under review for Catamount Core: S1

Students completing a course fulfilling the S1: Social Science requirement will: • Be able to draw on course topics, materials, and activities to describe how individuals, groups or institutions affect and interact with each other. • Be able to identify and demonstrate understanding of theories of human behavior, experience, institutions, or social systems addressed in the course. • Recognize and evaluate methods and processes of systematic investigation in one or more applied examples of social science research. This is a seminar on Free Speech and Expression under the US Constitution's First Amendment. The seminar will focus on first principles, foundational and normative values, doctrine, counter theories of broader speech protection or less protection, and current debates. The seminar will utilize a proactive, interactive teaching style that will engage students in discussion, dialogue, and debates. Free speech has become a subject of widespread debate. Today, conversations in secondary schools, the workplace, living rooms, and the popular media touch on a vast range of free speech issues. Arguments about protests by athletes, whether something constitutes "hate speech", the censoring effects of "political correctness", campaign contributions, the role of media, the former President's Twitter feed - and even more esoteric issues like "revenge porn" or whether someone should have a right to burn the flag or whether making a wedding cake qualifies as "speech" - have become commonplace. This seminar seeks to promote better understanding, and therefore better discussion, of the ideas that underlie our protection of free expression. It attempts to help readers better comprehend why free speech issues that presently confront us are uniquely complex. And, it sheds light on the factors that make debates over free speech so intractable and to offer educational tools that might help us improve our discourse around this fascinating and critically important topic. We begin by discussing the foundational values that traditionally have been identified as supporting expansive protection for free speech. The formidable force of those arguments and their influence on the development of first principles and legal doctrine will be analyzed. Next, we will trace the development of first principles and the evolution of free speech doctrine in the Supreme Court. It will show how those principles and doctrines connect with the values discussed earlier in the class. The class then will explore how the Supreme Court has applied those values, principles, and doctrinal frameworks to such current issues as campaign finance, speech in public schools, hate speech, campus speech, public employee speech and digital speech. The seminar will show how debates around these challenging issues necessarily call us to a consideration - and perhaps a reconsideration - of the values and first principles considered earlier in the class. The reading assignments primarily will come from a book I have co-written entitled (with Len Niehoff), Free Speech: From Core Values to Current Debates, published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press. Students will be assigned approximately 85 pages of reading each week. Supplemental readings in the primary text will include: The Federalist Papers, U.S. Supreme Court cases, historical documents, and several leading texts and treatises on the First Amendment. Students will be required to complete an independent research paper that will require research in primary documents, scholarly publications, and cases from federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court. The final grade will reflect the quality of class participation and engagement, the first draft of the seminar paper, presentation of the seminar paper in class, the final seminar paper, and several exams throughout the semester as chapters in assigned books are completed. Goals for the seminar include building and developing knowledge, keen analytical skills, strong communication abilities (both verbal and written), and a better understanding of constitutional rights. The in-class dialogue, together with the research paper, will build critical thinking and writing skills. In addition, students will learn how to do research for writing and publishing, as well as how to prepare for teaching a segment of the class in small groups or individually. Throughout the class, we will discuss and analyze an "absolutist or libertarian" view of the Free Speech freedoms - a view now embraced by the U.S. Supreme Court. This common framing of the absolutist view puts aside the normative and political questions of whether such a legal principle makes any sense, whether it aligns with our various goals as a society, and whether it has outworn its welcome and should be revisited - as laws in a constitutional republic can be. Perhaps the greatest challenge for absolutists lies here: the Freedoms are not as absolute as they may at first appear. Most will agree that no one has a right to threaten another with bodily harm, or to commit blackmail, fraud, or extortion - even though speech plays a central role in each of those activities. They will acknowledge, even if grudgingly, that some exceptions have to exist, for example, conceding that no one has the right to cry "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire. We will call the competing view the "relativist" view. This view reflects a willingness to compromise free expression in light of other countervailing interests that need to be considered and balanced against other values that we think important, like protecting people against discrimination, preserving public safety, maintaining sexual decency, affording individuals a zone of privacy and safeguarding personal reputation and dignity. Proponents of the relativist view maintain that our present protection for free expression extends too far that we have lost sight of other compelling interests and have lost touch with our deeply held intuitions about what makes for a just, welcoming, and healthy society. This lack of understanding results in an unfortunate and unproductive reductionism in both camps; the absolutists think of free expression as just about everything, while the relativists think of it as just another thing. This seminar seeks to help students achieve a stronger, clearer, and more nuanced understanding of free expression. One that provides a better comprehension of what's at stake when we limit free expression - and also when we champion it.

