Once upon a time, two brothers travelled the land, searching for the magic words that would make children smile. Their names were Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the land was Germany, and what they found were fairy tales like Rapunzel, Snow White, and Little Red Riding Hood—or so the old story goes. Today, the Brothers Grimm and their Children’s and Household Tales are a household name, with millions of copies sold, countless translations, and an official status as UNESCO world heritage. But how did we get to “happily ever after”? Was it really so happy?

Politics seems almost unimaginable without secrecy and lying.

This course is an interdisciplinary study of the emotions from historical, philosophical, literary, and cross-cultural perspectives. Considering diverse categories and interpretations of emotions can trouble modern universalist assumptions about human experience. How we feel and show our feelings, the languages we use to express them, and the social acceptability of emotions vary across cultural and historical contexts.

Each day, we are faced with decisions that change our future. Despite their uncertain outcomes, we make those decisions, using some combination of history, theory, and imagination to inform our thinking. Increasingly, changes to Earth systems are affecting our health and prosperity, which raises the questions: what role do we play in reshaping the planet, and how do we best make decisions given uncertainty in Earth’s future?

This course explores the special relationship between humor and regimes of free expression in Greco-Roman antiquity and today. Comedic license has historically been defended by comedy's social functions of “telling it like it is” and “speaking truth to power.” Yet comedy often fails to live up to this promise by punching down rather than up, and by reifying rather than subverting the status quo. So whence the continued investment in humor as a privileged site of expression? And in what sense can speech be called "free" or "unfree" in the first place?

What is the shape of the universe? How do stars die? What happens when galaxies collide? This course will explore questions such as these through an introduction to modern galactic and extragalactic astronomy. Topics covered include: the nature and evolution of stars, what is known about our own Milky Way galaxy, and what observations of other galaxies reveal about the origin, size, shape, and fate of the universe itself. Our investigations of galactic and extragalactic phenomena will build both qualitative and quantitative understanding of astronomical concepts.