This course is designed for any student curious about design in motion. It will introduce theories and processes of movement composition and choreographic analysis. We'll work with movement prompts and structured improvisations to discover ways to generate movement, and to compose it into set forms. We'll question expectations about what dance, or a "good" dance is, and push to broaden movement preferences. In the process students will hone skills in perceiving, describing and interpreting compositional strategies in choreography.

This course examines the fraught intersection of politics and popular culture. In this class, we ask: What is popular culture? How does it differ from other cultural expressions? How does popular culture connect to other aspects of social, economic and political experience? What differences, if any, are there between "high" and "low" culture? Is consuming pop culture products a form of political action? How do explicit political themes both enrich and detract from consumption? What economic imperatives drive popular culture production?

This course examines contemporary philosophical questions about the body: What is the significance of the corporeal interdependence we sustain with others and the world? What part does this play in creating bodily boundaries and spatial orientations? How do discipline, technology, and commerce shape bodies? In what ways is the body linked to language and other aesthetic idioms? To affect and materiality? How does the body signify intersecting forms of difference, such as those of race, class, gender, and sexuality? And how do these differences signify the body?

This course is designed to introduce students to several religious traditions of the world through a selective study of their chief canonical texts. In part our concern will be with fundamental thematic issues: what do these records seek to reveal about the nature of life and death, sin and suffering, the transcendent and the mundane, morality and liberation? In addition, we will address wider questions of meaning, authority, and context. Why do human communities privilege particular expressions as "sacred" or "classic"?

This course will introduce students to concepts and constructs of black womanhood from the mid-twentieth century to the contemporary. We will engage literature by Black women to tease out themes of power vis--vis sexuality and motherhood, history and geography, environments and spaces, economics and migration. The goal of the course is to think critically about the ways in which issues of power "play" in the novels, poetry, film, and critical works.

What does it mean to know the city: to trace, to follow, even to be lost in it or blur with it? How does the urban landscape inform the narrative? What narratives can the city give birth to? This class will look at various texts of investigation and detection that are inalienable from their surroundings. Authors will include Poe and Baudelaire, Pushkin and Conan Doyle, Dickens and Dostoevsky, Blok and others. Cities will include St. Petersburg, London, and Paris.

This course will explore the music of the Hispanic Caribbean, with particular emphasis on the musics of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and musical interchange with the United States (particularly New York). The course will include weekly reading and listening assignments, several short written assignments, a concert paper, and a final research paper. The focus will be on the interrelations between music and culture, and we will engage in some musical analysis of the various genres discussed.

An introduction to the archaeology, myth, history, art, literature, and religion of ancient Ireland: 4000 BCE to 1200 CE, from the earliest megalithic monuments to the Norman conquest. Consideration will be given, then, to these distinct periods: Pre-Celtic (Neolithic and Bronze Ages--4000 BCE-700 BCE); Pre-Christian Celtic (Late Bronze & Iron Ages--700 BCE-400 CE); and Early Christian Celtic (Irish Golden Ages and Medieval--700-1200 CE). The emphasis throughout will be on the study of primary material, whether artifacts or documents.

In conjunction with students' Campus and Community Engaged Learning (CEL) projects, this writing intensive course examines the fraught status of British literature as it both defines and challenges the responsibility we feel towards others. Literary meditations on the limits of social connection offer the class as an occasion to reflect on the terms of our activity in the community. Conversely, students draw on their CEL projects to generate fresh perspectives on British literary history.

Dance Pioneer Barbara Mettler said, "To create means to make up something new." In this course students explore the elements of dance through a series of creative problems solved through improvisations by individuals and groups. Directed exercises are used to heighten awareness of the body and its movement potential. Studies using the sounds of voice, hands and feet develop skills in accompaniment. Based on the principle that dance is a human need this work invites people of all ages and abilities to come together in movement and to make dance an element of their lives.