic theory interested in semiotics, phenomenology, reader response, and material culture will frame our approach to answering these questions, testing the boundaries between spoken and silently read word and song to better understand the ways lyric was and can be read and used. Focusing in equal part on the major poets (Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Milton) and less canonical figures like Anne Locke, Richard Barnfield, and Mary Wroth, we will consider the reader’s relationship to the speaker imagined in a poem—how readers are interpolated by texts rhetorically, grammatically, and materially, as audiences and as speakers. Students will develop a working knowledge of ancient and early modern rhetoric; modern theoretical texts will include Bergson, Saussure, Jakobson, Agamben, Austin, Barthes, de Certeau, de Man, Derrida, Wright, Culler, and Johnson, among others. This course will assume familiarity with prosodic analysis. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above (ENG 211, 212, or 213 strongly recommended), or consent of the instructor. This course applies toward the pre-1700 requirement. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

Remixing the Canon
One-unit semester course. Why would a British-Nigerian poet rewrite Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales? How might a translation of the Old English poem Beowulf speak to the Irish Troubles of the 1970s? What happens if you set Homer’s Odyssey in the postcolonial Caribbean? In this course we will study creative retellings of canonical works by contemporary anglophone poets including Patience Agbabi, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Daljit Nagra. Our guiding concept will be the remix: “a reinterpretation or reworking, often quite radical, of an existing music recording.” Spending roughly equal time with the original works, the modern retellings, and the contemporary poets’ broader oeuvres, we will explore topics such as the durability of poetic form across time, the relation of lyric poetry to narrative and epic, the nature of literary influence and originality, and the value of aesthetic tradition generally. Supplemental readings will include selections from older and newer poetry criticism and background material on relevant cultural contexts (e.g. Black British, Northern Irish, Sikh Punjabi). Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above (ENG 211, 212, or 213 strongly recommended), or consent of the instructor. Conference. 

English 370 - Studies in Cultural Contacts

Modern Irish Literature
One-unit semester course. Starting with the late-nineteenth-century Celtic Revival and Irish Literary Renaissance and continuing up to the present, this course will explore the extraordinary achievement and impact of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish literature. A particular emphasis will be the complex relationship between literature and colonialism in Ireland. We will devote some time to the forces that led to the creation of two states, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, a century ago in 1922; and to the Troubles of the late 1960s to the late 1990s in Northern Ireland; and to the literary response to both events. We will focus on questions about the relationship between politics and language; the roles of myth, folklore, and religion; how Irish nationalism interacts with the discourses of gender, class, and race; and the complicated relationships of Irish exiles like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett with their homeland. Authors will include W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, J.M. Synge, James Joyce, Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

Modernity and Memory in the Indian Ocean
One-unit semester course. The Indian Ocean has been a site of cultural exchange across continents for several millennia, but it has often been marginalized from discussions of modernity based on Euro-American and trans-Atlantic models. What does it mean to be modern in the context of the Indian Ocean, a region crisscrossed by multiple empires, competing religions, and movements of migrants, merchants, slaves, pilgrims, and soldiers? How have individuals and communities in the Indian Ocean been framed by larger transnational processes like colonization, decolonization, slavery, trade, migration, and displacement? Using literature as the primary mode of thinking, this course will consider the ways in which the unique history of circulation of people, objects, and ideas in the Indian Ocean shapes ideas of modernity distinct from those developed in the West. The aim is to explore the refashioning of modernity in literary and theoretical texts that return to archival sources to announce critical rewritings of the past. Paying close attention to narrative techniques and forms, the course will examine how the use of non-Western modes of representation and epistemologies provide modes for critiquing various theoretical positions on modernity. Prerequisite: two English or literature courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. Cross-listed as CRES 330. Not offered 2023–24.

English 381 - Film and New Media Studies

Agency and Identity in New Media Narratives
One-unit semester course. From hypertexts to video games to livestreams, the storytelling affordances of digital media have captivated creators for nearly half a century. While new media narratives have expressed the liberatory potentials of interactivity and connectivity in their works, they have also raised deep questions about human agency, responsibility, and identity within our increasingly technological world. How are users interpellated within constructs of race, gender, sexuality, and ability as they create an avatar or act within digital spaces? How does the ability to interface with creators or transform narrative outcomes alter one’s relationship to any given story? What are the ethical dilemmas inherent in taking control of virtual bodies, especially those that differ from one’s own? This course aims to allow students to explore these questions for themselves by analyzing a variety of new media texts and putting them in conversation with theories of technology and identity. Potential texts to be analyzed include literary hypertexts such as Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, digital games such as the Fulbright Company’s Gone Home, and digital-native visual media such as Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above (preferably one in film and media studies), or consent of the instructor. Conference-screenings. Not offered 2023–24.

