The goal of this course is to see how careful philosophical thought can help us with pressing issues that women face. We approach this topic through a distinctly feminist lens, as opposed to a traditional philosophical, queer theoretic, or gender studies lens. We will draw on a variety of philosophical resources, ranging from liberal and feminist political theory, to speech act theory. Possible questions we will consider include: What is objectification? What is consent? Is pornography degrading? How does sexism and bias lead to bad science?

The mechanisms of evolutionary change within populations and between species; patterns of change in space, time and form; and the origin of adaptations. These approaches make sense of the diversity of life. Then we turn to the evolution of developmental pathways, as a way of approaching the unity of life.

The aim of this course is to understand the fundamental unit of life--the cell--at the molecular level. We will consider the assembly and structure of cellular membranes, proteins, organelles, and the cytoskeleton, as well as their roles in cellular processes including the capture and transformation of energy, catalysis, protein sorting, motility, signal transduction, and cell-cell communication. Emphasis will be placed upon the diversity of cellular form and function and the cell biological basis for disease.

How is our understanding of U.S. history transformed when we place African American women at the center of the story? This course will examine the exclusion of African American women from dominant historical narratives and the challenge to those narratives presented by African American women's history through an investigation of selected topics in the field.

This course will examine the history of trans communities and identities and the development of trans activism in the US, focusing on how race, gender, sexuality, and class have affected transgender lives, communities, and politics. In doing so we will explore a number of topics including the social, medical, and political constructions of gender deviance; medical and social constructions of transsexuality; social, political, and other constructions of the category transgender; and the politics of trans liberation.

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?