HSA Departmental Courses

American Studies

  • AMST103 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Staff

    Description: An interdisciplinary introduction to principal themes in American culture taught by an intercollegiate faculty team.

    HSA Course Area: American Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • AMST120 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Balseiro

    Description: A focus on the experience of immigrants in the United States and Americans of diverse ethnic backgrounds, as reflected in literature and critical theory. The course will weave together works that treat the lives of immigrants and minority groups in the United States with examinations of such contemporary issues as bilingual education, the conditions of migrant workers, and children as cultural and linguistic interpreters for their parents. The intentionally broad and interdisciplinary nature of the course enables exploration of cultural identities, socio-economic status, and gender-specific roles.

    HSA Course Areas: American Studies; Literature; Chicano/a & Latinx; Asian American Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

Anthropology

  • ANTH110 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: de Laet

    Description: An exploration of cultural attitudes toward life and the human body: from Melanesian origin myths to the human genome project; from the first autopsies to cloning and genetic manipulation; from early body snatchings to the trade in bodies and body parts in the global economy. The question of what constitutes life is subject to controversy, and how it is answered is informed by cultural differences in practices, knowledge, and beliefs. This course aims to help students develop a sophisticated and informed attitude towards cultural difference.

    HSA Course Areas: Anthropology; Science, Technology, & Society

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • ANTH111 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: de Laet

    Description: An introduction to science and technology as cultural phenomena and a hands-on initiation into anthropology. While applying basic anthropological methods in the academic environment, students gain an understanding of science and technology as a culturally, socially, and historically specific way of constructing knowledge. In other words, rather than taking for granted the ways in which we make knowledge, this course renders those ways of knowledge-making "strange."

    HSA Course Areas: Anthropology; Science, Technology, & Society

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • ANTH115 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: de Laet

    Description: "The wings of the butterfly—that cause the hurricane at the other end of the earth—aren't guilty, right? ... no one is." "Just the opposite," replies Faulques. "We are all a part of the monster that moves us around the chessboard." As Faulques—the painter/ war-photographer protagonist in Perez-Reverte's novel The Painter of Battles—sees it, war and destruction and their attendant personal horrors are more ordinary, more typical of human beings than peace and civil order. But while chaos has its own rules and symmetries and nothing is coincidental or happens by chance, as spectators we are complicit in the occurrences of violent upheaval about which we read each day in The New York Times. We will investigate this premise. How do we explain war; what is it for? What does war do to us—distant or not-so-distant spectators—and to others—willing or unwilling participants? Is war endemic to the human condition? Is it a necessary evil? Does it emerge from psychologi­cal and irrational "drives," or from economic, rational considerations? If we have a talent for war, do we have a talent for peace?

    HSA Course Area: Anthropology

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • ANTH134 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: de Laet

    Offered: Offered alternate years

    Description: What does it mean to be rational? Does it mean anything, to say that you are thinking rationally? This seminar takes an anthropological approach to knowledge and knowledge-making practices; it explores connections between rationality and culture. We will ask how and where, in which kinds of practices, "scientific rationality"—as we will call it for the moment—is "located." What is it about this kind of rationality that is so compel­ling? Are other kinds of rationalities thinkable, possible, or plausible? Are such other kinds of rationalities perhaps "at work" even as we speak, in parallel with, or embedded in, the ways in which scientists make knowledge? To answer these questions, we will examine objectivity and calculatory logic—the elements of "scientific rationality." Are objectivity and logic perhaps values as much as they are practices? We will then mine the anthropological literature for alternate logics than the ones we take for granted, examining magical thinking, belief, and indigenous practices that define for "us" what is "irrational." Are such practices perhaps less irrational than we assume them to be? Finally, we will take on actual scientific practices of knowledge-making, empirically and anthropologically. We may assume that rationality as we know it imbues such practices. But are they perhaps informed by alternate logics as well? Here is where subjectivity and affect come into our picture of what scientific practices are made of; we will try to give such alternate values a place in how the bodies that "do" science act, think and make knowledge.

    Prerequisites: Any introductory course in anthropology or any introductory course in science, technology, and society

    HSA Course Areas: Anthropology; Science, Technology, & Society

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

Art

  • ART002 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Fandell

    Description: This class is an experimental lecture style art making/art history hybrid course. Lectures will focus on art practices of the last 120 years. Students will create unconventional art projects (not papers) in response to the course material and partake in massive public pop-up exhibitions and interventions throughout the Harvey Mudd College campus.

    HSA Course Area: Art

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • ART033 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Fandell

    Description: Approaching the medium from an artistic perspective, students will explore a variety of photographic concepts and techniques. This course emphasizes seeing, thinking, and creat­ing with a critical mind and eye to provide understanding of the construction and manipula­tion of photographic form and meaning. The fundamentals of camera controls are covered. Students will explore everything from early photographic tools and processes to modern cameras and software as equally legitimate tools for creating art. Assignments, lectures, readings, and excursions will build on each other to provide students with an overview of the history and contemporary practice of photography. $150 course fee.

    HSA Course Area: Art

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • ART060 HM

    Credits: 1.5

    Instructor: Groves

    Description: This workshop introduces students to the basic vocabulary and practices of typeset­ting, typography, and printing for and on an iron hand press. Work includes a skill-building project and a student-designed semester project.

    HSA Course Area: Art

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • ART188 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Fandell

    Description: Embracing the contemporary idea that art is not grounded in technique or medium but driven by concepts, this course emphasizes thinking and creating within a context of historical and theoretical concerns. Students will be challenged to re-contextualize skills they already have to address questions central to twentieth and twenty-first century art making. They will be expected to work beyond traditional labels such as painting, sculpture, photog­raphy, etc. and use unexpected processes, picking those which are best suited to their ideas and push the envelope as to what is considered art.

    HSA Course Area: Art

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

Art History

  • ARHI131 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Fandell

    Description: This course explores how photographic landscape imagery has shaped our experience and ideas of the land. Examining work dating back to the invention of the medium in 1839 to contemporary artists to NASA's Mars Rover images, we will consider how photographic imagery documents and determines the topography around us.

