ENROLL

Christopher Elias

This overview of the "interdisciplinary discipline" of American Studies will focus on the ways American Studies engages with and departs from other scholarly fields of inquiry. We will study the stories of those who have been marginalized in the social, political, cultural, and economic life of the United States due to their class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, citizenship, and level of ability. We will explore contemporary American Studies concerns like racial and class formation, the production of space and place, the consumption and circulation of culture, and transnational histories.

Sophomore Priority

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: AMST 115.WL0 (Synonym 64035)

Sarah Kennedy

What do antebellum plantations, Spanish missions, British colonies in Australia, mining camps in Latin America, and Roman estates all have in common? All are examples of unfair/unfree and forced labor in colonial and imperial settings. This class will review archaeological, archival, and ethnographic cases of past coerced and exploitative labor, and compare them with modern cases such as human trafficking, child slavery, bonded labor, and forced marriage. Case studies include the Andes under Inka and Spanish rule, North American and Caribbean plantations, British colonial Australia, and Dutch colonial Asia.

Ross Elfline

Prerequisite: Any one term of art history

Amanda Hund

Parasites and pathogens play a central role in shaping the natural world, from the physiology and behavior of individuals to the dynamics of populations and the structure of ecosystems. This course will explore the ecological and evolutionary processes that shape host-parasite interactions. Topics include transmission of disease through host populations, the evolution of virulence, coevolution between hosts and parasites, how disease influences communities and food webs, how parasites shape host behavior and life history, and the ecology of newly emerging infectious diseases. 

Prerequisite: Biology 125 and 126

Michael Elyanow

This course teaches students the fundamentals of screenwriting. Topics include understanding film structure, writing solid dialogue, creating dimensional characters, and establishing dramatic situations. Art, craft, theory, form, content, concept, genre, narrative strategies and storytelling tools are discussed. Students turn in weekly assignments, starting with short scenes and problems and then moving on to character work, synopses, outlines, pitches and more. The goal is for each student to write a 15 to 25 page script for a short film by the end of the term.

Prerequisite: Cinema and Media Studies 110 or 111 or instructor permission

Scott Carpenter

Travelers write. Whether it be in the form of postcards, text messages, blogs, or articles, writing serves to anchor memory and process difference, making foreign experience understandable to us and accessible to others. While examining key examples of the genre, you will draw on your experiences off-campus for your own work. Student essays will be critiqued in a workshop setting, and all work will be revised before final submission. Some experimentation with blended media is also encouraged.

Prerequisite: Students must have participated in an off-campus study program (Carleton or non-Carleton) or instructor permission

Kathleen Galotti

An examination of the way people think and reason, both when given formal laboratory tasks and when facing problems and decisions in everyday life. Students consider their own reasoning and decision making through course exercises. Topics include models of formal reasoning, decision making, heuristics and biases in thinking and problem-solving, moral reasoning, improving skills of higher order cognition.

Prerequisite: Psychology 110 or Cognitive Science 100 or 130

Jenny Bourne

Prerequisite: Economics 110 and 111

Anita Chikkatur

Sophomore Priority

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: EDUC 110.WL0 (Synonym 64670)

Nancy Cho

This course is designed to demystify the practice of academic writing and to introduce students to the skills they’ll need to write effectively in a variety of academic disciplines and contexts. Students will learn how to respond to other authors’ claims, frame clear arguments of their own, structure essays to develop a clear logical flow, integrate outside sources into their writing, and improve their writing through revision. All sections will include a variety of readings, multiple writing assignments, and substantial feedback from the course instructor.

Does not fulfill curricular exploration

Jessica Leiman

This course explores the history and form of the British novel, tracing its development from a strange, sensational experiment in the eighteenth century to a dominant literary genre today. Among the questions that we will consider: What is a novel? What makes it such a popular form of entertainment? How does the novel participate in ongoing conversations about family, sex, class, race, and nation? How did a genre once considered a source of moral corruption become a legitimate literary form? Authors include: Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Bram Stoker, Virginia Woolf, and Jackie Kay.

