The Lives and Music of Bach and Handel

A study of the lives and biographies of Bach and Handel, this course will examine selected compositions in detail in order to understand their artistic merit. Class meetings will focus on discussing the music, while the reading assignments will emphasize relevant biographical and cultural aspects. Prerequisites: The ability to read music notation; for honors students and music majors.

Introduction to Literary Studies

This course helps you learn to appreciate literature. It raises fundamental questions about the nature of literature: What is it? Why read and understand the conventions of fiction, poetry, drama, and the it? How is life transformed into imaginative works and how do they transform our lives? Does literature offer a unique form of knowledge? What distinguishes one literary text from another and from other kinds of texts? Is some literature better than other literature? Although works and approaches vary with the instructor, the emphasis in this course remains the same: It focuses on close reading and analysis to develop your critical skills and enrich your emotional and intellectual experience of literary texts.

Books That Changed Lives

This class will examine the act of reading—its goals and relation to other kinds of experience. We will ask what it means for a book to “change a life”: Does it need to alter the reader’s action or might it simply inspire a new understanding of an important issue? Eight faculty members will visit the class to discuss books that changed their lives. In addition to these texts, we will read a social history of reading, a novel that meditates on the relation between the reader and the writer, an author’s reflections on her reading practices, and several essays on related subjects. You’ll write weekly responses to the reading and expand two of these responses into 5- to 7- page papers. You’ll also deliver an oral report and take a midterm and final exam.

Epic and Anti-Epic

In this humanities/comparative literature course, you’ll study both oral and literary epic. Authors to be read, all in English translations, include the Classical Greeks Homer and Apollonius, and the Romans Catullus, Vergil, and Ovid. Bracketing these two in time, you’ll read the earlier Babylonian Gilgamesh and the later Old English Beowulf and perhaps the West African Sunjara. This study of archetypal literary type discusses issues of the epic genre, folk-consciousness, character formation (and education about “past” heroes and present gods) in pre-literate and literate societies, and the historical content of traditional oral poetries on two, or perhaps three, continents. No prerequisites.

Intermediate Microeconomics

This course provides an advanced economic analysis of how consumers and producers make decisions when faced with incentives and constraints and how their choices affect the collective outcome of a given market. During the first half of the course, you’ll focus on modeling household decisions on resource allocation under certainty, uncertainty, and across time. You will also learn how to model situations with asymmetric information and how to analyze the effects of imperfect monitoring. During the second half of the course, you’ll model the typical firm’s decision making and then analyze the corresponding market outcomes under different market structures, beginning with the benchmark case of perfect competition and gradually incorporating market power and strategic interactions. Pre-requisites: Economics 110, Mathematics 110 or 230, or consent.

Cultural Geography

You’ll explore the diversity of our world via a series of lectures and discussions based on classic and contemporary readings in geography and culture. The interpretation of cultural landscapes, the meanings of cultural traits (such as foods and music), and the directions of American culture in particular are explored in detail. You’ll be required to complete several short writing projects and a landscape reading exercise.

Introduction to Graeco-Roman History

This class introduces you to the “Classical” world of ancient Greece and Rome, the foundations of Western civilization. The course emphasizes the major historical developments from the beginnings of Greek civilization in the Aegean to the fall of the Roman Empire, with particular attention to social and cultural changes.

Advanced Quantitative Methods

This course is concerned with the analysis and interpretation of behavioral data gathered from experimental and correlational designs. There will be particular emphasis on the analysis of variance and multiple regression and correlation methods. Statistical software is used to analyze illustrative data. Prerequisite: Pysc 210 or Math 105 or 260 or permission of instructor.

Religions of the West

This course is a survey of the impact of religion on Western intellectual history. You’ll study religious developments in Greece and Rome, the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and modern Europe and America. In addition to sequential readings from the textbook, selections from a number of significant literary works will be assigned—works by authors such as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Philo, Paul, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Erasmus, Luther, Descartes, Voltaire, Marx, Freud, and Heidegger.

Ethnographic & Documentary Film & Filmmaking

This course equips you with the basic knowledge and skills to produce your own ethnographic/documentary film. You’ll explore film theory from the field of visual anthropology and from filmmakers’ written reflections on the process involved in completing particular film projects. You will view a series of early, classical, and contemporary documentaries to critique filmmakers’ representation of cultural difference and to consider cinema verte vs. explicit message, the strengths and weaknesses of the notion of objectivity, the ethics of filmmaking, and concerns about audience reaction. You will learn camera use and film editing techniques to complete a documentary.

