ENROLL

George Vrtis

Prerequisite: History 205 or instructor permission

Spring Break OCS Program Course. ENTS 307 required for Spring Term registration.

Melanie Freeze

How have political parties shaped the distribution of power and political landscape in the United States? This course explores theories of political party development, third-party dynamics in a two-party system, and the rise of ideological and party polarization in the United States. We will engage with scholarly debates that grapple with the extent and implications of polarization in the American case at all levels of government, in the electorate, and in interpersonal interactions.

Greg Marfleet

Why do countries go to war? What conditions promote a lasting peace? These may well be the two most important and enduring questions in international politics. The course combines an exploration of various theoretical approaches to war and peace—including rational, psychological and structural models—with an empirical analysis of the onset, escalation, and resolution of conflict. We investigate changing patterns in the frequency of global violence and identify where it occurs more (and less) often and assess whether there is an overall trend toward a more peaceful world.

Sonja Anderson

When will the world end, and how? What’s wrong with the world—morally, politically, naturally—such that people have seen its destruction as necessary or inevitable? Are visions of “The End” a form of sophisticated resistance literature, aimed at oppressive systems of power? Or are they evidence of a disturbed mind disconnected from reality? This seminar takes a deep dive into the contours of apocalyptic thought, which in its most basic form is about unmasking the deceptions of the given world by revealing the secret workings of the universe. We will begin with the earliest apocalypses, found in ancient Jewish and Christian texts, and move into modern religious and “secular” visions of cosmic collapse. Our approach will be historical and comparative, and we will explore topics ranging from doomsday cults to climate catastrophe, visions of heaven to tours of hell, malevolent angels to meddling UFOs, all the while asking how the apocalyptic imagination creates, as one thinker put it, “another world to live in.”