George Shuffelton

This class will focus on three of the most popular and closely connected modes of narrative enjoyed by medieval audiences: the epic, the romance, and the saint's life. Readings, drawn primarily from the English and French traditions, will include Beowulf, The Song of Roland, the Arthurian romances of Chretien de Troyes, and legends of St. Alexis and St. Margaret. We will consider how each narrative mode influenced the other, as we encounter warriors and lovers who suffer like saints, and saints who triumph like warriors and lovers. Readings will be in translation or highly accessible modernizations.

Timothy Raylor

“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought”—Audre Lorde.  In this course we will explore how poets use form, tone, sound, imagery, rhythm, and subject matter to create works of astonishing imagination, beauty, and power. In discussions, Moodle posts, and essay assignments we’ll analyze individual works by poets from Sappho to Amanda Gorman (and beyond); there will also be daily recitations of poems, since the musicality is so intrinsic to the meaning.

Christopher Martin

You will work in several genres and forms, among them: traditional and experimental poetry, prose fiction, and creative nonfiction. In your writing you will explore the relationship between the self, the imagination, the word, and the world. In this practitioner’s guide to the creative writing process, we will examine writings from past and current authors, and your writings will be critiqued in a workshop setting and revised throughout the term. 

Sophomore Priority

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: ENGL 160.WL0 (Synonym 64707)

Pierre Hecker

From the ancient Greeks to the Bible to the modern serial killer novel, murder has always been a preeminent topic of intellectual and artistic investigation. Covering a range of genres, including fiction, nonfiction, drama, and film, this transhistorical survey will explore why homicide has been the subject of such fierce attention from so many great minds. Works may include: the Bible, Shakespeare, De Quincey, Poe, Thompson, Capote, Tey, McGinniss, Auster, French, Malcolm, Wilder, and Morris, as well as critical, legal, and other materials. Warning: not for the faint-hearted. (May not be retaken as ENGL 395.)

May not be retaken as ENGL 395 Murder

Pierre Hecker

1st 5 weeks

Pierre Hecker

Shakespeare’s plays have been reimagined and repurposed all over the world, performed on seven continents, and translated into over 100 languages. The course explores how issues of globalization, nationalism, translation (both cultural and linguistic), and (de)colonization inform our understanding of these wonderfully varied adaptations and appropriations. We will examine the social, political, and aesthetic implications of a range of international stage, film, and literary versions as we consider how other cultures respond to the hegemonic original. No prior experience with Shakespeare is necessary.

Second 5 weeks

Constance Walker

Adriana Estill

This course engages the borderlands as space (the geographic area that straddles nations) and idea (liminal spaces, identities, communities). We examine texts from writers like Anzaldúa, Butler, Cervantes, Dick, Eugenides, Haraway, and Muñoz first to understand how borders act to constrain our imagi(nation) and then to explore how and to what degree the borderlands offer hybrid identities, queer affects, and speculative world-building. We will engage the excess of the borderlands through a broad chronological and generic range of U.S. literary and visual texts. Come prepared to question what is "American", what is race, what is human.

Constance Walker

What can and should be the role of literature in times of bitter political conflict? Caught in partisan strife, Irish writers have grappled personally and painfully with the question. We will read works by Joyce, Yeats, and Heaney, among others, and watch films (Bloody Sunday, Hunger) that confront the deep and ongoing divisions in Irish political life.

Susan Jaret McKinstry

This journalism course explores the process of moving from event to news story. Students will study and write different forms of journalism (including news, reviews, features, interviews, investigative pieces, and images), critique one another’s writing, work in teams with community partners, and revise their pieces to produce a final portfolio of professional work. 