Catamount Core: N1

ave you ever wondered why some ice creams drip all over while others barely seem to melt? Or noticed that leftover sushi rice stays soft, while long grain rice gets hard? Or swapped baking soda for baking powder in a cookie recipe and found that your cookies were much browner than usual? Or felt like your mouth was on fire when you ate a chili pepper, yet your nose burns after eating spicy mustard? Or eaten a gluten-free bagel and wondered why it didn’t have the chewy qualities of one made with wheat flour? Everyone who cooks, bakes, or simply notices differences in the foods they eat is a scientist. In this course, we’ll use science to unlock the mysteries of food and cooking. Our goals will be to investigate the chemical, biological, and physical principles that underly why foods behave the way they do in the kitchen, and to look at how we can test these principles. The course is designed to be approachable regardless of your experience with the natural sciences. Food provides a familiar and relatable context to explore scientific principles for the first time, and people majoring in the natural sciences will have the chance to expand their knowledge and apply it in new ways. Assessments will help you develop your ability to critique and design experiments to test scientific principles we discuss, and to explain the science behind culinary phenomena to a general audience. Other skills you’ll build include finding appropriate sources and reading scientific papers. Hands-on activities will also allow you to see, feel, smell, and taste some of the scientific principles we discuss at work. Although this is not a cooking course, you can use what you learn to better understand recipes and come up with your own culinary creations.

Catamount Core: AH2

This course is essentially devoted to the study of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, which we will read in its entirety in light of recent scholarship and taking into account different commentaries and critical approaches. We will also read Dante’s Vita nuova and short excerpts from his unfinished treatise on language (De vulgari eloquentia), his book on political theory (Monarchia), and his philosophical compendium (Convivio), works that are essential for a fuller understanding of the Divine Comedy. In addition, we will read relevant excerpts from the Bible and from works by Virgil, Ovid, and the Troubadours. Basics of prosody and rhetoric will also be introduced, and reference will be made to a variety of literary theories of interpretation that are of relevance to Biblical, Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, but great emphasis will be laid on close textual reading. Course goals and objectives 1) learning to analyze complex literary works in reference to the historical context that produced them 2) recognizing important literary trends, noting key distinctions and continuities among literary texts 3) engaging and developing critical thinking skills 4) investigating and engaging with moral issues connected to The Commedia that are still central to our common humanity. 5) applying the concept of “sustainability” to the analysis and study of forms of belief as well as literary structures 6) understanding “healing” and general health benefits derived from exposure to rhythms as found in poetic forms and artistic practices 7) comparing different English versions of a same Italian text.

Course description TBD.

Catamount Core: AH2

You are probably very familiar with the stories of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Rapunzel, but you may not realize that the oldest versions of these tales come from Renaissance Italy. More interestingly, few people know that the first Cinderella murdered her own stepmother by crushing her skull with the lid of a trunk; that the original Sleeping Beauty was raped and impregnated by a king married to someone else; and that Rapunzel, in the earliest version of the tale, drugged the ogress so she could have sex with the prince who climbed up the tower on her long braids. In this course, we will read these and other tale types from the European tradition (including “Beauty and the Beast” and “Little Red Riding Hood”), and watch some of the most compelling of their film adaptations.

