In the late 19th century, when cities first became home for millions rather than thousands of people, many writers became fascinated with how people behave differently when part of a crowd or a "mass." What is the attraction of being part of a crowd? In the 20th century, the phenomenon of the crowd has become central to modern life, as people joined crowds in many circumstances: mass political movements, strikes, concerts, parades, protests, sporting events, rallies, religious gatherings.

This course focuses on African popular music. It examines musical genres from different parts of the continent, investigating their relationships to the historical, political, and social dynamics of their respective national and regional origins. Musical idioms like highlife, soukous, kwaito, afrobeat, hiplife, and afrobeats will be studied to assess the significance of popular music as a creative response to social and political developments in colonial and postcolonial Africa.

Every culture bears unique sensibilities to sounds. People cultivate distinctive ways of hearing, understanding, and relating to them. These sensibilities are also re?ected in the processes of sound- and music-making. Different instruments are devised to encapsulate distinctive cultural values not only acoustically but also visually in their material forms. This course aims to explore diverse music cultures of the world through the lens of organology (the study of musical instruments). We examine a wide range of sound-making devices in their current sociocultural and historical contexts.

This seminar will examine the history of US immigration from the founding of the American nation to the great waves of European, Asian, and Mexican immigration during the 19th and early 20th centuries, to the more recent flows from Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. In addition to investigating how these groups were defined and treated in relation to each other by the media, we will consider the following questions: Who is "American"? How does the American Dream obscure US settler colonialism and slavery?

This course will focus on the role of electronic and computer technology in shaping musical thought, production, and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Because of the hybrid nature of this work, the term 'electroacoustic music' seems apt. We will engage the musical, technical, and aesthetic issues of electroacoustic music, broadly construed to include the classical avant-garde, electronica, DJ culture, and sound art. Listening examples will be drawn from a broad range of these genres and styles.

In an age of increased movement of people across the globe, this seminar focuses on past and present experiences of (im)migrants, which have inspired a number of recent and contemporary novels, feature films, documentaries, memoirs, and theoretical debates about cultural identity, place and displacement.

Introduction to Writing: This course will explore the work of scholars, essayists, and creative writers in order to use their prose as models for our own. We will analyze scholarly explication and argument, and we'll appreciate the artistry in our finest personal essays and short fiction. Students will complete a series of critical essays across the curriculum and for varied audiences and purposes. Students will have an opportunity to submit their work for peer review and discussion. Students will also meet individually with the instructors. Frequent, enthusiastic revision is an expectation.

Increasingly, it would seem to be the preference of readers in our neo-narrative age, age of biography and memoir, age of the talk show: an appetite for story. For narrative. But the lyric poet might just as easily say that every narrative poem obscures a lyric and suspends time. What happens when a poem is more concerned with "how something felt" than "what happened"? In this course, participants will investigate such questions, as well as the lyric poem at various levels of craft and technique.

We will learn how to build stuff that moves! Using wire, sheet metal, paper, wood, and a range of other media, we will examine and build mechanisms. We will contemplate the basic ingredients of mechanical forces and motion such as bearings, cams, cranks, gear ratios and more. Each student will develop an independent project that incorporates some type of physical motion. All levels of experience are welcome, but students should be comfortable using hand tools, willing and able to devote 6 - 10 hours a week outside of scheduled class time working on projects.

This is a creative writing workshop, ideal for both Div 1 and Div II students, with a focus on food-its making and consumption, culture and preservation. We'll read and write both fiction and non-fiction, with the purpose of exploring what we eat, with whom we eat, where it comes from, who has access to it, and what foods we've forgotten.