Signature Course Descriptions

This course is an introduction to the ways through which we understand works of art in four media: literature, cinema, visual art (painting and sculpture), and music.

Astronomy, one of the original seven liberal arts, has been integrated by countless generations of artists, authors and musicians into their works. We will explore examples in the visual arts, fiction, poetry, music and drama.

This seminar is an introduction to biodiversity, which refers to the diversity of living organisms. We will also examine the crises species face due to human activities and global warming.

This course uses narratives of older adults as a vehicle to learn how people can create a resilient and just society. It presents the narrative accounts of the lives of older men and women, focusing on how they overcame critical events such as racial discrimination, natural disasters/Katrina, and the Nazi Holocaust.

This course encourages students to move beyond merely static “authoritative” and “programmed” learning in ways which will develop students’ individual and ever-emerging personal authority and critical consciousness vis-√†-vis what has been pre-established in their world as credible ‘status quo’ official legitimate knowledge.

Nature is a human idea with a long and complicated history. Far from standing apart from humanity, the landscapes and creatures we label as “natural” are deeply entangled with the words, images, and ideas we use to describe them.

This course examines the origins, customs, and social, religious and also economic implications of food in South Asia, primarily India.

Antecedents, consequences, and strategies for the prevention of dating violence will be explored using a developmental ecological approach and epidemiological principles. Contextual factors including family, community, and societal influences will be discussed along with coping responses in relation to physical, mental and behavioral health.

The development of moral thinking, moral emotions and a moral self concept in children and adolescents will be considered as we try to understand what leads some people to help and others to harm.

With direct-to-consumer advertising, consumers are bombarded with drug information through various channels. How credible is this information and what influence does it have on prescription and over-the-counter medication use in this country? This course will expose students to the influence the media has on medical and drug information.

The intent of this signature course is to explore the exciting world of engineered products, from the perspective of history, current markets, and future forecasting. We will focus this exploration on innovations as they have changed the landscape of nations and cultures, especially the United States.

This course draws on literature from theology, philosophy, economics, social psychology, and evolutionary biology dealing with ethical issues.

This course focuses on many aspects of speech and hearing, from historical debates to current deaf issues, all while developing students’ speaking and presentation skills.

Whether it’s slow-cooked barbecue, homemade biscuits, or fast-food fried chicken, the foods we choose tell stories of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and region in the southern United States. We will use food as a lens into local and regional histories and cultures by exploring the invention of southern food traditions.

This course will consider the current state of pharmacy and drug discovery research from an historical perspective, beginning with the use of herbal medicines, to the proliferation of patent medicines beginning in the 17th century, to the reforms of the Pure Drug and Food Act, to the current state of both high-tech and natural/organic drugs.

This seminar will focus on health-related cultural concepts and their effects on health promotion and disease prevention among ethnic-minority populations in the U.S.

The purpose of this course is to provide hands-on exposure to a variety of advocacy approaches to social change, beginning at the local community level which in turn forms a part of larger social movements.

This course will explore the history of the American West through art and literature produced from roughly 1840-1980.

We will consider insurance plans (HMOs, indemnity, Medicare, and Medicaid), how pharmacy fits into the picture, and debatable health care issues, including health care as a right in the U.S., right-to-die, insurance coverage, physician extenders, role of nursing, and other issues.

In our study of practical ethics we will be focusing on making real-life ethical choices concerning our use of animals (for food, clothing, pets, etc.). In addition, we will focus on three values of the university– leadership, discovery learning, and diversity — and we will expand our sense of this state, this town, and especially this university, as your place, your Alma Mater (nurturing mother).

We will investigate the interdisciplinary nature of the color field, including color as wavelengths of light, biology of color vision, psychology of color perception, and the function of color and light in art, architecture, film, branding, and popular culture.

Stories play an important role in our lives, including many of the films, myths, political anecdotes, and examples we use or consume. Can we really learn anything about such serious matters as truth and morality from literally false objects? This course will examine issues revolving around narrative and its use in argument.

