CAS:  Humanities
GSB: D2, Social Science Core or Humanities Core
CALS:  Humanities & Social Sciences
CEMS:  Engineering Students - Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/CSIS/DS students check with your advisor and department chair
RSENR: Consult with your academic advisor
CNHS: Consult with your academic advisor 
CESS: Consult with your academic advisor

Major/Minor:

May count towards GSWS major or minor

This course is concerned with the history of the normative meanings attributed to femininity and masculinity in the modern period.  Working from a theoretical understanding of their constructed and relational character, we will explore ways in which these representations have both shaped some of the major transformations in European history and have also undergone significant changes in response to them.  Our interest in gender as a “way of knowing” is thus in a dual sense: as a system of ideas and practices that are constitutive of social relationships defined by power, but also as a critical analytic category though which society can be more adequately understood.  The course will likewise inquire into how these different representations of gender intersect with the history of sexuality and of the body.  Although the predominant focus of our coursework will be on examples from modern Europe, students are welcome to pursue research projects outside of the European context, and our readings will begin with the common assignment for all first-year HCOL spring semester seminars, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

CAS: Humanities
GSB: D1, Humanities Core
CALS: Humanities
CEMS: Engineering Students - Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/DS students check with your advisor
RSENR: Consult with your academic advisor
CNHS: Consult with your academic advisor
CESS: Consult with your academic advisor
“Representing Race” is a follow-up to the fall semester of the FY Honors College seminar (“The Pursuit of Knowledge”) in which the students read three philosophers—Descartes, Hume, and Aristotle—who gave them three different perspectives on how and what we know: rationalism, empiricism, and a kind of humanistic thinking that we referred to as narrativism.  In the reading that followed our exploration of those philosophical texts, we looked, sometimes directly, often indirectly, at the ways in which subjectivity can play a role in the construction of knowledge. Following on that experience, “Representing Race” narrows the focus to consider questions of knowledge (what do we know?), persuasion (how do we know it?) and power (who decides?) in the field of race and race relations. These are exceedingly vexing questions which play out across disciplinary boundaries. How biologists consider race is likely different than how a legal scholar thinks of the issue and distinct once again from how a poet, a painter, or philosopher thinks about the question. At the turn of the twentieth century, the issue of racial representation was further complicated by the births of cinema and the mass media, which offered spectators images of race that were at once “authentic” pictures of reality while at the same time culturally-determined fabrications. Hence in the first half of Representing Race, we will take a broad view of racial representations across a variety of disciplines, (biology, legal theory, visual arts, literature, philosophy, etc.) dating from antiquity to the present-day. In the second half of the semester, we will examine how these various types of knowledge play into representations of race in the mass-media from early silent films to television shows to the Internet, and beyond. In addition to traditional assignments, the course will culminate in the opportunity to a creative, collaborative project incorporating materials and ideas from the class.

CAS: Social Science  
GSB:  D2, Social Science Core
CALS: Social Science, Humanities 
CEMS:  Engineering Students - Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/CSIS/DS students check with your advisor and department chair
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS:  Consult with your academic advisor
CESS: Consult with academic advisor

Major/Minor Requirements

Elective for Health & Society (HSOC) major and minor

For optimal well-being, is happiness the ultimate goal or should one focus more on personal growth, positive relationships, and a purpose driven life?  While there is no current consensus on a single definition of well-being, researchers agree that well-being is a multidimensional construct involving biological, social, and psychological influences occurring over the course of one’s life. Optimal well-being is a state where one experiences good emotional, physical, and social health. So how do we attain positive states of well-being? Is optimal well-being the absence of suffering?  Positive emotions, absence of negative emotions or cognitions, mastery in chosen field, and satisfying interpersonal relationships provide us the ability to face life’s challenges successfully. However, the pursuit of optimal well-being and the different ways of knowing about aspects of well-being differs across cultures and societies.

CAS:CAS elective credit
GSB:  Social Science
CALS: Social Science
CEMS:  Engineering Students - Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/CSIS/DS students check with your advisor and department chair
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS:  Consult with your academic advisor
CESS: Consult with academic advisor

In this course, we will examine the scientific, political, and legal challenges that surround the “wicked problem” of nutrient pollution in Lake Champlain. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to understand the fundamental tenants of watershed management, the strategies available to address agricultural sources of pollution, and the ongoing legal battle over the future health of the lake. We will review scientific and technical reports, as well as primary materials with a focus on state and federal statutes and regulations. Class sessions will often feature round-table discussions with important stakeholders, including watershed scientists, attorneys, farmers, and state regulators. Students will work together to propose practical policies that can be applied locally.

