It is unprecedented in U.S. history that someone like Bernie Sanders who calls himself a socialist could mount a formidable challenge to the Democratic Party establishment. Recent polls among Millennials indicate a greater preference for socialism over capitalism. And while the Cold War-McCarthy era saw the demonization of Marxism, there is a rich, diverse, yet hardly known socialist tradition in the U.S. Here?s some important players: Edward Bellamy?s ?Looking Backward.? The Wobblies. Emma Goldman?s Mother Earth anarchism. The Farm Labor Party. 1930s Communist organizing.

Students will learn about sports-related mild traumatic brain injury (i.e., concussion) and postconcussion syndrome. They will learn about the cause, symptoms, assessment, and recovery of sports-related concussion. The class will discuss controversies about concussion. There will be a focus on the neuropsychological aspects of the condition.

Randomness and uncertainty exist in our daily lives as well as in every scientific investigation. This course helps students better understand randomness and uncertainty and gives them tools to make more informed decisions under uncertain situations.

We will discuss that our intuition is often wrong when assessing uncertain situations, leading us to make wrong decisions. We will provide real life examples where even professionals have misjudged chances and probabilities.

Focused around my books, Performing Whitely in the Postcolony (2016) and a series of performances I am curating in Fall 2017 at UMass, called Wrestling with Whiteness, this course engages students in an exploration of the multi-dimensional nature of race in contemporary culture by focusing on the performance of whiteness. We will unpack what whiteness (the racial category and the lived experience) is, explore how it functions in our contemporary society, and examine what artists offer to the conversation about white privilege, racism, and allyship.

Using Blake Snyder?s screenwriting bible ?Save the Cat? as a lens and the genre of the Hollywood heist
Thriller as a model, students will study the formulas of successful screenplays.
We?ll dissect the films beat by beat, breaking them down by act and scene, to gain an understanding of the essential story points necessary to constructing satisfying genre scripts. By the end of the semester, students should be able to beat out their own original screenplay treatments containing all the elements required by the genre.

This course will introduce concepts of engineered tissue replacements and tissue model systems for basic research. We will discuss the growing need for tissue replacements, in vivo cell-matrix relationships in biology, and how we can engineer biomaterials (both bioinert and bioinstructive) to act as cell scaffolds.