This class focuses on the positive aspects of human psychology. We cover the literature and theory in psychology concerning positive emotions, the processes involved in good relationships, and aspects of character and human virtue.

What is the value of poetry? How, and to what benefit, do poems move our hearts, sharpen our senses, grip our minds? We will discover and explore the pleasures and powers of poetry through reading and discussing a variety of poems by recent and current American poets.

From blood pressure testing to finger sticks on a glucometer, this course will introduce students to practical skills and topics needed for anyone interested in a healthcare profession.

This course examines the role of music in political mobilization. While music is usually thought of as a form of entertainment, having little or no relation to the ‘serious’ work of politics, this course will examine the numerous ways in which music may be enlisted to help effect social change.

The course will guide students in discovering how psychological principles are involved in musical experience, learning, and performance and show them how to investigate these issues in a scientific manner.

Brain imaging techniques have become increasingly powerful, and with this power have come questions about how they can and should be used. This course will start by discussing how to understand and interpret the findings of brain imaging research.

This course will point out the failures of past policy and recommend a wide variety of strategies and policies that have scientific validation but have yet to be systematically embraced as an overall approach to safer and more productive communities.

The purpose of this course is to examine representations of Los Angeles as they are manifest in a variety of media, including cinema, the novel, cyber cultures, music, advertising, and tourist practices, among many.

In this course, we’ll discuss what science tells us about the nature of addiction.

The main objective of this course is to provide students with an understanding of how social science can inform debates about social inequality and its interface with education in the Latin American context.

Everyone travels, but none of us want to be tourists. This course looks at a practice most of us engage in, leisure travel, and examines its history, how it effects local economies and the visual images and cultural attitudes that are produced as part of tourism.

This course explores the historical and contemporary reasons for the high levels of crime and violence in Latin America, including the relations between the United States and Latin America. Crime and Violence are developmental issues for Latin America, not only threatening the welfare of individuals, families and communities, but also inhibiting the region’s social and economic development.

This course is centered on current issues involving the allocation, use, and conservation of water. These will be viewed through the lens of the principles and the legal and policy-based responses that are beginning to consolidate around these issues at all levels of governance.

How is our social reality constructed? How does it unfold? Via participant observation and visual media (mainly documentaries), students will de-construct and analyze specific cultural content that is relevant to their world.

The purpose of this course is to introduce the student to the historical development of the African American sport experience. The course will critically analyze research on physical differences, racial stereotyping, identity development, social influences and how they impact ethnic participation patterns in particular sports.

In this course sequence we will become familiar with these ancient texts, the cultural traditions they communicate and preserve, and their legacies today. We will compare these stories with other traditions, and we will consider them within broader literary and philosophical frames to discover their shared paradigms and the ethics that derive from them.

We will read the stories of Sarah and Miriam, Ruth and Naomi, and several others, through the lenses of modern methods of treating women’s lives and roles throughout the world. We will also use art from various ages to assess the impact these women’s stories have had on our culture.

Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930s through the 1960s, was due in no small part to the presence of immigrants or refugees. This course will introduce you to some of their finest films and to the problems faced by artists in exile then and now.

Engaging with the disciplines of communications, government, journalism, law, and psychology, this course will prepare us to address social justice and activism in four areas of gender-based human rights: political representation, transgender issues, single-sex schools, and same-sex marriage and parenting.

You say YES, I say NO is more than a title to an old Beatle’s tune. Come explore the interactive world of grey in issues ranging from World Politics to Business and many topics in between.

This course is an opportunity to see how people in the past thought about, and acted on, such matters, and to compare their attitudes with modern controversies around racial difference and sexual behaviors.

Most people believe that the Earth goes around the sun. Why? The answer involves questions of how scientific knowledge does or does not become commonly accepted belief.

This course will consist of a broad and varied sampling of classic Italian films from WWII to the present. We will consider the works that typify major directors and major trends through five decades of filmmaking.

