For at least 3.5 billion years, the Earth’s surface environment has supported some form of life. What geologic processes first created and now maintain this environment? To what extent has life modified this environment over geologic time? What conditions are necessary for a planet to be conducive to life? What are the natural processes that operate at the Earth’s surface? This course looks at the environment from a geologist’s perspective.
As the science that considers the origin and evolution of the earth, Geology provides students with an understanding of what is known about the earth and how we know it, how the earth “works” and why we think it behaves as it does. In particular this course focuses upon the earth as an evolving and dynamic system where change is driven by energy generated within the earth.
From the high plains west of the Mississippi River, across the Rockies, Canyonlands, and Great Basin, to the Sierra Nevada, the striking natural landscapes of western North America result from the interactions of varied geologic processes through geologic time. This course will first survey the fundamental geologic dynamics that shape the earth’s surface and review major stages in the evolution of the earth’s crust and oceans. We will then turn to the particular expression of those processes in the American west, with special attention given to our national parks.
Independent Reading Courses. Full course.
Admission with consent of the instructor consent required. Fall and spring semesters.
A study of some of the greatest French New Wave (1959-1963) films, as well as earlier French films that influenced the New Wave. From the New Wave we shall view Truffaut’s The 400 Blows; Godard’s Breathless, My Life to Live, and Contempt; Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad by Resnais.
Le Siècle des Lumières. An analysis of the major philosophical, literary, and artistic movements in France between the years 1715 and 1789 within the context of their uneasy relationship to the social, political, and religious institutions of the ancien régime. Readings will include texts by Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and others. To gain a better sense of what it might have been like to live in eighteenth-century France, we will also read essays in French cultural history. Conducted in French.
The rise in the rate of literacy which characterized the early French Middle Ages coincided with radical reappraisals of the nature and function of reading and poetic production. This course will investigate the ramifications of these reappraisals for the literature of the late French Middle Ages.