The City in Film
One-unit semester course. Shots of the Manhattan skyline or its crowded streets and subways, car chases filmed on new freeways, views into apartments across the way: American cinema of the postwar period showed a particular fascination with the excitement, mobility, and alienation of urban life. These settings in turn shaped the narrative possibilities of film storytelling in the era. In this course we will focus on films from the 1940s and ’50s that set their action in cities and address the experience of urban life, especially in the contrasting examples of Los Angeles and New York. Film screenings will be accompanied by required readings on the language of film analysis, and on contemporary literature, art, and criticism focused on the modern and postmodern city. Directors will be drawn from among the following: Robert Aldrich, Samuel Fuller, Alfred Hitchcock, Phil Karlson, Fritz Lang, Joseph Lewis, Joseph Losey, Ida Lupino, Anthony Mann, Otto Preminger, Nicholas Ray, Edgar Ulmer, Fred Zinnemann. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference-screenings.

English 383 - Adaptation across Media

One-unit semester course. We are currently (and perhaps have always been) in a culture inundated with adaptations; from films to web series to board games, the modern media ecosystem consistently proves that textuality has never been more fluid. In this course, we will investigate adaptation as a product, process, and reception practice, drawing on theories and case studies that span literature, film, new media artifacts, and digital and analog games. Through discussion and analysis of literary adaptations of works by authors such as Shakespeare, Shelley, Austen, and more, we will seek to answer questions regarding fidelity to a “source” text, medium specificity, fan appropriation, and the limits of adaptation (among others). Note that this is a team-based learning course: in order to cover a wide range of adaptations, students will be divided into teams, each of which will be responsible for analyzing a particular film or new media work using theoretical course readings and integrating it into class discussion. Prerequisite: one 200-level English course. Conference.

English 384 - Poetry and History

American Modernism
One-unit semester course. Virginia Woolf wrote that on “or about December, 1910, human character changed,” voicing a widely shared excitement over an anticipated revolution in the arts. The American poets who stayed in the United States shared this excitement, but also faced unique cultural circumstances. We will do close readings of poems written over the first three decades or so of the twentieth century. The poets on whom the class will focus may include William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Melvin Tolson, Wallace Stevens, and Gertrude Stein; in particular, we will look at how these writers responded to and helped shape attitudes toward and practices in the visual arts transnationally, looking at and reading pieces by artists who may include Alfred Stieglitz, Charles DeMuth, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and Wifredo Lam. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level, or ENG 211, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

Contemporary American Poetry
One-unit semester course. This course is devoted to the works of American poets writing in the decades after 1945, beginning with poets ranging from Richard Wilbur to Charles Olson and ending with those writing now. The emphasis will be on the heterogeneous nature of poetic practices and poetic traditions and practices in the United States in the last half of the twentieth century, and most class discussions will focus on individual poems and essays about poetics, especially those less commonly read these days. We will also consider questions about the relationships between poetry, poetics, and American culture, characterizing major historical changes in the United States in the period. Prerequisite: ENG 211, 212, or 213 and one upper-division English course, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

Poetics of Resistance and Resilience
One-unit semester course. The purpose of this class is to examine the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and poetics in contemporary resistance poetry (1945–present). How do poets draw on traditions and update those traditions to meet new needs? Special attention will be paid to the influence of non-Western aesthetics and the role of sex and gender in the creation of poetic legacies. The course emphasizes close reading of the texts. Prerequisite: two 200-level English classes, or one CRES foundational course, or two regular CRES courses. Conference. Not offered 2023–24.

English 386 - Word and Image

One-unit semester course. “Written words have been combined with visual images in forms which range from the explanatory to the enigmatic, from the constructive to the contradictory, from the iconic to the irreverent,” writes Leslie Ross. This course will focus on text-image relations in paper and print media, including illuminated texts, illustrated texts, collage, texts with photographs, paintings with captions, graphic novels, and fine art books. Our study will be guided by the following questions: How do text-image compositions deploy their media to enrich meaning-making potential while also engaging their dissonance or dissociation? How do text and image differently engage the senses, the intellect, and the emotions? How do words and images each convey symbolic or metaphoric content or use syntax and argument? How do text and image illuminate, distort, or amplify aspects of individual consciousness or historical narrative? Primary texts may include Haida tradition in Raven Steals the Light, Plains Indian ledger narratives, Christine de Pizan’s Epistre D’Othéa, Gustave Doré’s and William Blake’s illustrations of Milton’s Paradise Lost, William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, Max Ernst’s The Hundred Headless Woman, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee. Theorists may include Bill Holm, Karl Kroeber, Michael Camille, W.J.T. Mitchell, Lisa Lowe, Marianne Hirsch, Scott McCloud, Hillary Chute, John Bateman, Neil Cohn. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference.