    HSA Course Area: Art History

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

Asian American Studies

  • ASAM086 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Staff

    Description: Viewing of films and other documentary forms by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) for critique and discussion. Basic instruction in use of digital video technology to document social issues relevant to Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. Community-project. 

    HSA Course Areas: Asian American Studies; Media Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: See your HSA advisor

  • ASAM111 AA

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Staff

    Description: This course will explore various topics within Indigenous education. Through a variety of mixed methods, this seminar will examine previous and current educational policy and its effects on diverse Indigenous peoples. It will also examine education as a tool for empowerment, resistance, and healing within varied Indigenous communities. Course topics covered include: Native/Indigenous epistemology, decolonizing methodologies, settler colonialism, cultural reclamation, and critical pedagogy. In addition to the course materials, students will engage in service learning by partnering with the Saturday Tongan Education Program (STEP). Participating in STEP will allow students to actively participate in an Indigenous educational initiative that directly relates to the course content and discussions.

    HSA Course Area: Asian American Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: See your HSA advisor

  • ASAM123 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Flores

    Offered: Spring

    Description: Life writing provides an opportunity to learn about history and its connection to the present. Utilizing the concept of Native survival, this course will examine the history and culture of Pacific Islanders through life writing that includes autobiography, biography, comics, graphic novels, and memoirs. Some of the main themes for this course include colonialism, diaspora, gender, indigeneity, race, trauma, violence, and war. Class discussions, lectures, film screenings, and readings constitute the interpretive lens for this course.

    HSA Course Area: Asian American Studies

  • ASAM124 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Flores

    Offered: Spring

    Description: This interdisciplinary historical course will introduce students to a variety of concepts, methods, and theories in Pacific Islander Studies through recently published articles and books. Students will have the opportunity to engage these works and learn how they are shaping the field of Pacific Islander Studies. This course will stretch across a broad time period and include themes such as climate change, colonialism, diaspora, environmentalism, gender, indigeneity, labor, law, militarization, oral history, and war.

    HSA Course Area: Asian American Studies

  • ASAM125 AA

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Flores

    Description: This survey course examines the history of Asian immigrant groups and their American-born descendants as they have settled and adjusted to life in the United States since 1850.  We will explore issues such as the experience of immigration, daily life in urban ethnic enclaves, and racist campaigns against Asian immigrants.  In addition, this course utilizes an ethnic studies framework that requires students to critically explore other themes such as class, community, empire, gender, labor, race, sexuality, settler colonialism, and war from the perspective of Asian Americans.

    HSA Course Areas: American Studies; Asian American Studies; History

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • ASAM126 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Flores

    Description: This course introduces students to the native/indigenous histories of Oceania with an emphasis on Aotearoa (New Zealand), Guahan (Guam), Hawai'i, the Marshall Islands, Samoa, and Tonga. These places will expose students to the global and local histories of colonialism, climate change, diaspora, empire, indigenous land and ocean stewardship, migration, militarization, nuclear testing, and tourism. In addition, this course critically explores other related themes such as environmentalism, gender, labor, race, sexuality, and war from the perspectives of Native Pacific Islanders.

    HSA Course Areas: American Studies; Asian American Studies; History

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • ASAM134 AA

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Staff

    Description: This course looks at the historical, cultural, social, and political issues which confront the South Asian American community today. Issues such as citizenship and transnational experiences, minoritization, economic opportunity, cultural and religious maintenance and adaptation, changes in family structure, gender roles, and generational shifts are explored

    HSA Course Area: Asian American Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: See your HSA advisor

  • ASAM150 AA

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Staff

    Description: Survey of contemporary empirical studies focusing on Asian American experiences in the U.S. and globally; major themes include race, class, gender, sexuality, marriage/family, education, consumption, childhoods, aging, demography and the rise of transmigration. Readings and other course materials will primarily focus on the period since 1965.

    HSA Course Areas: American Studies; Asian American Studies; Sociology

    HSA Writing Intensive: See your HSA advisor

Economics

  • ECON053 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Staff

    Description: An introductory course designed to provide a fundamental understanding of the national economy. Topics include theories of unemployment, growth, inflation, income distribution, consumption, savings, investment, and finance markets, and the historical evolution of economic institutions and macroeconomic ideas.

    HSA Course Area: Economics

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • ECON054 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Sullivan

    Description: Provides methods of investigating the individual behavior of people, businesses, and governments in a market environment. Topics include elementary models of human economic behavior and resource allocation, and the evolution of market institutions and their impact upon society.

    HSA Course Area: Economics

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • ECON153 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Staff

    Description: A reexamination of the principles of macroeconomics at a more advanced level. The use of formal models for macroeconomic analysis and application to topical problems.

    Prerequisites: ECON053 HMECON054 HM is recommended

    HSA Course Area: Economics

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • ECON154 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Staff

    Description: An advanced treatment of micro-economic theory using formal mathematical models for analysis. Optimization models of human behavior and resource use in a market environment are developed, analyzed, and applied to a topical economic allocation problem.

    Prerequisites: ECON054 HM 

    HSA Course Area: Economics

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

Environmental Analysis

  • EA010 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Staff

    Description: This course examines the history of environmental change, the environmental ramifications of economic and technological decisions, the impact of personal choices, and the need to evaluate environmental arguments critically. We will delve into questions such as: What is nature? How have ideas about nature varied across time and across different cultures? How have those ideas about nature influenced interactions with environments? Why doesn't everyone have access to a clean and safe environment?

    HSA Course Area: Environmental Analysis

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • EA174 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Groves

    Description: This course explores the complex network of urban communities in which we live in order that we might think more deeply about the relationship of the built to the natural environment. To complicate our conceptions of Los Angeles, we consider the city's history and infrastructure and examine the social stresses and environmental pressures that result from planning decisions. We also focus on Southern California architecture and design as a profound expression of the relationship between the built and the natural, including new urbanism and the maturation of green design. As a required experiential component, the course features a substantial number of Saturday field trips.