Gregory Smith

Prerequisite: One prior 6-credit English course

Peter Balaam

Readings in literature, urban studies, and the environmental humanities will ground practical exercises helping students to explore cosmopolitan theories of walking, mapping, paying attention, and reading the city. Honing practices of journeying, observing, curating, and collecting, students will make themselves locally expert on one or more of London’s streets or neighborhoods. Designated film screenings, lectures, exhibits, and the natural and built environment will help us to read London’s ever-changing human text over the last two millenia. What human processes are at work on any street in London; and how might they include you?

Prerequisite: Participation in OCS London Program

Requires participation in OCS Program: Living London

Peter Balaam

Students will attend productions of both classic and contemporary plays in London and Stratford-on-Avon and do related reading. Class discussions will focus on dramatic genres and themes, dramaturgy, acting styles, and design. Guest speakers may include actors, critics, and directors. Students will take backstage tours, keep a theater journal, and work on theater criticism and reviews.

Requires participation in OCS Program: Living London

Jessica Leiman

This course traces the development of a sensational, morally dubious genre that emerged in the eighteenth-century: the novel. We will read some of the most entertaining, best-selling novels written during the first hundred years of the form, paying particular attention to the novel’s concern with courtship and marriage, writing and reading, the real and the fantastic. Among the questions we will ask: What is a novel? What distinguished the early novel from autobiography, history, travel narrative, and pornography? How did this genre come to be associated with women? How did early novelists respond to eighteenth-century debates about the dangers of reading fiction? Authors include Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen.

Prerequisite: One English foundations course and one other 6 credit English course

Susan Jaret McKinstry

"Does the world really present itself to perception in the form of well-made stories?" asks Hayden White, metahistoriographer. To try to answer that question, we will read contemporary narrative theory by critics from several disciplines and apply their theories to literary texts, films, and cultural objects such as graphic novels, television shows, advertisements, and music videos.

Prerequisite: One 6-credit English foundations course and one additional 6-credit English course or permission of the instructor

Peter Balaam

Readings in literature, urban studies, and the environmental humanities will ground practical exercises helping students to explore cosmopolitan theories of walking, mapping, paying attention, and reading the city. Honing practices of journeying, observing, curating, and collecting, students will make themselves locally expert on one or more of London’s streets or neighborhoods. Designated film screenings, lectures, exhibits, and the natural and built environment will help us to read London’s ever-changing human text over the last two millenia. What human processes are at work on any street in London; and how might they include you?

Prerequisite: One English foundations course and one other 6 credit English course or permission of instructor

For students pariticipating in OCS London Program

Paul Petzschmann, Baird Jarman, Mihaela Czobor-Lupp,

This team-taught interdisciplinary course explores the relationship between memory, place and power in Europe’s cities. It examines the practices through which individuals and groups imagine, negotiate and contest their past in public spaces through art, literature, film and architecture. The instructors will draw on their research and teaching experience in urban centers of Europe after a thorough introduction to the study of memory across different disciplines. Students will be challenged to think critically about larger questions regarding the possibility of national and local memories as the foundation of identity and pride but also of guilt and shame. 

Candace Moore

This capstone seminar reads representations of racial, gender, and sexual minorities in popular culture through the lenses of feminist, critical race, queer, and trans theories. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in the late 1980s to describe an approach to oppression that considered how structures of power act multiply on individuals based upon their interlocking racial, class, gender, sexual, and other identities. This seminar takes up the charge of intersectional analysis—rejecting essentialist theories of difference while exploring pluralities—to interpret diversity (or lack thereof) in forms of art and entertainment, focusing on film, TV, and digital media.

Antony Adler

This course introduces students to maritime history, marine environmental history, and issues in contemporary marine policy. While traditional histories have framed the sea as an empty space and obstacle to be traversed, or as a battleground, we will approach the ocean as a contact zone, a space of labor, and as the site of focused scientific research, thereby emphasizing human interaction with the oceans. We will examine how people have come to know, utilize, and govern the world’s oceans across time and space, and we will explore how this history informs contemporary issues in maritime law, governance, and ocean conservation.

