(Offered as RELI 121 and ANTH 121)  This course will introduce students to the research methods, modes of analysis, and writing styles that accompany ethnographic fieldwork in religious communities.  We will begin with a focus on prominent ethnographies (written accounts of cultures based on fieldwork) that are set in religious communities.  We will consider the research questions and debates this literature has taken up as well as the specific ethical and practical challenges that characterize this scholarship.

(Offered as BIOL 114 and ANTH 114)  After consideration of the relevant principles of animal behavior, genetics, and population biology, it will be shown that extensions of the theory of natural selection---kin selection, reciprocal altruism, parent-offspring conflict, sexual selection, and parental manipulation of sex ratios---provide unifying explanations for the many kinds of social interactions found in nature, from those between groups, between individuals within groups and between genes within individuals.

Fall and spring semesters.

This course aims to provide a "how to" of American Studies from an integrative, multiracial, and socio-cultural perspective. It also takes on the task of surveying the development of American Studies as an interdisciplinary field, while paying attention to the theoretical concerns and bodies of work that have influenced American Studies scholars over the last half century.

Fall and spring semesters.

(Offered as AMST 374 and HIST 374 [US])  In the largest incidence of forced removal in American history, the U.S. incarcerated 120,000 people of Japanese descent during WWII, two-thirds of whom were American citizens. Preceded by half a century of organized racism, the attack on Pearl Harbor provided justification for imprisonment of an entire ethnic group solely on the basis of affiliation by “blood.” At the same time, Japanese Americans served in the U.S.

(Offered as ENGL 415 and AMST 365.) This course will focus on the manuscript culture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, using manuscripts as a means of thinking about the act of writing, the implications of audience and publication, and the relations between the private and public word.

(Offered as ENGL 353 and AMST 353.)  This course begins with the premise that if we are to understand the rise of nationalism in our time, it is worthwhile to grapple with its roots.  Although these roots reach back long before the beginning of the United States, we will focus on nationalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as it was linked to debates about race, social Darwinism, colonialism and immigration.  Some of the guiding questions will include:  How was nationalism entangled with Anglo-American claims to “native” American ide

(Offered as HIST 352 [US], AMST 352, and BLST 351.) Focusing on the United States, this course introduces students to foundational questions and texts central to the history of education and education studies. We will explore the competing goals and priorities Americans have held for primary, secondary and post-secondary education and ask how and why these visions have influenced – or failed to influence – classrooms, schools, and educational policy.

(Offered as HIST 351 [US] and AMST 351) A history of urban America in the industrial era, this course will focus especially on the city of Holyoke as a site of industrialization, immigration, urban development, and deindustrialization. We will begin with a walking tour of Holyoke and an exploration of the making of a planned industrial city. We will then investigate the experience of several key immigrant groups – principally Irish, French Canadian, Polish, and Puerto Rican – using both primary and secondary historical sources, as well as fiction.