    HSA Course Area: Environmental Analysis

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

Geography

  • GEOG105 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Seitz

    Description: This course introduces students to social and cultural approaches to space and spatiality. It explores how cultural geography can open up understandings of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other modes of social difference and power. The course critically engages a number of key concepts – space, place, scale, intersectionality, performativity, and orientalism - in leading intellectual debates about place, power, and difference. It will help students develop an awareness of how processes of identity and community formation are inherently spatial, and the significance of the work of social and cultural cultural geographers to political and intellectual struggles around difference.

    HSA Course Areas: American Studies; Geography; Gender Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • GEOG125 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Seitz

    Description: This course examines the uneven geographical distribution of disease and health, the spatial, social, and political processes that shape that uneven distribution, and some of the ways in which differently marginalized people contest health inequalities and the power relations that generate them. The course introduces a set of core concepts and theories around economic, racial, environmental and reproductive (in)justice, which help to put disease and health into geographical, historical, and political-economic context. It also introduces some of the health justice movements that have sought to address these concerns.

    HSA Course Areas: American Studies; Geography; Gender Studies; Science, Technology, & Society

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • GEOG165 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Seitz

    Offered: Fall & spring

    Description: To remark that the spaces in which education takes place are changing is to state the obvious. But what histories and geographies of education do today's transformations inherit, compound, transmit, reproduce, and interrupt? Education has uneven geographies. Schools have varied, contradictory and competing aims and uneven access to power and resources, and so do the people who work at and study within them. Why? Drawing on human geography, anthropology, history, sociology, and American studies, this course investigates how the geographies of education both express and contest the contradictions of capitalism and white supremacy. It offers students an opportunity to critically investigate the social and political functions of formal and informal institutions of education. Further, it invites students to bring this wide-ranging investigation back to the politics, economics, and geographies of the Claremont Colleges, as well as to their own future spaces of education and educational labor.

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • GEOG175 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Seitz

    Description: What is work? How is work socially and spatially organized? How are these forms of spatial organization struggled over and transformed? Who performs what kind of work? Where? Why? This course introduces students to some of the leading critical approaches to the geographies of labor, including Marxist political economy and feminist, critical-race, anticolonial and queer theories. This course investigates a number of contemporary shifts in the organization of work, including the rise of neoliberalism, deindustrialization, the feminization of the paid labor force, the prevalence of precarious work, contemporary forms of labor migration, and the expansion of prison labor. Locating these shifts in the longer histories and geographies of unfree labor, students will examine some of the ways in which workers have used their labor as a departure point for collective action, including unionization, work refusals, and struggles over social reproduction.

    HSA Course Areas: American Studies; Geography; Gender Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • GEOG195 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Seitz

    Offered: Fall, alternating years

    Description: Frequently gestured to, scrutinized, and debated, the promise of solidarity among (differently) marginalized, oppressed, and exploited people has long and contested histories in progressive social movements challenging inequalities of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This course stems from the wager that debates over solidarity become most productive and informative when solidarity is both theorized and contextualized. This course follows geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore's insight that freedom is a place to examine solidarity as a place. What are the historical, geographical, political-economic, and affective conditions under which solidarities become possible and are enacted?

    HSA Course Areas: American Studies; Geography

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

History

  • HIST081 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Hamilton

    Description: We will read works of natural philosophy from the 16th and 17th centuries, including selections by Vesalius, Copernicus, Galileo, Boyle, and Newton, individuals who have often been cast as crucial contributors to "The Scientific Revolution." Engaging with historians who debate the merits of this term, we will ask whether it is possible to unite these figures and the changes they represent into one coherent intellectual and social movement.

    HSA Course Areas: History; Science, Technology, & Society

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • HIST082 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Hamilton

    Description: An examination of several important episodes in the history of chemistry, biology, physics, and medicine from the late 18th to mid-20th centuries. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which new scientific theories have been developed and evaluated, to the impact of cultural beliefs about gender and race on science, and to fundamental debates within science and medicine about what counts as good evidence and proper methodology.

    HSA Course Areas: History; Science, Technology, & Society

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • HIST127 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Staff

    Description: An analysis of U.S. history from the Progressive Era to the present, with particular em­phasis on social, economic, and cultural developments and their relationships to political change.

    HSA Course Areas: American Studies; History

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • HIST150 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Hamilton

    Description: This course explores the increasingly technological nature of medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries, investigating the impact of new technologies on diagnostic practices, categories of disease, doctors' professional identities, and patients' understanding of their own bodies. Technologies studied include the stethoscope, electrotherapy devices, X-rays, ultrasound, and MRI.

    HSA Course Areas: History; Science, Technology, & Society

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • HIST151 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Hamilton

    Description: In this course, we will explore fictional texts as historical documents. Together, we will read novels from the 19th and 20th centuries in which the practice of science is central to the story being told, asking what each text reveals about cultural attitudes towards science in that time period. In addition, each student will pursue a historical research project centered on a fictional source of their choice.

    HSA Course Areas: History; Science, Technology, & Society

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • HIST152 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Hamilton

    Description: An examination of the cultural and social worlds of physics in the 19th and 20th centuries. Topics include the relationship of experiment to theory, the development of relativity and quantum mechanics, and the role of physicists in the atomic bomb project. We will consider how structures of race, gender and colonization have shaped contributions to modern physics.

    Prerequisites: One college-level course in physics.

    HSA Course Areas: History; Science, Technology, & Society

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts

  • HSA010 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Staff

    Offered: Spring

    Description: This seminar course introduces students to inquiry, writing, and research in HSA, through focused exploration of a particular topic selected by the instructor in each section. To encourage reflection on the place of HSA within the Harvey Mudd curriculum, the course begins with a brief unit on the history and aims of liberal arts education. Writing assignments include a sub­stantial research paper on a topic of interest chosen by the student in consultation with their instructor. The course ends with student research presentations in each section, followed by a Presentations Days event featuring the best presentations from across all sections.

