This class turns away from the conventional Eurocentric narrative of the Renaissance, reframing it as a time when exploration and cross-cultural encounters inspired a rich and varied array of art, architecture, and sculpture. The objects we will examine include world maps from Europe and China, West African ivories, Benin bronzes, Indian miniatures, Islamic metalwork, Mexican feather paintings, Aztec cartography, colonial Latin American buildings and murals, as well as European paintings and illustrated books. All of these items speak to expanding networks of trade and conquest.

The world's first large, vibrant, and developed cities arose in antiquity, fundamentally changing the lives of those who inhabited these ancient urban centers. Cities became places not only with large populations, but also economic and religious centers, venues in which the powerful could communicate their authority, and loci of social change. This course introduces the urban centers of the ancient Middle East, Egypt, and Mediterranean and also interrogates processes of urbanization and how urbanization affected residents of ancient cities.

The course is organized around small material objects that allude to monumental architecture in different periods and regions of Asia: real and imaginary buildings unfolding into reliquary shrines in Buddhist Central Asia, portable liturgical objects in Islamic West Asia, funerary lanterns and architectural models in Chinese tombs, and Persian and Indian miniature paintings that are themselves compartmentalized as architectural enclosures.

"Indian popular cinema, known commonly as Bollywood, is usually understood to have weak storylines, interrupted by overblown spectacles and distracting dance numbers. The course explores the narrative structure of Bollywood as what scholar Lalitha Gopalan calls a "constellation of interruptions". We will learn to see Bollywood historically, as a cultural form that brings India's visual and performative traditions into a unique cinematic configuration.

Ancient peoples produced some of the most striking and significant works of art known to man, architecture like the Great Pyramids at Giza, sculpture like the Aphrodite of Knidos and the Prima Porta of Augustus, and literature like The Iliad and The Book of Songs. We will examine materials that span the Neolithic Period to roughly 400 CE, approximately when three great empires, the Roman, the Gupta, and the Han, came to an end. We will cover a broad geographic area, including the Middle East, Egypt, Greece, Rome, India, and China.

The subject of this course is the book, from its invention in the late antique era to the advent of printing in the fifteenth century, in Western Asia, Europe, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. We will study books made for devotion, instruction, entertainment, and pleasure, from the earliest accounts of Christ's life, to jewel-encrusted books painted with gold for emperors, to student-copied textbooks of the oldest universities, to vernacular literature, legends, and histories.

Description: This research seminar looks at the relationship between historical painting and the history it depicts. How much is fact; how much is fiction; and how do we explain the differences? To what ends was it painted? The focus will be on contemporary history painting in the period 1770-1875. The first half of the semester will examine these questions using critical theory and real examples. Students will then develop a major American, British, or French history painting for sustained research and analysis.

Discover how the forces of nature shape our understanding of the cosmos. Explore the origin, structure, and evolution of the earth, moons and planets, comets and asteroids, the sun and other stars, star clusters, the Milky Way and other galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and the universe as a whole.

Advanced course covering physical processes in the gaseous interstellar medium, including photoionization in HII regions and planetary nebulae, shocks in supernova remnants and stellar jets, and energy balance in molecular clouds. Dynamics of stellar systems, star clusters, and the viral theorem will also be discussed, along with galaxy rotation and the presence of dark matter in the universe, as well as spiral density waves. The course concludes with quasars and active galactic nuclei, synchrotron radiation, accretion disks, and supermassive black holes.

We will examine the feasibility of converting the entire energy infrastructure of the US from one that is dependent on fossil fuels to one that utilizes mostly renewable sources of energy. We will examine the potential scale of energy production and the associated costs, natural resource requirements and land usage needs for both renewables, such as solar, wind and biofuel, and non-renewables, such as coal, natural gas, petroleum and nuclear.