(Offered as ARHA 135, ARCH 135, and EUST 135.) This course is an introduction to painting, sculpture, and architecture of the early modern period. The goal of the course is to identify artistic innovations that characterize European art from the Renaissance to the French Revolution, and to situate the works of art historically, by examining the intellectual, political, religious, and social currents that contributed to their creation.

(Offered as EUST 101 and MUSI 101) This course teaches the close reading of music through guided listening in a variety of traditions and historical periods. The topic may change from year to year. In 2015-16, we focus on aural analysis of musical texture and form through an historical survey of works stretching from medieval Europe (twelfth-century Gregorian chant) to twentieth- and twenty-first-century America (blues, swing, Broadway, bebop, and minimalism). Composers whose works we will study include: Hildegard von Bingen, G. Palestrina, C. Monteverdi, J.S. Bach, W.A. Mozart, L.

Independent reading course.

Fall and spring semesters. The Department.

(Offered as HIST 402 [^c] and ENST 401.) Wine is as old as Western civilization. Its consumption is deeply wedded to leading religious and secular traditions around the world. Its production has transformed landscapes, ecosystems, and economies. In this course we examine how wine has shaped the history of Europe, North Africa, and the Americas.

What we know and how we know about "the environment" is influenced by cultural, political, historical and social contexts.  Why are some knowledges about the environment perceived to be more accurate, objective and true than others?  How might our collective understandings of environmental change shift if multiple forms of knowledge--"western" scientific, indigenous, etc.--were mobilized in the production, dissemination and application of environmental knowledge?

(Offered as STAT 111E and ENST 240.) This course is an introduction to applied statistical methods useful for the analysis of data from all fields. Brief coverage of data summary and graphical techniques will be followed by elementary probability, sampling distributions, the central limit theorem and statistical inference. Inference procedures include confidence intervals and hypothesis testing for both means and proportions, the chi-square test, simple linear regression, and a brief introduction to analysis of variance (ANOVA).

Life has existed on Earth for nearly four billion years, shaped by massive extinction events. In the short span of the last 10,000 years, humans have become important agents in shaping global environmental change. The question this course considers is straightforward: Have humans been modifying the environment in ways that will, in the not distant future, cause another worldwide extinction event? There are no simple, much less uncontested, answers to this question. We will have to consider the ways we have altered habitats and ecosystem processes.

Independent Reading Courses.

Fall and spring semester. The Department.

(Offered as ENGL 474 and BLST 452 [CLA].)  This digital humanities seminar examines how the concurrent migrations of Chinese and Indian indentured laborers to the Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean workers to and from the Panama Canal, at the turn of the twentieth century, contributed to the emergence of Modern Caribbean Literature.  Students will explore the digital, print, and audio-visual archives related to these migrations, now stored in the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), to enrich their reading of Caribbean literature.  Librarians at Amherst, as well as scholars, li