Fall 2009 Large-Format Courses

Professor Jefferey Abramson
Hard Choices
Through the study of select actual and hypothetical cases, this course seeks to illuminate the fundamental moral choices and dilemmas that political life often present us.

Professor Jaqueline Angel and Professor Ron Angel
Global Inequalities and Health
This course provides an overview of the physical and mental health of human populations, paying particular attention to health care delivery systems around the world.

Professor Katherine Arens
Exiled to Hollywood: Immigrants in the Movie Machine
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.

Professor Jay Banner and Professor Dave Allen
Sustaining a Planet
This course will provide an overview of the three main pillars of sustainability, which are economy, societal equity and environment. We will try to find ways to create the social change necessary for achieving sustainability.

Professor Christopher Bell
Difficult Dialogues: The Origin and Early Evolution of Life on Earth
This course will explore the common boundary between biology, geology, chemistry and paleontology by investigating the major scientific hypotheses for the origin of life on Earth and evolution during the first 3.5 billion years.

Professor Douglas Biow
Italian Cinema
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.

Professor Daniel Bonevac and Professor Roy Flukinger
Ideas of the Twentieth Century
This course will explore the great strides made by such thinkers as Einstein, Freud and Wittgenstein in the 20th Century despite the ravages of so many wars.

Professor Michael Brandl
Your Global Money: History, Economics, & Policy
In this course we examine money from your pocket to the global economy and the impact of money on economics, finance, policymaking, and history.

Professor Patrick Brockett
Risk – The Final Frontier: An historic and philosophical examination of the development of risk measures in firms and society
This class will address the concept of risk issues from an interdisciplinary context, from the evolution of risk to the contemporary financial circumstances.

Professor Volker Bromm
The History and Philosophy of Astronomy
We will look at astronomy as a grand story of human discovery with deep connections between our view of the cosmos and the general cultural and intellectual outlook of a given age and civilization, ranging from the dawn of history to a survey of the most modern developments.

Professor Cynthia Buckley
HIV/AIDS: Global and Local Perspectives
This course will explore how HIV/AIDS continues to challenge the capacities of communities, countries and international organizations to provide prevention interventions, encourage effective monitoring and provide treatment for individuals living with disease

Professor Alan Campion
Chemistry and the Environment
Elementary topics in environmental chemistry will be presented, as appropriate for student with only a high-school background in chemistry. Essential chemical and physical processes in the earth’s atmosphere will be studied, as well as the interaction of the oceans with the atmosphere and the effects of anthropogenic materials on the environment.

Professor Lorenzo Candelaria
Music, Art, and Ritual in Mexican Catholicism
This course explores the central roles that music, art and ritual have played in the formation of Mexican Catholic identity from the early sixteenth century to the present.

Professor Robin Doughty
Humankind and Nature: Changing the Face of the Earth
This course explores the relationship of people to environment in respect to how we have transformed landscapes through hunting, cropping, establishing settlements including cities and how we have expressed various attitudes toward landscapes as both resources to be exploited and places to be protected and managed.

Professor Janet Dukerich and Urton Anderson
Organizational Corruption and Organizational Control
This course will examine the drivers of organizational corruption and the tools and techniques that have been developed for organizations to control the corruption and build ethical organizational cultures.

Professor Tarek El-Ariss
Contemporary Arabic Culture
Through films, music, literature, and historical and political writings, this interdisciplinary course offers an overview of contemporary Arabic culture.

Professor Miguel Ferguson
Poverty in America in Non-Fiction and Film
Course introduces students to the critical issue of poverty in the U.S., past and present, using film and literature as a means to understand causes and consequences of and policies to address, poverty.

Professor Kevin Michael Foster
U.S. Public Education: Promise and Peril
This course addresses the historical, cultural, ideological and social contexts of schooling in the United States.

Professor Michael Gagarin
Law in Human Society
This course introduces students to some of the world’s past and present legal systems, beginning with Athens and Rome, and including civil-law systems, Islamic law and classical Chinese law. We will use these systems to analyze our own law.

Professor Susan Harkins
Thinking about Thinking in the Disciplines
This course is an overview of ways of thinking in the major disciplines and their connection to fundamental concepts in critical thinking, including the role of intellectual virtues, intellectual standards, Socratic thinking and analysis of an argument.

Professor Steven Hoelscher
American Spaces and Places
The political-economic processes that would seem to homogenize place in fact increase its importance. At the center of this irony is the United States itself, created with an ideal of liberty and equality, is a place of profoundly uneven patterns of wealth, crime and pollution.

Professor Robert Jensen
Journalism and/in Democracy
Students will examine three crucial aspects of journalism (institutional structure, professional practices and ideological assumptions) to come to their own evaluation of the problems and promise of journalism in the United States today.

Professor Gregory Knapp
Latin America: Environmental History and Sustainability
Within the context of present day debates about sustainability, this course is an overview of Latin America’s environmental characteristics and the long-term history of human uses of environmental opportunities, environmental hazards and human impacts on the environment.

Professor Robert Koons & Professor Budziszewski
Morality and Human Nature
We will examine some central works examining morality, from antiquity (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero), the Middle Ages (Aquinas), and today (Anscombe, MacIntyre), both questioning the authors and allowing ourselves to be questioned by them in turn.

Professor Timothy Loving
Human Science: Solutions for Global Families
The primary objective of the course is to introduce students to different aspects of human health from biology to psychology and to consider how science can play a critical role in shaping family health (both biologically and socially).

Professor Caroline O’Meara
Music and the American City
From minstrel songs to disco, salsa to hip-hop, this course will examine music made and enjoyed in American cities.

Professor Charles Ramirez-Berg
History of World Cinema
This is an introductory history of world cinema that presupposes no prior film knowledge. Film terms and film appreciation concepts will be built into the course as part of the chronological survey of the development of the film medium.

Professor Michael Starbird
How do you know? Evidence, Mathematical Models, and Proofs
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.

Professor William Winslade
Medical Ethics
This course will expose you to various cases and controversies in healthcare while exploring the relevance of religion, politics and economics to explore value conflicts among individuals.