English 400 - Introduction to Literary Theory

See Literature 400 for description.

Literature 400 Description

English 470 - Thesis

Two-unit yearlong course; one unit per semester.

English 481 - Independent Reading

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Prerequisite: approval of the instructor and the division.

English 566 - Studies in Poetry: Beauty and the Poetic Text

One-half-unit semester course. What makes us perceive things as beautiful? Why do certain works of art move us emotionally, while others engage us intellectually? The concept of aesthetics is nothing if not fluid: it can relate to perception through the senses; the philosophy of beauty; the art or science of what is pleasing; the study of good taste; the standards by which art is judged—the list goes on. We will embark on a transhistorical exploration of beauty and the senses pairing English and American poetry with aesthetic philosophy, beginning with Plato and moving through the ideas of beauty and the sublime in the medieval world, representation and the self in the Renaissance, taste and sentiment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, finally ending with modernism and the turn toward self-conscious artistic creation and its heightened awareness of history and society. The course will give students an introduction to a major line in philosophical inquiry from antiquity to the late twentieth century together with reading culturally influential and literarily significant English-language poetry beginning with Thomas Wyatt and ending with T. S. Eliot, and including Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Shelley, Gray, Wordsworth, and Dickinson. Philosophy will include Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Eco, Sidney, Pope, Burke, Kant, Emerson, Wilde, Freud, Shklovsky, Benjamin, Adorno, Croce, Didi-Huberman. Conference. Offered spring 2024.

Environmental Studies 200 - Introduction to Environmental Studies Research Methods

One-unit semester course. This course is designed to provide an introduction to environmental studies research methods and design, including widely used techniques in natural and social sciences. Specific topics include spatial analysis, statistical modeling, document coding, case study, and archival research; students will also learn about and practice field study design and oral and visual data presentation. This course is designed for first- and second-year students. Prerequisites: completion of one semester of either BIOL 101 or 102 or CHEM 101 and one semester of HUM 110. Conference.

Environmental Studies 220 - Geology

One-unit semester course. An introduction to the composition of the earth and the physical forces acting upon it. The course will focus on minerals and rocks and the processes that affect their micro- and macroscopic structure. Topics will include the formation of the earth, plate tectonics, mountain building, volcanism, erosion, and earth history as revealed through the geological record. Prerequisite: CHEM 101. Lecture-conference. Cross-listed as CHEM 220.

Not offered 2023–24.

Environmental Studies 300 - Junior Seminar

Environmental Studies 470 - Thesis

Two-unit yearlong course; one unit per semester.

French 111 - Beginning French I

One-unit semester course. In this language course, students will develop essential listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills in French. Students will also be introduced to the French and francophone world by working on cultural materials from the French-speaking world, and learn to use French as it is spoken and written today. Conference.

French 112 - Beginning French II

One-unit semester course. In this course, students will develop essential listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills in French. They will learn enough language to handle a meaningful conversation, read a short novel, and speak or write about their experiences, thoughts and opinions. This class also starts to prepare students for ensuing literature and film classes in our curriculum. Students will write several short compositions. Students will also be introduced to the French and francophone world by working on cultural materials from the French-speaking world, and learn to use French as it is spoken and written today. Prerequisite: FREN 111 or equivalent. Conference.

French 211 - Intermediate French I

One-unit semester course. The primary goal for this course is to increase students’ fluency in both spoken and written French, while introducing them to the study of literary texts through in-class discussions as well as writing exercises. The course offers an intensive review of basic French grammar and numerous opportunities for students to develop their speaking skills in class and in informal conversation groups organized by the French language scholars. Students who complete FREN 211 and 212 will acquire the necessary fluency to follow advanced literature or film classes in French, or to study abroad in a French speaking university. Prerequisite: FREN 112 or equivalent. Conference.

