This course explores the music of India from musical and cultural perspectives. We will consider Indian classical, dance, folk, tribal, and popular musics. Points of discussion will include music theory, learning, and performance practice; ideological and philosophical conceptions about the music; changing balance of cultural authorship; ways of recording, distributing, and listening to music; and the sociality of music. The course will include weekly reading and listening assignments, several short written assignments, a concert paper, and a final research paper.

This introductory seminar is intended to 1) familiarize students with a range of texts (novels, short stories, essays and poems) written by writers from the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean 2) introduce the language of literary studies and narrative theory using contemporary Caribbean Literatures as aesthetic, historical, cultural and political models. 3) demonstrate the ways that memory, imagination, language function in narrative 4) explore the construction of gender & sexuality; race & class; difference & identity; and trauma & witnessing.

Since its founding, the US has closely regulated the bodies of Others and punished those that rebel against these socially-constructed designations. Utilizing an interdisciplinary amalgam of Critical Race Theory, Sexuality Studies, Queer Theory, Media Studies, Sociology, American Studies, Performance Studies, and Feminist Theory, this course will explore how the state, the media, and civilian institutions police the boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality by pathologizing, criminalizing, and stigmatizing difference.

Students in this course will study original works of Expressionist art in the Five College Museums. We will visit a number of exhibitions as well as permanent collections, covering the art of a variety of times and places, and study the historical context, critical reception, textual analysis, and curatorial issues of the art on display. Central to our deliberations in 2016 will be the exhibition of the expressionist printmaker Kathe Kollwitz at the Smith College Museum of Art. Our investigations will range from early twentieth century prints of E. L.

This course examines contemporary philosophical questions about the body: What is the significance of the corporeal interdependence we sustain with others and the world? What part does this play in creating bodily orientations, boundaries, and distances? How do discipline, technology, and commerce shape bodies? In what ways is the body linked to language and other aesthetic idioms? To affect and materiality? How does the body signify intersecting forms of difference, such as those of race, class, gender, and sexuality? And how do these differences signify the body?

This is a foundational art-making course based on artist Paul Thek's "Teaching Notes," for a "4-D Sculpture" class at Cooper Union around 1980. The original class kicked off with a 177 line of questions and prompts including "Redesign a rainbow, Should art be useful?Useless?, and How can we humanize the city?" We will work on many of these questions, as well as new ones inspired by Thek's teaching and 21st century concerns.

This class intertwines the philosophy and practice of yoga, and takes the form of a traditional yoga class that consists of opening chanting, asana, conscious breathing, and meditation, with an opening Dharma talk focusing on yogic history and philosophy. We will learn a style of yoga based on the vinyasa krama teachings of Tirumalai Krishnamarycharya, the so-called father of modern yoga who is credited with the revival of hatha yoga and with being the architect of vinyasa yoga, conjoining breath an movement.

How does the universe work? What is human nature? What is a good life? This course provides answers to these and other fundamental questions through an introduction to the religious traditions of China from their ancient origins to modern times. It begins with the oracular inscriptions of the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, and then concentrates on the three religions of prime importance throughout the bulk of Chinese history: Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism.

What is ultimately or fundamentally real? What is the nature of being? Is reality essentially physical, nonphysical, or both? Is it one or many, visible or invisible, discrete or diffuse, eternal or temporal? Philosophers have offered the wildest and most varied answers to these questions. Today, metaphysical debates continue to rage within philosophy, cultural theory, and social theory. In this course, we will survey a range of metaphysical theories, from ancient Greek, Indian, and Chinese philosophers up through the most recent debates in European and Anglo-American philosophy.

This course is designed to introduce students to key issues in film studies, focusing on the history of American cinema from 1895 to 1960. We will pay particular attention to the "golden age" of Hollywood, with forays into other national cinemas by way of comparison and critique. Screenings will range from actualities and trick films, to the early narrative features of D. W. Griffith, to the development of genres including film noir (Double Indemnity), the woman's film of the 1940s (Now, Voyager), the western (Stagecoach) and the suspense film (Rear Window).