    Corequisites: WRIT001E HM may serve as a co-requisite

Literature

  • LIT035 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Plascencia

    Offered: Fall and spring

    Description: This course is designed as an introductory workshop focusing on the writing of fiction and the discourse of craft. Through the examination of a variety of literary traditions, stylistic and compositional approaches, and the careful reading and editing of peer stories, students will strengthen their prose and develop a clearer understanding of their own literary values and the dynamics of fiction.

    HSA Course Area: Literature

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • LIT104 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Groves

    Description: A course for students interested in developing a basic ability to translate and pronounce Middle English. Works studied will include: the first fragment of Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales"; "Sir Orfeo"; "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"; and selections from Malory's "Le Morte D'Arthur."

    HSA Course Area: Literature

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • LIT107 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Groves

    Offered: Fall, alternate years

    Description: In this course, we study what poetry is and how it is used in the world. Neither strictly canonical nor historical in approach, this course introduces students to a wide range of English-language poems, most of them from the last two centuries. In most weeks throughout the semester, we focus on one or two primary poems (fourteen primary poems in all), with the support of companion poems that provide context. This course is writing intensive.

    HSA Course Area: Literature

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • LIT110 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Dadabhoy

    Description: Covers selected dramatic and lyric works by Shakespeare with some attention to other Elizabethan and Jacobean writers. Final project: a public performance of a Shakespeare play.

    HSA Course Area: Literature

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • LIT112 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Dadabhoy

    Offered: Fall

    Description: This course will approach Shakespeare's plays through contemporary social and cultural issues. We will explore and challenge the notion of Shakespeare's universality, to understand how and why this writer and his work continues to resonate with us today. Themes that we might explore in any given semester include: #MeToo, Social Justice, Imperialism and Colonialism, and Global Shakespeare. The final project for this course will engage with "public humanities," by creating either a zine, submitting writing to a blog, or creating a course conference. The topic will change/rotate every time it is offered.

    HSA Course Area: Literature

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • LIT117A HM

    Credits: 4

    Instructors: Groves, Eckert

    Offered: Fall and winter break

    Description: An intensive study of the work and literary development of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. Readings drawn from the authors' works and related critical, biographi­cal, and historical texts. Class travels to England over winter break; travel expenses are the responsibility of the student.

    Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.

    HSA Course Area: Literature

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • LIT141 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Dadabhoy

    Description: Our culture is fascinated by things that are weird, strange, horrifying, and grotesque. In other words, we're fascinated by monsters, those others that stand at the margins of human, civilized society, threatening us by their very existence. Are monsters only very scary things, or do they have a social and cultural function? In this course we will take up this and other questions as we investigate the nature of the monstrous. Moreover, we will explore the libidinal charge that the recognition of the monstrous or unnatural being evokes. Thus, we will examine both the physical and psychological permutations of monstrosity. In this course, we will consider monsters in their non-human, alien, and technological forms as well as some truly terrifying human monsters.

    HSA Course Area: Literature

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • LIT144 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Balseiro

    Description: A consideration of Poe's influence on the development of the fantastic short story in Latin America. Topics include: Poe's reception in Europe and in the Southern Cone, Poe's influence in the literature of magic realism in 20th-century Latin America.

    HSA Course Areas: Latin American Studies; Literature

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • LIT145 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Balseiro

    Description: Focuses on the relationships between gender and identity in the writings of Third-World women as well as theoretical background on Third-World feminisms. Authors include Nawal El Saadawi, Alifa Rifaat, Mariama Ba, Bessie Head, Ana Lydia Vega, and Jamaica Kincaid.

    HSA Course Areas: Literature; Gender Studies; Africana Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • LIT146 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Balseiro

    Description: An introduction to the interactions between literature, politics, and history in 20th-century South Africa. Readings include drama, poetry, fiction, and biography, and viewings include several films and documentaries.

    HSA Course Areas: Literature; Africana Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • LIT147 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Balseiro

    Description: An examination of the themes of nation, exile, race, and gender in works by Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ayi Jwei Armah, Yusuf Idriss, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Nadine Gordimer, George Lamming, Jean Rhys, and Rosario Ferre, among others. Theoretical background on postcolonial literature will also be covered.

    HSA Course Areas: Africana Studies; Latin American Studies; Literature

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • LIT155 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Balseiro

    Description: This seminar maps the literary terrain of contemporary South Africa. Through an examination of prose, poetry, and visual material, this course offers some of the responses writers have given to the end of apartheid, to major social events such as the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and to the idea of a "new" South Africa.

    HSA Course Areas: Africana Studies; Literature

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • LIT156 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Balseiro

    Description: This seminar is designed to introduce students to the foreignness of language through literary translation theory and its praxis. Participants will develop individual projects that will be revised and workshopped over the course of the semester. Weekly readings, including essays by theoreticians, accomplished writer-translators, and selections of multiple translations of a single text, will be used to familiarize students with a range of perspectives on translation and its relationship to writing. 

    Prerequisites: Students must have reading knowledge of at least one foreign language

    HSA Course Areas: Literature; Linguistics; Foreign Languages

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • LIT158 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Balseiro

    Offered: Spring

    Description: This seminar is designed to introduce students to Zora Neale Hurston as an ethnographer and fiction writer. Hurston was the first African American woman to graduate from Barnard College. Born in the South, highly educated in the North, a luminary amongst the talents of the Harlem Renaissance, and buried in an unmarked grave in her native Florida, Hurston's writing and life offer a unique view onto notions of race, gender, art, and class in the aftermath of Reconstruction that reverberate to this day.

    HSA Course Areas: Africana Studies; American Studies; Anthropology; Gender Studies; Literature

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

Media Studies

  • MS120 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Mayeri

    Description: This course will examine representations of animals in film - wildlife documentaries, animated features, critter cams, scientific data, and video art - to address fundamental questions about human and animal nature and culture. Animal Studies is an interdisciplinary field in which scholars from philosophy, biology, media studies, and literature consider the subjective lives of animals, the representations of animals in media and literature, and the shifting boundary line between human and animal. In readings, screenings, and discussions, we will consider the cultural and material lives of humans and animals through the lenses of science, art, literature, and film. 