Operations Research

This course introduces optimal decision-making processes for economic and management problems, with an emphasis on modeling and problem solving. During the course, you should acquire the ability to formulate real-world problems as abstract models (decision variables, constraints, optimization criteria), to identify solution methods and strategies, and to interpret their results. The course assumes no previous computer skills and uses Excel and add-ons as a numeric solver. The syllabus contains numerous applications from economics and management, including Workforce and Production Planning, Inventory Management, Design (of a national trucking network and routing of shipments), Nonlinear Pricing, and Portfolio Selection. In addition, you’ll be required to model and solve a large-scale complex problem from a list of suggested project topics. The projects will provide you with an understanding of the independent research process and also improve your presentation skills.

Exercise Science: Exercise for Health, Fitness, and Performance

The purpose of this course is to introduce you to the relationships between exercise and health, fitness, and performance. Topics include our evolutionary heritage for exercise, documentation of the relationship between exercise and health and fitness, physical responses to exercise, exercise programs for specific performance goals, and individual differences in response to exercise.

Education and the Law

This course explores several key areas in education law: compulsory education, rights of parents, school finance, desegregation, rights of privacy and free expression of students and teachers, drug testing, school choice, vouchers, gender equity, and the federal role in compulsory education.

Cultural Geography

You’ll explore the diversity of our world via a series of lectures and discussions based on classic and contemporary readings in geography and culture. The interpretation of cultural landscapes, the meanings of cultural traits (such as foods and music), and the directions of American culture in particular are explored in detail. You’ll be required to complete several short writing projects and a landscape reading exercise.

Ethics

This special section of Ethics will focus on the problem of the human conscience. For instance: What is a conscience and what is its source? Can we meaningfully distinguish acting on one’s conscience from acting on prejudice? And when violence is structured into society, how can one keep from losing one’s moral compass? (Apparently Adolph Eichmann lost his within four weeks of his first encounter with the death camps.) Your inquiry will be guided by the readings as well as a visit by a man who risked imprisonment to act on his conscience. In addition to the above problems, you’ll also pursue questions such as: What does it mean to treat someone with respect? Can moral virtues be taught? And what role can our emotion play in our moral reasoning? Possible authors include Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, Nietzsche, and Arendt.

American Thought

This course deals with leading thinkers and intellectual currents from the Puritan period to the present in relation to major philosophical concepts and social criticism. This course is for the general student, and the enrollment cap is 15.

Spanish Literature in Translation: Power, Politics, and Possibilities

Relations of power and resistance, of dominance and struggle, pervade all types of human interaction. The course will explore the diverse representations of power—the plight of the author or artist in a heavily censored society, power and gender, historical and literary constructions of power relationships, and more—in selected novels, plays, and short stories of the Franco and post-Franco eras in Spain. Works you’ll study include, but are not limited to The Back Room by Carmen Martín Gaite; Love Letters to Stalin by Juan Mayorga, School of the Sun by Ana María Mutate; The Time of the Doves by Mercé Rodoreda; The Basement Window by Antonio Buero Vallejo; A Love Too Beautiful by Manuel Martínez Mediero; The Inkwell by Carlos Muñiz; and El Sur. Bene by Adelaida García Morales, as well as complementary Spanish films with English subtitles. No knowledge of Spanish is required. The course may not be counted toward the major or minor.

Gender and Race in Science

Historically, students have been taught that science is free of the subjective, that proper use of the scientific method ensures a degree of objectivity. In the 1970s (and earlier, as our case study will reveal), feminist philosophers and academicians turned their gaze toward this assumption in a two-pronged approach. Part of their, and our, project involves examining the difficulties women and people of color have had in the professional science fields and to call attention to those who have been active but not adequately acknowledged. Another aspect of concern to us, like these feminists, is scientific study itself and that ways the gender and race bias can influence the interpretation of “objective” practice. The course is fully interactive; we want to foster a classroom atmosphere that is honest and respectful and that facilitates open discussion among students and instructors from diverse personal and academic backgrounds.