French 212 - Intermediate French II

One-unit semester course. The primary goal for this course is to increase students’ fluency in both spoken and written French, while introducing them to the study of literary texts through in-class discussions as well as writing exercises. The course continues the intensive review of basic French grammar begun in FREN 211 and offers numerous opportunities for students to develop their speaking skills in class and in informal conversation groups organized by the French language scholars. FREN 212 progresses from FREN 211 by placing more emphasis on the spoken and written analysis of literary texts than FREN 211. Students who complete FREN 211 and 212 will acquire the necessary fluency to follow advanced literature or film classes in French, or to study abroad in a French-speaking university. Prerequisite: FREN 211 or equivalent. Conference.

French 320 - Advanced French Language

One-unit semester course. This course is designed to help students develop strong written skills and near-native fluency in spoken French through focused grammar reviews, discussions, and a variety of reading and writing assignments centering on French and francophone texts, films, and other relevant cultural materials. Class conducted entirely in French. Prerequisite: FREN 212 or demonstration of equivalent ability by placement exam. Conference. 

French 321 - Advanced French Conversation

One-unit semester course. This course is designed to help advanced students develop near-native fluency in spoken French through pronunciation drills, discussions, and diverse types of oral presentations on a broad corpus of cultural materials and media, such as film, fiction and nonfiction literature, theoretical texts, news articles and videos, and podcasts. Students will be evaluated on spontaneous output (such as discussions and oral exams) and rehearsed output (such as recordings and recitations). Class conducted entirely in French. Prerequisite: FREN 212 or demonstration of equivalent ability by placement exam. Conference.

French 332 - Early Modern French Literature and Culture

One-unit semester course. This course will take “time and narration” as its principal area of inquiry. We will examine French works of literature from the early modern and Enlightenment periods (as well as a few works from the twentieth century that are inspired by these thinkers) that engage with one of the major philosophic questions of the period: the nature of temporality and its relation to representation. We will look especially at the work of Montaigne, Pascal, Racine, Mme de Lafayette, and Rousseau in an effort to discern how their experiments with representing time and the nature of becoming (rather than just being) inspire later twentieth-century thinkers such as Sartre, Deleuze, and Beckett. Discussion in French. Prerequisite: FREN 212 or demonstration of equivalent ability by placement exam. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

French 342 - Novel from Flaubert to the New Novel: The Collapse of Realism and the Undoing of the Subject

One-unit semester course. The theory and decline of realism in the French novel will be discussed in Flaubert, Proust, Sartre, Robbe-Grillet, and Sarraute. Focusing primarily on the evolution in narrative form from 1850 to 1960, this course will examine the shift in the modern novel from representing social structures or systems objectively to evoking subjectivity and provoking more complex reader-text transactions. Discussion in French. Prerequisite: FREN 212 or demonstration of equivalent ability by placement exam. Conference.

French 343 - Late Twentieth-Century French Fiction

One-unit semester course. This course will examine narrative strategies since the late 1950s and their underlying aesthetic theories. The course will focus on several issues or problems, including the autonomy of the literary text, narrative as a space of encounter between objective reality and the creative imagination, and the construction of the subject through autofiction. How do the formal aspects of prose fiction place into question our experience of the self and the world? To what extent are the self and the world disclosed through narrative, and what is the nature of this process? Readings will include Robbe-Grillet, Perec, Duras, Hébert, Barthes, Modiano, Ernaux, and Condé. Conducted in French. Prerequisite: FREN 212 or demonstration of equivalent ability by placement exam. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

French 363 - Introduction to Francophone Literature

One-unit semester course. This course is intended to introduce students to some of the issues (social, historical, and literary) at the core of francophone studies. To this end the syllabus will include literary works and critical essays by authors writing in French from a variety of cultural situations and geographic locations (the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean). It will treat, on the one hand, the thematic presence of the questions of identity, language, resistance to colonial power, religion, race, etc.; and on the other hand, the ways in which these issues become the object of specifically literary or formal analysis. It will seek out the interpenetration of theme and form in francophone works by exploring the ways in which narrative strategies, for example, transpose the problems and struggles of individuals and societies coming to grips with historical and cultural transformations. The authors studied will include Glissant, Schwartz-Bart, Kane, Kourouma, Ben Jelloun, Condé, and Chamoiseau. Prerequisite: FREN 212 or demonstration of equivalent ability by placement exam. Conference.

