This course will use writing as a way to notice the natural world more closely. We will read American and Russian authors for whom being in nature and writing about nature led to a deeper understanding of their social conditions. We will consider a variety of narrative positions, including those of naturalists, hikers, tourists, mystics, activists, scientists, sportsmen, soldiers, prisoners, workers (firemen at Chernobyl Nuclear station, for example), explorers and others. We will try to understand how and why women and men of the last two centuries constructed nature as they did.

Every culture bears unique sensibilities to sounds. People cultivate distinctive ways of hearing, understanding, and relating to them. These sensibilities are also reflected in the processes of sound- and music-making. Different instruments are devised to encapsulate distinctive cultural values not only acoustically but also visually in their material forms. This course aims to explore diverse music cultures of the world through the lens of organology (the study of musical instruments).

In this media production workshop, we will study historic and contemporary examples of campaigns produced for political groups and movements as we make media for change and transformation. Students will analyze works created by corporations, collectives, citizens and artists and use this knowledge to create work of their own. This course is open to students of all levels; production experience is not expected. Hands on technical workshops will reinforce or introduce production and design skills.

This course invites participants from diverse disciplines to investigate the interconnections of listeners and their sonic environments. A soundscape is an environment of sounds with emphasis on the way it is perceived, understood, and inhabited by an individual, a group, or by an entire society. The term may refer to actual environments, or to abstract constructions such as musical compositions and tape montages, particularly when considered as an artificial environment.

This studio architecture course will be a design investigation of a particular theme in, or approach to, architecture and the built environment. In this course, students will develop and apply traditional and contemporary architectural skills (sketches, plans, elevations, models, and computer diagramming) to inter-disciplinary and socially pertinent design problems. Creative and indexical study and analysis will be used to generate and foster a broad range of concepts and language necessary to identify and define spaces.

Is there such a thing as "objective" or "absolute" truth? Or is everything "relative" - to a particular individual, culture, language, or conceptual framework? What is truth, anyway? In this course, we will examine the nature of truth, knowledge, and value, and consider a range of challenges to the idea of "objective" or "absolute" truth.

We will examine the very meaning of African-American literature by reading a variety of major (and not so major) writers from the revolutionary era to the present. We will explore the idea of the African-American experience(s) of citizenship, race, sexuality, gender, class, and privilege. Instead of focusing upon the ways in which this literature emerges within history, we will address (across time) the various ways in which writers, orators, poets, rappers, and authors tackle these themes within literary forms: fiction, creative non-fiction, autobiography, poems, songs, etc.

"Asia" is a diverse, dynamic, and complex cultural entity that encompasses a vast geographic area and a long rich history. In this course we will investigate some representative performing arts traditions of South, Southeast, and East Asia, e.g., Indian classical music, Javanese gamelan, Japanese noh theatre, as a way of learning about the regions' unique history, different value systems, aesthetic sensibilities, spiritual beliefs, philosophies, and ways of life.

In this course we will explore a set of cultural texts - a poem, a short story, a comic book, a film, a music video, a video game - in order to practice skills of close reading/looking, and exploratory/critical writing. We will ask, what is "culture," and where did the idea of "culture" come from? What do we mean when we say "pop culture" or "high culture"? How do the meanings of "culture" relate to ideas about race, gender, class, and ability? How does a cultural object create meaning with its form - its shape and composition?

Although often writing in traditional forms such as the short story, the anecdote, or the allegory, each of the writers we will discuss raises difficult problems of interpretation insofar as they disturb the conventional limitations of their genre. Our emphasis will be the exploration of the "disturbances" that these writers create; the uneasiness which demands that we search again, read again, and continue to question our presuppositions not only about literature, but concerning our entire view of the world.