#collegecatalog

“Italian Fascism and German National Socialism were more than just political parties or regimes; rather, they had many of the characteristics of religious movements. Moreover, these “political” or “secular religions” were not unprecedented, but had deep cultural and intellectual roots in European modernity. In this course we will trace the history of the sacralization of politics from the French Revolution to World War II. We will look at primary sources in a variety of media—drawing examples from France (Rousseau, Maistre, and Sorel), Germany (Wagner, Nietzsche, Jünger, and Riefenstahl), and Italy (Pareto, D’Annunzio, G. Gentile, and Marinetti)—as well as some of the most important scholarly literature on this topic (Benjamin, Voegelin, and Aron). No prerequisites; all texts will be read in English translation.”

“The Tibetan language, with a history going back more than one thousand years, is one of Asia’s major literary languages. At the present time, it is the first language of close to seven million people in Tibet, as well as in India, Nepal, and Bhutan. The textbook is The Manual of Standard Tibetan by Nicolas Tournade and Sangda Dorje. This introductory sequence covers the script and pronunciation, the grammar of the modern Lhasa dialect, as well as basic reading and speaking skills.”

“ This course looks at the reception of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), whose philosophy, largely neglected at first, eventually came to enjoy far-reaching influence as European thinkers set out on repeated quests for the source of a different “modernity” or “Counter-Enlightenment” in fields as varied as political theory (Romagnosi, Cattaneo, Ferrari), the historical and modernist novel (Cuoco, Manzoni, Joyce), Romantic historiography (Michelet, Gioberti), literary criticism (Auerbach), and intellectual history (Berlin). What is the secret behind the enduring appeal of Vico’s anti-rationalist stance? This seminar, going further than dedicating itself to the legacy of a single thinker, wishes to investigate the “logic” (or lack thereof) that attends posthumous acclaim, eponymity, and etiological myths, and to provide guidelines for a disciplined approach to the history, practice, and theory of reception.”

“The objective of this course is to understand how microorganisms alter the geochemistry of their environment. The course will cover fundamental principles of microbial growth, metabolism, genetics, diversity, and ecology, as well as methods used to study microbial communities and activities. It will emphasize microbial roles in elemental cycling, bioremediation, climate, and ecosystem health in a variety of environments including aquatic, soil, sediment, and engineered systems.”

“ This course is designed to examine the field of child mental health from an interdisciplinary perspective, integrating anthropological, sociological and psychological insights to look at some of the significant questions and controversies present in considerations of children’s health today. Students will also spend significant time on developing individual research papers. We will begin in the first two weeks with an overview of the field of child psychopathology and the diagnostic systems most commonly used in the practice of child psychiatry. We will then spend the next three weeks looking at two of the most common and controversial diagnoses applied to children in the United States: Autism-spectrum disorders and Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. In examining these categories we will consider the cultural and historical contexts that have lead to the emergence of these diagnoses and the variety of experiences of those identified as being afflicted with these disorders. The highly public controversy over giving children psychiatric medication and the implications of exporting Western psychiatric knowledge about children to other cultural contexts will also be considered. In the second half of the class we will move away from examinations of psychiatric nosology to think more broadly about the ways in which concepts of the normative treatment and behavior of children vary across time and place, looking particularly at the effects of aggression on children. “

“This course seeks to develop skills in perception, comprehension, and interpretation when dealing with film and other moving image media. It encourages the close analysis of audiovisual forms, their materials and formal attributes, and explores the range of questions and methods appropriate to the explication of a given film or moving image text. It also examines the intellectual structures basic to the systematic study and understanding of moving images. Most importantly, the course aims to foster in students the ability to translate this understanding into verbal expression, both oral and written. Texts and films are drawn from the history of narrative, experimental, animated, and documentary or non-fiction cinema. Screenings are a mandatory course component.”

“This is an introductory course on optimization that will cover the rudiments of unconstrained and constrained optimization of a real-valued multivariate function. The focus is on the settings where this function is, respectively, linear, quadratic, convex, or differentiable. Time permitting, topics such as nonsmooth, integer, vector, and dynamic optimization may be briefly addressed. Materials will include basic duality theory, optimality conditions, and intractability results, as well as algorithms and applications.”

Tony was pretty good at beer pong, after all, it was all about being the right amount of drunk. You had to be just drunk enough to not think about it, but sober enough to not sway back and forth. Steve was only at the frat party because Sam had dragged him away from his most recent painting, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to let some stuck-up, spoiled, rich drunk frat boy beat him at a throwing game.