Undergraduate Courses Fall 2025

AMST 0031 (10130) / WGSS 0031

Scott Herring

MW 2:30-3:45pm

Areas HU

Overview of LGBTQ cultures and their relation to geography in literature, history, film, visual culture, and ethnography. Discussion topics include the historical emergence of urban communities; their tensions and intersections with rural locales; race, sexuality, gender, and suburbanization; and artistic visions of queer and trans places within the city and without. Emphasis is on the wide variety of U.S. metropolitan environments and regions, including New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, the Deep South, Appalachia, New England, and the Pacific Northwest. Enrollment limited to first-year students. 

 

AMST 0097 (10873) / ER&M 0097

Quan Tran

Th 9:25am-11:15am

Areas SO

Exploration of the relationship between food, race, and migration in historical and contemporary United States contexts. Organized thematically and anchored in selected case studies, this course is comparative in scope and draws from contemporary work in the fields of food studies, ethnic studies, migration studies, American studies, anthropology, and history.

 

AMST 1197 (13355) / ARCH 2600 / HIST 1125 / HSAR 3219 / URBAN 1101

Elihu Rubin

TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

Areas HU

Introduction to the study of buildings, architects, architectural styles, and urban landscapes, viewed in their economic, political, social, and cultural contexts, from precolonial times to the present. Topics include: public and private investment in the built environment; the history of housing in America; the organization of architectural practice; race, gender, ethnicity and the right to the city; the social and political nature of city building; and the transnational nature of American architecture.

 

ANTH 2252 (11112) / RLST 3300 / SAST 3760

Instructor TBA

MW 11:35am-12:50pm

Areas HU, SO

This seminar explores why ‘placemaking’ is significant for practitioners of various religions worldwide. From the holy city of Mecca to the sacred landscape of Banaras in India, religious traditions are tethered to sacred geographies. These locations are often physical sites imbued with sacred energies and social meaning. Religious activities can occur in churches or mosques, forests or mountains, community centers, public squares, or homes. The course materials consider specific religious sites and contexts (including those on the Yale campus), examining how these places simultaneously become sites of worship, articulations of identity and heritage, claims of political significance, and hubs of social and emotional life. Special attention is given to how space and place are gendered, racialized, and shaped by emotions, senses, and memories.

 

ANTH 2275 (10862) / ARCG 2275 / ARCG 6375 / ANTH 6375

Richard Burger

W 1:30pm-3:20pm

Areas SO

Survey and seminar discussing the archaeology and ethnography of greater Amazonia, along with the political stakes of this heritage for modern Indigenous communities in the region. Introduces students to the varied geography and ecology of greater Amazonia, before delving into topics such as: the archaeological record of domestication and landscape investment by past Indigenous societies; the ethnographic and historical records of their descendants; the contested spheres of knowledge production in anthropology that underpins both of these records; and the modern political struggles that Indigenous communities face today amid deforestation and the pursuit of economic development.

 

ARCG 2345 (13012) / NELC 2430 / NELC 7430 / ARCG 6345

Gregory Marouard

TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

Areas HU

This lecture course introduces the archaeology of ancient Egypt, beginning with an overview of the environment, climate, and history of the discipline, as well as the new archaeological methods used in contemporary fieldwork in Egypt. The course then explores ancient Egypt’s origins, starting with the Predynastic and Early Dynastic Periods (5300-2800 BCE) and continuing chronologically to the great pyramids of the Old Kingdom (2800-2055 BCE) and the Middle Kingdom (2055-1700 BCE). It covers the historical framework, the evolution of ancient Egyptian art and architecture, and material culture, and includes specific case studies of important archaeological sites and discoveries. This course is the first of two introductory lecture courses. However, it is not necessary to take both parts, and the order in which you take them does not matter. Discussion sections are included.

 

ARCH 2001 (13339) / HSAR 3326

Kyle Dugdale

TTh 10:30am-11:20am

Areas HU

Introduction to the history of architecture from antiquity to the dawn of the Enlightenment, focusing on narratives that continue to inform the present. The course begins in Africa and Mesopotamia, follows routes from the Mediterranean into Asia and back to Rome, Byzantium, and the Middle East, and then circulates back to mediaeval Europe, before juxtaposing the indigenous structures of Africa and America with the increasingly global fabrications of the Renaissance and Baroque. Emphasis on challenging preconceptions, developing visual intelligence, and learning to read architecture as a story that can both register and transcend place and time, embodying ideas within material structures that survive across the centuries in often unexpected ways.

