This course explores black identity as one that is rooted in the politics of space and place. Using the anthropological study of the African Diaspora, we will investigate the development of "race" as a category and the construction of political and cultural migrating identities. Scholarly texts will be accompanied by ethnography, film, guest lectures and music. This course explores black identity as one that is rooted in the politics of space and place.

This course is a socio-cultural view of the Black Church. It focuses attention on the development of the Black Church in the U.S. while locating the Black Church within the African Diaspora. We will explore the history of Black religious expression during slavery that created the merging of African spiritually and Protestantism in the Afro-Caribbean and the U.S. We will also explore the contemporary growth of the Pentecostal/holiness tradition in the Caribbean and Africa, as well as the more recent influence of Judaism and Islam on the African American religious experience.

The course is designed to introduce the student to the various music forms and their histories within the African American community from the early nineteenth century to the present. Specifically, the course will focus on spirituals, folk, blues, gospel, and jazz. Enrollment limited to 40.

Topics course From Lucy Terry's "Bars Fight" composed in Deerfield, MA in 1746, to Tracy K. Smith's Life on Mars, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, African Americans have been making significant contributions to American poetry. In this course, we will determine the ways in which Phillis Wheatley is the "mother" of the tradition. We will explore Paul Laurence Dunbar's work and discuss the role of dialect throughout the tradition. We will study periods in African American poetry, including the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement.

This course is designed to introduce students to the many methods of inquiry used for research in interdisciplinary fields such as Afro-American studies. Guided by a general research topic or theme, students will be exposed to different methods for asking questions and gathering evidence. This course is designed to introduce students to the many methods of inquiry used for research in interdisciplinary fields such as Afro-American studies. Guided by a general research topic or theme, students will be exposed to different methods for asking questions and gathering evidence.

This course is an introduction to philosophy concentrating on the skills necessary to evaluate philosophical claims about minds, brains and information. Topics will be chosen from the following: language, sentences, and logic; meaning, reference and thought; relativism and theories of truth; personal identity, the self and the brain; knowledge and belief; consciousness and the neural correlates of consciousness; dreaming and skepticism; materialism or physicalism, concepts and the mind-body problem; freewill and neurological determinism.

The majority of adults are able to read fluently. However, when children learn to read, the process is dependent on a number of skills and requires a great deal of adult guidance. In this course we will discuss the cultural importance of literacy across societies and throughout childhood. We will focus on the development of the complex skill of reading, including phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and higher-order processes that contribute to decoding and text comprehension.

This course is designed to give students a strong introduction to computer programming, with an emphasis on programming computer games. As the title reveals, we will be working in the Python programming language. By the end of the course successful students will be able to write programs of moderate difficulty, and will be able to use the Python pygames library to make use of graphic utilities with which to implement computer games.

This course will introduce students to the production of animated short films with the tools and techniques of three-dimensional (3D) computer graphics. Readings and lectures will cover the theoretical foundations of the field, and the homework assignments will provide hands-on, project-based experience with production. The topics covered will include modeling (the building of 3D objects), shading (assignment of surface reflectance properties), animation (moving the objects over time), and lighting (placing and setting the properties of virtual light sources).

This course can be summed up as: everything you wanted to know about aliens but were afraid to ask (a scientist). The course will explore the topic of extraterrestrial intelligence from the perspective of several different fields. We will look at the history of UFO sighting claims and analyze the reliability of eye-witness testimonies, explore psychological and sociological reasons behind claims of alien abductions, and analyze the current state of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) from the perspective of astronomy and planetary research.