French 371 - Nineteenth-Century French Poetry and Poetics

One-unit semester course. This course explores the blossoming of new poetic forms and changing conceptions of poetry and the role of the poet in the years spanning the romantic, Parnassian, and symbolist movements. Through close readings, we will develop a broad understanding of French versification and prosody, but we will also study and discuss various practices and trends that transformed the composition, the diffusion, and even the reading of poetry in this period: the work of translation; the increased circulation of non-Western texts; the dialogue between poetry and other arts such as music and painting; women’s effort to undermine the gendering of the canon; the mythologization of the poet as prophet, seer, flaneur, or poète maudit; revolutionary politics; the expansion of the press; and so forth. Works studied include poems by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Gérard de Nerval, Louis Bertrand, Charles Baudelaire, Louisa Siefert, Judith Gautier, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé. Conducted in French. Prerequisite: FREN 212 or demonstration of equivalent ability by placement exam. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

French 381 - Twentieth-Century French Poetry and Poetics

One-unit semester course. This course will focus on poets since Mallarmé and the theoretical, aesthetic, and ethical projects of poetry in the context of modernity. We will explore approaches to reading figurative language and its challenges to representation and referentiality; relationships of poetic language to ordinary speech; the structure of lyric address; selfhood and the modern lyric subject; and the emergence of a poetics of the nonhuman in late modernity. First and foremost, this course aims to develop the skills of close rhetorical reading as the foundation for all analysis and theoretical commentary. Authors studied include Apollinaire, Reverdy, Desnos, Eluard, Ponge, Bonnefoy, Guillevic, Réda, Leiris, and Roubaud. Conducted in French. Prerequisite: FREN 212 or demonstration of equivalent ability by placement exam. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

French 382 - Modern French and Francophone Theater

One-unit semester course. In this course, we explore some of the most thought-provoking expressions of French and Francophone avant-garde theatre in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Starting with Ubu Roi, a satirical farce about a gluttonous and cruel autocrat, the staging of which heralded a new era of experimentation in the world of theatre, we will make our way through a variety of plays that draw on all the possibilities of the theatre to question identity, community, politics, spectatorship, and action, to arrive finally at a consideration of contemporary efforts to decolonize theatre. To achieve a more multidimensional understanding of how theatrical texts mobilize not only language but also bodies in spaces, we will study scripts and videos of stage productions in conjunctions with theories of performance, theatrical space, and dramaturgy. Readings include plays by Alfred Jarry, Tristan Tzara, Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Aimé Césaire, Jean Genet, Hélène Cixous, Marguerite Duras, Bernard-Marie Koltès, Léonora Miano, and Marine Bachelot Nguyen as well as theoretical works by Antonin Artaud, Bertholt Brecht, Frantz Fanon, Hans-Thies Lehmann, and Françoise Vergès, among others. Conducted in French. Prerequisite: FREN 212 or demonstration of equivalent ability by placement exam. Conference.

French 384 - Poetics of the Nonhuman

One-unit semester course. This course focuses on poetic texts in French that figure the nonhuman—for instance, manmade or natural objects or substances, or nonhuman inhabitants of the natural world. By looking in depth and in detail at the poetry by authors preoccupied with this aesthetic goal, we will explore questions that arise at the intersection of literary texts and the world of material things, and potential conflicts or contradictions between the human practice of language and the nature of nonhuman animals and objects that it attempts to capture in poetic figures. What assumptions are expressed by poetic texts about the relationship between the human and the nonhuman, or the place of human beings in the world they inhabit? Can we imagine poetic texts regulating or even reconfiguring the relationship of human beings to nonhuman forms of life or material objects? Among the issues covered will be the logic of fable in La Fontaine, the poetics of the object practiced by Francis Ponge, the modern materialism of Yves Bonnefoy, the poetry of place in Guillevic, the vegetal lyric subject of Aimé Césaire, the terrestrial tropes of Marie-Claire Bancquart, the ethology of Vinciane Despret, and Anne Portugal’s interest in technology. Conducted in French. Prerequisite: FREN 212 or demonstration of equivalent ability by placement examination. Conference.

Not offered 2023–24.

French 390 - Postwar French Cinema (1945–1975)

One-unit semester course. This course examines the testimonial and critical function taken on by French cinema in the second half of the twentieth century. Focusing on films that problematize significant trends or crises in this historical period (the Occupation, the Holocaust, decolonization, the rise of consumer society, student protests in May ’68, etc.), we will discuss what formal strategies allow the filmic medium to propose critical alternatives to traditional historical narratives. Additionally, we will read key essays by film critics and theorists that examine the commitment of postwar French cinema to politics and ethics. Films viewed include works by filmmakers Melville, Resnais, Bresson, Tati, Varda, Truffaut, Godard, Marker, Eustache, and Akerman, as well as various cinétracts. Course includes weekly film screenings. Discussion in French. Prerequisite: FREN 212 or demonstration of equivalent ability by placement exam. Conference-screenings. 

