We will study the structure, function and evolution of the diversity of structures that allow vertebrates to perform basic functions such as locomotion. We will connect the functions with day-to-day challenges for vertebrates, and we will discuss functional disruption such as disease and trauma. In lab we will dissect fresh-frozen and formaline-preserved vertebrates. A willingness to work with such preserved material is critical to success in class. Students are expected to work in groups during class time, as well as read the required chapters before class.

During the last two decades, China has emerged as a world superpower, transforming her image from a poverty-stricken communist country. The Communist Party itself has led the nation's development of a capitalist economy, in contradiction to its official ideology. How can we understand this historical irony? Was Chinese communism, together with world Marxism, defeated by capitalism? What can China's experience with socialism tell us today?

This course explores the political/social meaning of gender and sexuality from the nineteenth century in the East Asian context. What did womanhood mean in neo-Confucian regimes? Why did gender emerge as a significant category in various social discourses, including anarchism, Marxism, and nationalism? How did certain types of women such as good wives and wise mothers, sexy modern girls, and socialist iron women emerge as (un)desirable models in these societies? How did women become historical agents or social victims during imperialist wars and economic development?

This course explores cities in East Asia from the late nineteenth century to the present. Why did the demolition of imperial city walls in Beijing, Tokyo, and Seoul symbolize modernity while Western-style architecture in treaty ports such as Shanghai and Yokohama represented a new civilization? How did monumental buildings such as Tiananmen Square, the Yasukuni Shrine, and the Kyungbok Palace play vital roles in formulating new national identities? Why did these cities become centers for mass movements?

Contemporary art belongs to a global exchange of ideas, requiring models for understanding its value beyond countries of origin. Museums and galleries regularly showcase artworks from different continents to signal historical interconnections. The course explores the challenges or curating contemporary art. We will study existing curatorial practices, and examine the role of small exhibitions as well as large international art fairs in creating an interlinked, international art community.

A detailed survey of the principal surviving monuments and the overall architectural development of the city of Athens from its origins in the Bronze Age to the end of the 4th century C.E. The archaeological evidence will be discussed against a broader cultural and historical background, with an emphasis on the specific people and events that helped to shape the city and the general social and political circumstances that gave the monuments meaning.

This course examines social protests from the perspective of the visual. Examining cultural productions from 1948-2015 we will focus on the geographical specificity of planned and spontaneous protests that have mobilized people into action. We will use a black studies framework to engage the possibilities present in resisting disparate power structures of race, gender, sexuality, class, and region. Artists, musicians, activists, writers, and grassroots organizers of social movements have been ever cognizant of the role of the visual in subverting power structures.

The seminar will draw upon Foucauldian analytics of governmentality to engage the concept of race/racism as founded on, and maintained by, colonial material conditions mobilized for political outcomes. In exposing race as constituted by a colonial and governmental lineage rather than a biological or ethnic ancestry of origins, the course shifts the conceptual meaning of race/racism from its contemporary anchorage in ideology and biology, to the constitutive logics of colonial practices of governmentality in contemporary western liberal democracies.

This course will examine African American literature and culture in the postwar period as American identities are coalescing around the concept of the US as a world power. Specifically, our task during the semester will be to discuss the myriad ways black authors and artists attempt to interrogate the structure of racial hegemony by creating poetry and prose meant to expand notions of culture and form. We will also examine music, visual art, and advertisements from this era to have a greater sense of the black experience through various cultural representations.