The primary goal of this course is to deepen your understanding of the music you like, while forging connections to music that is unfamiliar to you, making you a more well-informed music consumer. Throughout the course, you hone active listening skills, helping you to identify technical components and to connect with the music on an emotional level. These skills help you describe more specifically what you hear, and decode increasingly complex music. Classes cover folk, popular, jazz, non-western classical and other styles.

An introduction to formal analysis and tonal harmony, and a study of pieces in the standard repertory. Regular exercises in harmony. Prerequisites: ability to read standard notation in treble and bass clefs, including key signatures and time signatures, and the ability to name intervals. (A placement test is given before the fall semester for incoming students.) One 50-minute ear training section required per week, in addition to classroom meetings. Class sections limited to 20.

An introduction to formal analysis and tonal harmony, and a study of pieces in the standard repertory. Regular exercises in harmony. Prerequisites: ability to read standard notation in treble and bass clefs, including key signatures and time signatures, and the ability to name intervals. (A placement test is given before the fall semester for incoming students.) One 50-minute ear training section required per week, in addition to classroom meetings. Class sections limited to 20.

In this course, we will consider such questions as: What do we know and how do we know it? What knowledges count as “science”? How is knowledge culturally situated? How has “science” been central to colonialism and capitalism and what would it mean to decolonize science(s)? Is feminist science possible?

In this course, we will examine the space we now know as “New England” as a land with histories, peoples, landscapes, and life-ways that predate and exceed the former English colonies and current-day Canada and United States. We will devote our semester to learning about the cultural distinctiveness of many of the Native peoples of the Northeast—for example, Abenakis, Mohawks, Mohegans, Narragansetts, Nipmucs, Pocumtucks, and Wampanoags—and to understanding the historical processes of encounter, adaptation, resistance, and renewal that have characterized Native life for centuries.

This seminar examines the material culture of everyday life in New England from the earliest colonial settlements to the Victorian era. It introduces students to the growing body of material culture studies and the ways in which historic landscapes, architecture, furniture, textiles, metalwork, ceramics, foodways and domestic environments are interpreted as cultural documents and as historical evidence.

An introduction to the methods and concerns of American studies. We draw on literature, painting, architecture, landscape design, social and cultural criticism, and popular culture to explore such topics as responses to economic change, ideas of nature and culture, America’s relationship to Europe, the question of race, the roles of women, family structure, social class and urban experience.

This one-credit course gives students systematic practice in the range of public speaking challenges they face in their academic and professional careers. During each class meeting, the instructor presents material on an aspect of speech craft and delivery; each student then gives a presentation reflecting her mastery of that week’s material. The instructor films each student’s presentations and reviews them in individual conferences. During one class meeting, the students also review and analyze films of notable speeches. Classes are held for the first six weeks of the semester.

This one-credit course gives students systematic practice in the range of public speaking challenges they face in their academic and professional careers. During each class meeting, the instructor presents material on an aspect of speech craft and delivery; each student then gives a presentation reflecting her mastery of that week’s material. The instructor films each student’s presentations and reviews them in individual conferences. During one class meeting, the students also review and analyze films of notable speeches. Classes are held for the first six weeks of the semester.

This interdisciplinary project-based course emphasizes human-centered design process as well as critical social theory on the relationships between humans and designed things. Through hands-on, individual and collaborative making, students learn design-thinking skills such as user-experience research, rapid idea generation techniques, prototyping and iterative implementation. This learning happens alongside rich class discussions of both seminal and contemporary scholarly work on design’s role in shaping the lived experience.