Since the mid-nineteenth century, Americans have viewed Japan as the Orient's most exotic and mysterious recess, alternately enticing and frightening in its difference. Intense economic relations and cultural exchange between Japan and the U.S. have not dispelled the image of Japanese society and culture as fundamentally different from our own. In this course, we will strive for greater understanding of shared experiences as well as historical particularities. Issues covered may vary from one semester to another, but frequently focus on work, women, minorities, and popular culture.

This course introduces students to the critical study of media, focusing on electronic media, digital technologies, and network cultures. We will analyze the aesthetics, politics, protocols, history, and theory of media, paying attention to the ways they create and erase borders; affect how we form and articulate identities; invade privacy while providing a platform for exploration; foster hate speech and progressive movements alike; and participate in capitalist economies and the acceleration of climate change.

This is an introduction to differential equations for students in the mathematical or other sciences. Topics include first-order equations, second-order linear equations, and qualitative study of dynamical systems

Mathematical optimization involves finding the best solution to a problem from a set of feasible solutions defined by mathematical constraints. It has an elegant theory and applications in fields like management, economics, engineering, and computer science that require decision making under constraints on time or other resources. We will begin by studying linear optimization, including duality, the simplex algorithm, and the geometry of linear programming. Other topics will include discrete optimization, network optimization, and nonlinear optimization.

Topics include the real number system, convergence of sequences and series, power series, uniform convergence, compactness and connectedness, continuity, abstract treatment of differential and integral calculus, metric spaces, and point-set topology.

In this half-semester course students will become familiar with the elements of music notation (staves, clefs, pitch names, note and rest values) and with some of the basic skills necessary for college-level music instruction (e.g., construction and identification of scales, intervals, triads, and basic diatonic functions).

This comprehensive survey course explores the brain and the biological basis of behavior. We will examine the anatomy of the nervous system and the unique properties of the cells that make up the brain. We will discuss the mechanisms by which individual brain cells communicate with each other, and how networks of cells underlie more complex processes such as perception, learning, memory, and behavior.

An in-depth exploration of American culture, politics, and society at the turn of the twentieth century, from roughly the 1890s to World War I. Through readings, films, lectures, and discussions, we will examine several of the key transformations propelling the U.S. into the modern era: the boom and bust of industrial capitalism; the creation of legal segregation; the origins of modern mass media; the impact and experience of the New Immigration; tensions between urban and small town culture; the imperial project abroad; Progressive reform and more radical visions at home.