(Offered as SOCI 237 and SWAG 237.)  How has the rise of working women complicated modern workplaces and the idea of work? One challenge is how to value women’s work fairly. One index of this challenge is that in workplaces across the world, women earn significantly less than men and are underrepresented in high status positions. What explains such gender gaps in the workplace? Taking an empirical, social-science perspective, this course will discuss three main aspects of gender and work.

(Offered as SWAG 210 and ANTH 210.)  This course draws on anthropological literature to study the socio-cultural making of human sexuality and its variations, including theories of sexuality as a domain of human experience. It seeks to critically examine some of the most intimate and often taken-for-granted aspects of human life and locate sexual acts, desires and relations in particular historical and cultural contexts.

(Offered as ARHA 284, EUST 284, and SWAG 206.) This course will examine the ways in which prevailing ideas about women and gender-shaped visual imagery, and how these images influenced ideas concerning women from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. It will adopt a comparative perspective, both by identifying regional differences among European nations and tracing changes over time.

(Offered as ENGL 153 and SWAG 112.)  This course will examine the emergence of the “New Woman” as a category of social theory, political action, and literary representation at the turning of the twentieth century.  Early readings will trace the origins of the New Woman as a response to nineteenth-century notions of “True Womanhood.”  Discussions will situate literary representations of women in larger cultural events taking place during the Progressive Era–debates over suffrage as well as their relationship to issues of citizenship, immigration,

(Offered as ENGL 112 and SWAG 106.)  This course will examine the phenomenon of “realism” in a variety of artistic media.

This course introduces students to the issues involved in the social and historical construction of gender and gender roles from a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective. Topics change from year-to-year and have included women and social change; male and female sexualities including homosexualities; the uses and limits of biology in explaining human gender differences; women’s participation in production and reproduction; the relationship among gender, race and class as intertwining oppressions; women, men and globalization; and gender and warfare.

Our world is awash in data. To allow decisions to be made based on evidence, there is a need for statisticians to be able to make sense of the data around us and communicate their findings. In this course, students will be exposed to advanced statistical methods and will undertake the analysis and interpretation of complex and real-world datasets that go beyond textbook problems.  Course topics will vary from year to year depending on the instructor and selected case studies.

(Offered as STAT 360 and MATH 360.)  This course explores the nature of probability and its use in modeling real world phenomena. The course begins with the development of an intuitive feel for probabilistic thinking, based on the simple yet subtle idea of counting. It then evolves toward the rigorous study of discrete and continuous probability spaces, independence, conditional probability, expectation, and variance. Distributions covered include the Bernoulli and Binomial, Hypergeometric, Poisson, Normal, Gamma, Beta, Multinomial, and bivariate Normal. Four class hours per week.

Real world experiments often provide data that consist of many variables. When confronted with a large number of variables, there may be many different directions to proceed, but the direction chosen is ultimately based on the question(s) being asked. In biology, one could ask which observed characteristics distinguish females from males in a given species.