Carbon Christianity

This seminar investigates the multiple connections between modern forms of Christianity and fossil fuels. The course begins with a consideration of recent scholarship that details how workers' everyday experiences in coal mines and oil fields profoundly shaped their religious sensibilities. We then examine how fossil fuel companies funded many of the most significant Christian institutions in the United States-both liberal and conservative -- during the twentieth century.

Experimental Ethnography

Above all else, ethnography is a form of writing. Its formal properties range widely, running a gamut that transects art criticism, speculative fiction, travel writing, memoir, science writing, and poetry. But the genre's soul is an imaginative experiment: transporting one world into another. Ethnographers, then, share practices of representation and evocation with the arts. This course introduces the craft of imaginative ethnography, paying central attention to writing that refuses the (social) sciences' stodgy conventions.

Issues in Contemp Anth Theory

This course explores the major theoretical frameworks developed and debated by anthropologists of the past two decades. It covers core issues in anthropological epistemology, the relationship of ethnography to social and cultural theory, trends in anthropological analysis, and the place of anthropological theory in broader academic and public discourses.

Digital Cultures

In the last decades, digital media have become integral to our quotidian lives as well as to myriad translocal processes. "New" technologies are hailed in celebratory narratives of democratization and participation, access and innovation, enchantment and possibility; and newly-available gadgets, devices, and platforms are taken up with great speed and facility.

Philosophy of Law

This course surveys important philosophical issues arising in the practice and study of law. We examine fundamental questions in philosophy of law, such as: Is there a duty to obey, and sometimes disobey, the law? What does equality under the law mean? How do we reconcile moral luck with punishment? The course examines broad schools of legal thought in the context of contemporary legal issues like police profiling, affirmative action, and censorship. Readings include selections from legal theory and a variety of court decisions.

Computer Vision

This course provides an introduction to image analysis and 3D interpretation from image data. It uncovers the mystery behind standard techniques in image processing like filtering, edge detection, stereo vision, flow, etc. Math lovers, this course is for you! Throughout the semester, each student will develop their own computer vision library through programming assignments. Furthermore, students will learn about newer, advanced machine-learning-based computer vision algorithms.

Organizations and Inequality

In Organizations and Inequality, we analyze how organizations create, reproduce, and also potentially challenge social inequalities. Drawing on different organizational perspectives, students will engage the challenges of ethical action in a complex world marked by competing rationalities and deep inequalities. Students will also research an organization of which they are a member and develop their own case study.

Adaptation: A Study in Form

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "adaptation" as "the bringing of two things together so as to effect a change in the nature of the objects." Rather than studying adaptation as a project that attempts to reproduce an original work in another medium, our course considers the complex relationship between narratives and their retellings and revisions.

Knowing God

This course examines the following key texts from the ancient world that treat significantly the problem of knowing God and the mystery enveloping such knowledge: Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Plato's Phaedo, Cicero's Concerning the Nature of the Gods, Job, Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and others. Attention is also given to the different ways of thinking about the divine and human natures in these works, which are broadly reflective of Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian value systems.
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