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Physical processes are governed by the laws of thermodynamics, which deal with macroscopic phenomena such as temperature, heat, pressure, and volume. These can in turn be explained with statistical mechanics, which describes them in terms of motions and interactions or atoms and molecules. This course will provide an introduction to both thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, using biological and chemical processes as motivating examples.

Are we what we eat? We eat foods for social and cultural reasons, and we eat foods because they contain nutrients that fuel our cells and allow us to function -- grow, think, and live. The quest for food is a major evolutionary theme and continues to profoundly shape ecological, social, and human biological systems.

Climate Change: Exploring the Science and Solutions: An increasing body of observations gives a collective picture of a warming world and widespread changes in the different components of the climate system. Students in this course will examine the causes and impacts of past, present, and future climate change. Climate change is clearly an issue of increasing concern because of its potentially escalating and far-reaching impacts. This has brought the topic of "global warming" very much into the public eye and to the forefront of political debate.

With few exceptions, the greater an individual, family or large social group's access to resources, the better their health. This rule applies in the past and present. In this course we will start with data showing the connections between poverty, inequalities and health on local, group, national and global levels. We will then focus on understanding the processes by which poverty and the degree of inequality in wealth are causally linked to different measures of health and quality of life. A key question concerns whether access to resources drives health or inequalities in resources.

This course will explore the concept of color and its use in the visual arts from the perspective of a physicist. We will cover the basics of wave mechanics and the electromagnetic theory needed to describe light as an electromagnetic wave, the absorption and emission of light through quantum-mechanical processes and basic optics. We will then explore the relation between these physical principles and the fundamentals of color theory and its application in painting.

This course is a methods-course for all students interested in historical inquiry. We will start out by reading Gayatri Spivak's provocative essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?", in which she, among other things, problematizes the difficulties of writing the history of disenfranchised peoples who may not have left traces in the archive. We will then move into a variety of case studies from early modern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and South-Asia to discuss the potential for reading archival material against the grain.

This course is designed for Div II students who wish to use historical methods in their work, and who may be considering historical topics or approaches for their Div III. We will cover the nuts and bolts of primary source and archival research, and we will explore the practices and theories that historians use to produce new knowledge and expand our interpretive frameworks. We will survey a range of topics and methods, including transnational, immigration/migration, race and ethnicity, environmental, cultural, and legal histories.

In this course, we will explore art, literature, and other forms of cultural expressions in the early modern era (1400-1800) in different parts of the world. Case studies will be located in the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean Region, Africa, and pre- and post-Columbian Latin America. A particular focus will be on questions of gender. Research for final papers should be based on work with primary sources (such as original art works). Depending on funding, there will be a field trip to the Met.