 

ARCH 2104 (13179) / HSAR 4361

Morgan Ng

Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

Areas HU

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European architects and their patrons conceived buildings of newfound scale and artistic ambition—buildings that vied in grandeur with the monuments of classical antiquity. Before realizing such structures, however, architects first had to draw and model them. What graphic mediums and tools allowed them to visualize such large, complex works? What imaginative processes fueled their creativity? What innovations did they borrow from other disciplines, such as painting, sculpture, archaeology, and the geometrical sciences? And to what extent can scholars today reconstruct these past practices?

 

ARCH 2105

Anthony Acciavatti

Day/Time TBA

This lecture course focuses on a series of historical episodes since 1100 C.E. that present different approaches to reckoning with environmental uncertainty. Topics range from environmental management during the Southern Song Dynasty to seafaring across the Pacific Ocean and from patchworks of agriculture and urban centers throughout the Indo-Gangetic plains to the proliferation of observatories across the globe to monitor weather patterns. What ties these diverse places and histories together is but one goal: to understand how strategies for claiming knowledge are entangled with environmental uncertainty. Steeped within the histories of science, technology, and the environment, the course presents a variety of approaches to how people have come to know the world around them and what they have done to account for environmental change.

 

ARCH 3102 (13359) / URBN 3303

Warren Fuermann

Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

Areas HU

This course is designed as an introductory survey of the history of landscape architecture and the wider, cultivated landscape in Western Europe and the United States from the Ancient Roman period to mid-twentieth century America. Included in the lectures, presented chronologically, are the gardens of Ancient Rome, medieval Europe, the early and late Italian Renaissance, 17th century France, 18th century Britain, 19th century Britain and America with its public and national parks, and mid-twentieth century America. The course focuses each week on one of these periods, analyzes in detail iconic gardens of the period, and placse them within their historical and theoretical context.

 

ARCH 3120 (13039) / ENGL 3461

Christopher Hawthorne

TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

Areas HU, WR

A seminar and workshop in the craft of nonfiction writing as pertains to a given subcategory or genre. Each section focuses on a different form of nonfiction writing and explores its distinctive features through a variety of written and oral assignments. Students read key texts as models and analyze their compositional strategies. They then practice the fundamentals of nonfiction in writing and revising their own essays. Section topics, which change yearly, are listed at the beginning of each term on the English department website. This course may be repeated for credit in a section that treats a different genre or style of writing; ENGL 121 and ENGL 3461 may not be taken for credit on the same topic. Formerly ENGL 421.

 

CLCV 1701 (11400) / HSAR 3243 / ARCG 2143

Milette Gaifman

MW 1:30am-11:20am

Areas HU

Monuments of Greek art and architecture from the late Geometric period (c. 760 B.C.) to Alexander the Great (c. 323 B.C.). Emphasis on social and historical contexts.

 

CPLT 3450 (12913) / HUMS 2228 / EVST 2228 / HIST 1759

Katja Lindskog

MW 9am-10:15am

Areas HU

What can the Humanities tell us about climate change? The Humanities help us to better understand the relationship between everyday individual experience, and our rapidly changing natural world. To that end, students read literary, political, historical, and religious texts to better understand how individuals both depend on, and struggle against, the natural environment in order to survive.

 

CSGH 200 (31392)

Henriëtte Rietveld

M 1:30pm-3:20pm

Areas HU

This course explores how artists and scholars engage with their relationship to place and ecology in the face of the climate crisis. Together, we analyze a combination of theoretical readings by scholars including Dipesh Chakrabarty, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Miwon Kwon, and Robin Wall Kimmerer; and the work of contemporary artists such as Paul Chan, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, and Emily Johnson. We also experiment with our own approaches: making small-scale performances, engaging our bodies and local ecologies. Core concepts include climate and environmental justice; relationality; notions of space, place, and site; the intersection of ecology and performance; and more-than-human agency. How is place constructed, and how does our physical presence shape it? What does it mean to be “human,” what does that category do and hold, and how can and should it be decentered? Is it possible to think both on a local and a planetary level? Tending to how the legacies and structures of colonialism, imperialism, and the slave trade, as well as personal locations and histories, shape space and time and our experience of them, we consider if and how performance can address issues of environmental justice.

