This course is designed to give FMS majors and minors a solid grounding in the primary methods of our field. In other words, what are the broad approaches scholars have taken to the study of media, and what specific methodological strategies have proved most effective? We begin with theory as one such method—one that zooms out to ask broad questions about the essential nature of a medium. Our history unit shifts the focus to how media are impacted by and implicated in the progression of time and culture. Finally, our criticism unit features strategies for analyzing individual media objects.

This course will consider the historical, political, and practical forces that go into the making of school, both in the United States and in the developing world. Students will work with field-based practitioners to create a model alternative school in Nairobi, Kenya. Enrollment limit of 30.

The sustained explosion of Faulkner’s work in the dozen-odd years between The Sound and the Fury and Go Down, Moses has no parallel in American literature. He explored the microtones of consciousness and conducted the most radical of experiments in narrative form. At the same time he relied more heavily on the spoken vernacular than anyone since Mark Twain, and he made his “little postage stamp of native soil” in northern Mississippi stand for the world itself.

A course in the application of biomechanics to exercise and sport. Information on linear and angular kinematics, linear and angular kinetics, and fluid mechanics is presented in order for students to analyze exercise and sport.

An advanced perspective of the development of athletes’ functionality, strength and movement mechanics to improve overall performance. This course reviews lifting techniques, speed mechanics, functional training and practical theory of the athletic performance model and prepare students for applications of these principles in everyday sport coaching and to prepare for the NSCA-CSCS certification exam.

Analog and digital circuits are the building blocks of computers, medical technologies, and all things electrical. This course introduces both the fundamental principles necessary to understand how circuits work and mathematical tools that have widespread applications in areas throughout engineering and science. Topics include, Kirchhoff’s laws, Thévenin and Norton equivalents, superposition, responses of first-order and second-order networks, time-domain and frequency-domain analyses, and frequency-selective networks. Required laboratory taken once a week.

An examination of the latest theories and empirical evidence about the organization of firms and industries. Topics include mergers, advertising, strategic behaviors such as predatory pricing, vertical restrictions such as resale price maintenance or exclusive dealing, and antitrust laws and policies. Prerequisite: ECO 250.

This course examines social structures and meanings that shape contemporary family life. Students look at the ways that race, class and gender shape the ways that family is organized and experienced. Topics include the social construction of family, family care networks, parenthood, family policy, globalization and work. Prerequisite SOC 101. Enrollment limited to 35.

Commonly associated with pre-modern societies, the term “blasphemy” has taken on new life in today’s global and technologically-connected world. This course examines the notion of blasphemy—its meanings, the invisible boundaries it invokes in some of the world’s major religious traditions and the different ways of seeing it often signifies—and the contemporary public uses of this term. Based on case studies, it explores the challenges the term poses and the nature of the emotional responses it often triggers.

A study of the major poems and selected prose of John Milton, radical and conservative, heretic and defender of the faith, apologist for regicide and advocate of human dignity, committed revolutionary and Renaissance humanist, and a poet of enormous creative power and influence, whose epic, Paradise Lost, changed subsequent English Literature. Not open to first-year students.