This course focuses on the history of life as preserved in the sedimentary rock record. Students will learn how paleontologists and geobiologists use skeletal fossils, molecular fossils, and geochemical signatures to ask and answer questions about the evolution of ancient life and Earth history. Students will study the origination, radiation, and extinction of major groups of organisms in the context of global environmental change, with an emphasis on invertebrate and microbial life.

For at least 3.5 billion years, Earth’s surface environments have supported some form of life. What geologic processes first created and subsequently maintained a habitable environment? How does contemporary global climate change compare to climate variations over Earth’s long history? This course looks at Earth’s climate and its surface environment from a geologist’s perspective. We will develop an understanding of the atmospheric, oceanographic, geological, and biological systems that interact to modulate the climate.

For at least 3.5 billion years, Earth’s surface environments have supported some form of life. What geologic processes first created and subsequently maintained a habitable environment? How does contemporary global climate change compare to climate variations over Earth’s long history? This course looks at Earth’s climate and its surface environment from a geologist’s perspective. We will develop an understanding of the atmospheric, oceanographic, geological, and biological systems that interact to modulate the climate.

For at least 3.5 billion years, Earth’s surface environments have supported some form of life. What geologic processes first created and subsequently maintained a habitable environment? How does contemporary global climate change compare to climate variations over Earth’s long history? This course looks at Earth’s climate and its surface environment from a geologist’s perspective. We will develop an understanding of the atmospheric, oceanographic, geological, and biological systems that interact to modulate the climate.

Spring semester. The Department.

How to handle overenrollment: null

Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: Emphasis on written work; readings; independent research; textual analysis.

Independent reading course. Full course.

Admission with consent of the instructor required. Fall and spring semesters. The Department.

How to handle overenrollment: null

Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: Readings; independent research; textual analysis.

Denis Diderot, the genial philosophe at the center of the French Enlightenment, was the author of novels, plays, art criticism, music theory, and works on mathematics, politics, and philosophy.  As co-editor of the Encyclopédie, the French Enlightenment’s most ambitious intellectual project, he recruited contributions from the most distinguished thinkers of his time, while writing scores of articles on subjects ranging from botany and law to mythology and carpentry.  We will explore a variety of

The course provides a forum for seniors for the practice of spoken French at the advanced level with native speakers. Students will prepare and deliver presentations; practice interviewing techniques; and learn and practice using technical vocabulary from a variety of disciplines in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The choice of short readings and vocabulary sets will vary each time the course is offered and will reflect the interests of the students enrolled.

Open only to Amherst College Senior French majors. Spring semester. The Department and Language Assistants.

This course explores the concepts of the literary corpus and corporeal literature within a landscape of Francophone works from the Caribbean, the African littoral, and French Polynesia. We will explore how race, gender, and the body are portrayed through the form known as the book, and how literature can evoke complex experiences of desire, violence, resistance, and belonging.

A medium barely a century old, film has been an object of creative expression as much as it has been of theoretical reflection: the discovery of film went hand in hand with the development of film theory. As filmmakers and theorists produced and watched films, they found themselves faced with an array of questions: How does the filmic image relate to reality? How does the experience of film resemble and differ from other aesthetic experiences? How should filmmakers exploit the specificities of the filmic medium? What are the politics of image production?