 

EAST 4301 (13216) / HIST 2443

Instructor TBA

Time TBA

Areas HU

This course explores Japanese concepts of nature and the environment from the Tokugawa period to the present. Split into three modules, we consider how the Japanese government and society have responded to environmental change, degradation, and destruction. The first module—Tokugawa Nature (1600-1868)—examines shifts in agriculture and forestry, urbanization, and the emergence of scholarly knowledge of the natural world. The second module—Modern Transformation (1868-1945)—focuses on Japan’s rapid industrialization, disaster preparedness, and imperial expansion, tracing the environmental consequences of these processes on both the archipelago and East Asia. The third module—Postwar Developmentalism (1946-present)—addresses industrial pollution diseases, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the environmental struggles related to the American military bases in Okinawa.

 

ENGL 1014 (12007)

Alison Coleman

Time TBA

Areas WR

Instruction in writing well-reasoned analyses and academic arguments, with emphasis on the importance of reading, research, and revision. Using examples of nonfiction prose from a variety of academic disciplines, individual sections focus on topics such as the city, childhood, globalization, inequality, food culture, sports, and war. Formerly ENGL 114. 

Priority for enrollment will be given to students in the Class of 2028 and 2029. Advanced students contact the English Department Registrar. Cap will be raised in August to accommodate new students.

 

ENGL 1014 (12020)

Christopher McGowan

Time TBA

Areas WR

Instruction in writing well-reasoned analyses and academic arguments, with emphasis on the importance of reading, research, and revision. Using examples of nonfiction prose from a variety of academic disciplines, individual sections focus on topics such as the city, childhood, globalization, inequality, food culture, sports, and war. Formerly ENGL 114. 

Priority for enrollment will be given to students in the Class of 2028 and 2029. Advanced students contact the English Department Registrar. Cap will be raised in August to accommodate new students.

 

ENGL 1014 (12010)

Jessikah Díaz

Time TBA

Areas WR

Instruction in writing well-reasoned analyses and academic arguments, with emphasis on the importance of reading, research, and revision. Using examples of nonfiction prose from a variety of academic disciplines, individual sections focus on topics such as the city, childhood, globalization, inequality, food culture, sports, and war. Formerly ENGL 114. 

Priority for enrollment will be given to students in the Class of 2028 and 2029. Advanced students contact the English Department Registrar. Cap will be raised in August to accommodate new students.

 

ENGL 1014 (12003)

Shubhashree Basnyat

Time TBA

Areas WR

Instruction in writing well-reasoned analyses and academic arguments, with emphasis on the importance of reading, research, and revision. Using examples of nonfiction prose from a variety of academic disciplines, individual sections focus on topics such as the city, childhood, globalization, inequality, food culture, sports, and war. Formerly ENGL 114. 

Priority for enrollment will be given to students in the Class of 2028 and 2029. Advanced students contact the English Department Registrar. Cap will be raised in August to accommodate new students.

 

ENGL 1014 (12024)

Pamela Newton

Time TBA

Areas WR

Instruction in writing well-reasoned analyses and academic arguments, with emphasis on the importance of reading, research, and revision. Using examples of nonfiction prose from a variety of academic disciplines, individual sections focus on topics such as the city, childhood, globalization, inequality, food culture, sports, and war. Formerly ENGL 114. 

Priority for enrollment will be given to students in the Class of 2028 and 2029. Advanced students contact the English Department Registrar. Cap will be raised in August to accommodate new students.

