This course explores the multidimensional nature of Christian-Muslim social, religious, economic, and political relations before, during, and briefly after the Crusades in the modern-day territories of Palestine, Israel, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula. Most of the readings in this course were originally penned in Syriac, Greek, Arabic, and Castilian, though we will read them in English translation.

Dragon ladies, lotus blossoms, geisha girls--the U.S. cultural imaginary is saturated with myths regarding Asian sexuality and gender.

An introduction to literary and cultural theory with an emphasis on twentieth century and contemporary thought. We will focus on crucial questions that have focused, and continue to focus, critical debate. These questions may include representation, subjectivity, ideology, identity, difference, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nation. Throughout we will be particularly interested in the ways in which language and form mediate and construct social experience.

This course examines the relationship between the urban and Latina/o/x placemaking, identities and culture(s). Urban scholars have long studied the "evolving" city-this course explores the changing city in relation to Latina/o/x populations and urban social change movements. We examine historical and contemporary conditions and cover a broad range of topics including: urbanization, urban planning, "new urbanism," placemaking, gentrification, migration/immigration, segregation, and more.

We examine the writing of major nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century theorists, such as Marx, Nietzche, Freud, Dubois, Arendt, Fanon, Foucault, Butler, and others through the lens of embodiment. Rather than read theory as an abstract entity, we explore how theory itself is an embodiment of actual lives in which human beings experience life as precarious. What are the social conditions that create vulnerable bodies? How do thinkers who lived or are living precarious lives represent these bodies?

Using case studies such as the Eugenics Movement, Jonestown, and the Kennedy Assassination, this course will examine how distrust of the government, originally motivated by logical concerns, has transformed the way people think about power in the postmodern era. The class will explore the difference between rational questioning of authority and blind distrust that leads to questionable claims. Through topics such as the War on Drugs, this class shows how the powerful are able to use biases and public fears to carry out their own, often counterproductive, measures.

This class introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of Critical Social Thought. Students will learn to interrogate and challenge structures of social, cultural, and political power from a variety of theoretical traditions, such as Marxism, critical ethnic studies, queer and gender critique, critical race theory, media studies, performance studies, disability studies, history of science, the Frankfurt school, and settler colonial and postcolonial theory.

This two-credit independent study course, which is the culminating experience of the educational studies minor, requires analysis and synthesis of key ideas that emerged during focused study in the minor. Students will work with a faculty advisor of the Educational Studies Program Committee as they plan, write, and present a capstone paper.

This weekly seminar provides students with opportunities to design and discuss case studies involving adolescents in middle and secondary school settings, review researched-based models of instruction, and classroom management, and engage in dialogue with professionals regarding numerous aspects of teaching and student learning. Additional topics covered include reviewing the legal obligations of teachers, addressing the needs of students with disabilities, English language learners, and developing effective communication between home and school.

This is a fieldwork-based independent study course. During the fall and spring semesters it involves 20 to 40 hours of individually scheduled fieldwork in a secondary or middle-school classroom or educational program. Students keep a reflective journal, read relevant articles and essays, meet regularly with the instructor, and write a final report.