What are emotions, and how should we think about them? How are our emotional experiences related to our actions within the social realm? This course will attempt to address these questions and investigate the functionality of emotions in our relationships and in our lives more generally. We'll cover classic and contemporary emotion theories and consider recent work addressing the usefulness of emotions like gratitude, disgust, pride, jealousy, happiness, and anger.

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?

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.

The central focus of this course is to explore theory and organizing practices of grassroots democracy. Each week the seminar will move back and forth between historical and theoretical reflection and reflection upon the experience of organizing communities. The course is motivated by citizens acting together to generate responses to the most challenging questions and issues of the present.

This course will focus on the writings of Black political thinkers in the Americas, Africa and Europe. Through critical examination of the conditions against, and contexts within, which the discourses of these thinkers are situated, this course hopes to arrive at some understanding of the principles, goals and strategies developed to contest and redefine the notions of citizenship (vis-à-vis the imperatives of race/racism and the global colonial formation), humanity, development, democracy, and freedom.

The aim of this course is to provide a survey of modern and advanced ideas in physics that we typically cannot fit into our usual classes. Topics include: Special Relativity, General Relativity (and some Cosmology), Particle Physics, Condensed Matter Physics, and Fluid Dynamics. These are all very broad subjects, so the goal will primarily be to gain an appreciation of the big ideas in each area and learn about connections to current research. The course will be comprised of lectures, reading and discussion of articles, presentations, and some limited problem sets.

This seminar will examine the nature of prudential value or, more simply, The Good Life. That is, it is concerned with the question: What is good for me? (as opposed to, say, what is the morally right thing for me to do). More specifically, we will be considering various versions of the preeminent theories of well-being: Objective-List Theories, Desire-Satisfaction Accounts, and Hedonist theories.

In this seminar, students will gain a thorough understanding of the stress response system, referred to as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Using primary literature, the course will cover various facets of the HPA axis, including the cellular and anatomical neuroscience behind the stress response. Students will gain an understanding of the techniques commonly used to assess acute and chronic HPA axis activity and behavioral reactivity in humans and in a variety of non-human animals.

Designed for music and non-music majors, this advanced seminar examines core theoretical and methodological issues in ethnomusicology and the debates that have shaped its practice since its origins in the early twentieth century as comparative musicology. Drawing on musical traditions from different parts of the world and supplemented by workshops conducted by visiting professional musicians, the course explores the interdisciplinary approaches that inform how ethnomusicologists study the significance of music in and as culture.

In linear algebra the spectral theorem describes a linear operator in terms of its eigenvectors and eigenvalues, that is, its spectrum.The extension to infinite dimension includes differential and integral operators. The course will consider the finite dimensional case rigorously and explore analogous infinite dimensional cases through their motivating examples.