 

ENGL 4459 (10765) / MB&B 4590 / EVST 4469

Carl Zimmer

T 1:30pm-3:20pm

Advanced non-fiction workshop in which students write about science, medicine, and the environment for a broad public audience. Students read exemplary work, ranging from newspaper articles to book excerpts, to learn how to translate complex subjects into compelling prose. Admission by permission of the instructor only. Applicants should email the instructor at carl@carlzimmer.com with the following information: 1. One or two samples of nonacademic, nonfiction writing. (No fiction or scientific papers, please.) Indicate the course or publication, if any, for which you wrote each sample. 2. A note in which you briefly describe your background (including writing experience and courses) and explain why you’d like to take the course. Formerly ENGL 459.

 

EVST 1120 (10255) / HIST 1120 HSHM 2040

Paul Sabin

MW 1:00-2:15pm

Areas HU, WR

Ways in which people have shaped and been shaped by the changing environments of North America from the nineteenth century to the present. Migration of species and trade in commodities; the impact of technology, agriculture, and industry; the development of resources in the American West and overseas; the conservation and environmental movements; planning and the impact of public policies; automobiles, highways, and urban growth; toxic chemicals, radiation, and environmental justice; climate change and energy transitions.

 

EVST 2232 (11980) / SPAN 2155

Sarah Glenski

MW 9am-10:15am

Areas HU, LA (5)

What is our relationship with nature? What constitutes ecological mindfulness? Does the practice of ecological mindfulness constitute a poetics? Is art a form of ecological mindfulness? These are some of the questions that we consider as we examine the concept of ecological mindfulness as an intersection of poetics and praxis. Throughout the semester, we explore a wide array of artistic expressions (essays, short stories, sound, poetry, photography, painting, etc.), which allows us to both appreciate and interrogate the many ways in which interactions with nature are depicted and performed in different Hispanophone cultures. Our analysis of these texts is complemented by carrying out and reflecting upon our own practice of ecological mindfulness. This course is taught in Spanish. Prerequisite: SPAN 140, or SPAN 142, or SPAN 145, or equivalent.

 

EVST 3255 (11517) / PLSC 3220

John Wargo

T 1:30pm-3:20pm

Areas SO

We explore relations among environmental quality, health, and law. We consider global-scale avoidable challenges such as: environmentally related human illness, climate instability, water depletion and contamination, food and agriculture, air pollution, energy, packaging, culinary globalization, and biodiversity loss. We evaluate the effectiveness of laws and regulations intended to reduce or prevent environmental and health damages. Additional laws considered include rights of secrecy, property, speech, worker protection, and freedom from discrimination. Comparisons among the US and  EU legal standards and precautionary policies will also be examined.  Ethical concerns of justice, equity, and transparency are prominent themes. 

 

EVST 3350 (11516)

Verlyn Klinkenborg

T 2:30pm-5:20pm

Areas WR

This is a practical writing course meant to develop the student’s skills as a writer. But its real subject is perception and the writer’s authority—the relationship between what you notice in the world around you and what, culturally speaking, you are allowed to notice. What you write during the term is driven entirely by your own interest and attention. How you write is the question at hand. We explore the overlapping habitats of language—present and past—and the natural environment. And, to a lesser extent, we explore the character of persuasion in environmental themes. Every member of the class writes every week, and we all read what everyone writes every week. It makes no difference whether you are a would-be journalist, scientist, environmental advocate, or policy maker. The goal is to rework your writing and sharpen your perceptions, both sensory and intellectual. Enrollment limited to fifteen.

 

EVST 4422 (11506) / ER&M 3594 / GLBL 4394

Michael Dove

Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

Areas SO, WR

Seminar on the major traditions of thought regarding climate, climate change, and society, drawing largely on the social sciences and humanities. Section I, overview of the course. Section II, disaster: the social origins of disastrous events; and the attribution of societal ‘collapse’ to extreme climatic events. Section III, causality: the revelatory character of climatic perturbation; politics and the history of efforts to control weather/climate; and modern theories of environmental determinism. Section IV, history and culture: the ancient tradition of explaining differences among people in terms of differences in climate; and cross-cultural differences in views of climate.  Section V, knowledge: the study of folk knowledge of climate; local views of climatic perturbation and change; and story-telling and landscape. The goal of the course is to examine the embedded historical, cultural, and political drivers of current climate change debates.