Rebecca Brueckmann

This course focuses on the representation of African American history in popular US-American movies. It will introduce students to the field of visual history, using cinema as a primary source. Through films from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the seminar will analyze African American history, (pop-)cultural depictions, and memory culture. We will discuss subjects, narrative arcs, stylistic choices, production design, performative and film industry practices, and historical receptions of movies. The topics include slavery, racial segregation and white supremacy, the Black Freedom Movement, controversies and conflicts in Black communities, Black LGBTQIA+ history, ghettoization and police brutality, Black feminism, and Afrofuturism.

Victoria Morse

Extra time is required for a one-time map show in the library during 6a which we will schedule at the beginning of term.

Adeeb Khalid

Through readings in primary sources in translation, we will discuss the major intellectual and cultural movements that have influenced Muslim thinkers from the nineteenth century on. Topics include modernism, nationalism, socialism, and fundamentalism.

Through readings in primary sources in translation, we will discuss the major intellectual and cultural movements that have influenced Muslim thinkers from the nineteenth century on. Topics include modernism, nationalism, socialism, and fundamentalism.

William North

Acknowledged by contemporaries as one of the leading intellects of her time, Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364-ca. 1431) became an author of unusual literary range, personal resilience, and perceptiveness in a time of ongoing warfare, civil strife, and intellectual ferment. In addition to composing romances, poetry, quasi-autobiographical works, royal biography, and political theory, she became an articulate critic of the patriarchy and misogyny of her world, contemporary patterns and cultures of violence, and a critical voice in defense of female capability. Using Christine's writings together with other contemporary voices, we will examine how contemporaries confronted fundamental questions of identity, status, violence, ethics, and love in domestic and public spheres in late medieval France. 

George Vrtis

Since the nation's founding, the percentage of Americans living in cities has risen nearly sixteenfold, from about five percent to the current eighty-one percent. This massive change has spawned legions of others, and all of them have bearing on the complex ways that American cities and city-dwellers have shaped and reshaped the natural world. This course will consider the nature of cities in American history, giving particular attention to the dynamic linkages binding these cultural epicenters to ecological communities, environmental forces and resource flows, to eco-politics and social values, and to those seemingly far-away places we call farms and wilderness. 

Prerequisite: History 205 is recommended but not required

Adeeb Khalid

Through readings in primary sources in translation, we will discuss the major intellectual and cultural movements that have influenced Muslim thinkers from the nineteenth century on. Topics include modernism, nationalism, socialism, and fundamentalism.

Prerequisite: At least one prior course in the history of the Middle East or Central Asia or Islam

Not open to first year students. First year students should register in HIST 267.

Annette Igra

This course is designed to support majors in developing advanced skills in historical research and writing. Through a combination of class discussion, small group work, and one-on-one interactions with the professor, majors learn the process of constructing sophisticated, well-documented, and well-written historical arguments within the context of an extended project of their own design. They also learn and practice strategies for engaging critically with contemporary scholarship and effective techniques of peer review and the oral presentation of research. Concurrent enrollment in History 400 required. By permission of the instructor only.

HIST 400 required.

Seth Peabody

This class introduces students to the various theoretical frameworks and the many approaches scholars can use when analyzing a text (whether this text is a film, an image, a literary piece or a performance). What do words like ‘structuralism,’ ‘ecocriticism,’ 'cultural studies,' and ‘postcolonial studies’ refer to? Most importantly, how do they help us understand the world around us? This class will be organized around interdisciplinary theoretical readings and exercises in cultural analysis.