This course serves as an introduction to the study of the interrelationship between language and ethnic identity, a central topic within the larger fields of sociolinguistics and the sociology of language.

The rate of incarceration in the United States is the largest in the world: about 751 people are in prison for every 100,000 in population. In comparison to other industrialized nations, Russia comes in 2nd with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 in population. Today, more than 2.5 million people are behind bars.

Medicine is more than science. This course will explore the art of medicine and how medical practice in the U.S. is affected by politics, business, and cultural influences.

Although some art claims to represent the world as it really is, this course traces the ways in which the bizarre and the unexpected feature in the art, music, literature, and film of the last hundred years or so.

Focusing on films from Sweden and Denmark, this course will provide an introduction to some of the masterpieces of Scandinavian film from the Golden Age of silent film through the 2000s.

Students are introduced to the traditions established in the arts and sciences for generating new knowledge from original ideas. Modeling after the way that faculty conduct research, students are required to create original research reports or papers that utilize skills introduced in lecture and developed in the learning laboratory.

Questions about how the universe began, how it will end, what happens inside of a black hole, ways in which the Earth could be destroyed, and our quest to find life on other planets are some of the most exciting and important topics for scientists and the public. This course will focus on the current hot topics in Astronomy, with a strong focus on the interplay between the public, media, and science.

In this course, we will investigate happiness as a theme of human emotions and social life by focusing on a selection of classical texts from the Middle East and other societies around the Mediterranean, such as ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece.

This course takes a critical look at film representation of the Holocaust from the earliest representations (made by the Nazis and later the Allied liberators of the concentration camps) through a variety of international productions, which cover the Holocaust in both documentary and fictional fashion.

Through a series of inquiries, this course helps students build conceptual models, think like a scientist, conduct quantitative analyses, and critique and present results. Restricted to students in the Dean’s scholars and honors in the College of Natural Sciences.

Students will learn to design, develop, and lead social change organizations of their own invention. Over the course of the class, students turn their passion for changing the world into concrete plans for launching a venture.

This course will examine the cognitive, linguistic, and social dimensions of the phenomenon of language mixing (code-switching) between languages to challenge the popular notion that bilinguals switch because they are not competent speakers of one or the other language.

This course examines the development of technology in the Greek and Roman world and the underlying social, political, and intellectual motives behind it. Our exploration will be genuinely multidisciplinary, moving freely around such diverse disciplines as engineering, agriculture, medicine, geography, astronomy, land measurement, long-distance trade, and metallurgy.

This course addresses the historical, cultural, ideological and social contexts of schooling in the United States.

This course will focus on how we communicate about the natural world and our relationship with that world. Questions addressed include: How do individuals develop beliefs and ideologies about the environment? How do we express those beliefs through communication? How are we influenced by the messages of pop culture and social institutions?

As goes General Motors, so goes the nation? More likely, it is how societies regard their youth that distinguishes and predicts across time, cultures, and boundaries. This course will allow for considering the forces and influences on children—beginning with the students’ own childhoods. Through self-selected inquiry projects, students will investigate issues related to children’s roles, their ways of learning and making sense, their perceptions of their worlds, their depictions in art and film, their roles in economies, their housing, play, texts, and toys… and the records they have left in history (e.g., diaries of war or upheaval).

In this course, the students are introduced to many diverse issues of sexuality in Islam not only from the religious texts and their various interpretations, but also from cultural and political perspectives. Learn more about Difficult Dialogues.

The Parthenon is the quintessential icon of Western Civilization. To whom, however, does it really belong? The framework of the course is the controversy between Greece and the British Museum, London over the fate of the so-called Elgin Marbles. Learn more about Difficult Dialogues.

This course examines how theatrical art can be a productive tool for generating fruitful discussions around race. Through an examination of theatrical productions and texts, students will create analyses concerning racial formation, the role of aesthetics in constructing race, the racial politics of art, and the dynamics of healthy dialogue. Learn more about Difficult Dialogues.