How is the brain shaped by our environment? How do everyday experiences affect how we process and experience the world? This course explores the mechanisms of plasticity within the brain from conception through adulthood and the factors that influence them. The course will include topics such as the effects of environmental toxins on the brain, reorganization of the brain following injury, how traumatic events impact neurotransmitter systems, and how these changes affect behavior. In doing so this course will cover developmental, structural, functional and chemical plasticity.

Explore how psychology, neuroscience, and medicine come together to study the etiology and treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders. Students will examine the behavioral features and neurobiology behind various clinical disorders such as Autism, ADHD, Substance Use Disorders, Mood Disorders, Schizophrenia, Anxiety, and Neurodegenerative Diseases. The course will rely on primary research to identify how changes in physiology and biology might manifest in the behaviors that define psychopathology.

This seminar is for students who are completing an honors thesis. The primary purpose of this course is to provide students with constructive support during all stages of their research. In particular, this class will assist students with organizing the various components of their thesis work and help them meet departmental thesis deadlines.

This course introduces the ancient Greek language and epic meter through the study of the Iliad. The grammar of the Iliad, originally an oral poem, is relatively uncomplicated, so that by the middle of the first semester students will begin to read the poem in Greek. By the end of the year they will have read a portion of Iliad, Book I.

May include further readings in Homer, Herodotus, pastoral poetry, the dialogues of Plato, the Greek novel, or other authors, topics, or genres.

Studies in Greek lyric and tragedy, pastoral poetry, the dialogues of Plato, the Greek novel, the use of myth in literature, or other authors, topics, or genres.

We will accompany Odysseus on his return from Troy, retrieve the Golden Fleece with Jason, and race with Ovid through his witty -- and often troubling -- retelling of Greek myths from a Roman perspective. This course examines how Greek and Roman authors and artists from very different periods used myth to explore questions about life, art and politics. Works may include: Homer, Odyssey; Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica; Ovid, Metamorphoses and Heroides; Greek tragedy, and ancient images representing myths.

Ancient Rome and its empire can be viewed both as a measure of human achievement and a cautionary tale of the corrupting effects of unbridled power. This course covers the history of Ancient Rome from its mythologized beginnings (753 BCE) to the rise and spread of Christianity under the Emperor Constantine (312 CE).

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.

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.