From manga to K-pop, East Asian cultural influence has expanded worldwide. This course explores popular cultures in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong from the 18th century to the present. Using interdisciplinary techniques and sources, we will investigate traditional forms such as Chinese opera, pansori, and kabuki; the emergence of cities as centers for popular culture; and connections with technology, ideology, and gender.

This course explores the interconnections between art and society using a sociological lens. We will examine topics such as the social construction of cultural authenticity; the relationship between cultural capital and group boundaries; and the legitimation of art forms.

Understanding media systems and the democratic role of the public is relevant to policy makers working in globalized societies. How do journalists and leaders communicate toward different media audiences and international arenas? What is the role of the internet and social media for non-state actors communicating across borders? An interdisciplinary perspective on theories of democracy and public space using case studies in Europe and the United States.

This course will offer an introduction to the science in forensic investigations. We will explore several methods and instruments often used in CSI programs, such as mass spectrometry, infrared spectroscopy and DNA analysis, which are very valuable in evaluating crime scene evidence. We will explore the validity of scientific findings and the political implications of the use and availability of the data. Students will have a chance to be expert witnesses and be in the lab evaluating evidence.

Learn to speak with confidence and clarity about your summer internship or research project. What have you learned? How is it useful? What are your next steps? Students will reflect on their experience and collaborate with others to generate useful knowledge. Required for the Nexus but open to all students. For more information, email nexus-wm@mtholyoke.edu.

Maya culture has long attracted the attention of travel writers, tourists, and anthropologists. This course introduces students to historical and contemporary patterns of Maya culture through careful analysis of ethnographic texts. We will read Maya cultural formations against the historical backdrop of colonial and postcolonial Latin American history, from Spanish colonialism through the Guatemalan civil war and into the present. Discussions will cover the content of ethnographic accounts as well as the institutional and disciplinary contexts of research.

Eighteenth-century England witnessed the birth of the novel, a genre that in its formative years was both lauded for its originality and condemned as intellectually and morally dangerous, especially for young women. We will trace the numerous prose genres that influenced early novelists, including conduct manuals, epistolary writing, conversion narratives, travelogues, romance, and the gothic. In doing so, we will concomitantly examine the novel's immense formal experimentation alongside debates about developing notions of gender and class as well as the feeling, thinking individual.

This seminar focuses on contemporary anthropological scholarship concerned with the varieties of sexual expression in diverse cultural settings. We will read ethnographic accounts of sexual ideologies and the politics and practices of sexuality in Brazil, Japan, Native North America, India, and elsewhere. We will examine anthropological theories of sexuality with an emphasis on contemporary issues, including performance theory, 'third gender' theories, sexual identity formulation, and techniques used by various societies to discipline the body.

We explore how memorialization and reconciliation take place in societies that have experienced extreme violence. How do survivors, perpetrators and their descendants record the experience of atrocity through testimonials and memorials in ways that contrast with 'official' national narratives of the past? In what ways does memorialization end cycles of violence without re-triggering trauma? How does restorative justice, for example, address feelings of despair or guilt that get passed down from one generation to another?

This course will explore the scientific, technological, and philosophical significance of the development of thermodynamics. The formulation of the laws of thermodynamics had profound implications for our understanding of the universe. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says, roughly, that the entropy of the universe is always increasing, and it had a deeply destabilizing effect on our Enlightenment image of a clockwork universe that is ordered and unchanging. We will study the laws of thermodynamics and their impact on science, art, literature, and society.