French 391 - French Literature and Cultural Studies

One-unit semester course. We will examine how French cultural and social changes are discussed in short narrative forms, and see how fairy tales, fables, short stories and novellas reflect upon important clashes of class, identity, ideology and aesthetics. The course will cover texts from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. We will discuss authors including Marie de France, Perrault, La Fontaine, Mme D’Aulnoy, Voltaire, Maupassant, Balzac, Flaubert, Bloy, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Tournier, Gripari. Conducted in French. Prerequisite: FREN 212 or demonstration of equivalent ability by placement examination. Conference.

French 392 - French Connections: The Intertwined Histories of French and American Cinema

One-unit semester course. This course explores the deep connections between French and American cinema, which stem from over a century of reciprocal influences disseminated through powerful images and intersecting discourses on film as an autonomous language and art form. Structured around exchanges among cinephilic filmmakers, actors, camera operators, composers, and defiant critics from both sides of the Atlantic, it offers an introduction to the parallel histories of two major filmic traditions, while also questioning the very notion of national cinema. As we move in time from the contested origins of moving images and the development of national cinemas to the emergence of successive “new waves” to the transnational film industry of today, we will examine how the dialogue between French and American artists contributed to shaping significant periods in film history (silent film, surrealism, poetic realism, the French New Wave, New American Cinema), distinctive genres (the film noir, thriller, teen pic, musical, comedy of manners, road movie), and common themes (alienation, precarity, urban violence, police brutality, exile) in both commercial and independent films. Filmmakers discussed include Alice Guy-Blaché, Germaine Dulac, Maya Deren, Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, Nicholas Ray, Jean-Luc Godard, John Cassavetes, Robert Bresson, Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Charles Burnett, Mambéty, Eric Rohmer, Spike Lee, Mathieu Kassovitz, Agnès Varda, Kelly Reichardt, and Mati Diop. Conducted in English. No previous experience with film analysis is required. Students taking the course for French literature credit will meet in extra sessions. Prerequisite for students taking the course for French credit: FREN 212 or demonstration of equivalent ability by placement exam. Conference-screenings. Cross-listed as LITF 392.

Not offered 2023–24.

French 470 - Thesis

Two-unit yearlong course; one unit per semester.

French 481 - Independent Reading

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Prerequisite: FREN 212 or demonstration of equivalent ability by examination; approval of instructor and division.

German 111 - Beginning German I

One-unit semester course. This course is an introduction to reading, writing, and speaking German. Grammar instruction is supplemented with cultural materials from German-speaking countries. Classroom activities include poetry readings, film clips, and internet research. Conference.

German 112 - Beginning German II

One-unit semester course. This course is an introduction to reading, writing, and speaking German. Grammar instruction is supplemented with cultural materials from German-speaking countries. Classroom activities include poetry readings, film clips, and internet research. Prerequisite: GER 111 or equivalent. Conference. 

German 211 - Intermediate German I

One-unit semester course. This course is designed to enhance students’ skills in reading, writing, and speaking German. Along with a systematic grammar review, we explore literary, historical, and cultural topics, drawing on a variety of texts, including short stories, films, paintings, and newspaper articles. One hour per week is spent in small conversation workshops, and students regularly complete listening comprehension exercises online. Prerequisite: GER 112 or equivalent. Conference.

German 212 - Intermediate German II

One-unit semester course. This course further enhances students’ skills in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. In this semester, we complete the systematic grammar review, while continuing to explore literary, historical, and cultural topics. In addition to films, poems, and short stories, students will read an extended literary work—Kafka’s Die Verwandlung / The Metamorphosis. Prerequisite: GER 211 or equivalent. Conference.

German 311 - Advanced German I: Twentieth-Century Art and Politics (Berlin)

One-unit semester course. This class is designed to help students develop advanced competence in written and spoken German. There will be regular essay assignments, oral presentations, and group projects. We will discuss twentieth-century German culture and history, primarily through literary and filmic representations of Berlin. We will explore the city as the center of emergent mass culture in the early twentieth century, the capital of National Socialism, the divided capital of the Cold War era, the symbol of the united Germany, and the multicultural core of contemporary German society. Prerequisite: GER 212 or consent of the instructor. Conference.

