SPAN 110 is an introduction to Spanish and Spanish-American cultures. This course is recommended for students who have either no previous training in Spanish or no more than two years of high school Spanish. It gives the student a basic understanding of and ability to use the language. Grammar is used as a point of departure for development of oral and written skills.

Independent Reading Courses. A full course.

Fall and spring semesters. The Department.

Independent Reading Courses. A full course.

Fall and spring semesters. The Department.

(Offered as SOCI 341 and ENST 341)  Social movements—from the early conservation and anti-colonial movements that began over a century ago, to the modern climate justice movement—have worked to make environmental issues and inequalities part of the global political and policy agenda. The course draws upon sociological research that fosters an understanding of contemporary environmental debates, as well as the possibilities and obstacles we face in attempting to address socio-ecological problems.

(Offered as SOCI 334 and BLST 336 [US]) The passage of civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965 was a defining moment in American race relations. By comparison to what preceded it, the post-civil rights era amounted to a great social transformation, leading many to assert ours is now a “colorblind” culture. This course will use the idea of colorblind culture to examine the changing role of race and racism in the contemporary United States.

(Offered as AMST 302 and SOCI 302)  This course is an in-depth exploration of the increasing global interconnectedness of economic, political, and social processes, what many have come to call “globalization.” We begin by developing a sociological critique of the relationship between inequality, post-World War II global capitalism, and the neoliberal ideology that underlies it.  We do this through study of the major institutions and actors that endorse and perpetuate global capitalism.

This course explores the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of anti-Muslim discrimination in the United State and Europe. What, in short, accounts for the anxious fear of Islam and the ascendance of “the Muslim” as the defining racial and religious “other” of our time? The course frames Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism, challenging the idea that Islamophobia is merely a problem of individual bias and that “knowing more” about Islam will necessarily lead to a decrease in anti-Muslim racism.

The course introduces students to what C. Wright Mills referred to as the “sociological imagination.” Through accounts both classic and contemporary, students will learn to interrogate in a systematic way both their own lives and the lives of those around them, understanding how they are shaped in significant ways by groups, communities, institutions, and social structures, even as they remain authors of their own actions and determiners of their own fate.

Independent Reading Course.

Fall and spring semesters. The Department.