CAS:   Social Science
GSB:  D2, Social Science Core
CALS:  Social Science
CEMS:  Engineering Students - Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/CSIS/DS students check with your advisor and department chair
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS:  Consult with your academic advisor
CESS: Consult with academic advisor
Why use such a pejorative term as "madness" for the title of this course? This term has long history and illustrates the stigma often associated with mental health diagnoses. Using historical assessments, cultural differences worldwide, and psychological science research, students will use this multi-perspective approach to understand what is behind mental health stigma and will examine ways to break down such destructive stereotypes and treatment barriers.

Apply your knowledge to your own mental health processes (for example, categories of problems, evaluation, client/patient care, treatment methods and strategies, treatment outcomes) through weekly reflective assignments, class discussions and to professional applications such as education, communication disorders, law, clinical psychology/mental health, and social relationships.

CAS: Humanities, non-European
GSB: D2, Humanities Core
CALS: Social Science, Humanities
CEMS:  Engineering Students - Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/CSIS/DS students check with your advisor and department chair
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS:  Consult with your academic advisor
CESS: Consult with academic advisor

Over the past decade-and-a-half anime, manga, video games, toys, J-pop music, and horror movies, among other cultural and consumer products from Japan, have garnered a larger presence in the American, as well as global, popular culture scene. What does the expanding consumption of Japanese popular culture on the global market place tell us about globalization in the 21st century? How do global flows transform popular cultural products when they are consumed in different cultural contexts? What tools of social and cultural analysis help us to better understand popular culture from Japan, and how do scholars of Japanese culture interpret and study Japanese popular cultural products?

Globalization and Japanese Popular Culture looks beyond the glitzy surface of anime and manga to examine how popular culture in Japan has spread beyond its borders, the impact of cultural flows from Japan on patterns of consumption, and the uneven ways in which cultural products find audiences in different parts of the world. Through the course readings and discussions, we will examine the above and other questions concerning Japanese popular culture in the digital age of globalization. Students will be introduced to key concepts and debates concerning popular culture global flows and be given the opportunity to apply insights gained through course readings, lectures, and discussions to a Japanese popular culture research project of their own design.

CAS: Humanities
GSB: D2, Humanities Core
CALS: Humanities
CEMS:  Engineering Students - Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/CSIS/DS students check with your advisor and department chair
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS:  Consult with your academic advisor
CESS: Consult with academic advisor
This course will introduce students to some of the core concepts of intersectional feminist thinking and to expose students to both the assumptions and aims of several different feminist theoretical approaches. The course will investigate how and why the insights of intersectional feminist thought are not only practically and politically significant, but also essential to developing an adequate understanding of our own and others’ experiences as members of a gendered and racially divided society.  In so doing, the course will help students develop greater awareness and understanding of the diversity (especially gender and racial diversity) of lived-experience in our local, national and global communities, and put students in a position to engage productively with this wide range of individual perspectives.
This course will also help students continue to develop a set of critical thinking and communication skills can be usefully applied in a variety of different domains within and outside of academia.  Both through written work and through discussion, this course will help students develop the capacity to communicate clearly and concisely, to reconstruct arguments for a position or view from a piece of text, to apply a theoretical tools in analyzing current events, cultural phenomena, etc., to critically evaluate an argument, analysis, or theoretical framework, to construct persuasive arguments of their own in defense of a position or view, and to anticipate and address potential objections to arguments that they find persuasive.

CAS:  Social Science
GSB:  D2, Social Science Core
CALS:  Social Science, Humanities
CEMS:  Engineering Students - Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/CSIS/DS students check with your advisor and department chair
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS:  Consult with your academic advisor
CESS: Consult with academic advisor

Major/Minor Requirements

Elective for Gender, Sexuality, & Women’s Studies major and minor
Elective for Sexuality and Gender Identity Studies minor
Elective for Health & Society (HSOC) major and minor

Elective for Sociology major and minor

What is medicine? How is medical knowledge produced and by whom? How is medical knowledge and practice related to the larger political, cultural, and social contexts in which it develops? What “truths” does medicine tell us about sex, gender, and sexuality and how have these “truths” changed over time? Medicine, as a branch of science, is often envisioned as apart from culture. However, as this course will demonstrate, it is very much a part of culture. Medical knowledge and practice are shaped by culture and in turn shape cultural knowledge and practice. In this course we will examine medicine through a cultural lens, drawing on sociological, historical, anthropological, philosophical, feminist, queer, and critical race studies perspectives in order to explore the intersections of sex, gender, sexuality, and medicine.