    HSA Course Areas: Media Studies; Science, Technology, & Society

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • MS127 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Alves

    Description: New technology has created exciting new opportunities in the arts of abstract film, video, and computer animation. This course will explore theories of abstraction from music into the visual arts and film, analyzing the works of such pioneers as Oskar Fischinger and John Whitney. Students will create their own computer images and animations of "visual music."

    HSA Course Area: Media Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • MS170 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Mayeri

    Description: Intermediate/advanced video course, exploring the creative potential of digital video techniques, such as compositing, animation, and motion graphics. Students develop digital projects and participate in critiques. Lectures, discussions, and screenings enhance students' exposure to art and cinema. $75 course fee.

    Prerequisites: MS182 HM 

    HSA Course Areas: Art; Media Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • MS172 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Balseiro

    Description: Emerging in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, the notion of Third Cinema takes its inspiration from the Cuban revolution and from Brazil's Cinema Novo. Third Cinema is the art of political film making and represents an alternative cinematic practice to that offered by mainstream film industries. Explores the aesthetics of film making from a revolutionary consciousness in three regions: Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

    HSA Course Areas: Latin American Studies; Literature; Media Studies; Africana Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • MS173 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Balseiro

    Description: A thematic and formal study of the range of cinematic responses to the experience of exile. Exile is an event, but how does it come about and what are its ramifications? Exile happens to individuals but also to collectivities. How does it effect a change between the self and society, homeland and site of displacement, mother tongue and acquired language? This course examines how filmmakers take on an often painful historical process through creativity. Among the authors to read are Aime Cesaire, Edward Said, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, Med Hondo, and Hamid Naficy; films to be viewed focus on Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

    HSA Course Areas: Africana Studies; Latin American Studies; Literature; Media Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • MS182 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Mayeri

    Description: This course is an introduction to video art through history, theory, analysis and production. The goal for this class is for students to produce meaningful, creative, expressive, innovative media for an intelligent and broad audience. In order to achieve this goal students will learn the fundamentals of video production in labs, critiques, and exercises: conceptualizing, planning, shooting, sound recording, editing and analysis. Students will also learn - through readings and discussions - about pioneers and contemporary practitioners of video art. $75 course fee.

    Prerequisites: MS 049 PO or MS 049 PZ or MS 049 SC or MS  051  PO or MS  051  PZ or MS  051  SC or LIT 130  CM

    HSA Course Areas: Art; Media Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

Music

  • MUS003 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructors: Alves, Cubek, Kamm

    Description: This course covers the basics of theory, notation, and composition of music of the European tradition. It is largely a skills based course, intended to give students tools to help achieve creative goals such as composing, reading music in performance, or analyzing scores. It is a prerequisite to more advanced music theory courses, such as MUS 101 at Scripps College and MUS 80 at Pomona College. No previous musical experience is required. Carries departmental credit when taught by Alves, Cubek, or Kamm.

    HSA Course Area: Music

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • MUS046 HM

    Credit: 1

    Instructor: Alves

    Description: Performance of music of European Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music on instruments of the period. Students will be expected to learn Baroque recorder but may play other instruments as well. Prerequisite: ability to read music.

    HSA Course Area: Music

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • MUS048 HM

    Credit: 1

    Instructor: Alves

    Description: Rehearsal and performance of new and recent compositions for synthesizers and other instruments. Instrumentation and musical styles may vary. Though some synthesizers may be provided, in most cases students will be expected to own their own instruments.

    Prerequisites: Ability to play an instrument and read music; Audition may be required for instructor permission

    HSA Course Area: Music

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • MUS049 HM

    Credit: 1

    Instructor: Alves

    Description: Rehearsal and performance of new compositions for instruments adapted from the gamelan, a Javanese orchestra of metallophones and gongs. No prior experience on these instruments is required.

    Prerequisites: Ability to read music; approval of instructor

    HSA Course Area: Music

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • MUS063 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Alves

    Description: The fundamentals of music and listening through a survey of traditional music around the world as well as cross-cultural influences. Neither an ability to read music nor any other background in music is required.

    HSA Course Area: Music

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • MUS067 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Alves

    Description: An exploration of the history and aesthetics of the use of music in cinema, primarily the Hollywood film from the so-called silent era to the present. (We will not cover musicals, documentaries, or short films.) The course will include the development of skills of listening analysis and writing about music in the context of narrative film. No background in music or film history is required.

    HSA Course Areas: Media Studies; Music

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • MUS081 JM

    Credits: 3

    Instructors: Alves, Cubek, Kamm

    Description: This course explores important works of Western art music from diverse historical epochs through listening and analysis. Elements of music, basic musical terminol­ogy, and notation are discussed. Attention is given to the relation of the arts—especially music—to culture and society. Carries departmental credit when taught by Alves, Cubek, or Kamm.

    HSA Course Area: Music

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • MUS088 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Alves

    Description: The basics of using software on a general purpose computer to synthesize and manipu­late digital sounds. Neither a background in music nor the ability to read music is required. A background in computers is helpful but not required.

    HSA Course Area: Music

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • MUS104 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructors: Alves, Cubek, Kamm

    Description: An investigation of contemporary music through performances, analyses, recordings, and discussions of representative compositions from late Romanticism and such 20th-century styles as Neo-classicism, Serialism and Minimalism, as well as aleatoric and electronic techniques. Offered in conjunction with the Joint Music Program. Carries departmental credit when taught by Alves, Cubek, or Kamm.

    Prerequisites: The ability to read music

    HSA Course Area: Music

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • MUS118 SC

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Kamm

    Description: A survey of the history and development of music in the United States, this course will examine the diverse musical cultures and traditions, including European, African, Latin American, Native American, Asian, and others that have come to this country and have influenced the works of musicians and composers in the United States. Musical examples from American popular culture (jazz, rock, country, and pop), from religious services and practices of various denominations and sects, from ethnic groups and folk cultures within the United States and from art music in the United States will be studied as expressions of important concerns and values in our society, and as influences on music in other countries as well. Carries departmental credit when taught by Kamm.