 

 

ER&M 3016 (10933)

Hi’ilei Hobart

TTh 2:30pm-3:45pm

Areas HU, SO

What does it mean to be food sovereign? Are contemporary American diets colonial? This course takes a comparative approach to understanding how and why food is a central component of contemporary sovereignty discourse. More than just a question of eating, Indigenous foodways offer important critiques of, and interventions to, the settler state: food connects environment, community, public health, colonial histories, and economics. Students theorize these connections by reading key works from across the fields of critical indigenous studies, food studies, philosophy, history, and anthropology. In doing so, we question the potentialities of enacting food sovereignty within the settler state, whether dietary decolonization is possible in the so-called age of the Anthropocene, and the limits of working within and against today’s legacies of the colonial food system. Students previously enrolled in ER&M 040 are not eligible to enroll in this course.

 

ER&M 3044 (10583) / SOCY 3044 / URBN 3305

Leigh-Anna Hidalgo

T 1:30pm-3:20pm

Areas SO

The informal sector is an integral and growing part of major global cities. With a special focus on the context of U.S. cities, students examine where a burgeoning informality is visible in the region’s everyday life. How planners and policymakers address informality is an important social justice challenge. But what is the informal sector, or urban informality, or the informal city? This class addresses such questions through a rigorous examination of the growing body of literature from Sociology, Latinx Studies, Urban Planning, and Geography. We reflect on the debates and theories in the study of informality in the U.S. and beyond and gain an understanding of the prevalence, characteristics, rationale, advantages and disadvantages, and socio-spatial implications of informal cities. More specifically, we examine urban informality in work—examining street vendors, sex workers, and waste pickers—as well as housing, and the built environment.

 

GERM 1690 (13265)

Marion Gehkler

Mw 1pm-2:15pm

Areas HU, LA (5)

This class introduces students to aspects of architecture as art and building design, within the context of social and environmental justice issues in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students explore the “New Settlements of Berlin Modernism,” the Bauhaus School, subsidized public housing, industrial and solar architecture in Germany, as well as examples at Yale and in New Haven. Taught in German. Prerequisite: GMAN 140 or equivalent, any L5 class, permission of the instructor.

 

HSHM 2240 (11405) / HSAR 1170 / HUMS 4570

Marisa Bass

MW 11:35am-12:25pm

Areas HU

This global introductory course surveys the interrelation of nature and art from antiquity to the present. Throughout the semester, we consider a controversial question: is it possible to understand the history of art and science as a more-than-human story? Challenging traditional narratives of human progress, we attend to episodes of invention and destruction in equal measure. We discuss how art history is inseparable from histories of extracted resources, exploited species, environmental catastrophe, racialized and gendered understandings of the ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’, and politicized understandings of land as power. At the same time, we explore how makers across cultures approached the natural world as a locus of the divine, a source of inspiration, and the ground for both scientific inquiry and the pursuit of self-knowledge. The very notions of art and artistic creation are impossible to define without recourse to nature as both a concept and a site of lived experience. This course is open to all, including those with no prior background in art history. Sections will include visits to collections and sites across Yale campus.

 

HSHM 4230 (11034) / HIST 3175

Deborah Streahle

Th 9:25am-11:15am

Areas HU, WR

Where does healing happen? Is place an important factor in health care? How has the design of a space influenced health? What is the relationship between nature and health? Students in this course investigate healing spaces in the history of American medicine and consider how space has been understood to interact with health. We discuss health care in institutions, mobile settings, and natural spaces. From ambulances and hospitals to homes and gardens, we consider the impact of setting on patients and practitioners. The course  draws on resources local to New Haven as well as guest speakers. Students can expect to emerge from the course familiar with several healing spaces in New Haven and with the way space has impacted broader health care. While the course focus on U.S. history, I welcome student contributions addressing healing spaces beyond the U.S. 

