(Offered as POSC 437 and EDST 437) This course will consider how institutions, often contrary to their intended purposes, serve to disable individuals and limit their life potential. We will examine a variety of institutions, including state bureaucracies, facilities designed to house people with mental and physical conditions, schools, and prisons. We will also consider a range of disablements, resulting from visible and invisible disabilities as well as gender, sexuality, race and class-based discrimination.

This course examines the role of nature in international relations, exploring how natural resources have influenced cooperation and conflict between states. The first part of the course focuses on resource competition and collaboration during peacetime. In contrast, the second part addresses how environmental disputes can escalate into war, including the use of scorched-earth tactics. Students will engage in original research and team projects, with lectures and discussions throughout.

Should Marx be given yet another chance? Is there anything left to gain by returning to texts whose earnest exegesis has occupied countless interpreters, both friendly and hostile, for generations? Has Marx’s credibility survived the global debacle of those regimes and movements which drew inspiration from his work, however poorly they understood it? Or, conversely, have we entered a new era in which post-Marxism has joined a host of other “post-”phenomena? This seminar will deal with these and related questions in the context of a close and critical reading of Marx’s texts.

This course will examine the foreign policy of the Russian Federation of the past twenty years. As a successor state Russia has inherited both the Soviet Union's clout (nuclear arms, a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council) and Soviet debts—monetary, psychological, and historical. What are the conceptual foundations of Russian diplomacy? Can we deconstruct Russian nationalism so as to examine its different trends and their impact on foreign policy? Do Russian exports of oil and gas define Russian diplomacy, as it is often claimed?

This seminar examines how the digital age (the third industrial revolution) has transformed politics around the world, in democratic and non-democratic contexts. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) change how people, states, and non-state actors interact. Technology creates new access points and vulnerabilities, new windows of opportunity and new politically salient actors, new political behaviors and types of participation.

In this course, we will study the political thought of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. We will devote equal parts of the term to each thinker and carefully examine their efforts to theorize a variety of phenomena that still powerfully shape political life: capitalism, alienation, nihilism, the will to power, righteous moralism, rage against social constraint, the death drive, mass psychology, and more.

This course will examine the evolution and key debates about US foreign policy in the Middle East during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Key topics include the geopolitics of oil, alliances and “special relationships,” interactions with adversaries, the pursuit of regime change, and “endless wars” across the region. We will examine contemporary policy debates alongside scholarly literature that frames them in broader historical and theoretical perspectives.

(Offered as POSC 363 and HIST 363 [US/TE]) This course uses both international relations theory and historical analysis to understand how and why America moved from the periphery of world politics at the beginning of the twentieth century to the center of world politics during World War Two and the Cold War. Finally, we will conclude by paying special attention to how and why America gained and then lost its' unipolar position in the decades after 1989 and to Donald Trump's crucial role in transforming America's liberal internationalist orientation to the world. 

Can popular protests affect social change? This course examines protest and other forms of popular resistance by asking questions such as: How do people bring about social change from the grassroots? Under what conditions are social movements successful? What are the implications of popular movements for democracy, good governance, and citizenship? We will study a range of popular movements and acts of resistance, including peasant protest, workers’ rights, anti-globalization protests, women’s movements, and democracy movements.

This course will be an introduction to politics across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) from the late Ottoman era to the present day. Key topics will include the history of the state system, anticolonial movements, postcolonial state building, conflict and coexistence in societies with religious and ethnic pluralism, politics of authoritarian regimes, distinctive features of the region's political economy, and dynamics of repression, resistance, revolution, and reform.