(Offered as EUST 121 and CLAS 141.)  Topics in the past have included readings and discussion of a series of related texts from Homer and Genesis to Dante: Homer’s Iliad, selected Greek tragedies, Virgil’s Aeneid, selections from the Bible, and from medieval texts. Three class hours per week.

The Senior Seminar is intended to bring together majors with different course backgrounds and to facilitate original independent student research on an environmental topic. In the early weeks of the seminar, discussion will be focused on several compelling texts (e.g., Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring or Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us) which will be considered from a variety of disciplinary perspectives by members of the Environmental Studies faculty.

Independent reading course.

Fall and spring semesters. The Department.

The nascent field known as “conservation social science” is emerging among the major conservation organizations, like the World Wildlife Fund and The Nature Conservancy, as they realize the need to move beyond their traditional biological foundations towards the social sciences.  Conservation landscapes and species of interest are embedded in complex, and often long-standing, human-environmental relationships that require the retooling of conservation science to better understand and address integrated challenges.

Contesting values of and struggles over the control of “nature” are at the heart of environmental politics, and differently positioned political, economic, and social interest groups contend for and exert power through the U.S. environmental policy-making process.  In this course we will examine the politics of U.S. environmental policies, focusing on how local, regional, and national governmental institutions, non-governmental organizations and interest groups, and some publics (but not all) define environmental problems and actionable solutions.

(Offered as MATH 130E and ENST 240.) This course is an introduction to applied statistical methods useful for the analysis of data from all fields. Brief coverage of data summary and graphical techniques will be followed by elementary probability, sampling distributions, the central limit theorem and statistical inference. Inference procedures include confidence intervals and hypothesis testing for both means and proportions, the chi-square test, simple linear regression, and a brief introduction to analysis of variance (ANOVA).

(Offered as BIOL 230 and ENST 210.) A study of the relationships of plants and animals (including humans) to each other and to their environment. We'll start by considering the decisions an individual makes in its daily life concerning its use of resources, such as what to eat and where to live, and whether to defend such resources. We'll then move on to populations of individuals, and investigate species population growth, limits to population growth, and why some species are so successful as to become pests whereas others are on the road to extinction.

Independent Reading Courses.

Fall and spring semester. The Department.

(Offered as ENGL 484 and FAMS 484.)  This seminar will explore theories of animation and new media in moving image culture.  While animation is many times considered children’s entertainment, this course situates it as the technical coincidence of life and movement while examining its relation to the nature of cinema and other media.  Cinema is a privileged type of animation in the class, but one that exists in a long history of moving images that we will interrogate along with the roles different techniques and technologies play in that history’s formation. 

(Offered as ENGL 474 and BLST 452.)  Concurrent migrations of Chinese and Indian indentured laborers to the Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean workers to and from the Panama Canal, at the turn of the twentieth century, profoundly influenced the style and scope of modern Caribbean literature.  Both migrant groups worked under difficult conditions for exploitative wages, yet members of each managed to save enough to enter the educated middle class.  Their cultural forms and political aspirations shaped Caribbean literary production as well as anti-colonial political movements.