This course emphasizes understanding, speaking, and writing in a contemporary context. It also promotes creativity with presentations and original group projects. It includes Web activities, films, short stories, and frequent conversation sessions with language assistants.

After reviewing essential grammar and vocabulary, Intermediate Italian will expose students to new and more complex lexicon and communicative grammatical structures. Through authentic materials (videoclips, music, newspaper articles, websites etc.), the course emphasizes reading, writing, listening, and speaking. A realistic picture of modern Italy replaces stereotypical images of Italy with contemporary representation. Class time emphasizes group conversations and builds accurate use of the language in an interactive and dynamic way.

An introduction to painting, sculpture, and architecture in Europe and America from the Renaissance to the present. Classes are organized around five focused topics: Renaissance Florence; the artist in the seventeenth century; art and revolution; nineteenth-century realism and abstraction. Lectures will be complimented by class discussion.

Some of the best feature-length films of the past century have commanded our attention and imagination because of their compelling artistry and the imaginative ways they tell stories visually and verbally. This course closely studies narrative films from around the world, from the silent era to the present, and in the process it introduces students to the basic elements of film form, style, and narration.

This multicultural course introduces students to the visual arts of Asia from the earliest times to the present. In a writing- and speaking-intensive environment, students will develop skills in visual analysis and art historical interpretation. Illustrated class lectures, group discussions, museum visits, and a variety of writing exercises will allow students to explore architecture, sculpture, painting, and other artifacts in relation to the history and culture of such diverse countries as India, China, Cambodia, Korea, and Japan.

This survey outlines the arts in Italy from the late thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, a time of major cultural transformation. Our approach will be primarily geographic, focusing on individual cities and courts in order to understand the social networks that linked artists with their patrons and publics.

This course will survey art in Europe from the French Revolutionary era to the last quarter of the nineteenth century -- or, in the language of art history, from the neo-classical painters (David and his atelier) to the great painters of modern life in Paris (Manet and his followers).

This course surveys the first century of photography, beginning with its putative birth in 1839 and following its shifts and turns until the eve of World War II. We will look at a variety of photographic types: the daguerreotype, calotype, tintype, albumen and gelatin silver prints, and more. We will assess a range of practices: studio portraiture, commercial pictures, vernacular photography, journalism, and the fine arts. And we will follow camerawork in a variety of settings: China, England, France, Germany, Mexico, Russia, and the U.S.

A survey of painting and sculpture, this course introduces students to the work of individual artists. Classes also develop ways of looking at and thinking about art as the material expression of American social, political, and cultural ideas, including the depictions of nature, race, revolution, and country life. The course focuses on 'American Masters': Copley, Stuart, Cole, Church, Eakins, Homer, Sargent, Whistler, and Cassatt are some of the key artists.

This comprehensive survey course explores the brain and the biological basis of behavior. We will examine the anatomy of the nervous system and the unique properties of the cells that make up the brain. We will discuss the mechanisms by which individual brain cells communicate with each other, and how networks of cells underlie more complex processes such as perception, learning, memory, and behavior.