Prerequisite: At least one 200- or 300-level course in Literary/Artistic Analysis (in any language) or instructor permission

Stacy Beckwith

Judaism emphasizes transmitting memory from one generation to the next. How have pivotal events and experiences in Jewish history lived on in Jewish collective memory? How do they continue to speak through artistic/literary composition and museum/memorial design? How does Jewish collective memory compare with recorded Jewish history? We will study turning points in Jewish history including the Exodus from Egypt, Jewish expulsion from medieval Spain, the Holocaust, and Israeli independence, as Jews in different times and places have interpreted them with lasting influence. Research includes work with print, film, and other visual/ performative media.

Andy Flory

A survey of American music with particular attention to the interaction of the folk, popular, and classical realms. No musical experience required.

Brooke Okazaki

This course tackles a crucial question in the study of western classical music: why do compositions by white, dead, men still dominate the concert halls in the twenty-first century? And more importantly, how can we as music students and lovers change this? By looking at the role race and gender have historically played in the production and reception of western classical music, students will interrogate what it means to listen to it. Through a variety of assignments including listening analyses, creative responses, and a final QRE project students will develop skills to help them succeed in their various musical endeavors.

Brooke Okazaki

Japanese popular music encompasses a wide variety of genres, from World War II propaganda tunes to anime soundtracks. But how does this music relate to the history of modern Japan? What is “modern” (or post-modern) about this specific music? This class will examine the creation and consumption of Japanese popular music from around 1945 to present, focusing on how popular music worked in the cultural and political milieu. Through the study of Japanese folk, jazz, rock, hip-hop, bubble gum pop, and film music, students will engage with broader historical trajectories in society. We will discuss music as it relates to issues of race, gender, and pop culture in Japan and around the world.

Alican Camci

In the liner notes to his Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Brian Eno claims that ambient music “should accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as interesting.” In this class, we will investigate what we can learn from listening intently to that which is meant to sound in the background. While we will discuss the ambient as a genre, we will also consider its broader implications on how we experience music in everyday life. Our study of the repertoire will be paired with critical readings on ambient music and immersive sound.

Prerequisite: The ability to read music and a previous music course, or instructor consent

Hope Sample

Does life have a meaning? To answer this, we will first inquire into more basic questions about agency that provide a foundation for our topic: Is everything fated? Is fate compatible with free will? Can we always do the right thing without moral remainder, or are there genuine moral dilemmas? Are there grey zones of compromised responsibility due to structures of oppression, or other factors? How do we know what lives are meaningful for us? Is there any objective truth about the meaning of life? After developing your ideas on the answers to those questions, we will turn to various approaches to meaning in life, both those that affirm meaning and deny it. We will cover, for example, approaches to the meaning of life grounded in narrative, divinity, creativity, and more.

Anna Moltchanova

Prerequisite: 100-level Philosophy course or instructor permission

Hope Sample

We will read selections of writings from various seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers on metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. This course will not be limited to any geographic region, as it is open to philosophical traditions from Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. On the metaphysical side, we will cover topics such as time and space, freedom, and divinity. Ethical issues that we will cover include, but are not limited to, moral responsibility, virtue, suffering, and the good life. Further, we will cover epistemic issues concerning belief, perception, and knowledge. In sum, we will gain a deeper insight into perennial philosophical problems as well as an awareness of the assumptions that drive their solutions, given the author’s personal, social, political, and philosophical context.

Anna Moltchanova

Juan Diego Prieto

Sophomore Priority

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: POSC 120.WL0 (Synonym 65111)

Christina Farhart

Tun Myint

Christina Farhart

An introduction to research method, research design, and the analysis of political data. The course is intended to introduce students to the fundamentals of scientific inquiry as they are employed in the discipline. The course will consider the philosophy of scientific research generally, the philosophy of social science research, theory building and theory testing, the components of applied (quantitative and qualitative) research across the major sub-fields of political science, and basic methodological tools. Intended for majors only.