German 312 - Advanced German II

One-unit semester course. This course is designed to further students’ advanced competence in written and spoken German. Students will participate in a literature course but will write short papers in German and complete weekly grammar assignments. Prerequisite: German 311 or consent of the instructor. Conference. Cross-listed with GER 335 for 2023–24; see GER 335 for description. Students will not be allowed to subsequently take GER 335 for credit.

German 335 - Contemporary German Literature

One-unit semester course. This seminar focuses on literature written between 1990 and the present. We will explore topics such as the unification of Germany, multiculturalism, globalization, postfeminism, and the representation of the German past. Special attention will be paid to experimental forms of writing such as the prose poem, pop literature, the deconstruction of narrative patterns, and “the new storytelling.” Authors include Ingo Schulze, Christian Kracht, Judith Hermann, Zafer Şenocak, Jenny Erpenbeck, W.G. Sebald, Katja Petrowskaja, Herta Müller, and Yoko Tawada. Conducted in German. Prerequisite: GER 311 or consent of instructor. Conference. Cross-listed with GER 312 for 2023–24.

German 346 - Introduction to Media Studies

One-unit semester course. Since Marshall McLuhan’s pronouncement that “the medium is the message,” scholars have studied the ways in which media technologies—from the printing press and the postal service to electric lighting and Wi-Fi—support and transform our lives. This course offers and introduction to major theorists and debates in media studies through close analyses of films, literature, and theoretical texts. In keeping with McLuhan’s dictum, our focus will be not so much on understanding individual media, but on understanding from the perspective of media. Questions that will concern us include: What is (and isn’t) a medium? What do media do? To what extent do we create media, and to what extent do media create us? Readings from Plato, McLuhan, Kittler, Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, and Donna Haraway; art by Antonioni, Lang, Kafka, Hitchcock, Hoffman, H.D., Gertrude Stein, and Spike Jonze. Conducted in English. Students taking the course for German literature credit will meet in extra sessions. Prerequisite for students taking the course for German credit: GER 212 or consent of the instructor. Conference. Cross-listed as LITG 346. 

Not offered 2023–24.

German 349 - Cinema and Politics

One-unit semester course. This course offers an introduction to German cinema, focusing on the question: “What makes a film political?” From Expressionist film to New Wave cinema to the contemporary Berlin school, the German cinematic tradition includes numerous films with a political agenda. The “political” may take on the form of critique: of authorities and hierarchies, of racism and anti-Semitism, of the repression of the Nazi past, of capitalism and consumer society. Or it may aid the creation of inclusive communities by expanding our sense of who can talk and be heard, what can be seen and felt. We will watch groundbreaking films by German and other European directors, including G.W. Pabst, Fritz Lang, Sergei Eisenstein, Leni Riefenstahl, Roberto Rossellini, Alain Resnais, Helke Sander, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ulrike Ottinger, Fatih Akin, and Christian Petzold. Theoretical readings by Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, Arendt, Mulvey, Rancière, and others. Conducted in English. Students taking the course for German literature credit will meet in extra sessions. Prerequisite for students taking the course for German credit: GER 212 or equivalent or consent of instructor. Conference-screenings. Cross-listed as LITG 349.

German 358 - Representing Genocide

One-unit semester course. This course asks how film and literature can help us recognize, explain, and respond to genocide, a crucial feature of twentieth-century history. In the first half of the semester, we will focus on representations of the Holocaust, asking questions such as: How do authors and filmmakers grapple with events that shatter traditional forms of perception and comprehension? How do they portray human agency in an age of bureaucratically administered mass destruction? In the second half of the semester, we will compare the Holocaust to other cases of genocide and mass violence, including American slavery and the genocides in Turkey, Cambodia, and Rwanda. Throughout, we will explore a wide range of genres and media, including testimonies, memoirs, fiction, graphic novels, and feature films. We will also discuss the representation of victims and perpetrators, different forms of witnessing, and the aesthetics of shock and horror. Conducted in English. Students taking the course for German literature credit will meet in extra sessions. Prerequisite for students taking the course for German credit: GER 212 or consent of the instructor. Conference. Cross-listed as LITG 358.

Not offered 2023–24.

