Psychopharmacology focuses on the impact that drugs (both illicit and prescription) have on the brain, neurocircuitry, and behavior. Students will explore the underlying neurotransmitter systems of the brain and discover how substances influence nervous system function including the experience of pain, sleep, emotional states, motivation, addiction, and mental health. The course will bridge concepts in chemistry, biology, psychology, and neuroscience by highlighting major drug classes and their underlying mechanisms of action.

This course explores Black feminist anthropology as both a scholarly tradition and a political practice. We examine how Black feminist thinkers have challenged dominant anthropological methods and theories, centering care, embodiment, power, and lived experience. Students will engage works that push the boundaries of knowledge production while exploring the possibilities of an anthropology rooted in liberation and accountability.

This course explores Black feminist anthropology as both a scholarly tradition and a political practice. We examine how Black feminist thinkers have challenged dominant anthropological methods and theories, centering care, embodiment, power, and lived experience. Students will engage works that push the boundaries of knowledge production while exploring the possibilities of an anthropology rooted in liberation and accountability.

This creative writing course expands language to cosmic proportions. Reading and writing poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and other genres, we will bring the cosmos into our words alongside writers and artists whose works create a total experience, building worlds at multiple scales. Zooming in and out of our bodies and across time and space, we will write in alliance with spirits, animals, astrology, ancestry, and the elements. Authors and artists may include Etel Adnan, Octavia Butler, Henry Lefebvre, Gloria Anzaldúa, Davi Kopenawa, Kamau Brathwaite, Jennif(f)er Tamayo, and Ana Mendieta.

The course will focus on developing both analytical, technical and creative skills through the practice of videographic criticism. This form of audiovisual scholarship has emerged as a new mode of film research, circulating across multiple platforms such as YouTube and peer-reviewed online journals such as [In]Transition. Videographic criticism not only offers the opportunity to write about cinema, but also to write with cinema itself-using the images and sounds of film as critical tools.

This course approaches genres in two dimensions. First, we will examine the conventions and tropes of classical Hollywood genres such as melodrama, horror, western, and noir through the lens of feminist film theory, analyzing how women undermined or adapted these film conventions. Second, we will turn to contemporary retelling of these genres by women filmmakers, exploring how feminist interventions continue to denaturalize and transform genre expectations.

This course approaches genres in two dimensions. First, we will examine the conventions and tropes of classical Hollywood genres such as melodrama, horror, western, and noir through the lens of feminist film theory, analyzing how women undermined or adapted these film conventions. Second, we will turn to contemporary retelling of these genres by women filmmakers, exploring how feminist interventions continue to denaturalize and transform genre expectations.

Human effects on species other than our own (and also our own) have been devastating in the "anthropocene." We leave a wake of destruction, brutality, and extinction behind which makes us plummet into an 'Age of Loneliness'. But is it the "human" as a species that does that, or is it the human under the command of Empire? How to rekindle the flame of life in order to realize the inherent meaningfulness of the biosphere?

Paleoclimatology -- the study of past climates -- is a multidisciplinary field that integrates geological, geochemical, geophysical, and biological tools to interpret Earth's climate history and the processes that have shaped it. This course examines how climate-related events are recorded in the floodplain sediments of the Connecticut River and how surrounding tree populations have responded to local and regional climate change. Using data from local weather stations and historical archives, students will analyze climate trends over the past century.

In this course, we will examine the role of molecular genetic analysis in the study of phenomena such as human disease (e.g., cancer), animal development, and gene regulation. We will also discuss new techniques for genomic analysis, including the science as well as the health, legal, ethical and moral issues involved. There will be group discussions of original research articles and review articles.