Prerequisite: Statistics 120, 230, 250, (formerly Mathematics 215, 245, 275), AP Statistics (score of 4 or 5) or Psychology 200/201 or Sociology/Anthropology 239

Tun Myint

Extra Time Required

Julie Neiworth

A summary of theoretical approaches, historical influences and contemporary research in the area of human and animal learning. The course provides a background in classical, operant, and contemporary conditioning models, and these are applied to issues such as behavioral therapy, drug addiction, decision-making, education, and choice. It is recommended that students enroll concurrently in Psychology 211. A grade of C- or better must be earned in both Psychology 210 and 211 to satisfy the LS requirement.

Prerequisite: Psychology 110 or Neuroscience 127 or instructor permission

8 spots held for sophomores (Sophomores register for PSYC 210-10)

Julie Neiworth

A summary of theoretical approaches, historical influences and contemporary research in the area of human and animal learning. The course provides a background in classical, operant, and contemporary conditioning models, and these are applied to issues such as behavioral therapy, drug addiction, decision-making, education, and choice. It is recommended that students enroll concurrently in Psychology 211. A grade of C- or better must be earned in both Psychology 210 and 211 to satisfy the LS requirement.

Prerequisite: Psychology 110 or Neuroscience 127 or instructor permission

Held for Sophomores, once the course is filled Sophomores waitlist on PSYC.210.00

Cross-listed with PSYC 210.00

Julie Neiworth

This course accompanies Psychology 210. Students will replicate classical studies and plan and conduct original empirical research projects in the study of human and animal learning and memory. Psychology 211 requires concurrent or prior registration in Psychology 210. A grade of C- or better must be earned in both Psychology 210 and 211 to satisfy the LS requirement.

Prerequisite: Psychology 110 or Neuroscience 127 or instructor permission; Concurrent registration in Psychology 210

Four spots held for sophomores (Sophomores register for PSYC 211-11)

Julie Neiworth

This course accompanies Psychology 210. Students will replicate classical studies and plan and conduct original empirical research projects in the study of human and animal learning and memory. Psychology 211 requires concurrent or prior registration in Psychology 210. A grade of C- or better must be earned in both Psychology 210 and 211 to satisfy the LS requirement.

Prerequisite: Psychology 110 or Neuroscience 127 or instructor permission; Concurrent registration in Psychology 210

Four spots held for sophomores (Sophomores register for PSYC 211-12)

Julie Neiworth

This course accompanies Psychology 210. Students will replicate classical studies and plan and conduct original empirical research projects in the study of human and animal learning and memory. Psychology 211 requires concurrent or prior registration in Psychology 210. A grade of C- or better must be earned in both Psychology 210 and 211 to satisfy the LS requirement.

Prerequisite: Psychology 110 or Neuroscience 127 or instructor permission; Concurrent registration in Psychology 210

Held for sophomores. Sophomores unable to register should waitlist for PSYC 211-01

Cross-listed with PSYC 211.01

Julie Neiworth

This course accompanies Psychology 210. Students will replicate classical studies and plan and conduct original empirical research projects in the study of human and animal learning and memory. Psychology 211 requires concurrent or prior registration in Psychology 210. A grade of C- or better must be earned in both Psychology 210 and 211 to satisfy the LS requirement.

Prerequisite: Psychology 110 or Neuroscience 127 or instructor permission; Concurrent registration in Psychology 210

Held for sophomores. Sophomores unable to register should waitlist for PSYC.211-02

Cross-listed with PSYC 211.02

Sarah Meerts

The laboratory in Hormones, Brain and Behavior will consider the role of hormones in shaping the brain, the effect of experience on hormone levels, and neuroendocrine factors in the display of hormones. Students will learn common techniques in behavioral neuroendocrinology and will collect and analyze data. Psychology 219 requires current or prior registraion in Psychology 218. A grade of C- or better must be earned in both Psychology 218 and 219 to satisfy the LS requirement. 

