Theoretical and practical aspects of creating and managing an investment portfolio. Topics in investments including options strategies, commodities and other futures markets, problems and performance of institutional investments. Quantitative solution techniques and performance measurement procedures.

This class belongs to the Visiting Professor of the 21st c. Series. Award-winning international filmmakers and film scholars offer classes in screenwriting, directing, cinematography, and other key areas of filmmaking. Students have a unique opportunity to gain hands-on experience and enrich their portfolios. Class can be taken more than once, because content and faculty vary.

Video, still images and sound are used in this course to explore the fundamental character of storytelling, filmmaking and time-based art practices. Students perform all aspects of production with particular attention to developing ideas and building analytical, critical and production skills. We will read seminal written work and interviews with practicing artists in order to expand our knowledge, understanding and love for the medium. Through exercises that include weekly projects students will produce sketches aimed at exploring video as an experimentation tool.

Cinema, literature and the city are historically interrelated, and urban spaces have proved to be a rich and diverse imagetic setting and subject. Cities have been explored in a myriad of manifestations: as a character, as a fetish, as a historical document, as a cultural monument of religiosity, as a symbol of liberalism, sexuality, progress, and decay.

There are currently over 2 million people living in prisons and jails across the United States ? more incarcerated people per capita than any other country in the world.? What is the carceral state and how do particular gendered and racialized bodies get caught up in its logics?? How do gender, race, sexuality, and class shape systems of discipline, punishment, surveillance, and control?? What is ?anti-carceral feminism? and what are some of the abolitionist critiques of the prison industrial complex??

This course provides students with entry points to understand the complexities of gender and sexuality diversity, to critically examine the social construction of identities, and to consider what it might mean to queer understandings of gender and sexuality. Drawing on work from the fields of anti-oppression education and queer theory, the course exposes students to concepts that serve to identify, name, and explain social inequalities related to gender and sexuality diversity.

Hip Hop is a cultural form cultivated from evolving Black and African aesthetics drawn from ancestral expressions of culture and spirituality. For many in the United States, Hip Hop appears to be simply a pop culture phenomenon with limited representations associated with the culture and often consumed through corporate mass media. Despite its contemporary role in modern pop culture in the United States and beyond, the roots of Hip Hop connect to a profound history of struggle and resistance to oppression.

This course examines the kpop group BTS through a scholarly lens. We look at their rise to fame as a cultural phenomenon, and use it as a way to explore how phenomenons are studied in the humanities and social sciences. We will cover, for example, how sociologists think about kpop as a form of ?soft power,? and what ethnomusicologists say about the genre. We?ll see insights from gender studies scholars about what masculinity means for BTS, and will learn about their innovations on stage performance from communications scholars. We?ll consider the political impacts of BTS?

In addition to introducing the first year students to UMass, the students in this course will explore adoption from the perspectives of the triad members; those who are adopted, birth parents and adoptive parents.? Time will be spent discussing private domestic adoption, adoption from foster care and international adoption.? Content areas to be discussed within the different types of adoption include open vs. closed adoptions, adoption by lesbian and gay parents, transracial adoption and laws that help to prevent child trafficking.?

The rise of human civilization is marked by the development of ever more advanced materials, i. e. Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age?. How will future historians refer to our time? Perhaps it is the Age of Polymers? Polymers encompass a broad spectrum of our world from the readily available commercially plastics for packaging, to the cutting edge, such as the wings of advanced aircraft, or flexible electronic devices (example foldable phones). The DNA that encodes the blueprints for life, and the proteins that build our bodies, are also polymers.