Catamount Core: AH3

n this course we will investigate how performances across mediums participate in practices of healing transgenerational trauma. From epigeneticists who discuss “ancestral ghosts in your genome,” to the growing list of animated feature films on the theme of transgenerational trauma (think Coco, Encanto, and Turning Red), to the “transgenerational turn” in psychoanalysis and the “reparative turn” in art and performance studies, ghosts are back. We will cast a wide net across cultural conversations – reading plays, poetry, memoir, artworks, critical essays, and films – to explore the return of the dead, ancestors, and historical haunting. We will ask how our personal and collective past might be reaching out to the present – as memory, reminder, reckoning, and healing. This course is as much about exploring interdisciplinary content as it is about providing approaches for seeing these patterns of relationship across mediums. Literary texts, images, and performances are never neutral. Alongside an exploration of case studies, students will learn strategies for reading, analysis, critique, and personal reflection that help illuminate how artistic practices of healing transgenerational trauma are weaving their way through our contemporary life.

under review for Catamount Core: AH3

1920’s Berlin saw an incredible cultural renaissance in theater, music, literature, film, architecture, and design. This historical period, known as the Weimar Republic, came crashing down with Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany in 1933. The daring, subversive, political, progressive artists of the period, began an exodus West: to New York, and onward to Hollywood. This course will examine the lives and work of these artists in Germany (and Austria), and their work in exile. We will read two of the seminal chroniclers of the period, Stefan Zweig and Christopher Isherwood, study the work of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, listen to the music of various modernist composers, songwriters, and cabaret artists, learn about the Bauhaus design collective, and examine the films of artists such as Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang. The course will also focus on contemporary work which is clearly connected to the Weimar ethos: The films of Wes Anderson, underground cabaret artists such as Taylor Mac, choreographers Bob Fosse and Pina Bausch, the television work of Jill Soloway (Transparent), and the teleplay Babylon Berlin, and even Rock artists such as David Bowie, and more.

under review for Catamount Core: SU

Metagenomic analyses have established that viruses are Earth’s most abundant and diverse biological entities. Further, the sequencing of the human genome revealed that viruses and virus-like entities, together with related mobile genetic elements, make up more than half of it. These findings lead to a paradigm change: rather than being primarily perceived as pathogens, we now appreciate that viruses and related genetic elements are intertwined with the development and physiology of all known living entities – they are essential constituents of the biosphere. They are rooted in the pre-cellular world, have coevolved with cell-based biological entities, and such coexistence of cell-based organisms and viruses (and similar mobile genetic entities) has profoundly affected the evolution of presumably all cellular life forms. The overall goal of this course is to discuss this paradigm change: viruses should now be considered being overall positive genetic entities. They were not only essential for evolution, but they are also important during ontogenesis, and while some of them can temporarily act as pathogens, likely many more are either neutral or may actually help prevent diseases, for example by strengthening host physiology and immune functions. Notwithstanding the recent COVID-19 crisis and past and future more severe viral outbreaks, this course will thus focus on how securing sustainability of the human society and the biosphere requires an in-depth understanding of virus-host coexistence. Following a highly interactive approach (with group work, class discussions, etc), we will investigate why and how, rather than through inventions of ever novel and costly antiviral strategies (drugs, medical treatments, pesticides, etc), health and viability at all levels, from individual organisms to complete ecosystems, are likely best supported by preventing disequilibrium and by promoting homeostasis.

