ENROLL

Baird Jarman

This course will survey the history of ideal plans for the built urban environment. Particular attention will be given to examples from about 1850 to the present. Projects chosen by students will greatly influence the course content, but subjects likely to receive sustained attention include: Renaissance ideal cities, conceptions of public and private space, civic rituals, the industrial city, Baron Haussmann’s renovations of Paris, suburbanization, the Garden City movement, zoning legislation, Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, New Urbanism and urban renewal, and planned capitals such as Brasília, Canberra, Chandigarh, and Washington, D.C.

Prerequisite: Any one Art History course or instructor permission

Kelly Connole

This course is focused on the creative possibilities of the pottery wheel as a means to create utilitarian objects. Students are challenged to explore conceptual ideas while maintaining a dedication to function. An understanding of aesthetic values and technical skills are achieved through studio practice, readings, and demonstrations. Basic glaze and clay calculations, high fire and wood kiln firing techniques, and a significant civic engagement component, known as the Empty Bowls Project, are included in the course.

Prerequisite: Studio Art 128, 130, 236 or high school experience with wheel throwing and instructor permission

Rou-Jia Sung

The ability to visualize macromolecules at atomic detail has significantly advanced our understanding of macromolecular structure and function. This course will provide an overview of fundamental experimental methodologies underlying structure determination, followed by primary literature-based discussions in which students will present and critically discuss classic foundational papers as well as examples from the current literature that have advanced our understanding of macromolecule structure and function.

Prerequisite: Biology 125 and 126; and either Biology 280, Biology 380, Biochemistry 301 or Chemistry 320

Anita Chikkatur

Prerequisite: 100 or 200-level Educational Studies course or instructor permission

Extra Time Required

Colleen Carpenter

This course considers the contrast between the ways various religions conceive of water as sacred, and the fact that today’s intersecting environmental crises mean that drought, flooding, sea level rise, and lack of access to clean water and safe sanitation have made the human relationship with water more fraught and complex than ever before. We will look at specific situations of environmental injustice (including Flint, Michigan; Jackson, Mississippi; and the protests at Standing Rock) as well as reading more theoretical and theological takes on water, water justice, and water activism.

Seungjoo Yoon

This course tackles an evolving meaning of democracy and sovereignty in postwar Japan shaped by the transformative power of its social movements. We will place the anti-nuclear movement and anti-base struggles of the 1950s, the protest movements against revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty of the 1960s, and environmentalist movements against the U.S. Cold War projects in Asia to see how they intersect with the worldwide “New Left” movements of the 1960s. Topics include student activism, labor unionism, Marxist movements, and gangsterism (yakuza). Students will engage with political art, photographs, manga, films, reportage, memoirs, autobiographies, interview records, novels, and detective stories.

Antony Adler

This course will examine the world of history outside the walls of academia. Looking at secondary-school education, museums, and public policy, we will explore the ways in which both general and specialized publics learn and think about history. A central component of the course will be a civic engagement project.

Prerequisite: One History course

Extra Time Required.

Austin Mason

How do new methods of digital humanities and collaborative public history change our understanding of space and place? This hands-on research seminar will seek answers through a deep mapping of the long history of Northfield, Minnesota, before and after its most well-known era of the late nineteenth-century. Deep mapping is as much archaeology as it is cartography, plumbing the depths of a particular place to explore its diversity through time. Students will be introduced to major theories of space and place as well as their application through technologies such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), 3D modeling, and video game engines. We will mount a major research project in collaboration with specialists in public history and community partners.

Deborah Gross

Prerequisite: Interdisciplinary Studies 198 as first year student

Prior registration in IDSC 198

Andrea Mazzariello

In this composition course, students will co-create music with youth at The Key, a youth-led, youth services organization in downtown Northfield. Members of the class will visit regularly to make and share music, and will work towards a substantial collaborative composition, while also creating smaller projects throughout the term. To support this work, we will study model compositions that leave key parameters open, such as instrumentation and ensemble size, or that use alternate notation systems, or that depend on structured improvisation. We will also explore various technological tools that can extend our collaborative capabilities and that can assist us in documenting and presenting our collaborative work.

Prerequisite: Music 108 or Music 110 or instructor consent

Anna Moltchanova

What is important to individuals, how they see themselves and others, and the kind of projects they pursue are shaped by traditional and moral frameworks they didn’t choose. Individual selves are encumbered by their social environments and, in this sense, always ‘biased’, but some forms of bias are pernicious because they produce patterns of inter and intra-group domination and oppression. We will explore various forms of intersubjectivity and its asymmetries through readings in social ontology and social epistemology that theorize the construction of group and individual beliefs and identities in the context of the social world they engender.

Extra Time Required

Sonja Anderson

How does power flow and concentrate within the Catholic Church? What are the gendered aspects of the structure, history, and theology of Catholicism? Through a combination of readings, discussions, and conversations with living figures, students will develop the ability to critically and empathetically interpret issues of gender, sexuality, and power in the Catholic Church, especially as these issues appear in official Vatican texts. Topics include: God, suffering, sacraments, salvation, damnation, celibacy, homosexuality, the family, saints, the ordination of women as priests, feminist theologies, canon law, the censuring of “heretical” theologians, Catholic hospital policy, and the clerical sex abuse crisis.

Michael McNally

Constanza Ocampo-Raeder

The core of anthropological thought has been organized around the assumption that the production of complex cultural systems is reserved to the domain of the human experience. While scholars have contested this assumption for years, there is an emerging body of scholarship that proposes expanding our understandings of culture, and the ability to produce meaning in the world, to include non-human beings (e.g. plants, wildlife, micro-organisms, mountains). This course explores ethnographic works in this field and contextualizes insights within contemporary conversations pertaining to our relationship with nature, public health, and social justice movements that emerge within decolonized frameworks.

Prerequisite: The department strongly recommends that Sociology/Anthropology 110 or 111 be taken prior to enrolling in courses numbered 200 or above

Andy Poppick

(Formerly MATH 280) Students will apply their statistical knowledge by analyzing data problems solicited from the Northfield community. Students will also learn basic consulting skills, including communication and ethics.

Prerequisite: Statistics 230 and instructor permission

All interested students are encouraged to add to the waitlist and the instructor will reach out after registration. This course is repeatable, but if the instructor cannot admit every student on the waitlist, priority will be given first to Statistics majors who have not previously taken the course and then to other students who have not taken the course.

Claire Kelling

Either a supervised small-group research project or an individual, independent reading. Required of all senior majors.

Prerequisite: Senior Statistics major. Students are strongly encouraged to complete Statistics 230 (formerly Mathematics 245) and Statistics 250 (formerly Mathematics 275) before starting this course