Intro Comp Science II
A continuation of COSC 111. This course will emphasize more complicated problems and their algorithmic solutions. The object-oriented programming paradigm will be discussed in detail, including data abstraction, inheritance, and polymorphism. Other topics will include stacks, queues, linked lists, programming for graphical user interfaces, and basic topics in probability. A laboratory section will meet once a week to give students practice with programming constructs.
Islanders Abroad
Pacific Islander protagonists are conspicuously absent from nineteenth-century travel writing. Even so, myriad voyagers from Oceania journeyed to the furthest reaches of the planet in the 1800s, generating intercultural encounters and returning to their archipelagic homelands with news of the outside world. This research tutorial focuses on Indigenous Pacific Islander women and men who travelled to the United States, Europe, China, and Japan during the nineteenth century.
Politics and Poetry
On October 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech at Amherst College in celebration of the Frost Library and in tribute to his friend, Poet Laureate Robert Frost (1874-1963), with whom he had a turbulent relationship. An inspiring meditation on the crossroads where politics and poetry meet, arguably the most important feature of the speech was Kennedy's call for public service, part of a mission that resulted, among other things, in the Peace Corps, established to create a better understanding between Americans and other nations.
America's Death Penalty
The United States, almost alone among constitutional democracies, retains death as a criminal punishment. It does so in the face of growing international pressure for abolition and of evidence that the system for deciding who lives and who dies is fraught with error. This seminar is designed to expose students to America's death penalty as a researchable subject. It will be organized to help students understand how research is framed in this area, analyze theories and approaches of death penalty researchers, and identify open questions and most promising lines of future research.
Singing Together
The sonic and social dynamics of people singing together are, surprisingly, an under-developed and under-theorized field in music studies and voice studies. In the time of COVID-19, managing the significant risks of singing together amplifies these dynamics through the impossibility of physical co-presence and the possibilities of technologically enabled participation at a distance. This is an extraordinary time to think and write about what it means to sing together.
Special Topics
Independent reading course.
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
Special Topics
Independent reading course.
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
Greek History
A chronological survey of ancient Greece from the Bronze Age to the age of Alexander, with attention to the range of Greek political systems and religious life in each historic period, and to the wars that punctuated and to a large extent defined the different phases of Greek history.