FALL SEMESTER DESCRIPTION:

(Offered as BLST 204 [A] and MUSI 105.)   This course focuses on twentieth-century African popular music; it examines musical genres from different parts of the continent, investigating their relationships to the historical, political and social dynamics of their respective national and regional origins.  Regional examples like highlife, soukous, chimurenga, and afro-beate will be studied to assess the significance of  popular music as a creative response to social and political developments in colonial and postcolonial Africa.  The course also dis

This course explores the nature of probability and its use in modeling real world phenomena. The course begins with the development of an intuitive feel for probabilistic thinking, based on the simple yet subtle idea of counting. It then evolves toward the rigorous study of discrete and continuous probability spaces, independence, conditional probability, expectation, and variance. Distributions covered include the Bernoulli and Binomial, Hypergeometric, Poisson, Normal, Gamma, Beta, Multinomial, and bivariate Normal. Four class hours per week.

An introduction to analytic functions; complex numbers, derivatives, conformal mappings, integrals. Cauchy’s theorem; power series, singularities, Laurent series, analytic continuation; Riemann surfaces; special functions. Four class hours per week.

Requisite: MATH 211. Fall semester. Professor R. Benedetto.

Real world experiments often provide data that consist of many variables. When confronted with a large number of variables, there may be many different directions to proceed, but the direction chosen is ultimately based on the question(s) being asked. In biology, one could ask which observed characteristics distinguish females from males in a given species.

The study of vector spaces over the real and complex numbers, introducing the concepts of subspace, linear independence, basis, and dimension; systems of linear equations and their solution by Gaussian elimination; matrix operations; linear transformations and their representations by matrices; eigenvalues and eigenvectors; and inner product spaces. Special attention will be paid to the theoretical development of the subject. Four class meetings per week.

(Offered as HIST 242 [US^P], ARCH 242, and AHRA 133) Using architecture, artifacts, visual evidence and documentary sources, the course examines social and cultural forces affecting the design and use of domestic architecture, home furnishings, and domestic technology in the eastern United States from 1600 to 1960. In addition to providing a survey of American domestic architecture, the course provides an introduction to the study of American material culture.

An introductory course in the fundamentals of drawing. The class will be based in experience and observation, exploring various techniques and media in order to understand the basic formal vocabularies and conceptual issues in drawing; subject matter will include still life, landscape, interior, and figure. Weekly assignments, weekly critiques, final portfolio. Two three-hour sessions per week.

Limited to 20 students. Fall semester: Resident Artist Gloman; Visiting Lecturer Culhane. Spring semester: Resident Artist Gloman.

An introductory course in the fundamentals of drawing. The class will be based in experience and observation, exploring various techniques and media in order to understand the basic formal vocabularies and conceptual issues in drawing; subject matter will include still life, landscape, interior, and figure. Weekly assignments, weekly critiques, final portfolio. Two three-hour sessions per week.

Limited to 20 students. Fall semester: Resident Artist Gloman; Visiting Lecturer Culhane. Spring semester: Resident Artist Gloman.

This course provides a survey of major artworks produced during the twentieth century in Europe and the Americas, as well as an introduction to their social and historical contexts, their theoretical justifications and critical receptions, and their varied functions. Toward these ends, we will discuss issues of agency and authenticity with regard to modernist and postmodernist artistic practice--from the utopianism of Constructivism to the subversions of Dada; from Abstract Expressionism to conceptual art; and from Fluxus performance to more recent trends.