 

HSHM 4380 (11044) / HIST 3761

Elaine Ayers

W 3:30pm-5:20pm

Areas HU, WR

Penetrated jungles, “mother” nature, and quests to preserve the redwoods – for hundreds of years, colonial agents have characterized environments in racialized, gendered, sexualized, classist, and ableist terms, anthropomorphizing nature along ongoing systems of inequality.  This class traces shifting conceptualizations of nature from the early modern period to the present, focusing on how naturalists and scientists have described, collected, and displayed “new” environments and peoples while building extractive and exploitative natural history collections, from cabinets of curiosity to Yale’s own Peabody Museum. By analyzing methodologies like classification, conservation, and scientific communication, we will discuss how divisions between the “natural” and “unnatural” were created in western cultures along unequal ideas about human bodies. Critical analyses of sources across multiple disciplines will inform conversations about knowledge production with the goal of interrogating how these power structures have silenced voices and enacted long-lasting violences on both environments and the peoples inhabiting them. Using both primary and secondary sources while conducting original research, students will learn how binary and reductive categories have been used and abused in colonial science and beyond. This class will include visits to museums around Yale’s campus and beyond, with two of your assignments focused on the Peabody Museum.

 

HSHM 4640 (11696) / HUMS 4183

Gary Tomlinson

M 3:30pm-5:20pm

Areas HU

This course explores the Western conception of the human place in the natural world as it has shifted across four centuries. It features, alongside corollary readings, close study of three classic texts: Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1744), and Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859)―fundamental texts locating humans in the cosmos, in society, and in natural history, respectively. It finishes with a new work, Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature (2011), an attempt to explain the emergence of mind from the natural world. No prerequisites, though the challenging nature of the materials suggests that this course will be aimed mainly at students beyond their first year.

 

HIST 0737 (10230) 

Nurfadzilah Yahaya

TTh 1pm-2:15pm

Areas HU, WR

This seminar explores the history of the Indian Ocean from the Red Sea region to South Asia, and onward to Southeast Asia through two creative works by Amitav Ghosh. The first work is In an Antique Land, an autobiographical account of his time in Egypt as an anthropologist in the late twentieth century that he interspersed with that of the history of a Jewish merchant in Aden and Malabar in the twelfth century when Indian Ocean trade formed the backbone of international economy. The second book, Sea of Poppies is the first novel in his epic trilogy on the Indian Ocean, which traces the journey of a diverse group people from the Indian subcontinent to Southeast Asia and China during the nineteenth century. This seminar breaks out of conventional regional fields by closely following historical actors on the ground. Each session explores several core themes for historical research namely commerce, mobility, labor, climate, cosmopolitanism, colonialism, and modernization. Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program.

 

HIST 3214 (12415)

Maria Jordan

T 9:25am-11:15am

Areas HU, WR

This seminar is dedicated to the reality and the perception of the night across time and in different cultures. We explore how religious and philosophical beliefs, political and economic forces, changes in technologies of lighting, human biology, and the shift from rural to urban and agrarian to industrial societies affected attitudes toward time in general and the night in particular. These changes influenced the perceptions, uses, and the ways different groups experienced nocturnal time, and how we act, sleep, work, interact, and even dream. The traditional binary view of day and night is questioned by presenting a more complex “and dynamic face” of the night. Nightfall provides multiple opportunities for dissent and rebellion and becomes an ideal space for marginal and subordinate people. Historical analysis, literary texts, medical and scientific writings, and primary sources provide the class with a cross-disciplinary approach to examine how the night became the abode of the ghost, the devil, the witch, and the dead, and how the night became criminalized, commercialized and even politicized. In our time, improvements in lighting changed the nocturnal world, but also had detrimental effects on sleep and dreams, and caused contemporary movements–aesthetic and scientific–to “rescue” the night.

 

HSAR 4451 (10905)

Jennifer Raab and Tim Barringer

W 1:30pm-3:20pm

Areas HU

The study of landscape, during the long nineteenth century, as a powerful and contested artistic medium that could express the ideologies of empire, philosophies of nature, the relationship between geography and vision, and constructions of self and other. Review of such issues in American landscape painting in both a transatlantic and transhemispheric context with specific attention to works in Yale collections.

 

HSAR 4455 (10886)

Craig Buckley

Th 9:25am-11:15am

Areas HU

Introduction to the discipline of architecture through the elusive concept of space. This course traces key shifts in the conceptualization of space in aesthetics and architectural theory from the eighteenth century through to the present.