    HSA Course Area: Music

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • MUS132 SC

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Kamm

    Description: A seminar studying Igor Stravinsky's life and his ballets, other instrumental music, and vocal music. Study of Russia at the turn of the 20th century, Paris in the early 20th century, ballet, and other arts contextualizes Stravinsky's music. The course includes frequent student presentations on topics and works. Carries departmental credit when taught by Kamm. 

    HSA Course Area: Music

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • MUS173 JM

    Credit: 1

    Instructor: Kamm.

    Offered: Both semesters; joint offering of cmc, hmc, pitzer, and scripps

    Description: A study through rehearsal and performance of choral music selected from the 16th century to the present, with emphasis on larger, major works. Singers will be invited to register after a successful audition. Singers continuing from the previous semester need not reaudition. Carries departmental credit when taught by Kamm. 

    Prerequisites: Successful audition

    HSA Course Area: Music

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • MUS175 JM

    Credit: 1

    Instructor: Cubek

    Offered: Both semesters; joint offering of cmc, hmc, pitzer, and scripps

    Description: The study, through lecture, discussion, rehearsal, and performance, of styles and techniques appropriate for the historically accurate performance of instrumental works intended for the orchestra. Repertoire will include works from the mid-18th century to the present with special emphasis on the Classical and Romantic periods. Class enrollment permitted only after successful audition. Carries departmental credit when taught by Cubek. 

    Prerequisites: Successful audition

    HSA Course Area: Music

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • MUS176 JM

    Credit: 1

    Instructors: Alves, Cubek, Kamm

    Offered: Both semesters; joint offering of cmc, hmc, pitzer, and scripps

    Description: A study through rehearsal and performance of choral music for soprano and alto voices selected from the 14th century to the present. Singers will be invited to register after a successful audition. Singers continuing from the previous semester need not audition. Carries departmental credit when taught by Alves, Cubek, or Kamm. 

    Prerequisites: Successful audition

    HSA Course Area: Music

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

Philosophy

  • PHIL108 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Wright

    Description: An introduction to philosophy covering representative issues in epistemology, the metaphysics of human nature, and theory of value. Readings are drawn from historical and contemporary sources.

    HSA Course Area: Philosophy

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • PHIL111 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Staff

    Offered: Spring

    Description: To what extent is philosophy grounded on or informed by empirical observation and experimentation? To what extent ought it be so? To explore these questions, this course will make stops at important moments in the history of philosophy—such as Descartes' armchair philosophizing and Carol Gilligan's interviewing women about morality—on its way to the present movement called "experimental philosophy," wherein philosophers conduct experiments similar to those in cognitive and social science in order to address philosophical questions. Students will learn how philosophers think about intuitions and the roles they play in grounding and challenging theories in ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, etc. In addition, students will explore important intersections between philosophy and science, such as the emergence of neurophilosophy and moral psychology in the 20th century. The armchair isn't going anywhere, but neither is the question of which methods of inquiry, namely those empirically informed, are part of the philosopher's toolkit in addressing diverse questions about mind, knowledge, and morality.

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • PHIL121 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Wright

    Description: A survey of contemporary philosophical thinking about morality, emphasizing how metaethical inquiry into the nature of "goodness," "virtue" and "moral obligation" can inform normative inquiry into what is good and how to live. Attention is given throughout the course to the application of particular normative theories to personal decision-making and to contemporary social and political questions.

    HSA Course Area: Philosophy

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • PHIL122 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Wright

    Description: A comparative study of ethical theories from ancient Greek, Chinese, and Roman philosophy and from modern European and Africana philosophy.  Figures studied may include Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Mozi, Mengzi, Epictetus, Zera Yacob, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and/or others.  The course emphasizes ways in which philosophical accounts of the nature of goodness, obligation, and virtue shape conceptions of the ethical person and the ethical life.

    HSA Course Area: Philosophy

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • PHIL124 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Wright

    Description: A study of historical and contemporary arguments for the harmony of morality and enlightened self-interest, along with some of the main challenges raised against such arguments by their critics. Reading assignments may include selections from Plato, Aristotle, Sidgwick, Prichard, Ayn Rand, Rosalind Hursthouse, Derek Parfit, David Gauthier, and others.

    HSA Course Area: Philosophy

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • PHIL125 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Wright

    Description: After briefly exploring concepts and theories in normative ethics, this course examines a representative set of ethical issues confronting researchers and practitioners in the natural and formal sciences and in engineering. Issues covered will vary but may include animal experimentation, genetic engineering, internet privacy, the responsibility of engineers to foresee and prevent harm and others.

    HSA Course Areas: Philosophy; Science, Technology, & Society

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • PHIL129 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Wright

    Offered: Spring

    Description: After a brief introduction to some of the main theoretical approaches in moral and political philosophy, and to some key principles of argument analysis, this course will explore philosophical debates on a set of moral-political issues of current concern. Topics will include drug laws; immigration; the ethics of abortion; torture and the ethics of war; the nature of racism and sexism; and religious exemption laws. We will also spend one class period looking at how we might contribute to improving the caliber of public discourse on contentious moral-political issues. Throughout the course we will work to understand how different theoretical orientations lead to different modes of analysis on particular issues, and how the issues themselves are often linked.

    HSA Course Area: Philosophy

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • PHIL130 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Wright

    Description: The major traditions of political thought from antiquity to the present, with emphasis on the modern era, including natural rights theory, social contract theory, political individualism and its critics, the twentieth-century transformation of political liberalism, and the underpinnings of contemporary conservatism.

    HSA Course Area: Philosophy

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • PHIL138 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Wright

    Offered: Spring

    Description: "Libertarianism" and "classical liberalism" have become standard, if somewhat ambiguous, designations for a variety of political views that advocate a constrained role for the state, geared primarily or exclusively to protecting individuals from force and fraud (or that challenge the need for any state). Whatever their similarities, however, such views harbor important (and arguably fundamental) differences, including in the sorts of normative arguments they rely on; in their conceptions of and attitudes toward law and of the state; in the political role they assign to public justification and deliberation; and in various specific policy prescriptions. This course takes a comparative, critical look at several important statements of classical liberal and libertarian positions by philosophers and social theorists, and at the ways in which these theorists sometimes distance themselves from one another. In some semesters, the course will also consider left-libertarian views that fuse a commitment to self-ownership with egalitarian commitments. Authors may include Richard Epstein, Friedrich Hayek, Chandran Kukathas, Robert Nozick, Michael Otsuka, Ayn Rand, and/or others.

