(Offered as ARHA 352, EUST 352 and WAGS 352.)  In this research seminar, we will explore how sickness and healing were understood, taking examples over centuries.  We will analyze attitudes toward bodies, sexuality, and deviance--toward physical and spiritual suffering--as we analyze dreams of cures and transcendence.  We will interrogate works by artists such as Grünewald, Goya, Géricault, Munch, Ensor, Van Gogh, Schiele, Cornell and Picasso, as well as images by artists in our own time: Kiki Smith, the AIDS quilt, Nicolas Nixon, Hannah Wilke, and others.

(Offered as BIOL 330 and CHEM 330) What are the molecular underpinnings of processes central to life?  We will explore the chemical and structural properties of biological molecules and learn the logic used by the cell to build complex structures from a few basic raw materials. Some of these complex structures have evolved to catalyze chemical reactions with enormous degree of selectivity and specificity, and we seek to discover these enzymatic strategies.

Whether by categorising and experimenting on bodies, criminalising and incarcerating them or exoticising and desiring them, European imperial power operated through the body.  This course looks at how Western European empires constructed and governed colonised bodies both "at home" and in the colonies.  The course charts the ways in which ideas of masculinity, femininity and able-bodiedness changed as a result of colonial encounter.  It looks at a number of case studies, including the history of an enslaved South African woman, Sarah Baartman, who in life and death w

This course will examine the influence of hormones on brain and behavior. We will introduce basic endocrine (hormone) system physiology and discuss the different approaches that researchers take to address questions of hormone-behavior relationships.  We will consider evidence from both the human and the animal literature for the role of hormones in sexual differentiation (the process by which we become male or female), sexual behavior, parental behavior, stress, aggression, cognitive function, and affective disorders.    

[CP, IR][SC - starting with the class of 2015] The part of the world we most commonly call the Middle East is today the focus of considerable attention. This introductory course provides an overview of the history, politics and society of the Middle East which will help students get beyond the headlines. The purpose is to familiarize students with the historical patterns and political problems that countries in this region face.

[CP, IR][SC - starting with the class of 2015] This course is designed to introduce students to the basics of comparative politics. We will focus on questions such as: Why are some countries rich while others are poor? Why is democratization a challenge for some countries? Is world capitalism the answer or the problem? Are some countries more prone to violence?  What are the legacies of colonialism in the Third World?

In a seminal article with the same title, David Velleman poses the question “What Happens When Someone Acts?”. The goal of this seminar will be to answer to this question. It is only once we have answered it that we can tackle some of the most fundamental issues in moral philosophy — including issues concerning moral motivation, the possibility of unconditional moral requirements, the extent of moral responsibility, and the nature of virtue. We shall begin the seminar by examining Velleman's claim that the standard causal theory of action omits agents from the picture.

This class explores the connections between law and literature by considering how the past imagined and represented possession, authority, and identity when a range of modern theories that are available to us now were only beginning to emerge. We will take 16th- and 17th-century England as our case study, asking the following questions: What role did property play in constructing identity before the formation of the modern individual subject? How could identity be rooted in property before the emergence of modern theories of property?

[US] This seminar will look at the wars the U.S. has engaged in since the end of World War II, military conflicts as well as the war on poverty and the war on drugs along with the politics creating those wars. We will also read samples of the fiction and nonfiction that have emerged from these events. The course will be taught at the Hampshire County Jail, where twelve incarcerated students will meet weekly with twelve Amherst College students to discuss the week’s readings and to reflect on this recent history that has shaped all of our lives.

(Offered as FAMS 242 and THDA 155.) We “act” everyday. We play roles as students, as friends, as city-people, country-people, cosmopolitans. But what does it mean to present oneself publicly, either as “oneself” or in a role of another? The goal of this course is to demystify the acting process, to imagine together how we might “act naturally” in a world that is overwhelmed by technological forms of communication that both enable exchange with one another and that hamper it.