 

HUMS 1060 (12432) / PHYS 1060 / EVST 2206 / HIST 1727 / HSHM 2010

Alison Sweeney

TTh 1:30pm-2:20pm

Areas QR, SC, SO

Students explore the physical logic of energy and power in parallel with the histories of technology for energy exploitation and economic theories of sustainability on the path to modernity. They learn the fundamentals of quantitative analysis of contemporary and historical energy harvesting, its carbon intensity, and climate impact. They also gain an understanding of the historical underpinnings of the current global energy status quo and its relationship to economic theories of sustainability. Mathematical proficiency with algebra is assumed. Students from all academic interests and experiences are welcome in the course.

 

LATN 4525 (12972) / LATN 5525

Kirk Freudenberg

MW 1pm-2:15pm

Areas HU, LA (5)

An advanced Latin course (with L5 credit) focusing on ancient literary depictions of Roman encounters with the natural world. Through close readings of Latin texts, the class will examine how the Romans exploited their natural surroundings not only as physical resources, but as resources for human thought.  The focus will be on how ancient thinkers, living lives that were largely city-bound and detached from nature, structured their thoughts about the lives they lived (and about human existence more generally) by reference to their nonhuman surroundings: creatures, plants and places, some of which existed in the real world (in places far off, largely unknown and elsewhere; in places penetrated, explored, and/or told of), others of which existed entirely in the imagination, whether as inherited lore, or as places and creatures invented ad hoc by individuals and groups to get certain kinds of cultural work done.  We will look not only at the how and what, but at the why of nature’s encoding via culture, and vice versa (their symbiosis), paying special attention to conceptions of man and nature, natural history, agriculture, diet, human work (in the fields of war and on farms), waters, forests, bees and flowers. Prerequisites: The completion of two full years of Latin at the beginning and intermediate levels, as well as one ‘bridge’ course at the L5 level.

 

PLSC 3217 (13248) / EP&E 4390 / EVST 3212

Michael Fotos

Time TBA

Areas SO, WR

Democracy, liberty, and the sustainable use of natural resources. Concepts include institutional analysis, democratic consent, property rights, market failure, and common pool resources. Topics of policy substance are related to human use of the environment and to U.S. and global political institutions.

 

SOCY 3201 (10794)

Rene Almeling

W 1:30pm-3:20pm

Areas SO

We live in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and yet there remain millions of Americans who do not have a home, enough food to eat, or access to health care. Academic researchers produce enormous amounts of data and knowledge about social problems like poverty, and yet the poverty rate has remained almost unchanged for fifty years. Likewise, there are reams of historical and social scientific studies about major social problems such as racism, gun violence, abortion access, and climate change. In this seminar, we examine the social processes through which all of this knowledge is ignored by policymakers and others with power to make change. How does increasing knowledge keep resulting in inaction?

 

SPAN 2145 (11973) / ER&M 1678 / LAST 2228

Luna Najera

TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

Areas HU, LA (5)

The borders that constitute the geographical divisions of the world are contingent, but they can have enormous ordering power in the lives of people and other beings. Human-made borders can both allow and disallow the flow of people and resources (including goods, knowledge, information, technologies, etc.). Like geographical borders, social borders such as race, caste, class, and gender can form and perpetuate privileged categories of humans that constrain the access of excluded persons to resources, education, security, and social mobility. Thus, bordering can differentially value human lives. Working with the premise that borders are sites of power, in this course we study bordering and debordering practices in the Hispanic cultures of Iberia, Latin America, and North America, from the 1490s to the present. Through analyses of a wide range of texts that may include treatises, maps, travel literature, visual culture, material culture (e.g., currency), law, music, and performance art, students investigate the multiple ways in which social, cultural, and spatial borders are initiated, expressed, materialized, and contested. More broadly, we explore, describe, and trace the entanglements of bordering, globalizations, and knowledge production in Hispanophone cultures. Some of the questions that will guide our conversations are: What are (social) borders and what are the processes through which they persist? How do the effects of practices that transcend borders (e.g., environmental pollution, deforestation) change our understanding of borders? What can we learn from indigenous peoples’ responses to bordering process and globalization? Prerequisite: SPAN 140 or 145, or in accordance with placement results. The course is conducted entirely in Spanish. Readings are available electronically through Canvas and the University Library. To be conducted in Spanish.