Building large software systems introduces new challenges to software development. Appropriate design decisions and programming methodology can make a major difference in developing software that is correct and maintainable. In this course, students will learn techniques and tools that are used to build correct and maintainable software, improving their skills in designing, writing, debugging, and testing software. Topics include object-oriented design, testing, design patterns, software architecture, and designing concurrent and fault tolerant systems. This course is programming intensive.

How have animal bodies developed to meet the challenges of living on earth? We will study the common needs of animals -- such as eating, breathing, and moving -- and the design constraints these place on living bodies. We will also examine the manner in which cells come together to make biomaterials like bones, beaks, and beetle wings, and the way a squishy animal fashions a skeleton from water. Finally, we will trace these same principles of tissue design to better understand the potentials and pitfalls of lab-grown organs.

Cinema is a form of art that uniquely captures and portrays the human mind. In this course we will explore how mental experience is encoded in the brain, using film as our object of study. Students will, through movies, analyze major topics in psychology and neuroscience such as memory, mental time travel, addiction, and empathy. Course readings and class discussion will further offer students the opportunity to develop their critical thinking skills in order to better understand the multiple layers of cognitive processes and behaviors depicted in movies.

Is it true that what does not kill us makes us stronger? What is stress management? What is "stress culture"? This first year seminar will explore these questions, focusing on the relationship between stress and resilience. We will consider different ideas about stress, adaptive coping, psychological and resilience and their relationship to psychological and physical well-being. We will consider cultural differences in approaches to stress, as well as explore the impact of stress on our lives and society.

Unique among literary forms, poetry has the power to startle and to stun, to make us feel at once transported and more deeply rooted. In this introductory course, we will aim to engage with and understand the potency of poetry, focusing on the interplay between what can be sounded out, and what can only be sensed. By reading and discussing a wide range of works - from ancient fragments to contemporary poems - and through guided writing exercises - we will explore the ways poetry distills human experience.

This course presents a variety of practices and positions within the field of literary theory. Approaches include structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, gender and queer studies, cultural studies and postcolonial studies. Emphasis on the theory as well as the practice of these methods: their assumptions about writing and reading and about literature as a cultural formation. Readings include Freud, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Bakhtin, Gramsci, Bhabba, Butler, Said, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Žižek.

Offered as ENG 171 and WLT 272. Is the self a story? How do we translate ourselves into multiple personas in different locations and contexts? How do we speak to others with diverse beliefs or ourselves at new times? To learn, students read and compose short texts in Chinese, translate them into English, and consider the art and politics of translation.

A study of the major writers and diverse literary traditions of Africa with emphasis on the historical, political, social and cultural contexts of the emergence of writing, reception and consumption. We pay particular attention to several questions: in what contexts did modern African literature emerge? Is the term “African literature” a useful category? How do African writers challenge Western representations of Africa? How do they articulate the crisis of postcoloniality? How do women writers reshape our understanding of gender and the politics of resistance?