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

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:  Social Science
GSB:  SL, 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

Major/Minor Requirements

Methods requirement for the Geography major and minor

This course introduces students to a toolbox of research methods that researchers use to make sense of the world around them. It focuses on methods that can be applied to studies of human-environment relations, sustainability, and social justice.  We will consider the advantages and disadvantages of specific qualitative methods, as well as ways that researchers use multiple methods to achieve greater understanding of their topic.  The course is designed to prompt students to think critically about larger issues of the production of knowledge, epistemologies (how we know what we know), and socially constructed “truths.” We will critically evaluate the role of the researcher, power and positionality in the research process, as well as working definitions of “sustainability.”

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:  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:   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
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, Social Science Core or Humanities Core
CALS:   Humanities, 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 takes its inspiration from an essay by Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” which we will read in the course and in which she explores the problem of the move from theoretical discussions of justice to real political action in the world. While all recognize the need to base political action on firm philosophical principles, the life of the mind, in its constant questioning, problematizing, and reconsideration of its own foundations, does not at first glance seem to support political action, which ideally rests on commitment to firmly held convictions. And yet no thinker would want to shut down the possibility of acting for political change, broadly defined, on account of the ever-changing interrogations of what we mean by “equality,” “justice,” and so on.

The course will examine the ways power and privilege have been theorized, with attention to class, gender, race, and other categories, by those who go on actively to support, and also to engage in, activity that promotes political change in the world that is in line with the complexity of their own abstract reflections about engagement with the world. We will spend time looking at the relationship between education and democracy, with readings that trace the necessity of an informed citizenry, the obstacles to cultivating a life of the mind in a democracy and ways to overcome them, and the question of how best to cultivate cosmopolitanism in education. In the second section of the course, we will inquire why the habits of mind encouraged by the formation of intellect (the questioning, creative life of the mind as opposed to the goal-oriented, narrowly focused problem-solving of intelligence) so often lead, not to withdrawn contemplation but rather to progressive political engagement (and to resistance from dominant mainstream culture threatened by intellect). We will then examine theoretical and autobiographical writings by those who have both articulated and lived theories of social change across questions of class, race, culture, and sexuality and how the life of the mind informed, shaped, and altered the course of their political engagement. These figures include a diverse range of intellectuals, artists, and political figures from both within and beyond the United States.

CAS:   Humanities
GSB:  D1, 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

Memory is essential to our understanding of ourselves, of our collective past and present and our existence as humans.  But how does memory work?  Which parts of our brain are responsible for our memories? What happens when these parts do not function?  Can memory be manipulated? What role does memory play for the formation of identity?  These are some of the questions we will address in this seminar.  We will begin with learning about the general mechanisms of memory formation in the brain.  We will take these findings to examine our own experiences and memories.  From there we will proceed to study examples of individual, collective, and cultural memory from a variety of disciplines. We will learn how these memories are shaped and how they, in turn, shape us.

CAS:  Humanities
GSB: D2, 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 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 distribution credit, CAS Elective credit only
GSB: D2, Social Sciences 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 academic advisor
CESS: Consult with academic advisor

The focus of HCOL 086 is on the theoretical questions concerning how our culture understands the social construct of disability. Students will examine, critically reflect upon, and engage in dialogue about the historical, biological, social, cultural, political, and economic trends and factors in the societal construction of disability. In addition, students will explore the concept of disability as it relates to issues of diversity.

CAS: Humanities 
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

Major/Minor Requirements

Non-European Cultures
History major and minor in the Africa/Asia/Middle East/Global category
Elective for Religion major and minor

The course examines attitudes towards animals in various Muslim settings, past and present, and surveys the law and ethics of human-animal relations in Islamic sources. The course finds its intellectual roots in the newly-rising field of “religion and animals” and, thus, it deliberately engages, from an Islamic perspective, issues such as how humans differ from non-human animals (“animals”), how they should treat animals, and the overall place and roles of animals in divine creation. The course also considers the impact of the animal liberation movement on modern Muslim attitudes towards animals and examines a variety of recent religious and secular positions formulated by Muslims that have recently prioritized animal welfare and promoted environmental consciousness.

CAS:  Humanities
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:   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

Major/Minor Requirements

Elective for Health & Society (HSOC) major and minor

What does it mean to say that a mind is “ill”? According to many estimates, upward of a quarter of all people will at some point in their lives experience mental illness. That is a staggering figure, but what should we make of it? The significance – with respect to public health and to individual wellbeing – of psychiatric disorders is increasingly acknowledged. But without a serious effort at understanding, our grasp of the nature and implications of mental illness are likely to be inadequate or simply wrong.

This course will address a number of important conceptual and practical problems entailed in the disciplines of psychiatry and clinical psychology and their intersections with the rest of society. It will challenge intuitive or culturally normative notions about the realm of the “mental”; about what constitutes “illness”; about personal identity, agency, freedom, and responsibility; about the role of the legal system in regulating behavior; and about our capacities to grasp, categorize, and explain the experiences of others. Most fundamentally, this course will examine the various ways by which we might understand mental illness and those considered mentally ill.