This course examines Islamic religious beliefs and practices from the origins of Islam to the present, focusing on such central issues as scripture and tradition, law and theology, sectarianism and mysticism. Attention will be given to the variety of Islamic understandings of monotheism, prophethood, dogma, ritual, and society.

This course is an introduction to the study of religion, assessing the nature of religion and methodological approaches through an examination of subject matter drawn from numerous traditions.

This class explores major tendencies in European film from 1945 to the present. We approach the canon of European art cinema, discuss various genres (drama, youth film, comedy, sci-fi), movements such as Italian Neorealism, New Waves (French, Czech, German, Romanian), and migrant and accented cinemas. We pay special attention to movement as a repeating motif. As we investigate filmic representations of class, gender, and race across various national contexts, we challenge a vision of Europe -- and of its cinema -- as coherent and static.

This course is for all who stay to the end of the credits, purchase soundtracks, and argue over who should have won the Oscar for Best Score, along with anyone else interested in the undervalued importance of music to the general effect of a motion picture. We will explore and discuss the myriad ways in which these two media interact. The course will focus on classic scores by Herrmann, Morricone, and Williams, as well as the uses of pre-existing music in films of Kubrick and Tarantino.

This seminar covers the social history of punishment, beginning with the birth of the prison in the late eighteenth century and continuing to the present. Emphasis on the shift in philosophy from public to private punishment, prison reform movements, and the death penalty.

This course offers an historical survey of film theory, from the work of its earliest authors and practitioners at the birth of the 20th century (who first struggled to define the medium), to those who are working still to elucidate the place of the cinema in relation to new media in its ever-evolving and ever more complex place in culture. As a way of focusing the discussion of the various theoretical positions, we will watch and discuss films that represent that most modern of phenomena--the city.

This course is a critical survey of theoretical and empirical research on social inequality, stratification, and mobility. The central focus is class, race, and gender inequalities as they have changed during the post-World War II period in the United States (although we will look briefly at stratification regimes in other cultures and time periods). The concepts and methods of social stratification have wide application in sociology, economics, public policy, and administration contexts.

This course provides a foundation in the principles, techniques, and equipment involved in video production. Students will make several short videos over the course of the term as well as one final piece. We will develop our own voices while learning the vocabulary of moving images and gaining production and post-production skills. In addition to technical training, classes will include critiques, screenings, readings, and discussion.

The dynamic mother-daughter duo of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley is often read as part of the "Godwin-Shelley circle," a cadre of writers circulating around their respective literary husbands. This course will place them at the center of literary innovation, examining their expansive work in multiple genres. Asking what it means to be ardent and provocative women writers during this period, we will discuss their radical politics, their gender theories, and their ideas about literature intervening in the public sphere.

As London and the British novel enter the new millennium, both are sites of competing histories, traditions, and agendas. This course will map the city's progress from the center of an empire to a node in the global world's economy, and chart the twentieth-century novel's movement from realism to postmodernism and beyond. Beginning by contrasting the realist London of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes with Virginia Woolf's modernist version in Mrs. Dalloway, we will go on to trace the development of the post-1945 British novel.