This playwriting course is designed for students with prior writing experience who are ready to dive more deeply into the art and craft of writing full-length plays across multiple genres in an advanced workshop setting.

What is a play and how do you write it?  In this course, students will be introduced to the basic principles of writing for the stage (voice, craft, and process), and study short plays. Students will gain an understanding of foundational aspects such as conflict, character, objectives, obstacles, and stakes. In parallel to learning elements of playwriting, students will read plays reflecting various periods, cultures and narratives, as well as critical theories around the craft of playwriting and theatrical forms.

(Offered as HIST 424 and SWAG 424) The LGBTQ Rights Movement in the U.S. has revolutionized the lives, rights, and representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in modern life. Despite its transformative impact, few people know much of anything about the people, organizations, or legal issues involved in the struggle.

(Offered as  SWAG 365 and ENGL 372) Do people the world over love in the same way, or does romance mean different things in different cultures? What happens when love violates social norms? Is the “romance” genre an escape from real-world conflicts or a resolution of them? This course analyzes romantic narratives from across the world through the lens of feminist theories of sexuality, marriage, and romance.

(Offered as HIST 348 and SWAG 348) This seminar will explore the intersections of gender, migration, and labor, with a particular focus on Asian American women in the United States (broadly defined to include the U.S.’s territories and military bases), from 1870 to the present. Through transnational and woman-of color feminist lenses, we will investigate U.S.

(Offered as HIST 252 and SWAG 252) What can we learn about MLK and Malcolm X and from Magneto and Professor X? What can we learn about gendered and racialized depictions within comic books? As a catalyst to encourage looking at history from different vantage points, we will put comic books in conversation with the history of race and empire in the United States. Sometimes we will read comic books as primary sources and products of a particular historical moment, and other times we will be reading them as powerful and yet imperfect critiques of imperialism and racial inequality in U.S.

(Offered as ANTH 209, SOCI 207, and SWAG 209) This seminar uses feminist theory and methods to consider scientific practice and the production of medicoscientific knowledge. We will explore how medicine and science reflects and reinforces social relations, positions, and hierarchies as well as whether and how medicoscientific practice and knowledge might be made more accurate and socially beneficial.

(Offered as ANTH 209, SOCI 207, and SWAG 209) This seminar uses feminist theory and methods to consider scientific practice and the production of medicoscientific knowledge. We will explore how medicine and science reflects and reinforces social relations, positions, and hierarchies as well as whether and how medicoscientific practice and knowledge might be made more accurate and socially beneficial.

(Offered as SWAG 188 and BLST 288[US, D]) How might we connect the U.S.’s current economic, social, and military dominance over much of the world to empires of the past such as the nineteenth century British empire in India, Africa and the Caribbean? What does the existence of human zoos of the nineteenth and early twentieth century tell us about how empires thought of colonized peoples? How might we connect imperial legacies to the current immigrant crisis in the U.S.?

(Offered as STAT 360 and MATH 360) This course explores the nature of probability and its use in modeling real world phenomena. There are two explicit complementary goals: to explore probability theory and its use in applied settings, and to learn parallel analytic and empirical problem-solving skills. The course begins with the development of an intuitive feel for probabilistic thinking, based on the simple yet subtle idea of counting. It then evolves toward the rigorous study of discrete and continuous probability spaces, independence, conditional probability, expectation, and variance.