under review for Catamount Core: TBD

In a unique meditation on how landscapes shape our imagination, desires, and dreams, writer Barry Lopez wonders, “How do people imagine the landscapes they find themselves in? How does the land shape the imaginations of the people who dwell in it? How does desire itself, the desire to comprehend, shape knowledge?” But one may also ask how imaginations of austere and formidable places such as the Arctic shape scientific exploration, colonial conquests, geopolitical control, and further racial capitalism. The unfreezing Arctic environment and its changing sociocultural systems are a product of region’s colonial past. But an unstable Arctic poses threats, not only to the future of the region, but to the world itself. In this seminar we will explore a landscape that is rapidly changing, as a result of climatic and socioeconomic changes. These prospective changes will open new shipping avenues, reveal new resources, raise issues of native sovereignty, as well as prompt geo-political national security concerns. This seminar provides an interdisciplinary overview of the social, political, and environmental conflicts but also environmental sustainability and just transitions efforts in the Arctic. This is a dynamic course where each of you will co-lead the class to explore the following key themes we will discuss throughout the semester: • The histories of indigenous communities in the Arctic • Relationship between science, capitalism, and resource exploitation • Discourses and impacts of climate change in the region • Contemporary environmental conflicts • Just transitions in the Arctic. • Indigenous rights and Native sovereignty • Geopolitics of Arctic governance

under review for Catamount Core: GC1

Geared towards motivated undergraduate students with an interest in medicine, nursing, allied health sciences, public health, political science and economics, this seminar will serve as an introduction to the complexities of the American Health Care System and provide students with the tools to think creatively about health care innovation, policy reform and legislative advocacy. The course will be split into four components: the health care system, value and quality, population health and identifying opportunities for innovation, health care operations, and promoting change with innovation strategies.

under review for Catamount Core: D2

 Over 27% of the U.S. population identifies has having one or more disabilities according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As such, it is important to explore how people with disabilities and those who identify as disabled are viewed and how perceptions around disability play a role in societal practices and inclusivity. This class will introduce you to frameworks, practices, and debates regarding the intersection between disability and ableism and how this space provides a platform for reproducing inequity. We will cover some of the history and language used by and about this community, various frameworks that seek to define disability, and what ableism is and the privilege it affords. This course will also offer opportunities to critically reflect on how you think about disability and what this means for you personally and professionally.

under review for Catamount Core: SU

The Earth is a complex coupled human-natural system that is increasingly dominated by human activities. We will examine anthropogenic climate change as part of an integrated earth system that includes impacts on and feedbacks with human systems. We will consider the challenges and interactions between climate change and human societies by considering responses of current and past societies to climate change and environmental degradation. We will place anthropogenic climate change in the broader context of limits to growth, sustainability, and societal development. The class will emphasize readings, discussions, and construction of simple simulation models to understand the scientific and social basis of contemporary climate and sustainability. Students will use the graphical computer programming language Stella to develop a simplified model of the Earth system.

Course description TBD

under review for Catamount core: AH1

This course is an introduction to medieval art history with special focus on the study of romance imagery in illuminated manuscripts produced from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries in northern Europe. Students will engage with medieval texts and recent scholarship to establish a working knowledge of medieval art as well as with the production and reception of manuscripts in the medieval period. Subjects will include popular medieval texts such as the Romance of the Rose, The Romance of Alexander, and the Arthurian cycle. Through lectures and writing assignments we will consider the visual representation of themes such as courtly love, royal histories, mythologies, and allegory within the framework of socio-political, literary, and cultural developments.

under review for Catamount Core: TBD

BRIEF DESCRIPTION This course introduces students to the comparative study of spiritual, religious, and psycho-physical practices—exercises by which individuals and groups deepen, develop, challenge, and transform their perceptions and capacities for action in harmony with religious, moral-ethical, or philosophical ideals. The course covers a range that spans from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers (such as Stoics, Epicurians, and Neoplatonists), yogis and monks of South and East Asia, Christian and Muslim ascetics and Renaissance mages, to practitioners of modern forms of westernized yoga, martial arts, ritual magic, and environmental and spiritual activism. Readings of ancient texts and contemporary philosophical and sociological writings are complemented by practical exercises, writing and presentation assignments, and a practice project. 

Under review for Catamount Core: TBD

This seminar will cover a variety of topics about ethics and food. We'll decide on the topics by class vote. Past versions of the class have covered meat production and consumption, food workers, organic production, and food and identity.