(Offered as BLST 270[US] and HIST 270) All around us are examples of Americans misunderstanding slavery—framing slavery as beneficial to the enslaved, minimizing its significance, ignoring what historians describe as its “afterlives.” Failure to understand slavery has led to all sorts of problems, from ordinary citizens who do not know that power and wealth discrepancies are rooted in history, to more dangerous ones who enact violence on Black people motivated by racist ideas born during slavery.

(Offered as BLST 268 [CLA], HIST 268 [LA/TE/TR/TSP], and LLAS 268) Students will gain in-depth knowledge of the experiences of Africans and their descendants, slave and free, from the time the first captives were brought to Hispaniola in 1503 until the time of abolition in Cuba in 1886 in this course. Regions to be covered include the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America, and the Andean and Southern Cone regions.

(Offered as BLST 223 and RELI 223) This course explores the structure, beliefs, and practices of West African indigenous religions with an eye to their deeper philosophical and mystical meanings. We will examine several West African religions from the perspective of experts and practitioners who present the underlying philosophy of these traditions, exploring their epistemology (how knowledge works) and metaphysics (the nature of being).

[R] In this course students will focus closely on major debates that have animated the field of Black Studies, addressing a wide range of issues from the slave trade to the present. Each week will focus on specific questions such as: What came first, racism or slavery? Is African art primitive? Did Europe under develop Africa? Is there Caribbean History or just history in the Caribbean? Should Black Studies exist? Is there a black American culture? Is Affirmative Action necessary? Was the Civil Rights Movement a product of government action or grass-roots pressure?

[R] This interdisciplinary introduction to Black Studies combines the teaching of foundational texts in the field with instruction in reading and writing. The first half of the course employs How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren as a guide to the careful reading of books focusing on the slave trade and its effects in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Important readings in this part of the course include Black Odyssey by Nathan Huggins, Racism: A Short History by George Frederickson, and The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James.

Honors students take three courses of thesis research, usually, but not always, with the double course load in the spring. The work consists of seminar programs, individual research projects, and preparation of a thesis on the research project.

Open to seniors. Spring semester. The Department.

How to handle overenrollment: null

Honors students take three courses of thesis research, usually, but not always, with the double course load in the spring (499D). The work consists of seminar programs, individual research projects, and preparation of a thesis on the research project.

Open to seniors. Spring semester. The Department.

How to handle overenrollment: null

Most biodiversity on our planet can be found in tropical latitudes. Tropical rainforests, for example, which account for less than 10% of the Earth’s surface, may contain 50-75% of all plant and animal species. In this course we will examine some of the myriad biotic interactions that occur in the tropics using an ecological, evolutionary, and behavioral approach. The course is divided into two main components: a two-week interterm field course and an advanced seminar.

(Offered as BIOL 450 and NEUR 450) Concentrating on reading and interpreting primary research, this course will focus on classic and soon-to-be classic neurophysiology papers. We will discuss the seminal experiments performed in the 1950s that led to our understanding of action potentials; experiments in the 1960s and 1970s that unlocked how synapses function; and more recent research that combines electrophysiology with optical methods and genetic techniques to investigate the role of many of the molecular components predicted by the work from the earlier decades.