CAS:  Humanities
GSB: D2: History Core #1 or Global & Regional Studies Core #5
CALS:  Humanities & Social Sciences
CEMS:  Engineering Students - Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/DS students check with your advisor
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS: Consult with academic advisor
CESS: Consult with your academic advisor
Toleration and, indeed, acceptance or even celebration of difference (whether of race, ethnicity, class, gender, culture, or religion) are very recent and, in a global context, hardly generalized values.  This course aims to explore the meaning of toleration and the processes by which it can be achieved through an examination of encounters with difference in medieval and Renaissance Europe, a culture which, on the whole, valued intolerance.  The course will begin with readings that familiarize students with the structure of this society and the key normative values, categories, principles, and expectations that informed its identity as well as its approach to people who did not appear to conform to these norms.  Students will then analyze primary-source texts and images that bear witness to a number of encounters which threw into sharp relief the difference between the normative (i.e. Catholic, male, heterosexual, and often elite) European and the “Other.”  These encounters were fraught and often hostile, but they opened the eyes of many European observers to the ubiquity of difference and the humanity of those who were different.  This was the beginning of a complex process of self-examination and familiarization with difference that formed the basis for the possibility of creating the concept of toleration.  As an extension of the themes in HCOL 085, students will also consider the different “ways of knowing” that were used by the contemporaries of these encounters, and that evolved or were challenged in trying to make sense of them.

CAS: No Dist, CAS Elective Only
GSB: Social Science
CALS: Social Science
CEMS:  Engineering Students - Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/DS students check with your advisor
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS: Consult with academic advisor
CESS: Consult with your academic advisor

HCOL 086 is designed to have student question their understanding of disability as a social construct and how the concept of disability impacts our perception of a person's status, responsibility, and success in life. In this course students will explore the historical, social, political, economic, and cultural trends that shape society's construction of disability as well as the intersectionality of disability when incorporating other often marginalized groups.

Traditionally, society has viewed people with disabilities as a minority group in terms of social and economic status. However, unlike other minority groups; any person regardless of any standing, where it be socioeconomic class, age, gender, ethnicity/race, sexual orientation, or other can become a disabled. Matter of fact, some scholar would suggest that with age all persons develop a disability. The Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act (ADAAA, 2009) defines a person with a disability "as person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities" which would include those persons with physical or mental impairments due to old age.

CAS: Literature
GSB:  Humanities
CALS: Humanities & Fine Arts or Social Science
CEMS:  Engineering Students - Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/CSIS/DS students check with your advisor and department chair
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS:  Consult with your academic advisor
CESS: Consult with academic advisor

This course uses science fiction as a means of thinking through the challenges of sustainability in the face of the climate crisis. We begin with a non-fiction text, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, in which Amitav Ghosh argues, among other things, that literature struggles to tackle climate change. Outside the canon of literary fiction, however, science fiction has been exploring themes of climate change and sustainability throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries. This course will use some of these texts, representing perspectives from North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, to make climate change “thinkable” and to examine how the climate crisis threatens sustainable development and how lack of investment in sustainable development in turn contributes to the climate crisis.

CAS:  Humanities, non-European
GSB:  D2, Humanities Core
CALS: Social Science
CEMS:  Engineering Students - Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/CSIS/DS students check with your advisor and department chair
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS:  Consult with your academic advisor
CESS: Consult with academic advisor

Major/Minor Requirements

Non-European Cultures
Elective for Global Studies major and minor
Elective for Latin American & Caribbean Studies major and minor

In 2017, the European Alps lost more than 5 feet of water-equivalent glacier mass. In 2018, more than 8,000 fires burned 1,893,913 acres in California. In 2019, the shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami people warned a crowd of US scholars gathered in Cambridge, MA, of the imminent danger his people and the rainforest faced. A month later Amazonia burned.

In this course we will examine the advancement of some phenomena resulting from the one degree Celsius that has already warmed the planet, and their impacts on environmental, social, economic and human systems. We will locate examples and case studies in Latin America: from tipping point triggers in the Amazon rainforest, to social disruptions due to changing water patterns, climate migrations and the politics surrounding climate refugees.

CAS: Literature
GSB: Humanities
CALS: Humanities & Fine Arts or Social Science
CEMS:  Engineering Students - Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/CSIS/DS students check with your advisor and department chair
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS:  Consult with your academic advisor
CESS: Consult with academic advisor

In this class we will start by considering that “race” as a meaningful biological category, especially in the service of racial hierarchies, constitutes one of the most pernicious science fictions of recent human history.  Pseudo-scientific narratives establishing fundamental, socially meaningful differences among “races” have rationalized slavery, segregation, and many other forms of oppression. It’s no surprise, then, that writers of science fiction and fantasy (often collectively labeled “speculative fiction” or “sf” these days) have been well-positioned to challenge racism and to expose its effects. 

The works we’ll read during this class will frequently challenge basic assumptions about race (and class and gender), but they’ll also push us to read in new ways. Speculative Fiction challenges readers through shocks to the imagination as we’re invited to view our societies radically transformed and our texts playing by new rules. We’ll spend some of our time orienting ourselves in the new worlds and their new rules (which have implications in terms of social and literary models). As diverse readers ourselves, some of us may come to these texts with a background in fantasy, science fiction, dystopian narratives and the like; others will be new to these genres. Those with familiarity can teach us to see these texts through the eyes of experience; those who are new to this sort of work will teach us to see things we haven’t noticed yet!