German 375 - Thinking Machines: Androids and Automatons in Science and Literature

One-unit semester course. At the onset of modernity, the human being acquired a new kind of shadow: the android or machine-man, an automaton capable of replicating behaviors that had previously been the exclusive domain of humans. Since then, the question of what a human being is has been closely bound up with the question of what an automaton isn’t. This course tracks the interwoven fates of androids and humans from Descartes through to the present day, examining the ways in which machines have served as a foil for artists, scientists, and philosophers to understand what (if anything) is particularly human about human beings. Questions that will occupy us include: What abilities have historically been thought to distinguish humans from mere machines? And what happens when, as a result of scientific and technological progress, machines become capable of replicating human speech, motion, affection, thought, or labor? Texts and films from Diderot, Hoffmann, Freud, Kafka, Foucault, Marx, Lang, Turing, and Scott, among others. Conducted in English. Students taking the course for German literature credit will meet in extra sessions. Prerequisite for students taking the course for German credit: GER 212 or equivalent or consent of instructor. Conference. Cross-listed as LITG 375.

German 391 - German Theory I

One-unit semester course. Variable topics. See specific listing for prerequisites. Conference. May be repeated for credit.

Plants and Politics
One-unit semester course. In the modern era, botany and colonialism have been inseparable. With the rise of European imperialism, plants became big business, and their study and cultivation were as much a part of trade and conquest as scientific inquiry. To create an empire meant remaking ecosystems abroad and at home. Botany has also been a preoccupation of modern artists, poets, and philosophers, who have asked why it is so difficult to represent plants and what it means that flowers are one of the most venerable models of language. In this course, we will explore the intimate relationships between aesthetic and scientific conceptualizations of the plant kingdom from the eighteenth century to the present, looking at works of poetry and prose, photography, and film. We will also consider attempts to envision a postcolonial botany. Authors will include Rousseau, Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Dickinson, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Freud, Rilke, Celan, Mayröcker, Kincaid, and Moten. Conducted in English. Students taking the course for German literature credit will meet in extra sessions. Prerequisite for students taking the course for German credit: GER 212 or consent of the instructor. Conference. Cross-listed as LITG 391. Not offered 2023–24.

Introduction to Critical Theory
One-unit semester course. This class explores post-Kantian conceptions of critique, focusing on the role they have played in the modern study of fascism, mass culture, and aesthetic ideology. We will be particularly interested in claims for the political significance of literary discourses. We will also discuss the intersections of psychoanalysis and Marxism. Authors include Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Kafka, Benjamin, Arendt, Foucault, Butler, Berlant, Hartman, and Moten. Conducted in English. Students taking the course for German literature credit will meet in extra sessions. Prerequisite for students taking the course for German credit: GER 212 or consent of the instructor. Conference. Cross-listed as LITG 391.

German 470 - Thesis

Two-unit yearlong course; one unit per semester.

German 481 - Independent Study

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Prerequisite: approval of instructor and division.

Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies 470 - Thesis

Two-unit yearlong course; one unit per semester.

Greek 111 - First-Year Greek: Part I

One-unit semester course. This course offers a study of the elements of ancient Greek grammar and syntax, introduces students to the cultures that used ancient Greek, and conducts first readings in Greek prose and poetry. Conference.

Greek 112 - First-Year Greek: Part II

One-unit semester course. This course offers a study of the elements of ancient Greek grammar and syntax, introduces students to the cultures that used ancient Greek, and conducts first readings in Greek prose and poetry. Prerequisite: GRK 111 or equivalent. Conference.

Greek 201 - Intermediate Greek

One-unit semester course. This course offers an intensive review of the grammar and syntax studied in first-year Greek, while refining and extending students’ facility with the Greek language. Students will develop close reading and interpretive skills as well as familiarity with a variety of literary styles and authors. Prerequisite: GRK 112 or equivalent. Conference.

Greek 301 - Advanced Greek I

One-unit semester course. This seminar focuses on expanding students’ interpretive skills and critical vocabulary. Students analyze primary texts in the original and in translation, and employ and critique relevant scholarship and theory that aids the reading and understanding of these texts. Students typically study one landmark work of Greek literature, such as the Iliad or Odyssey or an Attic tragedy. Students also gain a broader understanding of Greek literary production. Prerequisite: GRK 201 or equivalent. Conference. May be repeated for credit.

Greek 302 - Advanced Greek II

One-unit semester course. This seminar utilizes and expands the linguistic and interpretive skills that students have developed in first-year and intermediate Greek. Students analyze primary texts in the original and in translation, and employ and critique relevant scholarship and theory that aids the reading and understanding of these texts. A wide range of seminars is offered over a four-year period. While some seminars are organized around specific works, others focus on authors, genres, and periods or places. Recent seminars have explored fifth-century Athenian tragedy, the development of historiography and ethnography, the politics and representation of athletics, the transformation of Greek literature in the Hellenistic world, and the Hellenistic urban environment. Prerequisite: GRK 301 or consent of the instructor. Conference. May be repeated for credit.

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