Adult illiteracy in the U.S. presents an ever-growing challenge. To understand this problem, we will learn various theories of reading. However, since many models of reading are based on data gathered from children, we will also examine how the cognitive abilities of adults are different from those of children. A large component of this class concerns learning the lab techniques associated with assessing reading abilities. In addition, since this is a community-based learning course, each student will become a tutor for an adult enrolled in an area literacy program.

This course offers a qualitative approach to Indigenous Data Sovereignty. As we explore examples of innovative tools and technologies, and investigate how Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing are online/in digital environments, we ground all learning in Indigenous ontologies: relationality, interconnectedness, and storytelling as a primary form of knowledge transmission.

How has global capitalism shaped labor and the lives of working people in the Middle East, a region that has historically been considered marginal to European and North American metropoles? This question will guide our analysis of "free" versus "unfree" and "formal" versus "informal" labor. We will develop a better understanding of the shifting location of the Middle East within the world economy. We will examine ways in which the region's incorporation into the global economy has relied on and encouraged the spread of "unfree" and "informal" labor.

With a transnational and historical scope, this course will examine everyday life and public space in Spanish cities. We'll approach cities as dynamic global networks shaped by cultures, politics, economies, ideologies, memories, and imaginations. Through literary, visual, and theoretical texts, we'll explore the in/exclusivity of large-scale urban phenomena such as street design, architecture, gentrification, globalization, and mass tourism.

In case studies beginning in the 1930s and continuing to the present, this course explores the many uses of photographs as art. It regards pictures made as individual art works as well as those objects using photographs and photographic materials as parts of an ensemble. We will trace a chronological but also winding path through different regions of the world, including experiments in Africa, Asia, and Europe, in addition to a more prominent concern with those in North America.

This course provides an introduction to the art and archaeology of the ancient Greeks. Through a chronological survey of monuments, sites, and artifacts, this course examines the major developments in Greek art, architecture, and archaeology from the Bronze Age (3rd millennium BCE) through the rise of Athens and Classical Art, the victories of Alexander the Great, and finally the conquest of Greece by Rome.

From gardens of paradise to wild forests, silent deserts to raging seas, the natural world was a potent source of meaning and metaphor in the Middle Ages. This course examines human engagements with nature in art, architecture, and literature to reveal how medieval people were shaped by-and also shaped-the landscapes around them. Adopting a thematic and comparative approach, we will explore the intersections between medieval science, society, and religion. How did medieval people conceptualize the world around them?

Like the internet in our modern digital age, the Renaissance print was a revolutionary tool of communication -- one that held the power to incite violence, alter beliefs, shape popular taste, frame intellectual and artistic debate, and open new worlds. This seminar will trace the rise of print from its origins in western Europe around 1450 to the emergence of the international print market by about 1600. Frequent sessions in the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and Special Collections will allow us to explore first-hand the physical and material properties of prints.

During the Middle Ages, the Iberian Peninsula was unique in its diversity: social and political, ethnic and religious, linguistic and cultural. This lecture course examines the art and architecture of Spain and Portugal from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages from the perspective of the interconnections between its various communities. We will explore instances of coexistence and acculturation, periods of persecution and violence, and where these relations found visual expression.

The course explores small objects that allude to large spaces in different periods and regions of Asia. Portable objects represent real and imaginary buildings in Buddhist Central Asia, Islamic West Asia, and Chinese tombs. Persian miniature paintings are sectioned into architectural enclosures. Chinese landscape paintings and Japanese "dry" gardens compress the natural environment itself. In an active learning environment, we will experience the pleasure of scale-shift in small things.