    HSA Course Area: Philosophy

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

Political Studies

  • POST114 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Steinberg

    Description: An examination of the political challenges faced by environmental advocates in diverse countries around the globe. Drawing on the fields of comparative politics and public policy, topics include comparative political institutions, environmental movements, corrup­tion, authoritarian regimes, democratization, lesson-learning across borders, policy reform, gender analysis, decentralization, and European unification.

    HSA Course Areas: Environmental Analysis; Political Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • POST140 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Steinberg

    Description: Analyzes the political dynamics driving global environmental problems and current attempts to address them. Concepts from political science and public policy are applied to issues such as ozone depletion, climate change, trade in endangered species, treaty formation and effectiveness, transnational activism, and multi-level governance.

    HSA Course Areas: Environmental Analysis; Political Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • POST168 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Steinberg

    Offered: Spring, alternate years

    Description: This course explores the challenge of creating bike-friendly cities, using bicycle transportation as a window into broader themes surrounding the politics of social change in urban/ suburban settings. The course combines community engagement with an introduction to relevant research literatures. Each week we will ride along bike routes in the surrounding cities of Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, meeting with community leaders.

    HSA Course Areas: Environmental Analysis; Political Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • POST188 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Steinberg

    Description: Under what conditions do novel political ideas become realities? This course explores the origins and impacts of political innovations large and small—from the framing of the Constitution to the development of major social policies, the creation and reform of government agencies and non-profit organizations, and experimentation with new forms of social protest and political mobilization.

    HSA Course Area: Political Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

Psychology

  • PSYC053 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Staff

    Description: An introduction to the field of psychology with a special emphasis on overarching themes and methodologies employed in the discipline.

    HSA Course Area: Psychology

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • PSYC108 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Gampa

    Description: Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and behaviors are influenced by other people, imagined or real, and the world around them. We will begin the course by covering the basics of scientific methodology and proceed to topics such as the self-concept, stereotyping and prejudice, close relationships, aggression, persuasion, conformity and liberation psychology. In general, this course will introduce you to the theories and research methodologies of social psychology and how these are used to understand, predict, and even control social behavior, with special attention paid to connecting social psychology to liberation.

    HSA Course Area: Psychology

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • PSYC134 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Gampa

    Description: Students will critically analyze experimental social psychology by applying it to the study of human nature and genocide, by studying classical social psychology paradigms and experiments. Students will also engage with theories such as evolutionary psychology, cultural anthropology, Marxist psychology, and critical theory, allowing them to compare and contrast various ways of studying human behavior. In order to aid in this journey, the course will ask questions such as: What role does human nature play in genocide? Can human nature be discovered by the scientific method? Can evidence from experiments (such as Milgram) provide enough insight into why a person may, or may not, be capable of committing acts of genocide? Is human nature today the same as it was 15,000 years ago? Or, could genocide have happened 15,000 years ago? Satisfies the HMC HSA writing intensive requirement.

    HSA Course Area: Psychology

Religious Studies

  • RLST105 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Dyson

    Description: An exploration of American religious history from pre-colonial indigenous civiliza­tions through the present, focusing on three related issues: diversity, toleration, and plural­ism. The course asks how religions have shaped or been shaped by encounters between immigrants, citizens, indigenous peoples, tourists, and, occasionally, government agents. In relation to these encounters, the course considers how groups and individuals have claimed territory, negotiated meaning, understood each other and created institutions as they met one another in the American landscape. Attention is also given to questions of power, translation, and the changing definitions of religion itself.

    HSA Course Areas: History; Religious Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • RLST112 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Dyson

    Description: This advanced-level seminar uses case studies to explore what counts as religion in a variety of contexts: media, law, academia, economics, politics, etc. How do people recognize religion? What consequences are there for recognizing or denying the legitimacy of religious practices or beliefs? How is that legitimacy judged? How is it narrated? By approaching a few cases studies from multiple perspectives, students gain insight into how the lenses used to assess religion can enable, deepen, or limit understanding.

    HSA Course Area: Religious Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • RLST113 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Dyson

    Description: Course examines the relationships between science and religion in the United States from the early 19th century to the present. Starting with the Natural Theologians, who made science the "handmaid of theology" in the early Republic, we will move forward in time through the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species and Andrew Dickson White's subsequent declaration of a war between science and religion, into the 20th century with the Scopes trial and the rise of Creationism, the evolutionary synthesis, and finally the recent debates over the teaching of Intelligent Design in public schools.

    HSA Course Areas: History; Religious Studies; Science, Technology, & Society

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • RLST114 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Dyson

    Description: This course looks at American configurations of the End Times, including, but not limited to, the ending of the Mayan calendar in 2012, Ghost Dance religions, Y2K predic­tions, The Church Universal and Triumphant, Heaven's Gate, the Left Behind books and movies, and varied interpretations of the book of Revelation in the Christian Bible. Students taking this course will become familiar with various forms of American apocalyptic thinking as well as literature from "new religious movement" or "cult" scholarship in order to explore the enduring appeal of End Time scenarios and to question what makes these scenarios persuasive to individuals at varied points in American history.

    HSA Course Area: Religious Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • RLST147 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Dyson

    Description: What happens to religious practices and communities when they are transplanted to new terrain? Examples include the establishment of "old world" religious enclaves in the United States, New Age adoptions of "foreign" practices, American understandings of world religions, or the exportation of American or Americanized religion to other countries through missionaries, media, or returning immigrants. Considering exchange, conflict, adaptation, and innovation as multi-directional, and always historically and politically informed, the course looks at several historic and contemporary instances of religious border crossings.

