Every culture bears unique sensibilities to sounds. People cultivate distinctive ways of hearing, understanding, and relating to them. These sensibilities are also reflected in the processes of sound- and music-making. Different instruments are devised to encapsulate distinctive cultural values not only acoustically but also visually in their material forms. This course aims to explore diverse music cultures of the world through the lens of organology (the study of musical instruments).

Since its invention, photography has produced both anxiety and fascination for writers and writing. This course will ask why writers envy photography, setting out from two significant moments for the West: 19th-century American literature, in which photography is associated with ideas about representation, scientific reason, and autobiography; and the European avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s, in which it is identified with the unconscious, revolution, and utopia.

This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of painting, such as composition, value, and color. Students will learn about material and the technical issues of painting. Drawings will often be produced in tandem with paintings in order to illuminate visual ideas. We will work with water based and oil based paint on various surfaces. Besides creating individual paintings, students will collectively prepare and work on large-scale canvases. This course will develop from individual representational set-ups towards collective, abstract work.

This is an introductory course for students who would like to explore their interest in documentary practice. Through a combination of screenings, lectures, readings and technical workshops, we will explore a critical/historical overview of this genre and incorporate our knowledge and experience to produce individual or collaborative projects in a variety of "modes of representation". Projects need not be restricted to a particular medium; in fact, students will be encouraged to explore the ways in which film, video, and/or animation can be utilized together.

This course is designed for the cohort of students involved in the sustainable design/technology area. It will offer an arena for students to present their own work and evaluate that of others, discuss advanced readings of interest, write analytical papers on topics of their choice, and work with guest speakers in the areas of sustainable development and technology. Class members will have large responsibility for determining the content and direction of the course.

We will explore the complex microbial interactions and succession seen in the production of some ales. This will be a research project-based course focused on questions of interest to brewers. The microbiology of many of the Belgian ales and some American dry hopped beers is quite complex and largely unexplored at the molecular level. The fermentation is natural and often involves mixed cultures of yeasts and bacteria. Some microorganisms may participate in parallel, while others act in a sequential manner with a changing dominant biota during the course of fermentation.

Stream Restoration Seminar: Rivers and streams wind through the landscape moving water, sediment and other materials. Riparian zones (the land areas along streams) link streams with upland terrestrial ecosystems and often are areas of high biological diversity. This class will explore the function of streams and their riparian zones, how they can become impacted or destroyed and current methods of restoration. Students will learn restoration design principles, explore the primary literature, visit local restoration sites and work in teams to collect field data and complete projects.

Standing as silent sentinels, trees in temperate regions record temperature, rainfall, amount of sunlight and response to disturbance in the width of their annual growth rings. We can use the patterns of these rings as surrogate climate records for years before people recorded weather data. In this project-based course, we will first learn the techniques of dendochronology, the science of reading tree rings, including collection and preparation of samples, data collections and analysis, and the biology of tree growth.

Infectious diseases are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Mathematical models are increasingly being used to understand host-virus dynamics and to determine optimal control strategies for containing and eliminating infections. This co-taught course will cover the basics of virology, epidemiology, and mathematical modeling methods. Students will read primary research articles, explore with well-known models, and contribute to the field with a semester-long project in which they build and analyze their own model. Pre-requisite: Calculus is recommended but not required.

In this course we will explore the fundamentals of catalysis and how they manifest in enzymatic systems. We will use nature's "simplest" catalyst, the proton, to examine the physical principles of catalysis, followed by iron as a "simple" redox catalyst. These two models will be used to address the similarities and differences between homogeneous chemical catalysis and enzymes, including their substrate specificity, regio- and stereoselectivity, and enormous rate accelerations.