Prerequisite: Requires concurrent or prior registration in Psychology 218

Sarah Meerts

The laboratory in Hormones, Brain and Behavior will consider the role of hormones in shaping the brain, the effect of experience on hormone levels, and neuroendocrine factors in the display of hormones. Students will learn common techniques in behavioral neuroendocrinology and will collect and analyze data. Psychology 219 requires current or prior registraion in Psychology 218. A grade of C- or better must be earned in both Psychology 218 and 219 to satisfy the LS requirement. 

Prerequisite: Requires concurrent or prior registration in Psychology 218

Sonja Anderson

How can we best understand the role of religion in the world today, and how should we interpret the meaning of religious traditions--their texts and practices--in history and culture? This class takes an exciting tour through selected themes and puzzles related to the fascinating and diverse expressions of religion throughout the world. From politics and pop culture, to religious philosophies and spiritual practices, to rituals, scriptures, gender, religious authority, and more, students will explore how these issues emerge in a variety of religions, places, and historical moments in the U.S. and across the globe.

Michael McNally

Jonathan H Dickstein

Sonja Anderson

How do religion and medicine approach the healing of disease and distress? Are religion and medicine complementary or do they conflict? Is medicine a more evolved form of religion, shorn of superstition and pseudoscience? This course explores religious and cultural models of health and techniques for achieving it, from ancient Greece to Christian monasteries to modern mindfulness and self-care programs. We will consider ethical quandaries about death, bodily suffering, mental illness, miraculous cures, and individual agency, all the while seeking to avoid simplistic narratives of rationality and irrationality.

Lori Pearson

How have religious thinkers understood the demands of justice, the work of love, and the relation of both to power and politics? Is resistance or compromise the most appropriate way to bring justice to human relations? How should the ideals of faith inform questions about political authority, struggles for equality, and engagement with difference? This course draws on Christian theology, African American religious thought, and Jewish thought to explore a range of questions about ethics and social change. Along the way, we encounter diverse models of human selfhood, moral obligation, and the role of religion in public life.

Jonathan H Dickstein

How “eco-friendly” are Asian religious traditions? What does “eco-friendly” even mean? This course begins with an overview of the major religious traditions of South, Southeast, Central, and East Asia. From this foundation, we turn to modern and contemporary ecological thinkers, movements, and policies and discuss their indebtedness to, and divergence from, various religious heritages. We will also explore how modernity, capitalism, industrialization, climate collapse, and Western environmental movements have influenced eco-advocacy in contemporary Asia.

Michael McNally

Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg

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

Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg

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

Annette Nierobisz

Since the 1980s, the United States criminal justice system has embarked on a social experiment we now call, “mass incarceration.” The outcome – unprecedented rates of imprisonment, particularly in BIPOC communities – has had devastating consequences for individuals, families, neighborhoods, and American society. This course explores the causes and consequences of mass incarceration. Potential topics include: race, class, gender, and age in the prison system; the impacts of incarceration on children and intimate partners who get left behind; punishment strategies such as solitary confinement and the death penalty; the lucrative business of the prison industrial complex; and the promise of prison abolition.

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

Constanza Ocampo-Raeder

Our ways of perceiving and acting in the world emerge simultaneously from learned and shared orientations of long duration, and from specific contexts and contingencies of the moment. This applies to the production of anthropological ideas and of anthropology as an academic discipline. This course examines anthropological theory by placing the observers and the observed in the same comparative historical framework, subject to the ethnographic process and to historical conditions in and out of academe. We seek to understand genealogies of ideas, building on and/or reacting to previous anthropological approaches. We highlight the diversity of voices who thought up these ideas, and have influenced anthropological thought through time. We attend to the intellectual and political context in which anthropologists conducted research, wrote, and published their works, as well as which voices did/did not reach academic audiences. The course thus traces the development of the core issues, central debates, internecine battles, and diversity of anthropological thought and of anthropologists that have animated anthropology since it first emerged as a distinct field of inquiry to present-day efforts at intellectual decolonization. 

Prerequisite: Socilogy/Anthropology 110 or 111, and at least one 200- or 300-level SOAN course, or permission of instructor.