    HSA Course Area: Religious Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • RLST168 HM

    Credits: 1.5

    Instructor: Dyson

    Description: The histories of social change activism are filled with individuals who understand their call to fight injustice, to work for community rights, or to alleviate suffering as grounded in their philosophical, religious, or spiritual practices.  In this course, students will combine community engagement work with their class work; learning about diverse thinkers and reformers, who have either found religious meaning in their activist or service work, or who have interpreted philosophy, doctrine, theology, or liturgy as demanding action from them.  Each semester, readings will be grouped around a particular theme such as: Engaged Buddhism; interfaith activism; violent vs. non-violent protest; the Direct Action years of the Civil Rights Movement; education as activism; theological and philosophical theories of justice; socialisms and social change; queer and Christian communities; and Hindu environmentalism. The class will meet once a week, every other week.

    Prerequisites: Instructor permission

    HSA Course Area: Religious Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: See your HSA advisor

  • RLST180 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Staff

    Offered: Alternating years at cmc, hmc, pomona, and scripps

    Description: Examines some current theoretical and methodological approaches to the academic study of religion.

    HSA Course Area: Religious Studies

    HSA Writing Intensive: See your HSA advisor

  • RLST183 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Dyson

    Description: An exploration of the interrelations between occult mediumship, modern media, and technology in Europe and the United States from the nineteenth-century through the present. The aim of the course is to explore how the Enlightenment and its offspring, modern technology, in their seemingly stark material and rational promises of progress, have never rid themselves fully of the paranormal and irrational. To explore the multiple relations between ghosts and the machines, topics for the course include: ghostly visions and magic lantern phatasmagoria; American spiritualism and the telegraph; phrenology and the rise of the archive; psychical research and stage magic; radio's disembodied voices; spirit photography and light therapies; psychic television; and magic on film.

    HSA Course Areas: American Studies; Religious Studies; Science, Technology, & Society

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

Science, Technology, and Society

  • STS010 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: de Laet

    Description: An introduction to the interactions among science, technology, and society. Examines the different concepts of rationality and the values that underlie scientific and technological endeavors as well as the centrality of value conflict in technological controversies.

    HSA Course Area: Science, Technology, & Society

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • STS114 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: de Laet

    Description: A seminar offered to students taking Clinic. Preparation of a major paper analyzing the ethical and/or social issues of the student's Clinic project or the product or application for which the project is a part. Reading assignments on the interaction between society and technology and case studies of specific examples.

    HSA Course Areas: Anthropology; Science, Technology, & Society

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

  • STS115 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Hamilton

    Description: This course will examine the ways in which science has been written, performed and displayed for non-specialist audiences from the early 19th century to today. Looking at different modes of communication including books, museum exhibits, newspapers, documentaries and science blogs, we will ask how boundaries have been drawn around professional science. What kinds of expectations have been shaped about who gets to be a scientist and about the nature of scientific knowledge? For the final project, students will create a work of popular science in a medium of their choosing.

    HSA Course Area: Science, Technology, & Society

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • STS150 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: de Laet

    Description: The human body is made of 60% water. But while this most essential of essentials – clean, clear water – is taken for granted by some, it is inaccessible to others; while it is life threatening by its scarcity in some places, it is dangerous by its abundance in others. While most of us give little thought to the availability, cleanliness, and flow of our drinking water, it is contested and its availability the product of politics and infrastructures. So, what's in your water? Where does it come from? How does it get to where it is used? What happens to it after? How does it shape and depend on community? Such questions are on our agenda. Technologies and cultures form each other: dams, dykes, and "polders"; hand water pumps, canals and aqueducts, irrigation systems, and draught mitigation, all "live" in specific cultural practices. The hidden systems – material and political – that bring water, take it away, and regulate its access, are the object of this course.

    HSA Course Area: Science, Technology, & Society

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • STS190 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Staff

    Description: Students read and discuss seminal and provocative works in STS. Each student conducts an independent project in an area of interest and competence. Open to seniors majoring in STS. Students with advanced preparation in STS may also enroll with instructor permission.

    HSA Course Area: Science, Technology, & Society

    HSA Writing Intensive: Yes

Social Sciences

  • SOSC140 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Sullivan

    Description: This course will examine a sample of human behaviors commonly seen as economic—including gift giving, pricing, and work ethics—from the perspectives of a variety of disciplines outside of economics. We will be particularly interested in cultural, social, and historical factors that influence human economic actions and interactions and will consider works by anthropologists, historians, sociologists, psychologists, artists, literary critics, and others. This course does not require any background in economic theory and is not designed to advance students within the standard micro/macro economic sequence.

    HSA Course Area: Social Science

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • SOSC150 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Steinberg

    Description: This course builds student speaking skills in three areas: communicating advanced topics in science and technology to non-specialists; speaking out on questions of politics and values; and engaging the intersection of the two through presentations on technically intensive social controversies.

    HSA Course Area: Social Science

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

  • SOSC180 HM

    Credits: 3

    Instructor: Steinberg

    Description: This course takes stock of the past two decades of social science research on tropical forests, examining the scale of deforestation, its causes and consequences, and the track record of attempted solutions. Special emphasis is placed on the ways in which values, institu­tions, and political-economic forces shape the decisions that will determine the fate of the forests.

    HSA Course Areas: Environmental Analysis; Social Science

    HSA Writing Intensive: No

Special Topics and Independent Study

  • HSA179 HM

    Credits: 1-3

    Instructor: Staff

    Description: Special topics courses—one-time or occasional course offerings—are designated with the number 179. They may be offered in any discipline within the humanities, social sciences, and the arts.

  • HSA197 HM

    Credits: 1-3

    Instructor: Staff

    Description: Students may arrange for independent study with individual faculty members in the humanities, social sciences and the arts, subject to their permission, in order to pursue particular interests that are not covered by regular courses. Independent study courses, designated with the number 197, may be taken in any discipline within the humanities, social sciences, and the arts. See the discussion of "Directed Reading/Independent Study Courses" in the "Academic Policies" section of this catalog for other restrictions.