In 1882, the U.S. passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law to ban a specific ethnic group. Over a century later, President Trump would designate COVID-19 the "Chinese virus," reigniting anxieties of "Yellow Peril," even as reports of anti-Asian violence spiked nationwide. This course aims to bridge these two moments by examining the social, political, and historical contexts that come to bear on contemporary Asian American experience.

How can we activate the tension between language, movement, and performance to reveal subterranean aspects of dancing experience? How do layers of relationship, dialogue, attention, sensation, and subjectivity shape meaning? In this upper-level seminar, students will explore practices of writing and dramaturgy in relation to dance-making process and performance. Taking a cue from dramaturg Katherine Profeta, we will oscillate between multiple vantage points -- stepping in and out of roles such as that of researcher, questioner, witness, archivist, translator, outside eye, and inside eye.

In this moment of climate emergency, how and why do we make meaning? What possibilities might various textual practices offer for engaging with, and positioning ourselves in relationship to, the unfathomable? If we are telling stories in the face of a radically uncertain future, who is our audience? In collaboration with students in the linked FMT-240CH course, we will find ways of telling stories that help us relate to this moment, and, crucially, to each other. This is a creative writing course.

Many of the world's most urgent issues, like Black Lives Matter, biodiversity conservation, or Indigenous self-determination, are also environmental justice challenges. This course will survey the theories, concepts, and perspectives on environmental justice at local and global scales. We will first apply a global perspective in understanding environmental justice, environmental racism, and environmentalism. A second part of the course will emphasize the justice dimensions of responses to pressing global environmental issues (such as food).

In this course, we will take a leap back in time to the origins of life, discuss the evolution of major organismal lineages, and investigate physiology and cellular processes. Through the lectures, labs, and in-class discussions, students will be able to explain how scientific knowledge is generated. In lab, students will explore biological diversity, physiology, and cellular dynamics, with a focus on gaining skills in scientific inquiry, including hypothesis development, experimental design, collecting and analyzing results, and scientific writing.

In this course, students will explore the diversity of form and function that exists within oceanic organisms with a particular focus on intertidal and subtidal ecosystems of the Northeast U.S. We will learn how organisms are classified, what structures and systems enable these organisms to function and adapt to their unique environments, and how organisms interact with one another and their habitats.